Drum’n’brakes: The cycling DJ taking the party to the streets

Lockdown stopped Dom Whiting’s indoor parties – so he got on his bike and put his decks to good use

With lockdown restrictions continuing, one man decided he was not prepared to wait for indoor parties to be sanctioned once again.

So he went on to eBay, bought a custom-made, three-wheeled bike, affixed his turntables to the handlebars and started simultaneously cycling and DJing around towns and cities across England, broadcasting electronic music from a speaker.

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by Mattha Busby via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘Black music is my superpower. It’s my way of showing love’: the art of Georgia Anne Muldrow

The LA musician, who has unleashed another of her psychedelic funk and hip-hop beat tapes, talks about social justice, her time in Brixton and the battle over ‘woke’, a word she helped popularise

Georgia Anne Muldrow may be more than 20 albums into her career and the woman who brought the word “woke” to wider consciousness, but she is not one for counting off milestones. “I’m the type of traditionalist that wants to give meaning to life,” she says. “My [concept of] success is directly linked to how Black folks see themselves; it’s not enough for me to be filthy rich or something, owning an island somewhere in the midst of what we live through.”

Since debuting with her EP Worthnothings in 2006, she has become known for her chameleonic ability to master different genres – soul, G-funk, jazz, electronic – under a number of aliases (for instance Jyoti) and collaborative projects. Last week, the 37-year-old vocalist, songwriter and producer released Vweto III, the latest in a series of beat tapes. These are self-produced and mostly instrumental albums full of psychedelic funk and prowling hip-hop (track titles such as Boom Bap Is My Homegirl show where her head is at). Besides solo releases, she has been featured on tracks by artists such as Erykah Badu, Flying Lotus and Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def), who described her as “like [Roberta] Flack, Nina Simone, Ella [Fitzgerald] – she’s something else”.

If somebody uses ‘woke’ in a derogative way, I don’t really care for what’s on their mind. I don’t really care about somebody who don’t even like Black people

Related: Georgia Anne Muldrow: Vweto II review – kaleidoscopic, sunshine timewarp jazz

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by Christine Ochefu via Electronic music | The Guardian

Lambchop: Showtunes review – American songwriting the slow and shimmering way

(City Slang)
Kurt Wagner puts a midi keyboard centre stage on Lambchop’s expansive, laid-back latest

Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner can’t play piano. So for Lambchop’s 15th studio album – the third in this Americana artist’s recent experiments in electronics – he transposed music he had written on the guitar on to a midi keyboard. The result is Showtunes, an album whose title suggests razzmatazz but delivers Wagner’s customary laid-back profundity with well placed digital embellishments.

Others have been this way before – Bon Iver and Low are just two guitar acts who have reinvented their work electronically. Yet Showtunes is indelibly a Lambchop album, a set of songs that references the legacy of American songwriting from inside a vat of shimmering treacle. The pace is slow but spacious, giving rise to a pair of instrumental meditations and a seven-minute track, Fuku, whose percussive pops, blithe piano motif and bittersweet brass accretes into a quasi-standard pondering the imperfect nature of love. Drop C uses cut-up found sound in a more staticky way, and Blue Leo essays some disorienting vocal manipulations that are perhaps too reminiscent of the latterday Bon Iver. Showtunes is much stronger, however, when Wagner layers its disparate elements more subtly – leaning into its limpid jazz horns and electronic atmospheres, with just the distant memory of an opera singer punctuating The Last Benedict.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes review – playful paean to a musical pioneer

Experimental and inventive, Caroline Catz’s film paints a fond, intimate and arty portrait of the influential electronic musician

I hope films like Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes (BBC Four) will still have a home at the BBC after BBC Four becomes an archive-only channel, as is planned. I cannot imagine anything so wilfully arty sitting on a more mainstream channel. This is a wonderfully inventive piece of storytelling that celebrates the strange brilliance of a mysterious pioneer of electronic music. Even if it is not likely to bring in record audiences, it would be a crying shame if it were not on television.

Knowing only a little about Derbyshire’s life before, and feeling much more illuminated afterwards, I think it makes sense that her story is told in this experimental style. It was originally a short film, written and directed by Caroline Catz, who has extended it to feature length. The result feels like several ideas spliced together, surprisingly effectively.

Related: Delia Derbyshire and the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop: From the archive, 3 September 1970

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by Rebecca Nicholson via Electronic music | The Guardian

Fatima Al Qadiri: Medieval Femme review – ancient and otherworldly

(Hyperdub)
This New York-based Kuwaiti artist combines early music with digital dubs to dreamlike effect

A decade into a career at the confluence of digital music and art, the latest album by New York-based Kuwaiti electronic composer Fatima Al Qadiri is full of echoes. Her 2017 EP, Shaneera, was a party-facing tribute to the “evil queens” in Arab culture, thriving in spite of oppression. More recently, her immersive score for Mati Diop’s contemporary ghost story, Atlantics, helped earn the film the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2019.

Medieval Femme, by contrast, hymns some very different Arab women to Shaneera – those of the medieval period – with the otherworldly delicacy honed on Al Qadiri’s soundtrack work. She has often played with perspective (how the west views the east) as well as place (often hyper-real) and time (juxtapositions, anachronisms), but never quite like this. Sheba sounds like early music laced with sighs of sensual longing and the merest scissor snip of 21st-century percussion. The meditative Tasakuba features sorrowful couplets from the seventh-century elegiac poet Al-Khansa. Apart from the more contemporary dystopian digitals of Golden, the feel throughout is ancient and enigmatic. But these lute tones and classical Arabic music figures are rendered digitally; the cloister garden is an interior dream-space.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian