Georgia: Euphoric review – seizing the day

(Domino)
Recorded in LA, the British singer-producer’s breezy third album is bigger on uplift than individuality

It would be natural to assume that Georgia’s third album tilts at dancefloor bliss. Georgia Barnes is made of beats: after a stint session drumming, the London singer-producer made her name with club-facing tracks. Her last LP, Seeking Thrills (2020), went big on the rush of hedonism. Then there’s the small matter of her dad being in Leftfield.

Here, though, Georgia is describing a more personal state, beyond sweating it out under lasers. Made in LA alongside co-producer Rostam Batmanglij – once of Vampire Weekend, now producer to Clairo and Haim – Euphoric seeks to capture a sense of freedom, born of letting go of baggage and widening horizons. The death of a close friend is also in the mix.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Lance Gurisik: Cull Portal review | John Lewis's contemporary album of the month

(33 Side/Pias)
Gurisik’s startling album – think Aphex Twin meets Keith Jarrett – combines jazz, electronica and contemporary orchestral music to compelling, coherent effect

Cull Portal slowly mutates in various directions. Analogue synths burble; intense meditative improvisations develop on the piano; pastoral string sections fade in and grow more harmonically complex; wispy saxophones spray modal jazz riffs over coruscating digital drones; live drums and electronic breakbeats occasionally disrupt proceedings. Imagine Tangerine Dream, Keith Jarrett, Vaughan Williams and Aphex Twin all playing concurrently, but still managing to create a coherent and compelling composition.

Lance Gurisik is a conservatoire-trained Australian composer and occasional commercial jingle writer who has returned to Sydney after many years in London. Most of this LP was recorded in isolation, under lockdown, using a vintage Yamaha CS-80 analogue synth, an acoustic piano, and a remotely-recorded string ensemble. The centrepiece is an 18-minute triptych entitled Cull, where the same rising chord sequence is repeated across three tracks in very different ways – as a glistening babble of synths, as a Bill Evans-style piano improvisation, a Wayne Shorter-ish saxophone freakout, a densely written pastoral string arrangement and eventually a morass of squelchy synth and electric piano textures. The next three tracks – Portal, Limbo and Quanta – create a similar trilogy by repeating a hypnotic two-chord phrase, first as a clanking, discordant industrial electronic riot, then a series of shimmering ambient drones and eventually a funky broken-beat groove.

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by John Lewis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Mercury prize 2023: Arctic Monkeys tie Radiohead’s record for most nominations

There are first-time nods for the likes of Fred Again, Lankum, Jockstrap and Raye, and repeat recognition for acts including J Hus and Jessie Ware

Arctic Monkeys have claimed their fifth nomination for the Mercury prize for seventh album The Car, making them the joint most-nominated artists in the award’s history alongside Radiohead. While Thom Yorke and co have never won, the Sheffield band previously took home the gong for their debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, in 2006.

This year’s shortlist features second-time Mercury nominations for four acts. J Hus is recognised for his third album, Beautiful and Brutal Yard – released on 14 July, the cutoff for this year’s submissions – following a nomination for his debut in 2017. Loyle Carner is up for his third album, Hugo, following recognition for his 2017 debut, and Young Fathers follow their 2014 win for debut Dead with a nod for Heavy Heavy. Jessie Ware receives her second nod, and first in 11 years, for her fifth record, That! Feels Good! “It means a lot,” said Ware. “It’s a prestigious award and recognition and I think I feel far more ready to receive it 11 years on. Being up for my debut was kind of amazing and overwhelming – I appreciated it then but I think I will really relish the moment this time.”

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by Laura Snapes via Electronic music | The Guardian

How Landscape made Einstein a Go-Go: ‘It was so ahead of its time we waited a few months to release it’

‘The phone calls in the intro are genuine – to the Kremlin, the White House, the Iranian embassy. If you did that today they’d send a Swat team’

We had been this cult and edgy instrumental jazz-punk-indie band that no one would sign. The nicest rejection letter I got was from Quincy Jones: “Great horns, great arrangements, pass owing to time commitments.” I’d started the band as a nine-piece to play my own music, which wasn’t very economically viable. We got it down to five and decided we’d try to make the band sound as big as possible using electronics.

Landscape a Go-Go (The Story of Landscape 1977-83) is out on 21 July

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by Interviews by Dave Simpson via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘Montmartre was dead’: how Paris district has been revived by music

The 18th arrondissement so beloved of tourists has been transformed by indie record labels and musicians

Quentin Lepoutre takes a seat outside at seafood brasserie La Mascotte. As the moustachioed producer, otherwise known as Myd, looks up, he notices he isn’t dining alone. On his right is triple-platinum selling French singer-songwriter Renaud – and on his left is Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo of electronic music duo Daft Punk, eating oysters.

“On this terrace there are maybe four tables, and there were three generations of musicians,” Myd laughs. “Classic 18th life.”

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by Henry Young via Electronic music | The Guardian

Jessy Lanza: Love Hallucination review – a sensual producer’s pursuit of pleasure

(Hyperdub)
The uniquely puckish Canadian electronic artist spans pop and beguiling abstraction on her fourth album, as she writes about boldly confronting her needs

Jessy Lanza’s third album, 2020’s All the Time, traded in suggestion. The Canadian producer let fly little wisps of desire – “want / you” – on the breeze of her off-kilter, neon-hued club music in the hope that they might be reciprocated. Love Hallucination changes mode: Lanza is no longer asking but demanding orgasms, devotion and boundaries, sometimes losing herself in the gulf between desire and reality. “So frantic with no purpose,” she sings over the wonky funk of Gossamer, sounding pleasurably lightheaded in pursuit of her needs.

Lanza has credited this newfound boldness to her initially writing these songs for other artists. Yet Love Hallucination isn’t cosplay but an affirmation of Lanza’s unique ear. Her tactile heavy bass, cirrus-wisp synths and spun-sugar falsetto have deepened: the low end is diamond-hard, her playful freestyle-inspired melodies and moods glimmer like the light refracted through the gem. Don’t Leave Me Now is at once prowling and prismatic in its hi-NRG; the glimmering Drive is a study in liquid and solid. There’s pop potential (the sing-songy “you’re unkind!” chorus of Don’t Cry on My Pillow) and beguiling abstraction (Big Pink Rose swerves between petal-plucking dreaminess and breakbeat tremors).

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by Laura Snapes via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘Here’s a green blob. What does it sound like?’: the kids’ orchestra making mind-expanding noise

Cornwall Youth Noise Orchestra sounds like the harsh end of 80s industrial and freaks out even their teachers. Ahead of a major concert, we visit their adventurous sound lab

It’s Wednesday afternoon, and the scene in a room on the campus of Falmouth university looks like after-school clubs the country over: a handful of teens, some enveloped in hoodies, some eating crisps and sweets; a couple of tutors. There the similarity ends. The desks are piled with an array of electronic music-making equipment: oscillators, modular synthesisers, a visibly homemade “white noise machine”, pens with contact microphones attached to them, an old four-track Portastudio connected to a series of effects pedals, a DJ turntable playing sound-effects records. Intermittent squeaks, whooshes and honks emerge as the teenagers start fiddling with them. A selection of microphones hang from a beam: swinging over small amplifiers on the floor, they produce squeals of feedback that shift in and out of phase, an idea borrowed from Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music, a 1968 piece subsequently covered by both Sonic Youth and Aphex Twin, who hails from just a few miles away.

This is a rehearsal by the Cornwall Youth Noise Orchestra, the brainchild of Matt Ashdown and Liz Howell of Moogie Wonderland, which began as a club night and now bills itself as “a participatory arts organisation”. Ashdown is also guitarist in “improvisational noise-rock trio” Mildred Maude, while Howell is descended from electronic music royalty: her dad is Peter Howell, a mainstay of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop throughout the 1970s.

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

One to watch: Anish Kumar

The Cambridge student weaves Daft Punk-esque house, anthemic breakbeats and moody hip-hop on his remarkably self-assured debut mixtape

On dancefloors across the UK, South Asians are having a moment. Thanks to the growing popularity of grassroots organisations such as Daytimers and Dialled In, a new generation of DJs including Yung Singh, Gracie T and DJ Priya are making names for themselves by blending the music of their heritage with high-energy genres such as garage, jungle and house.

The latest in this nascent lineage is Anish Kumar. A student at Cambridge University, Kumar has been spending his time between classes learning how to interpolate niche soulful vocals into emotive floor fillers. His debut self-released single, 2021’s Little Miss Dynamite, featuring a sample of Brenda Lee’s 1964 song Is It True pitched up into a summery house banger, earned a spin on one of DJ Annie Mac’s final Radio 1 shows. Kumar followed this success with 2022’s EPs Postcards and Bollywood Super Hits!, the latter putting a club-ready spin on Hindi film tracks and receiving co-signs from arena DJs Four Tet and Bonobo.

A Mixtape by Anish Kumar, available to pre-order, is out via Awal on 25 August

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

Lindstrøm: Everyone Else Is a Stranger review – minor variations on sleek space disco pleasures

(Smalltown Supersound)
This Norwegian producer returns from his period forays into the leftfield for an album that is as fizzy and enticing as ever

Hans-Peter Lindstrøm is nothing if not consistent. The Norwegian electronic producer is known for his romantic, cosmic take on disco: along with his countrymen Todd Terje and Prins Thomas, he helped popularise a sleek, euphoric form that felt novel in the mid-2000s, and which is now the de-facto soundtrack of every hip beachside bar the world over. Once in a while, Lindstrøm will make a left-field, exploratory record before snapping back to the space disco that made him famous.

Everyone Else Is a Stranger, his first album since the 2020 Prins Thomas collab III, represents the snap-back point: it’s a suite of four gloriously starry-eyed dance epics, filled with cheeky synth whirrs and undulating bass rhythms. It has all the enthusiastic fizz and enticing hue of a £30 bottle of pét nat; although it’s slightly less exciting than the seductive, moonlit III, it arrives at the perfect point of summer, when the heat is gruelling and the only thing that might help you cool down is 40 minutes of expansive synth jams.

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by Shaad D'Souza via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘This is so creepy!’: the Taylor Swift vinyl haunted by Britain’s weirdest musicians

Certain vinyl copies of Swift’s Speak Now have a bizarre glitch: they’re playing a obscure British electronica compilation. We delve into this ‘Bermuda Triangle of weirdness’

‘Please help me,” pleads Rachel Hunter on a TikTok video now seen by millions, as the sound of ominous drones hum beneath a robotic voice repeatedly asking, “The 70 billion people of Earth … where are they hiding?”

The noises are emitting from a record spinning on a turntable – the brand new vinyl release of Taylor Swift’s re-recorded Speak Now. Except it’s not. It’s the churning sounds of industrial-electro pioneers Cabaret Voltaire sampling the 1963 sci-fi TV show The Outer Limits on their 1992 track Soul Vine (70 Billion People).

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by Daniel Dylan Wray via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘I don’t believe in the idea of a future’: the Ukrainian producer who invented dungeon rap

Musician Alex Yatsun’s house was shelled by Russian forces, but he has focused the trauma and apocalyptic feeling into atmospheric tracks that help him get ‘out of reality’

When the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, Alex Yatsun was living just 30km from the Russian border in the northernmost part of Kharkiv. “When I woke up that day I started living in a completely different reality,” he recalls. “There were bombs falling every hour.”-

Yatsun’s family evacuated but he soon returned north to more dangerous territory to volunteer at a medical centre. “But my house was hit by shelling,” he recalls. A photograph on his Instagram shows the aftermath: huge chunks of wall blown out, smashed windows, a mangled front door. “That was the moment I decided to move closer to central Ukraine.”

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by Daniel Dylan Wray via Electronic music | The Guardian

Peter Brötzmann obituary

German saxophonist who was a pioneering figure in the world of European free jazz

Although the media label of “the loudest, heaviest free-jazz player of them all” pursued the saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, who has died aged 82, for much of his career, his music and his thinking about his art amounted to a great deal more than pyrotechnics.

For an artist who spent the best part of six decades spurning what music-lovers of many genres might consider a catchy hook, Brötzmann drew a remarkably devoted international audience into his personal soundworld.

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by John Fordham via Electronic music | The Guardian

Anohni and the Johnsons: My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross review piercing heartache

(Rough Trade)
Recorded at speed, Anohni’s first album since 2016 adds a soulful swagger to poetic, cathartic rock

On her first album since 2016’s hollowed out electronic lament, Hopelessness, and the first using the “and the Johnsons” moniker in more than a decade, Anohni continues to soundtrack oppression, loss and alienation with heart-aching precision. The presentation has shifted, however: made with British producer Jimmy Hogarth (Duffy, Amy Winehouse), songs such as lead single It Must Change and Can’t add a soulful swagger to often brutally direct lyrics contemplating forgiveness for abuse and the sudden loss of a friend (“I don’t want you to be dead”), respectively.

Loss also permeates the incandescent ballad Sliver of Ice, which poetically traces the final moments of mentor Lou Reed’s life, Anohni’s multi-octave voice dancing round a searching guitar figure. While in the past, piano and orchestral flourishes augmented shifts in emotion, here cathartic rock excess anchors the winding Rest and the gut-punch of Scapegoat, while Why Am I Alive Now?’s paean to a dying world is something approaching light-footed pastoral folk.

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by Michael Cragg via Electronic music | The Guardian

Our government sees it as cute but unimportant: the musicians keeping Frances Occitan language alive

Post-revolutionary France tried to stamp it out, but working class communities kept speaking it. Now Occitan powers a vivacious and political music European music scene

It’s May Day in Marseille, and beyond the celebrations – and the ongoing protests against President Macron raising the retirement age – another smaller but just as potent group are taking a stand on behalf of marginalised voices. It’s the 30th edition of the annual street party la Sardinade des Feignants (translated as the Lazy Man’s Sardinade), organised by the 40-year-old Massilia Sound System, a raggamuffin reggae and dub collective. In the blazing sun, the band toast the exuberant crowd as cooks grill sardines, the regional staple that give the celebration its name, off to the side.

Massilia also sing in Occitan, AKA langue d’Oc, and promote the conservation and vibrancy of this language and its dialects. The romance language sounds like a mixture of Catalan and Italian with barely a hint of a French accent, and its speakers sweep across the Pays d’Oc of southern France and into the Pyrenees and northern Italy. But today, says Massilia’s Tatou, AKA Moussu T (Mr T in Occitan), “the government still sees regional cultures that are not the language of the court of Versailles as exotic, folkloric, bizarre – cute but unimportant.”

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by Gianluca Tramontana via Electronic music | The Guardian

Japanese Breakfast review a two-way high-wire act

Roundhouse, London
Korean-American songwriter – and bestselling author – Michelle Zauner revels in an expansive set of dreampop and electronica laced with heartbreak and joy

Anyone partial to a narrative arc that goes from struggle to tragedy to validation need look no further than Japanese Breakfast – an indie rock success story and literary sensation, currently on an extended victory lap around Europe. You might call them bounce-back specialists: they keep doing it. The five-strong touring band missed their Glastonbury slot a few days ago owing to travel delays from Luxembourg, but their chief creative, Michelle Zauner, is a sanguine and ebullient presence tonight. Encased in a shiny skirt and banging a large gong as the band strike up Paprika – a chamber-pop song about the contradictions of being a successful performer – she bounces sinuously around the stage. The song’s woozy marching-band feel is underlined by violin and saxophone. “I guess I’ll never get to Pilton,” Zauner quips.

Her star ascended slowly and painfully. After years trying to make it in bands, the musician moved back to Oregon in 2014 to be with her mother, who was dying of pancreatic cancer. That period of intensity, then mourning (she had also recently lost her aunt), gave birth to Zauner’s first two solo albums as Japanese Breakfast, Psychopomp (2016) – named for the mythological figures that guide the deceased on to the next life – and Soft Sounds from Another Planet (2017), more sonically escapist.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian