Todd Edwards: the inspiring force behind Daft Punk and UK garage

His house music caused a sensation – ​but soon he was depressed and working a for a phone company. The US producer explains how he swung back to Grammy-winning glory

The video keeps getting removed from YouTube, but whenever it does, someone else uploads it again: jerky cameraphone footage of a man in a homemade T-shirt that reads Jesus Loves UK Garage, DJing at an Essex club in 2003. The crowd in Romford are going insane – the man is Todd Edwards, an American house producer whose rough-edged production style had exerted so much influence on the UK garage scene that he had become known as Todd the God – but the object of their worship looks, as he puts it now, “scared to death”: the smile on his face is weirdly fixed and unmoving, in a way that suggests not enjoyment, but terror.

He had, he explains today, never really DJ’d in a club before, certainly not in front of 1,500 people. Edwards had previously declined all entreaties to come to the UK, despite the fact that his music was vastly better known and more successful here than back home. Moreover, he had almost no idea what a UK garage club was like. His experience of clubbing had largely involved hanging around the booth at New York’s Sound Factory Bar, hoping that the resident DJ Little Louie Vega would play one of his tracks; a visit to Zanzibar, the Newark club where Tony Humphries had pioneered the original, gospel-influenced, American garage sound, had ended in disaster when Edwards’ car had been towed away.

I wish I had been strong enough to take advantage of fame, but I was a mess in my 20s. I was going through so much

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Latitude festival review: a hyper-real return to glitter, beer and British musical brilliance

Henham Park, Suffolk
The first full-capacity festival since the pandemic began hosted a series of artists – Sons of Kemet and Self Esteem among them – that show how vibrant the UK’s scene still is

Standing in a field, wearing glitter, watching bands, with a warm pint in blazing hot sun: these human behaviours had to be relearned for the first full-capacity UK music festival since the pandemic began. Some 40,000 unmasked people are taking part in Latitude’s trial as part of the government’s events research programme – results are as yet unclear but its success or failure could inform the staging of other festivals this summer.

A lateral flow test before entry and a daily health screening are the only obstacles to normality. It’s overwhelming – risky, even. But it all quickly comes rushing back: the giddy thrill of dancing next to strangers in a tent, queues for halloumi, the stamina it takes to pace across the site to see as many acts as possible. The only real difference is that men are washing their hands after a trip to the toilets.

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by Kate Hutchinson via Electronic music | The Guardian

Peter Rehberg, underground musician and Editions Mego head, dies aged 53

Artist made numerous albums of ambient and electronic music and set up label to champion key works in the genres

Peter Rehberg, the musician and record-label head who was a globally respected figure in underground music, has died aged 53 of a heart attack.

His death was announced by the musician Kassel Jaeger, who wrote on Instagram: “Peter is gone, suddenly. Just like that … I owe him so much. So do many of us.”

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

Mercury prize 2021: first-time nominees dominate shortlist

No 1 albums by Wolf Alice, Mogwai and Celeste are joined by leftfield artists such as Hannah Peel and Nubya Garcia in race for prestigious music award

Chart-topping albums by Wolf Alice, Celeste and Mogwai feature in nominations for the 2021 Mercury prize, one of the most prestigious music awards in the UK.

In a diverse list that ranges across jazz, soul, rap, electronic, contemporary classical and beyond – though with no folk or metal – other hit albums include those by veteran grime rapper Ghetts, indie-soul singer Arlo Parks, and proggy septet Black Country, New Road, all of whom reached the Top 5 in the UK albums chart in 2021.

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

How we made Beat Dis by Bomb the Bass

‘I was completely naive about sampling. Royalties didn’t cross my mind. If you were to make it now, you would need a good legal team’

I was working as a waiter in a Japanese restaurant and studying audio engineering at Royal Holloway University of London in the afternoons. I got into splicing tape and became fascinated by chopping things up and putting samples into a different order. I was 18 years old and completely naive. Royalties didn’t cross my mind. Sugar Hill Records – where we got the “everybody in the street” line – they were very pissed off and we ended up paying them a lot to use the sample as it was the song’s hook. If you were to make Beat Dis now, you would need a good legal team to track down the rights holders of all the 1960s and 70s records we sampled.

It came out the same week as Kylie’s I Should Be So Lucky. If the shops hadn’t sold out, we’d have got to No 1

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by Interviews by David Jesudason via Electronic music | The Guardian

Laura Mvula, Martha Argerich and more: July’s best album reviews

Discover all our four- and five-star album reviews from the last month, from pop to folk, classical and beyond

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by Guardian Staff via Electronic music | The Guardian

DJ-producer Sherelle: ‘I feed off people’s unexplained anger’

Black artists pioneered dance music, but the scene remains white-dominated. UK rising star Sherelle is dodging the trolls and trying to make change with her platform Beautiful

Wearing a fleece jacket covered in black and white acid smilies, Sherelle is a walking embodiment of dance music when I meet her. The 27-year-old north Londoner and self-professed “bocat” – a Jamaican slang term used in a derogatory manner to describe someone who enjoys giving cunnilingus, now proudly reappropriated by her on her T-shirts – is one of the UK’s most purely enjoyable new DJs. By blending various global forms of dance music, she is a catalyst for unrestrained raving who has stormed her way into the limelight at 160 beats per minute.

She grew up on dancehall booming out of her mum’s hi-fi system, and hip-hop and R&B music videos on cable TV. “In my house we had cable illegally, because we couldn’t afford to pay for it,” says Sherelle, whose younger self would cringe at her mother and older sister. “Whatever they were watching, they would dance to. I have a graphic image of Beenie Man’s Who Am I, around the time the tune came out, and my mum and sister having the greatest time. I was mortified.”

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by Marcus Barnes via Electronic music | The Guardian

Gang of Youths, Natalie Imbruglia, the Goon Sax and more: Australia’s best new music for July

Each month we add 20 new songs to our Spotify playlist. Read about 10 of our favourites here – and subscribe on Spotify, which updates with the full list at the start of each month

Related: Sony Music HQ was warned about workplace culture at Australian label under Denis Handlin decades ago

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by Nathan Jolly and Guardian Australia via Electronic music | The Guardian

Peter Zinovieff obituary

Synthesiser pioneer and acclaimed composer of electronic music

Although the Moog synthesiser became synonymous with electronic music, Peter Zinovieff’s Electronic Music Studios (EMS) deserves equal credit. The VCS3 synthesiser it launched at the end of the 1960s became a favourite creative tool of some of the most adventurous musicians of the era, including Brian Eno, Hawkwind, Robert Fripp, Curved Air, Led Zeppelin, Gong, Roxy Music and Jean-Michel Jarre.

“To me, the original VCS3 synthesiser is like a Stradivarius,” Jarre commented. “All these old analogue instruments are very poetic. I have a huge emotional relationship with them.”

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by Adam Sweeting via Electronic music | The Guardian

Blank Gloss: Melt review | John Lewis's contemporary album of the month

(Kompakt)
The Sacramento duo have moved towards the ruminative on their debut album, the latest in a developing, diverting genre

The music magazine Uncut recently featured a cover-mounted CD and an accompanying article celebrating “Ambient Americana”, subtitled “a road trip across psychic state lines”, while the Guardian surveyed the “ambient country” scene in 2020. Also known as “post-country”, “cosmic pastoral” or “bootgaze”, it’s a micro-genre that has been percolating for decades. Think of Ry Cooder’s soundtrack to Paris, Texas; BJ Cole’s collaborations with Guy Jackson or Øyvind Skarbø, Brian Eno’s work with Daniel Lanois, the avant garde primitivism of John Fahey, or even The KLF’s Chill Out album. In recent years it has been taken in new directions by the likes of Chuck Johnson, Mike Cooper, Marielle Jakobsons and the Nashville duo Hammock.

The latest development in the genre comes from Blank Gloss, a duo from Sacramento, California, comprising Patrick Hills and Morgan Fox. The pair have a history in thrashy punk and experimental bands but, since signing to the Cologne-based electronic label Kompakt, they’ve moved in a more ruminative, improvisational direction. Their debut album Melt is a futuristic journey through the US desert, one that dismantles the defining sonic tropes of American roots music (woozy pedal steel flourishes, slurring fiddles, brushed drums, the twang of a reverb-drenched electric guitar) and reassembles them as disembodied sounds, put through an ambient filter. Where so much electronica conjures up concrete brutalism, spacious warehouses and neon-lit motorways, Melt suggests wide open spaces, huge skies, endless horizons and dust-dry roads.

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by John Lewis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Cosha: Mt Pleasant review – confident and carefree come-to-bed beats

(Ashtown Lane)
The Irish singer seizes artistic control in an album charged with heated possibilities, sensual new love and sexual self-belief

On the opener of Mt Pleasant, her debut album as Cosha, the Irish pop singer Cassia O’Reilly sings about our spinning planet with contentment and resignation. “Leave it, let it turn,” she coos over the cushioned synths and come-to-bed beats of Berlin Air .

This fulfilment has been hard won. Previously releasing a frenetic blend of rave-inflected R&B and elasticated pop under the name Bonzai, she scored herself a major label record deal that soured, leaving her artistic vision compromised. Striking out alone, she changed her name and started from scratch. The result is Mt Pleasant, a luscious, confident and carefree record that could only have been crafted by someone in control of their artistic intentions.

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by Alim Kheraj via Electronic music | The Guardian