Musique Non Stop - Jazz, Funk, Soul, Broken Beat, Electro, Electronic, Funk / Nu Disco, NU Jazz, House, Techno, Ambient, Lo-Fi, Downtempo... and Many More!
From veteran crowd-pleasers the Chemical Brothers to first-timer yeule, musicians discuss what they love about playing the great outdoors and give their top tips for festival-goers
Playing the Isle of Wight festival, 15-18 June; Wilderness, 3-6 Aug; Cardiff Bay with 2ManyDJs, Hot Chip and Erol Alkan, 9 Sept
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Her studio equipment stolen, the London musician began with a more acoustic sound on this second album – but pure electronics are still her strong suit
Once known as Throwing Shade, Nabihah Iqbal has forged a reputation as an electronic musician, DJ and in-demand collaborator, working with visual artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans and curating this year’s multidisciplinary Brighton festival. Her second album necessarily departs from the textures of her debut, 2017’s Weighing of the Heart. Deprived of her studio equipment after a burglary, followed by a family emergency in Pakistan in early 2020, Iqbal grew the sounds of Dreamer more organically, working initially on harmonium and acoustic guitar. Pre-burglary, her work nodded vigorously towards beats, electronic pop and the indie cusp, while contemplating elevated themes. Her debut considered ancient Egyptian myths around death.
Feelings of existential melancholy linger elegantly throughout Iqbal’s work, with her gossamer vocals considering grief and the ineffable. Many of the more forward-facing tracks from Dreamer remember the dancefloor (such as the excellent Gentle Heart) or feature almost post-punk beats (as on This World Couldn’t See Us, beamed in from 1983). Iqbal combines these elements with gauzy electronics, leaning into dream pop on the album opener, In Light, and the title track. Mostly, this post-genre approach works. But pure electronics are her strongest suit; you want to cheer when the housey oscillations of Sky River arrive after too much derivative wafting.
Continue reading...The experimental Manchester quartet whip up a sonic storm around their Parisian singer’s politically charged lyrics
“I wish this music didn’t scare my wife or my cat,” a commenter confessed under the YouTube video of Mandy, Indiana’s latest single, Peach Fuzz. It’s true that the sounds emanating from the Manchester-grown industrial quartet are better suited to the strobe-lit depths of a basement club than the average living room. Comprised of Parisian frontwoman and lyricist Valentina Caulfield, guitarist and producer Scott Fair, synth-player Simon Catling and drummer Alex Macdougall, the experimental outfit whip up a dark, scattered sonic storm: an enthralling, danceable swirl of discordant EDM and crashing waves of unruly noise-rock.
The group first emerged online with a spate of recordings in 2019, later releasing their debut EP, …, in 2021. They garnered early support from dance veteran Daniel Avery, and have since opened for bands including Idles, Gilla Band and Squid. “I embrace chaos,” Fair said in a recent interview with NME. “I think sometimes the vocals and the music butt heads with each other. It’s supposed to be that battle between those elements.” Meanwhile, Caulfield’s politically charged lyrics manifest as rhythmic rallying cries, sung – and often shouted – with furious intent. On Pinking Shears she declares (in French): “I no longer want to wake up, when we let humans die, in the Mediterranean Sea.” Her visceral delivery ensures each verse lands like a gut punch.
Continue reading...As the synthpop duo return for a new album and tour, they will answer your questions about their career
With their wayward yet wildly catchy synthpop, Soft Cell crafted one of the most thrilling sounds of the 80s. Hits like Tainted Love and Say Hello, Wave Goodbye have stood the test of time, but the band faded from the spotlight after their initial success. Now, as they prepare to release their fifth studio album, and the first in two decades, Marc Almond and Dave Ball will answer your questions – post them in the comments below.
After growing up in separate northern seaside towns, the pair first met as students at Leeds Polytechnic in 1977, when Almond asked Ball to soundtrack his provocative performance art. After a string of experimental covers and local shows, the duo put together their debut EP Mutant Moments at the turn of the decade, using a simple two-track recorder. But it was the release of their sleazy revamp of Gloria Jones’s Tainted Love in 1981 that propelled Soft Cell from underground misfits to mainstream success. The track became the biggest single of the year in the UK and its 43 consecutive weeks on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart set a new record.
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The singer-songwriter elevates his reimagining of Xhosa folk music with synth-pop hooks and his melismatic voice
Over the past decade, South African singer-songwriter Bongeziwe Mabandla has been reimagining Xhosa folk music. His 2012 debut album, Umlilo, was a largely acoustic effort, combining the genre’s yearning choral harmonies with finger-strumming guitar and an underlying sense of jazz swing; five years later, on Mangaliso, he introduced electronic rhythms, which pulsated beneath his lyrics on love and loss and propelled the dancefloor stomp of his most popular song to date, Ndokulandela. Following the heartbreak-fuelled introspection of 2020’s Iimini, amaXesha (or The Times) vaults to the other end of the scale as his most expansive and wide-ranging record to date. Across its 14 tracks, Mabandla fuses Xhosa lyrics with electronic ambience, hook-laden synth melody and acoustic simplicity.
Opening on the plaintive guitar melody of Sisahleleleni (i), Mabandla’s delicate vocal builds to an anthemic chorus, which undulates through synth processing. The blend of acoustic and electronic continues on standout Ukuthanda Wena, where his strumming weaves through an arpeggiated synth, developing the feel of Ndokulandela to gesture towards the melodic electronica of producers such as Bonobo.
Continue reading...In public she oozed glamour, but in private the disco star battled depression, self-loathing and suicidal thoughts. Her daughter speaks about the film she made to understand Summer’s silent struggle
In a New York hotel room in 1976, Donna Summer stepped towards the window ledge. She had become instantly famous the previous year for her pseudo-orgasmic vocals on her single Love to Love You Baby, which had reached No 2 in the US and Top 10 across most of Europe. But, unknown to her fans, she was horribly conflicted over the sexualised performance, and also in the grip of a violently abusive relationship. She began climbing up.
“Another 10 seconds and I would have been gone,” she later said – but her foot became entangled in a curtain and at that moment a maid entered. “I felt God could never forgive me because I had failed him,” she explained. “I was decadent, I was stupid, I was a fool. I just decided that my life had no meaning.”
Continue reading...Same track that topped Triple J’s Hottest 100 takes top gong, with Rüfüs Du Sol, the Kid Laroi and Sampa the Great also winning
Flume took home the top gong at the Australian Performing Rights Association (Apra) awards on Thursday night, winning song of the year for his track Say Nothing.
Featuring Sydney pop musician May-a and written in 2020 during the peak of the pandemic, Say Nothing also topped the Triple J Hottest 100 in 2022. When the track was released, Flume (real name Harley Streten) said it “is about feelings of post-relationship clarity”. It was performed on the night in a gothic cover by Perth outfit Alter Boy.
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Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt have absorbed the revolutions in dance and electronic music since their previous album in 1999, and shaped them into melancholic, finely detailed stories
This week, Everything But the Girl’s social media accounts posted some previously lost footage of the duo around the time of their debut album, 1984’s Eden. A riot of extravagantly spiked hair, filthy-looking London streets and indoor smoking, the clips act as a time capsule and a reminder of the milieu from which the duo sprang: a grimier, greyer, more earnest 1980s than pop cultural nostalgia – with its rouged new romantics and yuppies bellowing into enormous mobile phones – usually allows.
It was all a very long time ago. Bands who reform decades on from their breakthrough tend to follow a set path: warmly received live shows playing the hits, followed by a new album designed to evoke fond memories of the way they – and their fans – once were. But Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn were never a band minded to abide by anything but a desire, as Thorn once put it, “to defy categorisation even at the risk of losing a guaranteed audience”. Eden established them among a wave of artists dubbed new jazz, but they never made an album that sounded like it again: theirs is a back catalogue in which slick modern soul chafes against kitchen-sink-drama indie and deep house, where lavish 60s orchestrations fight for space with drum’n’bass inspired by Peshay and Alex Reece.
Continue reading...At the start of the 2010s, the Londoner released two tracks that would change the sound of the next decade. Then he vanished. This weekend, he rewards faithful fans with his first ever show
The Coachella lineup sparks discourse every year without fail: it can tell you who might have an album dropping soon or who’s less famous than they may have initially seemed, the sounds that will dominate pop over the coming year and the legacy acts set to re-form. This year, the poster featured a jarring but not unwelcome surprise: on the second line of the Friday lineup, ahead of upstart rappers GloRilla and Latto, below near-mythical figures Frank Ocean and Björk, was Jai Paul – the London producer who sent ripples through the pop landscape with two singles in the early 2010s, before basically disappearing altogether.
Billing on a festival poster might seem inconsequential, but it can mean the world to an artist – just ask Lana Del Rey, who threatened to pull out of Glastonbury this year after not appearing high enough on the lineup. It symbolises a career milestone that some artists spend their entire lives trying to reach. Which is why it’s unheard of for an artist such as Paul, who has never even played a live show, to achieve that status on his first go. Of course, it’s not unwarranted: Paul’s music remains totally singular and goodwill towards him is strong.
Continue reading...They got back together for a one-off show on Hanna’s doorstep. Then they realised they had unfinished business: to affirm their place in the punk canon and get warring feminists offline and revelling together
Most bands wring their hands over whether to reunite or not, but for Le Tigre it was easy. The impetus was a festival in Pasadena, Los Angeles, in 2022. “It was three miles from my house,” says frontwoman Kathleen Hanna, laughing. “I was like: ‘I want to do this because I can cruise down the hill and go to the festival and all my friends can come.’” Then they concluded that the rehearsals for the festival – done over video call, and in LA and New York where bandmates Johanna Fateman and JD Samson live – shouldn’t be wasted. They announced a full tour, their first since 2005, which hits the UK in June.
Returning now, with Hanna free from the Lyme disease that severely limited her life for more than eight years, feels cathartic. “Getting back together to perform these songs is a bit of resolution for us artistically,” says Fateman. “We were either under too much pressure from promoting an album or we didn’t totally get to realise our vision, so we’re able to scale it up almost 20 years later, which is a crazy opportunity – who wouldn’t take that?”
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The Korean-American singer-DJ examines complex questions of heritage on a debut album proper that expands her beatscape to include moments of grace
DJ, producer, remixer, rapper and singer Yaeji is on a mission to destroy limitations. Hammer in hand on her debut album proper, she targets everything from Asian American stereotypes to her own self-limiting holdovers, all the while retaining the more nourishing parts of her family’s culture. The NYC-based Korean-American continues to swap between Korean and English in her singsong delivery; two previously released tracks, For Granted and Done (Let’s Get It), take her work notably pop-wards.
Yaeji began as a creature of the dancefloor, moving from left-field bangers into the dreamier, more insular headspace of her mixtape What We Drew (2020). While the textures and rhythms of With a Hammer remain the work of the same producer, this 13-track album is a more emphatic, even angry work charting her emotional evolution.
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Full of alarms, arrhythmic pulses and deep bass, Hecker’s eerie work feels as if it’s bracing for cataclysm – but is nevertheless rich, warm and inviting
The rise of always-on streaming threatens to reduce ambient to a genre of convenience: palliative soundscapes to study and relax to. Tim Hecker has other ideas. Rather than distract or soothe, the veteran laptop composer’s latest reflects our jaundiced reality – full of aural pollution, oil splatter and other nasty stuff. Like the most wholesome ambient works, No Highs is immersive and oceanic. Unlike them, it is not somewhere you would want to bathe.
The record opens with a warning – an arrhythmic pulse bent by tremors and ill-omened sirens. But the promised threat never arrives, just lurks like something repressed. On his last few records, Hecker used piano or ancient woodwind to sweeten and lift his drone washes. No Highs is darker, dingier, yet oddly inviting. On songs called Monotony and Monotony II – yes, he has jokes – his fuzzy morse code tones become a strange source of comfort, like an alarm integrated into a dream.
Continue reading...On the day the late DJ and producer would have turned 60, his friends and family are ensuring that his club nights, festivals and sense of cosmic wonder all live on
When the DJ, producer, artist and raconteur Andrew Weatherall died in February 2020, aged 56, a quite extraordinary burst of activity began. As Weatherall’s partner, Lizzie Walker, says, “within 24 hours there were tributes and murals popping up all over the country – all over the world, in fact” – but that was barely the start of it. Social events, online communities and archival programmes haven’t stopped since, and this month’s AW60 series of events across the UK, around what would have been his 60th birthday, continues the love-in.
The main pillars of the Weatherall community are the A Love From Outer Space (ALFOS) club he founded with DJ partner Sean Johnston; the Weatherdrive, a vast online repository of 1,300 hours of his DJ sets, radio appearances and other media, with its linked Flightpath Estate community of completists who annotate everything; and the Convenanza festival, in a castle in the mystically inclined medieval town of Carcassonne in southern France, founded by the equally mystical Weatherall with friend Bernie Fabre, which returned last year and continues in 2023.
Continue reading...The Korean-American artist was a darling of the underground dance scene, but hadn’t fully reckoned with her painful past. She explains how reiki healing and anime led to clarity and a wondrous debut album
Done (Let’s Get It), the groovy, squelching centrepiece of Yaeji’s debut album With a Hammer, is proof that inspiration – and life-altering revelation, in fact – can arise from the most unlikely of places. A song about breaking cycles of inherited trauma, the Korean-American producer was inspired to write it not after a therapy session or deep meditation, but after watching her dog, Jiji, eat – and realising that she was raising Jiji in a similar way to how her parents and grandparents had raised her.
“My grandpa would make dinner for me and then tell me to eat fast – he was constantly pressuring me in this way that felt really visceral and violent, and I would have indigestion,” she says. “I found myself doing the same thing to Jiji – and while comical, it was also a serious realisation, an example of passing down vicious cycles. It was such a slap in my face.”
Continue reading...The musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, who has died aged 71 of cancer, spent his life as a restless traveller, both personally and musically. “I was born in Japan but I don’t think I’m Japanese,” he said in 1988, two years before he moved to New York. “To be a stranger – I like that attitude. I don’t like nationalities and borders.”
A founder member of Tokyo’s pioneering computer-pop trio Yellow Magic Orchestra, whose work between 1978 and 1984 has proved a lasting influence on hip-hop and electronica, Sakamoto was able to combine his skills as an academically trained musician with an aptitude for electronic music and an ear for countless musical styles. He sustained a lengthy partnership with the British musician David Sylvian after first working with his band Japan on the track Taking Islands in Africa from the album Gentlemen Take Polaroids (1980), following which the duo collaborated on the double A-side Bamboo Houses/Bamboo Music (1982).
Continue reading...Sakamoto was one of Japan’s most successful musicians, acclaimed for work in Yellow Magic Orchestra as well as solo albums and film scores
Ryuichi Sakamoto, the Japanese musician whose remarkably eclectic career straddled pop, experimentalism and Oscar-winning film composition, has died aged 71.
As a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra alongside Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, Sakamoto created joyous and progressive electronic pop in the late 1970s and early 1980s, alongside solo releases. He acted alongside David Bowie in the 1983 film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence and composed its celebrated theme, the first in a series of film scores including Oscar-winning work in 1987 with David Byrne and Cong Su for Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor.
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With his fourth album, the acclaimed British producer has created the vintage rave soundtrack he would have wanted as a teenager. The result is magnificent
This is a pandemic dance record like no other. At the start of his career, British producer James Holden skewed trance, then techno, garnering acclaim for his remixes. He has since spent two fascinating albums exploring different paths to flow states, increasingly incorporating analogue instruments, cosmic jazz and Moroccan gnawa, while still adapting his own analogue synth rigs.
His fourth album returns to the dancefloor, integrating all that has gone before. Too young for the illicit sound system era, Holden has created the vintage rave soundtrack he wishes had existed when he was a teenager, dreaming of free party transcendence. It’s a sense of yearning mirrored by the album’s creation during the scary days of lockdown when musicians’ incomes evaporated.
Continue reading...The star producer of Kylie and Gorillaz, and one half of electro duo Simian Mobile Disco, has gone solo with a pleasingly idiosyncratic debut album
As a top-flight music producer, either you stamp your signature sound on to your clients’ music or you help your artist locate and magnify their essential self. James Ellis Ford is brilliant at the latter. This decade alone, he has given Kylie Minogue, Gorillaz, Florence + the Machine and Depeche Mode a glow-up, while continuing his collaborations with Arctic Monkeys – Ford has produced most of their albums, including all-time classic AM – and, as a drummer, with Alex Turner’s band the Last Shadow Puppets.
Ford started out in psych-tinged indie rockers Simian during the early 00s; if you were anywhere near a dancefloor in 2006, you’ll remember Justice Vs Simian’s thunderous We Are Your Friends. When Simian split, James and the band’s synth genius, Jas Shaw, teamed up as electronic duo Simian Mobile Disco (SMD). In 2018 the pair had just finished groundbreaking choral techno album Murmurations when Shaw was diagnosed with AL amyloidosis, a bone marrow disorder, and had to take a step back.
The Hum is out on 12 May on Warp
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