One to watch: yeule

This self-described cyborg’s disarming sound embraces the contradictions of the digital life

In 2012, Singaporean teenager Nat Ćmiel felt withdrawn and isolated from society. Perhaps a byproduct of growing up with the internet as second nature, they became fascinated by digital intimacy rather than relationships with their real-life peers. This would lead to an EP, self-titled with Ćmiel’s artist name, yeule, after the character from beloved gaming series Final Fantasy.

Over the past 10 years, yeule has been building on the eerie, exploratory electronic pop realised on that first EP, with their debut LP, Serotonin II, brimming with a yearning for human connection. Now 24 and based in London, yeule is releasing their second album, the boldly constructed Glitch Princess (the title presumably a nod to the jarring, sparking sound design present in their music).

Glitch Princess is released on 4 February on Bayonet Records

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by Tara Joshi via Electronic music | The Guardian

Jazz, Old Norse and ‘troll tunes’: the strange, stunning music of Shetland

It’s 550 years since the islands became part of Scotland, and the archipelago is still not for the faint-hearted. But it has inspired its own diverse music, where fiddles and accordions meet the sub-bass of the sea

Five hundred and fifty years ago next month, the king of Norway lost a deposit he had put down to settle a debt: more than a hundred wild, treeless islands in the sub-arctic North Sea. The Scottish king, James III, had wanted Rhenish florins, but he had to settle for Shetland instead.

The archipelago eventually became part of the UK and has since developed a diverse, distinctive musical culture. This weekend, at the annual Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow, the Shetland 550 concerts will celebrate it, bringing together experimental composers, jazz performers, poets and players of traditional tunes. The series is co-curated by the award-winning fiddler Chris Stout, who was born in the three-mile-long Fair Isle (population: 68) before moving to the Mainland at eight (population: 18,765). “Although, even there, you’re still only ever three miles from the sea,” he says.

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by Jude Rogers via Electronic music | The Guardian

Bonobo: Fragments review – a wondrous nirvana

(Ninja Tune)
Si Green’s celestial, swooning seventh studio album is a restful ambient dream

At every afterparty since 1988, at least one partygoer has fantasised about their friendship group growing old together in a rave retirement facility where they pipe mellow bangers through the intercom. Sesh pensioners, this is your ideal soundtrack. Since 2010’s breakthrough Black Sands, Bonobo’s Si Green has used what he calls “electronic methods to make non-electronic music” to richly satisfying effect, and Fragments is his peak production.

As with the Cinematic Orchestra or Caribou, you settle into a Bonobo album or gig knowing roughly what the destination will be, yet never sure exactly how you’ll get there. Harps and strings are central to this year’s trip, but there’s ample space for skittery breaks, deep house and haunting choral samples.

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by Damien Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian

The Weeknd: Dawn FM review – shimmering pop in extremis

(Universal)
Abel Tesfaye goes to the brink, and back to the 80s, on his most cohesive album yet

Midway through Abel Tesfaye’s fifth album as the Weeknd, the former blog-friendly miserabilist turned Super Bowl-starring megastar muses: “Catalogue lookin’ legendary”. It’s hard to disagree. His last album, 2020’s After Hours, spawned the record-breaking Blinding Lights, a glorious slice of electro-pop that joined Can’t Feel My Face and Starboy in the modern pop canon.

While Dawn FM doesn’t feature anything that screams global ubiquity – although disco-tinged lead single Take My Breath comes close – it also represents his most pleasingly cohesive album. Built around a retro radio station soundtracking purgatory, its featherlight, 80s-style pop – created alongside the likes of hitmaker Max Martin and electronic experimentalist Oneohtrix Point Never – is juxtaposed with lyrics that toy with annihilation. On eerie opener Gasoline, Tesfaye asks a lover to literally set him on fire, while songs such as Sacrifice and the shimmering Less Than Zero wrestle with past misdeeds and the sense that emotional destruction is all he knows.

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by Michael Cragg via Electronic music | The Guardian

FKA twigs: Caprisongs review – party tunes and hard-won notes to self

(Young/Atlantic)
The left-field singer makes a bid for the mainstream with hook-centric pop that centres on self-knowledge not trauma

Back in the day, mixtapes – on actual cassettes – were given away to friends, lovers and bandmates. They were vectors of shared passion, party playlists or just a way of introducing yourself. Caprisongs, British R&B singer FKA twigs’s third album-length project overall, is a self-declared mixtape, not merely in the hip-hop sense of a record put out for free, but in the old-fashioned one. It starts with the plasticky clunk of a tape being inserted into a deck. Tellingly, it feels addressed to twigs herself as much as anyone else, although this is a record that very much reintroduces her, and to a wider audience.

Through 17 tracks, this formerly niche artiste makes a bid for the mainstream, in the company of featured guests (eight in total) and producers (22 all told), friends (many) and a perfumer called Christi who is also an astrology buff. One significant presence is the electronic musician Arca, who worked on twigs’s LP1 (2014), among other releases. But all sorts of helpmeets had a hand in this effort: Welsh producer Koreless, Kanye alumnus Mike Dean, in-demand creative Sega Bodega and Nick Cave associate Warren Ellis. (Twigs and El Guincho co-executive produce.)

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Jazz, R&B and ‘sophistifunk’: James Mtume’s greatest recordings

From his Afrocentric jazz with Miles Davis and Lonnie Liston Smith to his chart hits for Roberta Flack and Stephanie Mills, we celebrate the best of the late musician

• James Mtume, jazz and funk musician, dies aged 75

The biological son of saxophonist Jimmy Heath, brought up by Dizzy Gillespie sideman James Forman, James Mtume was raised in jazz. His first appearance on record was on the 1969 album Kawaida, credited to his uncle, drummer Albert Heath – and on subsequent reissues to Herbie Hancock or Don Cherry, both of whom perform on it.

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

An underwater concert with pool noodle seats: drippy idea or splashy fun?

British DJ Leon Vynehall’s Floors Of Heaven: Submersive Study sees ambient music pumped into the waters of Sydney’s Boy Charlton pool

The line between novel and novelty could have been easily crossed last night at Andrew (Boy) Charlton Pool at Woolloomooloo Bay. Floors Of Heaven: Submersive Study is a 45 minute dip in a 50m outdoor saltwater pool as an ambient composition by British electronic producer Leon Vynehall is broadcast on a “specialised underwater sound system”.

The ambient part is a relief: an excitable early report had described Floors of Heaven as “a rave in one of the city’s most iconic pools”, while Sydney festival described Vynehall as a “certified master of the dance floor”. Listening to his club-inflected back catalogue, I did wonder if my fellow mellow night-swimmers might end up being party-starved groups of 10, standing around the shallow end with their hands in the air. And how do you rave in a pool anyway? Sounds like a lot of splashing. Should I Google goggles?

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by Kate Hennessy via Electronic music | The Guardian

The Weeknd: Dawn FM review – a stunning display of absolute pop prowess

(XO/Republic)
If this is the end for the Weeknd, what a way to bow out. Abel Tesfaye confirms his status as an all-time great with an album of icy 80s-inflected splendour

As the first half of his fifth album draws to close with a track called Here We Go … Again – a beautiful, beatless ballad blessed with a chord progression that recalls the Love Unlimited Orchestra’s sublime 1973 hit Love’s Theme – Abel Tesfaye allows himself a moment of self-congratulation. He hymns his appearance on the cover of Billboard magazine at the start of last year, suited and booted, smoking a cigar, surrounded by his “kinfolk”: “Catalogue looking legendary … now we’re cruising on a yacht, we clear.”

By the end of last year, Tesfaye – or rather his alter ego, the Weeknd – was on the cover of Billboard again, accompanying a feature that offered an oral history of the making of Dawn FM’s predecessor, After Hours. Complete with quotes from friends, producers, record company bosses and the tailor who made the suits he wore in the videos, it was the kind of celebration that normally appears in heritage rock magazines and is reserved for august classic albums. But then, After Hours’ biggest hit, Blinding Lights, had just dethroned Chubby Checker’s deathless 1962 smash The Twist as the top Billboard 100 single of all time, a designation based on total weeks on the US chart and the positions held during that time.

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian