Bespoke retro-futuristic synthesisers – in pictures

As a boy, Love Hultén used to tear electronics apart trying to understand their insides. Now, the Swedish audiovisual artist creates bespoke retro-futuristic synthesisers; his clients include Eminem, A$AP Rocky, Danger Mouse and Michael B Jordan. “I love analogue synths: learning how to manipulate sounds using hands-on controls and tactile waypoints is very intuitive and fun,” says Hultén. Unlike the touchscreens the music industry now tends to favour, his handmade synths are encased in wood, resulting in visually striking, high-concept objects. “I try to present alternatives to today’s tech. Commercial products go through strict processes that in my opinion kill the product. I’m a small-scale, one-man studio, unaffected by corporate principles, and I don’t need to compromise.”

See more at lovehulten.com

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by Kathryn Bromwich via Electronic music | The Guardian

Harp: Albion review – former Midlake frontman traipses through twilight

(Bella Union)
Tim Smith’s first album with Kathi Zung takes inspiration from William Blake and the Cure to create a landscape of 80s reverb and ghostly vocals

Heavy with quiet, Harp’s debut album invokes Sussex fields to muse on creative loss, loneliness and bittersweet new love. Inspired by William Blake, Herstmonceux Castle and the Cure’s Faith – possibly the Crawley band’s most desolate record – Tim Smith and Kathi Zung craft a barren landscape out of 80s-indebted reverb, ghostly vocals and sharp, tinny drums. It feels like a permanent twilight.

Albion arrives a decade after Smith left the Texas folk-rock band Midlake, citing creative differences, and fans of his previous work will be gratified by the texture and detail here: synthesised strings, sirens and wheezy flutes lurk behind a misty layer of electric and acoustic guitar. Frustratingly, Smith’s grand, mournful voice is buried in the mix, his gravitas subdued by swathes of sound.

Albion is released via Bella Union on 1 December

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by Katie Hawthorne via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘Mick Jagger was surprisingly hard-working’: the all-star life of synth whiz Wally Badarou

His reputation for futurist pop got him work with everyone from Grace Jones and Talking Heads to Foreigner – now the French keyboardist is reissuing a soundtrack for a yoga DVD that became a Balearic classic

During the course of the 1980s the pioneering French keyboardist and synth innovator Wally Badarou played on a string of chart-topping singles and albums for artists as varied as Grace Jones, Talking Heads, Robert Palmer, Level 42, Mick Jagger, Herbie Hancock, Jimmy Cliff, Gwen Guthrie, Julio Iglesias and more besides. Despite being in close proximity to such storied musicians, he says that only once during his illustrious career did he know that a song had hit written indelibly all over it: Foreigner’s I Want to Know What Love Is.

“It wanted to be that way,” he says of the archetypal soft rock power ballad. “And the record company wanted it. The rest, whether it be Pop Muzik, Addicted to Love – that wasn’t meant to be a hit – Burning Down the House … I was like, ‘Oh, it’s a hit. How interesting.’”

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by Jim Butler via Electronic music | The Guardian

One to watch: Montañera

The London-based Colombian singer-songwriter and composer travels through space, time and genres with her trusty Korg synthesiser

Cities can be lonely places until you find your footing, especially if you’ve travelled from another continent. But María Mónica Gutiérrez has created her own choir to keep her company. The singer-songwriter and composer layers her vocals to ethereal effect, recalling the delicate layering of Imogen Heap but also the music of her motherland, Colombia – such as bullerengue, where groups of women harmonise to promote peace and preserve traditions.

Gutiérrez moved to London from Bogotá for a music masters degree and goes by the name Montañera. It means “mountaineer” in Spanish, which seems fitting for her sonic explorations: adventurous and yet solitary. Her debut album, A Flor de Piel, began as a response to feeling untethered from a sense of place but sketches out her own musical world. She blends instruments and sounds from Colombia’s Pacific and Caribbean coasts alongside influences from Senegal and ambient electronics.

A Flor de Piel is out now on Western Vinyl

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by Kate Hutchinson via Electronic music | The Guardian

Celia Hollander: 2nd Draft review | John Lewis's contemporary album of the month

(Leaving Records)
Hollander’s works sound simple but are incredibly detailed and multi-layered, her treated piano solos evoking wind, rain and air

People have been playing the piano for centuries, but few people have ever made it sound like Celia Hollander does. Her latest album genuinely seems to redefine what the instrument can do. The music made by the Los Angeles-based composer – both under her own name and under the pseudonym $3.33 – is all about digital manipulation: 2020’s Recent Futures saw her mutilating everyday sounds; the sampladelic disfigurations of 2021’s Timekeeper recalled Brian Eno’s ambient works.

Here she uses the same techniques on an upright grand. While serving as composer-in-residence at an arts centre in Nevada, she recorded herself playing a series of piano improvisations – epic, swirling solos, featuring tumbling arpeggios and harp-like cascades – and then brilliantly mangled them in post-production. Fragments of her improvisations are sped up, slowed down, played backwards, pitch-shifted and put through numerous digital effects.

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by John Lewis via Electronic music | The Guardian