Elza Soares: End of the World Remixes review – samba legend gets an electronic victory lap

(Mais Um Discos)

Despite being in her late 70s, the Brazilian samba legend Elza Soares had a banner 2016, putting out the triumphant and progressive album The Woman at the End of the World, and performing at the Rio Olympics opening ceremony, imperious in a purple wig. She gets a victory lap here, with a raft of remixers showing how easily she slips into modern Latin dance. A line is drawn with another Portuguese colony, Angola, and its kuduro style, with DJ Marfox getting hectic while Nidia Minaj pitches Soares down for a minimalist take on Pra Fuder. Omulu, meanwhile, brings her voice right to the front of the mix for the title track, in all its glottal vibrato and gloriously audible salivation. As with every remix album, there are some inconsequential versions, but the curators do a smart job of showing the breadth of Brazil’s electronic scene, from Ricardo Dias Gomes’s placid ambient to Marginal Men’s sinewy reggaeton shuffle.

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

Marc Almond webchat – post your questions now

Various artists: Re:works Piano review – tiring, tedious and boring

Decca

In 1917, Erik Satie coined the term “musique d’ameublement” – furniture music – in a radical stunt of deadpan performance art. “It’s new!” he wrote in his manuscript. “It isn’t tiring! It isn’t boring!” Satie’s rogue irony pre-empted muzak by several decades and set in motion (or anti-motion) the slow cogs of ambient music and experimental minimalism. Then there’s the dross. The most callous kind of crossover saps the integrity of both forms being crossed. Decca – once a stamp of prestige, now part of the Universal label group cashing in on the trend for insipid “neo-classical” – releases the next in its Re:Works series with this grim chillout collection of electronic remixes. Cheerless, senseless and overproduced, it smothers the remaining life out of Pachelbel’s Canon, weirdly straitjackets Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and trashes the maverick surrealist stasis of Satie’s Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes. It’s not new, it is tiring, it is very boring.

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by Kate Molleson via Electronic music | The Guardian

Brian Eno reissues review – back to the future with his most beautiful music | Alexis Petridis' album of the week

After leaving Roxy Music, Eno created solo albums – Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Before and After Science and Another Green World – presaging everything from post-punk to My Bloody Valentine

Glam rock made stars of some unlikely people. From Sparks’ Hitler-moustachioed Ron Mael to Slade guitarist Dave Hill, it was an era packed with people who, at any other point in rock history, might have struggled to get any further than a record company’s reception area.

Among their number was Brian Eno. It wasn’t that he didn’t look the part – a man who can carry off blue eyeshadow, a diamante choker and a black cockerel-feather collar in broad daylight is clearly possessed of a je ne sais quoi that’s handy in the world of entertainment. It was more that no one seemed able to say what he actually did, including Eno himself: in interviews he would describe himself as “a non-musician”, and his role in Roxy Music as vaguely involving “treating” the other band members’ instruments with a synthesiser and “talking about the ideas behind the music”.

Related: Brian Eno: ‘We’ve been in decline for 40 years – Trump is a chance to rethink'

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

I Feel Love review – a moving celebration of sexual freedom and LGBT rights

City Hall, Hull
Will Young, Alison Moyet and others raise the rafters in a heartfelt tribute to the end of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act – with a reminder of how far there is to go

Headlined by Will Young, Marc Almond and Alison Moyet, this concert to celebrate the 50th anniversary of sexual freedom – simultaneously broadcast on Radio 2 - doesn’t lack party atmosphere. There are ticker-tape explosions and massed singalongs of the Village People’s YMCA and Donna Summer’s I Feel Love, led by the Gay Abandon choir. The celebratory piece de resistance is surely the guy in the crowd singing along with a ventriloquist’s dummy, which has been glammed up in a silver wig. Yet for all the massed outbreaks of joy, the most effective moments are more downbeat. Presenter Ana Matronic from the Scissor Sisters reminds us that in the 1967 so-called Summer of Love, “a section of society could be dragged before a magistrate for holding hands in the street”. Actor Allan Corduner reads from Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, written while the literary giant served two years hard labour for “indecency”. He dreamed of a quiet life by the seaside but was dead within three years.

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by Dave Simpson via Electronic music | The Guardian