Arca: Kick I review – dissonance meets overground ambitions

(XL)
The Venezuelan electronic innovator adds guests and party tunes to her trademark glitchy sounds

The Venezuela-born, Barcelona-based electronic innovator Arca has long made a feature of colliding sound-worlds and destabilising identities. Across three albums (four, if you’re counting the 62-minute track @@@@@) of mercurial productions, chaos and beauty have intertwined. Hand in hand with Arca’s fluid, writhing music have come inquiries into post-gender and non-binary selves.

KiCk I offers up an even broader palette than previously, while keeping up a steady diet of trademark dissonance alongside those slightly more overground ambitions. Stark album opener Nonbinary comes out fighting on behalf of “self-states”, while a handful of tracks plumb Arca’s Latinx heritage even more assiduously than previously: Mequetrefe is as close to pop as this artist has come; Riquiqui features a plethora of rhythmic Spanish voices over intricate clatter.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Washington, Wagons, Gordi and more: Australian music for isolated times

Each week we add 15 (or so) new songs to a Spotify playlist to soundtrack your physical distancing amid coronavirus – and help artists you love get paid

As some states begin to slowly open back up, Australia’s arts industry is still largely in lockdown – and the music industry was hit harder, and earlier, than most others. But until large gatherings and gigs happen again, there are small things you can do: it’s an imperfect solution, but streaming Australian music can help.

Each week, in partnership with Sounds Australia, Guardian Australia will add some 15 new songs to a playlist for you to put on repeat.

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by Guardian staff via Electronic music | The Guardian

Dom Servini – Unherd Radio Show #43 on Soho Radio

Listen here!

Intro

Pete Josef – Giants

Juls & Sango – Angele Ni Fie

Bahama Soul Club – Ain’t Nobody’s Business feat. Billie Holiday

Jorja Smith – Rose Rouge

Greg Foat – Symphonie Pacifique

Zara McFarlane – Future Echoes

Natalie Slade – Cloud Cover

Tensei – Last Dance feat. ADaD & Crl Crrll

Huw Marc Bennett – Blue Lias

Moodymann – Do Wrong

Bright & Findlay – Ain’t No Sunshine

Drab City – Troubled Girl

Number – Wedge

Le Commandant Couche-Tôt – Le Chevalier du Zodiac

SAULT – Eternal Life

Sun Ra Arkestra – Seductive Fantasy

Niklas Wandt – Luftkraft (Airforce Wandt)

WheelUP – People

J-Felix – Give Me Some of That feat. Afua (Titeknots Remix)

Lady Blackbird – Blackbird (Foremost Poets Adventure)

Hiatt DB – 6 O’Clock Rock

Teletronix – Metropolitan

Addvibe – Lonely

Bryony Jarman-Pinto – Day Dream

Keleketla! – International Love Affair (Edit)

Y-Bayani & Baby Naa – Nsie Nsie

Dampe & Mushkilla – Jesse James

Bishop Nehru – MEATHEAD feat. DOOM

The Koreatown Oddity – Weed In LA

Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids – When Will I See You Again

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Trax Records: Larry Heard and Richard Owens sue for $1m 'unpaid' royalties

A lawsuit accuses the house label of ‘masquerading as paternalistic benefactors’ for ‘musicians hungry for their first break’

The foundational house music producers Larry Heard (AKA Mr Fingers) and Richard Owens are suing Trax Records for allegedly unpaid royalties.

In a federal copyright infringement lawsuit filed in Illinois on 23 June, Heard and Owens accuse the legendary house label of “building its catalogue by taking advantage of unsophisticated but creative house music artists and songwriters by having them sign away their copyrights to their musical works for paltry amounts of money up front and promises of continued royalties throughout the life of the copyright”.

Related: 'It's all about feeling': Chicago dance great Larry Heard takes house to the heavens

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by Laura Snapes via Electronic music | The Guardian

Arca: KiCk i review – shapeshifting sonic vision of what pop could be

(XL)
Alejandra Ghersi’s new set is a subversive and mischievous fusion of aural fireworks and psychedelic lyricism aided by Björk, Shygirl, Rosalía and Sophie

Time, from Arca’s fourth album KiCk i, reduces a booming, bass-heavy 4/4 kick drum to a whisper that oscillates around Alejandra Ghersi’s blurry, anaesthetised words. “It’s time to let it out / And show the world,” she coos from a condemned space that evokes the atmosphere of a toilet stall at Berlin super-club Berghain. In the three years since her acclaimed 2017 album Arca, Ghersi has fallen in love and simultaneously found confidence from affirming her non-binary identity. If her previous album evoked a melancholy sci-fi opera set on a drifting space station, KiCk i is a live-streamed party, finding Ghersi at her most unrestrained, mischievous and joyful.

When something doesn't work, the failure acts as a reminder of the complexity of existence. Perfection is not revolutionary, but change is

Related: How cruising, graveyards and swan songs inspired Arca’s new album

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by John Twells via Electronic music | The Guardian

Good vibrations: how Bandcamp became the heroes of streaming

They waive their fees, raise cash for Juneteenth and champion everything from vaporwave to eco-grime. Founder Ethan Diamond explains how he did it

When Ethan Diamond founded Bandcamp in 2008, he imagined it an alternative to MySpace: an easy-to-use website where bands could interact with fans and sell music. Bandcamp would take care of the fiddly stuff – transcoding music into different formats, payments, analytics – and take a 15% cut of every sale. Five thousand miles away from Oakland, California, another startup millionaire was launching his own music service in Stockholm, one that would give listeners access to everything ever recorded. Spotify would be “better than piracy”, thought its 23-year-old creator, Daniel Ek.

In the decade afterwards, the music industry remade itself in Spotify’s image. Streaming services – including YouTube, Apple Music, Deezer and Tidal – signalled that the era of ownership was over. Who would want dusty vinyl or external hard drives if they could have all the music they wanted on their phone or laptop for a low subscription price? The result of this shift, as musicians from Taylor Swift to Thom Yorke to Joanna Newsom have complained, has been paltry payouts for artists and a consolidation of power among tech companies. Spotify has rarely turned a net profit, but it has 130 million paid subscribers and managed to scrape together $100m for a recent deal to host podcaster Joe Rogan exclusively.

A lot of independent labels waived their fees as well. Some gave to food banks and other organisations. Those labels aren't big corporations … that was amazing to see

People feel like their money is going somewhere, and not getting lost in this big black box of royalty nightmares

It can’t be that music is a commodity, or content to use to sell advertising. Artists have to come first

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by Chal Ravens via Electronic music | The Guardian

'We're not doing this to be ironic': are 100 Gecs the world's strangest band?

Their music may sound like the internet melting but the US duo have found a cult of fevered fans, including fellow pop futurist Charli XCX

For many US musicians, the height of ambition is winning a Grammy award. More ambitious performers might aim for an EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony). Bur, for the electronic duo 100 Gecs, only a PENOGT will suffice. “Pulitzer, Emmy, Nobel prize, Oscar, Grammy, Tony,” singer-instrumentalist Laura Les explains over video call. I haven’t heard that acronym before, I say. “We coined it, and it’s testament to our own ambition: there isn’t even a word for the shit we want.”

To those familiar with 100 Gecs, these aspirations might sound a tad inflated; some feel that the duo’s futuristic hyper-pop is too lo-fi, too entrenched in internet culture and unloved genres of the 90s and 00s (think chiptune, Nintendocore, German techno embarrassment Scooter), to be conceived of as anything but niche – so much so that the pair were accused, particularly at the start of their career, of being deliberately ironic, a postmodern inside gag. “It’s not a joke,” the band’s other half, producer Dylan Brady, reaffirms.

Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips

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by Hannah Ewens via Electronic music | The Guardian

Wah Wah Weekend Radio – June 2020

Listen here!

A Father’s Day Special

Intro

Skyzoo – A Song For Fathers

Horace Silver – Song For My Father

Shawn Lee – The Way Things Oughta Be

Amerigo Gazaway – Indivisible

Out of the Ordinary – Kind of Strange (North Street Remix)

SAULT – Sorry Aint Enough

Scrimshire – Ode to Daddy feat. Inga Lil-Aker

High Hopes Society – Father’s Day

Jonathan Jeremiah – Happiness

Gil Scott-Heron – Your Daddy Loves You

Billy Paul – It’s Critical

Stance Brothers – Resolution Blue (Teddy Rok Mass Appeal Edit)

Dele Sosimi x Medlar – Full Moon (Detroit Swindle Remix Radio)

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Pet Shop Boys: where to start in their back catalogue

In Listener’s digest, we help you explore the work of great musicians. Next: the peerless pop duo who elegantly delved into the big issues

Actually

Related: Neil Tennant on West End Girls: 'It's about sex and escape. It's paranoid'

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by Kate Solomon via Electronic music | The Guardian

Kevin Figes Quartet: Changing Times review – constantly fascinating

(Pig Records)
The multi-instrumentalist’s latest quartet recording is a mind-expanding feast for the ears

I didn’t think I was going to like this album at first, when greeted by the strains of an electronic sequencer. But this faded into a beautifully played flute solo. Then came some wordless chanting by two mysterious voices, leading to a horror-movie climax. As one piece followed another, the flute returned, this time apparently in an underground cavern. There were saxophones – baritone, alto and soprano, all impressively well played, and atmospheres, rhythms and textures that were constantly changing. It was fascinating. Even the bits that I couldn’t make head nor tail of were clearly the work of superb musicians.

Kevin Figes, who played all the saxophones, the flute and was one of the singing voices, composed all eight pieces. His first teacher was Elton Dea, saxophonist with the Soft Machine, who no doubt influenced his open attitude to music in general. The band is completed by Jim Blomfield on keyboards, bassist Thad Kelly, drummer Mark Whitlam and singer Emily Wright. I’m still intrigued by this music, even though parts continue to pass me by. Anyway, it does you good to stretch the ears from time to time.

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by Dave Gelly via Electronic music | The Guardian

Songs for the Children to Dance to by Dom & Isaac Servini

Listen here and watch here!

Don McCaskill – A Song The Children Dance To

Oscar Brown Jr. – Dat Dere

The Real Thing – Children of the Ghetto

Horace Silver – Accepting Responsibility

Bruce Forsyth – The Candy Man

The Muppets – Mah Na Mah Na

King Columbia Experience – I Wanna Be Like You

Lotte Laerså & Graesrødderne – Syng og Leg (Sing and Play)

Les Écoliers Reveurs – La Grenouille Qui Veut Se Faire Aussi Grosse Que Le Boeuf

Isaac Birituro & The Rail Abandon – Yesu Yan Yan (Isaac’s fave)

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'Why should I try to have a future at all?' Film captures hopelessness amid climate crisis

Kathy Drayton set out to make a documentary about the plight of Australian flying foxes. She ended up making one about her daughter instead

There had been previous obsessions; with eagles, with kangaroos. But when Imogen Jones first saw Princess Mononoke, a 1997 Japanese anime film that was made about the same time she was born, her alignment with the girl raised by wolves would be so profound that she would dress up as the character for years of her childhood.

Later she would name her electro-pop alter ego, Lupa J, in honour of the character.  

Related: Sydney film festival's isolation edition: from climate devastation to killer jellyfish

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by Jenny Valentish via Electronic music | The Guardian

Glastonbury to create virtual Shangri-La with Fatboy Slim and more

Chaotic rave zone of cancelled festival will be rendered in 3D online for two-day event in July

Glastonbury may be cancelled for 2020, but one of its most eye-catching areas will party on regardless: Shangri-La is to be recreated in a 3D digital form for a free two-day online festival in July featuring Fatboy Slim, Carl Cox and more.

The area, an outdoor art gallery situated in the notoriously hedonistic south-east corner of the festival site, will be rendered in a videogame-like 3D landscape for the online Lost Horizon festival. It will be accessible on PC or via a mobile app, plus a virtual reality option via the Sansar platform, and feature “computer-generated avatars and green screen hologram performances”, according to organisers.

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

DOM SERVINI’S CONSCIOUS TEN :: JUNE 2020

1. Syl Johnson – Is It Because I’m Black (Twinight LP)

2. Courtney Buchanan – R U Conscious (Club Mix) (Conscious Records 12)

3. Public Enemy & Branford Marsalis – Fight The Power (Inst) (White 12)

4. Gil Scott-Heron – Whitey on the Moon (Flying Dutchman LP)

5. Esther Marrow – Things Ain’t Right (Fantasy LP)

6. Billy Taylor – I Wish I knew How It Would Feel To Be Free (Tower LP)

7. Archie Shepp – Blues For Brother George Jackson (Impulse! LP)

8. Frank Foster – The Loud Minority (Mainstream LP)

9. Stevie Wonder – Black Man (Motown LP)10. The 24-Carat Black – Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth (Enterprise LP)

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Kate NV's lockdown listening: 'I'm definitely a major key person!'

The Russian electronic musician on her homeland’s bizarre 80s movie themes and reappraising childhood favourites

I’ve spent the whole lockdown at home in Moscow. It’s funny, I’d actually planned to spend March and April at home, writing new music – that was the plan. But then all this happened and I can’t do a thing. Lots of people have been saying things like “don’t blame yourself”, and I know that. But it’s taken me a while to realise that it’s fine: I wish I could write music right now, but I can’t force myself to do it. Lockdown is so uninspiring, oh my god.

Lots of my musician friends have postponed [releasing] their albums. But I just thought: OK, you can’t compete with everything that’s going on in the world, and I’m not trying to. If my music could help someone to get through this somehow, I would be so happy.

Related: Sophie Ellis-Bextor's lockdown listening: 'A child could understand it – stay at home'

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by Interview by Katie Hawthorne via Electronic music | The Guardian

The 100 greatest UK No 1s: No 1, Pet Shop Boys – West End Girls

Thirty-six years on, their debut single still pulses with beguiling ambiguity – a heady rush of lust, naivety, disco and opaque references to Lenin

• Read our 100 greatest No 1 singles list in full

West End Girls is a lens on to a glamorous demimonde. Primped young women and hungry young men meet in a corner of London that is starting to gentrify, although still seedy enough to expose the transactions behind the flirtation. You can almost hear their egos rattle as they use each other for sex and drugs, second-hand cool and sly oneupmanship, parsing the social codes in a suspicious, cinematic rush: “Have you got it? Do you get it? If so, how often? Which do you choose, a hard or soft option?” But a scene’s beautiful people are rarely as captivating as the wallflower at the orgy. After all, the West End girls and East End boys are doomed to a dead-end world. The real glamorous demimonde opened up by West End Girls is that of the Pet Shop Boys, perceptive night owls who make a virtue of being outsiders yet understand the allure of the charade.

Thirty-six years on, their debut single still pulses with that beguiling ambiguity; the exact emotion of Chris Lowe’s glacial chords and abrupt beat, and of Neil Tennant’s alternately wry and rhapsodic observations, impossible to pinpoint. Although Tennant cited Grandmaster Flash’s The Message as an influence on the rapped verses, West End Girls isn’t so much social commentary on London’s burgeoning yuppie class as it is an impressionist marvel, in which lust, naivety, disco and opaque references to Lenin rush by as if caught in the reflection of a bus window. TS Eliot’s The Waste Land was another influence. Years later, Tennant said he had never understood the poem, “but the poetry of it, the different voices talking about strange and disparate and even exotic things, is completely riveting and makes you want to read it again and again … hoping to find new meaning”. Some urbane listeners may have recognised themselves in the song, whether the flirtatious insider or worldly observer. But it is kids who send songs to No 1, and West End Girls was an aperture on to a mysterious adult world, the Pet Shop Boys’ distanced framing as captivating as the picture.

Related: Pet Shop Boys: 'The acoustic guitar should be banned'

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by Laura Snapes via Electronic music | The Guardian

Neil Tennant on West End Girls: 'It's about sex and escape. It's paranoid'

We voted the Pet Shop Boys’ debut single the greatest British No 1 of all time. Their frontman remembers the clubs, pathos and serendipity behind the hit

• Read the full 100 greatest UK No 1s list

We named West End Girls the greatest ever UK No 1. Did we get it right?
Well, I would have chosen Good Vibrations. It’s obviously intensely subjective. I can see that West End Girls is quite a lot of records in one record. It’s a dance record. It was actually written to be a rap record, back in the day. It’s a moody soundscape. It’s about the city at night. It’s about boys and girls meeting to have fun and presumably to bond [laughs]. It’s about sex. It’s paranoid. At the same time, its message is sort of like Dancing in the Streets – it’s about escape into the city at night, which is emblematic of pleasure.

When you were writing it, did you have a sense that these elements were potent ingredients for a pop song?
Oh, it was completely instinctive. It was written in early 83. I used to get the records ’cause of being at Smash Hits: Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa. One day I was at my cousin’s and we’d watched a Jimmy Cagney movie. Before going to bed, the opening lines came into my head and so I turned the light on and wrote them down. I got back to London and went with it and wrote a rap. These were the days when Chris [Lowe] and I used to make demos in a little studio off Camden Road. Chris was down from Liverpool University. We went into the studio, and I said to Chris and the guy whose studio it was: “I’ve written this rap!” Rather embarrassingly, I then performed it. Luckily, they were mildly impressed.

Related: One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem review – Neil Tennant’s superb songbook

Related: Neil Tennant: ‘Sometimes I think, where’s the art, the poetry in all this?’

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by Laura Snapes via Electronic music | The Guardian

The 100 greatest UK No 1s: No 4, Donna Summer – I Feel Love

Hypnotic synth, peerless vocals and visionary ambition make the 1977 genre-busting hit a turning point in pop and a truly timeless track

• Read our list of the 100 greatest UK No 1s

In 1975, a stellar team based in Germany laid the groundwork for a musical revolution, the aftershock of which is still being felt today. American singer Donna Summer, alongside production and songwriting duo Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, were responsible for the torrid single Love to Love You Baby. In technical terms, the track’s modernism can be heard in a heavily foregrounded 4/4 beat bolstered, metronomically, by rudimentary drum programming. But that isn’t what initially captured the imaginations of the disco cognoscenti.

During a coke-fuelled orgy at his LA mansion, the head of Casablanca records, Neil Bogart, took a break from the festivities to phone Bellotte in a state of high excitement saying that everyone was “fucking to this track” and demanding constant rewinds. He asked the trio to expand the song until it filled the side of an album, something that was relatively easy for them to do because of the rigid grid of drum machine beats. The resulting track, replete with 22 simulated orgasms (courtesy of the 12-inch version at least), earned Summer, a practising Christian and trained gospel singer, a BBC ban, a trans-Atlantic hit and a new record deal with Casablanca.

Related: Giorgio Moroder – his 20 greatest songs, ranked!

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by John Doran via Electronic music | The Guardian

Splendid Isolation 009 with Dom Servini

Listen here!

Intro
Syl Johnson – Is It Because I’m Black (A Song for George Floyd)
The Secret Waltz Club Band – Nothing To Do
Jill Scott – Slowly, Surely
AIM – What People Do All Day
Hairy Diamond – Givin’ Up
Kruder & Dorfmeister – Deep Shit Pts 1 & 2
Bonnie Prince Billie – Cursed Sleep
Kenny Rankin – Yesterday’s Lies (A Song for Cummings)
Lady Blackbird – Blackbird
Wings – Letting Go
Aeroplane – We Can’t Fly
Laura Mvula – Green Garden
Paul McCartney – Man We Was Lonely (skit)
Beck – Devil’s Haircut
Pekka Streng- Puutarhassa (In The Garden) (Extended Version)
Stereolab – Ping Pong
Joe Jackson – Steppin’ Out
Adam F – Circles
Les Gammas – See The Sun
Roy Ayers – Gotta Find a Lover
Max Beesley’s High Vibes – Painful Truths feat Omar
Erykah Badu – On and On
Martin Luther King Jr. – Interlude 1
Courtney Buchanan – Are You Conscious?
Pattie LaBelle & Michael McDonald – On My Own
En Vogue – Hold On
Masters at Work present India – I Can’t Get No Sleep ‘95 (Morales Late Nite Mix)
The Sounds of Blackness – OptimisticMartin Luther King Jr. – Interlude 2Outro

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