Blanck Mass: In Ferneaux review – the very definition of niche

(Sacred Bones)
Travel the world as Benjamin John Power mines a decade’s worth of field recordings on his gratifyingly singular fifth album

In Ferneaux represents something of a departure for electronica auteur Benjamin John Power. After the euphoric and abrasive maximalism of 2019’s Animated Violence Mild, and his work as half of Fuck Buttons, Power’s fifth album as Blanck Mass is a more oblique affair. A product of lockdown isolation, it comprises two lengthy soundscapes that blend his trademark layers of coruscating noise with sounds found on his travels over the past decade. Set out of context, these field recordings become for the most part wilfully abstract and very much open to interpretation: was this one recorded in downtown Bamako, that one at a Portuguese woodland rave?

Phase I begins with twinkling synths before hitting a bombastic climax, and then everything drops away around the six-minute mark, leaving only a recording of what could be a walking tour of an open-air cutlery-testing facility, which in turn becomes a slowly evolving drone. It ends with industrial pummelling. Feedback and distortion feature more prominently in Phase II, as does a gorgeous piano coda, while a carnival atmosphere prevails in the most prominent found sound. In an age of Spotified homogeneity, it’s the very definition of niche, but makes for admirably – and enjoyably – singular listening.

Continue reading...
by Phil Mongredien via Electronic music | The Guardian

'They left an indelible mark on my psyche': how Daft Punk pushed pop forward

Skrillex, Erol Alkan and those close to the French duo chart how they went from being industry outsiders to defining the trajectory of dance music

Following their split this week after 28 years, Daft Punk have ascended to pop Valhalla. Perhaps they’re sitting next to Prince, whose pirouetting falsetto funk and emotional vulnerability inspired the duo’s 2001 masterpiece Discovery, and Led Zeppelin, from whom they cribbed double-necked guitars and 10-tonne drums on 2005’s Human After All. Yet those albums were met with a mixed reception – audiences and critics alike had to learn to trust Daft Punk’s vision of the future.

For British producer-DJ Erol Alkan, whose fan forums were an essential incubator of the blog house movement that swept through club culture in the 2000s, the Parisians had a “deeply profound impact” on a generation, including Alkan. “They were a gateway into so much music that I love, and a big part of that admiration comes down to their position as outsiders,” he says. Daft Punk’s magpie approach to songwriting and visual art was a dominant story of early 21st-century music, similarly colouring the work of MIA, 2ManyDJs, the Avalanches and other sample-stitchers. Although some commentators queried how much inspiration could actually be bound up in recycling, Alkan thinks that in Daft Punk’s case, “the references are strong and familiar, and there is enough of themselves in there for it to always remain theirs”.

In the late 90s, you could already feel they were geniuses with real vision

Related: Daft Punk were the most influential pop musicians of the 21st century

Continue reading...
by Gabriel Szatan via Electronic music | The Guardian

Daft Punk were the most influential pop musicians of the 21st century

By resurrecting disco, soft rock and 80s R&B, and bringing spectacle to the world of dance music, the French duo changed the course of pop music again and again

• News: Daft Punk split up after 28 years

It’s hard to think of an act who had a greater impact on the way 21st-century pop music sounds than Daft Punk. The style Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo minted on their 1997 debut album Homework – house music heavy on the filter effect, which involved the bass or treble on the track gradually fading in and out, mimicking a DJ playing with the equalisation on a mixer; drums treated with sidechain compression, so that the beats appeared to punch through the sound, causing everything else on the track to momentarily recede – is now part of pop’s lingua franca.

In fact, no sooner had Homework come out than other artists started to copy it. Within a couple of years, Madonna had hooked up with another French dance producer, Mirwais, employed to add a distinctly Daft Punk-ish sheen to her 2000 album Music, and the charts were playing host to a succession of soundalike house tracks – 2 People by Jean Jacques Smoothie, who turned out to be a bloke from Gloucester called Steve; Phats and Small’s ubiquitous Turn Around; and No 1 singles, Modjo’s Lady and Eric Prydz’s Call on Me among them.

Continue reading...
by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Daft Punk, French electronic music duo, split up after 28 years

Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo do not explain split, after big hits including Get Lucky and One More Time

Daft Punk, the French duo whose sci-fi aesthetic and euphoric sense of pop transformed electronic music forever, have split up.

They announced the split with a YouTube video featuring a clip from their film Electroma, featuring an intertitle with the dates 1993-2021. Their publicist Kathryn Frazier confirmed the split to Pitchfork, but did not elaborate.

Continue reading...
by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

Sal Dulu: Xompulse review – boom-bap dreamscapes

(Duluoz)
Jazz, ambient and soul harmonise in the Dublin-based producer’s gently daze-inducing debut

Dublin-based producer and instrumentalist Sal Dulu makes calm, expansive beats that swim with the cinematic possibilities of the night-time. Xompulse is his debut album, and comprises a subtly enticing collection of tracks that marry everything from boom-bap, classical, jazz, ambient, warm licks of soul samples and glossy shades of 90s downtempo. There’s more than an occasional nod to celestial, Porcelain-era Moby and lush Madlib stylings.

Thematically, Dulu has said the record explores the liminal space between reality and dreams, with each of the 10 tracks serving as individual memories within this dreamscape. There is certainly a slow-burning, woozy quality that slips and slides gently from track to track, though slick features from rappers Fly Anakin, Koncept Jack$on and staHHr all cut through, lest things get too soporific (a couple more of these would have been welcome). Still, simple moments are rendered beautiful by Dulu’s arrangements: the quiet ebb and flow of the piano-led title track; the careening strings on Alien Boy 96; the soft sax on Just Like Sonnenalle Blues; the wobbling synth on I Kan. Twinkling and soothing, Xompulse is a pleasant reverie to sink into.

Continue reading...
by Tara Joshi via Electronic music | The Guardian

'It's been cathartic': how Blanck Mass made a travelogue album in lockdown

With touring halted, the electronic musician incorporated recordings from around the world, as well as memories of a late loved one, into a ‘sad and nostalgic’ new work

Unless you happened to be one of the thousands who, on March 15, 2020, attended a Stereophonics concert, then chances are the memories of your last pre-lockdown gig will be special. For me, it was being in a dark basement as Blanck Mass’s pulverising electronics rattled the walls, drowning out a ukulele duo playing the open-mic night in the neighbouring bar.

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

Continue reading...
by Daniel Dylan Wray via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘You can smell the sweat and hair gel’: the best nightclub scenes from culture

Writers and artists including Róisín Murphy, Tiffany Calver and Sigala on the art that transports them to the dancefloor during lockdown

There have been many notable nightclubs in film history. The Blue Angel in the Marlene Dietrich movie; the Copacabana in Goodfellas, accessible to privileged wiseguys via the kitchen; the Slow Club in Blue Velvet, with the emotionally damaged star turn Isabella Rossellini singing the song of the same name.

Continue reading...
by Peter Bradshaw, Claire Armitstead, Keza MacDonald, Simran Hans, Ammar Kalia, Lanre Bakare, Lyndsey Winship, Alexis Petridis, Arifa Akbar, Aniefiok Ekpoudom and Jonathan Jones. Artist interviews by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

Save and rave! How a compilation of pirate radio adverts captures a lost Britain

Fashion boutiques, shop-fitters and others advertised alongside raves on early 1990s pirate radio. Now, a new compilation is rediscovering a slice of the underground

“Have you got that record that goes ah-woo-ooo-ooh-yeah-yeah?” It’s a scene familiar to anyone who spent time in a hardcore rave record shop in the 1990s – a punter asking for a tune they’ve heard on pirate radio or at a rave but they don’t know the title of, so they mimic the riff or sample hook hoping someone behind the counter recognises it.

A relic of pre-Shazam life, the ritual is preserved in an advert for Music Power Records aired on the pirate station Pulse FM in 1992. Nick Power, owner of the north London shop, recalls that no matter how mangled the customer’s rendition, “nearly always, you’d be able to identify the exact record they were looking for”. In the advert, Power plays the roles of both sales assistant and punter, pinching his nose to alter his voice. Almost 40 years later, the comic skit commercial has been resurrected alongside others on two volumes of London Pirate Radio Adverts 1984-1993, by audio archivist Luke Owen. Power is pleasantly bemused by this turn of events: “I can’t see there’d be a demand for radio ads, but there’s got to be someone out there who’s interested enough to buy it. I don’t see it being a platinum release, though!”

Continue reading...
by Simon Reynolds via Electronic music | The Guardian

Nightlife meets wildlife: albums created from birdsong and techno beats

A Bogotà nightclub has used the sounds of animals and birds in the Colombian capital to make a new kind of dance track

Stuck inside and unable to hit the dancefloor, many of the regulars at the electronic dance nights at Bogotá’s popular nightclub Kaputt found themselves missing the clubbing community when they were forced into lockdown by Covid-19. But then came a rallying cry from DJs Jorge Pizarro and Felipe Rodríguez: start recording the “sounds from your window”.

Now the results of that callout are reaching a global audience, with a set of albums blending the sounds of animals and birds in the Colombian capital with techno beats available for streaming.

Fans of electronic music may be more willing to engage with ecology because dancing to it is spiritual, a mystical experience

Related: Building a green economy could stop ‘nightmare’ degradation of Amazon

Continue reading...
by Jo Griffin via Electronic music | The Guardian

Pauline Anna Strom: Angel Tears in Sunlight review | John Lewis's contemporary album of the month

(RVNG)
Strom’s first album in 30 years – and last, following her death in December – is a quiet riot of digitally manipulated drones and noise

The music of the San Francisco-based composer Pauline Anna Strom, who died just before Christmas, aged 74, might be described as new age – a mystical, trance-like synthesised babble that could conceivably accompany meditation sessions or yoga classes. But Strom was a cheerfully cantankerous figure who drew from more arcane Californian sources. Listen to the music that she released in the 1980s as Trans-Millenia Consort and you can hear traces of the blissful minimalism of Terry Riley; the wobbly electronica that Stephen Hill used to play on his Hearts of Space radio show; the electro-acoustic compositions of Joanna Brouk; even the hypnotic trance music that Alice Coltrane was making in her Santa Monica ashram.

Continue reading...
by John Lewis via Electronic music | The Guardian

No drone unturned: tracing the sound that unites ancient and modern

From primitive instruments and sacred chants to today’s minimalist electronica and metal, drone music has a long and mystical history. A new book investigates

From the womb – where the rushing of maternal blood is heard loud and clear at 88 decibels – through myriad historical, spiritual and subcultural pathways, our connection to the drone runs deep. Many ancient instruments – didgeridoo, bullroarer, carnyx – produced sustained tones, while the ancient Greeks evoked the delirium of Dionysus with the drone of the Aulos pipes. Indeed, religious practice all over the world, from the sacred Buddhist Om to haunting Gregorian chant, continues, as it has done for centuries, to centre the drone as a sonic enabler of meditative transcendence.

Continue reading...
by Harry Sword via Electronic music | The Guardian

Beyond disco: the Pakistani Brummie siblings who made a lost 80s synth-pop classic

Nermin Niazi and Feisal Mosleh were teenage immigrants blending their Pakistani musical heritage with Pet Shop Boys and Depeche Mode – and their punchy disco LP has been rescued from obscurity

Opening its doors in 1970, Birmingham’s Zella Studios played home to a who’s who of the city’s musical greats: Black Sabbath, Band of Joy, the Spencer Davis Group. But the Bristol Street institution was also home to one of the most remarkable and unfairly overlooked albums of the 1980s: Disco Se Aagay, by teenage British-Pakistani sibling duo Feisal Mosleh and Nermin Niazi.

“When I look back now I’m surprised at how much confidence we had,” Niazi says. “I remember walking in and feeling absolutely at home. The smell of the studio stays with me even now. There’s something very comforting and secure about it.”

The 80s was a different world to the broad-minded one we live in now

Continue reading...
by Michael Lawson via Electronic music | The Guardian

Record by near-unknown producer sells for $41,000 to become most expensive on Discogs

Producer Scaramanga Silk, who earns nothing from sale to anonymous bidder, is baffled: ‘I do not believe that any record is worthy of such a valuation’

A virtually unknown track by a virtually unknown British electronic producer has sold for over $41,000 (£29,800) on the music marketplace Discogs, making it the site’s most expensive record ever, and one of the most expensive records ever sold anywhere.

Choose Your Weapon by Scaramanga Silk – who hails from London, and has seven listeners a month on Spotify – was self-released in 2008, and there were only 20 copies made of the edition that drew the high price. It was released as a promotional vinyl edition with an accompanying poem, art print and CD.

Continue reading...
by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

US toddler to release debut album recorded in the womb

Luca Yupanqui was recorded by her parents using ‘biosonic MIDI technology’

An American toddler, Luca Yupanqui, is gearing up to release her debut album, the world’s first LP made from sounds inside the womb.

Her parents are Elizabeth Hart, a member of psych-rock band Psychic Ills, and musician Iván Diaz Mathé, who has worked with Lee “Scratch” Perry and others. In five hour-long “joint meditation” sessions, they recorded Yupanqui in utero via electrodes on Hart’s abdomen, and using “biosonic MIDI technology” transcribed the vibrations they picked up into synthesisers.

Continue reading...
by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

Sophie's triumphantly plastic music moulded a new world for trans people

The producer’s death is crushing, but we’re left with hyper-real music and an iconography that upends femininity and points to a new way of living

• Acclaimed producer Sophie dies aged 34

Long before the late Scottish producer Sophie’s astonishing 2017 track and video It’s OK to Cry were released – an image of Sophie’s transgender body in joyful, anxious, and deeply felt flux – this artist was already special to trans people. Sophie had long crafted electronic dance tracks that freed femininity and bodies from their usual contexts and let them dance with abandon. In 2013 it didn’t matter to me, as a not-yet-out-even-to-myself transgender woman, whether or not Sophie was transgender. What mattered was that in early singles, such as the genre-redefining Bipp that year, we felt as though we could become something else.

Related: Sophie: 10 of the greatest tracks by a genius of pop's expressive power

Continue reading...
by Jessica Dunn Rovinelli via Electronic music | The Guardian

Caroline Shaw: what next for the Pulitzer-winner who toured with Kanye? Opera – and Abba

She has scored films, played with rappers, starred in a TV comedy, and performed for the dying. As the classical sensation releases three new works, she talks about the shock of playing arenas – and making the leap into opera

When Caroline Shaw became, at the age of 30, the youngest ever winner of the Pulitzer prize for music, she described herself as “a musician who wrote music” rather than as “a composer”. Partita, her winning score, is a joyful rollercoaster of a work, encompassing song, speech and virtually every vocal technique you can imagine. It was written for Shaw’s own group, Roomful of Teeth.

Eight years on, she’s still wary of defining herself too narrowly. “Composer, for some people, can mean something very particular,” she says, “and I’m trying to make sure I don’t get swallowed up into only one community.” Not that Shaw’s range shows any sign of narrowing: even a small sample of her work over the past few years throws up an array of names not often seen together: rappers Kanye West and Nas, soprano Renée Fleming, mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry, pianist Jonathan Biss. She has written film scores, sung on others, was the soloist in her own violin concerto, and even managed a cameo appearance as herself in Amazon Studio’s comedy drama Mozart in the Jungle. A year ago, Orange, a recording of her string quartets, won the Attacca Quartet a Grammy.

Continue reading...
by Erica Jeal via Electronic music | The Guardian

Cult musician Emmanuelle Parrenin: 'I like to dive into the void and invent something'

The singer and instrumentalist caused a riot at a Clash gig, cured herself of deafness, and, decades on from her debut LP, is an icon to young French producers. ‘I love to discover,’ she explains

“In terms of my career, I only made bad choices.” Emmanuelle Parrenin is discussing the importance of intuition. “But in terms of what I like, I made good choices.”

Intuition has taken Parrenin, now at an undefined point in her 70s, to some remarkable places: from stages with the Clash to deserts in Morocco, and in and out of deafness. Often narrowly described as a folk musician for her role in the revival of French traditional music in 1970s, her career has been an exercise in pushing boundaries – and, indeed, ignoring them – while becoming one of her country’s most enduring cult musicians.

Continue reading...
by Philip Bloomfield via Electronic music | The Guardian