Musique Non Stop - Jazz, Funk, Soul, Broken Beat, Electro, Electronic, Funk / Nu Disco, NU Jazz, House, Techno, Ambient, Lo-Fi, Downtempo... and Many More!
We celebrate everything from Lil Nas X’s conservative-baiting Montero to Wet Leg’s instant indie classic – as voted for by 31 of the Guardian’s music writers
Continue reading...(Albert’s Favourites)
This unlikely duo forged in lockdown roam across swirling electronic soundscapes with their powerful protest messages
The past 18 months have yielded a number of unexpected collaborations as artists who have long admired each other’s work suddenly found themselves with time on their hands. One such pair is Daedelus and Joshua Idehen: the former, aka Alfred Darlington, a waistcoat-wearing linchpin of the LA beats scene, now relocated to Boston; the latter, the poet laureate of UK jazz, a British-born Nigerian living in Sweden, whose fragmentary utterings have seared tracks by The Comet is Coming and Sons Of Kemet.
Strange, then, that Holy Water Over Sons is largely beatless, a series of borderless lullabies for the end of the world. Idehen’s streams of consciousness are couched in electronic soundscapes that swirl across genres, untethered. The two had been trading ideas for a while, but last year’s BLM movement has refocused their message, and themes of racial injustice and identity on songs such as Floyd, Target and Pedal Down, No Breaks contrast intriguingly with warped organ, sun-dappled Fender Rhodes piano and lambent pools of strings arranged by Miguel Atwood-Ferguson.
Continue reading...Laura Mvula, Kasabian’s Serge Pizzorno, Snail Mail, BackRoad Gee, Sigrid and Eris Drew mull over the year’s big stories, from Britney’s freedom to battles over plagiarism and streaming
How did you feel coming into 2021, after the unprecedented bleakness of 2020?
Continue reading...Techno artist says being ‘recognised by your country is the greatest honour’, after winning prize for the year’s best Welsh album
The Welsh music prize, awarded to the best album by a Welsh artist each year, has been won in 2021 by electronic artist Kelly Lee Owens for Inner Song.
Owens, who is from the village of Bagillt in north Wales, said: “It feels amazing. As a Welsh artist to be recognised by your country, ultimately for me, is the greatest honour. I’m so passionate about Wales and I want everyone to know where I’m from.”
Continue reading...The broadcaster and DJ makes his directorial debut with a comedy about UK garage fans trying to celebrate the turn of the millennium in style. He explains why it’s time to portray Black British youth with joy
When you consider the cornucopia of subcultures that have been fictionalised in film, it is criminal that the golden age of UK garage hasn’t yet had the cinematic treatment. This was a hyper-vibrant, multicultural scene, born and bred in mid-90s London during a brief economic boom, where jewel-toned satin shirts and rhinestone cowgirl hats ruled the dancefloor and rounds of “champers” were racked up at the bar. Its soundtrack – a form of US house music sped up with a twitchy restlessness – was a ruffneck-yet-futuristic, soulful-yet-boisterous blend that encapsulated the push and pull of the new millennium, before grime twisted MC-led music into tougher shapes. Bold, brash songs such as Sticky’s Booo!, featuring Ms Dynamite, and So Solid Crew’s Oh No were surely destined for big-screen drama.
Reggie Yates recognised all this, which is why he has put UK garage (including both those songs) at the heart of his big-screen directorial debut, Pirates. The comedy caper, for which Yates also wrote the screenplay, follows three teenage friends as they try to get into the ultimate Y2K New Year’s Eve party hosted by the seminal club night Twice As Nice, with garage dons Heartless Crew, DJ Spoony and Pied Piper among the cameos.
Continue reading...He was a techno-classical genius loved by pop stars from U2 to Britney. Then he was sectioned in his 60s after a drug-induced breakdown. The superproducer explains how he came back around
There was a point in the early 00s when William Orbit was poised to go interstellar. He was one of the great pop architects of the Y2K era, the Mark Ronson or Jack Antonoff of his day. He produced Madonna’s Grammy-sweeping Ray of Light, with its magnetic techno-lite, in 1998; Blur’s 13 a year later; and made hits for some of the biggest films around the new millennium: Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, The Next Best Thing and The Beach.
The latter’s lead track, Pure Shores, recorded by the British pop group All Saints, was the second most successful UK single of 2000. Echoes of its breathy acoustica and bleepy-bloopy electronica can still be heard in the charts; it was recently championed by Lorde, who said the song was an inspiration for this year’s much anticipated album Solar Power.
Continue reading...(Room40)
The composer explored psychedelics during lockdown, creating synth music evocative enough to conjure aural hallucinations even if you’re not under the influence
In lockdown, the Chicago-based artist and composer Olivia Block began taking psychedelic mushrooms and listening with intent as a way to guide her composition. She used these sessions as both a music-making strategy and as a form of meditation on the pandemic: “The mushrooms helped me to listen somatically, pulling my ears towards low tonal patterns and the warped sounds of a broken Mellotron,” she said, describing the process as “an attempt to translate my emotions about this surreal and strange historical moment into sound”.
However, the resulting album, Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea, is not obviously psychedelic, but a deeply immersive ocean of sound, with watery, enveloping drones that ripple with a liquid tremolo and create patterns behind the eyes. During the same period, Block was reading Anna Kavan’s strange and snowy postapocalyptic fairytale Ice, and it helped frame the album as a soundtrack to the unmade film of this eerie novella.
This column’s regular author, John Lewis, is away
Continue reading...(Domino)
This pretty, soothing and occasionally transformative trip was inspired by time spent in an Ecuadorean cave
Plenty of outlier genres seek to take the listener elsewhere – through drumming, chanting, the devotional music of the east and south, drones, oscillations or electronics. Sometimes this altered state is helped along by useful plants; sometimes, it’s the more unadorned experience of great stillness allied to awe – which is where British electronic producer Jon Hopkins lands on his sixth solo album, a post-lockdown aural balm that sits usefully alongside Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics (2018).
In addition to his fine, beat-based output, Hopkins has previously worked with Brian Eno and released generative meditation tracks. His bona fides are hardly in question. Here, he improvises in response to the voice of the late mindfulness pioneer Ram Dass on East Forest: Sit Around the Fire; much of this ambient statement was inspired by a trip to, or in, an Ecuadorean cave. But in among all this pervasive beauty (which tends towards expansive prettiness and resonant succour rather than the sterner, more austere end of the ambience spectrum), it feels like only the eight-minute apex track Deep in the Glowing Heart rearranges the listener’s molecules in a transformational way.
Continue reading...Since we last heard from the synthpop star, she’s had a frightening brush with cancer and quit LA after a police shooting near her apartment. So how does she stay so upbeat?
Pip Brown was less than a year into motherhood when the mole on the back of her leg started to itch. The synthpop musician known as Ladyhawke had already been through the wringer with postnatal depression; now another life-altering situation was on the cards. “I’d always known it was there,” says Brown of the mole, “but when I got pregnant I noticed that it had started to change and was acting weird.” After being distracted by what she calls “new baby haze”, Brown finally had the mole examined and was immediately told that it was potentially melanoma.
“I knew it was going to be bad,” she remembers, speaking from her home in Auckland, where she lives with her now three-year-old daughter Billie Jean and her wife, the actor and director Madeleine Sami. “I just had this sick feeling.”
Continue reading...Photographer Dave Swindells was one of the few to discover the London nightclub when it opened 30 years ago – and capture its streetwear, Sloanes and giddy energy. He takes us back
There was no fanfare when the Ministry of Sound opened 30 years ago. There wasn’t even a press release. For decades it has been one of the world’s most famous nightclubs (and one of the world’s most successful independent record labels), yet it opened almost in secret, and that was part of the plan.
Justin Berkmann was a young DJ who’d lived in New York and been mesmerised by the Paradise Garage and the mixmastery of its resident DJ Larry Levan. After the Garage closed at the end of 1987, Berkmann returned to the UK with an evangelical determination to create a club in London that was built around a similar state-of-the-art sound system. He met two people who believed in his vision: the entrepreneur James Palumbo and his business partner Humphrey Waterhouse.
Speaker stacks and dry ice in the main room, the Box. Below; a mystery DJ in the Box
Continue reading...Childhood friends who would finish each other’s sentences, Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth were growing apart. Then Hollingworth’s boyfriend died aged 22. The pop duo explain what they learned in a devastating year
Let’s Eat Grandma arrive in a cafe after their Guardian photoshoot, looking exactly like a pair of pop stars. Jazzed up in opulent jewel tones and immaculate eyeliner, they are both tall – about 5ft 9in – but the resemblance ends there. Rosa Walton has the plump red curls of a 40s movie star, while Jenny Hollingworth channels something of the young Kate Bush.
They find it funny, being back in band mode after three years away, says Hollingworth, “because we view ourselves as just …”
Continue reading...Fused from jungle, rave and soul, trip-hop filled the coffee tables of the 90s, and is now inspiring Billie Eilish’s generation. So why is the term so despised by many?
Nobody really wanted to be trip-hop. The stoner beats of Nightmares on Wax’s 1995 Smokers Delight album were era defining, but it carried the prominent legend: “THIS IS NOT TRIP HOP”. James Lavelle’s Mo’ Wax label flirted with the term after it was coined by Mixmag in 1994, but quickly switched to displaying it ostentatiously crossed out on their sleeves. Ninja Tune did print the phrase “triphoptimism” on a king size rolling paper packet in 1996, but only as a joke about escaping categories.
“I always disliked the term,” says Lou Rhodes of Lamb, “and I would always make a point in interviews of challenging its use in regard to Lamb.” Mark Rae of Rae & Christian similarly says: “I would give a score of 9/10 on the lazy journalist scale to anyone who placed us in the trip-hop camp.” And Geoff Barrow’s ferocious hatred of the term – let alone its application to Portishead – has become the stuff of social media legend.
Continue reading...Pulp frontman weighs in on Cop26, Brexit and arts cuts as Let’s Stick Around is released
Jarvis Cocker has teamed up with the electronic DJ Riton to release what he calls “the world’s first sustainable banger” to encourage action to address the climate crisis.
Let’s Stick Around, released on Thursday to coincide with Cop26, brings together one of the figureheads of Britpop with a powerhouse of electronic dance music. “Anybody with any sense is passionate about the climate emergency, it’s moving more into the centre of everybody’s consciousness,” Cocker said.
Continue reading...The New Yorker has released an astonishing, must-listen project: The Clearing, a poetic musical rumination on how ‘disfluent’ speech can articulate a new way of living
Please don’t finish JJJJJerome Ellis’s sentences. The New York composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist and writer, who has a stutter – hence the repetition of Js in his name – asks for patience from whoever he is in conversation with. “Sometimes people just walk away,” he says. “Perhaps because I didn’t adhere to t-t-the choreography t-t-that we are often used to.” These kinds of experiences have left him feeling extremely vulnerable, he tells me candidly over a video call. “So much of the pain comes from not feeling fully human. Not feeling intelligent. People thinking that I might be evading a question.” This reality is most apparent to Ellis whenever he is stopped by police. “I don’t want my Blackness to come off as a threat and I don’t want my stuttering to come off as evidence of lying.”
Ellis is interested in bringing awareness to this intersection of stuttering (that he also calls disfluency) and Blackness. His latest project The Clearing is a profound and richly textured 12-track album with an accompanying book, that blends spoken word and storytelling with ambient jazz and experimental electronics to create a soundscape that is both meditative and theatrical.
Continue reading...This follows the rediscovery of Beverly Glenn-Copeland in his 70s – an electronic musician who radiates life and happiness
Here’s a spirit-lifting documentary about black transgender electronic music pioneer Glenn Copeland. It begins with the story of how he was “discovered” a few years ago, aged 72. At home in Canada, Copeland reads the email he got in 2015 from a record shop owner in Japan: the guy offered to buy any spare copies of Keyboard Fantasies, an album Copeland self-released in 1986 on cassette. At the time he was known as Beverly Glenn-Copeland, and the album is a trippy mix of electronica, folk and new age, overlaid with Copeland’s sumptuous contralto tenor; it’s now seen as his masterpiece. He had pressed 200 tapes and sold around 50.
I could watch Copeland talking for hours. With his smiling eyes he radiates life and happiness, basking in autumnal success – the world has finally caught up with him. He was born Beverly Glenn-Copeland into a middle-class family in Philadelphia. At 17 in the early 60s, he was one of the first black students at a prestigious Canadian university, studying classical music. Homosexuality was still illegal in Canada, but Copeland was open about his relationship with another woman. His parents carted him off to a psychiatric hospital for electroshock “therapy” but he escaped. After dropping out of college, Copeland recorded a couple of albums, both commercial disasters. Then in the early 80s he discovered computers – “and I was off to the races”.
Continue reading...Ian Mugerwa escaped hometown racism and a traumatic relationship to move to New York, where his electronic R&B has become a word-of-mouth triumph
Few albums that get dropped into the internet void then take on a life of their own through word of mouth alone. But when New York-based artist Ian Mugerwa, AKA Dawuna, created a record of luminous R&B laced with gospel undertones and experimental electronics, it couldn’t hide in the digital wilderness for long.
“When I put Glass Lit Dream online [in November 2020], I was in a hectic mental space, so it was this very impulsive decision. Would I do that now? Probably not,” the 25-year-old admits. “I was sitting on this thing that I thought was really good but the music industry was in disarray with Covid. So I didn’t even know how it would reach people.” Nonetheless it did, attracting the attention of ambient nomads Space Afrika and jazz drummer Moses Boyd. The latter describes the album to me as “so sick ... an intricately beautiful collection of songs and sonics. An incredible journey of music”.
Continue reading...Discover all our four- and five-star album reviews from the last month, from pop to folk, classical and more
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