Record by near-unknown producer sells for $41,000 to become most expensive on Discogs

Producer Scaramanga Silk, who earns nothing from sale to anonymous bidder, is baffled: ‘I do not believe that any record is worthy of such a valuation’

A virtually unknown track by a virtually unknown British electronic producer has sold for over $41,000 (£29,800) on the music marketplace Discogs, making it the site’s most expensive record ever, and one of the most expensive records ever sold anywhere.

Choose Your Weapon by Scaramanga Silk – who hails from London, and has seven listeners a month on Spotify – was self-released in 2008, and there were only 20 copies made of the edition that drew the high price. It was released as a promotional vinyl edition with an accompanying poem, art print and CD.

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

US toddler to release debut album recorded in the womb

Luca Yupanqui was recorded by her parents using ‘biosonic MIDI technology’

An American toddler, Luca Yupanqui, is gearing up to release her debut album, the world’s first LP made from sounds inside the womb.

Her parents are Elizabeth Hart, a member of psych-rock band Psychic Ills, and musician Iván Diaz Mathé, who has worked with Lee “Scratch” Perry and others. In five hour-long “joint meditation” sessions, they recorded Yupanqui in utero via electrodes on Hart’s abdomen, and using “biosonic MIDI technology” transcribed the vibrations they picked up into synthesisers.

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

Sophie's triumphantly plastic music moulded a new world for trans people

The producer’s death is crushing, but we’re left with hyper-real music and an iconography that upends femininity and points to a new way of living

• Acclaimed producer Sophie dies aged 34

Long before the late Scottish producer Sophie’s astonishing 2017 track and video It’s OK to Cry were released – an image of Sophie’s transgender body in joyful, anxious, and deeply felt flux – this artist was already special to trans people. Sophie had long crafted electronic dance tracks that freed femininity and bodies from their usual contexts and let them dance with abandon. In 2013 it didn’t matter to me, as a not-yet-out-even-to-myself transgender woman, whether or not Sophie was transgender. What mattered was that in early singles, such as the genre-redefining Bipp that year, we felt as though we could become something else.

Related: Sophie: 10 of the greatest tracks by a genius of pop's expressive power

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by Jessica Dunn Rovinelli via Electronic music | The Guardian

Caroline Shaw: what next for the Pulitzer-winner who toured with Kanye? Opera – and Abba

She has scored films, played with rappers, starred in a TV comedy, and performed for the dying. As the classical sensation releases three new works, she talks about the shock of playing arenas – and making the leap into opera

When Caroline Shaw became, at the age of 30, the youngest ever winner of the Pulitzer prize for music, she described herself as “a musician who wrote music” rather than as “a composer”. Partita, her winning score, is a joyful rollercoaster of a work, encompassing song, speech and virtually every vocal technique you can imagine. It was written for Shaw’s own group, Roomful of Teeth.

Eight years on, she’s still wary of defining herself too narrowly. “Composer, for some people, can mean something very particular,” she says, “and I’m trying to make sure I don’t get swallowed up into only one community.” Not that Shaw’s range shows any sign of narrowing: even a small sample of her work over the past few years throws up an array of names not often seen together: rappers Kanye West and Nas, soprano Renée Fleming, mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry, pianist Jonathan Biss. She has written film scores, sung on others, was the soloist in her own violin concerto, and even managed a cameo appearance as herself in Amazon Studio’s comedy drama Mozart in the Jungle. A year ago, Orange, a recording of her string quartets, won the Attacca Quartet a Grammy.

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by Erica Jeal via Electronic music | The Guardian

Cult musician Emmanuelle Parrenin: 'I like to dive into the void and invent something'

The singer and instrumentalist caused a riot at a Clash gig, cured herself of deafness, and, decades on from her debut LP, is an icon to young French producers. ‘I love to discover,’ she explains

“In terms of my career, I only made bad choices.” Emmanuelle Parrenin is discussing the importance of intuition. “But in terms of what I like, I made good choices.”

Intuition has taken Parrenin, now at an undefined point in her 70s, to some remarkable places: from stages with the Clash to deserts in Morocco, and in and out of deafness. Often narrowly described as a folk musician for her role in the revival of French traditional music in 1970s, her career has been an exercise in pushing boundaries – and, indeed, ignoring them – while becoming one of her country’s most enduring cult musicians.

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by Philip Bloomfield via Electronic music | The Guardian