Kelly Lee Owens: Inner Song review – a DJ finds her voice

(Smalltown Supersound)
The Welsh musician-producer unleashes her own vocals while digging deeper with brooding electronics

Delayed to show “solidarity” with record shops threatened by Covid, Kelly Lee Owens’s second album finds the banging techno DJ venturing further into the realm of electronic pop. The digitals are still on point. Arpeggi’s creepy retro-futurism recalls Boards of Canada and earlier electronic experiments in Germany in the 1970s.

But when Owens was on tour with Four Tet, Kieran Hebden urged her to stop hiding her singing voice under a bushel. Now some actual songs – such as the resolute, sad banger On, or L.I.N.E. (Love Is Not Enough) – find the Welsh musician in full coo. The sweetness is deceptive: L.I.N.E. weighs up the compromises people make in relationships; solitude, she concludes, beats warping your essence.

Related: Kelly Lee Owens: ‘My patients were my career advisers’

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Play what you see: how graphic scores can unleash your inner musical genius

When musical notation failed the great avant garde composers, they drew a picture instead. Now, a new project hopes everyone else will follow in their footsteps

Matt Ashdown is determined to make all aspects of music-making open to everyone – composing, recording and performing. Haven’t got an instrument? His Falmouth-based arts organisation, Moogie Wonderland, will help you build a synthesiser on a bread board for less than a tenner. Or you can use one of the “noise stations” that they’ve already assembled and instantly make your live debut – no experience required. At one show in 2017, featuring Damo Suzuki from krautrock group Can, an 11-year-old girl joined in the mayhem. The experience helped to improve her confidence, her dad told Ashdown afterwards. At another gig, led by American electronic musician Simeon Coxe of Silver Apples, Aphex Twin was spotted in the crowd. He made his way to the stage, where, Ashdown recalls, “he bashed a tray hooked up to a fuzz pedal, I think, and came up with some weird guitar effects”.

The joy of graphic notation is that it allows everyone to be a composer

For more details, go to Scores of People.

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by Phil Hebblethwaite via Electronic music | The Guardian

Disclosure: Energy review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

(Island Records)
With nightclubs closed during coronavirus, the third album from the British pop-house duo has an unwittingly mournful quality

Occasionally, songs take on qualities that their authors never intended them to have. The passage of time casts different light on them; political groups and protest movements co-opt them, lending unanticipated meaning to the words; artists unexpectedly die and their final work becomes freighted with poignancy. To a roll-call that includes Martha and the Vandellas’ Dancing in the Street, John Lennon’s (Just Like) Starting Over, Bob Dylan’s Maggie’s Farm and McFadden & Whitehead’s Ain’t No Stopping Us Now, we now might add, a little unexpectedly, the third album by Surrey-born pop-house duo Disclosure, which events overtook before it was even released.

There may have been less opportune moments in history to put out an album filled with songs hymning the pleasures of clubs, of dancing en masse and of fleeting eyes-meeting-across-the-dancefloor romance, but you struggle to think of one. Energy arrives in a world where most venues are shuttered and festivals cancelled, where dancing with others carries with it the potential of contracting a fatal illness, where illegal raves have become a bigger public bugbear than in the Criminal Justice Act-provoking wake of Castlemorton, and where the dance scene has recently been convulsed by an argument about whether DJs should DJ at all. Online footage of big name DJs playing in continental Europe this month was greeted with general horror, the legal but maskless, non-socially-distanced “plague raves” they were performing at held by some to have contributed to a rise in Covid-19 infections.

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Spinn & Rashad, Unsound 2011: dancing through a crack in time

By playing their ultra-fast footwork style in a Soviet-era Kraków suburb, the Chicago DJs opened a portal to the future

Half an hour from the centre of Kraków, out past the ring road, is the Soviet-era suburb of Nowa Huta, a model city that was never finished. It has roads wide enough for tanks, trees planted with the absorption of a nuclear blast in mind, and it is shaped so that the city can lock down into a fortress in the event of an attack. It is also the location of a vast post-industrial hangar-like theatre space called Łaźnia Nowa, where, one cold Saturday night in early October 2011, a crack in time opened, and the future arrived from Chicago.

With DJ Spinn and DJ Rashad at the controls, this set was one of the first times footwork – the fast ghetto-house dance music from Chicago’s South Side – had been played in Europe. Playing as part of Kraków’s experimental music festival Unsound, they took the roof off the low-ceilinged basement.

Related: Fancy footwork: how Chicago's juke scene found its feet again

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by Jennifer Lucy Allan via Electronic music | The Guardian

Dom Servini – Unherd Radio Show #45 on Soho Radio

Listen here!

Intro

The Milk – The Great Sorrow

Secret Night Gang – The Sun

Jaga Jazzist – Tomita (Edit)

Tawiah – How Much Left (Live)

Monzanto Sound – 23

Majja – Black James Dean

Black Thought – Thought Vs Everybody

Malta Mina – UFO (Sepalot Remix)

Marlowe – Future Power Sources

Saronde – Firewood feat. Idd Aziz

Romare – Sunshine

Smoove & Turrell – It Aint Working (Ashley Beedle’s NSW Vocal)

Destiny71z – T30001

The Staple Singers – Slippery People (Delfonic Edit)

G. Markus – Flawsome

Kuna Maze – Something To Say

Bad Business – Cadillac Villa (FSQ Caribbean Disco Remix)

Dele Sosimi x Medlar – Gúdú Gúdú Kan (Full Length Version)

Youthsayers – Racist Friend

Phase 7 – Dance The Night Away

Delfonic – Get Up And Spread Love

Reuben Vaun Smith – Trip On New Shores

Rubenstein – Joy

Matthew Halsall & The Gondwana Orchestra – When The World Was One

Lady Blackbird – Beware The Stranger

The post Dom Servini – Unherd Radio Show #45 on Soho Radio appeared first on Wah Wah 45s.

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Wah Wah Radio – August 2020

Listen here!

Intro

Lady Blackbird – Beware The Stranger (Matthew Herbert Remix)

Reuben Vaun Smith – Under The Thunder

Dele Sosimi x Medlar – Gúdú Gúdú Kan (Full Length Version)

Coladera – A Luz De Yayá (Melodiesinfonie Remix)

Kraak & Smaak – Naked (feat. IVAR & Berenice van Leer) (Fouk Remix) 

Toni Sauna – Ewings

Vex Ruffin – Mabuhay Boy

Common Saints – Summer Sun

The Milk – The Great Sorrow (Demo Version)

Andrew Wasylyk – In Balgay Silhouettes

Ambiance – 500 Miles High

Black and Blues – A Toast To The People (Ashley Beedle’s Heavy Disco Extension)

Outro

The post Wah Wah Radio – August 2020 appeared first on Wah Wah 45s.

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The Goods Radio Show – Wah Wah 45s Takeover with Dom Servini

Listen here!

1st Hour
Sparkle Division – You Go Girl!

Ambiance – The Arrival

Black And Blues – A Toast To The People (Ashley Beedle Edit)

East Coast Love Affair – Don’t Be Afraid

Dele Sosimi x Meldar – Full Moon (Detroit Swindle Remix)

Raul Monslave y Los Forajidos – Cafunga

Lokkhi Terra – Lal Mere

Los Miticos del Ritmo – Vampiro Sabanero

Ebo Taylor And The Pelicans – Come Along

A Tribute to Henri-Pierre Noel

Henri-Pierre Noel – A Fifth of Beethoven

Henri-Pierre Noel – Funky Spider Dance (The Reflex ReVision)

Henri-Pierre Noel – Merci Bon Dieu (Vocal Version)

Henri-Pierre Noel – Sambita

Dele Sosimi x Medlar – Gudu Gudu Kan (Radio Edit)
2nd Hour

Frankosun And The Family – Malaria

Lord Shorty – Sweet Music (Sofrito Edit)

Pablo Aravena in conversation

Kaytranada x Gal Costa – Spotlites (Same Speed Edit)

Moonstarr – Broken Bossa

Muzion – La Vie Ti-Neg

The Incubator – Here Kitty (Bop)

Blue James – Walk On

The Milk – The Great Sorrow (Scrimshire Remix)

Soothsayers – We Are Many 

Secret Night Gang – The Sun

Sam – Life (Exclusive)

The post The Goods Radio Show – Wah Wah 45s Takeover with Dom Servini appeared first on Wah Wah 45s.

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The Beloved: how we made The Sun Rising

‘The song blew up at the end of summer 1989, by which time a whole generation were going to outdoor raves. What other record are you going to play at 5.30am?’

Jon Marsh and I had been in an earlier, guitar-based version of the Beloved. We did two sessions for John Peel’s radio show, but then we slimmed to a duo and started making electronic music. It was the late 80s and house was just emerging. Jon had discovered an acid house club in London called Shoom and took me along. He said: “Come in here, take one of these and I’ll see you in the morning.” There was so much dry ice I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. I just danced all night. After that, we’d go to these clubs, then come home and re-create that emotional rush in our own music.

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by Interviews by Dave Simpson via Electronic music | The Guardian

Cut Copy on the role of dance music when dancefloors are closed: 'It doesn't really make sense'

In mid-March the indie-electro band played their timeless anthems to more than 10,000 people at a Melbourne gig. It feels like another world away

After almost two decades soundtracking nightclubs and parties, Dan Whitford is getting tired. When the founding member of the indie dance outfit Cut Copy decamped to Copenhagen in 2016, he began sussing out the local techno scene at warehouse raves. “I went to a couple when I first got there and then thought, ‘That’s a bit past my bedtime.’”

It wasn’t just the scene that turned him inward; the subzero winter and isolation from the familiarity of home began influencing the music he was making. The result, Cut Copy’s new record Freeze, Melt, is the band’s most contemplative and insular.

Our bread and butter has been sweaty dance floors and tightly packed festival crowds. It’s hard to imagine what context that’s going to exist in in the future

Related: Alex the Astronaut: 'I didn’t want to tell anyone that I was gay, let alone millions of strangers'

We’d given so much of our time to making music that would work on a dancefloor ... it just lost interest for us

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by Brodie Lancaster via Electronic music | The Guardian

Meet the musician summoning ghosts of the past from Melbourne Town Hall's grand organ

Wiradjuri artist Naretha Williams says her immense and fearsome new work, Blak Mass, is ‘meant to be unsettling’

Naretha Williams stares ominously from the cover of her new LP Blak Mass, hands outstretched as if performing an incantation. Standing in front of a large organ, this image of the Wiradjuri conceptual artist, composer and musician is unsettling, the kind of scene that precludes a curse. Those who press play on the disc inside, though, are far more likely to find a revelation.

Blak Mass is a fearsome work, a piece of music that utilises Melbourne Town Hall’s Grand Romantic Organ – the largest of its kind in the southern hemisphere – to ask questions about the nature of colonialism. A 33-minute composition commissioned by the City of Melbourne last year for the Yirramboi First Nations Arts Festival, Williams’ piece combines pummelling organ with elements of techno and avant-garde electronic to create an intense, magnetic work that dares its audience to reconsider both civic and personal history.

Related: Emma Swift: Blonde on the Tracks review – illuminating, intimate Bob Dylan covers

Related: ‘It’s hard to believe it when everything’s against you’: the rise of Melbourne’s African diaspora rap scene

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by Shaad D'Souza via Electronic music | The Guardian

One to watch: Otta

The Finnish-British musician’s compelling electronic pop recalls early Björk, the Radiophonic Workshop and more…

Otta is a Finnish-British singer-songwriter from south London whose electronic pop songs are bright, sharp and strange. On her new EP, Songbook, they have a compelling DIY fidgetiness about them – hardly surprisingly, given that she records much of her material in her home studio: “a cupboard-under-the-stairs-meets-shed”, she explains, “but still a precious altar”.

Moving to the UK when she was five, Otta first dreamt of being a professional drummer, starting lessons at seven. In her teens, acoustic guitars and Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy inspired her to write songs (she’d do this in her bathroom), and at 16 she won a place at the Brit School, which introduced her to jazz and electronic production. These elements inform her sound now, as do additional details from producer Kwes (Solange, Loyle Corner, Nubya Garcia), who discovered Otta on SoundCloud and signed her to his own label, Bokkle.

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by Jude Rogers via Electronic music | The Guardian

Throbbing Gristle, ATP 2004: a gateway to a strange other England

An encounter with the British industrialists opened not only a world of music and underground culture but a whole new way of living

By the winter of 2004, the Pontins holiday camp at Camber Sands had seen better days. Barely updated since its 1970s heyday, the bleak chalets, roamed by the ghosts of Bluecoats, were an appropriate setting for Throbbing Gristle’s comeback.

In the late 70s, the band had held up a mirror to a seamy, degraded Britain ruled by corrupt authorities and mired in industrial decline, with lyrics about the Moors murders and political control, and stage outfits made of army-surplus gear. Musically, their use of samplers and abstract sound made them pioneers. After they terminated their initial phase of operation in 1981, none of the industrial artists who later cited them as an influence – Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails – came close to their radical sonics and social commentary.

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by Luke Turner via Electronic music | The Guardian

Beat surrender: classic club-night posters – in pictures

“Artists and graphic designers like working on music [projects] because they get creative freedom,” says Gemma Curtin, co-curator of Electronic: From Kraftwerk to the Chemical Brothers, on view at the Design Museum, London W8 (until 14 February). The show explores the design and aesthetics that define electronic music. Curtin says: “Graphic designers like Peter Saville used innovative techniques and high production costs to create rich visuals that still look really fresh today.”

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by Kadish Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian