The 50 best albums of 2019, No 7: FKA twigs – Magdalene

Sex, sensuality and inner strength formed the core of a breakup album that mixed moments of fragility with rousing uplift

• The 50 best albums of the year
• More on the best culture of 2019

Despite a total lack of scriptural evidence, Mary Magdalene is commonly remembered as a penitent former sex worker, a once-sensual disciple of Jesus who straightened out to follow him to his death and beyond. On this album named after her, FKA twigs seems to say: get somebody who can do both. On the title track, she sings “I do it like Mary Magdalene” in the context of sex – carnal, but devotional. “Mary Magdalene would never let her loved ones down,” she sings on Home With You, and neither, she intimates, would she.

She’s written about this kind of emotional labour and nurturing sensuality before on her breakthrough single Two Weeks: “Suck me up, I’m healing / For the shit you’re dealing,” promising sex that satisfies the soul as well as the body. On stage, twigs has added pole-dancing to her routines, movements that are loaded with sexuality but, as she performs them, also transcend it to become a celebration of sheer corporeal movement and self-discipline.

Related: The 20 best songs of 2019

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

DOM SERVINI’S ALLO LOVE BEST OF 2019 TEN :: DECEMBER 2019

1. SAULT – Why Why Why Why Why (Forever Living Originals)

2. Tawiah – Lost in a Dream (First Word)

3. Jaimie Branch – Nuevo Roquero Esteréo (International Anthem)

4. Greg Foat – Of My Hands (Athens of the North)

5. La Boa – Por Eso (Big In Japan)

6. A. Billie Free – Flourish feat. Angel Bat Dawid (Tokyo Dawn)

7. Quantic – Now or Never feat. Alice Russell (Tru Thoughts)

8. Corey King – Beautiful People (Def Pressé)

9. Steve Cobby – Feline Plastique (Bandcamp)

10. Sampa The Great – Final Form (Ninja Tune)

The post DOM SERVINI’S ALLO LOVE BEST OF 2019 TEN :: DECEMBER 2019 appeared first on Wah Wah 45s.

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'The vibe was sex, sex, sex': Cocktail D'Amore, Berlin's free-love club night

Now celebrating 10 years of hedonism, this staple of Berlin nightlife has become a place for people to escape the drudgery of 9-to-5 existence

The room is dark and teeming when, four hours into his set, Boris drops Patrick Cowley’s remix of I Feel Love. Sweat-scented and balmy with body heat, the room lifts off. As Cowley’s synthesiser solo gets ever more ludicrous, hands throw silhouettes on the rainbow lights; two men make love; a hand-standing Italian woman tries not to topple over.

This is Sunday night at Cocktail d’Amore in Berlin, a friendly, gay, delirious party that is celebrating its 10th birthday this year with, among other things, a compilation and coffee table book. Berlin has a new generation of queer club nights – among them Herrensauna, Lecken and Buttons – but Cocktail d’Amore was the initiator of this wave.

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by Liam Cagney via Electronic music | The Guardian

The 50 best albums of 2019, No 10: Weyes Blood – Titanic Rising

The LA singer-songwriter’s switch to stately orchestral pop earned Karen Carpenter comparisons, but her all-American concerns were firmly of our times

• The 50 best albums of the year
• More on the best culture of 2019

Going from playing bass in an avant-garde noise band called Jackie-O Motherfucker to garnering comparisons to Karen Carpenter is no mean feat. And yet that has been the winding trajectory of Natalie Mering, an auteur based in LA whose solo career reached an almighty crescendo this year with her fourth outing, Titanic Rising.

As slow and stately as a tanker turning, and as waterlogged as its title implies, Titanic Rising was a curio in 2019. Unburdened by modish musical trends – no guests, no genre crossovers – it was a feat of immersive beauty, the kind of record you might put on an old-fashioned stereo, dim the lights and sit through in one indulgent sitting, the better to appreciate its three-dimensional production washing over your skin like a gong bath.

Related: The 20 best songs of 2019

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Grimes review – a suitably surreal invasion of the Miami Art Basel

The artist appeared among Florida’s monied art fiends with a pristine alternate-reality trip – and a gloriously flawed DJ set

The art world has descended on Miami for Art Basel, the annual fair dedicated to proving that old idiom about a fool and his money. The most talked-about piece so far is by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, who has found at least two buyers for a work consisting of a banana duct-taped to a wall. Arrested Development’s Lucille Bluth once blithely asked: “I mean, it’s one banana, Michael. How much could it cost?” The answer, it turns out, is $120,000.

Grimes fans could be forgiven for wondering if she might pull similar art pranks at her mysterious one-off show Bio-Haqué, held at an abandoned RC Cola plant that’s now transmogrified into a graffiti-blitzed 7,000-capacity outdoor venue in the city’s trendy Wynwood district. Details were scant when she first announced the show, writing cryptically on Instagram that she’d be joined by fellow provocateurs Sophie and Nina Kraviz and that it would be “a place where the well-proven anti-aging properties of raving have been distilled into the most potent experience available on the market today”.

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by Kevin EG Perry via Electronic music | The Guardian