Ambient music legend Midori Takada: ‘In Japan, artists keep going right into old age’

At 70, the groundbreaking musician is enjoying a late career bloom thanks to the internet. She talks about her prog rock past and escaping western influences

The sight of Midori Takada whiplashing between drums, cymbals and marimba is something few observers forget. She is a mesmerising performer of great physical intensity. So her billing as a “70-year-old percussionist” ahead of a performance at Melbourne’s Rising festival – a bit like calling Paul McCartney an 80-year-old guitarist – makes her smile. “It doesn’t quite tell the whole story,” she says, laughing good-naturedly. “I have a few more strings to my bow than that.”

Takada etched her name in musical history with the enigmatic ambient classic Through the Looking Glass, which she recorded over two days in 1983, engineering the album and playing gongs, ocarinas, chimes and every other instrument herself. Although the album fell into obscurity, Takada has in recent years become a cult figure, with her monk-like musicality and reverential cataloging of obscure world music. Her work, meanwhile, has been revived for millennials and generation Z by endless recycling on YouTube and social media, alongside her contemporaries Brian Eno and Steve Reich.

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by David McNeill in Tokyo via Electronic music | The Guardian

Haai: Baby, We’re Ascending review – rich, entrancing ambience from a party-starter star

The Australian producer’s anticipated debut is something of a left turn from high-frequency techno, at its best when it holds back in favour of open space

Over the past few years, Sydney-born DJ, producer and songwriter Haai – real name Teneil Throssell – has become something of an underground star in her adopted hometown of London.

A two-year resident at the Brixton club Phonox, Throssell’s sets are renowned for their frenetic pace and euphoric peaks, largely comprising breakbeat-heavy house and techno, with sojourns into other more idiosyncratic styles. Perpetually clad in sunglasses and seemingly always bearing a cheeky smile, she is a preternaturally talented party-starter, an intuitive, crowd-focused DJ with wide-reaching taste.

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by Shaad D'Souza via Electronic music | The Guardian

Andy Fletcher obituary

Keyboard player and business brain of Depeche Mode who pushed the electronic band to long-lasting success

Bands could not function without a member designated the quiet standard bearer, and in Depeche Mode that was Andy Fletcher, who has died suddenly aged 60. Constitutionally modest, he was lucky inasmuch as the group had two members – singer Dave Gahan and guitarist Martin Gore – who were comfortable with being Depeche Mode’s public face. That allowed Fletcher, universally known as Fletch, to get on with being their backbone.

He was crucial to their makeup, pushing the band to achieve, chivvying them to get into the studio or on the road. Without his tenacity, exercised over 42 years, Depeche Mode would have splintered long before they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2020.

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by Caroline Sullivan via Electronic music | The Guardian

Andrew Fletcher: the pop-loving everyman who held Depeche Mode together

As well as a keyboard player, Fletch was a facilitator – and someone whose cheerleading demeanour helped fans feel closer to the band they loved
• Depeche Mode’s Andrew Fletcher dies aged 60

Andy Fletcher was the last person to tell you why he was vital to Depeche Mode. In 101, the classic 1989 tour documentary directed by DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, he said: “Martin’s the songwriter, Alan’s the good musician, Dave’s the vocalist, and I bum around.” He knew there was much more to it than that, but the man they all called Fletch felt no need to shout about it.

Depeche Mode are one of the most popular and influential British bands of all time but nothing about them makes sense in conventional terms. It should not be possible to lose your chief songwriter (Vince Clarke) after just one album and then get bigger and better. There was no precedent for a synth-pop group evolving into a stadium rock band without actually playing rock music. It is unusual, if not unique, for one person to write the songs (Martin Gore) and another to sing them (Dave Gahan) with such conviction that it is hard to believe they are not autobiographical. They have sold more than 100m albums and had dozens of hit singles while retaining the outsider allure of a cult band – arguably the world’s largest, with no fewer than three documentaries made about their fandom. And all this from Basildon.

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by Dorian Lynskey via Electronic music | The Guardian

Shiva Feshareki: Turning World review | John Lewis's contemporary album of the month

(NMC)
Blending improvised samples with compositional prowess, the experimental musician and turntablist reimagines a concerto by Daphne Oram

London-born musician Shiva Feshareki has always blended two seemingly contradictory worlds. She is best known for creating improvisatory, sampledelic soundscapes using DJ equipment: Stanton turntables, a Roland Space Echo, the real-time sampling capabilities of a Korg Kaoss Pad, a theremin which spins on a turntable to create unusual electronic pulses. But she’s also a trained composer with a doctorate from the Royal College of Music, and has long championed avant garde works by likeminded women such as Pauline Oliveros, Éliane Radigue and Leslie García.

This album straddles both of Feshareki’s worlds. The main event is Still Point, a 40-minute concerto for double orchestra and turntables that was written – incredibly – in 1948 by a 23-year-old Daphne Oram, a decade before she founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Feshareki spent years exploring Oram’s archive in order to reimagine Still Point with fellow composer James Bulley before performing it at the 2018 Proms, and this is an eventful realisation. The first movement sounds like a grand, ominous film score, laced with high modernism; the second is a dystopian collage of 78rpm turntable sounds, discordant effects and air raid sirens. The final movement is the sound of a nation emerging from the ravages of war – shabby, end-of-empire grandeur and postwar uncertainty, all put through the dub chamber.

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by John Lewis via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘We were a different side of the 80s. Not the Duran Duran 80s’: the return of Propaganda

Fans of Throbbing Gristle with liner notes on the gender of vampires, the German synth-pop duo somehow broke into the mainstream. Now, after 37 years away, they’re back

In early 1983, a Düsseldorf band called Propaganda got a message: Trevor Horn wanted them to come to London. It was an enticing and deeply improbable turn of events. Horn was the UK’s hottest pop producer, a man who had unexpectedly turned the hopelessly drippy duo Dollar into a critical cause célèbre and piloted ABC’s debut The Lexicon of Love to platinum-selling transatlantic success, also making it the fourth biggest-selling album of 1982 in the UK.

Propaganda, however, were no one’s idea of a pop band. They were electronic experimentalists, a product of Germany’s burgeoning post-punk Neue Deutsche Welle scene. As vocalist Susanne Freytag puts it, they were attempting: “To go away from American music and find a kind of identity – there was a lot of shame in our generation in Germany, and it was a way of finding, or seeing people using the German language and making new music.” One of their members, Ralf Dörper, had previously been in metal-banging industrialists Die Krupps: he claimed to be less interested in music than he was in film. They had already caused a ripple of controversy in Germany by plundering imagery from the 1920s and 30s: a TV show refused to let them use a film featuring images of Zeppelin airships and Marlene Dietrich because, Dörper later said, “they didn’t understand that we might be questioning values of the past, rather than accepting them”. And they were not huge on melody. One of the songs on their demo tape was a German-language extrapolation of Throbbing Gristle’s entirely tune-free 1981 single Discipline. When the call from Trevor Horn came through, Propaganda scrambled to recruit a new member, Claudia Brücken, on the grounds that none of them could actually sing. “I felt a bit shocked,” says Freytag. “I thought ‘I’m not a singer, I’m happy to go and do something, but oh my God, we need a singer’. She is a very good singer, thank God.”

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Vangelis wasn’t just a film composer – he blew apart the boundaries of pop | Alexis Petridis

With music that ended up crossing paths with Jay-Z, Donna Summer and Rotting Christ, the late Greek composer’s creative mind was thrillingly open

Greek pop music of the 1960s is not an area of musical history where anyone who doesn’t fondly remember it first-hand is advised to dwell. There are a few exceptions – garage rock collectors have unearthed a string of obscure, impressively raw singles by the Stormies, the Persons and the Girls – but the archetypical mainstream Greek response to the rise of the Beatles might be Vangelis Papathanassiou’s band the Forminx, who dealt in novelty instrumentals, weedy Hellenic-accented stabs at Merseybeat and a side order of lachrymose balladry.

The Forminx were successful in Greece, but it clearly wasn’t enough for Papathanassiou, who claimed his earliest musical endeavours involved experimenting, John Cage-style, with the sound of radio interference. After the Forminx broke up, he took up a career writing film scores before forming Aphrodite’s Child with another refugee from the Greek beat scene, singer and bassist Demis Roussos.

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Flume finally finds happiness: ‘I didn’t want to tour any more. I hated my job’

At 21, music producer Harley Streten shot to global fame as Flume. Within a few years, he was alone, depressed and drinking too much. Then the pandemic happened – and ‘it was one of the best years of my life’

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In a trio of overgrown garden beds, tomatoes and chillies climb towards the sky. There are bite-size capsicums, both green and orange, plus bushy shrubs of parsley and rosemary. Somewhere in here, I am told, is pumpkin and sweet potato.

“I had a bunch of kale, too, but it died when I was at Coachella,” Harley Streten says.

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by Katie Cunningham via Electronic music | The Guardian

Vangelis, composer of Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner soundtracks, dies aged 79

Greek composer topped US charts with Chariots of Fire’s uplifting piano-led theme

Vangelis, the Greek composer and musician whose synth-driven work brought huge drama to film soundtracks including Blade Runner and Chariots of Fire, has died aged 79. His representatives said he died in hospital in France where he was being treated.

Born Evángelos Odysséas Papathanassíou in 1943, Vangelis won an Oscar for his 1981 Chariots of Fire soundtrack. Its uplifting piano motif became world-renowned, and reached No 1 in the US charts, as did the accompanying soundtrack album.

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

40 years of the Wire magazine: ‘Music deserves intelligent treatment. If that’s elitist, so be it’

From free jazz to doomy drones, outsider artists have always found a home in the Wire. Its creators reflect on upending the orthodoxy, coining genres – and their hatred of big-name rivals

“We were the last resort for a lot of music because nobody else would touch it,” says Tony Herrington, publisher of the Wire magazine. He also once said: “Most people would take the mickey out of some bloke making music by bowing away at the femur of a mountain goat, but we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.”

For 40 years – it is celebrating this anniversary with a series of events in July – the Wire has been covering bold, strange, noisy, genre-busting experimental music, in a crisp, sharply designed magazine.

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by Daniel Dylan Wray via Electronic music | The Guardian

Button pushers: the artists making music from mushrooms

Musicians and scientists armed with synths and electrodes are plugging in to mushrooms and cacti to encourage humans to reconnect with the Earth

To musician Tarun Nayar, mushrooms sound squiggly and wonky. Nayar’s “organismic music” project Modern Biology has only been active since last summer but, with his videos of mushrooms making calming ambient soundscapes, he’s already racked up more than half a million TikTok followers and 25m views.

The electronic artist and former biologist hangs out in mushroom circles, spending summers in the northern Gulf Islands of British Columbia with the Sheldrake brothers: Merlin, the author of the bestselling Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures, and producer-songwriter Cosmo. So it seems only natural that he would begin foraging mushrooms – not to eat, but to listen to.

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by Naomi Larsson via Electronic music | The Guardian

DJ Luke Una: ‘With ADHD, life can be torturous. Music stops the noise’

The DJ became a viral star for his music tips and streams of consciousness during lockdown, and has poured 37 years of joyous and painful late nights into a new compilation

‘I went crazy with it,” says Luke Una, of losing himself in his record collection during the pandemic. “I obsessively went into the archive. To the point where my missus and the kids were screaming at me because I didn’t stop playing music for the whole lockdown.”

Along with sellotaping bread to his face for rants about foraging, or mocking self-improvement gurus while delivering his own stream of positive affirmations, the DJ was zealously sharing his music on Instagram, and he became a lockdown hit. “I’ve always been a bit of a peacock,” he says. “There is a bit of narcissism with my Insta but traditional narcissism was liking your own reflection, not being a sociopathic bastard. So I’m more early-proto-narcissism.”

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by Daniel Dylan Wray via Electronic music | The Guardian

Soft Cell: *Happiness Not Included review – synth-pop elders with an eye on the future

(BMG)
Two decades after their last album, the band return with a wryly hopeful record – and some trademark electro bangers

Forty-one years since their debut album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, and 20 since their last album, 2002’s underwhelming Cruelty Without Beauty, Soft Cell return with an album that makes the very best of their vantage point as synth-pop elders with an eye on the future. *Happiness Not Included cleverly compares the 80s promises of a future straight out of science-fiction (“rocket ships and monorails, electricity that never fails”) with how things have actually turned out. While these songs reference war, famine, loneliness, isolation and authoritarianism, Marc Almond’s witty lyrics and synth man David Ball’s bouncy tunes mean the mood is more wryly hopeful than bleak. Heart Like Chernobyl actually begins: “Oh dear / I feel like North Korea.”

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by Dave Simpson via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘It was the poor man’s studio’: how Amiga computers reprogrammed modern music

It was grey, ugly and had 0.0128% of an iPhone’s memory. But the Amiga 500 defied its limitations to power a series of astonishing dance tracks, from early jungle to Calvin Harris

“Phat as fuck.” This was how jungle legend Gavin King – AKA Aphrodite – described the powerful bass capabilities of his Amiga 1200 home computer in a 90s interview. Several decades later, it remains in his studio. With its drab grey buttons, it looks more suited to tax returns, but Amiga machines are instrumental in electronic music as we know it.

“The thing about the Amiga bassline is that it was constant volume, it didn’t waver,” King says now, “so when you pulled it up to the maximum volume that you could press on to vinyl, it made it, well, phat as fuck.”

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by Tamlin Magee via Electronic music | The Guardian