One to watch: Nala Sinephro

This inspired jazz harpist takes on the universe with a joyous and deeply restorative debut album

You might have believed that Promises, the extraordinary ambient jazz album by Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the LSO, would have had few rivals this year. But a contender has emerged.

The debut album by the London-based composer and harpist Nala Sinephro reaches elegiac heights – and tissue-penetrating depths. Space 1.8 (out via Warp) is a healing sound bath full of rigorous psychoacoustic knowledge and elegant playing. It combines live instruments by notable names in the UK’s young jazz scene (percussion by Sons of Kemet’s Edward Wakili-Hick, for instance) with modular synths and multilayered audio processing by Sinephro, adding an otherworldly thrum.

Space 1.8 is released on 3 September. Nala Sinephro plays St Matthias church, London N16 on Friday 10 September; tickets here

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Bendik Giske: Cracks review | John Lewis's contemporary album of the month

(Smalltown Supersound)
The Norwegian musician mics the whole studio, influenced by everything from techno to queer theory, on his hypnotic second album

Bendik Giske is a saxophonist who doesn’t appear to like the saxophone very much. As a gay man growing up in Norway, and then attending a music conservatoire in Copenhagen, he hated the straight, male establishment that constituted the Scandinavian jazz scene; he hated the saxophone’s “thrusting”, phallic implications; he even hated playing melodies on his instrument. “By playing tunes you step into that understanding of what the saxophone is supposed to be, what it usually does,” he says. “I wanted to find my voice by abandoning the soloist role, which is a very illogical thing to do on the saxophone.”

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by John Lewis via Electronic music | The Guardian

3 by Ngaiire review –

Tying electronic pop with older traditions, Ngaiire’s new release is bright, alive and soulful, reaching back to her roots as it looks to the future

Throughout her career, Ngaiire Joseph has fought off being misunderstood. Born and mostly raised in Papua New Guinea, and based in Sydney, the singer and songwriter got her start in 2004 on Australian Idol, tearing through pitch-perfect renditions of modern R&B classics like India Arie’s Back to the Middle and Mary J Blige’s No More Drama as the judging panel mispronounced her name and chastised her shyness.

The industry proved unfriendly, as it often does for young women of colour, and Ngaiire attempted to make herself palatable. At one point, she decided not to identify professionally as Papua New Guinean, in case it was hampering her career. “Denying my own blood, and my own heritage and where I’m from, was one of the things that I felt like I needed to do earlier on,” she said recently. “To just protect myself from being in situations where people misinterpreted my music or misinterpreted who I was.”

Related: Australian singer Ngaiire on surviving bullying, volcanoes and childhood cancer

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by Shaad D'Souza via Electronic music | The Guardian

Big Red Machine: How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

(Jagjaguwar)
Aaron Dessner and Justin ‘Bon Iver’ Vernon recruit Taylor Swift, Fleet Foxes and more for this album full of misty autumnal beauty – and a quiet punch

Aaron Dessner cuts a very low-profile figure, even by the standards of both bookish US alt-rockers and blue-chip pop collaborators, neither of whom require otherworldly charisma or an outrageous image. Put it this way: the New York Times recently ran a lengthy profile piece, lauding his achievements – his work on Taylor Swift’s multi-platinum, Grammy-winning 2020 album Folklore; its follow-up Evermore and her ongoing project to re-record her entire back catalogue; the National’s 20 year career, including their own Grammy for 2017’s Sleep Well Beast; his collaboration with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon as Big Red Machine – and illustrated it with a photo not of Dessner, but his brother Bryce. An easy mistake to make – the Dessner brothers are twins – but nevertheless.

Dessner, though, seems happy with quiet anonymity. He had to be coaxed from the background to add three lead vocals to Big Red Machine’s second album, and would doubtless balk at the notion of this collective being a supergroup, although that’s precisely the label How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? would have earned them in a previous era. As well as Dessner and Vernon, the album variously features Swift, Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold, Sharon Van Etten, This Is the Kit, Anaïs Mitchell – the singer-songwriter whose 2010 album Hadestown begat the multiple Tony-winning Broadway musical of the same name – Ben Howard, Lisa Hannigan, My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Nova, and Naeem Juwan, the rapper formerly known as Spank Rock.

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

From Ghetts to Genesis, Nick Cave to Arlo Parks: autumn 2021’s essential music

From Fontaines DC to the Valkyrie, a techno Halloween to Little Simz, this is the unmissable music of the next few months

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by Alexis Petridis, Ammar Kalia and Andrew Clements via Electronic music | The Guardian

Green Man festival review – magical return for this psychedelic carnival

Glanusk Estate, Brecon Beacons
Mogwai, Nadine Shah, Fontaines DC and more mesmerise in the festival’s overwhelming, glorious comeback

‘This is friggin’ overwhelming,” exclaims Nadine Shah, grasping for words to sum up the hyper-emotional, multi-sensory overload that was returning to a music festival. Everyone present for the Tyne and Wear singer’s revitalising set of blown-out rock’n’soul early evening Friday will have known exactly what she meant.

Arms jabbed, throats and noses swabbed, antiseptic liquids flowing along with the real ale and the tears: Green Man was back. As with most festivals, last year’s Covid-related cancellation imperilled this carnival of pastoral-psychedelic delight beneath the Welsh mountains. But its late summer berth allowed organisers to gamble on restrictions lifting in time for a full return in 2021. Fans kept the faith – most tickets were rollovers from 2020 – and were repaid with a programme that, despite few international artists, still somehow felt as solid as ever: a magical mixture of cosmic rock, alt-folk, ecstatic jazz and sanitised hands-in-the-air club music.

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

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by Malcolm Jack via Electronic music | The Guardian

Manchester’s Space Afrika: ‘We’re totally ourselves – Black artists in the 21st century’

The duo’s groundbreaking music takes the mischievous appeal of their home city’s sound and adds a fresh dose of dark ambience

Joshua Inyang and Joshua Reid’s Space Afrika project is galactic in scope. When the duo started releasing music in 2014, they were heavily influenced by the dub-techno of Berlin – where Reid now lives – and Detroit. Their work matured through the sound and voice-collage aesthetic of their NTS Radio shows and last year’s fiercely politicised hybtwibt? (Have You Been Through What I’ve Been Through?) mixtape. Incorporating film and photography, it hinted at the maverick British spirit of Tricky, Burial and Dean Blunt. Their new album, Honest Labour – pulling Twin Peaks torch song, cryptic rap, composition and more into their magisterial dark ambience – suggests ambition as grand as their band name.

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

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by via Electronic music | The Guardian

Native Soul: Teenage Dreams | Ammar Kalia's global album of the month

(Awesome Tapes From Africa)
The teenage duo channel the newest mutation of their country’s house music, amapiano, coaxing us back to the shared space of the dancefloor

House music, and the glorious tension between its on-beat and its syncopated elements, has long been a sound associated with South Africa. From the languorous tempos of sample-heavy kwaito, a subgenre established in post-apartheid townships in Johannesburg, to the Pretorian call-and-response of diBacardi, and the adrenalised polyrhythms of gqom – a raw, bass-heavy recapitulation of kwaito, founded in the early 2010s in Durban – these dance musics have often been a vital means of self-expression for the country’s socially segregated youth.

Related: 'It speaks to an ancient history': why South Africa has the world's most exciting dance music

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

DJ Carl Cox: ‘When I tell people my story, they don’t believe it’

The three-deck wizard’s new memoir details a life behind the decks, from the Houses of Parliament to Honolulu – and tragedy in Venezuela. Now, he says, his baking is as popular as his music

In late November 2007, Carl Cox’s DJing career was over – or so he thought. A few days earlier he had played a set at a festival in Caracas, Venezuela, as part of a tour of South America. The vibe was good and the crowd was bouncing. “I heard all these fireworks go: ‘Bang, bang, bang.’ Everyone was going: ‘Woooo! Yeeaaaah!’” Cox mimics dancing behind the decks. “Then there were more bangs and I thought: ‘Yay, more fireworks!’ But then I looked at the crowd and something was wrong. They were dispersing. I realised: ‘Fuck, that’s not fireworks, that’s gunfire.’”

Two rival gang members had met on the dancefloor and begun shooting. Cox got down on the floor and crawled to a backstage locker room where he and his tour manager barricaded themselves in. After an hour, they were escorted out to a car, past scores of police vans and ambulances. Four people had died and nine were injured. “Seeing people shot on the dancefloor and dying in front of me, blood everywhere …” Cox says, rubbing his eyes. “One minute we were having the time of our lives and the next we were cowering for our lives.”

Related: How we made Space Ibiza

Oh Yes, Oh Yes! by Carl Cox is published by White Rabbit on 19 August (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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by Fiona Sturges via Electronic music | The Guardian

Jungle: Loving in Stereo review – hitting the neon dancefloor hard

(Caiola)
A little bit hip-hop, a little bit spangled funk… Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland take a more organic approach, and it works

Disco’s spinning glitterball shows no sign of slowing. Across two preceding albums, feel-good west London electronica outfit Jungle have tended towards tasteful, club-oriented soul. If their sound has sometimes strayed close to high-end muzak, their videos have kept bevies of dancers in high-energy, expressive work.

Loving in Stereo now finds Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland hitting the neon dancefloor hard. This album’s first single, Keep Movin’, packs in all the 70s signifiers: scything strings, falsetto vocals and pumping groove. Album closer Can’t Stop the Stars adds parping horns and omnipresent shimmer.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Joy Orbison: Still Slipping Vol 1 review – walking away from the dancefloor

(XL Recordings)
The UK producer, a defining figure for more than a decade of underground dance, creates a stream of nostalgic, intimate tracks for his first full-length release

Countless fans of the UK underground can trace their best club experiences back to London producer/DJ Joy Orbison. You could fill an entire dancefloor with anecdotes about his tracks: the catharsis of synth-y debut Hyph Mngo; the curiously quotable vocal cut-ups threaded through Sicko Cell, Ellipsis and Swims; every baptism in the submerging bass of Brthdtt; the decade-long yearn for unreleased cult hit GR Etiquette, and the collective jubilation last March when it was finally released for charity.

While Joy Orbison’s earlier releases helped define an era of underground electronic music, they’ve never quite defined him. In recent years he has collaborated with rave luminaries Overmono and maverick saxman Ben Vince, hosted radio broadcasts both on Radio 1 and in Grand Theft Auto, and peeled far away from floorfillers on 2019 EP Slipping. He continues down a left-field path on this new mixtape: the first full-length project of his 12-year career.

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by Tayyab Amin via Electronic music | The Guardian

Jana Rush: Painful Enlightenment review – an electronic visionary

(Planet Mu)
The Chicago producer finds new emotional depths to the footwork genre, confronting depression and overwork in stunningly original music

Few music genres have generated as much invention and perspiration in recent years as footwork, the Chicago-born dance style where pumping tempos of house are ratcheted up as if by a sadistic personal trainer to the point where they seem to stutter and gasp for air. The chopped samples and snapping percussion of rap add structure back into the mix, though the cornea-detaching bass threatens to undo it all again.

Only the most nimble and athletic dancers can truly keep up with this aural pandemonium, making the style popular among showboating dance crews. The extremity also endears it to the gothic chinstrokers of the avant-electronic scene, meaning that your average footwork event is likely to contain both the most and least awkward people you can imagine. Chicago heroes such as RP Boo and the late DJ Rashad went global and released landmark LPs in the early 2010s, and the curation of UK label Planet Mu has helped to keep the scene healthy outside the midwest (as well as Painful Enlightenment, it also released DJ Manny’s excellent Signals in My Head last month). At a time when the big pianos and vocal lines of Chicago house are used by lazy producers to signify euphoria rather than actually generate it, footwork is a reminder of how progressive and emotionally rich dance music can be. And with her second album, Jana Rush pushes it further than ever before.

Related: Fancy footwork: how Chicago's juke scene found its feet again

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

170 words per minute: rediscover drum’n’bass novel Junglist

Andrew Green and Eddie Otchere were teenage ravers who turned early-90s jungle into mutant modernism prose. In his foreword to a reissued edition, Sukhdev Sandhu explains its power, alongside photos from the era by Otchere

Andrew Green and Eddie Otchere – AKA Two Fingas and James T Kirk, whose extraordinary collaborative novel Junglist is reissued this month – came of age at a strange, indeterminate time. It was the early 1990s, post-Thatcher and post-Berlin Wall: a period of fudge and inertia, of recession and housing market collapse, of Britain being forced to leave the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. The Greater London Council had been abolished in 1986 and the city still had no mayor. Tourists were in short supply; bombs – the IRA attacked the Baltic Exchange, Bishopsgate, even Downing Street – were not.

Green and Otchere were from council estates south of the Thames in Vauxhall. The MI5 building had yet to go up in the neighbourhood and it was hard to imagine that the US embassy would one day move there. Where they lived, squatters were common. The fires that often broke out would have caused even more devastation than they did if the high-rise walling wasn’t so stuffed with asbestos. Turning 16, the two teenagers, both creative and independently minded, headed across town to Hammersmith and West London College. There they bonded over a shared love of comics, basketball, kung fu movies. Music, too.

The rave culture we as Black kids in south London started to experience in the 90s began four years earlier with those white kids. We saw how much fun they were having and brought it into our own circles. By just dancing together, by mimicking each other’s body movements, by being under the same roof, listening to the same music, feeling the same high, taking the same pills: in that magic moment the moodiness was gone.

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by Sukhdev Sandhu via Electronic music | The Guardian