‘We’re on TikTok? What’s TikTok?’ The forgotten bands going supersonic thanks to gen Z

Ageing acts that can’t even get radio time are going viral – and finding themselves playing arenas or even soundtracking Ukrainian resistance. But how do you follow up a hit no one can explain?

Like most musicians, Ryan Guldemond of the Canadian indie band Mother Mother had an extremely quiet 2020. Towards the end of the year, however, the frontman noticed that songs from the band’s 2008 album O My Heart were suddenly spiking on streaming platforms. Day after day, the numbers continued to rise. Something strange was happening. “We were able to track it to TikTok and it was like, ‘Well, what’s TikTok?’” Guldemond recalls. “There was this whole alternate universe of people enjoying Mother Mother songs written long ago.”

In 2008, Guldemond says, Mother Mother couldn’t get a song on the radio or build a significant international following: “There’s a thing called the Canadian curse where you can do well in Canada but you can’t break out.” They grew used to operating at a modest level. Now, thanks to TikTok, they have 8 million monthly listeners on Spotify – almost double that of their more lauded Canadian contemporaries Arcade Fire. Hayloft, an oddball tale of rural violence, has surpassed 400m streams — more than any song by, say, REM (bar Losing My Religion). In February, five years after they played to 350 people at London’s 100 Club, Mother Mother will headline the 12,500-capacity Wembley Arena.

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by Dorian Lynskey via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘Like brushing my teeth’: how Michiru Aoyama writes, records and releases an album every day

For two years, the Kyoto musician has risen at five, watched football, then made an eight-track album of super-deep ambient music – while fitting in a two-hour walk. And 200,000 fans are listening

When you’re interviewing a musician, it’s considered a good idea to have digested a decent amount of their art. Having said that, Michiru Aoyama, a Ryuichi Sakamoto fan and resident of Kyoto, has released a new album every single day since at least 31 December 2021 – so despite a fortnight of almost non-stop listening, I’ve barely scratched the surface.

I say at least because Aoyama has so many releases that if you scroll down on his Spotify page, the system basically groans and gives up. Today’s album is called Xyo, yesterday’s was Card, the day before that Moriko; they stretch on and on in their hundreds.

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by Rob Fitzpatrick via Electronic music | The Guardian

The 20 best songs of 2023

Voted on by over 30 Guardian music writers, we celebrate the year’s best tracks from Boygenius to Blur and beyond

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by Aneesa Ahmed, Ben Beaumont-Thomas and Laura Snapes via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘Euphoric’, ‘opalescent’, ‘perfect pop confection’: Australia’s best new music for December

Each month our critics pick 20 new songs for our Spotify playlist. Read about 10 of our favourites here, including Thelma Plum, The Native Cats and Holiday Sidewinder

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For fans of: 80s Madonna, Prince, Ladyhawke, Liz Phair

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

Love Minus Zero: L’Ecstasy review – Tiga and Hudson Mohawke unite on a high

(Love Minus Communications)
The Canadian and Scottish producers’ on-off partnership comes to fruition on this aptly titled, category-defying clubland set

Collaborative tracks made by the unlikely duo of electronic producers Hudson Mohawke (Glasgow) and Tiga (Montreal) have been trickling out slowly since a banging rave track called Love Minus Zero first appeared in 2020 (a Bob Dylan song of the same name is not an obvious reference point). Despite being very different creatures – the younger HudMo is a famed maximalist, while cult figure Tiga is a rave veteran with a sleeker aesthetic – the two clicked. “No apology, no cynicism, no irony, no winking,” is their mission statement of sorts. This 16-track collaboration, pointedly called L’Ecstasy, functions a bit like a less in-your-face version of the Skrillex/Fred Again/Four Tet juggernaut sweeping clubland. Here, bleary, ecstatic passages break up the squelchier, ravier and occasionally more punishing highs.

The odd track out is the best: In Order 2, a melancholic wallow in goth chords whose heartbreak theme is unexpectedly disrupted by a glorious saxophone line (Wolfgang Tillmans loved it so much he provided the LP’s powdery artwork). BuyBuySell is another crisp workout defying easy classification. But there is precisely nothing wrong with the rubbery techno of Duro, or superb guest features by Channel Tres on Feel the Rush, or Jesse Boykins III on Silence of Love, either.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Bespoke retro-futuristic synthesisers – in pictures

As a boy, Love Hultén used to tear electronics apart trying to understand their insides. Now, the Swedish audiovisual artist creates bespoke retro-futuristic synthesisers; his clients include Eminem, A$AP Rocky, Danger Mouse and Michael B Jordan. “I love analogue synths: learning how to manipulate sounds using hands-on controls and tactile waypoints is very intuitive and fun,” says Hultén. Unlike the touchscreens the music industry now tends to favour, his handmade synths are encased in wood, resulting in visually striking, high-concept objects. “I try to present alternatives to today’s tech. Commercial products go through strict processes that in my opinion kill the product. I’m a small-scale, one-man studio, unaffected by corporate principles, and I don’t need to compromise.”

See more at lovehulten.com

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by Kathryn Bromwich via Electronic music | The Guardian

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

‘My mother’s neurosurgeon loved Berghain’: producer Sofia Kourtesis on love, loss and her debut album

The Peruvian artist left her country for Berlin to be comfortable in her sexuality – then family illness took her back. She’s poured the turmoil into one of the year’s best dance albums

Of all the places to take your mother’s world-renowned neurosurgeon, Berlin superclub Berghain might not be top of most people’s lists. But, the Peruvian producer Sofia Kourtesis reasoned, she had seen so much of the Berlin doctor’s workplace, “I told him: ‘I want to show you a little of Sofia’s world.’” They went for Peruvian food before hitting the club this May. “He really loved it,” she says. “We bonded in a very beautiful way.”

The unlikely duo met when Kourtesis was seeking medical advice for her mother, who had been diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer and whose health was deteriorating rapidly. She needed life-saving surgery that very few specialists could offer. Kourtesis, who lives in Berlin, read about Peter Vajkoczy and was determined to reach him, despite knowing that obtaining an appointment would be near-impossible. She posted an Instagram story saying: “If anyone can put me in touch with Peter Vajkoczy, I’ll dedicate a song to him. I just need two minutes to talk to him.” Vajkoczy appreciated her cheeky request and agreed to meet.

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by Dhruva Balram via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘We put his face back together again’: the groundbreaking show bringing Ryuichi Sakamoto back to life

Shortly before his death this year, the iconic Japanese composer worked on mixed-reality concert, Kagami – featuring new music, 48 cameras and magic glasses for the audience

Todd Eckert is explaining, in circuitous yet joyous fashion, how he first fell in love with the work of the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. It’s a conversation that meanders through Eckert’s teenage visit to Preston, his years as a punk rock kid in Houston, Texas and his time producing the 2007 Joy Division film Control – yet ultimately always returns to Sakamoto’s astonishing songcraft.

“Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence was not the first thing of his that I had heard – it may have been Left Handed Dream – but it was the first thing that I totally understood,” he says, sitting outside a Brooklyn cafe in bright yellow trainers.

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by Laura Barton via Electronic music | The Guardian

Sofia Kourtesis: Madres review – a hymn to dance music’s healing powers

(Ninja Tune)
Dedicated to her parents, the Berlin-based Peruvian’s joyous debut album is a masterclass in emotive electronic production

Family is a constant inspiration for Peruvian producer and DJ Sofia Kourtesis. Her breakthrough 2021 single, La Perla, was dedicated to her late father, merging a gorgeously undulating melody with voice recordings, evoking a yearning for home from her new base in Berlin. Following a string of remixes for Caroline Polachek and Jungle, Kourtesis now delivers her debut album. Dedicated not only to her mother but also to the neurosurgeon who performed life-saving cancer surgery on her, Madres’s 10 tracks are a masterclass in emotive electronic production.

The opening title number sets the record’s joyous tone. With Kourtesis’s soft falsetto reverberating over a modular synth, it soars spaciously, spiralling outwards. This imaginative, cinematic quality is also a feature of the dancefloor-focused tracks such as the thumping Si Te Portas Bonito and bass-fuelled highlight Funkhaus. The ambient vocal layering in Moving Houses is an unconvincing, sketch-like interlude, but overall Madres is an uplifting experience. It peaks with How Music Makes You Feel Better, in which a techno-infused beat anchors a euphoric, arena-sized synth line, expressing Kourtesis’s belief in music’s capacity to heal the spirit.

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

The Guide #110: The outsized influence of PC Music

AG Cook’s oddball imprint founded in 2013 has had a seismic impact on the charts. Now, after ten years, it can wind down in victory

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There are woefully few grand narratives in pop music these days. Over the past 20 years, there’s been nothing even remotely similar to the thrilling scenes that defined late 20th-century Britain: punk, rave, goth, two-tone, Madchester, New Romantic, garage – genres that send hearts hurtling back to a certain time and place. Even grime – whose mid-2010s popularity explosion re-energised British music, fashion and politics – was essentially a reprise of the sound that blazed a trail through 2002. In fact, when surveying the pop landscape today, it seems the closest thing we have to an overarching ‘moment’ is still The New Boring, a term coined by writer Peter Robinson in 2011 to describe the beige, ballad-heavy wave of tediously inoffensive music – your Ed Sheerans, Adeles, Coldplays – that was smothering the zeitgeist at the time. By many metrics, it still is.

If this sorry state of affairs has you primed to grieve the end of pop culture, fear not – because it’s only half the story. A genuinely novel musical subculture actually has been unfurling over the past decade: it may not have revolutionised British nightlife, but it has steadily worked to reinvent pop music in its own image.

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by Rachel Aroesti via Electronic music | The Guardian

The Chemical Brothers review – mesmerising barrage of thunder and lighting

OVO Hydro, Glasgow
Sound is turned into spectacle in a theatrical two-hour performance mixing bold visuals and rapturous tunes into meticulously choreographed awe

Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons are indistinct within a looming ring of keyboards, drum machines, laptops and mixers. It isn’t clear, through darkness and dry ice, what precisely they are doing to conjure the mesmeric thunder of a Chemical Brothers live show. But they are busy as druids in a stone circle, working magic among the machines.

Nothing in this two-hour performance suggests the duo – now in their early 50s – are trading on past glories. Yes, the bassline of Block Rockin’ Beats is cheered like a returning hero, but the highlights actually come with less familiar songs, less straightforward moods. Wide Open is equal parts euphoric and elegiac. Goodbye is acid gospel in which bass pounds the chest – EDM as CPR – while a sampled vocal makes the heart ache.

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by Peter Ross via Electronic music | The Guardian

Overmono review – sparkling shards of rave culture tear up the dancefloor

Roundhouse, London
The Russell brothers bring the party to a damp weeknight, using ecstatic production and crowd-pleasing samples to inspire mass dancing even from those seated

Although pounding kick drums, speedy hi-hats, crawling basslines, and looped vocal samples are often associated with DJ sets in late-night club spaces, Overmono are one of the growing number of dance music acts showing that the genre can thrive in a large-scale gig environment and not lose its gritty character. London’s Roundhouse provides an alternative type of big-room experience to what tech-house-loving-bros might be used to, yet the concave roof collects the sound, engulfs listeners, and facilitates a Wednesday evening dance.

The duo of brothers Tom and Ed Russell, AKA Truss and Tessela, get the energy high from the off with their heavy Joy Orbison and Kwengface collaboration Freedom 2, before heading into their more synth-heavy, ecstatic cuts. Big tracks like Gunk and BMW Track are mixed in with crowd-pleasing samples – such as Ruff Sqwad’s Functions on the Low, the Streets’ Turn the Page, and Tessela’s own Hackney Parrot – and smooth transitions are made between them all; soon even those in the seating area stand up and move in a hemmed-in two-step.

Get more Overmono tour information here

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by Aneesa Ahmed via Electronic music | The Guardian

Women, life, freedom! Iranian electronic musicians reflect on a year of protest

A new compilation of work by female producers honours the women fighting for their rights in Iran in the wake of Mahsa Zhina Amini’s death in police custody

In September 2022, Mahsa Zhina Amini died after being arrested by Iran’s “morality police”, for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly. Authorities claimed she had a heart attack and brain seizure, but witnesses to her arrest said she was a victim of police brutality. The uprising sparked by her death was the largest Iranian civil rights movement since the revolution in 1979, as thousands took the streets and were often met with violent subjugation from the country’s authorities.

More than a year has now passed, and the ubiquitous chants of “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” (meaning “woman, life, freedom” in Persian) have seeped from the streets of Iran into the works of female Iranian electronic artists – literally so in the case of Azadi.MP3, whose track Empty Platform is filled with chants of those protests alongside heavily percussive beats.

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by Christina Hazboun via Electronic music | The Guardian