Leftfield: This is What We Do review – mighty, all-embracing workouts and more

(Virgin)
Born out of a tumultuous time in Neil Barnes’s life, this heady mix of bangers and righteous sounds is a keeper

Retro-leaning techno acts such as Bicep have prepped the ground propitiously for this fourth Leftfield outing in three decades. It sounds of a piece with its predecessors and yet of the moment: a fresh iteration of an evergreen set of electronic precepts overlaid with a warm filter. Neil Barnes has endured divorce and cancer and retrained as a psychotherapist. Although the “we” of the title is probably intended as embracing and inclusive, it’s worth noting that Leftfield is Barnes and current associate Adam Wren. Paul Daley opted out of their 2010 comeback LP.

The album’s two mightiest bangers are already out: Pulse boasts the kind of bass and 808 combo that gets your rig banned from venues, and Accumulator layers elements on with the skill that comes from ratcheting up the pressure on ravers for 30 years. But there are more workouts here invoking everything from electro to the eeriness of Boards of Canada.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

The Blessed Madonna’s listening diary: ‘You cannot argue with logic like ‘booty, booty, booty, booty’’

The DJ-producer looks back on records by Lio, Sworn Virgins and the Pointer Sisters that cued ‘legitimate chaos’ on the dancefloor and wind-down tunes by Big Audio Dynamite and the Korgis

7pm I was at my manager’s office because it was the day my new single was dropping and we were hosting a secret launch party later in the evening. Rosa Parks by Outkast was playing on someone’s Spotify. I grew up with Outkast because I’m from Kentucky, so it felt nice that that song was on. It had been a long day (I had to get a hotel room in the middle of London to take a nap halfway through because I knew the party was going to run late) and I was a bit stressed out. It’s my first record in five years and it felt like an enormous chance to screw everything up – so it was actually very comforting to hear Outkast, like a nice little love letter from home.

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by As told to Safi Bugel via Electronic music | The Guardian

Honey Dijon: Black Girl Magic review – eclectic dancefloor delights

(Classic Music Company)
The Chicago DJ delves into new jack swing, disco and house across 15 jubilant, guest-studded tracks

Witnessing the Chicago DJ Honey Dijon behind the decks can be as close to a spiritual experience as you can get on the dancefloor. Trading in the four-to-the-floor kick drum that provides the aortic pulse to house music, Dijon’s mid-tempo sets conduct her crowds perfectly from tantalising buildups to scattered breakdowns and communal euphoria as her soaring melodies kick in. Her debut album, 2017’s Best of Both Worlds, played as a rousing microcosm of these multihour sets, and in the years since its release, Dijon has become a sought-after producer, working this year on Beyoncé’s Renaissance.

Harnessing this collaborative experience, Black Girl Magic finds Dijon expanding her sound to incorporate a wider range of queer Black contributions to dancefloor culture, producing a 15-track masterclass in disco, new jack swing and soulful house. The driving drumbeat and piano chord stabs of Love Is a State of Mind set the hands-in-the-air tone. Standout features from the house pioneer Mike Dunn on the righteous thump of Work and from rapper Channel Tres on the sultry Show Me Some Love keep the pace moving, while the ecstatic disco of Everybody forms the album’s highlight. Here, Dijon sing-shouts a joyous refrain that calls for everybody to come together in service to an infectious synth-bass melody. It’s the perfect example of her slick production style, blending raucous energy with artful arrangement designed to play loud and get you moving. Hearing Black Girl Magic, the dancefloor is wherever you happen to be.

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

Honey Dijon: Black Girl Magic review – tight, anthemic celebration of Black queer identity

(Classic Music Company)
The house legend and Beyoncé collaborator is back with 15 celebratory hits that span styles and explode with personality

House is truly the genre that celebrates itself. What other music is so obsessed with describing the moment of its enjoyment – the bodies, dancefloors, drugs, love, communion? In the wrong hands, an “up in the club / together we are one” lyric can feel trite, but in the manicured talons of Honey Dijon, the meta-mood of house becomes monumental.

In the past decade the Chicago-born, New York-sculpted DJ has ascended from fashion party favourite to Ibiza resident to Lady Gaga remixer; in recent years, she’s collaborated with Comme des Garcons on a high-end fashion line and produced songs on Beyoncé’s Renaissance. Where her debut album, 2017’s The Best of Both Worlds, played it deep and groovy, its follow-up is an anthemic and vocal-heavy celebration of Black queer identity, with twice the style and oodles more personality.

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by Chal Ravens via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘I was high for five years’: bloghouse revivalist Grace Ives on separating partying from pop

The singer tells us how the bitesize, booming songs of her latest album Janky Star chart her crash course in drinking, drugs and the music industry

Being a burgeoning pop star is a thorny business. In 2019, when she released her debut album 2nd, New York’s Grace Ives was barely working within the confines of the music industry: she had made the album on a Roland 505 that she bought after seeing MIA use one; it was released on the experimental indie label Dots Per Inch, best known for bizarro pop acts such as Lily & Horn Horse and Lucy. In that world, everyone is friends, and people put out records for the love of it. So when Ives began shopping her second album, June’s Janky Star, to a slightly higher tier of indie label, it felt the same. “I was talking to my lawyer about deciding between two labels, and I was talking about one and I was like, ‘It’s cool, because I kind of feel like they’re my friends,’” Ives recalls over video from her apartment in Brooklyn. “My lawyer was like, Oh, Grace, no …”

Back then, Ives says, she was “excited and naive and also very impatient” to release Janky Star. “I didn’t realise the business side of music is so … like, you can be wined and dined and made to feel like a rockstar – and it can all be fake. That’s an easy word to use, but yeah, fake,” she says. “You get the support of a label, which is amazing. But you’re on your own, mentally. I didn’t know what it meant to own your masters or anything like that – the whole process of getting signed was so new to me. I thought that it was all lovey-dovey, but it’s business.”

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by Shaad D'Souza via Electronic music | The Guardian

Sarathy Korwar: Kalak review – deft musical storytelling

(The Leaf Label)
The Indo jazz drummer and bandleader muses on questions of time and identity on this warm, thoughtful outing

On his last album, 2019’s More Arriving, the US-born, Indian-raised drummer and producer Sarathy Korwar proved himself highly adept at thoughtful, engaging musical storytelling. Kalak is the London-based artist’s fourth full-length record as bandleader, and finds him less searing, more meditative than on its predecessor – but still every bit as vital.

Examining the double meaning of the Hindi and Urdu word “kal” (which is both “yesterday” and “tomorrow”), Kalak unfurls with questions such as: who gets to be remembered; how to do more than simply survive in the present; how to dream about the future? In a lesser artist’s hands the concept could border on didactic or cloying (and certainly, the spoken word elements on opener A Recipe to Cure Historical Amnesia feel skippable on repeat listens), but Korwar’s compositions here are irresistible.

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by Tara Joshi via Electronic music | The Guardian

Sault: Aiir, Earth, Today & Tomorrow, Untitled (God), 11 review – an act of supreme generosity

(Forever Living Originals)
The esteemed collective release five dazzlingly eclectic albums, melding rap, post-punk and modern classical composition

Since 2019, the revered collective Sault have offered a palimpsest of African, American and British black music history, with beautifully realised takes on R&B, jazz and psychedelic funk, doo-wop, trip-hop, symphonic soul, 1980s groove and soundsystem culture. But are these five new albums just proof that producer Inflo can’t be fussed with curation?

Aiir is a sequel to recent modern classical composition Air and is similarly pleasant if sometimes syrupy. Earth boasts Stronger, as good as their 2020 classic Wildfires, and brings polyrhythms and choral contributions. Its astonishing diadem, The Lord’s With Me, burns with the languorous intensity of 1970s experimentalists the Undisputed Truth.

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by Damien Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian

Helena Hauff’s listening diary: ‘I feel so grown up listening to jazz while cooking’

The Hamburg-based techno doyenne takes us through a few days of listening, from a surprise Depeche Mode song to funky, energetic electro

8pm I was going through my record collection to pack for the weekend. Sometimes I try to find things that I haven’t played in the club for a while, but it’s quite difficult because I play so often. I saw Structure by Aquasky and I was like: “Oh, yeah, that’s great”. I listened to it really loud on my headphones and danced around in my little studio in Hamburg. I didn’t actually end up playing it, but sometimes you find things that just excite you, and that was one of those. It’s really energetic, exciting and fun. And it’s fast. Sometimes I play drum’n’bass in my sets, but not that often, it really depends on the venue and the event. I’m always excited when there is an event coming up where I think: “I can really do this here”.

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by As told to Safi Bugel via Electronic music | The Guardian

Boko! Boko! The UK club superheroes celebrating global grooves and local roots

The pioneering DJ crew’s in-demand rave sets span the world, but they keep a close focus on community and sustainability

There’s something of the superhero team about dance collective Boko! Boko! There’s their big, complementary personalities and musical abilities and clear camaraderie, not to mention their colourful Lycra outfits. As they wait backstage in Oslo’s Blå club prior to their set at the Oslo World festival, the trio of Juba (AKA Chinwe Pam Nnajiuba, razor sharp with a buzzcut and specs, 32), Tash LC (Tashan Campbell, small and impishly witty, 27) and Mina (Hannah Mac, 5ft 11in of husky-voiced effusiveness, 31) are full of good cheer. Bantering about backstage catering and Norway’s blondness, taking selfies and wondering how they’re going to follow the Kenyan boyband currently on stage, they feel like old friends catching up.

Which they kind of are. Boko! Boko! may be one of the best and most important DJ teams around right now thanks to the high-energy, globally sourced rave sets they’ve been honing over seven years. This year has seen all three release spectacular records, and together they headlined Berlin’s ultimate techno bunker, Tresor, in September. Yet they rarely get to see each other. Juba lives in Berlin and travels constantly on projects such as her documentary, compilation and podcast series about women DJs/musicians, Assurance. The other two are based in south London but have hectic solo DJ careers and run record labels – Mina’s Earth Kicks and Tash’s Club Yeke – and Mina also records and tours with Ghanaian MC Bryte.

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by Joe Muggs via Electronic music | The Guardian

One to watch: Coby Sey

The Lewisham producer, vocalist and DJ explores a multitude of genres to create strange, unpolished melodies full of feeling

Producer, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and DJ Coby Sey is someone whose work has been quietly integral to the UK’s left-field, underground sonics for the past five years or so. The Lewisham artist’s collaborations with other forward thinkers including Tirzah, Mica Levi, Dean Blunt, Kelly Lee Owens and others is testament to the organic and expansive world in which he operates. Along with Levi and Brother May, Sey also runs Curl Recordings; the trio sometimes perform shows together purely via jamming and improvisation.

You can hear that exploratory approach on Conduit, Sey’s debut album, which came out in September. The record brings to life a space that is often uneasy, examining histories, politics and protest alongside something more frank and interior (on standout tracks such as the raw, galvanising Response, he offers: “I’m the one you get aroused by / In the mind and in the nether regions inside”). Sey’s zigzagging spoken word and unpolished melodies sit somewhere at the confluence of a multitude of genres (jazz, dub, noise, experimental electronic, trip-hop; his sound has sometimes been categorised as “post-grime”).

With music that embodies both hope and despair, often in the same breath, Sey explained to the Quietus online magazine his desire to make work that sits outside the binary of positive and negative: “I think thereis a wider palette of emotions that can be explored through sound and music.” It’s something he manages quite beautifully: in Sey’s work, you sit with the strange, imperfect edges of feeling it all.

Conduit is out now on AD 93. Coby Sey will play at the Pitchfork music festival, London, on 9 November

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by Tara Joshi via Electronic music | The Guardian

Dom Maker of Mount Kimbie’s listening diary: ‘I honestly think Liv.e is the next Beyoncé’

One half of the London/Los Angeles duo takes us through his week in listening, which features Joy Division and an inspiringly ‘mean’ rap song

9am I woke up fairly early and was out of the house by 8.30am. I’m in London at the moment, which is quite rare because I live in Los Angeles, but we’re working on the next record. I’m staying in an Airbnb in Clapton and the studio is in Tottenham, so I cycle along the River Lea. This morning was a very sunny day, and cold – which is something I’m not really used to any more so it was actually quite refreshing.

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by As told to Safi Bugel via Electronic music | The Guardian

Beckah Amani, Cry Club and Betty Who: Australia’s best new music for November

Each month we add 20 new songs to our Spotify playlist. Read about 10 of our favourites here – and subscribe on Spotify, which updates with the full list at the start of each month

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For fans of: Clairo, Sia, Benee

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by Nathan Jolly via Electronic music | The Guardian

Daniel Avery: Ultra Truth review – a perfectly balanced cocktail of euphoria and disquiet

(Phantasy Sound)
Introspective and propulsive, intense and opaque: these instrumentals tie the disparate strands of the producer’s oeuvre into a coherent, compelling whole

In September 2020, Daniel Avery released Lone Swordsman, a track he wrote on the day his friend and sometime collaborator Andrew Weatherall died. Of all the tributes paid to the revered DJ/producer, it might be the most striking: a simple melody endlessly dancing over melancholy chords, it’s an exquisitely beautiful four minutes of music. Clearly it was the product of a moment where everything clicked into place: Avery has talked vaguely about “the cosmic energy of the universe” having a role in its creation, but whatever was behind it, Lone Swordsman had a strong claim to be called the best thing that he had ever released. But it didn’t appear on his subsequent album, Together in Static. In fairness, it probably wouldn’t have fitted the mood. Together in Static was a collection of tracks he had written for a seated and socially distanced performance he gave at London’s Hackney Church in June 2020, imbued with all the tentative optimism you might expect given the circumstances, and, while there’s a definite warmth about Lone Swordsman, the overriding emotion it evokes is desperate sadness.

Instead, it turns up towards the end of Together in Static’s successor, where it fits perfectly, not just because Ultra Truth feels like an emotionally complex album – it manages to be both introspective and propulsive, intense and opaque – but because of its quality. Avery has had a rich and varied career since the release of his 2013 debut album Drone Logic, taking in releases that, in their scope and ambition at least, recalled the blockbusting crossover dance albums of the mid-90s – Underworld’s dubnobasswithmyheadman, Leftfield’s Leftism, the Chemical Brothers’ Surrender – alongside stuff such as 2020’s Illusion of Time, an experimental collaboration with Italian electronic auteur and Nine Inch Nails bassist Alessandro Cortini.

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian