Eris Drew: Quivering in Time review – divinely powerful and euphoric house

(T4T LUV NRG)
A compelling, cleverly inventive LP emerges from the New Hampshire woods care of a DJ and producer channeling her healing ‘Motherbeat’

There are some artists whose love for music is so strong, so genuine and so resonant that all there is to do is simply surrender to the emanating euphoria. Chicago-raised DJ and producer Eris Drew is one of those artists, and it’s a role she embraces. Her understanding of house music taps into its potential as an agent for communality, spirituality, healing, psychedelia and the divine feminine – all of which she conceptualises as “the Motherbeat”, acting as a guide and conduit to bring others to it. At 46, she’s a veteran of nightlife, witnessing its transformations while experiencing her own in recent years: skyrocketing popularity, establishment of the label and resource hub T4T LUV NRG along with partner Octo Octa, and relocation to a remote cabin in the woods of New Hampshire. It’s here she finally conceived her first LP.

It feels like an understatement to say the tracks on Quivering in Time are proper songs, as each one plays like a whole DJ set in and of itself. Take percussive roller Sensation: dropping to half-time on a whim, the mix gradually mutates across filters, melodic synths and piano make cameos, while the bass wriggles with a life of its own. Baby plays with tempo further, and novelly uses turntablism and scratching for sampling, while the closing title track is an ode to the breakbeats that have inspired Drew so much. Quivering in Time transcends the temporal as well as the planar, but crucially, it doesn’t leave us behind.

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by Tayyab Amin via Electronic music | The Guardian

Countdown to ecstasy: how music is being used in healing psychedelic trips

Jon Hopkins timed his upcoming album to the length of a ketamine high, while apps are using AI music to tailor drug experiences. Welcome to a techno-chemical new frontier

Two hundred psychedelic enthusiasts have converged in Austin, Texas for a “ceremonial concert” on the autumn equinox. People sprawl on yoga mats around a circular stage as staffers pace the candlelit warehouse, jingling bells and spritzing essential oils. While psychedelic drugs are prohibited, some attenders seem in an altered state, lying on their backs and breathing heavily as rumbles of bass from Jon Hopkins’ upcoming album, Music for Psychedelic Therapy, shakes the hushed space.

This is the first time Hopkins – known for acclaimed solo electronic albums as well as production for Coldplay and Brian Eno – has played his new record in public, and the crowd is visibly moved. As recordings of spiritual guru Ram Dass’s teachings fill the room on the final song, the woman next to me begins silently weeping.

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by Michelle Lhooq via Electronic music | The Guardian

Bex Burch and Leafcutter John: Boing! review | John Lewis's contemporary album of the month

Ghanaian gyil melds with space-age electronics for a spluttering, time-warping and thoroughly compelling collaboration

Percussionist Bex Burch was born in Yorkshire and trained at the Guildhall School of Music in London, but her most important musical education came in northern Ghana. She spent three years with virtuoso musicians among the country’s Dagaare people and was introduced to the gyil, a wooden xylophone/balafon-style instrument specific to the area.

Burch returned to London where she made her own 14-note gyil from scratch, featuring a series of tuned wooden slats placed upon two resonant calabash gourds, also attaching pickups to ensure that it could be amplified and put through effects units. The instrument’s muted, thudding sound and the hypnotic, minimalist, pentatonic patterns that Burch creates on it have become central to all of her projects, including her punky trio Vula Viel, in which she is backed by bassist Ruth Goller and drummer Jim Hart.

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by John Lewis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Dave Gahan: ‘Regret is a weird word. I don’t look back on my life like that’

The Depeche Mode frontman answers your questions, on his new covers album, taking early dance lessons from Mick Jagger and the right way to load a dishwasher

Did you accomplish everything you set out to on [forthcoming album] Impostor? MrBeelzebub

I was really burned out after the last Depeche Mode tour, then Rich [Machin, long-time musical partner in Soulsavers] and I started talking about songs and artists who had influenced us. Before we knew it, we were making a Soulsavers record with me as frontman that paid homage to those songs, but was almost a new piece of work. I realised that the choices were songs that put me where I am, suggested where I have been and where I might be. They are songs [such as Dan Penn/James Carr’s Dark End of the Street or Bob Dylan’s Not Dark Yet] that reflect on lives lived. I would not have known how to sing these songs when I was 18.

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by As told to Dave Simpson via Electronic music | The Guardian

DJ and producer Anz: ‘This is music for all hours – and music that’s all ours’

One of the brightest talents in UK dance music is getting used to bigger stages, thanks to her infectiously fun tracks that draw deeply from black cultural history

Nights out are a culmination of so many stimuli: pre-party rituals, journeys through the club and echoes of nightlife that linger into the next day. For Manchester producer and DJ Anz – AKA Anna-Marie Odubote – they are an experience she brings into her work. “I always listen to garage before I go out,” she says in a Mancunian bar, eyeing the entertaining mix of people leaving offices late or getting on the lash early to mark the end of another week. “I want to hear a drum workout at peak time. When they’re about to kick us out the club, I want something big, hands-in-the-air, like: oh my God, where are we going after?”

This narrative arc is the inspiration for her new EP All Hours. Bookended by a bright piano intro signifying the waking morning, and a dreamlike synth outro designed to sooth you into sleep as the sun comes up and strangers have passed out on your sofa, each track corresponds to a time of day so listeners can “choose their own adventure” through 24 hours.

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by Tayyab Amin via Electronic music | The Guardian

No Bounds festival review – Sheffield’s electro-industrial heart is still beating

Various venues, Sheffield
From brass bands in the bus station to thunderous techno in a former gun-barrel factory, this wildly innovative festival perfectly welded past to present

No Bounds is a festival that captures the duality of Sheffield’s past and present. Centrally located in the Hope Works nightclub, a former first world war gun-barrel factory on the outskirts of town, as well as at Kelham Island Museum, the city’s industrial past is never far from sight. Never more so than when you feel crumbling concrete flake from the walls as the merciless thumping techno of Helena Hauff rings in 4am on Sunday morning. The bass reverberates so intensely that the toilet seats rattle like chattering teeth in winter.

But, with the festival spread out further than ever this year, it also captures the essence of contemporary Sheffield, with music performed in DIY venues, canalside bars, and even in the bus station, where experimental electronic artist Mark Fell takes over to present Interchange. A three-hour performance by the Maltby Miners Welfare Band takes place throughout the hub, with gently thundering brass instruments booming around the slightly ghostly, echo-laden station. There is a quiet melancholy and a profound emotional resonance to the performance – which slightly resembles Terry Riley’s In C – as it marries huge engulfing sounds with the strange backdrop of a fully functional and bewildered-passenger-filled city centre interchange.

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by Daniel Dylan Wray via Electronic music | The Guardian

Krautrock legends Faust: ‘We were naked and stoned a lot – and we ate dog food’

They blagged a fortune off their label after promising to be ‘the German Beatles’ – then went wild in the countryside making experimental krautrock. But was there more to Faust than pneumatic drills and nude donkey rides?

Jean-Hervé Peron, former bassist and vocalist with Faust, would like to get something straight about his old band – specifically, the period in the early 1970s when they were living in a commune in Wümme, a rural area outside Hamburg. Faust’s time in Wümme is one of the great sagas in the history of experimental rock, which begins with their wily late manager, Uwe Nettelbeck, somehow convincing Polydor that they were signing not a recently formed collection of Hamburg musicians who would prove to be the most uncompromising band in an uncompromising era for German rock – even by the standards of fellow travellers Can, Kraftwerk and Amon Düül II, Faust’s eponymous 1971 debut album was a provocative, revolutionary, flat-out weird listen – but “the German Beatles”.

Faust’s keyboard player, Hans-Joachim Irmler, thinks their manager played on the fact that Polydor had lost both the actual Beatles, who had been signed to the label for a year while still performing in Hamburg, and Jimi Hendrix “because they didn’t care enough”, concentrating their attention on the lightweight, upbeat brand of Mitteleuropean bubblegum pop known as schlager. Having extracted a reputed DM 30,000 (roughly £160,000 today) out of the company, Faust decamped to an old school in Wümme, at which point the story gets more legendary still. Vast quantities of drugs were taken and the wearing of clothes was optional. Meals were frequently taken in the nude and the band’s original drummer, Arnulf Meifert, rode a donkey naked through a nearby village.

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Post your questions for Depeche Mode frontman Dave Gahan

As the singer readies his cover versions of Neil Young, PJ Harvey and more for new album Imposter, he’s all set to take on your questions

Continuing our new series where Guardian readers pose questions to stars of film and music is Dave Gahan, frontman of Depeche Mode whose latest album with the duo Soulsavers is out next month.

For over 40 years, Depeche Mode have carved out their own rather dimly lit corner of British pop, managing to be variously camp, gothic, exuberant and downbeat, sometimes all in the space of one song.

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘It was ridiculous. It was amazing’: the lost pop of 80s Yugoslavia

Pre-civil war, Yugoslavian musicians defied the limitations of technology to make superb electro-pop in an apparent socialist utopia

Bell-bottomed revellers clad in shining shirts, dancing the night away, were a familiar sight in the party capitals of the world circa 1970. But in brutalist New Belgrade, it was a brand new experience: in the basement of a sports hall, the first discotheque in socialist Yugoslavia was born.

The country no longer exists, having splintered into fragments following war in the 1990s. But before economic and ethnic fault lines appeared, and when the good times rolled, the country straddled the line between east and west – a successful socialist experiment, for a time, with an open society and vibrant cultural life. Yugoslavian disco, post-punk and electronic music thrived in the 1970s and 1980s – yet was mostly forgotten until recent efforts by hobby archivists and specialist record labels.

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by Tamlin Magee via Electronic music | The Guardian

Richard H Kirk obituary

Experimental electronic musician and founding member of the Sheffield-based band Cabaret Voltaire

Richard H Kirk, who has died aged 65, was a key figure in the development of British electronic and DIY music, from his co-founding of the Sheffield-based band Cabaret Voltaire in the 1970s, through his 90s recordings for Warp Records, and to his later solo work fusing electronics, funk and dub.

Cabaret Voltaire, formed in 1973 by Kirk, Chris Watson and Stephen Mallinder, predated the famous “steel city” electronic scene that included the Human League, Vice Versa (later ABC) and Heaven 17, and impacted on Pulp and Moloko’s hits years later.

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by Dave Simpson via Electronic music | The Guardian

From hardcore to bardcore: Kedr Livanskiy, the Russian producer inspired by Tolkienists

Livanskiy’s operatic vocals and hazy beats put her at the forefront of Moscow’s underground club scene. Now she’s retreated from the city to the forest to nurture her imagination

Yana Kedrina’s earliest exposure to music came in a wooden dacha in a pine-forested village 2,000 miles from Moscow. Kedrina’s grandmother, who built the summer cottage with her husband, would invite Kedrina and her seven sisters over to sing Russian folk songs and drink cherry leaf tea. The rustic surroundings and feelings of kinship nurtured in Kedrina an infatuation with her culture’s folklore and a devotion to community.

“A large family, gathering to connect to its ancestral heritage, was an experience unique to a time that predated this individualism we live in now,” Kedrina says, speaking in Russian. Her grandmother never lived to see her blossom into an internationally recognised musician under the name Kedr Livanskiy (Russian for the Lebanese cedar tree). But Kedrina, 31, takes solace in the fact that her career has spiritually fulfilled her grandmother’s dream of travelling beyond her village in Russia’s Tomsk region.

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by Aron Ouzilevski via Electronic music | The Guardian

Erasure review – a heady cocktail of corsets and classics

SEC Armadillo, Glasgow
On the opening night of their first post-pandemic tour, the British synth-pop duo proved they haven’t lost their essence

It’s hard to tell if Andy Bell spent 18 months or 18 seconds pondering his outfit for the opening night of Erasure’s first post-pandemic tour – an understated below-the-nipple bright blue corset and yellow tartan trews combination. “Wonder Woman crossed with Lindsay Wagner Bionic Woman She-Ra slash Powerpuff Girl,” he tells the crowd. Bell’s keyboard-prodding bandmate and studiously un-flamboyant foil Vince Clarke, in his inimitable having-none-of-it way, sports a trim grey suit, tie pin glinting under the stage lights.

The perennial bridesmaids of British synth-pop (32 consecutive UK Top 40 singles; only one No 1, the Abba-esque EP) are back to business, and it’s the fun and daft serotonin rush we all badly need. The duo have described their 18th album The Neon as a trip “back to the beginning”. Hey Now (Think I Got a Feeling) finds Bell beating the darkened city streets again, mildly off his box, looking for love and finding only empty hedonism, Clarke’s vintage synth-scape cascading around him like sodium glow. The sound of new-old Erasure can’t help but pale by comparison as the old-old classics drop – Who Needs Love Like That, Blue Savannah and A Little Respect in the first half-hour alone – but they remain a band who have never lost their essence.

Erasure: The Neon tour is in the UK until 18 October, before US and Europe dates in 2022.

This article was amended on 4 October 2021. It previously stated that Erasure had no UK No 1 singles; their 1992 EP Abba-esque was their sole No 1.

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by Malcolm Jack via Electronic music | The Guardian