LCD Soundsystem review – revenant dance-rockers play the hits

O2 Brixton Academy, London
Even if James Murphy’s cred has taken a hit of late, the frontman still aces the anthems that gave the band its powerful punk-disco potency

Multiple-night residencies have become an a la mode currency for artists who have the pulling power to fill arenas, yet still prefer to sweat it out within touching distance of the faithful. For LCD Soundsystem, that means a weeklong takeover at Brixton Academy in celebration of their 20th anniversary, with ringleader James Murphy, this century’s pre-eminent disco evangelist, opting only to rest on the fourth, not seventh, day.

Murphy’s reputation as a generational mouthpiece has taken a few knocks in recent years, chiefly the result of his vacillation between relatable world-weariness and questionable grand gestures: attempting 20 dates in New York during last winter’s Covid spike, shilling for crypto, or reversing course after an extravagantly ballyhooed retirement.

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by Gabriel Szatan via Electronic music | The Guardian

Cause of death of Depeche Mode’s Andrew Fletcher revealed

Keyboardist who died aged 60 in May suffered aortic dissection, with band saying ‘he passed naturally and without prolonged suffering’

Depeche Mode have announced the cause of death of their keyboardist Andrew Fletcher as an aortic dissection – a tear in a main artery to his heart.

In a statement on social media, the band said: “A couple weeks ago we received the result from the medical examiners, which Andy’s family asked us to share with you now. Andy suffered an aortic dissection while at home on 26 May. So, even though it was far, far too soon, he passed naturally and without prolonged suffering.”

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

House music had its Black roots ripped up – now Drake and Beyoncé are reclaiming them |

The world’s biggest Black stars have turned to the genre not to pander to white tastes – but to remind fans where it came from

This week, Drake treated fans to a surprise drop of his new album Honestly, Nevermind. Its release, just nine months after his last record, Certified Lover Boy, received lukewarm reviews from critics, was unexpected. Fans had hoped for a return to the sounds he made famous: conventional, bassy, euphoric hip-hop tunes to brood to; agonised lyrics that would be the mainstay in Instagram captions for the rest of the summer. But instead, another curveball: track after track of deep house beats.

A few days later, Beyoncé teased her new single, Break My Soul, featuring the distinctive bassline of the house classic Show Me Love by Robin S. It’s been hard to nail down Beyoncé’s sound in recent years. Her critically acclaimed 2016 album Lemonade featured some songs that entered new territory – take the country-tinged single Daddy Lessons – but on the whole, it was firmly anchored in the kind of R&B that has been popular and chart-topping for the past decade. But this single offered something new – an unmistakeable hark back to 90s house.

Michelle Kambasha works in the music industry

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by Michelle Kambasha via Electronic music | The Guardian

Orbital: ‘We can’t fall out with each other for ever. It would make Christmas awkward’

The Glastonbury legends, returning with a new album, answer your questions on embarrassing festival memories, their breakup and makeup – and being mistaken for the Orb

It’s Glastonbury this weekend. What do you remember of your legendary 1994 performance and why was it so important? Jamesis47

Paul Hartnoll: There we were, hammering it out on 909s and 303s [Roland’s TR-909 drum machine and TB-303 bass synthesiser], and people just went mental. It didn’t just bring dance music to Glastonbury; it brought us to the rock arena. Afterwards, we were booked to play all these rock festivals.

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by As told to Rich Pelley via Electronic music | The Guardian

Ukrainian techno, UK drill and Tony Christie: 30 acts not to miss at Glastonbury 2022

Whether it’s Kendrick Lamar’s hugely anticipated headline slot, soul music singalongs or late night DJ sets, here are our picks from the hundreds of acts playing Glastonbury

It’s a vintage year for headliners with three artists (Billie Eilish, Paul McCartney and Kendrick Lamar) who cover pop’s entire map between them, but Kendrick Lamar’s set is absolutely unmissable. The whole world will be watching: this is the first time anyone has heard material from new album Mr Morale & the Big Steppers played live, and hearing Lamar’s rhythm-chopping, forensic, self-lacerating flow is quite simply one of the great experiences in any art today.
Pyramid stage, Sunday, 21.45

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

Beyoncé: Break My Soul review – house anthem doesn’t break the mould

First single from forthcoming album Renaissance preaches freedom but gets stuck in some familiar musical tropes

The last major musical statements the world heard from Beyoncé were Black Parade, an electronic growl of anger at police brutality and racism that slowly built into a euphoric celebration of African American and African culture, and Be Alive, her Oscar-nominated contribution to the soundtrack of King Richard: a ballad set to a relentless, pounding rhythm that hammered home its message of Black empowerment. They were, spiritually at least, of a piece with the albums that preceded them in 2019, the Beyoncé-produced alternative soundtrack for The Lion King, which dragged the sound of Afrobeats into a mainstream spotlight, and the live recording of her extraordinary Coachella performance Homecoming: evidence of an artist committed to taking musical risks, of constantly pushing forward and trying something different.

It makes the release of the first single from her forthcoming album Renaissance all the more surprising. Rather than presenting her audience with something strikingly different, Break My Soul sounds weirdly familiar. It’s a mid-tempo house track based around a keyboard bass sound that – without wishing to be overly technical – very closely resembles setting number 17 on the Korg M1 synthesiser. Even if you’ve never heard of a Korg M1 synthesiser, you’ve heard that sound: it’s the basis of the 1993 Stonebridge remix of Robin S’s Show Me Love and MK’s 1992 remix – or “Dub of Doom” of the Nightcrawlers’ Push the Feeling On, two of the most influential house tracks in recent pop history.

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Four Tet settles historic royalty rate dispute with Domino Records

The independent British label has recognised Kieran Hebden’s original claim and agreed to pay him a 50% royalty rate on streaming and downloads

Four Tet, AKA Kieran Hebden, has announced that he has settled his dispute with Domino Records over royalty rates.

In August 2021, Hebden sought damages against the independent British record label for applying a historic royalty rate to streaming revenue and downloads of four studio albums he released on the label between 2001 and 2010.

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by Laura Snapes via Electronic music | The Guardian

Drake: Honestly, Nevermind review – brand new moods, same old moans

(OVO/Republic)
The Canadian superstar’s new album is surprisingly full of house music, but his passive-aggressive complaints get dull

The kind of news story that relies on quotes from Twitter is seldom the most accurate gauge of public mood – whatever opinion you want to underline, you can doubtless find someone with 38 followers spouting it – but, in the case of Honestly, Nevermind, said stories might have a point. “New Drake album shocks followers with radical change of musical direction” offers one, complete with the news that at least one Twitter user thought its contents amounted to “trolling”.

The issue is that Honestly, Nevermind – at least until its final two tracks – is essentially a house album, and that is not traditionally a genre in which rappers dabble. It’s a move that is not entirely without precedent. Drake’s 2017 mixtape More Life had a sprinkling of house-infused tracks, most notably Passionfruit. Kanye West sampled Hardrive’s 90s New York house classic Deep Inside on Fade, from The Life of Pablo; P Diddy made a documentary about how much he loved Ibiza, while, if you delve back into the late 80s, you can find house tracks by the Jungle Brothers and Queen Latifah. But these are isolated incidents. For the most part, hip-hop and house are a twain that seldom meets, perhaps for the reasons once suggested by Outkast’s André 3000: “To the average guy in the street, house music is kind of connected to the gay community … in the ’hood, they think [if you listen to house] you’re gay or white.”

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Post your questions for Orbital

Back with a new album following their second reformation, the electronic duo – and Glastonbury veterans – will take on your questions

Whenever you ask Glastonbury veterans for some of their favourite memories, one name comes up time and again, particularly among gnarled-looking ravers: Orbital.

Their 1994 set is seen by many as the moment when Glastonbury fully grasped dance music. Rave culture was in the bones of the hippies who attended the festival (or snuck in at least), and Underworld’s Experimental Sound Field in 1992 brought repetitive beats into the overall musical mix – but this Orbital set was a mainstream moment, hosted for 40,000 people at the NME Stage.

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

Nova Twins: Supernova review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

(Marshall Records)
The genre-splicing pair’s sharp, concise songwriting makes for a mindblowing blast of distorted noise-pop – and destroys the narrative about who gets to make rock music

One of the Nova Twins’ most vocal celebrity supporters, guitarist Tom Morello, has a story he regularly tells about the peculiar phenomenon of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave fans who simply refuse to believe that he’s Black, even after he repeatedly tells them that his father is Kenyan. “I think it disrupts the false narrative that music like mine can only be made by people who look like them,” he said to the Guardian last year.

It’s a subject addressed, more forcefully, in the opening two tracks of the Nova Twins’ second album. “Look me in the face – say you’ve never met someone like me,” growls Antagonist. “You can buy your looks, but you can’t change your genes – I’m a straight talker, fucking say what you mean,” snaps Cleopatra, which announces the duo as “blacker than the leather that’s holding our boots together”.

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘I had to do something’: Senegal electro star sings to save his language

Mënik is spoken by only a few thousand people, but Benoit Fader Keita hopes to change that by bringing it to a new audience, from Dakar to Paris and Berlin

Benoit Fader Keita never intended to make electro music. But after a sell-out first show in Dakar last month, the singer believes the genre could be key to saving his beloved language from extinction. “Techno has an international appeal. Everyone came to this concert – there were people from lots of different countries,” he says. “It is probably the first time that they have ever heard someone singing in Mënik.”

Known by stage name Beni Fadi, the 36-year-old comes from the Bedik minority of south-east Senegal. Mënik, his mother tongue, is spoken by fewer than 4,000 people. Unesco classifies it as one of nearly 2,500 endangered languages around the world.

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by Sam Bradpiece in Bandafassi via Electronic music | The Guardian

Moonchild Sanelly: Phases review – on track for global adulation

(Transgressive)
With this versatile, fizzing double album, the South African rapper holds on to her originality while reaching out to western audiences

You don’t need a working knowledge of niche South African genres – gqom or amapiano – to appreciate Moonchild Sanelly, a mischievous and box-fresh artist who is based in Johannesburg but has mainstream global adulation within reach. Combining the hard-hitting primary colours of Nicki Minaj or Doja Cat with the edgier electronics of MIA, the blue-haired, sex-positive rapper-singer is in a category all of her own, mixing snatches of Xhosa with the international language of flexing.

The more eagle-eared will have clocked Sanelly’s rise: her cameo on Beyoncé’s Lion King 2019 soundtrack, her Gorillaz team-up, or her killer hook on Ghetts’s Mozambique. But it’s on her own originals that she really shines. Demon is a banging diss track (“She’s a heifer! A demon!”) whose energy rebounds on the many idiosyncratic party tunes here, many of which could be singles. At the opposite end of the emotional range are songs such as Favourite Regret or the yearning Bird So Bad, as close as this versatile and fizzing double album comes to vulnerability.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘Like seeing a sculpture from a different angle’: Max Richter on rewriting The Four Seasons – for the second time

His 2012 reimagining of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was huge hit. So why, a decade later, is Max Richter recording it once again – this time with period instruments and a vintage synth?

I fell in love with Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons when I was very young. It was one of the few classical records my parents owned and I listened to it constantly. I would line the needle up, wait for the crackle, and sit back as the music flowed magically into the room. The work is perfect for a child. There are wonderful melodies, lots of drama, stories and atmosphere. It’s a gateway into the classical music universe. I felt that I had discovered a secret, beautiful world.

Vivaldi wrote the four violin concertos that make up The Four Seasons between 1716 and 1720, and they were published in conjunction with four sonnets – one for each season, possibly also by the composer. The works are groundbreaking in many ways. He employed all kinds of effects to imitate what the sonnets describe: the buzzing of flies on a hot summer’s day, dogs barking, bird calls and drunken people partying. This idea that instrumental music could illustrate events or nature was completely new.

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by Max Richter via Electronic music | The Guardian

μ-Ziq: Magic Pony Ride review – electronic producer canters into joy

(Planet Mu)
Remastering his classic LP Lunatic Harness – plus an Icelandic horse-riding trip – inspired Mike Paradinas to make this often sumptuous disc

The most apparent truth about Mike Paradinas’s glitchy, skittering music is that it doesn’t like to sit still. As μ-Ziq, Paradinas established himself in the arena of 90s experimental, abstract and tweaked-out electronica, his sense of giddy delirium and rhythmic playfulness distinguishing him from peers such as Aphex Twin and Autechre. Not content to melt down and reassemble jungle and breakbeat according to his own warped desires, he would mess with electro, hardcore and ambient techno styles under a number of different aliases and group projects. In 1995, he founded the label Planet Mu, which has been pivotal in bringing Chicago’s juke and footwork across the Atlantic while also giving a platform to a transformative new generation of UK bass-driven music.

For Paradinas, that legacy is a catalyst. His new album, Magic Pony Ride, was inspired by the process of remastering his classic LP Lunatic Harness, as well as familial introspection and an idyllic holiday horse-riding in Iceland. Parts 1 and 2 of the title track are the record’s most thrilling moments: the former all plush bass tones, rave fragments and sumptuous breakbeats, the latter an elemental adventure of arpeggios, irresistible melodies and dynamic momentum.

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by Tayyab Amin via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘I was losing words. I didn’t remember the week before’: Beth Orton on chronic illness, MeToo and motherhood

On her brilliant new album, Orton ploughs her deepest emotions – and doesn’t hold back. She talks about living with Crohn’s disease, her identity struggles and the limits placed on women

In aspirational Hampstead in north London, Beth Orton says people don’t know what to make of her. “Everyone’s poking you with sticks,” she says. “‘What are you, are you successful? What kind of music do you make, what’s your thing?’ I don’t know, I’m just muddling through. I’m a fucking mess, all right? I’ve become a ‘mother’. I meet my children at the gates of the school. And I don’t know if I am that person, but I’m trying to be. I’m also a singer and a songwriter, and I’ve been famous – did that happen, I’m not sure? Trying to incorporate all those incredibly disparate bits of the self into one is ... I just don’t know any more. I don’t know who the fuck I am.”

Motherhood, waning fame and the strangeness of a new neighbourhood are just some of the challenges Orton has faced on the way to her darkest album to date, Weather Alive, along with grief, multiple chronic illnesses, label rejection and financial instability, all of them creating a centrifuge that flung apart but also concentrated her sense of self.

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

Under the Underground review – punky doc gets deep down with the Viennese music scene

Angela Christlieb’s film captures the anarchic spirit of the musical collective based in the mad scientist’s lair of electronic equipment known as Janka Industries

With the fuzzy whirring of electrical machines in its underground cocoon, Janka Industries recording studio is a universe away from the hustle and bustle of Vienna. Sound equipment, retro monitors and miscellaneous gadgets sprawl into every nook, and the space resembles some mad genius’s cave in a 1950s sci-fi film. And yet there is magic in the chaos, as a steady flow of artists and musicians come to this otherworldly haven to record, or simply bask in its collaborative atmosphere.

Established in the 1980s by Chris and Ali Janka, the collective now based there has had many temporary homes, from a rat-infested air raid shelter to its current basement; the rodent threat now replaced by a soon-to-be expired lease. In an era when art and music are increasingly corporatised, the DIY ethos of Janka Industries feels like a relic from a bygone time. As an immersive descent into this subculture sanctuary, Angela Christlieb’s documentary emulates the punky grittiness of Janka Industries by giving a scratchy texture to its footage, which alternates between a digital look and the visual flourishes of 8mm film.

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by Phuong Le via Electronic music | The Guardian

Dave Smith: the synth genius who made pop’s instruments work in harmony | William Stokes

Smith, who died this week aged 72, changed the course of music history by championing unity and collaboration, while his synths lit up Madonna, Radiohead and more

Dave Smith’s name may be ubiquitous enough to look almost forgettable on the back of a synthesiser – at least next to the distinctive monikers of his peers such as Oberheim, Moog, Linn and Rossum – but it fits the portrait of Smith painted by those who knew him and his work: that of an unassuming yet brilliant innovator, a quiet kind of genius. He didn’t just create iconic synthesisers, he united electronic instruments everywhere.

This week’s announcement of Smith’s death at the age of 72 was met with messages of grief and appreciation by musicians and producers the world over. Know him by name or not, you will have nodded your head countless times to the sound of Smith’s innovation: Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Madonna’s Like a Virgin, Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place – they all use his Prophet-5 synthesiser.

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by William Stokes via Electronic music | The Guardian