Neo rhythms: why techno music and The Matrix are in perfect harmony

The films’ heroes look like they’ve just stepped off the Berghain dancefloor – and the connection isn’t merely aesthetic. The series shares the genre’s philosophy of liberation

“We can’t see it,” says a character in The Matrix Resurrections, “but we’re all trapped inside these strange repeating loops.” Small surprise techno producer Marcel Dettmann was commissioned to write music for this latest film in the franchise. It’s a natural fit. Its director, Lana Wachowski, goes clubbing at Berghain, the Berlin techno club where Dettmann is resident and where, cut off from the everyday world, people have surreal, liberating experiences. Techno continues to inspire the franchise’s aesthetics.

When club techno arose in 1980s Detroit, African American producers were reimagining the deindustrialised city as a site of futurist fantasies. Cybotron’s dystopian 1984 track Techno City was inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the Tokyo of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s track Technopolis. “I extrapolated the necessity of interfacing the spirituality of human beings into the cybernetic matrix,” said Cybotron’s Rik Davis (using the word “matrix” before the film existed), “between the brain, the soul and the mechanisms of cyberspace.”

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by Liam Cagney via Electronic music | The Guardian

The 10 best contemporary albums of 2021

The year’s best experiments ranged from Blank Gloss’s ambient Americana to Space Afrika’s manipulated Manchester field recordings and Floating Points’ extraordinary electronic masterpiece

• More on the best music of 2021
• More on the best culture of 2021

So much new composition seems to make connections between contemporary minimalism and early music. Narrow Sea sees Pulitzer prize-winning composer Shaw create a very American variety of antique minimalism, featuring opera soprano Dawn Upshaw. The ancient folk song Wayfaring Stranger and other Sacred Harp hymns are placed in a disorientating sonic environment, with Gilbert Kalish providing discordant piano and the New York ensemble Sō Percussion switching between Steve Reich-ish marimbas and atmospheric effects on ceramic pots, water bowls and dulcimers.

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by John Lewis via Electronic music | The Guardian

New artists join Adele and Dua Lipa on list for first non-gendered Brit awards

As the music prizes strive for inclusivity, first-timers Self Esteem and Central Cee make the shortlist along with veterans Abba

Adele, Ed Sheeran, Little Simz and Dave have topped the largest-ever field of nominations at the Brit awards, as the ceremony moves beyond gendered categories.

Each artist earned four nominations, including in the new “artist of the year” category that has replaced “British male” and “British female”, and for album of the year. New awards have been added this year to highlight excellence in genres: alternative/rock, hip-hop/grime/rap, dance, and pop/R&B.

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘Everyone was partying for their life’: Bang Gang, bloghouse and the indie sleaze of the mid-2000s

A new book charts the rise and fall of an internet-fuelled electronic music movement that sent Australian artists global and set Sydney’s Kings Cross alight

Back in the mid-noughties, one party ruled Sydney’s Kings Cross. It was called Bang Gang, and co-founder Jamie Wirth remembers it well.

“Oh my God, it was wild. It was just fucking mayhem,” Wirth recalls. “There was a bit of dodginess, a lot of smooching, it was pretty horny. It was wild, and colourful, and it was like everyone was partying for their life. But it was also a celebration of this new form of music: it was exciting, and it was coming out every week.”

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by Katie Cunningham via Electronic music | The Guardian

Jerusalem in My Heart: Qalaq review – bearing witness to a manufactured apocalypse

(Constellation)
Radwan Ghazi Moumneh and avant garde peers collaborate on a defiant, vulnerable lament for Lebanon

• More albums we missed in 2021

Radwan Ghazi Moumneh has had a hand in some of the most astonishing experimental music this side of the millennium, both behind the scenes as recording engineer at Montreal studio Hotel2Tango and on stage fronting his own project, Jerusalem in My Heart. The Lebanese artist merges folk instrumentation and field recordings with abyssal drones and tectonic electro-acoustics, forming a foundation upon which his grave, guttural vocals are sung in Arabic.

On Qalaq, he inverts the orchestral premise of his prior LP, choosing instead to collaborate with avant garde peers in a remote, individuated and turn-based capacity – one that invites each guest artist to interpret the record’s titular theme of deep worry and anxiety for Lebanon. The result is an album that’s as defiant and visceral as it is vulnerable.

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by Tayyab Amin via Electronic music | The Guardian