Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, LSO: Promises review – extraordinary

(Luaka Bop)

Five years in the making, this breathtaking album transcends the genres each of its three collaborators bring to the table

Not strictly classical, jazz or ambient electronica, this one-track, nine-movement album embodies the highest, most etiolated aspects of all three disciplines. British artist Sam “Floating Points” Shepherd is the anchor here, an electronic free thinker with a neuroscience doctorate. He supplies recurring leitmotifs and Promises’s sense of gossamer, largely peaceable inquiry. Jazz legend Pharoah Sanders should need no introduction; in his first recordings for more than 10 years, the saxophonist mostly holds off the free skronk of some of his most famous recordings in favour of his other mode: deeply felt spiritual jazz interventions. (Sanders’s wordless vocals also add to the promise of Promises.) Halfway through, the forward-thinking London Symphony Orchestra strings turn up and the dappled otherworldliness enters a more cinematic and canonical phase, but hardly to the detriment of the piece overall, instead adding depth and weight. There is room here too for a highly sophisticated iteration of cosmic psychedelia, for drones and tiny rustles, for electronic birdsong and the audible thud of fingers on keys as the mood swings from succour to awe and back again many times. Recorded over the course of five years, this extraordinary collaboration deserves excellent speakers and a soft couch to catch the swooning listener.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Neuroscience, the cosmos and trees: going deep with composer Hannah Peel

From praise from Paul McCartney to writing music for Game of Thrones, the musician has had an extraordinary career so far. She discusses her next step - an album embracing the natural world through electronica

Paul McCartney knew Hannah Peel’s talent before the world did. He hands out pin-badges at every degree ceremony at Liverpool’s Institute for Performing Arts, which he co-founded, and where Peel studied music. In 2007, her graduation year, she’d been chosen to compose something to accompany each student walking on stage.

Peel had been advised to do a fanfare of trumpets, but refused; she wrote a minimalist miniature for vibraphone and marimba instead. “My principal hated it,” she says, laughing down the Zoom line. “But when I crossed the stage and shook Paul McCartney’s hand, he whispered in my ear, ‘I really like your music. Well done!’”

I grew up with a sense of transition, awareness that things are never stable. All that history that stays with you

Related: Obay Alsharani: the Syrian refugee keeping his mind free with ambient music

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by Jude Rogers via Electronic music | The Guardian

Dance duo Justice begin legal action against Justin Bieber over crucifix design

Cease-and-desist letter sent to pop star, whose new album cover is accused of imitating Justice’s logo

Grammy-winning French electronic music duo Justice have accused Justin Bieber of illegally infringing on a trademark with the cover design of his new album, Justice, released on Friday.

The duo’s logo is their name with the letter T designed as a crucifix, a design trope that Bieber uses for his album cover. Bieber’s new merchandise also features a contested crucifix design.

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

Musician Michael Milosh, AKA Rhye, accused of sexual abuse and grooming

Canadian artist denies allegations by ex-wife, actor Alexa Nicholas, calling them ‘outrageously false’

Musician Michael Milosh, AKA Rhye, has been accused by his ex-wife of grooming and sexually abusing her.

Milosh has denied the allegations, calling them “absurd and outrageous false claims”.

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

Observer/Anthony Burgess prize for arts journalism 2021: Milo Nesbitt on Electronic: From Kraftwerk to the Chemical Brothers

The Burgess Prize nominee reviews a homage to the sex and staying power of electronic music at London’s Design Museum
• Read the rest of this year’s shortlisted entries in the Observer/Anthony Burgess prize

Milo Nesbitt, 22, is currently studying for a master’s in English at Oxford University

At one point in Electronic, which opened in July 2020, you come to an array of variously sized plastic circles, packed tightly together and lit at an angle so as to project their shadow on to the wall behind and above them. There’s a moment when you wonder what these shapes are: some kind of abstract art, a mountain-range silhouette, a heartbeat. Then you realise, of course, that it’s a spectrogram for the song you’ve just listened to through your headphones – and that these black plastic circles are supposed to look like records. It’s a lovely reflection of electronic music’s ways of generating meaning without necessarily relying on lyrics. These signs could mean anything; they could mean everything.

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by Milo Nesbitt via Electronic music | The Guardian

Gazelle Twin & NYX: Deep England review | John Lewis's contemporary album of the month

(NYX Collective Records)
A dramatic reworking of Gazelle Twin’s techno-folk Pastoral album with the NYX choir adds layers of hair-raising chills

Gazelle Twin is the alter ego of Elizabeth Bernholz, a composer, producer and singer who creates unsettling, terrifying and occasional hilarious electronic music. Her stage costume resembles a Morris-dancing Leigh Bowery in Adidas trainers impersonating one of the droogs from Clockwork Orange. This retro-futurist court jester garb suited her remarkable 2018 album Pastoral, a febrile journey into the heart of middle England that mixed thuggish techno, menacing folk chants and lyrics that satirised old Albion and delved into its dark, paganistic roots.

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by John Lewis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Gurrumul, Omar Souleyman, 9Bach and DakhaBrakha: the best global artists the Grammys forgot

From the Godfathers of Arabic rap to the father of Ethio-jazz, Grammy-winning producer Ian Brennan guides a tour through global music’s greatest

• The Grammys have a major problem with global diversity. Lip service isn’t going to solve it
  

This week I wrote about the glaring lack of international inclusivity in the Grammys’ newly redubbed global music (formerly world music) category.

In the category’s 38-year history, almost 80% of African nations have never had an artist nominated; no Middle Eastern or eastern European musician has ever won; every winner in the past eight years has been a repeat winner; and nearly two-thirds of the nominations have come from just six countries (the US, the UK, Brazil, Mali, South Africa, India). The situation shows little signs of improving.

Related: The Grammys have a major problem with diversity. Lip service isn’t going to solve it | Ian Brennan

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by Ian Brennan via Electronic music | The Guardian

Chart star Joel Corry: 'I’m pretty isolated. I have one good friend'

After years of slogging through DJ sets, bodybuilding and reality TV, the London producer had one of 2020’s biggest and best pop hits. But his brutal work ethic is ‘a gift and a curse’

Amid the draining gloom of pandemic life, Joel Corry has been a soothing constant: if you have turned on the radio at any time in the past year, there is a huge chance that one of the British pop-house producer’s three big singles will have been playing. Sorry, Lonely and Head & Heart (the latter a six-week chart topper) have collectively earned more than a billion streams and made Corry into one of the UK’s biggest new pop stars, a Calvin Harris type who has guest vocalists out front while he prods equipment and points gunfingers skyward. Sorry got a boost from being used on Love Island in 2018, and his music is rather like the Love Island of pop: buoyant, cheesy, suffused with romantic drama and sparkling sunlight. But when talking to him in his hotel room, clouds gather.

Corry could actually be a Love Island contestant: he has the good looks and earnest kindly nature of a 90s boyband heartthrob, as well as the abdominals, which look not so much chiselled as 3D-printed following a successful earlier career as a bodybuilder. In fact, he has reality TV pedigree as a rare southern interloper amid the cast of MTV’s lairy Geordie Shore; he was the boyfriend of the show’s charismatic bad-influencer Sophie Kasaei, with whom he had a six-year relationship until 2017.

I had to be on my own. And I still feel like that now. It’s almost selfish, but I can’t have any distractions, man

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

How Depeche Mode (almost) became my own personal Jesus

I thought I was a true fan of the synth-rock giants, but a convention showed me that I preferred music as a solo experience

• Read more from The fandom that made me series

The first time I really thought about fandom was the evening of 8 July 1990. The occasion was a convention of Depeche Mode fans at Camden Palace in London. I had only been one of them myself for 10 months, since hearing Personal Jesus on Radio 1’s Singled Out made my jaw drop, but I had been making up for lost time. I wasn’t just busy buying up every album, 7-inch and 12-inch that I could lay my hands on, I was also transcribing Martin Gore’s lyrics into an exercise book, painting sleeve art and learning to play the simpler tracks on a Casio keyboard. I don’t recall writing poems about them but let’s not rule it out. I wanted to be a True Fan and do what I thought True fans did, which was to join a fanclub and attend a gathering of the faithful.

Around that time, I filled out a personality test that concluded I was equal parts introvert and extrovert, so Depeche Mode were my ideal band. They sang about many of my pressing concerns – sex, death, guilt, spiritual confusion, gauche leftwing politics – and I could dance to them. I liked their story, too. After songwriter Vince Clarke quit in 1981, Gore had to reinvent the band on the hoof, trying out communist chic and industrial angst before finding that horny, morbid sweet spot on the Black Celebration album. At the same time, advances in synthesiser and sampler technology enabled their music to grow grander and sleeker. By the time I got into them, they were electronic music’s first arena band but still hadn’t lost their essential Basildon blokeyness. You could never be David Bowie but you could, with a bit of luck, imagine being genial synth-prodder Andy “Fletch” Fletcher.

Related: From the Band to Beyoncé: concert films to fill the live music black hole

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by Dorian Lynskey via Electronic music | The Guardian

Tenement Kid: Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie to publish memoir

Book charts the singer’s journey from his childhood in Glasgow to his band’s breakthrough 1991 album Screamadelica and their notorious live shows

Bobby Gillespie is to publish a memoir spanning his childhood in a working-class Glaswegian family and the breakthrough of his band Primal Scream with their third album, 1991’s Screamadelica.

Tenement Kid took shape during the first year of the pandemic, Gillespie said in a statement. “At the beginning of 2020 I wanted to challenge myself creatively and do something I had never done before. I didn’t want to write another rock record, I’d done plenty of those, so, I decided to write a memoir of my early life and worked on it all through the summer, autumn and winter of 2020.”

Related: Bobby Gillespie remembers Andrew Weatherall: ‘He was a true bohemian’

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by Laura Snapes via Electronic music | The Guardian

Obay Alsharani: the Syrian refugee keeping his mind free with ambient music

The music producer escaped Assad’s Syria and ended up in a Swedish refugee centre, where the space and minimalism of ambient allowed him to express his alienation

The 30-year-old Syrian producer Obay Alsharani’s debut album, Sandbox, is stunning. Its textural layers and floating fragments of melody easily match Burial or Boards of Canada’s abilities to deliver devastating emotion with a dreamy lightness of touch. But where many talk about ambient music and virtual worlds as providing sanctuary and succour, for Alsharani, the reality of that is deadly serious. Sandbox was conceived and written while trapped in limbo in a refugee centre, north of the Arctic circle and around 2,000 miles from home, struggling to come to terms with the terrors that had brought him there.

Talking via video chat from Stockholm, Alsharani is as disarmingly gentle as his music, maintaining a friendly, matter-of-fact tone whether discussing his tastes, or the realities of Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. “From when I was eight,” he says, “my father worked in Saudi Arabia, he had a good job, and I got used to moving around, which is useful to me now.” The family lived in four different Saudi cities, returning to Damascus for the summer each year.

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by Joe Muggs via Electronic music | The Guardian

Bicep: Live Global Stream II review – 90 minutes of pure throwback pleasure

Saatchi Gallery, London; live stream
Marking the release of their acclaimed second album, Isles, the duo transmit a steady stream of rapturous, 21st-century rave nostalgia into living rooms around the world

The laptop screen pulsates with images of hands in lurid colours that distort and repeat ad infinitum. The retro neon graphics of Bicep’s live stream announcement gradually give way to elegant organic visuals; these in turn form stark, generative abstracts. The Bicep logo – think Manx flag – appears inside a rolling circle within another rolling circle, like a psychedelic geometry assignment whose equation is just out of reach.

From time to time these retina-searing visuals ebb away, leaving behind reality: two black-clad men facing each other in an empty white room. Gear is laid out before them symmetrically. We are in London’s Saatchi Gallery, but the walls are bare. Bicep are supplying all the art: a luminous, 21st-century spin on 90s rave music, given go-faster stripes by their long-time graphics team Black Box Echo. (“Gallery temporarily closed”, reads a sign under spooky flickering lights.)

Bicep’s Live Global Stream II will be re-streamed on demand from 12-14 March; free to existing ticket-holders or £14 via dice.fm

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Guedra Guedra: Vexillology review | Ammar Kalia's global album of the month

(On the Corner)
Abdellah M Hassak integrates the rhythms of north African folk music with a bassline-heavy electronic pulse

From the spiritual polyrhythms of gnawa to the looping vocalisations of Sufism and the percussive tessellations of Berber folk, the world of north African cultures meet in the music of Morocco. Producer Abdellah M Hassak, AKA Guedra Guedra, has taken these rhythms as the core of his work. His name comes from the Berber dance music performed on the guedra drum; his debut EP, 2020’s Son of Sun, explored these diffuse roots through a dancefloor filter, with added field recordings and electronic Midi sequencing, a junglist collage that straddles tradition and contemporary dance musics.

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

Jane Weaver: Flock review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

(Fire Records)
Having earned a cult audience for her psychedelia, Weaver makes her version of a pop record, where Kylie-level hooks are set against hallucinatory backings

Jane Weaver’s 11th album arrives heralded by the artist’s assurance that it’s the record she “always wanted to make”. It’s the kind of thing that musicians are wont to say on the promotional cycle, but it feels a little strange coming from Weaver. Her career has encompassed a variety of musical styles – grunge, folk, psychedelia and electronica among them – but she’s never given the impression of being an artist hidebound by convention or commercial considerations, or anything else that might conceivably prevent you from doing what you want to do.

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

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Rian Treanor: the producer hacking a smarter, kinder future for music

The Rotherham electronic musician is using his skills to tackle dementia, teach children and collaborate across the globe – and dreams of a club where the dancers play the drum machines

Living in lockdown while caring for someone with dementia “isn’t just like Groundhog Day”, chuckles Rian Treanor, “it’s like Groundhog Second.” The soft-spoken electronic music producer has spent a year indoors with three generations of his family – including his producer and sound-artist dad, Mark Fell, and his grandmother, Doreen, who is has late-stage Alzheimer’s. It’s certainly a change of scene for the producer of one of 2020’s most audacious and frenzied dance albums, File Under UK Metaplasm.

Instead of the pointillist rave and singeli – a high-speed Tanzanian style – that influenced that record, the Treanor-Fell household playlist is geared towards Doreen’s favourites, particularly dub reggae and Hawaiian-style steel guitar. “When she listens to that she’s completely in the zone, she astrally projects into it,” marvels Treanor. Music has a powerful effect on brains damaged by dementia, unlocking memories and opening up non-verbal channels of communication, so they tried Doreen on a piano next, knowing that she’d grown up with one. When the keys proved too complicated, Fell designed a set of blocks for her to use, described by Treanor as “squares with little notches cut out that create different chord shapes”.

Related: Public house music: Mark Fell on making art in a derelict boozer

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by Chal Ravens via Electronic music | The Guardian

Can Danny L Harle reinvent hard dance for a new generation?

The British producer’s debut album is a perfect simulacrum of gabber, hardstyle, trance and more – but it lacks the overdriven ferocity of the genres it imitates

The easiest way to sell a new cultural product is through familiarity, whether it’s a gender-flipped version of Ghostbusters or an upsampled Star Wars: all the swashbuckling elements enhanced with new effects and younger, smoother-skinned leads. Remake, remix, reboot – we are living in an era where culture turns like a mirrorball in a hall of mirrors, reflecting infinitesimally.

Related: Danny L Harle: Harlecore review – big, dumb escapist fun

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by John Twells via Electronic music | The Guardian