Dom Servini at The Standard #1

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5 and a half hours of soul, jazz and other mellow music….

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Beatrice Dillon: the most thrilling new artist in electronic music

The London musician is releasing her debut album after years of odd jobs and collaborations, pitting the highbrow against the homespun in masterfully light yet complex music

‘The computer always wins, that was my phrase.” Beatrice Dillon is explaining the sound of her debut album, Workaround, in which her computers spar with acoustic instruments played by a dozen guests ranging from cellist Lucy Railton to tabla player Kuljit Bhamra (who has an MBE for services to bhangra, Dillon points out proudly).

Out in February, the album confirms Dillon as the most thrilling new voice in British electronic music today. Workaround moves with the airborne grace of capoeira fighters, every track rattling along at 150bpm – the tempo between techno and jungle. It somehow connects the pointillist precision of electronic producers such as Mark Fell and Errorsmith with the disorienting bass-scapes of dub masters Scientist and Lee Perry, reflecting Dillon’s wide interests. These extend beyond music into fine art, which she studied at Chelsea College of Arts. “They don’t really teach you anything at art school, it’s a complete waste of time,” she breezes in her bright and airy studio beside the Thames in Somerset House, central London. “But if they do teach you anything it’s criticality: ‘What are you actually doing?’”

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by Chal Ravens via Electronic music | The Guardian

The best underground dance music of 2019

Whether it was Conducta’s anti-nostalgic UK garage revival or the experimentalism of Shanghai’s SVBKVLT label, 2019 saw dancefloor boundaries staked out in exciting new territory

Gabber Modus Operandi

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by Tayyab Amin and Lauren Martin via Electronic music | The Guardian

Wah Wah Radio Round Up of the Year – December 2019

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1. Alison Crockett – Like Rain (Yam Who? Remix)

2. Time Grove – Indopia

3. Honeyfeet – Clap Hands

4. The Milk – Never Come Down (Radio Edit)

5. Lea Lea – The Road (Dub Version)

6. Resonators – Soul Connection (Live at Electric)

7. Soothsayers – Natural Mystic (Sarathy Korwar Remix)

8. Paper Tiger – Bioluminescent feat. Olivia Battacharjee

9. Isaac Birituro & The Rail Abandon – Yesu Yan Yan (Village Cuts Remix)

10. Isaac Birituro & The Rail Abandon – Highlife

11. Kutiman – So Long feat. Rioghnach Connolly

12. Talc – Pie Time

13. The Milk – Colours

14. Hardkandy – Brief Encounters feat. Scarlett Fae

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Dom Servini – Unherd Radio Show #36 on Soho Radio

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The Best of 2019

Damon Locks – From a Spark to a Fire

Steve Cobby – Feline Plastique

Kid Fonque – Infinity feat. Daev Martian & Ziyon

Surprise Chef – Blyth Street Nocturne

Brainstory – Mnemophobia

Jitwam – Temptations

Middle Name Dance Band – Weekend Love Chant (Radio Edit)

Corey King – 3 Years

Laneous – Terms

Ghost Funk Orchestra – Slow Down

Yelfris Valdes – After Sly

14KT – Sunday’s Yellow

Ti Seles – Pa Dekouraje’w Toni

Kutiman – Line 3

Jaimie Branch – Nuevo Roquero Estéreo

GUTS – L’Origine du Monde

Yu Su – Watermelon Woman (Edit)

Zilla With Her Eyes Shut – Get Your Way (Bambooman Remix)

A. Billie Free – Flourish feat. Angel Bat Dawid

79ers Gang – Iko Iko (79ers Gang Version)

Particle Ray – Saints Stomp Their Feet 

Tawiah – Lost in a Dream

SAULT – Why Why Why Why Why

Michael Kiwanuka – You Ain’t The Problem

Abdullah Ibrahim – Jabula

The Lewis Express – Clap Your Hands

Homeboy Sandman – Far Out

Sampa The Great – Final Form

Kutiman – So Long feat. Rioghnach Connolly

Quantic – Now or Never feat. Alice Russell

Justine – Mama Didn’t Tell Ya

The Milk – Colours

Resavoir – Taking Flight feat. Brandee Younger

Angel bat Dawid – What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black?

Scrimshire – Thru You feat. Georgia Anne Muldrow

Tensei – Walk It Out feat. Georgia Anne Muldrow

Out of the Ordinary – Meadows (Gospel Mix)

Isaac Birituro & The Rail Abandon – Für Svenja

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Sault: 5 / 7 review – intriguing grooves from a mystery funk machine

(Forever Living Originals)
No one seems to know who they are, but one thing is sure: Sault make hooky, dubby, funky music with echoes of ESG and Can

Mystery is a rare commodity in rock and pop these days. The internet has made investigative journalists of us all, and an artist who expends a lot of effort creating an enigmatic aura will almost invariably find themselves revealed online. So hats off to Sault, who managed to release two albums in 2019 – titled 5 and 7 – without anyone managing to conclusively solve the puzzle of who was behind them.

It was not for want of trying. Some people suggested the involvement of a London-based musician called Dean Josiah, whose CV boasts co-writing and production credits for Michael Kiwanuka, the Saturdays and Little Simz – the last of whom raved about Sault on social media. Others have posited that British soul singer Cleo Sol and Chicago-based rapper and sometime Kanye West collaborator Kid Sister – both signed to Sault’s label, Forever Living Originals – are the vocalists. But no one has confirmed or denied anything.

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Guardian albums and tracks of 2019: how our writers voted

We’ve announced our favourite releases of the year – now the Guardian’s music critics reveal their top picks of 2019

• The 50 best albums of 2019
• The 20 best songs of 2019

Albums
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Ghosteen
Michael Kiwanuka – Kiwanuka
Sturgill Simpson – Sound and Fury
Billie Eilish – When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?
Slowthai – Nothing Great About Britain
Sharon Van Etten – Remind Me Tomorrow
Fontaines DC – Dogrel
Sault – 5
Tyler, the Creator – Igor
Dave – Psychodrama
Weyes Blood – Titanic Rising
Nilüfer Yanya – Miss Universe
Chemical Brothers – No Geography
Brittany Howard – Jaime
Little Simz – Grey Area
Jamila Woods – Legacy! Legacy!
International Teachers of Pop – International Teachers of Pop
Angel Olsen – All Mirrors
Anderson .Paak – Ventura
These New Puritans – Inside the Rose

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by via Electronic music | The Guardian

Burial: Tunes 2011 to 2019 review – a bleak, beautiful, brave compilation

(Hyperdub)

It’s strange to remember how much of the excitement around Burial’s emergence focused on the act’s anonymity. Like any serious underground scene, dubstep was hardly about fame-chasing faces in 2005. But Burial became its Banksy, a feted street artist who told poetic truths about the prosaic to the public. Evocative yet blunt song titles (In McDonalds, Night Bus, Homeless) introduced music that was easy to digest yet restless and difficult to define. Burial was the city after dark, sometimes comforting, often unsettling, studded with scraps of songs from passing cars or phones, industrial static mixed into ghostly, gorgeous melodies.

Then, after a Mercury prize nomination in 2008 for Untrue and the unmasking of Will Bevan as Burial, there were no more Burial albums, just some remixes and singles, the latter collected here over a languorous two-and-a-half hours. Bevan has jettisoned the sleep paralysis pop of his early work for something even more dissociated and peripatetic. You might head for the vicious rave of Rival Dealer or Nightmarket’s sumptuous, pealing melody first, to swerve some long, austere, beatless passages, but this is a compilation of rare bravery and beauty.

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by Damien Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian

Alabama 3 review – raucous ravers soak up mashup outlaws' sin and soul

Barrowland Ballroom, Glasgow
This was a rambunctious wake for founding member Jake Black – with their Sopranos’ theme a high point among club and country meldings

Jake Black, one of the founding members of Alabama 3, died in May this year. The southern-fried, dance-infused country irregulars formed in Brixton in the mid-1990s, yet Black was from Glasgow: this would have been a hometown gig.

Usually, you might say he was here in spirit. But Black, who performed as addled preacher the Very Reverend D Wayne Love, is also here in a more corporeal form, commemorated as an alabaster-white idol in a black suit, gazing out over a raucous, sold-out flock of ravers of all ages.

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by Graeme Virtue via Electronic music | The Guardian

St Vincent/Nina Kraviz: Masseduction Rewired review

(Loma Vista)
Russian producer Kraviz moves St Vincent’s 2017 album through a variety of gloomy musical lenses, from footwork to dub

Throughout the 2010s, the album has become somewhat amorphous. Today’s artists are more prone to releasing multiple versions of their records, and many of the old rules about the format have gone out of the window.

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by Aimee Cliff via Electronic music | The Guardian

Daniel Lopatin: Uncut Gems Original Soundtrack review

(Warp)
Lopatin, AKA Oneohtrix Point Never, has created a soundtrack for the Safdie brothers’ latest that brings its whole roiling humanity brilliantly to life

Uncut Gems is one of the films of the year, cementing its directors, the Safdie brothers, as the masters of stressing you out by watching flawed people make even more flawed life decisions – here, Adam Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a gambling-addicted jeweller who is in love not so much with the winning as the survivors’ adrenalin of not losing. After scoring their previous film, Robert Pattinson heist movie Good Time, Daniel Lopatin – AKA electronic producer Oneohtrix Point Never, now composing under his own name – once again writes the music.

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

Sheffield's post-punk explosion: synths, steel and skinheads

In the late 70s, the city’s bands set out to create the sound of the future – while trying to avoid getting beaten up. Jarvis Cocker and other leading lights recall a revolutionary scene

‘Sheffield in 1977 had a slight feeling of being the city of the future,” recalls Jarvis Cocker. “I didn’t realise that it was all going to go to shit. It was Sheffield before the fall.”

That pre-fall year is the starting point for a new box set: Dreams to Fill the Vacuum: The Sound of Sheffield 1977-1988. Familiar names appear – Pulp, Heaven 17, the Human League, ABC – but they are joined by a wealth of other acts, such as I’m So Hollow, Stunt Kites, They Must Be Russians and Surface Mutants, spanning punk, post-punk, indie and electronic with that droll outsider energy particular to South Yorkshire.

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by Daniel Dylan Wray via Electronic music | The Guardian

The 50 best albums of 2019, No 7: FKA twigs – Magdalene

Sex, sensuality and inner strength formed the core of a breakup album that mixed moments of fragility with rousing uplift

• The 50 best albums of the year
• More on the best culture of 2019

Despite a total lack of scriptural evidence, Mary Magdalene is commonly remembered as a penitent former sex worker, a once-sensual disciple of Jesus who straightened out to follow him to his death and beyond. On this album named after her, FKA twigs seems to say: get somebody who can do both. On the title track, she sings “I do it like Mary Magdalene” in the context of sex – carnal, but devotional. “Mary Magdalene would never let her loved ones down,” she sings on Home With You, and neither, she intimates, would she.

She’s written about this kind of emotional labour and nurturing sensuality before on her breakthrough single Two Weeks: “Suck me up, I’m healing / For the shit you’re dealing,” promising sex that satisfies the soul as well as the body. On stage, twigs has added pole-dancing to her routines, movements that are loaded with sexuality but, as she performs them, also transcend it to become a celebration of sheer corporeal movement and self-discipline.

Related: The 20 best songs of 2019

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

DOM SERVINI’S ALLO LOVE BEST OF 2019 TEN :: DECEMBER 2019

1. SAULT – Why Why Why Why Why (Forever Living Originals)

2. Tawiah – Lost in a Dream (First Word)

3. Jaimie Branch – Nuevo Roquero Esteréo (International Anthem)

4. Greg Foat – Of My Hands (Athens of the North)

5. La Boa – Por Eso (Big In Japan)

6. A. Billie Free – Flourish feat. Angel Bat Dawid (Tokyo Dawn)

7. Quantic – Now or Never feat. Alice Russell (Tru Thoughts)

8. Corey King – Beautiful People (Def Pressé)

9. Steve Cobby – Feline Plastique (Bandcamp)

10. Sampa The Great – Final Form (Ninja Tune)

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'The vibe was sex, sex, sex': Cocktail D'Amore, Berlin's free-love club night

Now celebrating 10 years of hedonism, this staple of Berlin nightlife has become a place for people to escape the drudgery of 9-to-5 existence

The room is dark and teeming when, four hours into his set, Boris drops Patrick Cowley’s remix of I Feel Love. Sweat-scented and balmy with body heat, the room lifts off. As Cowley’s synthesiser solo gets ever more ludicrous, hands throw silhouettes on the rainbow lights; two men make love; a hand-standing Italian woman tries not to topple over.

This is Sunday night at Cocktail d’Amore in Berlin, a friendly, gay, delirious party that is celebrating its 10th birthday this year with, among other things, a compilation and coffee table book. Berlin has a new generation of queer club nights – among them Herrensauna, Lecken and Buttons – but Cocktail d’Amore was the initiator of this wave.

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by Liam Cagney via Electronic music | The Guardian

The 50 best albums of 2019, No 10: Weyes Blood – Titanic Rising

The LA singer-songwriter’s switch to stately orchestral pop earned Karen Carpenter comparisons, but her all-American concerns were firmly of our times

• The 50 best albums of the year
• More on the best culture of 2019

Going from playing bass in an avant-garde noise band called Jackie-O Motherfucker to garnering comparisons to Karen Carpenter is no mean feat. And yet that has been the winding trajectory of Natalie Mering, an auteur based in LA whose solo career reached an almighty crescendo this year with her fourth outing, Titanic Rising.

As slow and stately as a tanker turning, and as waterlogged as its title implies, Titanic Rising was a curio in 2019. Unburdened by modish musical trends – no guests, no genre crossovers – it was a feat of immersive beauty, the kind of record you might put on an old-fashioned stereo, dim the lights and sit through in one indulgent sitting, the better to appreciate its three-dimensional production washing over your skin like a gong bath.

Related: The 20 best songs of 2019

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Grimes review – a suitably surreal invasion of the Miami Art Basel

The artist appeared among Florida’s monied art fiends with a pristine alternate-reality trip – and a gloriously flawed DJ set

The art world has descended on Miami for Art Basel, the annual fair dedicated to proving that old idiom about a fool and his money. The most talked-about piece so far is by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, who has found at least two buyers for a work consisting of a banana duct-taped to a wall. Arrested Development’s Lucille Bluth once blithely asked: “I mean, it’s one banana, Michael. How much could it cost?” The answer, it turns out, is $120,000.

Grimes fans could be forgiven for wondering if she might pull similar art pranks at her mysterious one-off show Bio-Haqué, held at an abandoned RC Cola plant that’s now transmogrified into a graffiti-blitzed 7,000-capacity outdoor venue in the city’s trendy Wynwood district. Details were scant when she first announced the show, writing cryptically on Instagram that she’d be joined by fellow provocateurs Sophie and Nina Kraviz and that it would be “a place where the well-proven anti-aging properties of raving have been distilled into the most potent experience available on the market today”.

Related: Sign up for the Sleeve Notes email: music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras

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by Kevin EG Perry via Electronic music | The Guardian

Burial: Tunes 2011-2019 review

(Hyperdub)
The producer’s collected post-Untrue EPs reveal him as one of the most evocative voices in British music

The nights are drawing in and the weather outside is frightful, so it’s the time of year to reach for an old favourite – no, not just Michael Bublé but Burial, the south London producer whose tracks remain the perfect accompaniment to a moody illicit joint in the snow at your parents’ house over Christmas; the sound of cloud covering a 4pm dusk.

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

The Veronicas, Violent Soho, Jade MacRae: Australia's best new music for December

Each month we add 20 of the best new Australian songs to our Spotify playlist. Read about 10 of our favourites below – and subscribe on Spotify, which updates with the full list at the start of each month

Related: The 20 best songs of 2019

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by Nathan Jolly and Guardian Australia via Electronic music | The Guardian

The 50 greatest Christmas songs – ranked!

From John Fahey, the Sonics and the Waitresses to Slade, Wizzard and Mariah Carey, we count down the best festive numbers

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by Michael Hann via Electronic music | The Guardian

The 50 best albums of 2019: 41-50

We begin our pick of the year’s finest albums with gritty electropop, oddball songwriting, tender jazz, louche punk funk. Check in every weekday as we count down to No 1

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas and Laura Snapes via Electronic music | The Guardian

Hannah Diamond: Reflections review – gloriously overwrought

(PC Music)

The press release for Hannah Diamond’s debut album hammers home the fact that the 28-year-old from Norwich is a real person. As the early figurehead for gonzo collective PC Music’s synthetic, hyper-real take on pop music, Diamond was caught in a wider conversation surrounding notions of authenticity, with her early singles dismissed as two-dimensional or, worse, the work of male geniuses using her as an avatar. Reflections, a gloriously overwrought breakup album, proves there’s a beating heart beneath Diamond’s self-aware, Photoshopped exterior.

Over 10 off-kilter songs, Diamond, whose deadpan, heavily tweaked vocals lend every word a sort of icy detachment, details the stages of a relationship ending, from catching a new flirtation on OTT hyper-ballad Invisible (“do you wish I wasn’t even there sometimes?”), to unpicking the moment of full implosion on the tactile Never Again.

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by Michael Cragg via Electronic music | The Guardian