Post your questions for Hot Chip

As the beloved dance-pop band release their eighth album, Joe Goddard and Al Doyle will answer your questions – post them below

Two decades after their formation, Hot Chip have pretty much achieved national treasure status for their playful, soulful, sometimes biting, sometimes lovelorn take on dance pop. They’ve never slouched – and yet their forthcoming eighth album, Freakout/Release, is a standout in a catalogue not short on them, filled with full-blooded pop songs that widen – and darken – the band’s usual scope.

Featuring Canadian rapper Cadence Weapon, The Evil That Men Do touches on racial tension and violence against women, while Not Alone despairs at fallen male heroes: “It’s never the heroines that let us down,” sings frontman Alexis Taylor. There are starker personal lows here, too, with tracks such as Broken, Guilty and Out of My Depth nodding to the sense of loss of control that many people felt during the sharp end of the pandemic.

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by Laura Snapes via Electronic music | The Guardian

The Prodigy review – tireless electro-punks do Keith Flint proud

Mountford Hall, Liverpool
The late vocalist is etched in lasers for a comeback show that proves the fiery veterans are still a source of euphoria

An air raid siren sounds and bass starts hammering through the subwoofers with convulsive power. The Prodigy arrive on stage and vocalist Maxim clambers atop a speaker stack where he stands statuesque, bathed in strobes. The opening riff of Breathe begins as live guitarist Rob Holliday, in sleeveless leather, starts slinging his instrument around like an out-of-control chainsaw. Pandemonium is instant.

This run of shows is the band’s first since the death of their vocalist and dancer Keith Flint in 2019, a man whose devil-horned hair became a more recognisable emblem for the Prodigy than their actual ant logo. Such was his stage presence that in the aftermath of his death some wondered whether the band could continue without him – but the showmanship is so powerful here that the audience are clearly not worried.

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by Patrick Clarke via Electronic music | The Guardian

Lamin Fofana review | Ammar Kalia's global album of the month

(Black Studies)
The Sierra Leonean producer lulls with languid sonics then forces a sudden focus with sharp bursts of static or melody

Across the eight tracks of Lamin Fofana’s latest album trilogy, the Sierra Leonean producer builds on his previous explorations in ambient music. He plays with a languid slowness induced by gradual shifts in tone, rustling field recordings and synth-based melody. The liner notes reveal a hefty ideological underpinning here: Amiri Baraka’s poetry and the pandemic warping our perception of time guide the opening instalment, Ballad Air & Fire; disruption of European colonial notions of art and rationality in Shafts of Sunlight; and the legacies of migration on The Open Boat.

But even without this guidance, Fofana’s musical choices have a nuanced and emotive impact. The opening, title track of Ballad Air & Fire conjours an ominous sense of anticipation with its half-hour of white noise, thunderous rumblings and creaking whispers of rhythm. Shafts of Sunlight’s title track continues the menacing motif until reverb-laden melody breaks through the noise, like those rays piercing the clouds. Fofana reaches his apex in The Open Boat: melodic rhythm builds like undulating waves on Poseidon (Dub Version)/Sea Is History and edges closer to the dancefloor with the arpeggiated melodies of The Unity Is Submarine. It closes on enveloping synth chords that ring with the hiss of static – a journey back to the liminal noise that opened the trilogy.

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

Laurent Garnier: Off the Record review – upbeat spin on pioneering DJ’s career

Docu-tribute to club hero offers uncritical praise but also tells an intriguing history of electronic dance music since the 80s

In the teeming, highly diverse cinematic habitat of music documentaries, there are surprisingly few about the phylum of electronic dance music and its many sub-classes, orders and colourful creatures. There are some: films about scenes such as the late 80s/early 90s rave movement or specific clubs such as Sub Berlin: History of Tresor. There are others about specific superstar DJs such as the slick, very commercial Leave the World Behind, a tribute to Swedish House Mafia, or Villalobos, a mesmeric, arthouse portrait of Ricardo Villalobos. This docu-tribute to French-born DJ-composer Laurent Garnier lies tonally somewhere between the latter two. It offers fairly uncritical praise for Garnier’s artistry and is built around extensive interviews with the man himself, who is admittedly very articulate and informative; but there is also a very interesting historical-anthropological strain to the film that charts the rise of house, rave and techno from the 1980s onwards.

Garnier was right there in the middle of a lot of it, or as in the middle as you can be in an international movement that started, depending on how you look at it, in a number of places at the same time and then spread like a virus. Trained to be a silver service waiter, Garnier worked first at the French embassy in London where he would slip off at night to go clubbing at events organised by Leigh Bowery and visit the Haçienda in Manchester. Compelled to do national service back in France, he started moonlighting as a DJ in key venues such as the Rex Club in Paris, and then built up a massive international following.

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by Leslie Felperin via Electronic music | The Guardian

S3 E9: Goldie, music producer and DJ

The legendary drum’n’bass DJ Goldie has flown into London for summer performance dates, but first he stops by Grace’s living room. They discuss growing up in care, letting rave life get on top of you, and his new life with his wife and child in Thailand. And, as always, the comfort foods that have seen him through it all

New episodes of Comfort Eating with Grace Dent are released every Tuesday

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by Grace Dent, Leah Green, Jack Claramunt, Cathy Drysdale, Solomon King via Electronic music | The Guardian

Supersonic festival 2022 review – joy and fury from an inspiring music community

Various venues, Birmingham
From Grove’s queer swagger to Circle’s ecological visions and Divide and Dissolve’s call for decolonisation, this thrilling underground fest has radical utopianism at its heart

At the end of a horrible week in British politics, there’s nowhere better to be than a sweaty moshpit in a Digbeth warehouse being vibrated by the Bug’s colossal bass music, exorcising rage through MC Flowdan’s fury. This is the first night of Birmingham’s Supersonic festival, their first since 2019, promising release, recovery and rebuilding through a combination of metal and experimental music.

It opens on Friday with the euphoric herald of violinist Rakhi Singh playing Julia Wolfe’s Lad, originally for nine bagpipes, brilliantly transposed for violin. Later, Birmingham punk-with-electronic-hardware Blue Ruth rides the big soundsystem, with their part-punk, part-Suicide raw electro.

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by Jennifer Lucy Allan via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘Everything felt new’: the cross-cultural joy of Ghana’s ‘burger highlife’ music

Political turbulence in 1980s Ghana drove musicians to Europe, where they created a glorious new style. Now working as London church ministers and more, the original stars look back

In 1970s Ghana, nightlife was booming: live bands played James Brown, Kool and the Gang, Otis Redding and the Rolling Stones in packed dancehalls, and pop music from Europe and the US was dominating the radio. Traditional sounds were often sidelined as DJs turned to funk, soul, disco and rock – but these heady days didn’t last.

Political turbulence stemming from a succession of coups and military dictatorships was soon to drive out many of the country’s most talented musicians. As the country headed towards an economic crisis in the 1980s, the government of Jerry Rawlings placed an embargo on live music and introduced a 160% import tax on musical instruments. “People who were making a living out of playing live music could no longer do it,” recalls Herman Asafo-Agyei, later the bassist of the bands Osibisa and Native Spirit. “So people fled.”

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by James Balmont via Electronic music | The Guardian