Weapons-grade 808s, luscious horns and a megastar’s early steps: the best music our writers discovered this year

From a slept-on Chief Keef banger to an overlooked Taylor Swift classic and a neglected jazz Kenny, we reveal the older releases that have got us going this year

As someone generally averse to the fact that album releases never seem to slow down any more, even at the end of December, I managed to miss Chief Keef’s 4NEM when it dropped in late December last year. Known for pioneering drill before it splintered into a thousand different global subgenres, the Chicago rapper is beloved for the kind of abrasive, potty-mouthed raps that older listeners shake their fists at but which send younger listeners into a craze.

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by Christine Ochefu, Tim Jonze, Shaad D'Souza, Ammar Kalia, Safi Bugel, Elle Hunt, Laura Snapes, Dhruva Balram, Dave Simpson and Joe Stone via Electronic music | The Guardian

Ukrainian hardcore, Nigerian alté and Red Bull-soaked bloghouse: 2023’s most promising musical newcomers

From Memphis rap to Manchester post-punk and Laurel Canyon-worthy beauty, a new generation is coming this way

From Los Angeles, US
Marina Allen wears songwriterly classicism with incredible lightness: there are tinges of Brill Building doyennes such as Laura Nyro to her conversational piano playing and lilting voice; of west coast wonder to her open-hearted and unflinching lyricism. Her second album, 2022’s gorgeous Centrifics, was produced by Cass McCombs and Weyes Blood collaborator Chris Cohen, and represented Allen daring herself to say “yes” to being honest with herself, to write her way out of rumination. LS
Recommended if you like Joanna Newsom, Cassandra Jenkins, Carole King
Up next Touring the UK from 8-15 February

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by Shaad D'Souza and Laura Snapes via Electronic music | The Guardian

Flume, Body Type, Midnight Oil and more: the 21 best Australian albums of 2022

From globe-trotting glitch-pop to Aria-winning Yolŋu surf-rock, here are Guardian Australia’s favourite releases of the year

Key track: Tread Light

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by Andrew Stafford, Nathan Jolly, Shaad D'Souza, Sian Cain, Michael Sun, Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen, Nick Buckley, Janine Israel , Walter Marsh and Jared Richards via Electronic music | The Guardian

The 50 best albums of 2022: No 3 – The Weeknd: Dawn FM

Abel Tesfaye’s luridly spectacular album continued his trangressive and dazzlingly deranged themes with gorgeous, grand music voiced by his depressive alter ego

• The 50 best albums of 2022
• The best songs of 2022
• More of the best culture of 2022

Dawn FM is the Dom Pérignon of male manipulator music – a slick of negging and neediness, sleaze and sanctimony that carries the unnatural, alluring glow of toxic waste. Released without fanfare in the first week of the year and still as luridly spectacular 11 months later, the Weeknd’s fifth album – eighth if you count his superlative and still-astounding 2011 mixtape trilogy – is also his most dazzlingly deranged, and a high watermark for any star seeking to inflict their own vision on mainstream, stadium-primed pop music.

Dawn FM serves as the midway point in a trilogy of concept albums that began with 2020’s After Hours, and which will supposedly end with an album about the afterlife. But it also feels like a direct reaction to After Hours’ success. That record allowed Abel Tesfaye to showcase some of his most nakedly transgressive art for increasingly huge audiences. In its music videos, he depicted himself battered and bruised, his teeth caked with blood; he attended awards ceremonies in full facial bandages and occasionally appeared in caricaturish prosthetics. The aesthetic leaned obscurist, drawing liberally from the relatively obscure 80s Scorsese comedy After Hours and the suffocating atmospherics of cult synth-pop band Chromatics.

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by Shaad D'Souza via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘It was a gateway for people to get into electronic music’: 30 years of Warp Records’ Artificial Intelligence

Taking cues from Detroit techno and showcasing Autechre and Aphex Twin, the famed compilation found hedonism in the wind-down. As it is reissued, famous fans from then and now explain why they love it

In the white hot rave heat of 1992, Warp Records, then based in Sheffield, released a compilation for the wind-down: Artificial Intelligence. The name would, sadly, prompt talk of “intelligent techno” and then “intelligent dance music” (IDM), implying an air of nerdy elitism. However Warp insisted the title was only ever a tongue-in-cheek alignment with sci-fi, and the balmy music was unmistakably hedonistic. Taking cues from Detroit techno, and featuring future superstars in Autechre and Aphex Twin (as the Dice Man), it perfectly captured the still-ecstatic backroom and after-party vibe of the era.

As a new reissue celebrates the compilation’s 30th anniversary – and three decades of its pleasure principle reverberating across subsequent scenes and generations – we asked famous fans from 1992 to the present about why Artificial Intelligence endures.

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by Joe Muggs via Electronic music | The Guardian

Manuel Göttsching laid the groundwork for generations of electronic musicians

The restlessly innovative German guitarist went on to make records including the legendary E2-E4, a foundational source for techno and ambient house

Although it might help, there’s a fair chance you don’t need to be standing behind the counter of a record shop to know what “the album with the chess cover” refers to. Since its release in 1984, Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4 – iconic chessboard sleeve and all – has been heralded as a Year Zero for electronic minimalism by crate-diggers and newcomers alike. Some have gone further, declaring it the first electronic dance album. In any case, for Göttsching, who died last week aged 70, it was just one of several giant leaps guided by a career-long reverence for the unrepeatable moment.

Born in 1952 in West Berlin, Göttsching spent his youth listening to opera at home and playing in blues bands with friends. It was with one of them, Hartmut Enke, that he later studied improvisation under Swiss avant-garde composer Thomas Kessler. Alongside fellow student Klaus Schulze, the outgoing drummer of Tangerine Dream, they swiftly broke free from the world of blues-rock to form Ash Ra Tempel in 1970. Described by one early critic “as the James Brown band on acid,” their searing freakouts, captured on early 70s albums Ash Ra Tempel and Schwingungen, redrew the map for free-form psychedelia. Albums such as Seven Up – an avant-garde collaboration with countercultural guru Timothy Leary – proved a legitimate alternative to the norm, even for many fans of innovators such as Neu! and Can.

From the first foreboding textures of Amboss, the sprawling opener from the band’s 1971 self-titled debut, Göttsching was a guitarist who seemed to intuitively grasp that spontaneity is often best harnessed within basic parameters. All it took was a cue or two – a couple of chords or some skeletal rhythmic motif – for mind-melting exploration to roam free. Released in 1975, his solo debut, Inventions for Electric Guitar (subtitled Ash Ra Tempel VI following the departure of Enke and Schulze) was a textbook example of his improvisational talent. Inspired by the cyclical electric organ of Terry Riley, its trance-inducing guitar mantras may have been the closest mid-70s rock came to mimicking the advent of digital audio sequencing. If Inventions for Electric Guitar proved anything it was that much like the vast careers of his peers, including Schulze and Neu! co-founder Michael Rother, Göttsching’s output was often most potent when it played with both chance and control.

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by Brian Coney via Electronic music | The Guardian

Mount Westmore: Snoop, Cube, 40, $hort review – harmless nostalgia and charmless bluster

(Mount Westmore/MNRK Music Group)
The west coast rap supergroup’s album works reasonably well at times, but there are more misses than hits

Last October, Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, E-40 and Too $hort released not-bad bop Big Subwoofer, its camper-than-panto video showing the west coast rap supergroup Mount Westmore flying into space to… stage an am-dram Avatar sequel in a strip club? It was never quite clear. Distressingly, they tried to parlay the limited artistic gains of that debut single into a summer album, Bad MFs, which appeared “on the blockchain” (honestly, no idea) and is proffered here with a worse name and tracklisting. Its lush, soul-stroked title track is gone, while the drab, misanthropic Have a Nice Day (Fuck You) remains.

Their four quite different flows still work reasonably well together, from $hort’s lubricious bars to Cube’s truculent pugilism, over comfort-zone beats of electro, P-funk and other familiar 1980s grooves. Yet harmless nostalgia predictably succumbs to charmless bluster. Up & Down is the nadir, wherein our four elderly chums become obsessed with watching a “thicc” woman (wife, mother, daughter or stripper, it’s again unclear) struggling to put on jeans because of the size of her thighs. It’s supposed to be amusing, but has all the wild comedy of listening to your dad trying to finish a porno.

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by Damien Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian

Lea Bertucci: Xtended Vox review | John Lewis's contemporary album of the month

(SA Recordings)
It might sound a bit Vic Reeves, but go past the giggles and the experimental vocalists and this compilation touches profundity in fascinating ways

The first time you witness a truly experimental vocalist, you could be forgiven for believing that you’re watching Vic Reeves’ absurdist comedy. These performers create art from all the stray noises – sibilants, clicks, breaths and plosives – that sound engineers usually try to disguise. Once you get beyond the initial shock and stifled giggles, these performances initiate a profound examination about the nature of sound, the inarticulacy of speech, the limitations of musical instruments and the blurring of melody, harmony and rhythm as categories.

These are all clearly things that interest the American sound artist, composer and saxophonist Lea Bertucci. She is best known for making drone-based, site-specific works that explore acoustics, but Xtended Vox is a compilation of contemporary artists who are doing extraordinary things with their vocal cords. Bertucci herself contributes to one track – a duet with composer Ben Vida, previously of New York outfit Town & Country – featuring garbled whispers and stray burbles that have been put through assorted FX pedals and cut and spliced into a shimmering soundscape.

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by John Lewis via Electronic music | The Guardian

2ManyDJs on 20 accidental years of mashups and mayhem: ‘It’s more fun when it’s a little bit naughty’

Their album As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt 2 kicked-started the mashup phenomenon. As they prepare for an anniversary concert, the Dewaele brothers discuss bootlegs, brotherhood and looking back

In 2002, Belgian duo Stephen and David Dewaele released a mix album called As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt 2 under the name 2ManyDJs. It sold half a million copies, and its playful, hectic variety spoke to people who were equally excited by Daft Punk and the Velvet Underground, garage rock and electroclash. In many clubs, though, there was some initial resistance. “Half the people were like: ‘We’re here for house music, what are you playing?’” Stephen remembers. “A quarter were like: ‘OK, I’ll go with it.’ And 10% were like: ‘Oh my God, you played the Stooges!’ Those were the people we were doing it for. Gradually that room shifted to everyone going: ‘Give us the Stooges!’ The world had turned upside down.”

This month, as the album comes to streaming platforms for the first time, the brothers are throwing a 20th anniversary party at Brixton Academy, London, where they will play a souped-up audiovisual version of the mix. “We took a lot of convincing,” says David. “It’s not in our nature to look back. But that particular record still sounds fresh because we didn’t really know what we were doing. If listening to old records is like looking at old pictures of yourself, this is different. It’s like looking at a picture of yourself but you had no idea there was a camera. It was just us messing around.”

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by Dorian Lynskey via Electronic music | The Guardian

BBC Sound of 2023: Fred Again, Gabriels and Rachel Chinouriri among nominees tipped for success

Dance music acts dominate the award, whose previous winners include Adele, Stormzy, Sam Smith and Haim, with many having already had breakout success via TikTok

This year’s BBC Sound of 2023 shortlist – which tips the brightest new musical talents – suggests that dance music will dominate the next 12 months.

Among the 10 nominees are Piri and Tommy, a young Manchester couple who make drum’n’bass in their bedrooms, and who went viral on TikTok with the single Soft Spot; Bradford-born jungle producer Nia Archives, who is also nominated for the Rising Star award at next year’s Brits; and the ubiquitous London producer Fred Again, AKA Fred Gibson, who has worked with acts such as Stormzy and Charli XCX and struck out as a solo act in 2021.

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by Laura Snapes via Electronic music | The Guardian

25 Years of UK Garage review – roll-call of electronic music genre’s glory days

Most of the scene’s stars are here for documentary which follows its emergence from ‘wild west’ parties to chart success and moral panic

This exhaustive insider survey of UK garage music – whose demise has been greatly exaggerated – leaves you feeling like some wrung-out Ayia Napa afterparty casualty. It isn’t too great at clearly delineating the scene’s origins (in short: up-tempo versions of Paradise Garage-style house, hence the name, dovetailing with British jungle), and gives too much airtime to seminal club night Garage Nation, possibly because its former promoter Terry Stone co-directed this film. But, calling on an A-Z of exponents – from Pied Piper and MC Neat to approximately 13% of So Solid Crew – it supplies a wry rewind to late 90s extravagance and hand-wringing consternation about the genre’s future.

The film meanders through UK garage’s early days, a “wild west” with promoters such as Stone running free in the era’s more laissez-faire clubland to road test MCs and dubplates of potential new bangers. The garage sound was more lacquered and luxuriating than jungle, bringing in more female clubbers, and the style 100% aspirational. The documentary works best in the more structured segments cringing at the fashion of the era (think palm tree-print Moschino T-shirts and pinstripe trousers) and the excess. By the early 00s, when UK garage was decamping en masse for summer rec in shellshocked Cyprus, it was getting out of hand. Perennial afterparty venue Insomnia apparently had a secret room with a four-poster bed and, for some reason, a monkey; So Solid’s Lisa Maffia confides that the smell of sambuca hits her sick trigger to this day.

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by Phil Hoad via Electronic music | The Guardian

Leftfield: This is What We Do review – mighty, all-embracing workouts and more

(Virgin)
Born out of a tumultuous time in Neil Barnes’s life, this heady mix of bangers and righteous sounds is a keeper

Retro-leaning techno acts such as Bicep have prepped the ground propitiously for this fourth Leftfield outing in three decades. It sounds of a piece with its predecessors and yet of the moment: a fresh iteration of an evergreen set of electronic precepts overlaid with a warm filter. Neil Barnes has endured divorce and cancer and retrained as a psychotherapist. Although the “we” of the title is probably intended as embracing and inclusive, it’s worth noting that Leftfield is Barnes and current associate Adam Wren. Paul Daley opted out of their 2010 comeback LP.

The album’s two mightiest bangers are already out: Pulse boasts the kind of bass and 808 combo that gets your rig banned from venues, and Accumulator layers elements on with the skill that comes from ratcheting up the pressure on ravers for 30 years. But there are more workouts here invoking everything from electro to the eeriness of Boards of Canada.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

The Blessed Madonna’s listening diary: ‘You cannot argue with logic like ‘booty, booty, booty, booty’’

The DJ-producer looks back on records by Lio, Sworn Virgins and the Pointer Sisters that cued ‘legitimate chaos’ on the dancefloor and wind-down tunes by Big Audio Dynamite and the Korgis

7pm I was at my manager’s office because it was the day my new single was dropping and we were hosting a secret launch party later in the evening. Rosa Parks by Outkast was playing on someone’s Spotify. I grew up with Outkast because I’m from Kentucky, so it felt nice that that song was on. It had been a long day (I had to get a hotel room in the middle of London to take a nap halfway through because I knew the party was going to run late) and I was a bit stressed out. It’s my first record in five years and it felt like an enormous chance to screw everything up – so it was actually very comforting to hear Outkast, like a nice little love letter from home.

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by As told to Safi Bugel via Electronic music | The Guardian

Honey Dijon: Black Girl Magic review – eclectic dancefloor delights

(Classic Music Company)
The Chicago DJ delves into new jack swing, disco and house across 15 jubilant, guest-studded tracks

Witnessing the Chicago DJ Honey Dijon behind the decks can be as close to a spiritual experience as you can get on the dancefloor. Trading in the four-to-the-floor kick drum that provides the aortic pulse to house music, Dijon’s mid-tempo sets conduct her crowds perfectly from tantalising buildups to scattered breakdowns and communal euphoria as her soaring melodies kick in. Her debut album, 2017’s Best of Both Worlds, played as a rousing microcosm of these multihour sets, and in the years since its release, Dijon has become a sought-after producer, working this year on Beyoncé’s Renaissance.

Harnessing this collaborative experience, Black Girl Magic finds Dijon expanding her sound to incorporate a wider range of queer Black contributions to dancefloor culture, producing a 15-track masterclass in disco, new jack swing and soulful house. The driving drumbeat and piano chord stabs of Love Is a State of Mind set the hands-in-the-air tone. Standout features from the house pioneer Mike Dunn on the righteous thump of Work and from rapper Channel Tres on the sultry Show Me Some Love keep the pace moving, while the ecstatic disco of Everybody forms the album’s highlight. Here, Dijon sing-shouts a joyous refrain that calls for everybody to come together in service to an infectious synth-bass melody. It’s the perfect example of her slick production style, blending raucous energy with artful arrangement designed to play loud and get you moving. Hearing Black Girl Magic, the dancefloor is wherever you happen to be.

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

Honey Dijon: Black Girl Magic review – tight, anthemic celebration of Black queer identity

(Classic Music Company)
The house legend and Beyoncé collaborator is back with 15 celebratory hits that span styles and explode with personality

House is truly the genre that celebrates itself. What other music is so obsessed with describing the moment of its enjoyment – the bodies, dancefloors, drugs, love, communion? In the wrong hands, an “up in the club / together we are one” lyric can feel trite, but in the manicured talons of Honey Dijon, the meta-mood of house becomes monumental.

In the past decade the Chicago-born, New York-sculpted DJ has ascended from fashion party favourite to Ibiza resident to Lady Gaga remixer; in recent years, she’s collaborated with Comme des Garcons on a high-end fashion line and produced songs on Beyoncé’s Renaissance. Where her debut album, 2017’s The Best of Both Worlds, played it deep and groovy, its follow-up is an anthemic and vocal-heavy celebration of Black queer identity, with twice the style and oodles more personality.

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by Chal Ravens via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘I was high for five years’: bloghouse revivalist Grace Ives on separating partying from pop

The singer tells us how the bitesize, booming songs of her latest album Janky Star chart her crash course in drinking, drugs and the music industry

Being a burgeoning pop star is a thorny business. In 2019, when she released her debut album 2nd, New York’s Grace Ives was barely working within the confines of the music industry: she had made the album on a Roland 505 that she bought after seeing MIA use one; it was released on the experimental indie label Dots Per Inch, best known for bizarro pop acts such as Lily & Horn Horse and Lucy. In that world, everyone is friends, and people put out records for the love of it. So when Ives began shopping her second album, June’s Janky Star, to a slightly higher tier of indie label, it felt the same. “I was talking to my lawyer about deciding between two labels, and I was talking about one and I was like, ‘It’s cool, because I kind of feel like they’re my friends,’” Ives recalls over video from her apartment in Brooklyn. “My lawyer was like, Oh, Grace, no …”

Back then, Ives says, she was “excited and naive and also very impatient” to release Janky Star. “I didn’t realise the business side of music is so … like, you can be wined and dined and made to feel like a rockstar – and it can all be fake. That’s an easy word to use, but yeah, fake,” she says. “You get the support of a label, which is amazing. But you’re on your own, mentally. I didn’t know what it meant to own your masters or anything like that – the whole process of getting signed was so new to me. I thought that it was all lovey-dovey, but it’s business.”

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by Shaad D'Souza via Electronic music | The Guardian

Sarathy Korwar: Kalak review – deft musical storytelling

(The Leaf Label)
The Indo jazz drummer and bandleader muses on questions of time and identity on this warm, thoughtful outing

On his last album, 2019’s More Arriving, the US-born, Indian-raised drummer and producer Sarathy Korwar proved himself highly adept at thoughtful, engaging musical storytelling. Kalak is the London-based artist’s fourth full-length record as bandleader, and finds him less searing, more meditative than on its predecessor – but still every bit as vital.

Examining the double meaning of the Hindi and Urdu word “kal” (which is both “yesterday” and “tomorrow”), Kalak unfurls with questions such as: who gets to be remembered; how to do more than simply survive in the present; how to dream about the future? In a lesser artist’s hands the concept could border on didactic or cloying (and certainly, the spoken word elements on opener A Recipe to Cure Historical Amnesia feel skippable on repeat listens), but Korwar’s compositions here are irresistible.

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by Tara Joshi via Electronic music | The Guardian

Sault: Aiir, Earth, Today & Tomorrow, Untitled (God), 11 review – an act of supreme generosity

(Forever Living Originals)
The esteemed collective release five dazzlingly eclectic albums, melding rap, post-punk and modern classical composition

Since 2019, the revered collective Sault have offered a palimpsest of African, American and British black music history, with beautifully realised takes on R&B, jazz and psychedelic funk, doo-wop, trip-hop, symphonic soul, 1980s groove and soundsystem culture. But are these five new albums just proof that producer Inflo can’t be fussed with curation?

Aiir is a sequel to recent modern classical composition Air and is similarly pleasant if sometimes syrupy. Earth boasts Stronger, as good as their 2020 classic Wildfires, and brings polyrhythms and choral contributions. Its astonishing diadem, The Lord’s With Me, burns with the languorous intensity of 1970s experimentalists the Undisputed Truth.

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by Damien Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian

Helena Hauff’s listening diary: ‘I feel so grown up listening to jazz while cooking’

The Hamburg-based techno doyenne takes us through a few days of listening, from a surprise Depeche Mode song to funky, energetic electro

8pm I was going through my record collection to pack for the weekend. Sometimes I try to find things that I haven’t played in the club for a while, but it’s quite difficult because I play so often. I saw Structure by Aquasky and I was like: “Oh, yeah, that’s great”. I listened to it really loud on my headphones and danced around in my little studio in Hamburg. I didn’t actually end up playing it, but sometimes you find things that just excite you, and that was one of those. It’s really energetic, exciting and fun. And it’s fast. Sometimes I play drum’n’bass in my sets, but not that often, it really depends on the venue and the event. I’m always excited when there is an event coming up where I think: “I can really do this here”.

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by As told to Safi Bugel via Electronic music | The Guardian

Boko! Boko! The UK club superheroes celebrating global grooves and local roots

The pioneering DJ crew’s in-demand rave sets span the world, but they keep a close focus on community and sustainability

There’s something of the superhero team about dance collective Boko! Boko! There’s their big, complementary personalities and musical abilities and clear camaraderie, not to mention their colourful Lycra outfits. As they wait backstage in Oslo’s Blå club prior to their set at the Oslo World festival, the trio of Juba (AKA Chinwe Pam Nnajiuba, razor sharp with a buzzcut and specs, 32), Tash LC (Tashan Campbell, small and impishly witty, 27) and Mina (Hannah Mac, 5ft 11in of husky-voiced effusiveness, 31) are full of good cheer. Bantering about backstage catering and Norway’s blondness, taking selfies and wondering how they’re going to follow the Kenyan boyband currently on stage, they feel like old friends catching up.

Which they kind of are. Boko! Boko! may be one of the best and most important DJ teams around right now thanks to the high-energy, globally sourced rave sets they’ve been honing over seven years. This year has seen all three release spectacular records, and together they headlined Berlin’s ultimate techno bunker, Tresor, in September. Yet they rarely get to see each other. Juba lives in Berlin and travels constantly on projects such as her documentary, compilation and podcast series about women DJs/musicians, Assurance. The other two are based in south London but have hectic solo DJ careers and run record labels – Mina’s Earth Kicks and Tash’s Club Yeke – and Mina also records and tours with Ghanaian MC Bryte.

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by Joe Muggs via Electronic music | The Guardian

One to watch: Coby Sey

The Lewisham producer, vocalist and DJ explores a multitude of genres to create strange, unpolished melodies full of feeling

Producer, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and DJ Coby Sey is someone whose work has been quietly integral to the UK’s left-field, underground sonics for the past five years or so. The Lewisham artist’s collaborations with other forward thinkers including Tirzah, Mica Levi, Dean Blunt, Kelly Lee Owens and others is testament to the organic and expansive world in which he operates. Along with Levi and Brother May, Sey also runs Curl Recordings; the trio sometimes perform shows together purely via jamming and improvisation.

You can hear that exploratory approach on Conduit, Sey’s debut album, which came out in September. The record brings to life a space that is often uneasy, examining histories, politics and protest alongside something more frank and interior (on standout tracks such as the raw, galvanising Response, he offers: “I’m the one you get aroused by / In the mind and in the nether regions inside”). Sey’s zigzagging spoken word and unpolished melodies sit somewhere at the confluence of a multitude of genres (jazz, dub, noise, experimental electronic, trip-hop; his sound has sometimes been categorised as “post-grime”).

With music that embodies both hope and despair, often in the same breath, Sey explained to the Quietus online magazine his desire to make work that sits outside the binary of positive and negative: “I think thereis a wider palette of emotions that can be explored through sound and music.” It’s something he manages quite beautifully: in Sey’s work, you sit with the strange, imperfect edges of feeling it all.

Conduit is out now on AD 93. Coby Sey will play at the Pitchfork music festival, London, on 9 November

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by Tara Joshi via Electronic music | The Guardian

Dom Maker of Mount Kimbie’s listening diary: ‘I honestly think Liv.e is the next Beyoncé’

One half of the London/Los Angeles duo takes us through his week in listening, which features Joy Division and an inspiringly ‘mean’ rap song

9am I woke up fairly early and was out of the house by 8.30am. I’m in London at the moment, which is quite rare because I live in Los Angeles, but we’re working on the next record. I’m staying in an Airbnb in Clapton and the studio is in Tottenham, so I cycle along the River Lea. This morning was a very sunny day, and cold – which is something I’m not really used to any more so it was actually quite refreshing.

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by As told to Safi Bugel via Electronic music | The Guardian

Beckah Amani, Cry Club and Betty Who: Australia’s best new music for November

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

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For fans of: Clairo, Sia, Benee

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by Nathan Jolly via Electronic music | The Guardian

Daniel Avery: Ultra Truth review – a perfectly balanced cocktail of euphoria and disquiet

(Phantasy Sound)
Introspective and propulsive, intense and opaque: these instrumentals tie the disparate strands of the producer’s oeuvre into a coherent, compelling whole

In September 2020, Daniel Avery released Lone Swordsman, a track he wrote on the day his friend and sometime collaborator Andrew Weatherall died. Of all the tributes paid to the revered DJ/producer, it might be the most striking: a simple melody endlessly dancing over melancholy chords, it’s an exquisitely beautiful four minutes of music. Clearly it was the product of a moment where everything clicked into place: Avery has talked vaguely about “the cosmic energy of the universe” having a role in its creation, but whatever was behind it, Lone Swordsman had a strong claim to be called the best thing that he had ever released. But it didn’t appear on his subsequent album, Together in Static. In fairness, it probably wouldn’t have fitted the mood. Together in Static was a collection of tracks he had written for a seated and socially distanced performance he gave at London’s Hackney Church in June 2020, imbued with all the tentative optimism you might expect given the circumstances, and, while there’s a definite warmth about Lone Swordsman, the overriding emotion it evokes is desperate sadness.

Instead, it turns up towards the end of Together in Static’s successor, where it fits perfectly, not just because Ultra Truth feels like an emotionally complex album – it manages to be both introspective and propulsive, intense and opaque – but because of its quality. Avery has had a rich and varied career since the release of his 2013 debut album Drone Logic, taking in releases that, in their scope and ambition at least, recalled the blockbusting crossover dance albums of the mid-90s – Underworld’s dubnobasswithmyheadman, Leftfield’s Leftism, the Chemical Brothers’ Surrender – alongside stuff such as 2020’s Illusion of Time, an experimental collaboration with Italian electronic auteur and Nine Inch Nails bassist Alessandro Cortini.

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

One to watch: Plastic Mermaids

The Isle of Wight scores again with this multi-talented, playfully ambitious indie five-piece

If you launched an Isle of Wight festival strictly for homegrown bands – and surely someone will do it soon – Plastic Mermaids are ready for the headline slot. This creative collective don’t just produce their own music, artwork, videos and colourful shows – artist/designer Jamie Richards has also invented an effects pedal used by Bon Iver, Warpaint, Hot Chip, Bicep and many more, and they’re apparently planning a pigeon-operated synthesiser.

There are five main Mermaids, writing playfully ambitious songs that wander from bouncy pop and orchestral psych to indie folk and electro. But there’s an open door to their home studio, bringing string-playing60-somethings or mates with brass to deepen and enrich their ludic sound. The island’s odd demographics (“Most people leave between 18 and 30,” says Jamie’s brother, singer Douglas) necessitate more cross-generational collaboration than you get elsewhere. Over the years, the band’s members have played with local pals Lauran Hibberd, Coach Party, Champs and Wet Leg, alongside day jobs such as making ornaments and directing fashion shoots.

It’s Not Comfortable to Grow is out now on Sunday Best. Plastic Mermaids tour from 2 to 15 November

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by Damien Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘Grace Jones was in a state’: legendary producer Trevor Horn relives his mega-hits

From Frankie Goes to Hollywood to Grace Jones, ABC and Tatu, he gave pop some of its greatest, most forward-looking moments. He also sang for prog rockers Yes. The trailblazing button-twirler recalls his best – and worst – decisions

When I ask if I can use the toilet in Trevor Horn’s house, he shows me the way there himself. “Bob Hoskins’ old thunderbox,” he smiles as he opens the door. “He used to sit there and read his scripts, apparently.”

There’s another door next to it, which leads down to Horn’s studio. A house formerly owned by a Hollywood star, big enough to accommodate a huge recording studio: it’s the home of someone who’s done very well for himself, which of course, Horn has. His recently published autobiography, Adventures in Modern Recording, details a stellar career as a record producer, packed with wildly entertaining stories which usually involve Horn barricaded in a studio, smoking a vast amount of marijuana while dealing with the dizzying array of technical issues that come from pushing the latest recording gadgetry to its limit, then finally emerging with a hugely successful single. ABC’s The Look of Love. Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax. Grace Jones’s Slave to the Rhythm. Tatu’s All the Things She Said.

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

One to watch: Hagop Tchaparian

The British-Armenian producer expertly combines field recordings and grit-flecked electronics on his debut album for Four Tet’s Text Records

Hagop Tchaparian may be a new name to electronic music fans but has been behind the scenes, or in different guises, for some time. Scan the tracklisting for Hot Chip’s 2006 breakthrough The Warning and his surname is right there at number six – a tribute, perhaps, to the period in which he was the group’s tour manager. Before that he was a guitarist in pop-punkers Symposium. After they split in 2000, some went on to form other rock bands, while Tchaparian contributed to a compilation on which artists reflected on their Armenian heritage and mixed up traditional sounds with contemporary beats.

It’s a spirit he has maintained more than two decades later with his debut album, Bolts. Signed to Kieran Hebden AKA Four Tet’s Text Records, it’s rooted in grit-flecked, lambent electronics while weaving together field recordings from Tchaparian’s travels: drummers accompanying a fire-jumping ritual at an Armenian wedding; street musicians playing the Arabic harp called a qanun; gravel underfoot.

Bolts is out on now on Text Records

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by Kate Hutchinson via Electronic music | The Guardian

Post your questions for Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes

The Birmingham legend has spent over 40 years pushing the boundaries of style and sound, accruing platinum records, No 1 hits and Grammy awards in the process. Now he’s ready to answer all your questions

This year sees the 40th anniversary of Duran Duran’s iconic Rio album – the band’s 1982 opus, which featured indelible hits such as Hungry Like The Wolf, My Own Way and, of course, the album’s title track. But the Birmingham four-piece, founded in 1978 by Nick Rhodes and John Taylor, are far more than just one record. In their time together, the New Romantic heroes have released 15 albums, amassed a swathe of chart hits, and embarked on dozens of acclaimed tours.

One of the first bands whose rise was linked inextricably to the launch of MTV, Duran Duran also have a deep catalog of brilliant music videos – the most famous of which, for 1981’s Girls on Film, won a Grammy award. Perhaps because of this association, the band had major success in America, accruing nine top-10s over the course of their career. To this day, the band’s single A View to a Kill is the only Bond theme to ever reach the top of the US charts.

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by Shaad D'Souza via Electronic music | The Guardian

Trax Records faces lawsuit over alleged unpaid royalties and lack of payment

Marshall Jefferson and Adonis are among more than a dozen artists suing the pioneering Chicago house label

More than a dozen artists are suing the pioneering Chicago house label Trax Records, the estate of co-founder Larry Sherman, and current owners Screamin’ Rachael Cain and Sandyee Barns, Rolling Stone reports.

The plaintiffs, among them Trax co-founder Vince Lawrence and musicians Marshall Jefferson, Adonis and Maurice Joshua – allege that the label owes them unpaid royalties and in some cases that the label never paid them anything at all, according to a copy of the lawsuit seen by the Guardian.

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by Laura Snapes via Electronic music | The Guardian

Fred Again: ‘I was fortunate not to be good at anything else, so I had clarity’

The in-demand producer has worked with Ed Sheeran and Stormzy but, for his own records, he’s more often found on buses, tubes and trains with his finger on the record button, waiting for inspiration to strike

Stretched out on the sun-dappled balcony of his fancy LA rental, Fred Gibson looks every inch music’s go-to super-producer. Even dressed down in an embroidered oversized sweatshirt, Gibson’s Zoom screen-dominating smile suggests things are going Quite Well. Having overseen hits for everyone from Stormzy to Rita Ora, Ed Sheeran to AJ Tracey, Gibson was responsible for a third of 2019’s UK No 1 singles. A year later he won the Brit award for best producer, before launching his own dance-leaning artist project, Fred Again in 2021, the same year as spending 15 weeks at No 1 via two Ed Sheeran co-productions.

But looks can be deceiving. When I suggest he got the better deal vis-a-vis interview locales the 29-year-old south Londoner replies with a misty-eyed “I long for where you are”, which is too nice a thing to say about the south-east London suburb of Brockley. He balks, too, at the super-producer tag (“That’s quite gross”), while mention of his Brit is met with a polite shrug. “I’m not really fussed,” he says. “I don’t want to shit on something that matters to people but it’s just so not why I do it.”

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by Michael Cragg via Electronic music | The Guardian

Mode festival review – ‘elevated’ dance music brings new life to Sydney’s Cockatoo Island

The former penal colony has been the sandstone-and-steel backdrop for art shows, concerts and festivals – but nothing quite like Mode

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On a perfect spring Saturday in Sydney, roughly 3,000 people headed for a festival that most of the city knew nothing about.

Siloed in the heritage grandeur of Cockatoo Island and accessible only by private ferry, the first-ever Mode festival was sold on its lineup of “elevated dance music” and an “expansive visual arts experience”. Produced by Sydney-based promoters Bizarro, who until now have largely thrown parties in clubs and warehouses, the festival promised a rare gamble in a typically risk-averse city.

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by Jack Tregoning via Electronic music | The Guardian

Brian Eno: ForeverAndEverNoMore review – personal, intimate and urgent

(UMC)
The producer contemplates the future of the planet on these heartbreaking songs shot through with wonder

You suspect that when Brian Eno co-founded the Long Now Foundation in 1996, he was confident in there actually being a future for the planet – its art projects included a clock in a mountain designed to tick for 10,000 years, as an exercise in stretching our perception of time. But here we are in 2022, the world literally on fire.

Eno’s new album, his 22nd, is an emotional contemplation of environmental catastrophe. It’s as huge and enveloping as you’d hope, its undulating soundscapes suffused with longing and wonder. But there is a mournful quality, too, something heartbreakingly elegiac about these songs. There Were Bells was composed for an event at the Acropolis in Athens last year, performed on a sweltering 45-degree day; as Eno recalls: “I thought, here we are at the birthplace of modern civilisation, probably witnessing the end of it.”

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by Sophie Harris via Electronic music | The Guardian

Todd Rundgren: ‘It’s hard to find sincerely musical artists nowadays. The music is just mediocre’

As the cult musician and producer releases a new collaborative album, he reflects on 50 years of experimentation – including his forays into psychedelics – his obsession with the new, and the recent Rundgrenaissance

It is morning in Hawaii and on the island of Kauai, Todd Rundgren is beginning his day. “The sun is out. It’s balmy,” he says. “Probably somewhere in the high 70s and getting up into the 80s today.” Earlier, he went outside, chose a couple of oranges from one of his trees and juiced them himself. “Filter wide open, by the way,” he says. “You need your fibre!” Then he made one perfectly scrambled egg. “Some day,” he promises, “I’ll show you how to make that.”

Rundgren has lived on Kauai since 1995. Aside from the climate and the orange trees, one appeal is its time zone. Out in the Pacific Ocean, three hours behind the US west coast, Hawaii is quite removed from the rest of the world. “So,” he says, “one of the unique advantages is that, by the time I get up and start moving, everything’s happened already.” Down the line, his voice is warm and leisurely. “The stock market’s already closed. There’s nothing for me to fret about. It’s already happened.”

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by Laura Barton via Electronic music | The Guardian

Aria awards 2022: Rüfüs Du Sol and Amyl and the Sniffers among top nominees

Dance group leads with seven nominations, with Flume, the Kid Laroi, Baker Boy and Vance Joy also winning multiple nods

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Rüfüs Du Sol has dominated the 2022 Aria award nominations, featuring in a total of seven categories, followed by Amyl and the Sniffers and Flume.

The Sydney electronic trio’s latest album, Surrender, continues to pay dividends for the band, who won best group and best dance song for their track Alive at last year’s Arias. Alive also won them best dance song at this year’s Grammy awards.

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by Kelly Burke via Electronic music | The Guardian

Autechre review – a bombardment of singular sounds to combat the dark

Barbican, London
Performing in total darkness, the electronic duo improvise a show of fractal syncopated percussion and cascading chords that makes the whole auditorium thrum

Over the past decade, British experimental electronic duo Autechre have been playing live shows in the dark. Not the darkness of a night-time bedroom but a pitch-black void, ridden of space or structure, from which they unfurl their fractal sounds to a waiting audience.

Like the pulsating dark matter we encounter when we close our eyelids, Autechre’s live environment is liable to switch at any moment from dreamscape to nightmare, all watched over by their intricate hardware manipulations. Tonight, the unassuming pair take to the Barbican’s grandiose concert hall, transforming it into a formless black for an hour of improvisations.

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

One to watch: Tsha

With her thoughtful, propulsive dance music, Teisha Matthews has moved to the floor-filling big time

The dancefloor can be a space for emotive introspection as much as it is a catalyst for hedonism. London-based producer and DJ Teisha Matthews, AKA Tsha, has spent the past four years crafting tracks filled with sparkling melodies and enveloping instrumentals that inspire sweaty crowds with that sense of self-reflection, as well as providing space for kinetic catharsis.

Debuting in 2018 with her EP Dawn, Matthews combined bright vocal features with layered percussion and expansive keyboard sounds to create an electro-acoustic mix reminiscent of early tracks by singer-songwriter Sampha and the orchestral inflections of producer Bonobo’s work. It was the latter’s inclusion of her propulsive single Sacred in his 2019 compilation for London mega-club Fabric that catapulted Matthews from crate-digging find to mainstream floor-filler. With subsequent continent-crossing tours under her belt and a record deal with Bonobo’s Ninja Tune, she has just released her debut album, Capricorn Sun.

Capricorn Sun is out now on Ninja Tune. Tsha will play Depot Mayfield, Manchester, on 21 October

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

Sarathy Korwar: Kalak review | Ammar Kalia's global album of the month

(The Leaf)
Flute, horns, synths and tabla accompany Korwar’s undulating percussion in the dummer’s hypnotic fourth album

Sarathy Korwar has a light touch behind the drum kit. Since debuting with 2016’s Day to Day, where he mixed the folk music of the Siddi community from rural Gujarat with west African rhythms and Indian classical melodies, Korwar’s playing has been soft and subtle enough to encompass the intricacies of disparate rhythms, while still possessing a grounded metronomic solidity. Korwar makes himself heard not through power and volume, but in the guiding steadiness of his hand.

On his fourth album as a bandleader, Korwar reaches the apex of this open drumming technique. Made in collaboration with electronic producer Photay, Kalak is a beguiling body of work, enveloping the listener in undulating synth melodies, layered horn fanfares and vocal features – all driven forward by Korwar’s ever-present percussion.

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

The Orielles: Tableau review – cherry-picking genres to make a rich feast of musical ideas

(Heavenly)
The West Yorkshire trio flit from R&B to funk to dance to indie in their ambitious, disorienting fourth album

The Orielles have always valued artistry over a quick buck. Having emerged from West Yorkshire in the 2010s as a trio of preciously talented teens, they are more interested in geeking out over niche recording techniques than in chasing chart success. Their old-school appeal has earned them a cult following entranced by their slow-burn evolution into a psychedelic jam band.

On their fourth album, Tableau, the exploratory, ambitious side of the band’s music has never been more clear. Many of the songs pick through various genres, magpie-style, subverting expectations: Honfleur Remembered is easy-listening R&B delivered with the light electronic touch of the French band Air, while the bassline of Airtight walks a line between frenetic funk and intergalactic hyper-pop. Likewise, The Room opens as a dance track, but immediately morphs into skittish indie, evoking the skinny-jeaned guitar bands of the 00s.

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by Jenessa Williams via Electronic music | The Guardian

Isabella Manfredi, Tumbleweed and Sollyy: Australia’s best new music for October

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

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For fans of: Holiday-era Madonna, Haim, Duran Duran

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by Nathan Jolly via Electronic music | The Guardian

For a long time I didn’t even know Black composers existed: it’s not just an absence, it’s erasure

The British musician writes about discovering the work of avant garde US composer Julius Eastman and reinterpreting his work for a new century

When the label Phantom Limb got in touch about me creating music inspired by the late New York avant garde composer and pianist Julius Eastman, I had barely heard of him. They had a connection with his surviving brother, Gerry, which meant they had access to parts of his archive. I was gifted a zip drive of original pieces by him. Pretty quickly I realised that I knew lots of his peers – people such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich – who I learned about when I was studying music. But I never got taught anything about Julius Eastman. He was a long-standing part of that New York scene, but for a long time I didn’t even know Black composers existed. It’s not just an absence, it’s erasure – it feels as though there was effort made to leave him out.

Like me, Eastman was a queer Black composer, but while those aspects of his identity resonated with me, we’re also really different – we’re decades apart, and I’m from London. I’ve had it easier than him in some ways, even if my experiences haven’t been wholly positive, but I don’t face what he did, especially as a composer and musician. It’s an ambivalent, bittersweet thing to think about.

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by Loraine James via Electronic music | The Guardian

Shygirl: Nymph review – a sensuous, playful debut

(Because Music)
British rapper, DJ and singer-songwriter Blane Muise slinks between genres, mischief and melody on her experimental first album

With her soft, almost-whispered falsetto floating over low-frequency beats, London-based Blane Muise, AKA Shygirl, has become a sensuous and pervasive force in UK club music over the past five years. Regularly collaborating with experimental producers such as Arca and the late Sophie, Muise has established herself as the perfect vocalist to slip between the melodic cracks of their fractal sound design. On 2020’s Slime, for instance, she sing-raps with a skittering percussiveness over Sophie’s sparse basslines, while 2018’s Nasty pits Muise’s languid vocal against Sega Bodega’s thundering trap drums.

On her debut album, the typical grit of Muise’s productions are supplanted by something altogether brighter. Opener Woe hints at her earlier output with its sinister bass synth, but Nymph soon opens out into the plucked guitar melodies of Shlut and Firefly’s hyperpop inflections. Highlights come on Coochie (A Bedtime Story), when Muise’s sexual lyrics pair with the track’s singsong melodies to create a playful exploration of intimacy, while on Honey, jungle breakbeats are transmuted into an R&B ballad by her entreating vocals. Having explored the darker side of the dancefloor, Nymph finds Muise experimenting with its more irreverent aspects.

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

Jockstrap review – electro-pop duo find order in the chaos

Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh
Taylor Skye and Georgia Ellery piece together a patchwork of musical genres into a beautiful tour opener

A playlist of horror movie scores ushers Jockstrap on stage. “Can we have the house music off, please?” Georgia Ellery politely asks the sound engineer, as viscous, stabbing strings bleed into the title track from their debut album I Love You Jennifer B.

As Jockstrap, Ellery and her bandmate Taylor Skye produce musical scrapbooks, songs in which they graft together their influences from retro soul to pulsing electronics. Recent music school graduates, the pair take sharp turns in their songwriting, through disco nostalgia, head-banging jungle and orchestral pop.

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by Katie Goh via Electronic music | The Guardian

Lynchian punk to Lady Gaga: the best music Guardian staff and writers discovered this year

Old or new, wildly popular or punishingly obscure: our critics share the best songs, albums and artists they found this year – and how they discovered them

In search of absolution after realising that I had been streaming NTS Radio uninterrupted for a week, I took the most convenient route I know to finding something fresh to listen to: Pitchfork’s mailout of highest-rated new albums. In that week’s list was the debut album by Chat Pile. Emerging from the post-industrial wastes of Oklahoma City, the not-so-young four-piece channel that strain of American vitriol that made a punk-horror canon out of Dead Kennedys, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Slipknot.

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by Chal Ravens, Shaad D'Souza, Dave Simpson, Rebecca Liu, Christine Ochefu, Laura Barton, Tayyab Amin and Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Tell us about your best new music discovery in 2022

We would like to hear about your new music highlights of the year so far, and how you found them

We would like to hear about your best music discoveries of the year so far, whether brand new or decades old, and how you found them.

What was your best recent discovery? How did you discover music in 2022? How have changes in technology over the years affected how you find it?

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by Guardian community team via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘This gets the stinkfaces going!’: DJs on the tracks they are asked about the most

From Thai hip-hop to UK hardcore, five DJs tell us the tracks that most consistently get crowds asking: ‘What’s this song?’

Trigger Happy – Untitled

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by As told to Kate Hutchinson via Electronic music | The Guardian

Jake Blount on his Afrofuturist folk climate eulogy: ‘What would music sound like when we’re dead?’

The New Faith imagines a religious service for Black refugees from a collapsed society. Blount explains why he is focused on the future of traditional music

When Florida security guard George Zimmerman was acquitted over his shooting of unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin in 2013, 18-year-old Jake Blount turned to the past to cope with his despair. “I wanted to know how music has historically allowed Black people to feel human in the face of racism,” he says. “My ancestors would have sung spirituals and work songs when they were enslaved – this music is all that remains of how they survived.”

Initially, Blount found their message jarring. “It felt like they were saying: ‘Life is terrible, but at least we get to die someday,’ which isn’t what you want to hear when you’re 18,” he says, laughing over a video call from his home in Rhode Island. “But I felt a sense of rightness in the act of singing them. This is music that my people have been singing for generations. It felt like what I was raised to do.”

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

Has streaming made it harder to discover new music?

Services such as Spotify and Apple Music give us access to the entire history of popular songs. But has that access made us lazy listeners? And could TikTok or TV really help us rediscover our passion for discovery?

Earlier this year, Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill unexpectedly became the most popular song in the world. After it was used on the soundtrack of the Netflix sci-fi series Stranger Things, the streaming figures for Bush’s 1985 single rocketed by 9,900% in the US alone. Something similar was happening wherever Stranger Things was available: by 18 June, three weeks after season four of Stranger Things premiered, Running Up That Hill was No 1 on Billboard’s Global 200 chart, which, as its name suggests, collects sales and streaming data from 200-plus countries.

It became a big news story, big enough that Bush – no one’s idea of an artist intent on hogging the media spotlight – was impelled to issue a couple of statements and give a rare interview. That was partly because it was an extraordinary state of affairs: the upper reaches of the Global 200 are usually the sole province of what you might call the usual suspects – BTS, Bad Bunny, Adele, Drake et al – and not a world that plays host to tracks from critically acclaimed 37-year-old art-rock concept albums. And it was partly because the unexpected success of Running Up That Hill seemed to say something about how we discover and consume music in 2022.

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Hot Chip review – an immersive dance phenomenon

Brixton Academy, London
Years ahead of the disco reboot curve, the British synthpop stalwarts deliver a performance so charged they even break a drum

Calling a band “an institution” can feel like putting them out to pasture, critically. It would be more accurate to peg Hot Chip, now on their eighth album, as a perpetual motion machine, rarely faltering – a particularly fine example of British engineering. It’s a surprise, then, when this theoretically urbane electronic outfit come to an abrupt halt because their beast of a drummer has burst the skin on his kick drum. And yet here is Hot Chip percussionist Leo Taylor, greeting the news that he’s been playing too hard by leaping up and doing some double devil’s horns to howls of approval.

Hot Chip have maintained a metronomic pulse at the heart of British song-making for more than 20 years, pairing Alexis Taylor’s sweet vocals with a kaleidoscopic range of percolating sounds. Over and Over was their first hit, in 2006. It remains not just a reworked live staple, faster and harder than the original, but something of a tenet for the band to live by. Hot Chip called their 2010 album One Life Stand, in part to explore the beauty of committed relationships as distinct from fraught one-night stands: another title-as-creed. They’ve never split up, directing any non-Chip energies into solo albums and record labels such as Greco-Roman, co-frontman Joe Goddard’s side gig. Both Taylor and Goddard have recently put out standalone works: Taylor’s touching lockdown meditation, Silence, in 2021, and Goddard’s disco- and house- fuelled outing with Amy Douglas, Hard Feelings, earlier this year.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Mura Masa: Demon Time review – fleeting dance-pop joys

(Polydor)
The British producer bounces back with a clutch of guests and an eclectic romp through genres

Producer Alex Crossan, AKA Mura Masa, lived up to the “difficult second album” trope when it came to releasing 2020’s RYC. Supplanting the brash, vibrant pop that made his name on 2017’s self-titled debut, RYC was drab and moody, trading on themes of isolation, anxiety and nostalgia against a backdrop of chugging drums, post-punk guitars and plaintive vocals.

After the Covid lockdowns, Crossan has thankfully found joy once more. Demon Time contains a starry roster of collaborators – singers Shygirl and Erika de Casier and rappers Slowthai and Unknown T, to name a few – with Crossan giving them free rein in the studio. The result is infectious on the club-thumping vibrations of Hollaback Bitch, featuring Shygirl, as well as with De Casier on R&B bop E-motions.

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘It feels harder than ever’: independent radio stations under threat from rising bills

Gilles Peterson and other station bosses explain how the passion projects that sustained music scenes and consoled listeners over lockdown now find themselves in jeopardy from rocketing costs – with little sign of government help

Gilles Peterson got his first broadcast gig aged 16 at Radio Invicta, the pirate station that boasted it put “soul over London”. He got his own slot a year later, and has spent the ensuing four decades channelling his inquisitive musical spirit into shows with Kiss FM and the BBC, as well as his Brownswood record label, and festivals in the UK, France and Italy. But for the past six years, a freeform online radio station, Worldwide FM (WWFM), has been at the forefront of his efforts, providing shape and sound to a global community of music enthusiasts.

This week, WWFM announced it would be ceasing new broadcasts from the end of October while it seeks new funding options.

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by Will Pritchard via Electronic music | The Guardian

Hekla: Xiuxiuejar review | John Lewis's contemporary album of the month

(Phantom Limb)
The Soviet-era electronic instrument is often used as an exotic novelty, but the Icelandic musician unleashes its real potential

In the century since Leon Theremin invented his eponymous instrument – as a Lenin-approved symbol of Soviet technological ingenuity – the theremin has been paraded as the human face of electronic technology. From classical musician Clara Rockmore in the 1930s and psych rockers Lothar and the Hand People in the 1960s to the soundtracks of Miklós Rózsa and the jazz-infused solos of Pamelia Kurstin, the theremin is often used as an exotic novelty sound, placed alongside “proper” instruments.

The (literally) frictionless device – you change the pitch by moving one hand further or closer to an antennae, and alter the volume moving the other hand up and down – can sound uncannily like an operatic human voice, a swanee whistle, a violin or an FX-laden electric guitar.

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by John Lewis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Mura Masa: Demon Time review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

(Polydor)
The producer’s relentless UK garage-style bombardment feels like standing next to a tween frantically scrolling through TikTok without earbuds

The effect of Covid on British pop music has proved a curious thing. The expected glut of pandemic pop – introverted music powered by loneliness, woe at the state of the world and existential dread – never materialised. Instead, pop looked outward: perhaps as a natural reaction to the privations of the times, or perhaps, more pragmatically, taking note that the big hits during lockdown suggested audiences weren’t terribly interested in wallowing in what had happened. The past few years have been dancefloors and disco balls all the way. Seven months after Britain’s final pandemic restrictions ended, the charts are noticeably devoid of introspection: if anyone did make music like that while stuck at home or staying two metres away from everyone else, they seem to have kept it to themselves. Even Lewis Capaldi, the multi-platinum breakout star of pre-Covid sadboy angst, has returned with a single that leavens his usual brand of romantic calamity with something like a dance beat.

It’s a shift mirrored in the saga of the third album by Mura Masa, as 26-year-old Guernsey-born producer Alex Crossan prefers to be known, who rose to fame five years ago when tropical house was in vogue, before going off-piste with his guitar-heavy second album RYC. His initial thought during Covid was to follow RYC with “a bunch of ponderous and introspective music”. His second thought was apparently to give up music entirely and become a potter. His third was to try the stuff that comprises Demon Time, which couldn’t be less ponderous or introspective if it tried. It’s not just an album that features a song called Prada (I Like It), it’s an album on which a song called Prada (I Like It) ranks among its deeper and more profound statements, where even a solitary throwback to the melancholy style of its predecessor – 2gether, which carries something of Radiohead circa The Bends in its DNA – finds itself unexpectedly disrupted by an incongruous grinding synth drop.

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘He wore tartan pyjamas to the laundry!’ Electro mashup masters Jockstrap come clean

They have made one of the albums of the year, a mind-bending trip through pop history that leaves a chaotic, kaleidoscopic mosaic in its wake. We meet them in Penzance, where the singer had her first snog

It’s the hottest day of the summer and Taylor Skye has found one of the few public spaces in Penzance that is safe from the midday glare: a graveyard. The electronic producer, one half of Jockstrap, leads us past a man sleeping off last night between the gravestones of St Mary’s church, towards a bench under a giant oak. Georgia Ellery, the group’s songwriter and vocalist, grew up a few streets away and approves of the location: “Good choice! This is where I had my first snog!”

Jockstrap play fast and loose with pop. Their debut album, I Love You Jennifer B, touches on jazz and torch song, disco and AOR, dubstep, grime, neoclassical music and so much more, with tiny shards of each formed into a dazzling mosaic. That isn’t to say what they do is pastiche. Skye and Ellery, 24, have a gift for timeless songwriting that’s clear even beneath the disruptive electronic production that courses through the album.

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by John Doran via Electronic music | The Guardian

100 Gecs review – wizards of hyperpop hellbent on fun

SWG3 Galvanizers, Glasgow
Loud and lurid, the American duo fuse distorted vocals, synthetic pop and singalong punk in a madcap extravaganza

The stage is invisible, a wall of fog lit by strobes. Two figures bounce out of the mist, one wearing a giant yellow wizard’s hat that glows fluorescent in the UV light. So dense is the dry ice, so magenta and lime green the lights, sometimes all you can see is this disembodied hat – which belongs to Dylan Brady, 50% of 100 Gecs – or an arm, sometimes attached to Laura Les, the Gecs’ other 50%.

But the duo make their presence felt. Loud, lurid and packed with nagging hooks, 100 Gecs’ music provides the kind of sensory overload that powers moshpits and burrows deep into the brain with its Dr Seuss rhymes and catchy choruses. It’s fitting that you can only see parts of Brady and Les, because their music is so bitty: a barrage of noises, sugary melodies, short, sharp smash-and-grabs on your attention.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Sudan Archives: ‘In so many places in the world the violin brings the party’

Discovering rave and the non-western history of stringed instruments inspired Brittney Parks’s unique pop. After her elegant debut, she’s letting loose and showing her playful side on one of the albums of the year

Brittney Parks is on a mission “to show the Blackness of the violin”, she says. As a child in Ohio, she learned to play the instrument by ear. She moved to Los Angeles in her late teens where, escaping her stepfather’s dream that she and her twin sister Cat should form a pop duo, she started to research the history of string music. “I found violinists who looked like me in Africa, playing it so wildly,” says Parks. “It’s such a serious instrument in a western concert setting, but in so many other places in the world it brings the party.”

This discovery pushed Parks towards her true musical path, though it would take a while to get the party started. She named herself Sudan Archives and, after an initial EP in 2017, her elegant, poised debut album, 2019’s Athena, established her exploration of non-western string traditions through the inclusion of instruments such as the bouzouki and oud. But it’s her new album, Natural Brown Prom Queen, that fully embodies the riot of sound that this family of instruments can create.

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

Mabe Fratti: Se Ve Desde Aquí review | Ammar Kalia's global album of the month

(Unheard of Hope)
The Guatemalan musician layers soft vocals and jarring textures to create a direct and forceful new tone

Life after lockdown has been a time of creative change for Mabe Fratti. The Guatemalan cellist and composer wrote her second album, 2021’s Será Que Ahora Podremos Entendernos?, while isolating in an artist’s compound outside Mexico City. The nine-track album was a delicate suite of gauzy melodies and keening string lines punctuated by field recordings – an enigmatic music searching for meaning.

On her latest album, Se Ve Desde Aquí, Fratti re-enters the world, recording between Rotterdam and Mexico City and supplanting her supple arrangements with an experimental process that seeks to embrace the rougher edges of self-expression. Recording without overdubs to enhance the power of singular instrumental sounds, Fratti sets a direct and forceful new tone. Opener Con Esfuerzo eschews the cocoon-like tonal warmth of Fratti’s typical layered string sections and soft falsetto, instead placing a reverberating synth line over scattered hits of snares and angular guitar lines. Desde El Cielo continues the staccato feel, with Fratti singing a plaintive melody over a rapidly disintegrating rhythm section.

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

George Riley: Running in Waves review – gorgeous, softly futuristic R&B

(PLZ Make It Ruins)
Riley’s frank lyrics and molten vocals are immersed in a polished soundscape from producer Vegyn

On her debut mixtape, last year’s Interest Rates, A Tape, west London musician George Riley collaborated with producer Oliver Palfreyman to created a sonic realm where jazz, R&B and jungle melded together. Throughout, Riley offered wry and thoughtful lyricism, her voice forthright but silky.

Running in Waves is Riley’s second record, and her collaborator of choice is Vegyn, the British producer best known for his work with Frank Ocean. It’s an engaging link-up that finds Riley’s molten, free-flowing vocals fully immersed in Vegyn’s characteristically polished soundscapes. Some tracks feature plush, gliding strings, others crackle with electronic glitches and, occasionally, as on the record’s title track, both occur simultaneously. The result is a softly futuristic R&B tape that sits somewhere alongside the gentler music of Kelela or Dawn Richard. It’s a gorgeous record – although, given that Riley and Vegyn are known for their somewhat experimental output, it doesn’t feel quite as unconventional as expected.

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by Tara Joshi via Electronic music | The Guardian

Björk: Atopos review – one of the most dramatic left turns of her career

The thrilling first single from the singer’s tenth album is an apocalyptic almost-dance track which pairs experimental techno with pulsing clarinets

Björk’s last album, 2017’s Utopia, was a vision of paradise. Filled with birdsong and built around a 12-piece Icelandic flute section, it was one of the avant garde icon’s sweetest, quietest records, a suite of pastoral orchestration and hushed electronics that acted as an emotional counterweight to 2015’s Vulnicura, an album about her protracted, devastating divorce. In the intervening five years, during which Björk has been largely out of the public eye, it’s been easy to imagine her inhabiting some version of the world of Utopia, surrounded by lushness and beauty.

Atopos, the first single from her forthcoming tenth album Fossora, breaks that illusion. An ominous, clattering, almost-dance track made with Indonesian experimental duo Gabber Modus Operandi, it finds Björk shattering the idealism of her last record, replacing it with a steely pragmatism: “Pursuing the light too hard is a form of hiding,” she sings. A six-piece clarinet section swells beneath her, their discordant palpitations preventing the song from ever easing into the frantic techno rhythm that Gabber Modus Operandi’s hammering beat is trying to create. Although Björk is no stranger to abrasive textures, this is one of the more dramatic left turns of her career, and it’s a thrill to hear her paint with the brutalist tones of experimental techno.

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by Shaad D'Souza via Electronic music | The Guardian

The 15 biggest Australian dancefloor anthems – sorted!

Prepare for your most synth-filled Monday ever, for here is the definitive, entirely subjective list of Australian anthems that fill dancefloors without fail

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Australia’s DJs, producers and uncredited ghostwriters have an uncanny knack for delivering bangers on the regular, from acid techno freakouts to tribal house workouts and beyond. Anthem status, however, is not so easily attained. The main prerequisite? A big, belt it out at the top of your lungs vocal hook, or a chorus you might see a burly tradie mouthing the words to in the condiments aisle.

This all means that furious chinstroking over whether Lydian & The Dinosaur or Fasten Your Seatbelt best represents Australian breakbeat can be put on hold (for now). And only tracks with original vocal performances qualify – so please, Since I Left You devotees, put down your pitchforks.

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by Kris Swales via Electronic music | The Guardian

Oliver Sim: Hideous Bastard review – raw frankness on xx singer’s solo debut

(Young)
Though he struggles to match the devastating lead single, Sim reveals new emotional range

“Been living with HIV since 17/ Am I hideous?” Even in today’s pop climate, where disclosure of mental and physical ailments is almost demanded, the xx singer Oliver Sim’s directness on Hideous is devastating. Partly because we expect xx members to be taciturn, vague, less explicit, but also due to a rawness in his singing, a strength and fragility he has rarely hinted at before. Nothing else on his solo debut is as powerful – Sim isn’t always the most compelling presence in the xx, and so it proves here. Yet with genius bandmate Jamie xx producing an entire album for the first time since 2017, Hideous Bastard is always an intriguing listen.

Sim is gently overcoming his natural reticence, and you feel the weight, on Fruit, of his first use of male pronouns to describe a lover. Yet, apart from a goosebump-raising falsetto from Jimmy Somerville, there are no other voices except samples and Sim himself. Even in the ingenious vocal hall of mirrors on GMT, you slightly miss Romy’s harmonies and their chilly caress. Sim has said this record is inspired by horror films… well, this adds welcome colour to the xx cinematic universe, but it’s no blockbuster.

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by Damien Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian

Sudan Archives: Natural Brown Prom Queen review – dizzying earworms

(Stones Throw)
Post-genre American musician Brittney Parks extends her range yet further on her dizzying second album

Eighteen tracks long and hellbent on swerving lanes, Sudan Archives’ second album proper is one of those records that invites you to get comfortable in its dizzying headspace. Drawing from a wide array of sources – hip-hop, R&B, west African traditions, club beats, up-to-date digitals, analogue handclaps, looped strings – it all hangs together as a portrait of an artist keen to emphasise her range and primacy. Or, as Sudan Archives puts it on OMG Britt, a straight-up trap track: “They gonna have a fit when they hear this shit!”

Born in Cincinnati (that’s the 513 area code of the closing track) but relocated to LA, Brittney Parks is a post-genre operative whose skillset seems to expand with each release. Natural Brown Prom Queen brings her closer to the mainstream, thanks to takes on R&B that range from the canonical – Ciara, Freakalizer – to the more restless: Home Maker, or ChevyS10, a booty call where Parks deploys an angelic falsetto, a quote from Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car and an on-trend disco denouement. Parks’s earworms don’t hurt either. As woozy and restless as these multipart productions are, she packs in plenty of sticky stuff: melodies, hooks, insistent figures. On the glorious title track, she chafes against colourism up against a Middle Eastern string loop that doesn’t quit.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

One to Watch: Telenova

The Australian trio, who have been compared to Portishead, specialise in free-flowing electronic pop and intense grooves

Melbourne has been a hotbed of genre-spanning musical talent in recent years. The city’s largely independent music scene has produced international success stories from the likes of jazz-fusionists Hiatus Kaiyote to punk newcomers Amyl and the Sniffers. Now, trio Telenova – comprised of ex-members of Melbourne groups Miami Horror and Slum Sociable – add their names to this roster with hook-laden pop numbers that reference everything from trip-hop to doo-wop.

After releasing their debut EP, Tranquilize, in 2021, the group earned comparisons to Portishead for vocalist Angeline Armstrong’s husky delivery and bandmates Edward Quinn and Joshua Moriarty’s head-nodding, sludgy grooves. On their latest EP, Stained Glass Love, they alter their sound to encompass the singalong, Amy Winehouse-esque fanfares of Haunted, the euphoric driving rhythms of the title track and the 2000s indie-pop of Why Do I Keep You?

Stained Glass Love is out now

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

Beatrice Dillon and Kuljit Bhamra review – electro-acoustic alchemy

Earth, London
Techno producer Dillon and Bhangra percussionist Bhamra seem as one as they take their lightning-fast polyrhythms on an unpredictable musical odyssey

The release of producer Beatrice Dillon’s 2020 debut album, Workaround, heralded a unique talent. Over 14 compositions – each clipping along at a frenetic 150bpm – Dillon manipulated acoustic instruments as varied as the kora, tabla, saxophone and cello to sound as slippery and densely metallic as her computer-programmed electronics. An enveloping soundscape escaped its metronomic constrictions thanks to its shaking bass frequencies, snapping rhythm and piercing melody, resulting in computer music with immense feeling.

It’s Bhangra instrumentalist Kuljit Bhamra who plays the tabla on Workaround: by pressing the heel of his hand into the skin of the drum, he creates bass glissandos, bending notes to sound like the manipulations of a digital synth. Tonight’s show at Earth in east London homes in on this electro-acoustic alchemy as the pair perform a selection of works in progress. Bhamra plays cymbals and percussion, including a talking drum, timbale and gourd as well as a new digital instrument he has developed – the Tabla Touch – which converts each strike of a surface that mimics the tabla into a range of programmable sounds. Dillon’s setup, by contrast, is minimal, comprising just a laptop and sequencer.

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

100 Gecs review – hyperpop provocateurs’ electrifying UK debut

Kentish Town Forum, London
Laura Les and Dylan Brady give a thrilling performance that emphasises the intricacy of their abrasive sound

Pour one out for the security team at Kentish Town Forum. Watching them try to keep the fans in the balcony seated during 100 Gecs’ debut UK headline show was like watching someone battle a hydra: every time one audience member was subdued, two more sprang up in their place. By the time the band – St Louis, Missouri producers and vocalists Laura Les and Dylan Brady – ended their set, with a boisterous rendition of 800db Cloud, security had given up: in their live shows, as in their recorded music, 100 Gecs defy all logic and, especially, all rules.

100 Gecs broke out in 2019 with 1000 Gecs, an album of crushingly loud pop that combined emo and EDM with dubstep, chiptune, rap-rock and ska. The almost comical intensity of their music, as well as Les and Brady’s avant garde, extremely online sensibility, turned the album into a viral success; by the end of 2019, the pair were the poster children of hyperpop, a microgenre of eccentric, internetty electronic music that was basically willed into existence after the creation of a Spotify playlist bearing its name.

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by Shaad D'Souza via Electronic music | The Guardian

Good mourning Britain: how chillout music soundtracked the death of Diana

When Princess Diana died 25 years ago, Radio 1 replaced its entire playlist. Why did it decide that a 10-minute ambient epic was the best choice for a royal elegy?

What was the soundtrack to Diana, Princess of Wales’s death? Surely Elton John’s Candle in the Wind 1997? After all, it’s the biggest-selling UK single of all time. But no: if you were listening to Radio 1 – and back in late summer 1997, tens of millions still were – the musical backdrop to Diana’s death was downbeat trip-hop and ambient techno. It was Apollo 440. It was the Sabres of Paradise. It was the Aloof. It was chillout music.

Radio 1 had long been sensitive about its playlists at moments of national crisis: during the first Gulf war, for example, Phil Collins’s In the Air Tonight was one of many songs banned for somewhat tangential reasons. At the point of Diana’s death, there was already a sense that the station’s “Obituary CDs” (which then were literally a set of compilation CDs of tasteful instrumental music, kept in a cupboard in each studio) needed an upgrade. Not too upbeat, not too bleak and, crucially, lacking any lyrics that could be interpreted as offensive, chillout was the perfect music to accompany a national tragedy.

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by Phil Harrison via Electronic music | The Guardian

We Out Here festival review – celebratory weekend of raucous dance and cosmic jazz

Abbots Ripton, Cambridgeshire
Showcasing rising UK talents like Two Shell and the Comet Is Coming alongside Detroit legends Underground Resistance, Gilles Peterson’s festival is a delight

The musical taste of Gilles Peterson – the BBC Radio 6 Music broadcaster and curator behind Worldwide FM and Brownswood Recordings – is nothing if not eclectic. We Out Here, the festival he stages across the August bank holiday weekend in leafy Cambridgeshire, is proof. Taking its name from a 2018 Brownswood compilation showcasing London’s fertile jazz scene, the festival sits somewhere between a specialist affair and a more mainstream event, its lineup boasting acts as disparate as jazz legend Pharaoh Sanders, superstar rave duo Overmono, south London rapper Enny, and footwork selector Sherelle.

Now in its third year, We Out Here jolts to life on a grey Thursday, revellers in cowboy hats and waterproof jackets perusing non-musical attractions like the on-site record store, skating at the roller rink and testing their abdominal strength during a limbo session at the Lemon Lounge.

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by Jasmine Kent-Smith via Electronic music | The Guardian

Re-Sisters by Cosey Fanni Tutti review – take three outsider women

The Throbbing Gristle co-founder communes with electronic pioneer Delia Derbyshire and 15th-century mystic Margery Kempe in her account of female artists who fought to be heard

First, some introductions. Cosey Fanni Tutti – her name is a pun on the borderline misogynist Mozart opera Così fan tutte (literally “that’s what women do”) – is a multimedia artist who first made her reputation as part of 1970s art collective COUM Transmissions and their sonic heirs, Throbbing Gristle. Her 2017 memoir, Art Sex Music, was as shocking as it was celebrated, recounting a lifetime of challenging the mainstream through industrial music and eyebrow-raising art. It also laid horribly bare how abusive and controlling her long-ago former partner was: Throbbing Gristle’s far more lionised irritant-in-chief, Genesis P-Orridge (who died in 2020).

Delia Derbyshire should require no thumbnail sketch. Often the sole woman at the BBC’s famed Radiophonic Workshop, she was in great part responsible for the Doctor Who theme tune as well as numerous other pieces of incidental music. A lack of recognition, for electronic music generally and her own compositions, stymied her in her lifetime. To add injury to the insult of men taking the credit for her work, this maths and music whiz had a complex personal life, in which alcohol, snuff and ill-chosen romantic partners also compromised the expression of her talents.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian