Everything but the gull: how Ben Watt fought the Covid blues with birdsong

Blackcap! Chiffchaff! Warbler! The Everything But the Girl star is fighting to save a nature reserve in the heart of the city. As his new album Storm Shelter is released, we join him for some birdwatching

Cetti’s warbler!” says Ben Watt suddenly, raising a finger to indicate the new addition to the ambient soundscape. Listen, he says, to the opening “chi” followed by what sounds “almost like a little typewriter going off”. Watts does that, interrupts himself, or the silence if he’s not talking, to announce a new bird he’s seen or heard. “Blackcap!” he’ll exclaim. “Chiffchaff!”

We’re sitting in a bird hide overlooking a reed bed and an expanse of water on a gorgeous spring day. A heron stands, still as a photo, two metres in front of us. It could be rural East Anglia – apart from the roar of traffic and the giant arched structure in the background. These are, respectively, the A406 north circular and Wembley Stadium. And the place we’re at is the Welsh Harp reservoir, named after a pub that no longer exists.

The damage we're doing will contribute to the end of us

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by Sam Wollaston via Electronic music | The Guardian

One to watch: BABii

The Margate-based multi-hyphenate channels her colourful upbringing on her hypnotic second album

For her forthcoming album, MiiRROR, BABii has produced 10 darkly beautiful electronic pop songs, directed videos, made costumes, designed an alternative reality game, written a fantasy book, birthed a dragon and typed a lot of extra “i”s. Born Daisy Warne, brought up by her father in Canada and England, she still helps run his arts studio in Margate as well as teaching video game writing at uni. Days off are rare.

Growing up surrounded by her dad’s artist friends in creative spaces and salvage yards, BABii learned how to create beauty out of anything, all the time. Recently, she reconnected with her mother, and the emotional aftershock led her to empty her heart into the fabulous MiiRROR. It anatomises BABii’s chaotic childhood and ongoing struggle with maternal figures, while sounding like a chainsaw made of candyfloss.

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by Damien Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian

Sophia Kennedy: Monsters review – showtunes and sub-bass from sonic shapeshifter

(City Slang)
Unable to categorise the Baltimore-born, Hamburg-bred artist, you are thrown into her disarming, disorientating but oddly relaxing emotional world

For the modern musician, genre-fickleness is no longer the exception but the rule. Switching styles and blending sounds doesn’t simply cater to listeners with depleted attention spans – it can also be a way of evoking and critiquing the chaotic internet culture that left them that way. Baltimore-born, Hamburg-bred artist Sophia Kennedy’s music does both those things, but it also channels a restlessness and nostalgia that has little in common with her peers.

For a start, her sonic references include Tin Pan Alley and vintage showtunes, she complements curious melodic callbacks with ominous electronica, expansive hip-hop, sub-bass, trap beats, twanging guitars and the sound of monkeys screeching. What’s also unusual is that she doesn’t temper this fluctuation with a consistent voice: frequently, it’s a low, stately, Bette Davis-style drawl; sometimes it’s a brittle falsetto; sometimes a taut, mean sprechgesang.

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by Rachel Aroesti via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘I’m going to follow my mind’: Falle Nioke, the Guinean musician who moved to Margate

The singer spent hard years touring west Africa to pursue his dream of a music career, but a chance holiday meeting – and relocation to the Kent coast – sealed the deal

Ten years ago, Falle Nioke was sitting with only his bolon drum for company in a Gambian jail cell, some 3,000 miles from the Kent seaside town of Margate where he now lives and light years from his current world of domestic bliss and critical acclaim.

Raised in Conakry, Guinea, the 33-year-old singer and percussionist spent most of his 20s as part of a touring group of musicians that played across west Africa, a pursuit often hamstrung by arrests pertaining to immigration permits. Nioke survived by whatever means necessary to hold on to his musical passion. “I used to make soap and go to the market to sell it to pay the rent,” he says today. “If someone was selling rice, we would sing for them and we would get some fees and some food.” His indelibly positive worldview was forged during these years. “Everywhere I have been, there are people who will be happy to help,” he says.

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by Max Pilley via Electronic music | The Guardian

Leon Vynehall: Rare, Forever review – warped, intense, cerebral

(Ninja Tune)
The DJ-producer’s introspective, genre-defying second album rewards engaged listening

Leon Vynehall’s 2018 album Nothing Is Still was a sleepy sensation. Although the house DJ had produced a couple of track compilations and entrancing singles, such as Midnight on Rainbow Road and It’s Just (House of Dupree), he took a giant step forward with his debut album, pulling jazz, ambient, club and chamber music into its sweeping ambit. Each song matched a chapter in an accompanying novella based on Vynehall’s family history; short films were shot. Played live, it evolved into something more warped, intense and cerebral, and some of that energy survives here.

Perhaps that’s because Rare, Forever looks inward. Although it’s as carefully constructed as Nothing Is Still, there is nothing as mellifluous as that record’s Movements (Chapter III). It’s more abstract, fractured, complex and unpredictable, fluttering across the lanes. This is best exemplified by Snakeskin ∞ Has-Been’s skittish rave, with its vertiginous drop and wasp-in-a-jar stabs, disintegrating without warning into the pastoral nocturne of its coda. Rare, Forever rewards engaged listening, though, and intriguingly it’s the classical and jazz influences that are most persuasive, particularly on album bookends Ecce! Ego! and All I See Is You, Velvet Brown, and Mothra’s majestic orchestral techno crescendo.

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by Damien Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian