Classical home listening: John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London’s latest; Éliane Radigue

Wilson and co’s follow-up to English Music for Strings is another gem. And Quatuor Bozzini immerse themselves in Radigue’s Occam Delta XV

• A new release from John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London – a well-known ensemble in the 1950s, relaunched in 2018 by Wilson for special projects – has become a red-letter day in the recording calendar. Following an English Music for Strings disc in 2021 (Britten, Bliss, Bridge, Berkeley), the group’s new album, of Vaughan Williams, Howells, Delius and Elgar (Chandos), presents two string masterpieces from earlier in the 20th century: Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro (1901, 1904-5) and Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910, revised 1919). The Concerto for String Orchestra by Herbert Howells, influenced by RVW and Elgar but with a gritty modernist accent, and Delius’s rhapsodic Late Swallows (arr. Fenby), complete the programme.

As ever, the brilliance of the playing makes this essential listening, the precision and attention to detail alive and exhilarating. The entire disc holds the attention, but the last movement of the Elgar, urgent and impassioned, has you on the edge of you seat: a tour de force.

Continue reading...
by Fiona Maddocks via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘I want an indescribable feeling’: composer Kali Malone on her search for the sublime

The US minimalist, acclaimed for her organ works, on moving beyond the instrument, the science of sound – and taking inspiration from the mountain ranges of her Denver youth

Listening to composer Kali Malone’s Does Spring Hide Its Joy is like watching weather move across a landscape. Sinewaves and strings swell gently, like a calm dawn; electric guitar overwhelms like clouds blocking the sun. It is the US composer’s fifth full-length album and her most expansive. It contains three hour-long versions of the piece, which has been performed with visuals that bathe the audience with pulsating bands of colour. “I want to create an immersive environment so that when it’s over, you don’t know how much time has passed,” Malone explains to me in the empty Purcell Room on London’s South Bank, the afternoon before a second performance.

The tenacious, smart Malone is still in her 20s but already has a large fanbase for her minimalist pieces. She writes for choir, electronics and other instruments, but after numerous split releases and EPs, her following snowballed in 2019 behind the organ dirges of The Sacrificial Code. It has become her signature instrument, one she regularly plays in famed churches and cathedrals – recently in Gaudí’s Sagrada Família in Barcelona. But, she says emphatically: “I’m not an organist, I’m a composer.” And last year’s acclaimed Living Torch cemented her in a lineage of minimalists and electroacousticians, made on French artist Éliane Radigue’s rare ARP 2500 synthesiser: density builds through a melodic cycle; pitches cluster, roaring, occasionally breaking free to soar skyward. It has a glorious goth residue, resisting the feel of squeaky clean concert-hall classical.

Continue reading...
by Jennifer Lucy Allan via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘It felt like a revolution’: Jive Turkey, the Sheffield club night that blazed a trail for UK house

The pioneering electro, soul and jazz funk night united Black and white kids, bucked superstar DJ culture – and rivalled the Haçienda

For Sheffield’s music scene, 1985 was a year of change. Jarvis Cocker fell out of a window trying to impress a girl with a Spider-Man impression. Hospitalised and in a wheelchair, he had a lyrical epiphany that would change the fate of Pulp from cult outsiders to Britpop’s finest. Industrial-funk outfit Chakk signed a major deal and used the money to build FON studios, which produced countless hit records and effectively led to the birth of Warp Records. And a pioneering new club night began: a place where Black and white kids would feverishly dance to a new style of relentlessly jacking music imported from America.

“Jive Turkey was different” says influential DJ Luke Una, one early attender, who went on to run Electric Chair and Homoelectric in Manchester. “It sounded like a new world. I was reborn – [it was] the most important club in my journey that followed over the next 37 years.”

Continue reading...
by Daniel Dylan Wray via Electronic music | The Guardian

Jen Cloher, DMA’s and Marcus Whale: Australia’s best new music for January

Each month our critics pick 20 new songs for 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

• Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email

For fans of: Mo’Ju, the Triffids

Continue reading...
by Isabella Trimboli, Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen, Andrew Stafford, Shaad D'Souza and Michael Sun via Electronic music | The Guardian

Rian Treanor and Ocen James: Saccades review | Ammar Kalia's global album of the month

(Nyege Nyege Tapes)
The presence of James’ bow complements Treanor’s dense compositions, creating the latter’s most melodic and dancefloor-adjacent work to date

Within the grid-based continuum of contemporary electronic music, Rotherham producer Rian Treanor is an experimental outlier. Shunning four-to-the-floor kick drums and repetitive synth melodies, Treanor trades in squeals, shrieks and scattergun bass, stretching formulaic structures into amorphous tracks that veer between danceablity and cacophony.

Treanor’s influences span British computer music innovators such as Autechre, Aphex Twin, and his father, Mark Fell; his 2019 debut, Ataxia, comprised fractal, bass-heavy edits, while 2020’s File Under UK Metaplasm grew from a residency at Ugandan label Nyege Nyege’s Kampala studio, where Treanor was introduced to east African hyperspeed dance styles such as singeli and balani.

Continue reading...
by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ: the cheeky dance producer who’s been mistaken for Aphex Twin

The pseudonymous dance producer’s sample-dense beats cast a spell in the pandemic that’s set to last

From London, England
Recommended if you like The Avalanches, Chuck Person, AG Cook
Up next New album coming in spring; six-LP Charmed box set in July 2023

There’s a rumour going around that DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ – the mysterious dance producer whose sprawling, sample-dense tracks have become an online sensation and led to a collaboration with the 1975 – might actually be Richard D James, AKA Aphex Twin. On a Zoom in mid-December, the polite, witty woman staring back certainly doesn’t look like James, but I double-check, just to be sure. “At one point, I was supposedly Taylor Swift,” she says with a hearty laugh. “And now Aphex Twin, that’s quite a good repertoire!”

Continue reading...
by Shaad D'Souza via Electronic music | The Guardian

'It's exactly what Prince did': inside Melbourne's synth gym – video

Robin Fox, the co-founding director of Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio, discusses his favourite things about the synthesizer museum. Housing hundreds of working and often rare synthesizers, Mess allows anyone to come in and play on machines such as the CS-80, used by composer Vangelis for the Blade Runner soundtrack, the Fairlight CMI used by Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel, and the ARP 2600, which provided the voice of R2-D2 in Star Wars

• In the synth gym with machines used by Kate Bush, Vangelis and R2-D2 – Full Story Summer
• Full Story podcast

Continue reading...
by Lisa Favazzo Lewis Isaacs Camilla Hannan via Electronic music | The Guardian

In the synth gym with machines used by Kate Bush, Vangelis and R2-D2 – Full Story Summer

Housing hundreds of working and often rare synthesisers, the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio allows anyone to come in and play on machines such as the CS-80, that was used by composer Vangelis for the Blade Runner soundtrack, or the Fairlight CMI – used by Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel – or the ARP 2600, which provided the voice of R2-D2 in Star Wars. It’s a space dedicated to inclusion and access, specifically for those underrepresented in electronic music.

Camilla Hannan follows three people with a passion for synths to create a sonic portrait of the studio

Find out more:

Continue reading...
by Presented by Laura Murphy-Oates with Camilla Hannan. Produced and sound designed by Camilla Hannan. Series producer Ellen Leabeater. Executive producer Laura Murphy-Oates via Electronic music | The Guardian