Musique Non Stop | eMusic Electronica

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Fink, Hard Believer Posted: 14 Jul 2014 08:55 AM PDT After a slow build, something of a career climax The spacious beats that occasionally loom behind the songs on Hard Believer hint at Fin Greenall’s former life. The Bristol-raised DJ and producer has collaborated with Zero 7, Lamb, Nitin Sawnhey and even a 17-year-old Amy Winehouse (his track “Half Time” features on her posthumous compilation Lioness) — but Hard Believer is dedicated to somber, lushly orchestrated songwriting, a talent that has led to his curious niche on Ninja Tune. For a man with such a multilayered career behind him, Greenall — together with bassist Guy Whittaker and drummer Tim Thornton — can play it very straight, and the National-sized “Shakespeare” and “Looking Too Closely” sounding a lot like an as-the-crow-flies journey between the studio and the nearest arena. There are, however, moments that are harder to pin down: The title track’s stately gothic feel suggests Mark Lanegan, while the expansive “White Flag” sounds like a woozy vamp round a lost Bad Seeds piano motif. With two live albums — 2012′s Wheels Turn Beneath My Feet and 2013′s Fink Meets the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra — to the Fink name, Greenall’s ambitions have always been admirably grand, and Hard Believer should bring their fulfillment ever closer. As he sings on the moody Radiohead glower of “Pilgrim”: “From small beginnings come big endings.” After a slow build, Hard Believer feels like something of a career climax.

Musique Non Stop | eMusic Electronica

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Fatima Al Qadiri, Asiatisch Posted: 05 May 2014 11:46 AM PDT   Imagining China requires more than easy listening. Asiatisch, the first full-length by Brooklyn-based composer, musician and visual artist Fatima Al Qadiri, opens with a familiar melody. Over a bed of female voices, Helen Feng (ex-MTV China VJ and lead singer of Nova Heart) sings in Mandarin to the tune of Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares to You.” Beneath the melody, the choir arrangement shifts and modulates, each voice sampled and replicated into chords. Feng’s words, when translated back into English, amount to nonsense.

Musique Non Stop | eMusic Electronica

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Chet Faker, Built on Glass Posted: 15 Apr 2014 07:01 AM PDT   A wash of narcoleptic synths and stumbling beats with no momentum In 2011, Chet Faker’s brilliantly brooding version of the Blackstreet ’90s-R&B classic “No Diggity” went viral, not only reaching No. 1 on Hypemachine and sound-tracking a Super Bowl beer commercial but also helping to turn the Melbourne singer-musician’s debut EP Thinking in Textures into a pop hit back home. This led to a 2013 collaboration with kindred EDM upstart Flume; their haunted “Drop the Game” went platinum in Australia. All this is particularly remarkable for a dude who consistently looks and sounds as though he just woke up from an all-night bender. The process of writing, recording and playing nearly every note on Built on Glass, his first full-length album, may have dragged Faker out of his bedroom, but he actually sounds less awake and fully realized than on his earlier work: There’s nothing as effective as the oscillating electric piano on “Diggity” and little as catchy as his Flume collaboration. This is PBR&B without the inspiration of a Weeknd or Frank Ocean — a wash of narcoleptic synths and stumbling beats with no momentum. Despite his moniker, Faker’s got a genuine presence and it’s not all dissolute. In nearly every song here, he alludes to being emotionally and physically stuck, and his see-sawing tunes capture the vibe of someone whose bad habits, inner turmoil, and pull toward self-destruction get him nowhere and keep him there. Unfortunately, the music mirrors him: On “Talk Is Cheap,” the first single, his pained cry is compelling, but overly repetitive keys and vocal samples stagnate the track. All this comes to a head in “Melt,” in which he admits his happiness is “some kind of fucked up mess” while his duet partner Kilo Kish dreams of her bones being broken before she breaks off the relationship. But rather than capturing a capricious spark between losers, the two just sound lost: Faker comes off, irritated while Kish can’t even hit her easy notes. A sexual connection so strong that it’s likened to an overdose shouldn’t sound like a headache.

Musique Non Stop | eMusic Electronica

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Lockah, Yahoo or the Highway Posted: 13 Apr 2014 11:00 PM PDT   Exploring and expanding upon the intersections of hip-hop and electronic music It’s been two and a half years since Rustie’s Glass Swords, but its influence is hard to overstate. Alongside fellow Glaswegian Hudson Mohawke, Rustie’s pristine, album-oriented EDM continues to serve as a jumping-off point for a new wave of bedroom producers. Tom Banks, who records as Lockah and hails from the slightly less cosmopolitan city of Aberdeen, is one such producer, and on his debut album for Brighton-based label Donky Pitch, Yahoo or the Highway, he restructures what he has called his “rap-influenced pop music for the club” into something more intimate and melodic. Like his contemporaries, Banks uses his music to explore and expand upon the intersections of hip-hop and electronic music. But where Rustie’s sound is characterized by brassy stabs, Lockah’s is bubbly and optimistic, drawing heavily from Miami bass and the dance-crossover melting pot of mid-’90s radio. Banks’s pop vision is at once unassuming and exacting, with straightforward, repetitive harmonic progressions providing a foundation for minutely chopped-up beats and see-sawing synth lines. “If Loving U Is Wrong, I Don’t Want To Be Wrong” nods to INOJ’s classic “Love You Down” before expanding into a lush landscape that hovers somewhere between kitschy homage and highbrow reinterpretation. Banks’ sharp mixing allows him to tackle a gamut of sounds, from the glitchy, discordant syncopation on “Ayyo Tricknology” to the upward-spiraling “Heartless Monster.” And though there’s a certain irreverence at play here, the most jokingly-titled track, “Summer Jorts (Some Cats Still Do)” is also the album’s most ecstatic moment of originality, a blippy, Nintendo-via-YouTube confection that could easily be the song of the summer. It’s music that rewards short attention spans while playfully encouraging a deeper response.

Musique Non Stop | eMusic Electronica

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TRUST, Joyland Posted: 04 Mar 2014 06:00 AM PST   Abandoning surly lo-fi for perfectly sheen production In the two years since their brooding, coldwave-inspired debut album, Trst, Toronto synthpop outfit Trust lost a member (Maya Postepski, who left to focus on her band Austra) and became an alias for singer Robert Alfons. The switch-up seems to have given Alfons a new sense of clarity — on his new album Joyland, he mostly abandons Trust’s typically surly lo-fi sound for production that’s polished to a disconcertingly perfect sheen.

Musique Non Stop | eMusic Electronica

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Penny Penny, Shaka Bundu Posted: 13 Nov 2013 01:45 PM PST   Hard-hitting house from apartheid South Africa The youngest of 68 children (his father had 25 wives), Giyani Kulani Kobane was a 34-year old janitor working for a Johannesburg record company when he cut his 1994 debut as Penny Penny with the help of a sympathetic Tsonga tribesman, producer Joe Shirimani. Shaka Bundu, released several months before apartheid ended in South Africa, was an unexpected hit and sold a couple hundred thousand copies. Penny, who sang in the relatively insular Xitsonga language of his home Limpopo province, came to symbolize the country’s newfound tribal equality. Penny and Shirimani used an Atari computer and Korg M1 synthesizer to record Shaka Bundu. This is a hard-hitting house album that, reminiscent of dance bands like Londonbeat and Inner Circle, must have sounded both wickedly modern yet tribally funky to its fans. Variation is not Penny’s strong suit but he sure is consistent. Shirimani whips up secret-sauce bass lines with a subliminal organ vibe, female singers engage in spunky call-and-response, and steel-drum synths and Atari special effects add sonic spice as Penny growl-raps lines about witchcraft (“Shibandza”), empathy (“Ndzihere Bjhi”), and the culture of his native Limpopo region (“Zirimini”), with bonus elephant sounds on the latter. Everyone loves the baby of the family. Penny continued to tour and record and in 2011 was elected an African National Congress ward councilor in Limpopo.

Musique Non Stop | eMusic Electronica

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Interview: Planningtorock Posted: 16 Feb 2014 01:00 AM PST   On 2011′s eerily compelling album W, Planningtorock came wrapped in mystery — not to mention an astonishing facial prosthesis. Designed to undercut the typical assessment of a female singer’s looks, the heavy brow and nose shifted Jam Rostron’s identity as much as her pitched-down vocals, making her look like a beautiful and terrifying cross between a Roman emperor and intergalactic queen. On third album All Love’s Legal, however, the Bolton-raised, Berlin-based electronic musician, producer and video artist strips things back, heading straight for the gender-political jugular with a sharpened sense of intent. Worried that the lyrical ambiguities of W weren’t reflecting the issues most important in her life, Rostron found a new directness in last year’s remix of friends The Knife’s track “Full Of Fire” — retitled “Let’s Talk About Gender, Baby, Let’s Talk About You & Me” — and the Misogyny Drop Dead EP. With all All Love’s Legal, she pushes her message into the pulsing heart of the dance floor: “I don’t want to wait/ patriarchal life you’re out of date.”

Musique Non Stop | eMusic Electronica

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CEO, WONDERLAND Posted: 04 Feb 2014 06:00 AM PST Cranking his childlike vibe to 11 Like many of us, Eric Berglund, aka CEO, is stuck on childhood: The former vocalist of Gothenburg duo the Tough Alliance is now in his early 30s, yet still sings in a distinctly pre-pubescent whine. Many of his melodies recall kindergarten sing-alongs; his lyrics similarly suggest nursery rhymes, albeit ones, like “No Mercy,” that contemplate smoking crack. The catalog of his label, Sincerely Yours, which includes limited-edition music and apparel items like bulletproof vests, is numbered with the obsessiveness of an elementary student newly proud of his ability to create lists. Through it all, there’s a vibe, sometimes overt, sometimes less tangible but nevertheless felt, of aiming to heal what recovery programs identify as the child within.

Musique Non Stop | eMusic Electronica

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East India Youth, Total Strife Forever Posted: 13 Jan 2014 01:00 AM PST   The confident first step of a maverick embarking on a solid career As East India Youth, 23-year-old William Doyle has already managed to distinguish himself at a time when UK leftfield electronica is in seriously rude health. 2013 hit a peak, with high-profile releases from Jon Hopkins, Fuck Buttons, James Blake, the Haxan Cloak and James Holden, but EIY still made his mark with his debut EP Hostel, a canny, tag-averse combination of techno, ambient electronica, krautrock, synth-pop and singer-songwriter fare.

Musique Non Stop | eMusic Electronica

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Grammys 2014: Same Love Posted: 27 Jan 2014 08:39 AM PST If the Grammy Awards could be summed up by a song, it would be “Tradition,” the ode to the status quo from Fiddler on the Roof. Two of this year’s genre-spanning Big Four categories were won by Daft Punk, whose 2013 comeback album Random Access Memories reclaimed not only disco, but the idea of the session musician-aided pop spectacle; Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney each got their own performance slot, with Starr handling drums for his ex-bandmate; and the night’s two most chatted-about performances were focused on marriage — one involved a mass wedding, while the other breathlessly ran down the sort of drunken sexual congress that could happen even after rings had been exchanged. Talking about the Grammys as an awards show is always frustrating — the world of pop is vast, and as a bloc, the voting pool of the Grammys tends to favor institutions. Each year, this results in some laughable award recipients — yesterday, for example, Led Zeppelin’s Celebration Day, a recording of a 2007 reunion show at the O2 Arena, won Best Rock Album, while projects involving McCartney amassed four trophies, among them Best Rock Song for his collaboration with the surviving members of Nirvana, “Cut Me Some Slack.” Best Reggae Album went to a Ziggy Marley live record.

Musique Non Stop | eMusic Electronica

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Actress, Ghettoville Posted: 27 Jan 2014 01:00 AM PST A pared-down, pitch-shifted series of textural exercises Thanks to Darren Cunningham’s cryptic self-mythologizing, rumors swirled that the London producer’s latest LP as Actress, Ghettoville, might be his last: Press materials for the album ended with the statement “R.I.P. Music 2014.” As it turns out, though, Ghettoville only sounds like a door closing. Actress originally gained traction through sonically adventurous DJs like Richie Hawtin and Theo Parrish, who championed his hyperkinetic, uncategorizable post-dubstep. Now four albums into the project, Cunningham has morphed into a craftsman of gritty grayscale miniatures, which he uses here to describe a decaying cityscape (the album title reprises his 2008 debut, Hazyville.) While he throws the club a few bones here, on churning techno cut “Frontline” and the aquatic thumper “Gaze,” Ghettoville is predominantly a pared down, pitch-shifted series of textural exercises, as alluring for the experimental set as it is devoid of DJ-friendly fare. “Rims,” which devolves into an insistent click track, pushes sonic deconstruction to near-hostile levels, while the warped slow jam “Rap” slyly acknowledges that Cunningham once described his music as “R&B concrete.” As a piece of sound art, it’s finely drawn and intermittently seductive, but Ghettoville has the effect of further obscuring its creator’s intentions.

Musique Non Stop | eMusic Electronica

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Discover: PAN Posted: 24 Jan 2014 09:13 AM PST Few enterprises make followers of electronic music turn as saucer-eyed and reverential as PAN. Since its humble beginnings in 2008, the label run by Bill Kouligas has amassed a formidable catalog with an idiosyncratic identity. A noise record might be followed by a techno one; a collection of sounds made with modular synthesizers can come just as well before or after a work of abstract sonic collage. Each comes packaged in eerie, mysterious cover art — designed by Kouligas himself — establishing an aesthetic that’s both distinguished and distinctive. It wasn’t fated to mean much of anything at the start. “Sometimes you want to put out stuff by people you like, and you just go and do it,” Kouligas says. “I didn’t start with the idea to make a label. It was more of a DIY move.” PAN started in London, where Kouligas moved to go to art school after growing up in Athens, Greece. He studied graphic design. “My main passion for years was typography — I was fascinated by the whole Fluxus history of design and concrete poetry books, very experimental things like that,” he says. After school, and shortly after starting PAN, he moved to Berlin, where his interest in the textures of underground noise music communed with the energy of techno. “I started listening to more big bass music when I moved to Berlin, and it was interesting for me to see how the music of that city could filter through what I do,” Koulias says. Dance records slowly started to find space in the PAN discography, but even the danciest among them sounded skewed and strange. (“The dance releases are still very experimental and freeform by dance-music standards,” Kouligas concedes.) Alongside records suited for the club (if only a very discerning, refined club) came music devoted to drones and bowed strings and peculiar aural phenomena of the inner-ear known as psychoacoustics. It’s all amounted to serious business, sound-wise. “I don’t care necessarily about seriousness in the sound, but I do care about people being serious about what they do and what they represent,” Kouligas says. “Artists on the label pay a lot of attention to the creation of what they do and what it means, both conceptually and musically. That’s a crucial point for me. I’m not going to put a record that just sounds nice — I need to know more about the whole picture.”

Musique Non Stop | eMusic Electronica

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I Break Horses, Chiaroscuro Posted: 22 Jan 2014 12:29 PM PST   A remarkable juggling act with a twinkly electronic aesthetic Chiaroscuro is a $5 art-world term that means the use of light and dark in an image. Sure, it would have been simpler for I Break Horses to name their sophomore album Contrasts. But primary songwriter/frontwoman Maria Lindén has no interest in taking the easy road. Jettisoning the shoegazy wall of guitars that marked their first album Hearts, the Swedish musician has embraced a twinkly electronic aesthetic that owes more to M83 and Ladytron than My Bloody Valentine. It’s a remarkable juggling act, Lindén orchestrating keys, drum machines and an untold number of effects, interweaving them with her fairytale soprano to create a deliciously oppressive atmosphere.

Musique Non Stop | eMusic Electronica

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Who Is…Marley Carroll Posted: 16 Jan 2014 02:36 PM PST File under: Melancholic electro-pop with psychedelic sample play For fans of: Dntel, Caribou, Toro Y Moi From: Asheville, North Carolina Marley Carroll isn’t the easiest musician to pin down. A singer-songwriter who admires Four Tet’s sampling prowess? A former hip-hop turntablist whose warm, fuzzy first record evoked Sebadoh and Slowdive? All of these things are true of Carroll, a North Carolina musician whose recent album Sings runs from winsome electro-pop to sentimental neo-shoegaze to skittering bass music to trim, minimalist house tracks, variously recalling John Talabot, Akufen, Vampire Weekend and James Blake along the way. (He also provided some helpful tech advice to this reporter, who spent the 30 minutes prior to the interview struggling with the damage caused by a massive system failure.) The son of an architect, Carroll grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, and headed off to Los Angeles to study at CalArts. “I kicked around L.A. for a year or two afterwards,” he says, “but never really found my footing, never really fit in. At the time, there was a recording studio called Echo Mountain that was opening in Asheville. Gorgeous studio. I decided I would try to get an internship or a job there. I ended up moving to Asheville. It was supposed to be my decompression from L.A., but now I’ve been here for five years, living and working and making records. It’s a really wonderful place.”

Musique Non Stop | eMusic Electronica

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Heatsick, Re-Engineering Posted: 04 Dec 2013 02:19 PM PST Turning to Eurodisco, acid house and samba If New York and Berlin-based label PAN, home to the likes of Lee Gamble and SND, is a hub for musical cross-pollination, then Steven Warwick, the mind behind Heatsick, is its resident Puck — an indefinable smart-aleck with an aim to gently provoke. A Casio wiz with a wide-ranging skill for emulation, Warwick mixes composed figures with improvisation in his live sets, a technique he used to blissful effect on 2012′s Déviation EP. On Re-Engineering, his latest, most compact effort, he tunes his ear to Eurodisco, acid house and samba to explore the concept of DJ tools for club play. Warwick’s creations are most appetizing when served with a dash of self-awareness (the industry-spoofing “Watermark”), a strength that helps him wink suggestively at institutions like British radio and the aging dance-club culture that informs his music. “Speculative” squirms under smokey lounge ornamentation, while “Mimosa” has a kitschy Afro-Cuban topcoat, and the lightly funky title track paraphrases William Carlos Williams in a deadpan spoken-word piece (“a poem is a machine made out of words”). That piece is later reprised on “Accelerationista” amid chittering birdsong, and alongside the hypnotic “Dial Again,” it sounds like an invitation either to call back, or disconnect entirely.

Musique Non Stop | eMusic Electronica

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1. Laraaji’s Cosmic Ambience and Stunning Beauty
2. The Many Sides of Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes
3. Teengirl Fantasy, Nun EP
4. Daniel Avery, Drone Logic

Laraaji’s Cosmic Ambience and Stunning Beauty Posted: 27 Nov 2013 09:47 AM PST In May of 1978, Brian Eno found himself subletting a flat in Greenwich Village in what would prove to be a fertile period for the man and his music. Within the next two years, he became a staple on the downtown scene, recording no wave bands for the epochal No New York compilation and collaborating with CBGB fixture Talking Heads on a series of records that moved their sound away from punk and toward a polyrhythmic groove that would power the band on into the ’80s. But late in 1979, Eno happened upon a busker while strolling through Washington Square Park. He was sitting in the lotus position, eyes closed, lost in the waves of sound he coaxed from his zither. When Edward Larry Gordon opened his eyes, he found amid his donations Eno’s business card. He entered the studio with Eno a few months on and emerged with a new name (Laraaji), a new album (1980′s Day of Radiance, released as part of Eno’s influential Ambient series), and a new sound: his zither run through a patina of electronic effects. It was a relationship that would continue throughout that decade and into the ’90s, with Laraaji releasing a string of albums for Eno’s All Saints imprint. This music revealed a strain of New Age that could be by turns placid yet exquisitely psychedelic, mind-elevating and body-erasing. Gordon’s life, in particular, serves as a definition and counterpoint. He was born in Philadelphia, where he learned to play violin, piano and trombone; he eventually studied composition in Washington, D.C., at Howard University. After college, in the early ’70s, he relocated to New York City, where he took up stand-up comedy and acting, in addition to playing music gigs. No doubt influenced by the Eastern spiritualism infused into the late-’60s free jazz of John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders that still hung in the air of the Village, Gordon began to study with gurus like Swami Satchidananda and Shri Brahmananda Sarasvati. But it was when he came upon a zither in a pawn shop that he became attuned to his musical and spiritual calling.

Musique Non Stop | eMusic Electronica

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Clark, Feast / Beast Posted: 26 Oct 2013 12:21 PM PDT At 29 tracks, Clark’s double remix album — where he is both makeover artist and subject — satisfies both elements of the title, but it’s more smorgasbord than sit-down banquet. His is a restlessly adventurous creativity that’s produced a series of startling records perhaps best described as baroque house, but here he’s aware of serving not only like minds (e.g. Nathan Fake, Amon Tobin), but also those from radically different worlds (Health, Depeche Mode, Maximo Park). Consequently, Clark has tempered his love of textured micro explosions, as the delicate dismantling of Glen Velez’s “Bendir” and the Looney Tunes minimalism applied to Letherette’s “D&T” attest.

Musique Non Stop | eMusic Electronica

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Penny Penny, Shaka Bundu Posted: 13 Nov 2013 01:45 PM PST Hard-hitting house from apartheid South Africa The youngest of 68 children (his father had 25 wives), Giyani Kulani Kobane was a 34-year old janitor working for a Johannesburg record company when he cut his 1994 debut as Penny Penny with the help of a sympathetic Tsonga tribesman, producer Joe Shirimani. Shaka Bundu, released several months before apartheid ended in South Africa, was an unexpected hit and sold a couple hundred thousand copies. Penny, who sang in the relatively insular Xitsonga language of his home Limpopo province, came to symbolize the country’s newfound tribal equality.

Musique Non Stop | eMusic Electronica

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Interview: Cut Copy Posted: 12 Nov 2013 01:41 PM PST Australia’s Cut Copy first emerged in 2004, their name — a dry reference to routine computer functionality — belying the hedonism that’s always been a crucial part of their sound. Their debut album marked them out as big fans of New Order, but they made that indie/dance union sound fresh and vital, replacing untouchable cool with warmth, sincerity and unselfconscious fun. Their next two albums were similarly stuffed with shimmering, disco-pop hooks, but for Free Your Mind, Cut Copy opened the door to the unexpected by hiring Dave Fridmann, a rock producer with a reputation for throwing psychedelic curveballs. They tracked back even further in dance-music history — in particular, to late-’80s Manchester — to reanimate a revolutionary clubbing experience geography and timing had denied them. Returning to the source, they’ve proved, can also be progression.

Musique Non Stop | eMusic Electronica

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M.I.A., Matangi Posted: 05 Nov 2013 06:00 AM PST Balancing between clamor and self-reflection, politics and partying M.I.A.’s career has been propelled by constant questioning: She’s used her music and her persona to slice preconceived notions about geopolitics, gender, and cultural identity to ribbons. She refuses to be boxed in by any demographic, whether it’s her ethnicity, her class, her gender, or her status as a mother—almost a sin in the targeted-marketing era. Instead, she fuses all of these elements, as essential together as they are irrelevant apart. And if her boastful, stuffed-to-the-gills fourth album Matangi could be summed up with a single, driving question, it would be: “Why?”