Public Service Broadcasting: Bright Magic review – mood music, from Weimar to Bowie

(Play It Again Sam)
Berlin is the inspiration for the band’s inventive if melancholy fourth album

As with its predecessors’ focus on the space race and the British coal industry, there’s a strong thematic concept to Public Service Broadcasting’s Bright Magic. This time it’s a selective history of Berlin, split into three distinct movements: the city’s rise, a celebration of Weimar-era hedonism and a more abstract three-track requiem. Every Valley, released in 2017, felt like a transitional record: the artfully chosen speech samples that had so defined their first two albums were complemented then by a handful of guest singers.

Bright Magic feels like a logical next step, with fewer samples, and the likes of Blixa Bargeld, Nina Hoss and Eera much more foregrounded. The downside is that, for all the invention on display here, J Willgoose Esq and Wrigglesworth have lost some of their USP with this shift in focus.

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by Phil Mongredien via Electronic music | The Guardian

Nao: And Then Life Was Beautiful review – soaring to new heights

(RCA)
The Grammy-nominated Londoner takes things to the next level with this impeccably on point third album

Last year was tricky. To the global pandemic add a major breakup and a baby – events that shaped And Then Life Was Beautiful, a gamechanging third album by this Grammy- and Mercury-nominated soul singer. Since her debut in 2016, Nao has combined aerated, spun-sugar tones – think Aaliyah, but with east London glottal stops – with eclectic backings.

ATLWB feels like a step up, detailing an emotional journey that refreshes tired tropes with hard-won insight and musical self-assurance. Not settling for unhappiness is the theme of album taster Messy Love. Even better is the 90s-leaning Glad That You’re Gone, which piles heavenly harmonies on to Nao’s deceptively featherlight vocal. Tremulous strings and a restrained guitar solo add to the feeling of classy unconventionality here.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Mathematicians discover music really can be infectious – like a virus

New music download patterns appear to closely resemble epidemic curves for infectious disease, study finds

Pop music is often described as catchy, but it seems you really can infect friends with your music taste. The pattern of music downloads after their release appears to closely resemble epidemic curves for infectious disease – and electronica appears to be the most infectious genre of all.

Dora Rosati, lead author of the study and former graduate in maths and statistics at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada along with colleagues, wondered whether they could learn anything about how songs become popular using mathematical tools that are more usually applied to study the spread of infectious diseases.

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by Linda Geddes Science correspondent via Electronic music | The Guardian

Richard H Kirk was prolific, hungry, angry and funky to the end

The Cabaret Voltaire musician exemplified Sheffield’s experimental mindset and transformed British club music
• Richard H Kirk, founding member of Cabaret Voltaire, dies aged 65

It’s fairly said that Richard H Kirk revolutionised music more than once. He’ll be remembered most widely for his work in Cabaret Voltaire, the band (or as they preferred, art project) he started in 1973 with Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson, and which laid the groundwork for electro-pop, industrial and even punk. But the Sheffield-born musician’s own electronic club music projects have a strong claim to being just as world-changing – Kirk was one of the first artists to release on local institution Warp Records, and he cemented a uniquely British bass-heavy approach to dance music. Throughout the subsequent decades, he never once stood still or looked back, making unique records to the end.

In no small part, that’s down to a very particular strain of local bloodymindedness. Kirk was born and lived his whole life in the capital of the “People’s Republic of South Yorkshire” and epitomised the combination of bluntness, self-effacement and love of experimentation that has fuelled the city’s close-knit scene over the years. Plus, Sheffield loves to dance: from Clock DVA and the Human League through Moloko and Pulp to Toddla T, that character shines through (and every one of those acts has a direct Kirk connection to boot).

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by Joe Muggs via Electronic music | The Guardian

Park Hye Jin: Before I Die review – forthright to a fault

Bedroom-dreamy and in-your-face all at once, the young rapper-producer’s debut album is an unsettling affair

Thanks to her track Like This being included on the Fifa 21 video game soundtrack, this South Korean-born, LA-based producer’s stock has risen vertiginously of late. Park Hye Jin makes all her own beats, sing-rapping in a mixture of English and Korean; she sounds both box-fresh and jaded.

As on her previous EPs, Hye Jin continues to deal in simple melodies, in lyrics that double down on one central emotion, and an accomplished array of mainstream-plus-niche sounds. On I Need You, trap beats pair with beatific piano, for instance. Although the dominant mood is bedroom-dreamy, the effect of her staccato choruses and slapping beats is hammeringly percussive, allying her with the hyper-pop of Charli XCX.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Mercury prize 2021: Arlo Parks wins for Collapsed in Sunbeams

21-year-old singer-songwriter adds to Brit award win earlier in the year

Arlo Parks has won the 2021 Mercury prize, awarded to the year’s most outstanding British album, for her debut Collapsed in Sunbeams.

Presenting the award, judge Annie MacManus said: “We chose an artist with a singular voice who uses lyrics of remarkable beauty to confront complex themes of mental health and sexuality, and connects deeply with her generation as she does so.”

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

Low: Hey What review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

(Sub Pop)
The veteran group continue the scorched digital manipulations of 2018 masterpiece Double Negative, but their vocals are left pristine and beautiful

Low seemed a singular band from the outset. They were a married, practising Mormon couple, devoted to playing as quietly and slowly as possible, in the teeth of the early 90s grunge era. In fact, Low stood out so much that people felt obliged to invent a new subgenre to describe what they were doing: slowcore. It was a label the band disliked and quickly outgrew; it turned out they could move at quite a clip when it suited them.

Then, 25 years into their career, Low became more singular still. Their sound had always shifted and changed, occasionally in unpredictable directions, and electronic percussion had crept into 2015’s Ones and Sixes. But nothing could quite prepare listeners for 2018’s Double Negative, which took the kind of studio processes commonplace in modern mainstream pop – pitchshifted vocals, digital manipulation, the sidechain compression that causes the rhythm tracks on pop-dance hits to punch through everything else – cranked all of them up to 11 and applied them to a rock band. The end result was an album that genuinely sounded like nothing else. Low weren’t the only alt-rock artists thinking along roughly similar lines – Double Negative was produced by BJ Burton, who had worked on Bon Iver’s technology-fractured 22, A Million – but the sheer extremity with which the band’s sound was altered shifted Double Negative into a category of its own.

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Dance music collective Daytimers: ‘Brownness isn’t a hype – it’s who we are’

Formed during the first Covid lockdown, Daytimers are using wild parties to change perceptions both inside south Asian communities and out

The dancefloor is rammed with people of all colours and creeds shuffling for space as the carnatic drum beat begins. At the decks, turbaned Sikh men and others in kurtas dance beside the outstretched hands of women wearing saris, bangles and sneakers reaching into gun fingers. A wheel-up is pulled in seconds.

This wild reaction was for a DJ set in early August by Yung Singh, who curated a lineup on the digital music platform Boiler Room with fellow members of Daytimers, a new collective of British south Asian creatives. To kick things off he played an edit made for the occasion. The sweet vocals of Panjabi MC and Sarvjeet Kaur’s Kori, a modern take on an old giddha – a type of Punjabi folk song performed by women at auspicious occasions – came first. Then entered Benga and Coki’s dubstep classic Night, which has one of the most recognisable lead melodies in contemporary electronic music. A clip of the drop went instantly viral.

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by Ciaran Thapar via Electronic music | The Guardian

The Presets’ Julian Hamilton on the under-the-bed discovery that changed his career

The musician shares stories of ‘creating acid squelches’, pestering Kraftwerk and a beloved tunnel’s second life

Julian Hamilton was a student at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music when he crossed paths with Kim Moyes. It was a fortuitous meeting – the pair eventually went on to become the Presets, the electronic music duo who were first a fixture of claustrophobic clubs and eventually big festival stages throughout the 2000s.

More than 15 years on from their first EP, the Presets are still going strong. But with Covid forcing a touring hiatus, this year Hamilton decided to try his hand at something new: making music by himself. His debut single as a solo artist, City of Love, arrived last month, with more songs set to come across the summer.

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by As told to Katie Cunningham via Electronic music | The Guardian

Little Simz, Iron Maiden and more: September’s best album reviews

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

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by via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘The 90s seem like yesterday’: Saint Etienne on 30 years as pop auteurs

Sarah, Bob and Pete talk about recording their mesmeric new album via Zoom, the reality of the 90s and the oddness of pop parenthood

In the concrete balcony bar of the BFI Southbank on a late summer’s afternoon, three old friends are sitting on mid-century seats, talking about the passing of time. Thirty years ago this month, Saint Etienne – Bob Stanley, Pete Wiggs and Sarah Cracknell – released their debut album, Foxbase Alpha, which stitched together samples from Dusty Springfield, the Four Tops and James Brown records, clips from old films and electronic beats that had their heart and soul in the clubs.

Renowned music journalist Jon Savage wrote the sleevenotes, laying out how their approach to music-making could be a blueprint for a new kind of British pop culture. It might come from somewhere like London’s grimy Camden Town, home to “a myriad of sounds, looks and smells from all over the world, each with its own memory and possibility”. In Saint Etienne’s London, Savage wrote, you could immerse yourself in dub, reggae, old psychedelia and Northern soul, combining these sounds with contemporary ideas.

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by Jude Rogers via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘A summer of love!’ Musicians on the awesome, tearful return of gigs

From Sleaford Mods in London to Mogwai in France, bands and performers talk about the strange and wonderful experience of returning to the stage after 16 months of deprivation

There were those few weeks of strange, haunted gigs in autumn 2020, but for most people live music disappeared at the start of March last year and didn’t return until this summer. It was a peculiar enough experience being in the crowds, but what was it like for the artists walking on stage after 18 months without the hum of amps, the dimming of house lights and the roar of an audience? From festival headline sets to low-key club shows, this is how the return to playing live felt for the musicians who came back.

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by As told to Michael Hann via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘I’m worshipping anger as a holy force’: dub, dancehall and destruction with the Bug

For three decades, Kevin Martin has detonated the British music scene with various apocalyptically noisy projects – all as a way to ‘get over the crushing tyranny of existence’

Kevin Martin’s industrial dancehall project the Bug started 20 years ago, in chaotic circumstances. As part of electronic duo Techno Animal, the producer was playing a show in Bern, Switzerland, and had just started his soundcheck when the ramshackle wood-framed arts complex was attacked by football hooligans, some brandishing incendiary devices.

Speaking to me from his home in Brussels, the permanently baseball-capped Martin says: “It was like warfare. There were people barricading doors. Glass was shattering as concrete went through windows. We were shitting our pants: ‘Hold on, this is a wooden building – if one of those molotovs goes off, we’re chargrilled!’”

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by John Doran via Electronic music | The Guardian