techno
joe.muggs
Imagine that The Ramones were not only still playing into the mid 2000s, but were still writing new songs as good as “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” and still sending young audiences completely delirious to boot. That might seem fanciful, but it's a pretty accurate analogy for where Lorenzo D’Angelo – Lory D – is now. From 1991, Rome-born and bred Lory D has been making techno that boils all of the European and black American history of the genre down to its most perfectly minimalist but completely wild core elements, and delivering it to crowds who want nothing more than that. One of the most Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Those coming to Lifetime of Love expecting something – anything – approaching Moses Archuleta’s day job in Deerhunter will find those expectations confounded. With his Moon Diagrams solo project, Archuleta has presented us with a sonic sketchbook of ideas that range from ambient, hymnlike refrains to hypnotic house grooves and epic experimentalism.Where Lifetime of Love does share ground with Deerhunter is in its deeply personal feel and its genesis in personal strife. Written over a 10-year period that saw the breakdown of Archuleta’s marriage and a self-imposed exile from friends and family Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Helmut Geir has been around the block multiple times but, like an electro-sonic Batman, always pops up just when he’s needed. Never much moved by fads, the Bavarian DJ-producer has always kept a foot in pre-house music styles, notably punk, Eighties synth-pop and Seventies electronica. His new album, only his fifth in a 25 year recording career, is, without doubt, his meisterwerk. Titled after the German for “Music of the Future”, a Wagnerian term, it’s actually retro-futurist in tone, yet so startlingly original and ambitious it posits directions for not only electronic music, but pop, rock Read more ...
joe.muggs
OK, the title could be offputting, suggesting as it does the crassest of adversarial politics. But this record is something far deeper, far subtler and far more enjoyable than that. Yes, the Russia-born, Israel-raised, Berlin-based singer-songwriter Mariya aka Mary Ocher things to say about authoritarianism, xenophobia, and gender and sexual politics – but there is so much more to her expression.This record is produced by Hans Joachim Irmler of Krautrock and international psychedelic scene mainstays Faust, and features a variety of other German legends including long-standing electro- Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is not a standard dance music story. Marquis Hawkes is one of the club music success stories of the past couple of years – since the first release in 2012 on Glasgow's revered Dixon Avenue Basement Jams, there've been many 12" club hits on multiple connoisseurs' labels, and his album Social Housing on the Fabric club's Houndstooth label has soundtracked many people's summer this year, with the artist all the while remaining anonymous. But the reason for that anonymity is that he's a long, long way from the usual neatly-coiffed 20-something house producer you usually see in “breakthrough Read more ...
joe.muggs
Detroit techno music is important. Any student of the club music of the modern age knows this. The sound that fermented among the majority black population of the decaying industrial city in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as disco's last remnants fused with the avant-garde experiments of Europeans who were first getting their hands on synthesisers and drum machines, went on to change the world. It seeded the UK's rave explosion, jungle, drum'n'bass and all the electronic experiments that came after. It created a futurist aesthetic, which managed to be somehow both optimistic and dystopian, Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Dance music has, for millions of people, become synonymous with the very worst that the human race has to offer. Preening, vain, beach-body bumholes dancing like everyone’s watching, while keeping half an eye on their camera, making sure than the framing is right, no matter that they’ve got everything else wrong.Yep, wrong. Because dance music – at its core and at its best – is about losing oneself, about transcendence. Always has been. From Bach to basement clubs, there’s power in the pulse. It's the trigger to a communion that goes way beyond hearing and can transport and transform the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Without wishing to repeat myself, small venues almost always work best. The intimacy they offer heightens emotion and increases impact while breaking down the barrier between artist and audience. There's a mathematical consideration, too – fewer people means fewer antisocial arseholes no matter which way you divide it. And so I find myself back in East Kent’s best venue, among some of Ramsgate's most upstanding, to see the swirling, melodic storm of Berlin/London duo The KVB. First though, there’s the surprisingly engaging prospect of support band M!R!M.Also a duo, M!R!M create a haunting Read more ...
joe.muggs
Once upon a time, techno was the future, and Orlando Voorn was right at the heart of building that future. The Dutchman was in early on the late-1980s wave of Detroit electronic production – in which small groups of black Americans surrounded by decaying industry drew the natural link between Kraftwerk and funk, filled themselves with equal quantities of utopian and dystopian visions, and set a blueprint that would irrevocably alter the sound of music worldwide. Indeed, he worked with and for many of Detroit's finest, and his tracks were very often some of the most stunningly beautiful of the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
After the release of 2006’s Barking, it was difficult to know what to make of Underworld. A couple of decent songs aside, collaboration seemed to have stripped away identity, leaving us with sketches on which a host of different producers had scribbled with their own, vivid, Crayola colours. For a band whose strength had been found in the album format, this was an unwelcome volte-face. Six years on, Rick Smith and Karl Hyde are back, but is Barbara Barbara, We Face a Shining Future a return we should welcome with open arms?Early indications are certainly promising. “I Exhale” slaps us Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's a current running through the underground club / electronic music of the 2010s that cares not a jot for progress – but neither is it retro as such. It's been called “outsider house”, which is a pretty lame name for stuff that is often extremely accessible and welcoming, and is certainly not just house music. Rather it's a kind of neo-psychedelia, a sound that plays tricks with memory and expectation, collapsing oppositions between sophistication and naiveté, between kitsch and sincerity, and between low and high fidelity in the pursuit of beautiful discombobulation. And as the none- Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's a new kind of forum for electronic musicians. Certainly not a rave, and not just a recital to earnest nerds, built on a kind of patronage, but a long way removed from a standard corporate gig where you're just providing the interchangeable soundtrack to X or Y product launch. The realm of the technology party, often seen at conference-festivals like Amsterdam Dance Event and Sónar, but increasingly as a standalone thing throughout global cities, is something very 21st century, very odd, and still to be negotiated.But this is a necessary negotiation: technology is creating new Read more ...