Ambient music legend Midori Takada: ‘In Japan, artists keep going right into old age’

At 70, the groundbreaking musician is enjoying a late career bloom thanks to the internet. She talks about her prog rock past and escaping western influences

The sight of Midori Takada whiplashing between drums, cymbals and marimba is something few observers forget. She is a mesmerising performer of great physical intensity. So her billing as a “70-year-old percussionist” ahead of a performance at Melbourne’s Rising festival – a bit like calling Paul McCartney an 80-year-old guitarist – makes her smile. “It doesn’t quite tell the whole story,” she says, laughing good-naturedly. “I have a few more strings to my bow than that.”

Takada etched her name in musical history with the enigmatic ambient classic Through the Looking Glass, which she recorded over two days in 1983, engineering the album and playing gongs, ocarinas, chimes and every other instrument herself. Although the album fell into obscurity, Takada has in recent years become a cult figure, with her monk-like musicality and reverential cataloging of obscure world music. Her work, meanwhile, has been revived for millennials and generation Z by endless recycling on YouTube and social media, alongside her contemporaries Brian Eno and Steve Reich.

Continue reading...
by David McNeill in Tokyo via Electronic music | The Guardian

Haai: Baby, We’re Ascending review – rich, entrancing ambience from a party-starter star

The Australian producer’s anticipated debut is something of a left turn from high-frequency techno, at its best when it holds back in favour of open space

Over the past few years, Sydney-born DJ, producer and songwriter Haai – real name Teneil Throssell – has become something of an underground star in her adopted hometown of London.

A two-year resident at the Brixton club Phonox, Throssell’s sets are renowned for their frenetic pace and euphoric peaks, largely comprising breakbeat-heavy house and techno, with sojourns into other more idiosyncratic styles. Perpetually clad in sunglasses and seemingly always bearing a cheeky smile, she is a preternaturally talented party-starter, an intuitive, crowd-focused DJ with wide-reaching taste.

Continue reading...
by Shaad D'Souza via Electronic music | The Guardian

Andy Fletcher obituary

Keyboard player and business brain of Depeche Mode who pushed the electronic band to long-lasting success

Bands could not function without a member designated the quiet standard bearer, and in Depeche Mode that was Andy Fletcher, who has died suddenly aged 60. Constitutionally modest, he was lucky inasmuch as the group had two members – singer Dave Gahan and guitarist Martin Gore – who were comfortable with being Depeche Mode’s public face. That allowed Fletcher, universally known as Fletch, to get on with being their backbone.

He was crucial to their makeup, pushing the band to achieve, chivvying them to get into the studio or on the road. Without his tenacity, exercised over 42 years, Depeche Mode would have splintered long before they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2020.

Continue reading...
by Caroline Sullivan via Electronic music | The Guardian

Andrew Fletcher: the pop-loving everyman who held Depeche Mode together

As well as a keyboard player, Fletch was a facilitator – and someone whose cheerleading demeanour helped fans feel closer to the band they loved
• Depeche Mode’s Andrew Fletcher dies aged 60

Andy Fletcher was the last person to tell you why he was vital to Depeche Mode. In 101, the classic 1989 tour documentary directed by DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, he said: “Martin’s the songwriter, Alan’s the good musician, Dave’s the vocalist, and I bum around.” He knew there was much more to it than that, but the man they all called Fletch felt no need to shout about it.

Depeche Mode are one of the most popular and influential British bands of all time but nothing about them makes sense in conventional terms. It should not be possible to lose your chief songwriter (Vince Clarke) after just one album and then get bigger and better. There was no precedent for a synth-pop group evolving into a stadium rock band without actually playing rock music. It is unusual, if not unique, for one person to write the songs (Martin Gore) and another to sing them (Dave Gahan) with such conviction that it is hard to believe they are not autobiographical. They have sold more than 100m albums and had dozens of hit singles while retaining the outsider allure of a cult band – arguably the world’s largest, with no fewer than three documentaries made about their fandom. And all this from Basildon.

Continue reading...
by Dorian Lynskey via Electronic music | The Guardian

Shiva Feshareki: Turning World review | John Lewis's contemporary album of the month

(NMC)
Blending improvised samples with compositional prowess, the experimental musician and turntablist reimagines a concerto by Daphne Oram

London-born musician Shiva Feshareki has always blended two seemingly contradictory worlds. She is best known for creating improvisatory, sampledelic soundscapes using DJ equipment: Stanton turntables, a Roland Space Echo, the real-time sampling capabilities of a Korg Kaoss Pad, a theremin which spins on a turntable to create unusual electronic pulses. But she’s also a trained composer with a doctorate from the Royal College of Music, and has long championed avant garde works by likeminded women such as Pauline Oliveros, Éliane Radigue and Leslie García.

This album straddles both of Feshareki’s worlds. The main event is Still Point, a 40-minute concerto for double orchestra and turntables that was written – incredibly – in 1948 by a 23-year-old Daphne Oram, a decade before she founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Feshareki spent years exploring Oram’s archive in order to reimagine Still Point with fellow composer James Bulley before performing it at the 2018 Proms, and this is an eventful realisation. The first movement sounds like a grand, ominous film score, laced with high modernism; the second is a dystopian collage of 78rpm turntable sounds, discordant effects and air raid sirens. The final movement is the sound of a nation emerging from the ravages of war – shabby, end-of-empire grandeur and postwar uncertainty, all put through the dub chamber.

Continue reading...
by John Lewis via Electronic music | The Guardian