‘Black music is my superpower. It’s my way of showing love’: the art of Georgia Anne Muldrow

The LA musician, who has unleashed another of her psychedelic funk and hip-hop beat tapes, talks about social justice, her time in Brixton and the battle over ‘woke’, a word she helped popularise

Georgia Anne Muldrow may be more than 20 albums into her career and the woman who brought the word “woke” to wider consciousness, but she is not one for counting off milestones. “I’m the type of traditionalist that wants to give meaning to life,” she says. “My [concept of] success is directly linked to how Black folks see themselves; it’s not enough for me to be filthy rich or something, owning an island somewhere in the midst of what we live through.”

Since debuting with her EP Worthnothings in 2006, she has become known for her chameleonic ability to master different genres – soul, G-funk, jazz, electronic – under a number of aliases (for instance Jyoti) and collaborative projects. Last week, the 37-year-old vocalist, songwriter and producer released Vweto III, the latest in a series of beat tapes. These are self-produced and mostly instrumental albums full of psychedelic funk and prowling hip-hop (track titles such as Boom Bap Is My Homegirl show where her head is at). Besides solo releases, she has been featured on tracks by artists such as Erykah Badu, Flying Lotus and Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def), who described her as “like [Roberta] Flack, Nina Simone, Ella [Fitzgerald] – she’s something else”.

If somebody uses ‘woke’ in a derogative way, I don’t really care for what’s on their mind. I don’t really care about somebody who don’t even like Black people

Related: Georgia Anne Muldrow: Vweto II review – kaleidoscopic, sunshine timewarp jazz

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by Christine Ochefu via Electronic music | The Guardian

Lambchop: Showtunes review – American songwriting the slow and shimmering way

(City Slang)
Kurt Wagner puts a midi keyboard centre stage on Lambchop’s expansive, laid-back latest

Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner can’t play piano. So for Lambchop’s 15th studio album – the third in this Americana artist’s recent experiments in electronics – he transposed music he had written on the guitar on to a midi keyboard. The result is Showtunes, an album whose title suggests razzmatazz but delivers Wagner’s customary laid-back profundity with well placed digital embellishments.

Others have been this way before – Bon Iver and Low are just two guitar acts who have reinvented their work electronically. Yet Showtunes is indelibly a Lambchop album, a set of songs that references the legacy of American songwriting from inside a vat of shimmering treacle. The pace is slow but spacious, giving rise to a pair of instrumental meditations and a seven-minute track, Fuku, whose percussive pops, blithe piano motif and bittersweet brass accretes into a quasi-standard pondering the imperfect nature of love. Drop C uses cut-up found sound in a more staticky way, and Blue Leo essays some disorienting vocal manipulations that are perhaps too reminiscent of the latterday Bon Iver. Showtunes is much stronger, however, when Wagner layers its disparate elements more subtly – leaning into its limpid jazz horns and electronic atmospheres, with just the distant memory of an opera singer punctuating The Last Benedict.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes review – playful paean to a musical pioneer

Experimental and inventive, Caroline Catz’s film paints a fond, intimate and arty portrait of the influential electronic musician

I hope films like Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes (BBC Four) will still have a home at the BBC after BBC Four becomes an archive-only channel, as is planned. I cannot imagine anything so wilfully arty sitting on a more mainstream channel. This is a wonderfully inventive piece of storytelling that celebrates the strange brilliance of a mysterious pioneer of electronic music. Even if it is not likely to bring in record audiences, it would be a crying shame if it were not on television.

Knowing only a little about Derbyshire’s life before, and feeling much more illuminated afterwards, I think it makes sense that her story is told in this experimental style. It was originally a short film, written and directed by Caroline Catz, who has extended it to feature length. The result feels like several ideas spliced together, surprisingly effectively.

Related: Delia Derbyshire and the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop: From the archive, 3 September 1970

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by Rebecca Nicholson via Electronic music | The Guardian

Fatima Al Qadiri: Medieval Femme review – ancient and otherworldly

(Hyperdub)
This New York-based Kuwaiti artist combines early music with digital dubs to dreamlike effect

A decade into a career at the confluence of digital music and art, the latest album by New York-based Kuwaiti electronic composer Fatima Al Qadiri is full of echoes. Her 2017 EP, Shaneera, was a party-facing tribute to the “evil queens” in Arab culture, thriving in spite of oppression. More recently, her immersive score for Mati Diop’s contemporary ghost story, Atlantics, helped earn the film the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2019.

Medieval Femme, by contrast, hymns some very different Arab women to Shaneera – those of the medieval period – with the otherworldly delicacy honed on Al Qadiri’s soundtrack work. She has often played with perspective (how the west views the east) as well as place (often hyper-real) and time (juxtapositions, anachronisms), but never quite like this. Sheba sounds like early music laced with sighs of sensual longing and the merest scissor snip of 21st-century percussion. The meditative Tasakuba features sorrowful couplets from the seventh-century elegiac poet Al-Khansa. Apart from the more contemporary dystopian digitals of Golden, the feel throughout is ancient and enigmatic. But these lute tones and classical Arabic music figures are rendered digitally; the cloister garden is an interior dream-space.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Everything but the gull: how Ben Watt fought the Covid blues with birdsong

Blackcap! Chiffchaff! Warbler! The Everything But the Girl star is fighting to save a nature reserve in the heart of the city. As his new album Storm Shelter is released, we join him for some birdwatching

Cetti’s warbler!” says Ben Watt suddenly, raising a finger to indicate the new addition to the ambient soundscape. Listen, he says, to the opening “chi” followed by what sounds “almost like a little typewriter going off”. Watts does that, interrupts himself, or the silence if he’s not talking, to announce a new bird he’s seen or heard. “Blackcap!” he’ll exclaim. “Chiffchaff!”

We’re sitting in a bird hide overlooking a reed bed and an expanse of water on a gorgeous spring day. A heron stands, still as a photo, two metres in front of us. It could be rural East Anglia – apart from the roar of traffic and the giant arched structure in the background. These are, respectively, the A406 north circular and Wembley Stadium. And the place we’re at is the Welsh Harp reservoir, named after a pub that no longer exists.

The damage we're doing will contribute to the end of us

Related: Olivia Rodrigo: ‘I’m a teenage girl. I feel heartbreak and longing really intensely’

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by Sam Wollaston via Electronic music | The Guardian

One to watch: BABii

The Margate-based multi-hyphenate channels her colourful upbringing on her hypnotic second album

For her forthcoming album, MiiRROR, BABii has produced 10 darkly beautiful electronic pop songs, directed videos, made costumes, designed an alternative reality game, written a fantasy book, birthed a dragon and typed a lot of extra “i”s. Born Daisy Warne, brought up by her father in Canada and England, she still helps run his arts studio in Margate as well as teaching video game writing at uni. Days off are rare.

Growing up surrounded by her dad’s artist friends in creative spaces and salvage yards, BABii learned how to create beauty out of anything, all the time. Recently, she reconnected with her mother, and the emotional aftershock led her to empty her heart into the fabulous MiiRROR. It anatomises BABii’s chaotic childhood and ongoing struggle with maternal figures, while sounding like a chainsaw made of candyfloss.

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by Damien Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian

Sophia Kennedy: Monsters review – showtunes and sub-bass from sonic shapeshifter

(City Slang)
Unable to categorise the Baltimore-born, Hamburg-bred artist, you are thrown into her disarming, disorientating but oddly relaxing emotional world

For the modern musician, genre-fickleness is no longer the exception but the rule. Switching styles and blending sounds doesn’t simply cater to listeners with depleted attention spans – it can also be a way of evoking and critiquing the chaotic internet culture that left them that way. Baltimore-born, Hamburg-bred artist Sophia Kennedy’s music does both those things, but it also channels a restlessness and nostalgia that has little in common with her peers.

For a start, her sonic references include Tin Pan Alley and vintage showtunes, she complements curious melodic callbacks with ominous electronica, expansive hip-hop, sub-bass, trap beats, twanging guitars and the sound of monkeys screeching. What’s also unusual is that she doesn’t temper this fluctuation with a consistent voice: frequently, it’s a low, stately, Bette Davis-style drawl; sometimes it’s a brittle falsetto; sometimes a taut, mean sprechgesang.

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by Rachel Aroesti via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘I’m going to follow my mind’: Falle Nioke, the Guinean musician who moved to Margate

The singer spent hard years touring west Africa to pursue his dream of a music career, but a chance holiday meeting – and relocation to the Kent coast – sealed the deal

Ten years ago, Falle Nioke was sitting with only his bolon drum for company in a Gambian jail cell, some 3,000 miles from the Kent seaside town of Margate where he now lives and light years from his current world of domestic bliss and critical acclaim.

Raised in Conakry, Guinea, the 33-year-old singer and percussionist spent most of his 20s as part of a touring group of musicians that played across west Africa, a pursuit often hamstrung by arrests pertaining to immigration permits. Nioke survived by whatever means necessary to hold on to his musical passion. “I used to make soap and go to the market to sell it to pay the rent,” he says today. “If someone was selling rice, we would sing for them and we would get some fees and some food.” His indelibly positive worldview was forged during these years. “Everywhere I have been, there are people who will be happy to help,” he says.

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by Max Pilley via Electronic music | The Guardian

Leon Vynehall: Rare, Forever review – warped, intense, cerebral

(Ninja Tune)
The DJ-producer’s introspective, genre-defying second album rewards engaged listening

Leon Vynehall’s 2018 album Nothing Is Still was a sleepy sensation. Although the house DJ had produced a couple of track compilations and entrancing singles, such as Midnight on Rainbow Road and It’s Just (House of Dupree), he took a giant step forward with his debut album, pulling jazz, ambient, club and chamber music into its sweeping ambit. Each song matched a chapter in an accompanying novella based on Vynehall’s family history; short films were shot. Played live, it evolved into something more warped, intense and cerebral, and some of that energy survives here.

Perhaps that’s because Rare, Forever looks inward. Although it’s as carefully constructed as Nothing Is Still, there is nothing as mellifluous as that record’s Movements (Chapter III). It’s more abstract, fractured, complex and unpredictable, fluttering across the lanes. This is best exemplified by Snakeskin ∞ Has-Been’s skittish rave, with its vertiginous drop and wasp-in-a-jar stabs, disintegrating without warning into the pastoral nocturne of its coda. Rare, Forever rewards engaged listening, though, and intriguingly it’s the classical and jazz influences that are most persuasive, particularly on album bookends Ecce! Ego! and All I See Is You, Velvet Brown, and Mothra’s majestic orchestral techno crescendo.

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by Damien Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian