‘What chance did I have against Pete Tong?’ Morgan Khan, the unsung hero who made the UK dance

The founder of the influential Street Sounds compilation label of the 1980s introduced underground hip-hop and house to schools, suburbs and small towns across Europe. So why haven’t you heard of him?

We’re nearly two hours into our conversation when Morgan Khan starts to cry. I have just mentioned that for decades now, the UK charts have been filled with the children of Street Sounds, the dance music compilation series he began 40 years ago. “It’s true,” he says, when he has composed himself. “I’m balding, with a pot belly and a small dick. That’s me being objective. But what you said is true.”

Without ever writing a song, without ever fronting a group, Khan changed the face of British music. He was one of the first cheerleaders for Britfunk, the first to bring electro and hip-hop to the UK, and one of the pioneers of house. Every root of the dance music that has blossomed in mainstream pop grew in the UK thanks to Khan transplanting it from the US.

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by Michael Hann via Electronic music | The Guardian

Confucius, Beowulf and an AI called Kevin: Everything Everything’s search for hope in strange places

Tired of writing pop dystopias, the art-rockers approached their new album by ‘abandoning the human brain’ and feeding ancient and modern writing into an AI

A common criticism of pop music today is that it is too dominated by technology. Vocals are smoothed into perfect pitch and drums or synths come from presets, the end result being that too many songs sound almost the same. They are lacking humanity, those critics say – literally brainless.

For Raw Data Feel, their superb new album, Everything Everything have gone further still, “abandoning the human brain”, says singer Jonathan Higgs, in favour of artificial intelligence. “Not until we were about halfway through,” he elaborates over a cuppa in a Manchester bar. “But, yeah, that’s exactly what we did.”

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by Dave Simpson via Electronic music | The Guardian

Arooj Aftab review – a mesmerising ambient jazz threesome

Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
Flanked by just bass and harp, the Grammy-nominated, Brooklyn-based Pakistani artist Arooj Aftab wows Leeds with a pared-down account of her latest album – and its standout track, beloved of Barack Obama

On this year’s best new artist Grammy award shortlist (the ceremony is in April), Brit-winning pop revelation Olivia Rodrigo is battling it out with Billie Eilish’s brother, Finneas, and rapper Saweetie, among others; Arlo Parks is in the mix too.

Gatecrashing this none-more-mainstream party, however, is a little-known electronic composer and jazz conservatoire graduate who sings songs of longing in her native Urdu. Arooj Aftab’s spellbinding music defies easy categorisation. Jazz, ambient and traditional forms such as the ghazal – a Persian/Pakistani form of poetry – are components, rather than complete accounts, of Aftab’s work, which is full of ancient sadness and modern compositional rigour. The point of her work is not to promote orientalist readings of traditional Pakistani music. Aftab’s is as much a New York state of mind (her current home) as it is a south Asian one. Singer Jeff Buckley is a relevant reference point; Aftab covered his cover of Hallelujah as a teenager and it went viral in Pakistan. Buckley, of course, admired the great qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

An orgy and then a cup of tea: Crossbreed and the new boom in sex clubs

With perv patrols, wellness sanctuaries, and femme-only playrooms, the kink scene has reinvented itself for a new, inclusive era – with straight men sent to the back of the queue

Although public physical contact has not been a defining feature of the last couple of years, London’s sex clubs are experiencing a renaissance, thanks to a generational shift. Think: fewer key bowls and CEOs in expensive lingerie, more pioneering house DJs and art students in makeshift harnesses, as younger crowds drive demand for events that foreground inclusivity, individuality and queerness. For smoke machines and St Andrew’s crosses, try Klub Verboten. For hedonism with a sense of humour, you’ll want Adonis. And for women and non-binary people, One Night offers a blend of Japanese rope bondage and R&B.

Between them all lies Crossbreed, a night where underground stars such as Shanti Celeste and Tama Sumo DJ to a room full of techno fans who can partake in everything from exhibitionist orgies to solo cups of tea in a dancefloor-adjacent wellness sanctuary. “The [queer fetish] community has long been dominated by gay men, who have rightly claimed and taken up space,” explains Alex Warren, who founded the event in 2019. “But that has left bisexuals, pansexuals, lesbians, trans and non-binary people with fewer non masc-dominated spaces to call home.”

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by Emma Garland via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘It’s 100% cool Cymru 2.0’: pumping it out on Welsh language music day

Artists such as electronic duo Roughion emerge from Covid lockdowns to celebrate Dydd Miwsig Cymru

Gwion Ap Iago, half of the duo Roughion – sometimes billed as Wales’s answer to the Chemical Brothers – is in no doubt that this is “a moment” for Welsh language music.

“A lot of people are learning Welsh, a lot of people are really wanting to support the Welsh language music scene and they’re realising what is pumping out there is really, really good,” he said. “We had that thing in the 90s – cool Cymru, Catatonia and all that. We are 100% living in a cool Cymru 2.0.”

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by Steven Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian

Maya Shenfeld: In Free Fall review – 21st-century tech communes with the ancient

(Thrill Jockey)
The Jerusalem-born sound artist’s debut invokes the transcendent via a compelling mix of analogue synths, brass and human voices

Maya Shenfeld trained as a guitarist, learning classical guitar at university in her native Jerusalem and later playing electric guitar in assorted art projects in Berlin. You can see her online, playing her instrument through a laptop and a host of effects pedals; improvising over tape loops; or leading an ensemble of 11 guitarists to rework Julius Eastman’s minimalist classic Gay Guerrilla until it sounds like a Sonic Youth track.

But Shenfeld’s debut album doesn’t feature any guitar. Instead it explores texture and grain using analogue synths, brass and human voices. A lot of music rooted in drone-based minimalism can be quite harmonically tedious, but Shenfeld’s compositions go places. Sadder Than Water, the longest track here, sounds like a Bach fugue being played in slow motion by Wendy Carlos; Body, Electric is a series of descending, constantly modulating synth arpeggios over a warm blanket of drones; Voyager sounds like one of the more compelling instrumentals from David Bowie’s Low. Shenfeld also creates space-age soundscapes using acoustic sources: the opening and closing tracks create sepulchral tones by exaggerating the natural resonances of brass instruments; while Mountain Larkspur sees her getting a youth choir to sing in ghostly, microtonal harmonies.

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by John Lewis via Electronic music | The Guardian

MØ: ‘I was terrified to stop and crash – I had to make time to reflect’

The Danish synth star was nearly broken by years of gruelling tours and stepped back from the business. But now, she says, the planets are aligning for her again

NO!” cries MØ in mock defeat, clutching the purple beret she was crocheting before our conversation, hook and half-constructed hat held to heart. I have just told her that Mercury retrograde is set to fall this week: a celestial event believed to throw certain star signs into flux. MØ, a Leo and Gemini rising sign, is among those potentially affected by this planetary shift. I assure her that it’s actually good given her circumstances: it’s supposed to facilitate new beginnings. Fitting, as she is on the cusp of releasing her make-or-break third album Motordrome.

MØ is in London to shoot a music video for the aptly titled New Moon. It’s the central banger on the album, which articulates the past two years spent taking back control of her life and work. “I was super burnt-out at the beginning of 2019,” the Danish singer says. “I was having panic attacks. My voice was broken. Everything was spinning.”

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by Anna Cafolla via Electronic music | The Guardian