Neo rhythms: why techno music and The Matrix are in perfect harmony

The films’ heroes look like they’ve just stepped off the Berghain dancefloor – and the connection isn’t merely aesthetic. The series shares the genre’s philosophy of liberation

“We can’t see it,” says a character in The Matrix Resurrections, “but we’re all trapped inside these strange repeating loops.” Small surprise techno producer Marcel Dettmann was commissioned to write music for this latest film in the franchise. It’s a natural fit. Its director, Lana Wachowski, goes clubbing at Berghain, the Berlin techno club where Dettmann is resident and where, cut off from the everyday world, people have surreal, liberating experiences. Techno continues to inspire the franchise’s aesthetics.

When club techno arose in 1980s Detroit, African American producers were reimagining the deindustrialised city as a site of futurist fantasies. Cybotron’s dystopian 1984 track Techno City was inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the Tokyo of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s track Technopolis. “I extrapolated the necessity of interfacing the spirituality of human beings into the cybernetic matrix,” said Cybotron’s Rik Davis (using the word “matrix” before the film existed), “between the brain, the soul and the mechanisms of cyberspace.”

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by Liam Cagney via Electronic music | The Guardian

The 10 best contemporary albums of 2021

The year’s best experiments ranged from Blank Gloss’s ambient Americana to Space Afrika’s manipulated Manchester field recordings and Floating Points’ extraordinary electronic masterpiece

• More on the best music of 2021
• More on the best culture of 2021

So much new composition seems to make connections between contemporary minimalism and early music. Narrow Sea sees Pulitzer prize-winning composer Shaw create a very American variety of antique minimalism, featuring opera soprano Dawn Upshaw. The ancient folk song Wayfaring Stranger and other Sacred Harp hymns are placed in a disorientating sonic environment, with Gilbert Kalish providing discordant piano and the New York ensemble Sō Percussion switching between Steve Reich-ish marimbas and atmospheric effects on ceramic pots, water bowls and dulcimers.

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by John Lewis via Electronic music | The Guardian

New artists join Adele and Dua Lipa on list for first non-gendered Brit awards

As the music prizes strive for inclusivity, first-timers Self Esteem and Central Cee make the shortlist along with veterans Abba

Adele, Ed Sheeran, Little Simz and Dave have topped the largest-ever field of nominations at the Brit awards, as the ceremony moves beyond gendered categories.

Each artist earned four nominations, including in the new “artist of the year” category that has replaced “British male” and “British female”, and for album of the year. New awards have been added this year to highlight excellence in genres: alternative/rock, hip-hop/grime/rap, dance, and pop/R&B.

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘Everyone was partying for their life’: Bang Gang, bloghouse and the indie sleaze of the mid-2000s

A new book charts the rise and fall of an internet-fuelled electronic music movement that sent Australian artists global and set Sydney’s Kings Cross alight

Back in the mid-noughties, one party ruled Sydney’s Kings Cross. It was called Bang Gang, and co-founder Jamie Wirth remembers it well.

“Oh my God, it was wild. It was just fucking mayhem,” Wirth recalls. “There was a bit of dodginess, a lot of smooching, it was pretty horny. It was wild, and colourful, and it was like everyone was partying for their life. But it was also a celebration of this new form of music: it was exciting, and it was coming out every week.”

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by Katie Cunningham via Electronic music | The Guardian

Jerusalem in My Heart: Qalaq review – bearing witness to a manufactured apocalypse

(Constellation)
Radwan Ghazi Moumneh and avant garde peers collaborate on a defiant, vulnerable lament for Lebanon

• More albums we missed in 2021

Radwan Ghazi Moumneh has had a hand in some of the most astonishing experimental music this side of the millennium, both behind the scenes as recording engineer at Montreal studio Hotel2Tango and on stage fronting his own project, Jerusalem in My Heart. The Lebanese artist merges folk instrumentation and field recordings with abyssal drones and tectonic electro-acoustics, forming a foundation upon which his grave, guttural vocals are sung in Arabic.

On Qalaq, he inverts the orchestral premise of his prior LP, choosing instead to collaborate with avant garde peers in a remote, individuated and turn-based capacity – one that invites each guest artist to interpret the record’s titular theme of deep worry and anxiety for Lebanon. The result is an album that’s as defiant and visceral as it is vulnerable.

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by Tayyab Amin via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘I never worked in a cocktail bar’: How the Human League made Don’t You Want Me

‘Philip turned up to meet my parents fully made up, with red lipstick and high heels. My dad locked himself in the bedroom and refused to come out’

I had intended to recruit just one female backing singer but when I walked into the Crazy Daisy nightclub in Sheffield, the first thing I saw was Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley dancing. They somehow looked like a unit while being clearly different individuals. I knew they were right.

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by Interviews by Dave Simpson via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘He touched a nerve’: how the first piece of AI music was born in 1956

Long before Auto-Tune and deepfake compositions, university professor Lejaren Hiller premiered a concert recital composed by a computer and became an overnight celebrity

On the evening of 9 August 1956, a couple of hundred people squeezed into a student union lounge for a concert recital at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, about 130 miles outside Chicago. Student performances didn’t usually attract so many people, but this was an exceptional case, the debut of the Illiac Suite: String Quartet No 4, that a member of the chemistry faculty, Lejaren Hiller Jr, had devised with the school’s one and only computer, the Illiac I.

Decades before today’s artificial intelligence pop stars, Auto-Tune and deepfake compositions was Hiller’s piece, described by the New York Times in his 1994 obituary as “the first substantial piece of music composed on a computer” – and indeed by a computer.

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by Jeff Gage via Electronic music | The Guardian

Gang of Youths, Courtney Barnett and Barkaa: Australia’s best new music for December

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

For fans of: Justice, Gwen Stefani, the Jackson 5.

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by Nathan Jolly via Electronic music | The Guardian

Arca: KicK iii review – a joyous sonic headrush

(XL)
Over 12 frantic songs, and a flurry of adjacent albums, the electronic innovator truly comes into her own

When the Venezuelan electronic music pioneer Arca released her fourth album, KiCk i, last June, she promised a flurry of followups. Eighteen months later and she’s unveiled Kick ii, iii, iiii and iiiii. While that opening salvo, which featured the likes of Rosalía and Shygirl, prodded pop into new shapes, and other albums in the series explore her more delicate side, the mutated dance music of KicK iii plays out like a violent headrush.

Tellingly, it opens with Arca giggling “oh shit” as if half-excited, half-scared about what she’s about to unleash. Over the course of 12 frantic songs, she leads the listener through the volcanic dancefloor anthem of opener Bruja (“Let me see you bitches bounce!” she screams, within a cyclone of distorted synths), the head-knocking, club-ready Señorita and the album’s euphoric highlight, Ripples. Rearing up from a tentative start, Arca intoning “my body, my flesh”, the song quickly morphs into a heaving, twitching apocalyptic anthem.

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by Damien Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian

Arca: Kick ii, iii, iiii, iiiii review | Alexis Petridis's albums of the week

(XL)
Four new albums of extravagantly warped electronics offer listeners a lot to take in – and her most pop-focused music to date

For the best part of a decade, Alejandra Ghersi Rodriguez has built her career as Arca on a kind of idiosyncratic, confrontational maximalism. Her signature style involves densely woven tapestries of warped electronics, seemingly designed to engulf the listener. The accompanying visuals are similarly extravagant, featuring Arca as a grotesque pillar-box red mutant, or with prosthetic appendages and flame-throwers for arms, or as a naked, androgynous being attached to the bonnet of a car with a series of terrifying-looking mechanical devices. The latter appeared accompanying Arca’s 2020 single @@@@@: a solitary track that was 62 minutes long. Last year, she released the first “official remixes” of her material: 100 of them, at once, all of the same song. Arca, you get the feeling, does not place a tremendous amount of store by the theory that less is more.

Her latest release feels similarly overwhelming. She recently announced three new albums, follow-ups to 2020’s Grammy-nominated KiCk i, to be released simultaneously. It turns out there are actually four: KICK ii, KicK iii, kick iiii and kiCK iiiii (released as a surprise today) that between them amount to 44 songs and 135 minutes of music. It’s a lot to take in, but that isn’t a shock given her previous form. What is surprising is that this is her most obviously pop-focused and straightforward music to date.

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian