Sex-positive pop star Shygirl: ‘I want to affect your equilibrium’

After feeling sexualised even before her teens, the south London rapper wrested back her power. She explains how her disruptive club music creates a space where anything can happen

Shygirl’s tracks are, for want of a better word, filthy. The 28-year-old musician’s lyrics detail sexual exploits and disposable partners. “I like to glide, figure skate,” is not about ice dancing. This week she releases BDE, a collaboration with Northampton rapper Slowthai, and it’s less rapping on her part, more an intoxicating mix of cooed and snarled commands over ominous production. This is sex as chaotic workout, and if it ends up jarring the listener, the artist has achieved her goal. “I love it when art makes me uncomfortable, because I have to question where that’s from,” she says. “How can something affect my equilibrium like that? I want to affect other people’s equilibrium.”

Her domineering musical persona is worlds away from the chatty, pleasant woman I meet in a bar outside Cambridge University’s Union, where she has just given a talk about her artistry and the accessibility of the creative industries. About a quarter of our time is spent laughing; sharp introspections on owning one’s narrative as a public figure come as easily as self-deprecating tales of recording angry voice notes about previous partners. And it’s easy to see why she’s increasingly considered a fashion force: following a recent Burberry campaign and soundtracking runways for Thierry Mugler, she stands out majestically via orange hair, wholesome babydoll dress and eye-catching Telfar Clemens boots, noticed by wide-eyed students in our vicinity.

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by Christine Ochefu via Electronic music | The Guardian

Jazz-funk guru John Carroll Kirby: ‘When musicians are uncomfortable, it can be interesting’

He’s worked with Solange, Frank Ocean, Harry Styles and more – and his own music is wondrously fun and spiritual. The LA artist explains why it sounds like butterflies and mountain lions

Amid the swirling sounds and scenes intersected by Los Angeles’ sprawling freeways, John Carroll Kirby is somewhere at the centre of it all, shirt open, hair slicked back. He circles the city’s buzzing jazz movement with his soul-dappled instrumentals and is a keysman, composer and producer who’s been enlisted by some of the most exciting names in contemporary pop: Frank Ocean, Mark Ronson, Harry Styles, Blood Orange, and Solange Knowles, whose incendiary past two albums, A Seat at the Table and When I Get Home, were shaped in part by Kirby.

He laughs as he describes his own work as “French cat burglar music”: it blends jazz with new age, funk and exotica, flutes often taking centre stage. Tracks are inspired by paintings of ayahuasca visions or stories about dolphins that turn into lost boys. Kirby is of a spiritual persuasion, but he has a sense of humour about it, too.

Related: Charles & Eddie's Eddie Chacon: 'It took me 10 years to recover from being a one-hit wonder'

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by Kate Hutchinson via Electronic music | The Guardian

Jon Hassell: radical musician who studied with Stockhausen and worked with Eno

The influential experimental US composer ‘celebrated and dignified’ his ‘fourth world’ sources and contributed to albums by Brian Eno and Talking Heads

• Jon Hassell, avant garde US composer, dies aged 84

By the time Jon Hassell became a revered figure – the kind of determinedly non-commercial, avant-garde artist whose ideas are so strong and so forward-thinking they end up influencing the mainstream regardless – he was already middle-aged, but had crammed a lifetime’s worth of musical experience into his 40 years.

He had begun his career as a trumpet player in the swing era – tellingly, his own tastes leaned towards Stan Kenton, among the most progressive and experimental of the big band leaders – before becoming immersed in the cutting edge of modern classical music and moving to Cologne to study under Karlheinz Stockhausen: his fellow pupils included Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay, both later of Can. In an early example of his lifelong desire to meld differing musical forms, he began attempting to apply Stockhausen’s tape experiments to recordings of jazz vocal quartet the Hi-Los.

Related: Jon Hassell, avant garde US composer, dies aged 84

I feel like a mother bird whose babies have been touched by humans and don’t want to have anything to do with them any more

Related: Jon Hassell, music's great globetrotter: 'Be more aware of the rest of the world!'

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Future Utopia review – grime’s silent partner Fraser T Smith turns up the volume

Bold Tendencies, London
The super-producer to Stormzy, Dave and Kano showcases his solo album, with Kojey Radical and Simon Armitage among his eclectic guests

We should all be used to unusual gigs by now. Tonight’s performance, however, finds the UK’s poet laureate Simon Armitage pacing the stage, declaiming about the state of human nature; it sees left-field rapper Kojey Radical clad in sky-coloured velour, anatomising the difference between value and worth. Naturally, we’re in a multistorey car park in Peckham, south London – a venue called Bold Tendencies – perched on socially distanced plastic chairs.

The mild-mannered British super-producer holding the evening together – Fraser T Smith, currently trading as Future Utopia – is smiling, encased inside a sculpture, Noise Matrix, made of brightly coloured pipework. Noise Matrix represents the discordant waveforms of human-generated noise; it’s by Smith’s partner, the artist Sarah Thorneycroft-Smith.

Smith has effectively overseen the transition of grime from Cinderella genre to mainstream domination

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Peter Zinovieff, British composer and synth pioneer, dies aged 88

The Beatles, Pink Floyd and Kraftwerk all used Zinovieff’s EMS synthesisers

Peter Zinovieff, a hugely influential figure in British music whose early synthesisers helped to change the sound of pop, has died aged 88. He had suffered a fall at home earlier this month.

With its marketing slogan “think of a sound – now make it”, his company Electronic Music Studios (EMS) was one of the first to bring synthesisers out of studios and to the public. With products such as the portable VCS3 and Synthi A, EMS customers – including David Bowie, Kraftwerk, the Who, Tangerine Dream and Pink Floyd – were often taught to use the instruments by Zinovieff.

Related: Peter Zinovieff: ‘I taught Ringo to play synth. He wasn’t very good – but neither was I'

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

Arushi Jain: Under the Lilac Sky review | Ammar Kalia's global album of the month

(Leaving Records)
The composer blends classical Indian vocals and modular synth drones into harmonic textures full of warming solace

For every raga there is a time. Traditionally, the Indian classical form is composed with a specific time of day in mind, and only then is each raga meant to reveal the height of its melodic beauty to the listener.

Indian American composer Arushi Jain weaves her diasporic identity into this notion of timely ragas in her debut album, Under the Lilac Sky. Composed for the sunset, it blends Jain’s training as an Indian classical vocalist with modular synth work inspired by the likes of American composers Suzanne Ciani and Terry Riley into six ambient arrangements that reflect the transition from day to night.

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

Subwoofers at the ready! The jungle and drum’n’bass revival is upon us

With turbocharged tracks storming the charts, both genres are having a boom – but did they ever really go away?

Jungle and drum’n’bass are back, back, BACK! High Contrast’s Notes from the Underground album – its elegiac 90s rave moods created with vintage 90s tech – was a dance chart success at the end of 2020. Chase & Status’s RTRN II FABRIC mix, which turbocharged jungle classics, was huge last year, too. Harmony by Origin8a and Propa ft Benny Page is everywhere lately and it’s far from the only euphoric 174bpm tune you’ll hear on daytime Radio 1.

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

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by Joe Muggs via Electronic music | The Guardian

The best albums of 2021 so far

From drill’s high watermark to Tuareg rock, Colombian pop and London jazz, here are our music editors’ picks of the best LPs from the first half of the year

Related: Nick Cave and Warren Ellis: Carnage review – the firebrand returns

Related: ‘Nature is hurting’: Gojira, the metal band confronting the climate crisis

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas, Alexis Petridis and Laura Snapes via Electronic music | The Guardian

Marina: Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land review – ambitious manifesto pop

(Atlantic)
The Welsh singer brings an operatic seductiveness to her ballads against misogyny

There are very few artists who create as thoughtfully as Marina Diamandis, formerly Marina and the Diamonds. “I am here to take a look inside myself,” she confides on the title track, sleekly propulsive electropop with a cheering message of self-acceptance. The self-loathing of Electra Heart, the 2012 concept album she addressed to the worst parts of herself, is banished, as are the many romantic imbroglios of 2019’s Love + Fear. What’s inside Marina today is deep concern for women and the world outside, and her best songs couple the personal and the political.

The music is pleasantly accessible, rather than daring, although you could imagine legendary producer Trevor Horn remixing Venus Fly Trap’s elegant take on 80s synth funk. Lyrically, it’s brimming with bristling ambition. Man’s World’s first two verses breezily link the Salem witch trials and 18th-century painter François Boucher with Marilyn Monroe and hypocritical, homophobic autocrats. Pandora’s Box may be a collection of limp balladeer cliches, yet it follows the bruising New America, her savage rebuke of the failure of the States. Anti-misogyny manifesto pop could easily become clumsy and overwrought, but the joy Marina invests into her mannered, quasi-operatic delivery makes sedition sound seductive.

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by Damien Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘We’re trying to sneak into people’s minds and hearts’: Laurie Anderson meets Róisín Murphy

The musicians – and mutual fans – get together virtually to discuss their influences, post-pandemic performance and Anderson’s groundbreaking O Superman 40 years on. Introduction by Jude Rogers

“I’m going to show you my new gong – check it out!” Laurie Anderson is giving a new friend a tour of her flat on New York’s west side, jiggling through the corridors with her laptop. In a north London living room, Róisín Murphy is in her glasses, grinning, leaning into the screen. “I needed a gong to just bong, you know,” Anderson explains. “I really needed to beat a gong once in a while!”

At 74, Anderson remains the American queen of avant-garde art-pop. She recently celebrated the 40th anniversary of O Superman – her astonishing vocoder-led hit, inspired by the Iranian hostage crisis, technology and the operas of Massenet – with a reissue of its parent album, Big Science, on lipstick-red vinyl. Murphy’s career began with chart hits with Moloko in the 1990s, before she strode out as an adventurous, independent DIY solo artist, stretching at the seams of progressive pop and disco in unusual ways. She has released 25 singles, five extended plays and five LPs (including 2015’s Mercury-nominated Hairless Toys), mixing in performance art, philosophical lyrics and fantastic fashion.

Related: ‘It has never been more pertinent’ – Margaret Atwood on the chilling genius of Laurie Anderson’s Big Science

After 9/11, we built two towers of white light to represent the people who died. With Covid, nothing

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by Guardian Staff via Electronic music | The Guardian

Ones to watch: Hyyts

The new EP from the Glaswegian electropop duo beguilingly documents a doomed relationship in reverse

Though not brothers, Adam Hunter and Sam Hunter of Glasgow-based electropop duo Hyyts have shared a bond since childhood that has sustained them through a meandering path to the brink of success. Singer and lyricist Adam studied musical theatre in Edinburgh, before moving to London in a thwarted attempt to become a singer-songwriter, then returning to Scotland to work as a musical therapist in prisons. Sam, meanwhile, spent some time as a professional gamer, and graduated from promoting niche dance and electronica nights in Edinburgh to producing his own tracks.

In 2015, not long after they started making music together, Adam moved to Dundee to work on a film soundtrack with Gary Clark, former frontman of 80s pop band Danny Wilson, and Sam came along too. Hyyts’s sound was honed over two years living in the city.

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by Emily Mackay via Electronic music | The Guardian

Martina Topley-Bird: ‘I wasn’t trying to be famous. I was embarrassingly earnest about being authentic’

The vocalist breaks her long silence to talk about grieving for her daughter, her pioneering work with Tricky on Maxinquaye and finally making an album she’s 98% happy with…

Martina Topley-Bird is struggling with her voice today. “It was awful last night,” she says, croakily, down the line from her home in Valencia. “My first interview in 11 years and then this happens!” As it turns out, Topley-Bird’s will hold out for well over an hour. But it won’t always take her to where she wants to go. She’s agreed to an interview to promote Forever I Wait, her first album since 2010’s Some Place Simple, but she doesn’t enjoy talking about herself; she’s fully aware of her tendency to let conversations drift, leave sentences unfinished, not quite pin down the message she wants to deliver. Speaking to her can be like listening to some of her dreamier music: captivating, meditative, yet somehow with a sense of her barely being there at all. A typical anecdote might grind to a halt midway through: “But yeah… I don’t know… sorry, vagued out again!”

There is also a subject that is never going to be easy to talk about. In 2019, Topley-Bird’s daughter, Mazy, also known as Mina, killed herself at the age of 24. She had suffered a psychotic episode following a gig with her band 404 and died after being admitted to West Park hospital, Darlington. An inquest led to the coroner saying he would make two prevention of future death reports to reduce the risk of patients self-harming on the ward. At the time, Topley-Bird put out a statement saying: “Sweet baby, life won’t be the same without you.” But she hasn’t spoken since. She’s said in advance today that the subject can be broached, but that doesn’t make it any less difficult. “I’m only just beginning to process it,” she later admits.

Essentially, I didn’t have all the skills I needed to achieve what I wanted to achieve

It was very difficult to figure out who to trust

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org

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by Tim Jonze via Electronic music | The Guardian

One to Watch: Loraine James

Enfield’s electronic adventurer produces dreamlike, fractured soundscapes flavoured with free jazz, jungle and more

You wouldn’t know it from her fragmented crushes of electronic sound, but Loraine James’s musical journey began with an unexpected choice: 2000s emo band Death Cab for Cutie. Then came the diverse tastes of her mum, who played anything from calypso to heavy metal in the Enfield tower block where James grew up, and where she also came out in her teens. The brightly hued Alma Road Estate appeared on the cover of her 2019 debut, For You and I, both a tender memory of her childhood and a chilling reminder of inner-city gentrification.

James’s work has been described as “fearlessly queer” but, if anything, its defining quality is its unwillingness to sit still: time signatures are out the window and rushes of beats twitch and glitch around each other like free jazz. Her productions are deeply textural, thuds of drum punching through the dense, deconstructed thickets that incorporate IDM, grime, broken beat, jungle and beyond. Often her songs also have a gentle, dream-like quality, marking James out as a Squarepusher for the xx generation, perhaps.

Reflection is out now on Hyperdub

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by Kate Hutchinson via Electronic music | The Guardian

The pioneers of electronic music – archive, 5 June 1957

5 June 1957 Arthur Jacobs meets Karlheinz Stockhausen and other modern composers who build their compositions from pure sounds electronically prefabricated

It sounds like every composer’s dream – a kind of music that eliminates the performer (and all the uncertainty and capriciousness that the performer represents). What is called Electronic Music, as developed in the broadcasting studios of Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne, allows the composer himself to build his composition from pure sounds electronically prefabricated. The result, in the form of a tape, comes directly to the listener through the play-back mechanism of a tape-recorder.

Related: A guide to Karlheinz Stockhausen's music

Related: Electronic music's sound of futures past

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

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by via Electronic music | The Guardian

Loraine James: meet a genre-splicing genius of British electronic music

The London producer is navigating a predominantly white IDM scene with a stunning hybrid sound, and conquering anxiety after the pandemic knocked her career

The pandemic might have knocked her momentum, but with her new album Reflection, Loraine James is about to solidify her position as one of the UK’s most brilliant and boundary-pushing electronic producers, meshing IDM – the “intelligent dance music” of artists such as Aphex Twin – with R&B, jazz and drill influences.

Raised in a tower block in Enfield, north London, James has been inspired by electronic music since her mid-teens, allured by IDM greats like Squarepusher and Telefon Tel Aviv: “I was always intrigued by melodic IDM, and wanted to replicate it,” she says, sitting among the craft-beer-sippers in a bar in Hackney Wick, east London. But James has gone far further than mere replication.

Related: Sisters With Transistors: inside the fascinating film about electronic music’s forgotten pioneers

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by Timi Sotire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Drum’n’brakes: The cycling DJ taking the party to the streets

Lockdown stopped Dom Whiting’s indoor parties – so he got on his bike and put his decks to good use

With lockdown restrictions continuing, one man decided he was not prepared to wait for indoor parties to be sanctioned once again.

So he went on to eBay, bought a custom-made, three-wheeled bike, affixed his turntables to the handlebars and started simultaneously cycling and DJing around towns and cities across England, broadcasting electronic music from a speaker.

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by Mattha Busby via Electronic music | The Guardian