Roosevelt: Young Romance review – enjoyable, airbrushed synth pop

(Greco-Roman)

Twentysomething German producer Marius Lauber, AKA Roosevelt, first emerged with his Elliot EP in 2013. Released on Greco-Roman, it showcased all the hallmarks of that label: ever-so-slightly left-field, poppy electro that was perfect for the then in-vogue indie dancefloor. Roosevelt’s eponymous debut album followed in 2016 to solid reviews: these were dynamic, disco-tinged bangers which, while hardly groundbreaking, were certainly enjoyable.

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by Tara Joshi via Electronic music | The Guardian

One to watch: Ider

The London flatmates combine introspective lyrics with gorgeous harmonies and memorable melodies

“I’m trying to enjoy myself, love myself/ Who the fuck is myself?” is a very Ider lyric. Lily Somerville and Megan Markwick (Ider is the “mysterious third band member” that manifests itself when they harmonise) may not have found themselves yet, but were lucky enough to find each other at university, and they’ve sung and written their way to a promising career since. Now flatmates in London, their shared setup allows constant collaboration and produces a series of thoughtful, gorgeous songs that mostly attempt to map the worlds outside and within.

If you’re not a lyrics person, tracks such as Does She Even Know bring enough beautiful, indelible melodies, power synths and ghostly, funky fingerclicks to decorate all the damage and eviscerated hearts. You’ll hear everything from Haim to Frank Ocean and Portishead in Ider’s anxiety dream pop and heartbreak ballads. Their latest track, Mirror, broods over identity, imposed or chosen, but with a steroidal kick fattening their spare sound to radio strength.

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by Damien Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian

Tim Hecker: Konoyo review – Japanese forms abstracted by ambient dystopias

Kranky

Having created his own particular aesthetic over nearly two decades – imagine an ambient dreamscape in the rain-soaked alley between a church and a nightclub – the Canadian composer Tim Hecker continues to hone and broaden it out. On his previous album he semi-abstracted an Icelandic choir; now he looks to Japan, collaborating with Tokyo Gakuso, a group who play traditional courtly gagaku music. Hecker takes their drums, chimes, and close, borderline discordant strings – a heady, spiritual sound – and adds his own sense of disruption, suggesting real or psychological fracture.

On the most adventurous pieces, such as This Life and Keyed Out, the instruments are made to shiver and thrash as if on a hospital gurney, struggling for equilibrium, as Hecker’s trademark plumes of static billow beneath. On the magnificent Across to Anoyo, the album’s only steady pulse is crowded out by a kind of maniacally melodic feedback, itself taken over by industrial chords and bass notes of pure dread.

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

'The state means to kill us': meet Gaika, Britain's most vital rapper

The Brixton artist makes tracks that focus on gentrification, violence and the immigrant experience – ‘black music with all the sex left in it and all the bullshit maths taken out’, as he says

Gaika has spent the day in Brixton’s Brockwell Park to try to find some space to breathe and ease a pollen-induced tightness in his chest. It hasn’t worked, and when we meet in a nearby pub it becomes clear that this sensation may have been triggered by something other than pollen.

Born to Jamaican and Grenadian parents, Gaika Tavares grew up in the area. He is in a sombre mood today, the second anniversary of his father’s death. “I did the particular walk to the park that I used to do with my dad,” he says. For the past two years, he has been absorbed in making an album in homage to his father. Even its title, Basic Volume, is a reference to the place he worked as a material scientist. Gaika is wearing a brilliant-white lab coat (“I thought it was apt”) over an orange T-shirt and jeans; his hands are adorned with gold rings and tattoos.

Related: Gaika: Basic Volume review – gripping new voice of British rap

This is what the black experience sounds like, in all its joy, and heat and pressure

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by Kieran Yates via Electronic music | The Guardian

DOM SERVINI’S ALLO LOVE TEN :: SEPTEMBER 2018

1. Spiral Deluxe – Voodoo Magic (Axis 2 x LP)
2. Web Web – Dance of the Demons (Compost Promo DL)
3. Dengue Dengue Dengue – Pua feat. Penya (On The Corner Promo 12)
4. Jesse Futerman – Basement Cuts (Jus Like Music Records Promo DL)
5. Stone Foundation – Standing on the Top (100% Records 12)
6. Nkotti Francois & the Black Styl – Muwaso Mwa Longue (Ketu 12)
7. Jaques Renault – I Want You More (Barefoot Beats 10)
8. Blood Orange – Charcoal Baby (Domino DL)
9. Edmony Krater – Chimin Spirit (Ivory Super Glass Test 12)
10. Jazzanova – Everything I Wanted feat. Charlotte OC (Yoruba Soul Mix) (Sonar Kollektiv Promo DL)

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DOM SERVINI’S ALLO LOVE TEN :: AUGUST 2018

1. Hunrosa – We Know (Lavan Remix) (Wah Wah 45s Test 12)
2. Children of Zeus – Travel Light (First Word 2 x LP)
3. Mandigo Brass – Everything Looks Better From A Distance (McBoingBoing Edit) (BBE Promo DL)
4. Djeuh Djoah & Lieutenant Nicholson – El Nino (Hot Casa Records 7)
5. Roisin Murphy – Plaything (Vinyl Factory 12)
6. Captain Planet – Mystery Trip Vol.2 (White 12)
7. Woven Entity – Two (Enid Records LP)
8. Rulefin – Finnitus Edits #3 (Rulefin 7)
9. Randolph Baker – Getting Next To You (Kalita 12)
10. Carlo Coupe – Love From Outer Space (Black Nylon Corporation 7)

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Dom Servini – Netil Radio Show #8

Listen again here!

Intro – Chillin’ on the Rooftop

Paul Randolph – Heavy feat. Vernon D Hill (Ashley Beedle’s North Street Space Vocal Remix)

Joseph Malik – Vanguard

Mr Circle – Thai Nam

Vadou Game – Tata Fatiguee

Stone Foundation – Please Be Upstanding

America – Are You There

Special Touch – Share A Little

Dream Cast – Up 2 U

Noname – Montego Bae

Georgia Anne Muldrow – Aerosol

Nkotti Francois & The Black Styl – Nja Ka

Night Marks  – Strza z body

Benny Sings – We’ll Make Love Songs

P.Unity – Funk Jest

Chip Wickham – (Soul) Rebel (Reginald Omas Mamode IV Remix)

Troublemakers – All the love

Sam Sobie Zeglarzem (Lonesome Sailor) – Test

Envee – Lil Child

Wojtek Mazolewski – Sunday (Envee rmx)

SBB – Fortepian na jednej nodzw

Joseph Malik – Intermission

Shy FX – Call Me feat. Maverick Sabre

Calibre & High Contrast – Mr Majestic

Danny Byrd – Holy Star

Aurora Dee Raynes – Find My Way

Snips – The Chessboxin Rhythm Commission

Gecko Turner – Cortado Bajito

Gerardo Frisina – Camaguey

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Dom Servini – Unherd Radio Show #20 on Soho Radio

Listen again here!

OfficialKanKick – In The Sun Rappin’

Skinny Pelembe – LaxmiFlying

Matthew Halsall & The Gondwana Orchestra – You’ve Got To Have Freedom feat. Dwight Trible

Nico – Mini Calcutta

Thabang Tabane – Nyanda Yeni

Anchorsong – Testimony

Dexter Story – Eastern Preyer feat. Nia Andrews (Peter Croce Remix)

Dorian Concept – You Give and Give

Tropics – Hidden

Jah Gumby – Original

Singing Melody – Stoned Out of my Mind

Dur Dur Band – Oohiyeh

Jesse Gannon – Dr. Spin (Thrust)

Perry Day – Take It Easy (Original Mix)

Kassin – Relax

Kiala & The Afroblaster – Sorrow, Tears & Blood

Tom Noble – Lord I’m Trying

Rick Wilhite – Is It Because I’m Black (Godson’s Flip Mix)

Jazzanova – Everything I Wanted feat. Charlotte OC (Yoruba Soul Mix)

Children of Zeus – Vibrations (Zed Bias Remix)

Glenn Astro – Discomania (Nelson Of The East Remix)

Bluestaeb – Alright

Hocus Pocus – Beautiful Losers feat. Alice Russell

Blood Orange – Charcoal Baby

Catching Flies – New Gods feat. Jay Prince & Oscar Jerome

Jesse Futerman – Black is the Colour

Leifur James – Mumma Don’t Tell

Night Marks – Strzal Z Body feat. Archeo

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Gary Numan 'utterly devastated' as tour bus kills elderly pedestrian in Ohio

Singer cancelled Cleveland concert after his bus hit a 91-year-old man at a pedestrian crossing

British musician Gary Numan has said he is “utterly devastated” after his tour bus struck and killed a 91-year-old man in Cleveland, Ohio, according to reports.

Police said the bus was making a right turn when it hit the pedestrian, who was pushing a cart and died at the scene on Monday. Numan cancelled his performance at the House of Blues venue that evening.

Related: Gary Numan: ‘Eye contact is something I find incredibly difficult’ | This much I know

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by Laura Snapes via Electronic music | The Guardian

Calvin Harris v Diplo: which is the best superstar DJ?

They’ve both got fake names, famous friends, Dua Lipa collabs and chart-conquering hits. So how to separate them? Why, by pitting them against each other in a (metaphorical) battle to the death

But in this world, nothing can be said to be certain,” Benjamin Franklin once said in 1789, “except death and taxes, and the fact that at any one time, somewhere on the planet, an extremely normal-looking man will be earning $75m to be a DJ.” And of those normal-looking men, the two biggest? If you ignore the existence of Steve Aoki, Tiësto, both the lads out of Daft Punk and almost certainly some Dutch 22-year-old whose entire career has boomed and busted in the time since I started this sentence, the two biggest are: Calvin Harris (Scotland) and Diplo (United States).

Related: Diplo: 'Being a white American, you have zero cultural capital'

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by Joel Golby via Electronic music | The Guardian

One to watch: Yves Tumor

The electronic artist’s genre-shifting sound is as tricky to categorise as his look

It’s nigh-on impossible to retain an air or even a measly puff of mystery these days. But Tennessee-born experimental noise artist Yves Tumor is a slippery prospect. He has gone by numerous pseudonyms. He is evasive in interviews. And his aesthetic – androgynous, fashion-forward, Marc Bolan by way of Marilyn Manson – is as uncategorisable as his music.

Since 2010, over three albums and various EPs, Tumor has honed an alluringly sensuous style of sample collage that sounds like little else. He has achieved, if you like, a kind of genre anonymity, running his fingers over the likes of ambient, R&B, boogie, trip-hop and noise, and folding them into something eerily ambiguous, as if you’re squinting into fog lights or listening to a very witchy Avalanches. “I’m very into making moods,” he has said, and his previous album, 2016’s Serpent Music, was full of slinkily undone come-hither funk.

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by Kate Hutchinson via Electronic music | The Guardian

Low: ‘We want to punch new holes in the possibilities of music’

Never afraid to sit still, even after a dozen albums, the Minnesota band look back at the tracks that define their evolving sound: ‘Just say what you feel strongly about now’

At home in Duluth, Minnesota, Alan Sparhawk gives a tour of his vegetable garden, where long pumpkin vines rope around the heirloom tomatoes; Lake Superior is a few miles away and takes up the entire horizon. He, now aged 50, and his wife, Mimi Parker, 51, are the core of the American band Low – they have known each other since they were nine, have been married since before starting the band in 1992 and are parents of two teenage children. Their home offers evidence of their domestic lives and artistic ones, with Parker’s drums set up in the living room and the tour van parked next to the minivan in their driveway. After the interview, Sparhawk takes off to chaperone an end-of-summer beach bonfire for his son’s church youth group.

Related: Low: Double Negative review – the sound of the world unravelling

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by Jessica Hopper via Electronic music | The Guardian

Gazelle Twin: Pastoral review – techno tormentor tramples tedium

Anti-Ghost Moon Ray

In 2000, the UK garage duo Oxide and Neutrino released Bound 4 Da Reload, a single that sampled the Casualty TV show theme. There are moments on the third album by Brighton’s Gazelle Twin that sound unflatteringly like Fever Ray remixing the “Is that your final answer?” music from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, adding leering melodrama to conventional ticking signifiers of peril. Often on Pastoral, Elizabeth Bernholz’s attempts to defamiliarise the horrors of contemporary British society – Brexit, poverty, xenophobia – through absurdity land squarely on the nose.

The poor are “kicked into the curb like empty Coke cans”; shrill and fractured voices hector that it was “much better in my day”. The admirably nasty production – turning the thumbscrews on Chicago footwork, battering-ram techno, operatic vocals and sylvan folk – means that not only is Bernholz preaching to the converted, she’s also preaching to an audience who pride themselves on their tolerance for enduring hostility.

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by Laura Snapes via Electronic music | The Guardian

Friday’s best TV – Can You Feel It: How Dance Music Conquered the World

Disco house and techno giants including Tom Moulton, Derrrick May and Gerald Simpson reflect on the enduring global impact of club culture. Plus: the sun comes out in The Island Strait

10pm, BBC Four
Dance music hits BBC Four’s Friday music heritage slot with this fine three-part series. Tonight’s opener is the story of the outliers and renegades who created disco, house and techno and then watched with amazement as their experiments went nuclear. The series speaks to all the right people (Tom Moulton, Derrick May, Gerald Simpson and many more) and does a good job of communicating both the arms-aloft hysteria engendered by the music and the social contexts from which it sprung. Phil Harrison

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by Paul Howlett, Mike Bradley, Jonathan Wright, Graeme Virtue via Electronic music | The Guardian

Клуб: the St Petersburg rail factory that became a visionary nightclub

Set in an industrial area far outside the city – and with industrial tracks to match - the nightclub Клуб is putting community before music to create a truly beloved space

Ask Sasha Tsereteli, founder of St Petersburg’s DIY nightclub Клуб, what the most important aspect of his club is and you might be surprised. Despite great success serving nights that span a melange of techno, acid, noise and industrial, he says that community comes first and music second. “It’s always been about getting people together, and seeing what happens,” he explains. “There are enough music clubs in the world so we never really positioned ourselves as one – I think that’s one of our best accomplishments. Although you can only afford to say that when your music programme is impeccable.”

Renowned as the duo who first brought international acts to St Petersburg, Sasha Tsereteli and his partner Julia Si had been running parties for a decade before co-founding Клуб (meaning “klub”) in November 2017. Housed within brutalist infrastructure – a former national railway factory – Клуб is not the kind of club you stumble upon by chance. Much like Berlin’s Berghain, it’s set far from civilisation, in an industrial area just outside the city. “Nobody comes here by accident,” says Tsereteli. “It’s nearly impossible, so we never know how many people will attend an event.”

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by Brooke McCord via Electronic music | The Guardian

'We did it!' – behind the decks at Paul Oakenfold's Stonehenge rave

He’s played Everest and the Great Wall of China. So what happened when Oakenfold set out to become the first person ever to DJ at Stonehenge? Our writer grabs his glow stick and heads for the A303

A Holiday Inn by the A303 is not really the kind of place you would expect to meet Paul Oakenfold. He is, after all, the person who almost singlehandedly invented the latter-day notion of the superstar DJ, and whose 30-year career has warranted not only a mention in the Guinness Book of Records (as “the world’s most successful DJ”) but also a a graphic novel. “This book,” reads the blurb, “charts the windy road taken to fame, fortune and musical nirvana.”

Yet here he is, in a business park just off the windy road taken to Basingstoke, dressed in tracksuit bottoms and exuding a surprising degree of nervousness about his next gig. Later today, he will become the first-ever DJ to play at Stonehenge, as the advance publicity has it. In fact, he almost certainly isn’t – someone must have played records between performances by Hawkwind and Gong at the infamous Stonehenge free festivals in the 1970s and 80s. But, technically, those events took place in fields adjacent to the stones, while Oakenfold is doing his stuff right in front of them.

I’ve been in Ibiza practising, timing music to sunsets. How do I build up into it? How can I touch you emotionally?

The event must look simultaneously spectacular and baffling

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Wah Wah Radio – September 2018

Second show in our new format, welcoming Wah Wah family member Delia Tesileanu to the show bringing her unique selection of jazz, spoken word, bruk and soul to the proceedings.

Listen again here!

Web Web – Land of the Arum Flower

The Expansions – Transcoso (Radio Edit)

Wojtek Mazolewski Quintet – Chase The Devil

Dengue Dengue Dengue – Pua feat. Penya

Hunrosa – We Know

Gabriele Poso – The Night Falls (Clap! Clap! Remix)

Allysha Joy – Know Your Power

Kamau Daaood – Her

Yussef Dayes & Alfa Mist  – Blacked Out

Fourth Kind – Afterglow

Nikki Giovanni  – Poem For Aretha

Laboratorium – I’m Sorry, I’m Not Driver

Envee – Lil’ Child

Donald Byrd – Black Byrd

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The month's best mixes: Discwoman, Gian Manik, LSDXOXO and more

The best DJ mixes and radio shows this month feature everything from exhilarating hardstyle to a cappella Farsi – plus a bit of My Humps by the Black Eyed Peas

August’s assortment of the world’s best mixes features musicians delivering distinctly erotic sets in summer heat, while folk-club hybrids, minimal polyrhythms and breathtaking hardstyle are also present.

Related: The month's best mixes: Gigsta, Susumu Yokota and 25 years of Dutch dynamo Clone

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by Tayyab Amin via Electronic music | The Guardian

Yves Tumor: Safe in the Hands of Love review – thrilling plunderphonics

(Warp)

As this year’s Reading & Leeds lineup showed, kids have extremely catholic tastes as a result of growing up with the radical accessibility of streaming, but musicians themselves still usually cleave to one or two aesthetics. Yves Tumor, though, is thrillingly untethered to style, and as such is a bard for our cultural moment.

Having previously released drifting ambient, clattering experimental trap, lo-fi vintage boogie and more, the secretive Tennessee expat continues to swerve from one mood to the next. Honesty is a driving analogue techno number in the vein of Hieroglyphic Being: arid, punchy 808 claps drive a bleating vocal line from a heartbroken Tumor. Then he handbrake-turns into the superb Noid, a piece of Avalanches-style breakbeat pop that perkily addresses police brutality. Then he reverses back into more lovelorn sadness on Licking an Orchid, this time to a trip-hop shuffle.

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

Tracey Thorn, Nadine Shah and Peggy Gou top Aim independent music awards

The awards for the best in British independent music acknowledged a wide-ranging series of names, from Goldie to Idles and Sophie

Tracey Thorn has been awarded the most prestigious prize at the Aim independent music awards, which recognise the best in British music from outside the major label system.

Thorn was presented with the outstanding contribution to music prize, for a career that has featured major chart hits with duo Everything But the Girl, as well as solo work including this year’s album Record. Another award for an entire career’s work, the Pioneer award, was presented to drum’n’bass star Goldie.

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

Lindy Morrison, Megan Washington, Regurgitator and more pick their favourite Brisbane song

Who better to talk about the influence of Brisbane music than Brisbane musicians?
• Vote for your favourite Brisbane song in our Songs of Brisbane poll
• Read Andrew Stafford on the political legacy of the city’s sound

To celebrate Brisbane’s music scene and this year’s BigSound conference, Guardian Australia is running the Songs of Brisbane poll in order to find the city’s top song. Here, local artists, including Screamfeeder, Ball Park Music, Katie Noonan, the Grates and Cub Spor, weigh into the debate.

Songs of Brisbane. Please explain?

Related: What is the best Brisbane song? Have your say in the Guardian's poll

Related: Brisbane: brave music from a city that keeps pulling people back in | Andrew Stafford

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by Megan Washington, Sam Cromack, Ben Ely, John Patterson, Simon Ridley, Sam Netterfield, Katie Noonan, Lindy Morrison, Matt Somers, The Kite String Tangle, Screamfeeder, Eves Karydas, Austen via Electronic music | The Guardian

Halloween Special with Dom Servini @ The Church (27/10/2018)

Details

• Artist:
  Dom Servini
• Date:
  27/10/18
• Time:
  7:30pm
• Venue:
  The Church
• City:
  Birmingham
• Country:
  United Kingdom
• Age restrictions:
  No Minors
• Add to Google Calendar | Download iCal

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50 great tracks for September from BTS, Marie Davidson, Boygenius and more

From Empress Of’s modern classic to the magnificent angst of Boygenius, here are 50 new tracks you shouldn’t miss – read about our 10 favourites below, and subscribe to the playlists

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

Wysing Polyphonic review – daring explosions in the sonic inventing shed

Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire
Moor Mother curates an inspirational gathering where electronic artists, dancers and poets freely test the boundaries of expression

‘Noises of spoons!” I’m in an octagonal wooden structure that’s half Grand Designs man-shed, half denouement to a slasher movie, in a field in the Cambridgeshire countryside. Elaine Mitchener is kicking things off at Wysing Polyphonic, delivering scat poetry that’s as light, intricate and unmappable as rain falling on a roof. Alongside her is Neil Charles, tapping his double bass’s body like a faith healer, a tambourine tucked in its neck. Mitchener’s spoon mantra dissolves into stutters. She clicks shells and stones in her hands, as the bass fumbles and shuffles – the pair are trying to put something or other back in one piece.

This is one of the most valuable music festivals in the country – one that refuses, inspirationally, to put anything neatly together. Curated this year by avant-gardists Camae Ayewa (AKA Moor Mother) and Paul Purgas, it’s a loose study of corporeality and groove.

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

Tunng: Songs You Make at Night review – a welcome return

(Full Time Hobby)

Sam Genders and Mike Lindsay became the founding fathers of “folktronica” in the 00s with a slew of innovative albums with Tunng. The pair have travelled separate paths over the past decade: Genders forming the band Diagrams, Lindsay moving to Reykjavik, then on to this year’s collaboration with singer Laura Marling as Lump. Here, they reconvene Tunng’s original line-up for an album that builds seamlessly on its predecessors’ strengths; dreamy moods, pastoral landscapes undercut with dark currents, and conjurations of acoustic and electronic instrumentation. It’s lighter on the sampled clicks, whirrs and speech of their early work, and heavier on the beats; Dark Heart has a Kraftwerk-like coda, and there are burbles of Fender Rhodes piano throughout.

The appeal, however, is much the same; Genders’s delicate falsetto (in the manner of Robert Wyatt) is full of lyrical surprises – “fragments of a better life” that rain from the sky, visions of “an army of abandoned souls” – and comes counterpointed by Becky Jacobs’s haunting vocals. The melodies are simple but lovely, often spelled out on tumbling acoustic guitar, as on Like Water, before being taken up by the group. It’s wonderful to have them back.

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by Neil Spencer via Electronic music | The Guardian

Unfettered Irish dance to a brand new tune

Wave of liberalism inspires electro scene that is now conquering Britain’s dancefloors

From Celtic reels to the Cranberries, and Val Doonican to the Pogues, Irish music has long found fame in Britain. Now a new wave of acts from the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland are taking over the British dance scene – this time with electronic music.

The new sounds are rooted in folk music as well as club bangers. Many names will be unfamiliar, such as producer J Colleran from Co Kildare, Dublin’s Seán Mac Erlaine and Galway’s Olan Monk. But there are higher-profile acts, like Bicep of Belfast, who have had millions of streams on YouTube, and Dublin’s Krystal Klear, whose Neutron Dance is of the year’s biggest dance singles.

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by Tess Reidy via Electronic music | The Guardian