Tori Amos review – flexing her musical muscle on an ecstatic return

London Palladium
Sounding as fresh as ever, the singer-songwriter swivels between instruments in an eclectic setlist scattered with cult classics, B-sides and covers aimed at pleasing the hardcore fans

‘You have been so missed” beams Tori Amos, sat astride her piano stool three songs into her first gig since the pandemic. The feeling is clearly mutual; the adoring front rows honour her return with three consecutive standing ovations, and you can feel the sense of relief ricocheting off the London Palladium’s ornate walls. Without the “voltage” of performing live, and grieving the death of her mother, the American singer-songwriter has said that she had depression in lockdown, eventually finding her way back via the rugged countryside of her adopted home of Cornwall. Realising she had to write her way out of the emotional fog, just as she had done on 1992’s uncompromising breakthrough Little Earthquakes, the ornate Ocean to Ocean started to take shape.

While this short UK tour is ostensibly in support of that album, her sixteenth, Amos is famous for her eclectic setlists peppered with fan favourites, B-sides and covers. Tonight is no different. After her ecstatic arrival in which she bows and mimes a wide group hug, she settles down between her giant Bösendorfer piano on one side and a bank of keyboards on the other. Head turned to face outwards, eyes peering inquisitively over the top of black-framed glasses, she joins her drummer and guitarist for the swirling Juárez, a song about the murder of hundreds of women taken from 1999’s electronic curio, To Venus and Back.

Continue reading...
by Michael Cragg via Electronic music | The Guardian

One to watch: Hinako Omori

The composer fuses Wiltshire field recordings with astral punk, drawing on the therapeutic Japanese practice of ‘forest bathing’

In a world beset by traumas, there has been a marked new age turn in music in recent years. The likes of Jenny Hval, Björk and Gang Gang Dance have made thoughtful use of therapeutic sounds while cleaving closer to this plane than ambient musical adventurers of yore. Even more so Yokohama-born, London-based composer and sound engineer Hinako Omori. Her debut album, A Journey…, is born of an immersive project created at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studios for the 2020 lockdown version of the Womad festival, and is inspired by the 1980s Japanese therapy of shinrin-yoku, “forest bathing”, a walk in the woods as an exercise in awareness.

Field recordings from the Chew Valley, Mendip Hills and the Wiltshire fields near Real World become a solarpunk sci-fi soundtrack on the likes of Spaceship Lament, in which sparse, silvery hazes and hyperdrive arpeggios are lit by suddenly transfixing swoops of synth. Time becomes elastic in Will You Listen In; its soft blooms, swells of synth, interweaving whispers and soft cries are made for Pauline Oliveros-style deep attention. A word of warning, though, on the album’s “healing” frequencies and binaural beats: “As a disclaimer, I’d recommend not listening to the music while operating machinery,” Omori has said. “A relaxed environment would be better.”

A Journey… will be released on 18 March on Houndstooth. Hinako Omori will perform at the Purcell Room, Southbank Centre, London, with the London Contemporary Orchestra on 19 March, 8pm

Continue reading...
by Emily Mackay via Electronic music | The Guardian

Yves Tumor review – a star-making statement of intent

Troxy, London
The genre-bending US singer-producer delivers a raw, kaleidoscopic show with the crowd-courting confidence of an artist on the verge of lift-off

The last time I saw Sean Bowie, AKA Yves Tumor, they were shirtless and writhing on stage, wreathed in dry ice. Their tall frame paced across a strobing backdrop as they belted out a lithe mix of experimental noise and nonchalant spoken word to a small, devoted moshpit of headbanging fans. The rest of us looked on, curious and somewhat bemused at this singular figure producing ear-splitting sounds as we waited for the main act, house producer Jacques Greene, to come on.

That was in 2017 at the Electric Brixton. Five years on, Yves Tumor is the defiant headliner, and that mini-moshpit of fans has turned into the entire room. Tonight’s show had been scheduled once more for Electric Brixton but was upgraded to the Troxy, which has double the capacity. A hushed buzz of anticipation sweeps round the art deco space before Bowie steps out in an orb of light in front of two vast plinths housing the band. They have ample reason to treat this show like a victory lap. It’s just one stop on a mammoth and largely sold-out US and European tour in support of the performer’s fourth LP, Heaven to a Tortured Mind (2020) and last year’s EP The Asymptotical World.

Continue reading...
by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘We see pop as a vehicle to say something’: meet club provocateurs Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul

The Ghent duo’s addictive songs bring playful humour to heavy topics. They talk friendship, signing with Soulwax and Belgian colonial atrocities

The backbone of Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul’s song Haha is the sound of Adigéry’s laughter spliced into a persistent refrain, a sound occasionally interjected with the phrase: “Guess you had to be there.” It’s as catchy as it is unsettling. The Ghent-based dance music duo want to make listeners dance – but they’re also not afraid of making them squirm with their pointed and drily funny politicised lyrics.

And yet, Adigéry was surprised when a white woman told them recently that she had been joyously dancing in her kitchen to another song, Blenda, until she realised they were singing about xenophobia (“Go back to your country where you belong,” Adigéry sings on the track) and suddenly felt uncomfortable. “I said maybe it’s not that bad that you knew you’d feel awkward,” says Adigéry. “[Maybe] that’s a new way to start empathising.”

Continue reading...
by Kadish Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian

Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul: Topical Dancer review – wildly eclectic electropop

(Deewee)
The Belgian duo’s debut album is a banging fusion of funk, house and techno that makes up for in mischievous energy what it lacks in subtle wit

Bangers that work the prefrontal cortex as much as the pelvis: that’s the manifesto for Belgian electropop duo Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul. Truth be told, they’re stronger on the hips than the quips. Their debut album, co-written and co-produced with Soulwax, is a treasure chest of funk, French house, sweaty techno and all kinds of dirty electronic weirdness to rival Moloko at their freakiest. But their takes on the fraught subject of wokeness on Esperanto (“Don’t say: I would like a black Americano/ Say: I’ll have an African American, please”), or sexual agency on the Timbaland-flavoured dark R&B of Reappropriate err on the side of basic.

The thumping, technoid Blenda, working out the tensions of immigrant heritage, and the rubberised-metal shimmy of It Hit Me, recounting the duo’s moments of sexual awakening, make a better fist of topicality. Their mischievous energy is toughest to resist on the cheeky Ceci N’est Pas Un Cliché, a string of overused lyrical phrases given marching orders over deeply infectious funky house, or Thank You, a pulsing, sarcastic up-yours to all us purveyors of unsolicited advice: “Couldn’t have done this without you and your opinion… Yes, I prefer my first EP too!”

Continue reading...
by Emily Mackay via Electronic music | The Guardian