Harp: Albion review – former Midlake frontman traipses through twilight

(Bella Union)
Tim Smith’s first album with Kathi Zung takes inspiration from William Blake and the Cure to create a landscape of 80s reverb and ghostly vocals

Heavy with quiet, Harp’s debut album invokes Sussex fields to muse on creative loss, loneliness and bittersweet new love. Inspired by William Blake, Herstmonceux Castle and the Cure’s Faith – possibly the Crawley band’s most desolate record – Tim Smith and Kathi Zung craft a barren landscape out of 80s-indebted reverb, ghostly vocals and sharp, tinny drums. It feels like a permanent twilight.

Albion arrives a decade after Smith left the Texas folk-rock band Midlake, citing creative differences, and fans of his previous work will be gratified by the texture and detail here: synthesised strings, sirens and wheezy flutes lurk behind a misty layer of electric and acoustic guitar. Frustratingly, Smith’s grand, mournful voice is buried in the mix, his gravitas subdued by swathes of sound.

Albion is released via Bella Union on 1 December

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by Katie Hawthorne via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘Mick Jagger was surprisingly hard-working’: the all-star life of synth whiz Wally Badarou

His reputation for futurist pop got him work with everyone from Grace Jones and Talking Heads to Foreigner – now the French keyboardist is reissuing a soundtrack for a yoga DVD that became a Balearic classic

During the course of the 1980s the pioneering French keyboardist and synth innovator Wally Badarou played on a string of chart-topping singles and albums for artists as varied as Grace Jones, Talking Heads, Robert Palmer, Level 42, Mick Jagger, Herbie Hancock, Jimmy Cliff, Gwen Guthrie, Julio Iglesias and more besides. Despite being in close proximity to such storied musicians, he says that only once during his illustrious career did he know that a song had hit written indelibly all over it: Foreigner’s I Want to Know What Love Is.

“It wanted to be that way,” he says of the archetypal soft rock power ballad. “And the record company wanted it. The rest, whether it be Pop Muzik, Addicted to Love – that wasn’t meant to be a hit – Burning Down the House … I was like, ‘Oh, it’s a hit. How interesting.’”

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by Jim Butler via Electronic music | The Guardian

One to watch: Montañera

The London-based Colombian singer-songwriter and composer travels through space, time and genres with her trusty Korg synthesiser

Cities can be lonely places until you find your footing, especially if you’ve travelled from another continent. But María Mónica Gutiérrez has created her own choir to keep her company. The singer-songwriter and composer layers her vocals to ethereal effect, recalling the delicate layering of Imogen Heap but also the music of her motherland, Colombia – such as bullerengue, where groups of women harmonise to promote peace and preserve traditions.

Gutiérrez moved to London from Bogotá for a music masters degree and goes by the name Montañera. It means “mountaineer” in Spanish, which seems fitting for her sonic explorations: adventurous and yet solitary. Her debut album, A Flor de Piel, began as a response to feeling untethered from a sense of place but sketches out her own musical world. She blends instruments and sounds from Colombia’s Pacific and Caribbean coasts alongside influences from Senegal and ambient electronics.

A Flor de Piel is out now on Western Vinyl

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by Kate Hutchinson via Electronic music | The Guardian

Celia Hollander: 2nd Draft review | John Lewis's contemporary album of the month

(Leaving Records)
Hollander’s works sound simple but are incredibly detailed and multi-layered, her treated piano solos evoking wind, rain and air

People have been playing the piano for centuries, but few people have ever made it sound like Celia Hollander does. Her latest album genuinely seems to redefine what the instrument can do. The music made by the Los Angeles-based composer – both under her own name and under the pseudonym $3.33 – is all about digital manipulation: 2020’s Recent Futures saw her mutilating everyday sounds; the sampladelic disfigurations of 2021’s Timekeeper recalled Brian Eno’s ambient works.

Here she uses the same techniques on an upright grand. While serving as composer-in-residence at an arts centre in Nevada, she recorded herself playing a series of piano improvisations – epic, swirling solos, featuring tumbling arpeggios and harp-like cascades – and then brilliantly mangled them in post-production. Fragments of her improvisations are sped up, slowed down, played backwards, pitch-shifted and put through numerous digital effects.

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by John Lewis via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘If it doesn’t smell like funk, something’s wrong with your recipe’: Brazilian baile funk goes global, again

Four decades after it originated in the favelas of Rio, a new wave of the electronic music genre is exploding on TikTok, and inspiring the likes of Cardi B and Travis Scott

Harsh, thunderous kicks; offbeat, crispy cymbals; powerful – sometimes incomprehensible – vocals, all preferably blasted out of sturdy speakers. This is the sound of baile funk, an electronic music born 40 years ago the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and one of the most thrilling and downright weird sounds to ever cross into mainstream culture.

While it has long since spread throughout Brazil, it has recently spilled over the country’s borders into memes, fashion weeks, and today’s anglophone pop: Cardi B and Travis Scott have tapped into it this year. And there’s a new wave called bruxaria, which translates as witchcraft, a sombre, four-on-the-floor strain that blossomed in São Paulo’s fluxos – parties in favelas (slums or working-class neighbourhoods) where souped-up car sound systems blast music throughout narrow streets all night long. Bruxaria has also gained momentum beyond Brazil, in turn giving birth to phonk: an internet-based music that exaggerates (and arguably smooths out) its predecessor’s main traits, and has exploded on TikTok and Spotify. Nearly 7m people are subscribed to Spotify’s main phonk playlist, making it one of the most popular in the world.

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by Felipe Maia via Electronic music | The Guardian

God is a DJ: the Jesuit priest who runs avant garde electronica nights

Father Antonio Pileggi is a former composer who found his calling running a festival dedicated to ethereal and spiritual expressions of electronic, ambient and experimental music

On a windy evening in late October, Father Antonio Pileggi’s flock are queuing up under the portico of the 15th-century Jesuit church on Milan’s San Fedele Square. The theme of tonight’s congregation at the San Fedele Cultural Centre, however, is not evangelism but electronic noise.

The 57-year-old Jesuit priest, a tall and thin figure with a crucifix around his neck, is presenting an evening of music by experimental electronic composers Maryanne Amacher and Tim Hecker, a Canadian whose ambient instrumentals veer between bliss and terror. The worshippers, silently seating themselves inside the newly renovated auditorium, are university students, electronic music fans and metalheads. Next month, Pileggi will host a concert by Nine Inch Nails’ keyboardist Alessandro Cortini, who will play on a self-designed Strega synthesizer.

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by Marco De Vidi via Electronic music | The Guardian

Flying Lotus review – electronic music legend flexes his jawdropping skills

Here at Outernet, London
Despite being a heavily garlanded and in-demand collaborator, composer, label owner and soon to be sci-fi director, the musician seems happiest simply making people dance

Very few people can say they’ve soundtracked a Netflix series, made music with Kendrick Lamar, Thom Yorke and Herbie Hancock, started a world-famous electronic label, won a Grammy, and are currently directing a Hollywood sci-fi movie. Flying Lotus has done it all, but after having spent time focusing on his cinema, this one-off gig shows the musician is still in the business of making people dance.

Fan-favourite Flying Lotus tracks, including Kendrick collaboration Never Catch Me, 2010’s Zodiac Shit, as well as Black Gold and Pain and Blood from the Flying Lotus-produced animated series Yasuke get huge cheers from the crowd who chant lyrics back in unison. But it’s when Lotus knows he’s in a safe space to experiment that he’s at his happiest.

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by Aneesa Ahmed via Electronic music | The Guardian