electronica
CD: Walls - CoracleThursday, 29 September 2011
Walls reclaim the soft-focus beats and keyboard wash that soundtracks the lounges of continental European hotels. The half-remembered chillout of their second album hazily drifts through a world where Ibiza, shoegazing and Krautrock travel on the... Read more... |
Go clubbing and running to support planting urban treesSunday, 11 September 2011
As artificial spaces, clubs struggle to embrace the organic environment. The music and arts collective Noise of Art are bridging the gap by working with the charity Trees for Cities, with DJs donating their time to raise funds for planting trees in... Read more... |
CD: Laki Mera – The Proximity EffectSunday, 11 September 2011
The Proximity Effect’s two opening cuts set the stall. Glitchiness gives way to a descending, sad, drifting melody on “The Beginning of the End”. “More Than You” is an upbeat, poppy, Tango in the Night Fleetwood Mac refracted through a chilly Nordic... Read more... |
King Creosote & Jon Hopkins, Queen Elizabeth HallFriday, 09 September 2011
There are some acts you’d rather not catch in a concert hall. The relatively recent pairing of King Creosote and Jon Hopkins isn’t, however, one of them. Diamond Mine, their seven-year project, is a deceptively serious piece of art that prefers... Read more... |
My Summer Reading: Musician MaximThursday, 08 September 2011
Maxim (b. 1967) who is known for, amongst other things, his mesmerising, somewhat unnerving stage presence (he has a penchant for cats-eye contact lenses and is not adverse to wearing a skirt) is a founder member of the electronic dance group The... Read more... |
CD: Santos - If You Have Meat You Want FishMonday, 29 August 2011
An awful lot of people involved in producing electronic dance music find a niche and stick to it. Many do this with a very po face. Speak to them about it and they may play you a track they think is "poppy" to demonstrate their range. It usually isn... Read more... |
CD: Mara Carlyle - FloreatSunday, 21 August 2011
It opens quietly, with swelling strings that evoke Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave. After they give way to a jazzy percussion and wordless vocal interplay, Carlyle declares, “I used to sleep/ Too many secrets to keep”. Floreat itself was almost a secret... Read more... |
CD: Lucas Santtana - Sem NostalgiaWednesday, 17 August 2011
I first heard Bahia-born Lucas Santtana on the best compilation of contemporary Brazilian music of the past couple of years, Oi! A nova musica Brasileira. His track “Hold Me In”, an acoustic slice of bossa nova, was a quiet interlude amonst all the... Read more... |
CD: Housse de Racket - AlésiaTuesday, 16 August 2011
There’s a strand of electro-assisted, dance-leaning French pop that’s captured the international consciousness. Phoenix and Justice are Grammy winners, while Air exemplify the cooler, more reflective end of it. The bands come from chi-chi burbs like... Read more... |
Cassette: The Astroboy - The Chromium FenceWednesday, 03 August 2011
The Seventies “Kosmische” music of Germany – the more spaced-out and synthesister-led counterpart to Krautrock that had its commercial apogee in Tangerine Dream – seems to be a gift that keeps on giving. Perhaps because the releases were for so many... Read more... |
CD: DJ Diamond - Flight MuzikTuesday, 02 August 2011
This is pretty weird stuff. Or at least, that’s the way it seems at first. If all you know, as I did to begin with, is that DJ Diamond is a 24-year-old DJ from the West Side of Chicago whose real name is Karlis Griffin, and that Flight Muzik is... Read more... |
CD: Son Lux - We Are RisingFriday, 29 July 2011
The Anticon label is a deepy peculiar animal. Around the turn of the millennium, its core members – going by names like Boom Bip, Doseone, cLOUDdEAD, Jel and So-Called Artists – took a nerdy yet intensely psychedelic approach to hip hop, and ended... Read more... |
