Rhapsody: The Mix: Philip Sherburne Category Feed tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2009-06-05://1 2011-11-30T00:07:44Z Movable Type Pro 4.31-en Label Spotlight: Spectrum Spools tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.4414 2011-11-29T17:06:08Z 2011-11-30T00:07:44Z The Cleveland trio Emeralds may play at stoner affect, but slackers they ain't. These three ambient ambassadors from the noise underground are not only responsible for dozens of tapes,... Philip Sherburne The Cleveland trio Emeralds may play at stoner affect, but slackers they ain't. These three ambient ambassadors from the noise underground are not only responsible for dozens of tapes, CDRs and "official" albums, they also pursue multiple side projects. Steve Hauschildt recently released one of 2011's finest electronic albums, Tragedy & Geometry, on the Kranky label. Mark McGuire has put out three albums on Editions Mego in the past 13 months, in addition to a steady stream of cassettes, CDRs and vinyl-only LPs. And John Elliott might be the most prolific of all: in addition to his array of solo projects and side groups (among them Mist, Imaginary Softwoods and the vividly named Colored Mushroom and the Medicine Rocks), he's also responsible for Spectrum Spools, a label offering an even broader view of Emeralds' brand of psychedelic synthesizer music.

Rippling drones are at the core of the Spectrum Spools aesthetic, which remains heavily indebted to the blissed-out electronic fantasias of Klaus Schulze, Edgar Froese, Harald Grosskopf and other analog cosmonauts. (You wouldn't expect anything else from a guy who also records as Outer Space.) But the Spectrum Spools catalog — numbering an incredible nine albums so far, after just one year in operation — ventures far beyond the traditional limits of "cosmic" synth music. Container's LP is mutant techno in the vein of Rephlex's early-'90s records, pummeling and unhinged, while Temporal Marauder's Temporal Marauder Makes You Feel — allegedly a lost recording from the '70s by a Belgian musician with connections to Conny Plank — runs the gamut from Suicide-style electrobilly to industrial skronk in the vein of Cabaret Voltaire or Throbbing Gristle. As for the more placid, conventionally ambient sectors of the Spectrum Spools universe, they range from kitschy prog impersonations to lie-on-the-floor-drooling bliss-out drone fests.

My playlist Spectrum Spools: A Sampler features representative tracks from all Spectrum Spools' releases to date, so dig in and space out. Check out the whole catalog via the links below.

]]> Fabric: A Sort of Radiance
Bee Mask: Canzoni dal Laboratorio del Silenzio Cosmico
Forma: Forma
Mist: House
Bee Mask: Elegy for Beach Friday
Temporal Marauder: Temporal Marauder Makes You Feel
Container: LP
Driphouse: Spectrum 008
Hive Mind: Elemental Disgrace

]]> A John Fahey Christmas Companion tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.4383 2011-11-23T14:00:00Z 2011-11-23T18:24:44Z Let's get this out of the way up front: I am no great fan of the Christmas season, although that manifests itself less in grinchitude than in mild indifference.... Philip Sherburne Let's get this out of the way up front: I am no great fan of the Christmas season, although that manifests itself less in grinchitude than in mild indifference. (No, Fox News, I am not waging a war on Christmas; I just want to enjoy the ability to indulge or ignore it at my leisure, without being reminded that 'TIS THE SEASON every commercial break and/or city block.) Anyway, the same goes for Christmas music.

Some of that stuff I actually like to hear on, say, December 24 and 25. You can't argue with Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" — that would be like arguing against, I don't know, oxygen. "The Little Drummer Boy" has that Bing Crosby/David Bowie version going for it, of course. And I have fond memories of performing carols in a bell choir at a friend's church when I was a boy. But finding a Christmas recording that doesn't send my kitschometer off the charts — that's a different matter.

Enter John Fahey. Fahey was an eccentric master of fingerpicked guitar — a onetime philosophy student who discovered the blues and never looked back. His early recordings built upon the knowledge of old-time blues and bluegrass he amassed over years of collecting records, folding in elements of European church music and 20th-century classical composers. A champion of American "primitivist" music, he also moved in avant-garde circles: he recorded with the Red Crayola in the late '60s, and in the '90s, linking up with musicians like Jim O'Rourke, he established his legacy for a new generation of listeners.

None of that seems like the pedigree of an avid performer of Christmas music. Nevertheless, Fahey released several Christmas albums in his lifetime, beginning with 1968's The New Possibility: John Fahey's Guitar Soli Christmas Album and continuing through 1975's The John Fahey Christmas Album, 1982's Christmas Guitar Vol. 1 and 1988's Popular Songs of Christmas & New Year's. (Another album in Rhapsody's catalog, John Fahey Live at Studio KAFE, includes four of the Christmas songs he returned to most often.)

I'm particularly fond of the creaky grace of the earlier recordings. The starkness, the twang and the dissonance don't scan as typical "holiday music"; they have an intimacy and even an imperfection that runs counter to the plastic trees and blinding lights of the season at its most commercialized. I've culled some of my favorites from all five aforementioned albums to create a single playlist, A John Fahey Christmas Companion. 'Tis the season!

]]> Radio: The Lowdown: Dubstep and Bass tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2010://1.4371 2011-11-16T22:30:45Z 2011-11-16T22:31:37Z Dubstep really isn't made for albums. That's not to say that dubstep artists haven't made some fine long-players. But the music's cold-sweat intensity is best experienced in a long,... Philip Sherburne Dubstep really isn't made for albums. That's not to say that dubstep artists haven't made some fine long-players. But the music's cold-sweat intensity is best experienced in a long, rolling rush, from bass riff to bass riff. To facilitate that visceral immersion in the deep end, we've created a brand-new radio station, The Lowdown: Dubstep and Bass. Here you'll find every variation of low-end pressure, from Magnetic Man's festival-tested anthems to Shackleton's apocalyptic drum circles—all the pleasures and terrors of bass.

Listen Now: The Lowdown: Dubstep and Bass

]]> Electronic Roundup, November 2011 tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.4352 2011-11-15T18:03:45Z 2011-11-15T17:58:30Z Synthesizer freaks will be stoked this month, whether it's for the cosmic frequencies that Emeralds' Steve Hauschildt harnesses on his new album for Kranky, or the Day-Glo arpeggios and... Philip Sherburne Synthesizer freaks will be stoked this month, whether it's for the cosmic frequencies that Emeralds' Steve Hauschildt harnesses on his new album for Kranky, or the Day-Glo arpeggios and cartoon trance of Rustie's audacious debut album for Warp. Oneohtrix Point Never's Daniel Lopatin actually moves away from the supersaturated synths of his previous work, but his new record's cryptic vignettes are still a treat for fans of well-tempered analog sound. And the dark drones of Sandwell District's glowering Feed Forward, finally given a digital release, insert coldwave keyboards into techno at its most austere.

We also highlight new albums from Tycho, The Juan MacLean and more; to hear tracks from all those records, listen to our Electronic Roundup, November 2011 playlist.


]]> 1. Sandwell District
Feed Forward
Originally released only on limited vinyl, Sandwell District's 2010 album, Feed Forward, finally gets a digital release. (About time: the wax currently goes for well over $100.) The U.K. collective has spent years inventing its own style of techno — dark, brooding, intensely repetitive. As forbidding as it is, there is something visceral, even sensual, about their machine minimalism, where overtones of post-punk and 20th-century composition glow like embers amid the cold steel and clockworks. [Philip Sherburne]

2. Rustie
Glass Swords
Glasgow's Rustie has always inhabited dubstep's furthest fringes; on his debut album, he audaciously declares his margins the new center of the dance music world, and for the most part, you believe him. He's not afraid to borrow the tricks that make Magnetic Man and even Swedish House Mafia arena kings, but even the glammiest trance stabs are offset by Aphex Twin levels of mischief. Corralling pan pipes, '80s synth presets and cartoonish effects with triple-time G-funk, it's often over the top, but its vision is laser focused. [P.S.]

3. Oneohtrix Point Never
Replica
After several albums of rippling drones and synth fantasias in the style of Klaus Schulze, New York's Daniel Lopatin eases into more fluid, song-like forms on Replica. Along with his trusty Juno-106, he samples snippets of vintage TV commercials sourced from an online hoarder of broadcast ephemera, but there's nary a trace of thrift-store kitsch. Instead, he loops incidental rhythms and lush keyboards into cryptic, kaleidoscopic miniatures that open up into dreamscapes as wide as the horizon.

4. Steve Hauschildt
Tragedy & Geometry
Steve Hauschildt is the quiet member of the trio Emeralds; his solo output is slim compared to the volumes amassed by bandmates John Elliott and Mark McGuire. His first widely available (non-CD-R) album is accordingly economical, making the most of its materials. It's not minimal, but it's rapturously focused. No gesture is wasted, and his pinging synthesizer fugues roll like perpetual motion machines. Klaus Schulze, Durutti Column and Detroit techno's John Beltran inform the dewy arpeggios, but the music is a universe of its own making. It's a refreshing reminder that even in a genre as heavily trafficked (and hackneyed) as space music, there are still quadrants left to explore.

5. Tycho
Dive
Like M83, Apparat and Ulrich Schnauss, Tycho is a master of ulterior motives: beneath his moody electronic atmospheres lies the purest of pop sensibilities. He's clearly studied the liquid properties of shoegaze as well as the epic proportions of the '80s' most iconic alt rock. Nevertheless, the music gels with a kind of dreamy clarity that has more to do with ambient fantasists like Boards of Canada. ("Adrift" might as well be a tribute to the latter.) "Lush" barely begins to describe it.

6. King Midas Sound
Without You
King Midas Sound's Kevin Martin, aka dancehall/grime producer The Bug, is deeply invested in Caribbean sound-system culture, from an almost mystical devotion to bass to the pursuit of a kind of dub voodoo. Here, King Midas Sound pay tribute to remixing as a collective enterprise, inviting a wide array of artists to rework tracks from 2009's Waiting for You. From Ras G's noisy psychedelia to Mala's traditionalist dubstep, it's a dazzling display of communal force.


7. The Juan MacLean
Everybody Get Close
On Everybody Get Close, Juan MacLean showcases the clubbier side of his catalog, from burbling acid house to piano-stabbed disco. The downbeat "Deviant Device" is a rare foray into languid dub techno, but the majority of this collection of B-sides and previously unreleased material has its sights set firmly on the dancefloor. For all its reverence for dance music's past glories, the record never gets bogged down in retro. Quite the contrary: it shows, perhaps better than his albums do, what a canny interpreter of classic forms the artist really is. For more in this vein, check out MacLean's tracks under his Peach Melba alias.

8. Matthew Herbert
One Pig
There's not much that Matthew Herbert hasn't sampled. Brushed teeth, bitten apples and cheering clubbers have all proved grist for his sonic mill. Now he turns his mic on a lone pig, whose life he captures from birth to death to dinner — a posthumous coda of sorts, featuring smacking lips and clinking silverware. Formally, it's more abstract than Herbert's warmhearted house music, but it's not as forbidding as you'd expect. The rustling rhythms and subdued tones are meant to create a space that invites contemplation — of the music, the choices we make and the systems that bind us.

9. Alva Noto
Univrs
Carsten Nicolai's work as Alva Noto neatly straddles the line between art galleries and dance clubs, using techno's repetitive structures to explore some pretty abstruse concepts about technology and representation. The follow-up to 2008's Unitxt, a treatise on data in its molecular form, Univrs is said to focus "on the conceptual differentiation of a universal language." Whatever that means, the album is a fascinating fusion of techno-inspired rhythms and queasy digital drones.


10. Ford & Lopatin
Channel Pressure Remixes
Ford & Lopatin's Channel Pressure, which lovingly evokes the bright, optimistic tones of mid-'80s synth pop, gets reworked by a diverse crew of remixers. They all sound unusually inspired by the material. The Bug turns in a particularly lysergic brand of dub, while Alan Braxe refashions the "French Touch" as a gentle caress. Optimo's JD Twitch delivers a highlight with the slow-mo funk of "Joey Rogers," and Gavin Russom and Legowelt both show off their analog panache.


]]> Senior Year, 2001: The Proto-Hipster tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.4326 2011-11-08T18:05:30Z 2011-11-09T18:49:55Z With Rhapsody turning 10 years old next month, let's flash back exactly a decade to salute the class of 2001 — the generation that brought us, for better or... Philip Sherburne 20111108-proto-hipster-560x225.jpg With Rhapsody turning 10 years old next month, let's flash back exactly a decade to salute the class of 2001 — the generation that brought us, for better or for worse, the hipster.

Now, "hipster," that most desiccated of straw men, is an oft-abused term, and it's also a cipher of sorts: if no one hip enough to be a hipster cops to being one, then who's left to populate the demographic? Nevertheless, their habits are well documented. (Like dark matter, theory confirms their existence even when their actual capture eludes us.) And nowhere is that truer than in their musical tastes.

To understand why the hipster emerged when it did — the literary journal n+1 locates the contemporary hipster's emergence in 1999, which is good enough for our armchair sociology session — just look at the musical landscape of the turn of the millennium. Consider a few touchstones from that year: The Strokes' Is This It, Daft Punk's Discovery, Jay-Z's The Blueprint. Epochal albums all, and all from radically different corners of the musical universe, but all contributing, in their way, to the development of what we might call the hipster sensibility.

We're generalizing here, but I think you can describe the hipster's approach to taste as a voracious connoisseurship, a kind of competitive curiosity — the desire to know more about more different kinds of music before anyone else. The hipster sensibility is a constellation of tastes; rooted in self-aware styles of indie rock and hip-hop, it quickly grew to encompass New Wave, Krautrock, funk carioca, Baltimore club, Chicago house and countless other niche sounds. (In this sense, the contemporary hipster is a walking, talking incarnation of The Rock Snob's Dictionary.)

That sensibility is everywhere in the music of 2001, a pivotal year for many reasons — from The Avalanches' post-everything sampledelia to Miss Kittin's arch electro, from Yeah Yeah Yeahs' sardonic downtown chronicles to Radiohead's new sincerity. It's a complicated nexus of cool, sincerity, irony, pose, distance, guilty pleasures and unabashed enthusiasms. Untangle its DNA and get in touch with your own inner hipster with our playlist.

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: Senior Year, 2001: The Proto-Hipster


]]> Discover Delsin Records tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.4312 2011-11-03T17:09:17Z 2011-11-03T16:12:15Z A week ago, Amsterdam's rain-slicked streets filled up with DJs, industry types and hangers-on for the Amsterdam Dance Event, one of the club world's biggest confabs. There were panels... Philip Sherburne A week ago, Amsterdam's rain-slicked streets filled up with DJs, industry types and hangers-on for the Amsterdam Dance Event, one of the club world's biggest confabs. There were panels and photo ops, champagne toasts and all-night ragers. It would have been the perfect opportunity for the city's Delsin imprint to crow in celebration of its 15th anniversary.

But Delsin isn't that kind of label. They threw a party, in the city's acclaimed Trouw club, but, unlike so many operations that hit such milestones, they haven't made much noise about their longevity. That seems fitting. Home to some of the deepest techno out there, Delsin put out music on a resolutely timeless tip.

Since their inception, they've been rooted in the traditions of Detroit techno, but they've never been copycats; 15 years in, they carry on a tradition, born in the Motor City, of powerful, emotive, deeply nuanced electronic music that kicks like a mustang and purrs like an idling engine. Artists like Redshape and Conforce mark Delsin's most purist-oriented take on techno, while Lebanon's Morphosis takes the label deep into analog sound design and beat-oriented improv. And Newworldaquarium's 2000 single "Trespassers" is simply one of underground dance music's most compelling tracks of its decade.

Explore the breadth of Delsin's catalog in this playlist, featuring Redshape, Vince Watson, Mike Dehnert, Newworldaquarium, and more: Discover Delsin Records.


]]> Cheat Sheet: The New Deep House tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.4290 2011-10-26T17:39:43Z 2011-11-30T18:30:37Z Deep house never really goes out of fashion; somewhere, there'll always be someone playing jazzy chords over a disco beat. For whatever reason, though, the style is particularly hot... Philip Sherburne 20111024-deep-house-560x250.jpg Deep house never really goes out of fashion; somewhere, there'll always be someone playing jazzy chords over a disco beat. For whatever reason, though, the style is particularly hot right now, with artists from Los Angeles to the Ukraine sinking their teeth into the slower tempos and moody melodies of dance music at its most romantic.

In part, it's a reaction to minimal techno's long, anemic reign of clicks and bleeps; it's also a logical extension of pop culture's cyclical appetites. Birthed in the 1990s, deep house fits the emerging decade's desire for the near-vintage, the just-past-its-prime-becoming-prime-again. But the return of deep house means more than that. It's also a reminder of disco's role as the genesis of all contemporary dance music; it unlocks the door for R&B to sneak inside. And, unlike what's happening in commercial dance music right now, the new deep house requires you to meet it halfway. While hardly bereft of riffs or hooks, it veils more than it yields.

Read on to sample some of the deep-house highlights of the past year or two, and hear even more on The New Deep House playlist.

Also, to check out the roots of deep house, listen to our Chicago House Cheat Sheet.


]]> Vakula
Untitled
Ukraine's Vakula is making some of the deepest house out there right now. It's hard to say what sets him apart from so many others; he uses the same moody chords, the same shuffling beats, the same purplish midnight hues. But, like Move D or Roman Fluegel, he finds new ways of aerating the old hat on this single for Edinburgh's Firecracker label. "Mama Said Go Slow" unspools hypnotic chords over crisply slicing hi-hats and adds a tad of G-funk theremin for good measure; "Deaf World Dub" is even slower, writhing inside a cocoon of delay.

Various Artists
Hot Waves Compilation, Vol. 1
In 2011, no house-music property is hotter than the Hot Creations and its proprietors Hot Natured, aka Jamie Jones and Lee Foss. Pulling the best bits off the CDRs that circulate among their extended posse of DJ pals, they've launched a new sub-label, Hot Waves, to explore new directions in their trademark sound. It's a humid, urban style, full of jacking drum grooves and sexual suggestion; disco gives it shape, and R&B its juicy hue. Swaggering and louche, it's music for L.A. rooftops and Ibizan terraces and parties in their third day — when grooves start unwinding and time stands still.

Christopher Rau
How Are You
Affiliated with labels like Smallville, Aim and Giegling, Hamburg's Christopher Rau is part of a new generation of producers in thrall to moody chords, sampled vocals and crisp, propulsive drum programming; he draws inspiration from classic Chicago house as well as oddball innovators like Pepe Bradock. Released on DJ Koze's excellent Pampa label, this EP is equal parts supple and brittle, cutting up spongy chords with filed-down drum machines. There's a starry-eyed quality to the melodies, but the percussion digs in for the long haul.

Nebraska
Displacement
Nebraska's Ali Gibbs hails from London, but his music pays homage to the timeless dance music of the American Midwest — Detroit and Chicago, specifically. His debut album for Rush Hour delves deep into disco breaks, jazzy vamps and grooves that seem to stretch out forever; schooled by Moodymann and the French touch, he knows how to capture a vibe and make it kick. It's easygoing, with loose rhythms and faded colors, but nothing's out of place and every sound is tuned specifically to make you move, or feel, or both.

Morning Factory
Fantasy Check EP
The Dutch duo Morning Factory takes its name from a 1994 track by Ron Trent and Chez Damier, a gelatinous moon-stomp that opened up a whole new world for deep house. They're big shoes to fill, but Morning Factory take their influences in stride, fleshing out the requisite congas-and-hi-hats chug with blocky pianos, a nimble bassline, and a wistful, well-worn pop melody as super-saturated as The Avalanches' samples. Between the lilting groove and optimistic chords, it sounds like 9 a.m. on the best day of your life — no matter whether it's just starting, or drawing to a close.

Tensnake
In the End I Want You to Cry
Hamburg's Tensnake found international fame with his summer 2010 hit "Coma Cat," but the previous year's "In the End (I Want You to Cry)" did more to help kick off the deep-house revival. It proves that economical can be sexy, using little more than an almost imperceptible bass throb, crisp disco drums and coquettish chords. Despite its modest proportions, the longer it goes on, the more it feels like the only song in the world. The rest of the EP places its chips on disco and R&B, and wins the night all over again.

Carter Bros.
Full Disco Jacket
As the "French touch" taught us, all you really need is a killer disco loop and a filter to highlight its colors and contours. Australia's Carter Bros. take that principle to heart on their first record for Amsterdam's Rush Hour label, using nothing more than a tight bass/drums/guitar loop, a feel-good horn fanfare and some clever EQs and dub delays to knock the whole thing out of this world. One of 2011's most gratifying house tracks, it's an instant classic.


Two Armadillos
People of the World
Despite the name, Two Armadillos do not lumber. Members Martin Dawson and Giles Smith, a cofounder of London and Ibiza's Secretsundaze parties, know how to make their beats snap like a beach towel or a dry martini at an early hour. "Warriors Return" is immaculate deep house that strikes a perfect balance between wispy chords, crisp drum machines, sinewy acoustic bass and staccato sax; "People of the World" is a drunken hip-hop-disco tumble in the style of Pal Joey. Everything "Night Ridin" knows about chords and filters it learned from Moodymann, but that doesn't detract from its modal rush.

Abyss
"Birdsong"
Ever shuttling between the acoustic and the electronic, Ben Watt — half of Everything But the Girl, and head of the house-y Buzzin' Fly label — knows the importance of piano in dance music. Back in 2004, he released Justin Martin's "Sad Piano," a masterful pairing of jacking drums and melancholy trills; now he gives us "Birdsong," by Italy's Abyss, with languid chords buttressed by a muscular left-hand line. Flowers and Sea Creatures' remix swaps the original's determined skip for a shoegazing shuffle; a rework by Walls member Snoretex picks up the Chicago thread again, lo-fi but high-tension.

Various Artists
If This Is House I Want My Money Back Zwei
Munich's Permanent Vacation label may not seem to take life too seriously, between the name and the self-deprecating compilation title. And sure, they can be slackers, lingering in the lower BPMs and spacing out on synthesizer curlicues. But John Talabot, Mano Le Tough and their labelmates prove to be avid students of classic house, giving their low-slung funk and robo-disco a rigor lacking in most new jacks. They tick all the right boxes — luminous pianos, scuffed disco breaks, clattery 808s — but they also know when to set aside the books and cut loose. Now that's edutainment.

Trickski
Unreality
The idea of dance music for living rooms is at least as old as the CD; Berlin's Trickski turn the notion on its head by reimagining the club as a kind of living room — not some mythical peak-time vortex, but a space where time passes and moods wax and wane. Copping moves from deep house, disco edits and Detroit techno, they like their beats slow and low; their grooves shuffle with a woozy intimacy, while their mixture of synths and worn samples lends a warm, flickering light, like the hearth refracted in a slowly spinning disco ball.

Genius of Time
Drifting Back
I don't know much about Genius of Time aside from the fact that they're Swedish and they like the sound of classic American house and techno in the vein of Moodymann or Pal Joey. "Drifting Back," from their new EP for Rotterdam's Clone Royal Oak label, is a masterpiece of midtempo house. Its groove, carved from drum machines and sampled congas, cuts through the mix with an unusual sense of presence; its looped Rhodes solo and vocal harmonies are an invitation to levitation. I can't get enough of this jaunty, hypnotic jam.

Mano Le Tough
Stories EP
Mano Le Tough, aka Ireland's Niall Mannion, now based in Berlin, proves that he's really a softie at heart on these three tracks for Ben Watt's Buzzin' Fly label. The bells, staccato percussion and trim arpeggios of "Stories" feel skeletal at first, but it fills up with Mannion's own heartfelt vocals, hugging the line between club track and pop song. The instrumental "Take It Back" is even more of a tearjerker, like vintage New Order spun through a house-music kaleidoscope, while "From the Start" examines Sonic Youth's melancholic sonics with a narcotic electro lens.

Benoit & Sergio
Boy Trouble
Even New York's DFA label isn't immune to the lures of deep house; despite its brash, punky roots, DFA has spent the past couple of years sinking into lush, pneumatic grooves. The D.C. duo Benoit & Sergio's melancholy romps straddle the line between indie pop and club music: "Full Grown Man" sounds like Paul Simon over congas and budget synth, and "Boy Trouble" is a New Wave paean to girls with legs "like a Ferrari." (Their lyrics need some work.) But Visionquest, the American all-star quartet featuring Seth Troxler, Ryan Crosson, Shaun Reeves and Lee Curtiss, remodel "Boy Trouble" for the dancefloor's most liquid hour, with chest-thumping bass, trippy effects and tentative chords that go on and on and on.

Fudge Fingas
What Works
Edinburgh's Firecracker Records has been around since 2004, but its profile has risen recently thanks to limited-run pressings on clear wax that fetch absurd collectors' prices. Fortunately, for the rest of us, there's digital. Fudge Fingas get downright dreamy on "What Works," a blissful paean to the golden era of Chicago house that earns every second of its nine-minute length with graceful Rhodes leads, stubby bass and liquid effects. Ukraine's Vakula proves why he's one of house music's brightest rising stars with a dubby remix that pays tribute to Chez Damier and Ron Trent.

Deeper Still:
Maya Jane Coles: Cool Down EP
Gadi Mizrahi: I Can Never Get Enough EP
Art Department: The Drawing Board
Azari & III: Reckless With Your Remix 01
Various Artists: Get Lost 4 Mixed by Damian Lazarus
Maceo Plex: Life Index
Axel Boman: Europa
Various Artists: Good Children Make Bad Grown Ups
Wolf + Lamb vs Soul Clap: DJ Kicks
Jimpster: Change in You / Infinity Dub
Various Artists: 10 Years of Secretsundaze
KiNK: Reflections 001

]]> Electronic Roundup, October 2011 tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.4250 2011-10-11T16:13:04Z 2011-10-12T03:05:10Z Electronic dance music has been enjoying an unusual amount of exposure lately, reflecting the music's rising stateside popularity. The bulk of the spotlight, though, tends to fall on the... Philip Sherburne Electronic dance music has been enjoying an unusual amount of exposure lately, reflecting the music's rising stateside popularity. The bulk of the spotlight, though, tends to fall on the crossover sensations — your Skrillexes and Swedish House Mafias and Afrojacks.

That's fine and reasonable. But beyond the mega-clubs, the festival main stages and other Twitter- and TMZ-friendly events — like Tiesto's performance last week at the 26,000-seat Home Depot Center in L.A., billed as "the largest single-DJ event in U.S. history" — there's a wealth of music that doesn't get talked about outside specialist sites and geek-friendly forums. That's understandable, too — released as singles and spun by obscure DJs, a lot of independent, underground dance music doesn't exactly lend itself to coverage in your local daily newspaper.

But if you really want to hear where the music's headed, take the Billboard dance charts with a grain of salt and head for the shadowier corners of the scene, where pleasing 26,000 fans at a single pop is less important than taking risks, going deep and getting strange. To that end, explore the state of house, techno and bass music with the selections below, from Chicago-inspired deep house straight outta Ukraine to Japanese techno via Uruguay. And listen to tracks from these records plus more key new releases in our Electronic Essentials: October 2011 playlist.


]]> 1. James Blake
Enough Thunder EP
After winning indie hearts with his debut album, James Blake took a hard left with "Order" and "Pan," two tracks of atomized, alienating dubstep minimalism. Enough Thunder is far cuddlier: the Justin Vernon duet "Fall Creek Boys Choir" is a melancholy Auto-Tune prelude with woodland critter effects, and the live title track and the Joni Mitchell cover "A Case of You" present Blake at his most vulnerable, with rippling piano as the fig leaf to his naked, cracking voice. "We Might Feel Unsound" and "Not Long Now" dip back into electronics in a way suggestive of Björk. [Philip Sherburne]

2. Brandt Brauer Frick
You Make Me Real - The Remixes
Berlin's Brandt Brauer Frick make dance music with largely acoustic means, recording and performing with a chamber ensemble that includes prepared piano, percussion and (of course) a laptop. Here, Leonel Castillo luxuriates in supple piano chords in his Balearic house remix, while Lance Gamble sinks into velvety, reverberant dub. The highlight is Pepe Bradock's "Geoduck Dive Remix," a wriggling acid-house number daubed with vibraphones, piano and voice. Once again, the legendary French producer reminds us that dance music needn't check its ambitions at the door. [P.S.]

3. Mano Le Tough
Stories EP
Mano Le Tough, aka Ireland's Niall Mannion, now based in Berlin, proves that he's really a softie at heart on these three tracks for Ben Watt's Buzzin' Fly label. The bells, staccato percussion and trim arpeggios of "Stories" feel skeletal at first, but it fills up with Mannion's own heartfelt vocals, hugging the line between club track and pop song. The instrumental "Take It Back" is even more of a tearjerker, like vintage New Order spun through a house-music kaleidoscope, while "From the Start" examines Sonic Youth's melancholic sonics with a narcotic electro lens. [P.S.]

4. Gonno
Acdise #2
Recorded by Japan's Gonno, scouted by London's Gatto Fritto and released on Uruguay's International Feel, "Acdise #2" is about as global as it gets. The original is an effervescent jam reminiscent of Aphex Twin when he still grooved, pushed forward by cricket rhythms and burbling acid. It's the very definition of sunrise techno, and Gatto Fritto's remix stays true to both the daybreak vibe and the '90s-oriented palette. The Skudge remix follows a snaky acid line into a dank basement, but the aptly titled "Turn to Light" brings us back to the surface via lush guitars and echoes of Eno. [P.S.]

5. Fudge Fingas
What Works
Edinburgh's Firecracker Records has been around since 2004, but its profile has risen thanks to limited-run pressings on clear wax that fetch absurd collectors' prices. For the rest of us, fortunately, there's digital. Fudge Fingas gets downright dreamy on "What Works," a blissful paean to the golden era of Chicago house that earns every second of its nine-minute length with graceful Rhodes leads, stubby bass and liquid effects. Ukraine's Vakula proves why he's one of house music's brightest rising stars with a dubby remix that pays tribute to Chez Damier and Ron Trent. [P.S.]

6. Regis
In a Syrian Tongue
London's Blackest Ever Black was gothic from the get-go; flagship artists Raime inaugurated the label with bleak, slow-mo techno washed in post-punk affect. Regis takes us even deeper into paranormal club music. "Blood Witness" writhes like a beast in burlap, biting and growling; it has techno's pulse, but, caked in grit and suffused in echo, it's oddly subdued. A live version, performed with Scorn's Mick Harris, dials up the desperation with suffocating reverb and ominous metallic accents. "Blinding Horses" is even more hair-raising, pitting buzz-saw guitars against pile-driving drums. [P.S.]

7. Blawan
What You Do With What You Have
Many erstwhile dubsteppers are turning to classic house and techno; Blawan underscores his own defection to the ranks of four-to-the-floor foot-soldiers with two tracks of unrelenting bunker techno. "What You Do with What You Have" hammers its point home with thick chord stabs and overdriven drums. The squelching 303 bassline is acid at its most primal, while the back-to-basics pep talk, sampled from a Moodymann lecture, is processed in a way that makes it urgent and strange. "Vibe Decorium" is even more intense, with a manic chorus underscored by industrial drums running perilously amok. [P.S.]

8. Solvent
RDJCS5
Tempting evidence of artificial intelligence arrives with this EP from Toronto's Jason Amm. The title references a Yamaha CS5 synthesizer once owned by Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin, which found its way into Amm's arms and is responsible for every sound on the record. What else but a ghost in the machine could give this a spirit so like Aphex Twin's sci-fi fantasias? Humanists will surmise that Amm is simply one hell of an interpreter; his own voice shines through in the music's sense of restraint. Whatever your thoughts on the Singularity, it's a singular delight. [P.S.]

9. Crowdpleaser
Remixes
Tiga may have come up as a darling of the electro scene, thanks in part to cheeky covers like "Sunglasses at Night" and "Hot in Herrre," but his Turbo Recordings label doesn't restrict itself to populist dance crossover. Case in point: Crowdpleaser, a purveyor of dusky, off-kilter deep house. These four reworks stretch his supple grooves in radically different directions, from Giorgio Gigli's downy dub techno to St. Plomb's carnival house. Hreno and the Mole pair dissonant house with a monologue espousing the pleasures of psychedelic drugs — a clichéd tactic, but just freaky enough to work. [P.S.]

10. Sam Walton
Walton EP
Just 20 years old, Manchester's Sam Walton has clearly soaked up more than his share of dance-music history. His debut EP, for Kode9's Hyperdub label, thrums with elements of grime, dubstep, Sheffield bleep, classic IDM, UK garage, Detroit techno, electro boogie — you name it. He makes beats as though he were playing Whac-a-Mole, lashing out with off-beat snares and stuttering samples, but there's plenty of tenderness in soft chords and basslines that glow like vacuum tubes. [P.S.]

Essential New Albums
Joakim: Nothing Gold
Apparat: The Devil's Walk
Roll the Dice: In Dust
Sleep ∞ Over: Forever
Aardvarck: Anti Concept: The Album
A Winged Victory for the Sullen: A Winged Victory for the Sullen
Welder: Florescence
Ricardo Villalobos and Max Lodebauer: Re: ECM
Nebraska: Displacement
The Rapture: How Deep Is Your Love?
]]> Friday Mixtape: Futurism Restated tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.4202 2011-09-30T16:25:34Z 2011-09-30T16:51:26Z I'm off to Poland in a couple of weeks for Unsound, an annual festival of electronic and experimental music. This year, my itinerary involves not just a flight from... Philip Sherburne I'm off to Poland in a couple of weeks for Unsound, an annual festival of electronic and experimental music. This year, my itinerary involves not just a flight from Berlin to Krakow but also, apparently, some kind of time machine: the festival's 2011 edition is being billed as Unsound 1970. (That's the year before I was born; hopefully it won't cause me any problems at the bar.) Behind the temporal slippage lies this year's theme: "Future Shock," a phrase borrowed from Alvin Toffler's 41-year-old treatise on technology, social change and information overload.

The topic is timely for at least two reasons. Toffler's description of future shock as "the sickness that comes from too much change in too short a period of time" remains applicable to much of our contemporary malaise, from the Tea Party to the Euro zone. The concept also applies to broad swathes of contemporary music, as artists and listeners alike grapple with unprecedented access to the history of recorded music.

As Simon Reynolds explores in his recent book Retromania, popular music is addicted to the past as never before. This is particularly true in electronic music, from the '90s stylings of so much contemporary house and techno to the muddled memory-beat of chillwave, which spins scraps of new wave, shoegaze, ambient and more into an ersatz vintage swirl.

]]> Dylan Ettinger, who makes lo-fi, high-concept synthesizer music that might be described as new-age déjà vu. Or take VHS Head, who samples old video cassettes (and, probably, YouTube streams) to lend the impression of rapid-fire channel surfing through decades-old transmissions.

Not every performer at the festival is explicitly retro-futurist: the lineup includes acid house, Chicago juke, bass music, contemporary composition, drone and unclassifiable hybrids, as well as electronic-music pioneers like Morton Subotnick, Chris & Cosey and John Foxx. But, taken together, the program offers an intriguingly blurry snapshot of music for a time out of joint.

In anticipation of the festival (where, full disclosure, I'm also playing records), I've put together a sampler of artists scheduled to perform. Titled in homage to a song from the Minutemen's 1984 album The Politics of Time, "Futurism Restated" features Maria Minerva, Model 500, Laurel Halo, Hype Williams, Kangding Ray, Rustie, Kode 9, Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer, and more. It's like a three-hour tour in a hotwired Delorean.

Click here to listen to my playlist: Friday Mixtape: Futurism Restated


]]> Source Material: Ford & Lopatin, Channel Pressure tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.4164 2011-09-14T20:53:08Z 2011-09-14T18:04:31Z Joel Ford and Daniel Lopatin might seem like an odd pairing. Ford's group Tigercity makes terse, danceable rock with elements of both The Rapture and The Strokes; Lopatin, as... Philip Sherburne Joel Ford and Daniel Lopatin might seem like an odd pairing. Ford's group Tigercity makes terse, danceable rock with elements of both The Rapture and The Strokes; Lopatin, as Oneohtrix Point Never, crafts trippy electronic fantasias with an evident debt to '70s synthesizer music. Together, however — first operating under the name Games and now simply as Ford & Lopatin — they turn their attentions to the richly emotive electronic pop of the mid- to late '80s.

This is not, of course, a particularly original idea. But no matter how thoroughly that decade would seem to have been mined for inspiration, Ford & Lopatin reveal hitherto untapped veins. They seem less interested in what consensus deems the "cool" side of the '80s — underground New Wave and post-punk, electro and acid house — than in its oft-derided overground manifestations. Anyone who grew up on Top 40 radio in the mid-'80s will recognize its DNA here. With their gleaming digital synths and crisp detailing, Ford & Lopatin's songs evoke the hyper-drive radio pop of acts like Mike & the Mechanics, Chris De Burgh and Jan Hammer.

It's a bold move, the musical equivalent of busting out a given style of clothing at precisely the moment of its fashion nadir. But their spirit of bricolage goes well beyond mere provocation. If we've come to expect a certain amount of historical fealty in our retro, this album does away with any kind of period-appropriate behavior. The opening "Softscum" is a good indicator of what's to follow, spinning like a radio dial through fragments of untethered synths, bird song and soft rock before collapsing into downpitched hip-hop vocals; "Break Inside" applies their rose-tinted aesthetic to contemporary R&B, in a sort of reverse of the maneuver by which Kanye sampled Mike Oldfield. Ambient experiments like "Green Fields" rub shoulders with perfect pop songs like "Joey Rogers."

]]> Channel Pressure as a loose concept album about a boy, Joey Rogers, who gets sucked into a television dreamscape. Appropriately, the record is a grab bag of styles and tropes, a rag-and-bone shop full of patch cords and dusty machines.

We've attempted to decode the album's DNA: read about some of its likely forebears below, and hear even more antecedents, including Scritti Politti, Propaganda and Kate Bush, on our playlist Source Material: Ford & Lopatin.


Jan Hammer
Beyond the Mind's Eye (1992)
Jan Hammer's Trivial Pursuit card, if he has one, surely lists only the Miami Vice theme, but that reputation hardly does justice to a catalog that ranges from lilting pop to full-on jazz-funk fusions. This 1992 soundtrack to the video game Beyond the Mind's Eye isn't his best work, but it's representative of certain sounds of the era — booming syn-drums, glistening digital synthesizers — with which Hammer will be forever identified. Many of those sounds have long been considered passé, but Ford & Lopatin make a conscious effort to resuscitate them, stripping away the aura of quaintness and breathing new life into stale circuitry. (Indeed, they recorded the album's raw material in Hammer's own studio.) It's not just about an "objective" reappraisal of bygone styles; beyond that, there's a real sense of unconditional, almost familial love. — Philip Sherburne

Yellow Magic Orchestra
Kyorestsu Na Rhythm (1992)
Yellow Magic Orchestra — the trio of Ryuichi Sakamoto, Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, augmented by programmer Hideki Matsutake — are often remembered as "the Japanese Kraftwerk." But they could just as often sound like a synth-pop Beatles, as witnessed by songs like "Lotus Love" and the transcendent "Pure Jam," as perfect a slice of psychedelic electro-funk as has ever been buttered. (As conceptualists, they went way beyond "Revolution No. 9" — just listen to the bizarre, racist-baiting outro to "Tighten Up," as uncomfortable as their harmonies are soothing.) You can hear Y.M.O.'s influence all over Ford & Lopatin, from the odd, modal melodies and trills to the primitive analog drum machines and digital samplers. This best-of compilation originally appeared in 1992, around the time of the band's brief revival after their 1984 split; it wraps up with a bracing acid-house megamix that recontextualizes their sound for a new era, much as Ford & Lopatin do again now. — P.S.

Stanley Clarke
Time Exposure (1984)
Stanley Clarke is having a moment of reappraisal. Thundercat's daisy-garlanded, electronic jazz fusion references him, and Ford & Lopatin included Clarke's "Are You Ready (For the Future)" in a recent DJ mix along with cuts from Scritti Politti, Carly Simon and the nu-disco producer Todd Terje. Clarke's bass snaps with an electrifying funk, snaking between jittery syn-drums and lush synthesizer chords. With titles like "Future Shock" and "Spacerunner," Clarke's sci-fi preoccupations find obvious kinship with Ford & Lopatin's retro-futurist, man/machine vibes. — P.S.

Phil Collins
Face Value (1981)
Phil Collins opens his solo debut with one of the great pop songs of the 20th century: "In the Air Tonight" (its original video is totally avant-garde). The rest of the album, with its emphasis on funk and R&B, isn't too shabby either. The Genesis drummer turned frontman turned solo star must've taken copious notes when working with Brian Eno just a couple years prior; his use of drum machines, synthesizers and ambient textures (John Giblin's watery bass in particular) is smart and subtle. Face Value's other hit is "I Missed Again," but "I'm Not Moving" is even better. — Justin Farrar

Thomas Dolby
The Flat Earth (1984)
Thomas Dolby's 1984 album stands as a stern rebuke to anyone who never got past "She Blinded Me with Science." Balancing electronics with generous swaths of piano, fretless bass and percussion, Dolby and his collaborators perfect an unusually economical fusion of progressive rock, ambient and jazz. Only seven songs long, the album covers more sonic and emotional terrain than most bands manage for a box set, but it never sprawls. The title track alone is worth the price of admission, as is a Latin cover of "I Scare Myself," as sumptuous as it is unlikely. The 2009 reissue includes remixes and live cuts. — P.S.

Robert Palmer
Pride (1983)
A real Flashdance-era curio, this expands on the synth-pop template Palmer first used on the superior Clues. What's funny is that the gold-larynxed Lothario still can't keep away from blue-eyed soul ("You Can Have It" is the album's best track) and light Caribbean styles even as he plugs into the Matrix. — Nick Dedina




Martin Gore
Counterfeit EP (1989)
In the years between Music for the Masses and Violator, Depeche Mode's main songwriter and occasional vocalist snuck out this compact, six-track 1989 masterpiece of downcast synth pop. The songs might be D.M. demos: just a handful of synths and drum machines backing Gore's unassuming, midrange, carefully multitracked voice to sound heftier than it is. Most of it is low-key and restrained, but "Gone," with its heavy chords and metallic clang, rivals anything in Depeche Mode's catalog for dusky glamour. — P.S.

Colourbox
Best of 82/87
They should have been massive. "Pump Up the Volume" is only the tip of Colourbox's creative iceberg, and this collection teases you with the riches of their two-album career. It's a good start, though, and at least has the gorgeous "Arena 2," the dub-tastic "Baby I Love You So" and the slamming "Hot Doggie," all of which show Colourbox's deft use of clips and samples. — Nate Baker


]]> Electronic Top 10: September 2011 tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.4141 2011-09-06T17:04:53Z 2011-09-06T16:59:03Z It's not official, but Labor Day pretty much sealed the deal: summer is over. And so we turn from the fading season's gregarious hits and focus our attention on... Philip Sherburne It's not official, but Labor Day pretty much sealed the deal: summer is over. And so we turn from the fading season's gregarious hits and focus our attention on slightly more esoteric fare. There are plenty of sunny grooves to be found in records from the Swiss house producer Agnes, Germany's Permanent Vacation label and the rising London talent Maya Jane Coles. But this is music for the back rooms rather than the festival tents — especially when introverts like Lukid and Legowelt get involved.

For a broader selection of the season's key electronic releases, check out our playlist Electronic Essentials: September 2011, which presents two hours of music from Spank Rock, Jan Driver, Cassius and more.

]]> 1. Grouper
Water People
Grouper's music has always been aquatic. But where the Portland musician's looping pedals once rumbled like the stones in a muddy creek bed, her new single drifts through cool, limpid waters. Where once there was only reverb and hum, her guitar picking now takes a definitive shape, and you can even (almost) make out the words, if you lean in. It's still a profoundly lonesome sound, just clearer and sweeter, like echoes of Low wafting up from the bottom of a cistern.

2. Legowelt
Sark Island Acid
A true analog savant, Legowelt recently surrounded himself with vintage synths in his studio in the Hague, recorded one of the year's finest techno albums, and released it as a pay-what-you-will dealie on his own website. Why not? There's plenty more where that came from. For instance, this sublime, acidic three-tracker for New York's L.I.E.S. imprint. "Backwoods Fantasies" is Autechre by way of Juan Atkins, while "Sea of Nuhuhu" rages like a waterspout off Lake Michigan; the title track is 1992 through rose-tinted lenses, as lyrical as techno gets.

3. CFCF
Cometrue
The summery vibes of CFCF's 2009 album, Continent, plus titles like "You Hear Colours" led some listeners to lump him in with the chillwave phenomenon. But the Montreal artist owes a greater debt to dance music than many of his contemporaries. His new single, "Cometrue," is a retro double-take, filtering mid-'90s piano house through the lens of late-'90s 2-step garage, and it's a gorgeous example of dancefloor balladry — a little bit Ben Watt, a little bit Burial. The rimshots and treated vocals of "Looking So" sound even more like Burial, if not quite as bleak; there's a rapturous glow behind its melancholy. Montreal's d'Eon adds lush disco strings and snappy 909 snares to his "Cometrue" remix, while Physical Therapy's unabashedly ambient "Deep Forest Mix" floats atop rustling shakers and sampled birdsong.

4. Little Dragon
Ritual Union EP
Even if you're used to "Ritual Union" as the lead track from Little Dragon's third album, don't neglect this bewitching single, released shortly before the LP. The song, if you don't know it, is Motown by way of The XX with extra Moogs, dubbed-out pop with a neon outline and a classic shape. Neo-disco upstart Tensnake defies expectations with a remix that sounds like low-budget dubstep, while Magnetic Man protects the Casiotone home front. But it's Maya Jane Coles' remix you need to hear: slouchy and insouciant, it's a new role for the rising deep-house star, proving her versatility yet again.

5. Mike Simonetti
Capricorn Rising
Mike Simonetti founded the New Jersey hardcore label Troubleman Unlimited in 1993; he also runs the disco-influenced imprint Italians Do It Better, home to Chromatics and Glass Candy. His debut album is a rich, reverent ode to synth-pop at its most timeless. "Song for Luca" drinks from the same melancholy font as Superpitcher or Lawrence; "Dust Devil" pays tribute to Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells." The opener, featuring Sam Sparro, is a candy-colored, slow-motion ambient disco whirligig; "Aculpoco," a reprise, calls to mind 10cc and medieval motets against a backdrop of birdsong.

6. Lukid
Spitting Bile EP
Like his labelmate Actress, Lukid belongs to an elastic patch of cosmos that defies the usual laws — samples and synthesizers, hip-hop and techno all crumple together, grainy and aglow. Where Lukid's LPs explore slack tempos, this single keeps the dancefloor grimly in its sights. "Park It Low" is the highlight, with droning synths, vocal fillips and faintly African guitar suggesting a desiccated Four Tet. That track tips its hat to Moodymann, while "Spitting Bile" and "Dragon Stout" are raw and unkempt, the kind of things they'll build future Nuggets comps around.

7. Radio People
Hazel
With each new release, Sam Goldberg's Radio People project moves from abstract synth-drone to more of a synth-pop aesthetic, one that embraces traditional conceptions of melody, groove and even beauty. As a result, Hazel recalls Jean Michel Jarre more than it does Conrad Schnitzler. As a composer and musician, Goldberg's timing is impeccable; his architectonic runs — spacey in a gentle way — never unfold too quickly or slowly. The record is instrumental for the most part. However, its final track, "Patience," contains some wonderfully tranquil vocal patterns that feel inspired by Eno. — Justin Farrar

8. Machinedrum
Room(s)
Travis Stewart has been parsing hip-hop beats and twitchy electro as Machinedrum for a decade, and on his first album for Planet Mu, the project returns reinvigorated, sounding almost reborn. He's borrowed his lickety-split syncopations from Chicago juke music and modeled his soaring vocal samples on Joy Orbison's ecstatic style, but the end result is unique. The breakbeats here move with a rare energy, and the synths and voices add vivid color and lush, seductive texture; tracks like "GBYE" tell you all you need to know about his vision of futurist R&B.

9. Agnes, Agnes Presents Cavalier
A Million Horses
Geneva's Agnes is known by many names: Ray Valioso, Benelli, Modeste, Torpedoman. Here he presents the debut full-length of Cavalier, an alias reserved for Zurich's Drumpoet Community label. In keeping with the imprint's remit, A Million Horses gallops confidently into the past to graze on the deeply rooted house of '90s Chicago and New York. That's hardly a new idea, but Cavalier's crisp drum programming and moody atmospheres keep things fresh and engaging across 80 minutes of prime at-home clubbing, from slo-mo stumblers to starry-eyed, high-stepping grooves.

10. Various Artists
If This Is House I Want My Money Back
Munich's Permanent Vacation label may not seem to take life too seriously, between the name and the self-deprecating compilation title. And sure, they can be slackers, lingering in the lower BPMs and spacing out on synthesizer curlicues. But John Talabot, Mano Le Tough and their labelmates prove to be avid students of classic house, giving their low-slung funk and robo-disco a rigor lacking in most new jacks. They tick all the right boxes — luminous pianos, scuffed disco breaks, clattery 808s — but they also know when to set aside the books and cut loose. Now that's edutainment.


]]> David Guetta's Greatest Hits tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.4134 2011-09-01T17:06:46Z 2011-09-01T16:51:36Z Erstwhile hair model David Guetta has gone on to become the face of electronic dance music's crossover into the pop charts — and he's done it, remarkably, by remaining... Philip Sherburne Erstwhile hair model David Guetta has gone on to become the face of electronic dance music's crossover into the pop charts — and he's done it, remarkably, by remaining behind the decks and the mixing board. In a few short years, his profile has eclipsed that of early collaborators like Chris Willis or Kelly Rowland. And with his new album, Nothing but the Beat, he proves that his contact list is second to none, enlisting everyone from Nicki Minaj to Usher to Sia, as well as earlier cohorts Akon and will.i.am, to take their star turns in the light of his disco ball. But he also reminds us, with a bonus set of instrumental club tracks, that he's at home when he's alone in the DJ booth, ministering to packed dancefloors.

To accompany the new album, we've pulled together two dozen of Guetta's biggest hits and key remixes into one massive playlist. Because sometimes you just can't Guet enough.

Click here to listen to the playlist: David Guetta's Greatest Hits.


]]> Senior Year, 1996: Suburban Trip-Hop Odyssey tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.4089 2011-08-23T20:25:08Z 2011-08-23T16:41:51Z Trip-hop was certainly not immune to urban pretensions: the graffiti strokes of DJ Krush's logo, faux-"hard" titles like DJ Cam's "Gangsta Sh*t." But really, was there ever a genre... Philip Sherburne 20110823-trip-hop-560x225.jpg
Trip-hop was certainly not immune to urban pretensions: the graffiti strokes of DJ Krush's logo, faux-"hard" titles like DJ Cam's "Gangsta Sh*t." But really, was there ever a genre better suited for the suburbs than trip-hop's brand of soporific Barcalounge music? They called them "blunted" beats, but there weren't many Swishers being split and relicked around these joints; more like bong hits in the basement and endless (and, we should add, ill-advised, under said conditions) cruising in the Subaru.

So it's 1996, and our recent grad whiles away his days behind the counter at the local coffee shop, and spends his evenings sprawled on a picnic table in the park, brown-bagged beer and boom-box each within arm's reach. The lifestyle (and possibly the facial hair) is straight out of Richard Linklater's Slacker. But the soundtrack couldn't have been further from the alt rock staples of just five years earlier. (Poi Dog Pondering?!) By '96, armed with college radio and a dial-up modem, your humble layabout, restless in his tastes, had hit upon trip-hop's studied cool: the snatch of jazz, the alien synth, the hiss of vinyl, already nostalgic.

]]> DJ Shadow — which vaguely suggested a distant world of incomprehensible technologies and unimaginable nightclubs. Oh, and you could get laid to it, if you could land a date in the first place. (This was true for hip-hop fans of both sexes, which itself was a reason so many dudes flocked to it: leaving a Kruder & Dorfmeister CD on the bedside table was just a subtle way of suggesting that there were Trojans in the top drawer.)

We're still awaiting Noah Baumbach's rendition of our goateed naïf. (Noah! Call us! We've got a great script idea for you!) For now, relive those halcyon days of the late mid-'90s with our playlist of trip-hop's greatest hits, featuring Portishead, Lamb, Massive Attack, DJ Krush, Herbaliser, Morcheeba, Funki Porcini, Tosca, Tricky and more.

Click here for the entire playlist: Senior Year, 1996: Suburban Trip-Hop Odyssey.


]]> Source Material: Gang Gang Dance, Eye Contact tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.4066 2011-08-17T17:05:49Z 2011-08-17T16:28:41Z Months after its release, I still have trouble entirely wrapping my head around Gang Gang Dance's Eye Contact. That's not a criticism — quite the opposite. It's been awhile... Philip Sherburne Months after its release, I still have trouble entirely wrapping my head around Gang Gang Dance's Eye Contact. That's not a criticism — quite the opposite. It's been awhile since I heard a record that left me so happily bewildered. That's not necessarily because the album is "experimental" or "difficult," but because of the way it mixes pop and dance music so promiscuously with fragments of noise and sunburst. (I might have been prepared had I heard the band's previous album, 2008's Saint Dymphna, an omission in my listening I have only recently, and gratefully, rectified.)

One of Eye Contact's great pleasures is the way it evokes so many kinds of music — it's a dizzy rush of references even though, more often than not, Gang Gang Dance don't really sound like anyone other than themselves. I decided to catalogue the antecedents and associations that came to mind. Read on for a track-by-track breakdown of Eye Contact's range.


]]> Track 1. "Glass Jar"
"I can hear everything … It's everything time," intones a man's voice at the song's opening. It could be a koan, but there's something in his drawl that makes it blasé; it could be just an observation, the kind of thing every listener deals with nowadays — Kanye or Scriabin? Mixtape or Tibetan monks? It's a tough starting point for musicians: how do you justify adding to the noise, and how do you amplify your pin drop? "Glass Jar" isn't really about referential overload. The band simply beats a path to the sublime the old-fashioned way, with a drawn-out crescendo exploding into high-stepping Fourth World techno pop. But you can hear the influence of trippy, blippy records like Klaus Schulze's Trancefer in the song's buzzing synths and long, meandering lines; Gang Gang Dance are clearly listening to some of the same records as Oneohtrix Point Never. There's a little bit of Bjork's Volta in there, too — not so much the sound as the general instability — and trace elements of early Knife (steel drums! yelping!). And where do we file those synthesizer stabs? Zomby? Tiesto? (Holding this alongside the latest Hudson Mohawke EP and Araabmuzik's Electronic Dream, I'm left wondering: when did all the hipsters start listening to trance?)

Track 2. "∞"
Writing about Gang Gang Dance leads to such questions as, "How do I make the infinity symbol?" (Found it.) And, "What language is that?" On this one-minute interlude, a scratchy, extended sample of a vocal baritone solo sounds almost Italian, although it's decidedly not; the lilt in the voice sounds vaguely Eastern, and the way it fuses with limpid New Age chords reminds me, however erroneously, of the heart-rending modal acrobatics of Georgian folk music, like The Tiesto Rustavi Choir's Georgian Voices, Rustavi Folk Choir's Georgian Lyric Songs, or Harmonie Géorgienne's Sacred Georgian Chants.

Track 3. "Adult Goth"
Electric guitars come raining down in big, cartoonish strokes like the colored droplets in Sin City; it's the kind of trick Siouxsie and the Banshees pulled off on 1986's wonderfully overstuffed Tinderbox. (Right now I could kiss G.G.D. for giving me an excuse to check in with my 15-year-old self's favorite album.) There's something of Siouxsie in the banshee howl of G.G.D.'s Liz Bougatsos, for that matter; also something of Bollywood, as many critics have pointed out — I don't know, but her sliding pitch does often sound non-Western, except when it sounds like Kate Bush. (Again, not a bad thing.) And, just because I'm old, I want to hear a hint of Propaganda's A Secret Wish in this, as well, whether it's for the Fairlight stabs or the unabashed drama. (Right now I could kiss G.G.D. for giving me an excuse to check in with my 14-year-old self's favorite album.)

Track 4. "Chinese High"
From the coiled groove and splotchy bass, it sounds like G.G.D. have been boning up on the dancehall showcased on Mo' Wax's great Now Thing comp. (Sadly, it's unavailable on Rhapsody, as is the majority of the Mo' Wax catalog, which somebody really needs to reissue digitally. For reference, check out Lenky's Diwali or Bubble Up riddims.) Except G.G.D.'s drumming is fuller and fatter, and they fill in the empty spaces between the beats with the sort of sparkly DX-7s and fretless bass riffs you'd find in Billy Ocean's Suddenly, an album whose neon R&B sounds suddenly, surprisingly relevant in 2011. At some point, I could swear that I flashed on the South African house producer DJ Mujava's "Township Funk," but I'd be hard pressed to tell you where. As for the song's strange bridges and segues, I'm at a loss — perhaps somewhere there's a band that attempts a similar fusion of Yes and Sade, a cover band at a Hilton in a postcolonial city, where sound still travels at the speed of cassette tapes plucked from market stalls.

Track 5. "Mindkilla"
I read somewhere that this references 1991's "Fear: The Mindkiller" by the late techno producer Eon, but I don't hear an explicit reference — though it's likely that Gang Gang Dance are also fans of Dune, the source of Eon's "Fear is the mind-killer" sample. The track opens with the same sort of glum keyboards that witch housers like Salem are so fond of, but here they're a means rather than an end — a springboard for Bougatsos' Björk-meets-Cyndi Lauper hiccup and a launching pad for the song's rolling, reggaeton-like groove. It's all a bit like a lo-fi Basement Jaxx, from the carnival vibes to the hyperkinetic overload; more fancifully, it suggests to me what the Boredoms might be doing if they were influenced by Afrojack and Dutch house rather than heavy metal.

Track 6. "∞ ∞"
A lazy, loping hip-hop beat that's mostly tambourine and reverb, the kind of melting synths you hear in Zomby, and not much else, save a snatch of keening voice like Ofra Haza.

Track 7. "Romance Layers"
And here, it's revealed that Gang Gang Dance are also fans of R&B slow jams. They're hardly alone here; James Blake, How to Dress Well and, to a lesser extent, The xx have all flirted with indie-fied flavors of R&B. Part of the twist here, though, is to put a warbly falsetto from Hot Chip's Alexis Taylor in place of the Barry White-grade baritone you expect. As before, the bright, digital sounds and hard surfaces evoke the tired acoustics of a Radisson bar band, something that makes the muscular drum fills — shades of D.C. go-go bands like Trouble Funk — positively leap from the speakers. (I'd bet you money that the band has a dub of Dam-Funk's Adolescent Funk in the cassette deck of their tour van.)

Track 8. "Sacer"
One of the sunniest songs on Eye Contact, "Sacer" faintly recalls the Caribbean sugar rush of The Knife's The Knife; watery guitar lines echo Cocteau Twins' Heaven or Las Vegas. Beyond that, I actually have trouble finding precedents, but that might only be because, by this point in the album, I find my brain turning into overstimulated mush.

Track 9. "∞ ∞ ∞"
Buzzing bees, vox with backwards reverb, Eastern scales, and tribal pots and pans: just the stuff for a home-spun tribute to the Boredoms' Vision Creation Newsun.

Track 10. "Thru and Thru"
It all comes together here, from the Eastern modalities to the Zomby-like arpeggios to the processed vocals, which fuse Kate Bush with The Knife like a digitally morphed photo portrait. I don't know why it didn't occur to me before, but Battles' brand of pitch-shifted post rock is all over this, even if Gang Gang Dance are less invested in traditional chops. The music spins dangerously close to out of control, and the mind spins with it: it's a mad, mad, mad, mad whirl.


]]> Electronic Roundup: August 2011 Top 10 tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.4005 2011-08-02T17:00:05Z 2011-08-02T20:03:44Z Simon Reynolds would probably have a field day with this month's roundup of new releases in electronic music. His new book, Retromania, examines the grip that the past has... Philip Sherburne Simon Reynolds would probably have a field day with this month's roundup of new releases in electronic music. His new book, Retromania, examines the grip that the past has on the contemporary imagination, and most of my picks this month have a firm purchase on one bygone style or another. Portland's Soft Metals give New Wave its umpteenth iteration; Morning Factory and Two Armadillos both turn their hands to deeply classicist deep house. And Brooklyn's Laurel Halo makes lush, psychedelic electronica reminiscent of the '90s output of the Rephlex and R&S labels.

None of that is a bad thing, mind you: every one of these records has more going for it than its influences. But for an avowed Modernist like Reynolds, who recently told Pitchfork, "I wish there were a sense of things hurling forward more, with more direction," hope comes in the guise of both Zomby and Hudson Mohawke, two bass musicians whose new releases are decidedly future-tense.

Check out selections from all these records, and more, with our Electronic Essentials: August 2011 playlist.

]]> Zomby
Dedication
The British dubstep producer Zomby has recorded odes to spliffs and concept albums about raving, but the notoriously reclusive musician gets serious on Dedication, his first album for 4AD. It's as colorful and impish as he's ever been, cross-cut with bright arpeggios like a Chutes and Ladders game made of Lite Brite. But alongside shivery steppers like "Vortex," there's also buoyant trance, dusky minimalist garage, and Sakamoto-like ambient elegies. Elements of Baroque counterpoint, soca, G-funk and Morricone only serve to make Zomby's sound all the more his own.

Laurel Halo
Hour Logic EP
Signed to Hippos in Tanks, the label responsible for records from Hype Williams, Autre Ne Veut and Games (aka Ford & Lopatin), New York's Laurel Halo shares her peers' penchant for sine-wave psychedelia and wired nostalgia. Instead of '80s electro-pop, though, Halo takes inspiration from '90s labels like Warp and R&S, with propulsive drum machines underpinning billowing synths and vox. You can hear references to Luke Slater's 7th Plain, Plaid and Sun Electric, but it goes way beyond retro. More substantial than many full-lengths, this six-track EP confirms Halo as a formidable new talent.

Hudson Mohawke
Satin Panthers
"Beat music" has never felt like a fair term for Hudson Mohawke. As much as it hugs a boom-bap frame, his style is less about pulse than interruption, jangling like a pocketful of change. Two years after his debut album, Butter, it's also less about beats than ever. His drums are heavy, but they cede center stage to thousand-watt synthesizers so bright they border on the garish. "Thunder Bay" pairs jump-up grime with amphetamine trance; "All Your Love" is helium-filled piano house, and "Thank You" is simply one of the biggest tunes you've ever heard, like the Mount Rushmore of U.K. funky. But the record's best track is "Cbat," a sparse, dubbed-out hip-hop number with a reggaeton lean, led by telephone chirps and a squeaky balloon.

Ulrich Schnauss & Jonas Munk
Ulrich Schnauss & Jonas Munk
To any Cocteau Twins fans lamenting the lack of new material from Liz Fraser and Robin Guthrie, take heart: Ulrich Schnauss and Jonas Munk have taken it upon themselves to make up for it. OK, so their self-titled album lacks Fraser's inimitable vocals, but everything else — rippling synthesizers, stately chord progressions and most of all, ringing, reverberant guitars — evokes the Cocteaus' most lush, sensual material, with nods to Brian Eno and Aphex Twin. For dream-pop junkies, this is the fix you've been dreaming of.

John Beltran
Ambient Selections
Since the demise of the chill-out room, ambient music has been identified mostly with drones and beatless soundscapes. But in the '90s, Detroit's John Beltran conceived of ambient as something more like techno without the drums. While there were plenty of elegiac pads, the addition of rippling arpeggios and pinging guitar tones gave the music an unusual degree of movement and detail. Here, Amsterdam's Delsin label collects his best work. Like much Detroit techno, it's about decay, but it's also about redemption, capturing both the vacant lot and the dewy spiderweb sparkling against the blacktop.

Soft Metals
Soft Metals
Soft Metals offer further evidence for Portland, Ore.'s role as a hotbed of indie-dance action. The duo is clearly in love with the brittle drums and supple synths of '80s synth-pop and house; its members also happen to be in love with each other, their relationship an outgrowth of their musical collaborations. As a result, their self-titled debut album departs from cold-wave anomie, focusing on the more intimate aspects — and humid dancefloor proclivities — of influences like Depeche Mode, Propaganda and Clan of Xymox.

Abyss
"Birdsong"
Ever shuttling between the acoustic and the electronic, Ben Watt — half of Everything But the Girl, and head of the house-y Buzzin' Fly label — knows the importance of piano in dance music. Back in 2004, he released Justin Martin's "Sad Piano," a masterful pairing of jacking drums and melancholy trills; now he gives us "Birdsong," by Italy's Abyss, with languid chords buttressed by a muscular left-hand line. Flowers and Sea Creatures' remix swaps the original's determined skip for a shoegazing shuffle; a rework by Walls member Snoretex picks up the Chicago thread again, lo-fi but high-tension.

Morning Factory
Fantasy Check EP
The Dutch duo Morning Factory takes its name from a 1994 track by Ron Trent and Chez Damier, a gelatinous moon-stomp that opened up a whole new world for deep house. They're big shoes to fill, but Morning Factory take their influences in stride, fleshing out the requisite congas-and-hi-hats chug with blocky pianos, a nimble bassline, and a wistful, well-worn pop melody as super-saturated as The Avalanches' samples. Between the lilting groove and optimistic chords, it sounds like 9 a.m. on the best day of your life — no matter whether it's just starting, or drawing to a close.

Two Armadillos
People of the World
Despite the name, Two Armadillos do not lumber. Members Martin Dawson and Giles Smith, a cofounder of London and Ibiza's Secretsundaze parties, know how to make their beats snap like a beach towel or a dry martini at an early hour. "Warriors Return" is immaculate deep house that strikes a perfect balance between wispy chords, crisp drum machines, sinewy acoustic bass and staccato sax; "People of the World" is a drunken hip-hop-disco tumble in the style of Pal Joey. Everything "Night Ridin" knows about chords and filters it learned from Moodymann, but that doesn't detract from its modal rush.

More New Releases

Austra: Sparkle
Hype Williams: Kelly Price
How to Dress Well: Just Once EP
Floating Points: Marylin
Die Vögel: Fratzengulasch
Falty DL: Make It Difficult
John Daly: Meltdown Remixes
DJ Yoav B: Wisdom Traxx
Surgeon: Muggerscum Out Remixes
Speedy J: Bek
]]> Brostep A Gentlemanly Introduction tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.3988 2011-07-27T17:07:13Z 2011-07-27T16:20:09Z "Brostep" isn't a real genre -- it's a tongue-in-cheek term for dubstep's most aggressive wing, which has a propensity for serrated bass riffs and, sometimes, a reform-school sense of... Philip Sherburne "Brostep" isn't a real genre -- it's a tongue-in-cheek term for dubstep's most aggressive wing, which has a propensity for serrated bass riffs and, sometimes, a reform-school sense of humor. Like chillwave, witch house and crabcore, it's a tag with which few artists wish to be identified. But that doesn't keep it from being a useful shorthand for dubstep at its gnarliest and tooth-gnashingest. (It just as well could have been called chainsaw 'n' bass, or perhaps testoster-tone.)

"Brostep is sort of my fault, but now I'm starting to hate it, in a way," admitted Rusko, the mohawked dubstep upstart, at the end of last year. "I kind of took it there, and now everybody else is taking it too far. It's not heavy metal. I've been in America touring for a long time, and even more so, they just want it as hard as you can. They're like, 'Rusko, I want you to melt my face off tonight! Play the hardest, hardest, hardest you've got.' I'm like, it's not about playing the hardest, hardest tracks for an hour and a half, it's like someone screaming in your face for an hour -- you don't want that. A lot of dubstep fans just come because they want to hear the most disgusting, hard, dirty, distorted music possible, and that's not what it's about."

]]> Cockney Thug," overlaid with a snippet of dialogue from Guy Ritchie's gangster film Snatch, is something like the scene's founding anthem. It's an unambiguous expression of brostep's adolescent, cheerfully rude-boy attitude, using the F-word the way other producers might deploy a powerful snare drum, dropped with gusto at the end of every four bars. (His buddy Caspa, meanwhile, laces his tracks with horny braggadocio sampled from Larry Clark's Kids.) But Rusko tracks like the G-funk-influenced "Lick the Lizard" show how, even at his most punishing, he still knows how to be elegant, even sexy.

Acts like 12th Planet, Excision, Datsik and Flux Pavilion, on the other hand, appear to be engaged in a bass-fueled arms race, with every release more lacerating than the last. With that testosterone-fueled swagger sometimes comes a sniggering, puerile sensibility. Flux Pavilion's "How Rude" features a female voiceover proclaiming a fondness for sodomy, while Borgore's "Love (Gagging VIP Mix)" is so unabashedly misogynistic, it makes Odd Future look like Woody Allen. If Rusko invented brostep, Israel's Borgore must be the poster boy for its most Neanderthal wing. His "Delicious" is a sneering rebuttal to "haters" ("Haters gonna hate, haters gonna hate / But I'll be f**king models while they sit and masturbate"), and he embraced his role as a scene villain with the two-part EP Borgore Ruined Dubstep, featuring still more invective against sisters, mothers, women in general, haters and pretty much anyone that isn't Borgore. (As tracks like his "Thoughts" show, he's a talented producer; it's too bad he's also such a dick.)

Despite the bad rep that brostep has gotten, there's plenty to recommend its most inventive specimens, at least if you have a penchant for the cartoonish; like the latest Transformers film, it's in-your-face, over-the-top and not to be taken too seriously. You can explore the genre with Rhapsody's 90-minute playlist, mix_play_18x14.gifBrostep: A Gentlemanly Introduction. In keeping with the title, I've excluded the genre's nastiest examples (sorry, Borgore). But there's still plenty of strong language, abrasive frequencies and general misanthropy, so if you're at work, you might want to keep your headphones on.

]]> Friday Mixtape: The Art of Moving Boxes tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.3965 2011-07-22T17:36:53Z 2011-07-22T18:25:38Z There's nothing like a major move to make you appreciate cloud-based music. As I wrote last week, my mom is selling her house, so I've been tasked with going... Philip Sherburne There's nothing like a major move to make you appreciate cloud-based music. As I wrote last week, my mom is selling her house, so I've been tasked with going through the approximately 3,000 records I have stored in her basement, and figuring out which to sell and which to ship back to Berlin, where they'll join another couple thousand pieces of vinyl already eating up all the available floor space. (My girlfriend has told me, in no uncertain terms, that we have space for exactly 1,600 more—that's the number of records that fits in Ikea's 4x4 "Expedit" model, the shelving of choice for DJs and hoarders the world over. So the culling is rather grueling.)

Despite a sore back, rug-burned knees and a frazzled brain, it's not all bad -- frankly, there's very little I'd rather do than just hang out with my records. There have been some happy surprises along the way, records I had no idea I owned: a pristine double of Theo Parrish's "Smile" to replace the played-to-hell copy in my DJ bag in Berlin, for instance, as well as 10 early singles from Parrish's Sound Signature label, all long out of print, and some of them fetching insane prices on Discogs.com. Speaking of insane prices, the process has reminded me that I really need a renter's insurance policy: the triple-vinyl edition of Boards of Canada's Geogaddi is going for upwards of $120; a white-label Global Communication remix of Lamb's "Gorecki" is selling for $160!

]]> Friday Mixtape is a selection of the songs I've been happiest to come across in my course through the corrugated maze, a cross-section of the electronic dance music I collected from the late '90s until around 2005 or so, when I moved to Europe and left the majority of it behind. (A special shout-out to my mom, who put up with it all these years.)

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: mix_play_18x14.gifFriday Mixtape: The Art of Moving Boxes

]]> Cheat Sheet: The Guitar and Other Machines tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.3939 2011-07-13T17:56:56Z 2011-07-22T22:23:20Z Last week I was packing up boxes in my mother's basement in Portland, Ore., when I came across an old favorite: Fennesz' 2001 album Endless Summer. Not the most... Philip Sherburne 20110712-guitar-and-other-machines-560x225.jpg
Last week I was packing up boxes in my mother's basement in Portland, Ore., when I came across an old favorite: Fennesz' 2001 album Endless Summer. Not the most germane music for sorting through thousands of LPs and CDs, perhaps — I find my teenage punk favorites get the job done a lot quicker — but it turned out to be the perfect fit for July's sweltering weather. As I nursed a cold Ninkasi Radiant Ale with the hum of the freeway wafting over the pine tops, deciduous leaves wind-whipped into a white-green froth in the hazy afternoon light, Fennesz' pink-noise fantasia felt tailor-made for the scene.

Apologies if that prose rubs you purple, but Christian Fennesz' super-saturated music tends to have that effect on the senses: working with guitars and computers, the Viennese musician has a way of turning the six-string's ring into a powdery, pastel explosion of color and texture. Endless Summer, as its Beach Boys-riffing title suggests, is a pipeline to the sublime.

]]>
Listen to our accompanying playlist: mix_play_18x14.gifCheat Sheet: The Guitar and Other Machines.


Fennesz
Endless Summer
Released in 2001, Christian Fennesz's Endless Summer was an anomaly for glitch music, and not just because it took its title from the Beach Boys. Instead of the austere, clinical atmospheres of his clicks-and-cuts peers, Fennesz conjured a warm, rosy glow out of his CPU by feeding it lithe strands of electric guitar. The result is a real live wire of a record, twitching and spitting sparks, luminous as the phosphorescent tide. —Philip Sherburne

Bibio
Mind Bokeh
Bibio's early records flitted between electro-acoustic ambient jams and finger-picked tributes to John Fahey; moving to Warp, he introduced swaggering hip-hop beats, squelchy funk synthesizers and occasional vocals without ever losing his pastoral vibe and gossamer detailing. Mind Bokeh, his best yet, has all that and more. Steely Dan, Nick Drake, J Dilla, Brian Eno, Stereolab, Jim O'Rourke at his sunniest: it all finds its way in. But it makes sense, bound by Bibio's bright-eyed curiosity and his brilliant sonics, so crystalline they could soundtrack a LensCrafters ad. —P.S.

Guitar
Sunkissed
Guitar make no secret of their inspiration on their 2002 debut for Morr Music: from the opening swirl, you're sucked into the My Bloody Valentine fuzzbox, a roaring echo chamber reinforced by Stone Roses-style breakbeats. Regina Janssen (of Donna Regina) slips unscathed through the maelstrom, her crystal voice immune to the sandblasting distortion all around. Backward loops lend a woozy undertow to raga-like drones, while hip-hop beats provide the rolling motion. Ringing with pink noise, it's a veritable dream-pop classic. —P.S.

Seefeel
Seefeel
Emerging from England's fertile post-rock scene of the early '90s, Seefeel started out crafting dubby, blissed-out shoegaze somewhere between King Tubby and the Cocteau Twins; their 1995 album, Succour, was a broken heart reeking of freezer burn. Fifteen years after their ambient masterpiece, they returned to Warp with 2010's Seefeel; it feels almost like a kaleidoscopic remix of the former, with close-miked drums cleaving hard angles through a rolling feedback haze. —P.S.

Battles
Mirrored
Mirrored indeed. Refracted, reflected, distorted, contorted — the sounds on this mostly instrumental album are like shards of light caroming off reflective surfaces. And physics is a good touch point here: at once coldly scientific and naturally beautiful, these jams fuse the electronic and the acoustic, the sequenced and the hand-played, the unrecognizably affected (the vocals) and the vigorously Spartan (those drums). "Atlas," a careening rush of a tune, is the centerpiece, but don't skip the oozy bass that closes "Tonto." Actually, don't skip anything — the whole album is genius. —Garrett Kamps

Ulrich Schnauss
Goodbye
Fans of Schnauss need read no further — it's another tour de force. Start with "Stars." Fans of the Cocteau Twins will be delighted to see that band's spirit lives on within this German producer. They should start with "Never Be The Same." Fans of lush, groovy, washed-out downtempo saying "Ulrich who?" should hang their heads in shame and immediately play this whole album, followed by his first two releases as well. It's all beautiful stuff and a million miles from much of the utter rubbish that's been passing for ambient music ever since Eno tripped over an ARP 2600 in the '70s. —Nate Baker

Oren Ambarchi
Suspension
Australia's Oren Ambarchi has never quite achieved Fennesz's crossover acclaim, but he's no less intrepid an explorer of the guitar's post-naturalist possibilities, patching electric pickups into an array of effects and digital post-processing to achieve shimmering fields of prickly tone color. Ambarchi has collaborated with Fennesz, in fact, as well as a range of experimental musicians including Otomo Yoshihide, John Zorn, Phill Niblock and even Sunn O))). Suspension, released in 2001, offers just what the title promises: a pensive, pendent hum of oscillating feedback and radiant overtones. —P.S.

Dntel
Dumb Luck
Master of moody indie-tronica Jimmy Tamborello returns with his third album under the Dntel moniker. Dumb Luck's haunting, downtempo glitch-pop balances cohesion and abstraction, with gently plucked acoustic guitar rising through digitized mist and fractured digital beats. Tamborello's boyish vocals sound lost and longing. He has attracted a slew of luminaries as guests this time out, including Jenny Lewis, Conor Oberst and Mia Doi Todd, whose crystalline voice on "Rock My Boat" is the essence of beautiful alienation. —Jonathan Zwickel

M83
Saturdays =Youth
There was always a hint of a pop fiend lurking in the prior albums Anthony Gonzalez created as M83, but the degree to which Saturdays = Youth embraces songs (not tracks) is nevertheless stunning. As is the wholehearted, unironic embrace of mid-'80s alternative music — the triptych of "Kim & Jessie," "Skin of the Night" (sung by Morgan Kirby) and "Graveyard Girl," specifically, could have been lifted from a John Hughes soundtrack. M83's trademark ambient bliss remains, yet you cannot help but feel that it's now part of a grander, more hopeful vision. —Piotr Orlov

Rinôçérôse
Installation Sonore
From titles like "La Guitaristic House Organisation" and "I Love Ma Guitare," you get a pretty good idea of what to expect from France's Rinôçérôse: house beats with lots of jagged, overdriven guitars. Nobody talks about them much these days, but these Daft Punk acolytes were definitely a precursor to the whole Ed Banger punky disco thing. In fact, between the current filter-disco resurgence and dance music's general anything-goes climate, the group's 2000 debut sounds even more relevant, more than a decade later. —P.S.

Oval
O
The sheer scope of Oval's O is fairly mind-blowing: 70 tracks totaling almost two hours of skitter and ping. Like its predecessor, the Oh EP, the album is far more accessible, or at least musical, than Oval's output of a decade before, using as it does such recognizable sounds as plucked acoustic guitar and, occasionally, meaty rock drumming. The music is still a product of digital arrangement and manipulation, but it sounds almost like free improvisation, like a meeting of Chris Corsano and the late Derek Bailey, with arrhythmic sequences of tones scattering like drops of water in a hot, greased skillet. —P.S.

Juana Molina
Un Dia
On her fifth album, the Argentine future-folkie sticks to the script of her previous releases, but that's just fine. With her usual tools — acoustic guitars, subdued percussion, subtle electronics and her wispy voice — Molina keeps finding new passageways to a strange, subconscious realm that's bathed in light. For the delicacy of her approach, Molina's music has real muscle: beyond folk and bossa nova, you can hear references to musique concrète, ambient electronics, spaghetti westerns, Indian ragas and even Public Enemy. It's a feather duvet sewn to the specs of a fine-art museum. —P.S.

Caribou
Up In Flames
Swatches of The Stone Roses' back-masked guitars get sewn up with drum breaks that have been pushed into the red and left to sizzle, while Manitoba's washed-out vocals put a psychedelic stamp on the material. The last album Dan Snaith recorded before changing his alias from Manitoba to Caribou, it's at once dreamy and invigorating, with melodic and percussive muscle that easily pushes aside its "folktronica" tag. Meaty, mesmerizing stuff. —P.S.

Jesu
Heart Ache & Dethroned
After the ambient detour of Pale Sketches Demixed, Justin Broadrick returns Jesu to its pummeling essence, reissuing 2004's Heart Ache EP with four extra tracks. The older tracks, 20 minutes apiece, are monolithic dirge metal laced with synths and drum machines, rich and menacing, reminiscent of early Swans atonal clang and Big Black's controlled bite. The additions, begun in 2004 and completed in 2010, pair chugging riffs from Earth or the Melvins with synths and atmospheric vocals; the overall effect feels almost like Nirvana chopped 'n' screwed. —P.S.

Pan American
For Waiting, For Chasing
Originally released on Stefan Németh's Mosz label in 2006, Pan American's For Waiting, For Chasing gets reissued by his longtime home, Kranky. It's timely: abandoning his dubby, post-rock foundations for crackling drones and incidental skitter, Pan American's Mark Nelson helped expose a vein of electro-acoustic experimentation that's still being mined today by all manner of ambient projects. But this is hardly a purely formalist exercise: recorded during his partner's pregnancy, and incorporating samples of his unborn son's heartbeat, its amniotic atmospheres gel with purposeful emotion. In the vein of Oval, Supersilent or Loscil, but with its own distinct sense of space and motion, it's sensual, engrossing stuff, as elegantly warped as driftwood. —P.S.

See Also:

The Durutti Column: Another Setting
Minotaur Shock: Maritime
Pascal Comelade & Richard Pinhas: Oblique Sessions II
Brian Eno: Another Green World
David Bowie: Heroes
The Orb: Cydonia

]]> Electric Daisy Carnival's Greatest Hits tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.3918 2011-07-05T17:37:42Z 2011-07-06T20:12:32Z Even for a 40-year-old gawker like myself, it was easy to feel welcome at last month's Electric Daisy Carnival, a three-night bacchanal where as many as 75,000 ravers wearing... Philip Sherburne Even for a 40-year-old gawker like myself, it was easy to feel welcome at last month's Electric Daisy Carnival, a three-night bacchanal where as many as 75,000 ravers wearing beads, body paint and, often, very little else came together at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway to hear some of the biggest names in electronic dance music. That's not just because virtually everyone there was unusually friendly and unfailingly polite. (Even police officers at the scene reported kids giving them high-fives throughout the course of the dusk-til-dawn extravaganza — a marked contrast from an earlier E.D.C. event in Dallas marred by multiple hospitalizations and one death.) No, it's because no matter where you went, you were bound to hear Martin Solveig's "Hello" blasting out at you from speaker stacks as tall as a midsized office building. DJ after DJ latched on to the French producer's poppy, singsong refrain, sometimes making you wonder if you had wandered into some gigantic, Glee-themed call center from an alternate dimension.

]]> like that song.

Some of the biggest hits of the weekend were as-yet-unreleased edits or bootlegs: Strains of Kanye West's "Lost in the World" kept cropping up, as did scraps of Plastikman's percussive classic "Spastik" and even dubstep variants of Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the Name," with which Benga and Skream ended their set, to savage effect, at the disembowelingly loud Bass Pod stage. The weekend's most frequently remixed artist was almost certainly Adele, whose "Rolling in the Deep" served as fodder for reworks by Steve Angello, Laidback Luke and many others. (That seems apropos, given that "rolling," in rave parlance, means "high on ecstasy.")

But plenty of anthems came straight off the shelf, as well. Swedish House Mafia's "Save the World" was a universal constant; Pitbull's "Give Me Everything" could be heard, well, everywhere. A new Nicky Romero remix of the Green Velvet chestnut "Flash" was improbably ubiquitous; Rusko's tearjerking "Hold On" was absolutely inescapable, especially in its Subfocus remix. (Frankly, that's fine by me — I don't think I'll ever get tired of that song.)

But, after Solveig, it was Skrillex, a former emo kid turned dubstep breakout star, who really dominated things, between tunes like "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites," "Reptile's Theme" and his remix of Benny Benassi's "Cinema." Hell, even Benassi himself reportedly played Skrillex's version rather than his own. And Skrillex also deserves extra credit for producing the one sound that wasn't heard at any other moment during the entire festival: a moment of silence, which he commanded during a lighters-in-the-air tribute to the late Jackass star Ryan Dunn. In a weekend of ringing ears and amps at 11, the quiet, however brief, was deafening.

Check out the tracks that dominated E.D.C. Las Vegas in our two-hour mix_play_18x14.gifE.D.C. Playlist.

]]> Rhapsody Radar Interview: Com Truise tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.3914 2011-07-01T19:43:09Z 2011-07-06T12:10:14Z Welcome back to Rhapsody Radar, our month-long celebration of 24 up-and-coming artists we're excited about. Today, we've got an interview with playful electronic-music retro-futurist Com Truise. Read on, and... Philip Sherburne 20110628-radar-com-truise.jpg Welcome back to Rhapsody Radar, our month-long celebration of 24 up-and-coming artists we're excited about. Today, we've got an interview with playful electronic-music retro-futurist Com Truise. Read on, and for more in this vein, please see our Electronic Roundup, June 2011 playlist.

A former drum 'n' bass DJ, Seth Haley has tried his hand at various production aliases in a variety of styles, but it wasn't until he adopted the persona Com Truise that he found his first real acclaim. Despite the cleverness (or not-cleverness) of the name, Com Truise isn't some celebrity deconstruction or po-mo prank. The retro-futurist melancholy of the music soon gives the name a different resonance—you start thinking of "Com" as in "intercom," and "Truise" as, perhaps, a star in a distant quadrant. His debut album, Galactic Melt, pays homage to '70s synthesizer music, '80s funk, and Boards of Canada's woozy nostalgia for the same periods.

Read on as the upstate New Yorker talks to Rhapsody about synthesizers, sci-fi, subwoofers and Spoonerisms.

]]> First, I have to ask about the name. Why did you choose it, and what does it suggest to you?
It started out as a joke. I had two other names for the project before I decided to go with Com Truise. I woke up one morning and realized I had no real intentions for this project, so let's go with this crazy name, who cares? Then it just kind of stuck. When I think back, if I had made a different choice or went with one of the other names, I probably wouldn't be where I am now. It's silly, but I do believe it has some sort of stopping power.

A lot of people are like, "I love the music but hate the name." The point of the music isn't really the name. I could call it, like, Monkey Turd, you know?

Don't do that.
No, no. But it doesn't really bother me anymore.

I had my doubts at first, but it's come to have a certain resonance all its own, a kind of sci-fi quality.
It's meant to be sci-fi-esque.

Were you aware of Jichael Mackson and Mord Fustang?
Those are, I guess, more recent? I wasn't aware of anything until right after everything started to get big, and I heard about Wevie Stonder. They've been around for a while. But now more and more people are doing it; I see a new one every day. It's annoying, but I can't really say anything about it, because I did it, too. I just have to outshine 'em.

You said you didn't have any expectations for the project. Did you have general aesthetic parameters or techniques to direct it?
I definitely had the techniques in mind that I wanted to use. The aesthetics kind of came along afterwards. I had a vision of some of it, because I do graphic design for a living—I'm an art director. So I had somewhat of a vision, as far as the aesthetics go, and definitely techniques with sound and certain things I wanted to try. I have a bunch of other aliases. I don't really like to make a whole bunch of music under one name, different genres or styles, because I'm really big on branding, I guess, and keeping things separated.

When you sit down to make music, do you know that it's for a particular alias? Or do you sort that out later?
I usually sit down with it already set in my mind, like, "I'm working on an Airliner song," or "I'm working on a Com Truise song," or whatever. These past two weeks, I've been working on some Airliner stuff. It's actually taking me quite a lot longer than I expected to get back into the mind-frame of that project and where I want to take it. But I feel like I'm going to be jumping back and forth pretty regularly here, so I'm going to have to figure out a simple way to do that. I know that I have certain techniques that I use for each project. But I never just sit down and make something and say, "Well, it fits in this bucket or in this bucket."

How did you get started working with synthesizers and electronic production?
Probably the way most people did. I started out as a DJ about 11 or 12 years ago, and I DJ'd drum 'n' bass music. I thought, "OK, I like everything I'm playing, but I want to make my own." It's a big deal to be able to play your own music for a lot of people. I just decided to start producing. Basically, how I got into synthesizers—drum 'n' bass music has less melody, just drums, you know? It's a lot of drums. Or at least the type of drum 'n' bass I was into. I think the first time I heard Boards of Canada, I was like, "Ohhh, so that's what's lacking in my music."

I feel like [drum 'n' bass] is a very strict genre where, if you don't follow certain guidelines, you won't go as far as you could. So I felt kind of boxed in. I wasn't able to completely express what I wanted to. Basically, yeah, I heard Boards of Canada. I think a friend told me, "You might like these guys, check 'em out." I was like, "This is the most amazing music, how did I miss it?"

After that, I started producing downtempo, ambient-type stuff, and I bought my first synthesizer. It was a Minimoog Voyager, rack-mount edition, which I sadly sold.

To buy more?
Well, yeah. At that time, I wasn't fully aware of where I wanted to go and how I wanted to use certain things, so I jumped on the, like, electro bandwagon, electro-house-type stuff. So I wanted kind of an '80s synth, something that was glisten-y. So I picked up a Nord Lead 2X. The Minimoog is monophonic, and I wanted polyphony. After three or four years, I was like, "You know, I really probably should have held on to that." And it's just been a whirlwind from there.

I don't know a lot about your studio setup. Are you working principally with hardware?
I have a good healthy mix of both. One of the synths I have is the Oberheim Matrix 6—that's like my pad machine. I love the bass sounds it gets, but they aren't exactly sharp enough. For a lot of my bass in my songs, I use software. It's so much more precise, and I can dial everything in exactly how I want it, perfectly, instantly. It's so much faster than programming the Matrix 6—that's like programming the lunar module to land on Mars.

How long did you spend on the album? Was it done in a focused burst of energy, or over a long time?
It was definitely done over a long time, maybe a year and a half. There's some really recent stuff I've written, and then there's some older stuff on there. For me, listening to it, it's like, here's a new song, and then the next one is like, "Jeez, that's the oldest song ever." The actual title track, "Galactic Melt," has been done for over a year. I kind of had the whole picture in my mind of how I wanted it to sound and how I wanted it to feel. Then when the music started to blow up, starting to deal with press and pressure, I've done a bazillion remixes in such a short period of time, and I worked full time—next week is actually my last week. I guess with all that going on, to me, the sound is cohesive, but in my mind it's disjointed, because I know that I wrote everything at different points in time, different situations, different things happening in my life. But what I strove for was for everything to sound like one solid idea, one solid chunk of sound.

If you had told me it was recorded in a couple of months, I would have believed you.
Thanks. I'm so excited, after I do a tour—because I won't have a real job any more—to go back and just lock myself inside and be able to work. I've been listening to the album for months now, and I hear things—I think, I should have added this here, or changed this. At the same time, I wanted to keep the music simple. There's so much crazy music out there, I didn't want to make music that you really had to think about. I just people to listen to and enjoy it, just kinda synthy, warm, somewhat dark and science-fiction type stuff.

Let's talk about the sci-fi thing—you're a big sci-fi fan?
Huge. Super-nerd.

What's your favorite thing about sci-fi films?
I think my favorite thing is the vision of the future they had. I definitely love the technology. Whenever there's a computer in a scene in a science-fiction movie, I always pause it. Like what's on the computer screen in Aliens, all the strange animation, stuff like that. I love the way technology looked, or the way they perceived it would look.

Do you ever worry that the retro-futurist angle could become constricting, as an artist?
Yes, I think, definitely, it can be constricting. But for me, I don't know. I guess what I'm trying to do—I'm not trying to recreate '80s sounds; I'm more focused on the production techniques. The way the music sat in the mix, the way things were compressed and EQ'd, and the reverbs… I'm more interested in the production techniques and the sound of the sound, and less in, "Oh, I want to make the same synthesizer stab from Yazoo's 'Don't Go.'" That's not really what my goal is. But I feel like on this album there are a lot of songs that are like an updated version of me, a little cleaner, and a little less nostalgic.

What is the ideal place to listen to your music? I know you said that you listen to the Blade Runner soundtrack in your car.
Yeah, yeah. Definitely the car. I listen to it in the car and I love it, a lot of bass, just cruisin' music. I'd say the car! Or some type of spaceship or something.

]]> Electronic Roundup, June 2011 tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.3903 2011-06-29T17:09:06Z 2011-06-29T17:41:48Z This week brings us one of the year's most anticipated albums: London's masked producer SBTRKT has finally arrived with his debut full-length. Featuring a diverse and wildly talented bunch... Philip Sherburne This week brings us one of the year's most anticipated albums: London's masked producer SBTRKT has finally arrived with his debut full-length. Featuring a diverse and wildly talented bunch of singers (including Little Dragon's Yukimi Nagano), it's a stunning realignment of pop along bass music's principles — or perhaps vice versa. Recent Ghostly signing Com Truise and the Oneohtrix Point Never-related Ford & Lopatin, meanwhile, prove that there's still plenty of future left in '80s electro pop, while Sarcastic Disco hero DJ Harvey brings us bleary-eyed Balearica with his Locussolus project, and Berlin's Trickski puts a slow-motion spin on house music.

Keep reading to check out all those and more, including new releases from Depeche Mode, Vladislav Delay, John Digweed, Robert Hood and the Hot Creations/Hot Waves family. Also be sure to check out our Hot New Electronic Releases - June 2011 playlist.

SBTRKT
SBTRKT
After a few years of EPs and remixes for the likes of M.I.A. and Basement Jaxx, London's SBTRKT finally drops his debut LP, and it's enough to blow a sideways hole in bass music. Drawing from dubstep, garage and U.K. funky, his beats snap with club-tested precision, but it's the fullness, the songfulness of his productions that really carries you away. Rotating singers Jessie Ware, Little Dragon's Yukimi Nagano and the velvety Sampha inhabit the music with ease, practically luxuriating in the music's glistening architectures; they also temper the harder edges with a weary grace. This isn't dubstep, per se, but it's unthinkable without the context dubstep gave it — in that sense, it's probably dubstep's finest incursion into pop music yet, and all without losing any of the vitality or dynamism of the underground.

]]> Com Truise
Galactic Melt
Titles like "Terminal," "Futureworld" and "VHS Sex" offer a good indication of Com Truise's preoccupations. His pealing synthesizers reveal an artist who's logged many hours immersed in Vangelis' sound-world for Blade Runner, while his shuddering beats are unrepentantly nostalgic for the glory days of '80s electro-funk — as heard through lysergic, rose-tinted headphones. You can hear Boards of Canada's influence in his keening, detuned tones, but the driven rhythms and fat, compressed sounds belong to a galaxy entirely of his own invention.

Ford & Lopatin
Channel Pressure
Formerly known as Games, Tigercity's Joel Ford and Oneohtrix Point Never's Daniel Lopatin explore an alternate '80s on Channel Pressure. Forgoing the studied affect of many retro acts, Ford & Lopatin evoke the gated drums and bright synths of Jan Hammer, Phil Collins, Mike Oldfield and others who were too prog for New Wave. The sonics connote cheese, but the duo's ambient interludes and moody pop songs are made with evident love and dazzling craft. An inspired trip into an imaginary future-past, it's just as Philip K. Dick predicted: they can remember it for you wholesale.

Locussolus
Locussolus
England's DJ Harvey is legendary for his wildly eclectic mix CDs and 12-hour DJ sessions, taking epic journeys into a genre entirely of his own making. His lengthy career is lighter on original productions (possibly because he's too busy surfing), but you wouldn't guess it from his debut full-length, recorded under his Locussolus alias. Taking up the baton that DFA once took from him, he touches up throbbing, bass-heavy machine funk with hints of acid rock, deep house and Balearic flights of fancy. Cheeky? Sure. But there's nothing lightweight about this "Sarcastic Disco."

Trickski
Unreality
The idea of dance music for living rooms is at least as old as the CD. Berlin's Trickski turn the notion on its head by reimagining the club as a kind of living room — not some mythical peak-time vortex, but a space where time passes, and moods wax and wane. Copping moves from deep house, disco edits and Detroit techno, they like their beats slow and low; their grooves shuffle with a woozy intimacy, while their mixture of synths and worn samples lends a warm, flickering light, like the hearth refracted in a slowly spinning disco ball.

Robert Hood
Omega: Alive
Call it the Robocop effect, but sci-fi has a tenacious grasp on the imaginations behind Detroit techno. In 2010, Robert Hood paid tribute to a 1971 Charlton Heston classic with Omega, an album that conjured urban apocalypse in his typically brooding, relentless strokes. Omega: Alive remixes that album's elements for live performance, folding in other tracks from his discography that suit the mood. His only conceptual misstep is his precision: the end of humankind will surely be far messier than these surgical patterns allow. We should be so lucky to go down this elegantly.

Vladislav Delay Quartet
Vladislav Delay Quartet
After testing his percussive mettle in the Moritz von Oswald Trio, Finland's ambient-techno maestro Vladislav Delay parks himself behind the drums once again, this time to helm his own electro-acoustic improv outfit. Accompanied by bassist Derek Shirley, winds player Lucio Capece and Pan Sonic's Mika Vainio on electronics, Delay whips up a shimmering haze of frozen drones and almost incidental pulses. There's not much to grasp onto, but getting lost in this wilderness is a reward in its own right.

Various Artists
Hot Waves, Vol. 1
In 2011, no house-music property is hotter than the Hot Creations and its proprietors, Hot Natured, aka Jamie Jones and Lee Foss. Pulling the best bits off the CDRs that circulate among their extended posse of DJ pals, they've launched a new sub-label, Hot Waves, to explore new directions in their trademark sound. It's a humid, urban style, full of jacking drum grooves and sexual suggestion; disco gives it shape, and R&B its juicy hue. Swaggering and louche, it's music for L.A. rooftops and Ibizan terraces, and parties in their third day — when grooves start unwinding and time stands still.

John Digweed
Structures Two
Progressive-house icon John Digweed works on an epic scale. A follow-up to 2010's double-disc Structures mix, Structures Two begins with a disc's worth of "blissed out electronica" from moonlighting techno artists, seamlessly remixed. Disc 2 catches a set of deep, chugging tech house recorded at L.A.'s Avalon nightclub, while the unmixed third disc rounds up exclusive tracks from Digweed's Bedrock label, with an emphasis on moody synths and driving grooves. Its glide is autopilot-smooth, but it's got enough twists and turns to stay engaging throughout.

Depeche Mode
Remixes 2
Depeche Mode spin 30 years of remixes into an infinite universe of forking paths in this collection of rare, out-of-print and unreleased versions. Club jocks like Bushwacka and Eric Prydz deliver tough progressive reworks, while bands like M83 and Peter Bjorn and John ply more indie-friendly wares; Claro Intelecto, Monolake and Efdemin all pursue more minimalist approaches. Meanwhile, vintage mixes like "Fly on the Windscreen (Death Mix)" revive the glory days of '80s import EPs, with their treasure trove of B-sides.


]]> Senior Year, 1995: Party Girl tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.3870 2011-06-23T17:27:01Z 2011-06-23T03:05:05Z The 1995 film Party Girl stars Parker Posey as Mary, a club-hopping, party-throwing firestarter with plenty of street smarts, but not enough common sense. A downtown New Yorker through... Philip Sherburne 20110621-party-girls.jpg The 1995 film Party Girl stars Parker Posey as Mary, a club-hopping, party-throwing firestarter with plenty of street smarts, but not enough common sense.

A downtown New Yorker through and through, she lives the nightlife to the hilt; when she discovers a love for library sciences, she throws herself into the subject with the same gusto, going so far as to re-organize her roommate's records according to the Dewey Decimal System. Her system is so inspired, it bears reproducing in detail:

]]> 310 Techno Mix
320 Techno Dream
330 Techno Rap
340 Tech-Noize
350 Mental Euro

400 Hip-Hop
410 Hip-Hop Mix
420 Super Hip-Hop
430 Pop Hip-Hop
440 Dead-End Hip-Hop

500 Rap
510 Sexist Rap
520 Political Rap
530 Adolescent Rap
540 Kid Rap
550 Old-School Rap

600 Disco
610 Disco Classics
620 Now Disco
630 Faux Disco
640 Crisco Disco
650 Frisco Disco

There are even color-coded stickers for additional data points: a blue dot means "especially good after 4 a.m."

Her roommate, Leo (Guillermo Diaz) — a short, slick-talking DJ with the era's requisite pencil goatee, African beads, backward ballcap and Girbaud jeans — is about as pleased with her meddling as you'd imagine. Making matters worse, he's just 20 minutes away from the most important gig of his life. "Yo, what happened?" he practically shrieks, his voice going falsetto. "You f**ked with my albums?"

"Give the system a chance," Mary calmly admonishes him, challenging him to name a record he needs for his set.

"'Mighty Real' from Sylvester," he says, pouting. She flips through her card catalog. "It's gonna be cross-listed under Disco Classics and Divas, Male." That shuts him up.

What follows is a scene that will have any crate-digger reaching for the pause and rewind buttons, over and over again. (At least, that was the case for this crate-digger.) In a burst of overdubbing, Leo reels off a dozen or so tracks: Pal Joey's "Hot Music," Jungle Brothers' "My Jimmy Weighs a Ton," Grace Jones' "Drive," Nuyorican Soul's "The Nervous Track," Ralphi Rosario's "You Used to Hold Me," even "Is It All Over My Face?", by Arthur Russell's disco project Loose Joints.

It's an amazing cross-section of downtown dance-music culture, rolling up disco, hip-hop and house music in a way that will resonate with anyone who went clubbing in New York in the mid-'90s.

In tribute to Mary, then, this Senior Year rounds up the tracks from 1995 that you might have heard at one of her parties, including songs from Deee-Lite, Ultra Naté, C + C Music Factory, Moby and CeCe Peniston — along with all the tracks we could identify from Leo's list. File under Girl, Party and cross-reference with Cookie, Smart.

Click here to listen to the complete playlist: Senior Year, 1995: Party Girl.


]]> A Conversation About Pitbull and the Electronic/Rap Fusion tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.3878 2011-06-22T17:25:23Z 2011-09-09T18:21:21Z Pitbull's anticipated new album, Planet Pit,hits stores this week. Its first two singles, "Hey Baby (Drop It to the Floor)" and "Give Me Everything," have dominated pop-radio playlists for... Rhapsody Editorial Pitbull's anticipated new album, Planet Pit,hits stores this week. Its first two singles, "Hey Baby (Drop It to the Floor)" and "Give Me Everything," have dominated pop-radio playlists for months, with the latter charting at No. 1 in several countries.

The Miami rapper is yet another example of how the worlds of dance-pop and hip-hop are intersecting. Pitbull has dabbled in both genres for years, as have Flo Rida, Lil Jon, Kid Cudi, Gorilla Zoe and many others. But while rappers increasingly rhyme (and sing) over progressive house and trance-inspired beats, more critics and fans are complaining that it's all just bad pop music made by cynical record labels for an undiscerning audience.

]]> Planet Pit, and why it doesn't necessarily represent the best that the new electronic/rap fusion has to offer.

Be sure to check out our Pitbull and the Electronic/Rap Crossover playlist.

Mosi Reeves: I want to talk about Pitbull's album Planet Pit. I think it's interesting how much electronic music has cross-pollinated with pop music in general and rap music (or at least the mainstream side of hip-hop) in particular. That's not to say that Pitbull's album is a watermark, but it's reflective of this trend that's built over the past few years.

Philip Sherburne: Would it be appropriate to define what we mean by "electronic music," briefly? Because of course hip-hop is also "electronic music," as is most pop. Not that I disagree with the conventional wisdom that pop and hip-hop have "gone dance." (Apologies in advance for all the scare-quotes.)

Rachel Devitt: Sounds like a good idea. Philip, do you want to offer an initial definition? I'm not super-familiar with the official terms for various types of dance music, so I guess I often just use more descriptive language to try to explain what I mean when I talk about it.

P.S.: Well, electronic dance music is always a shifting landscape, but I think it's pretty easy to identify the influence of house and trance in Pitbull (plus of course The Black Eyed Peas and countless other artists in the dance-pop sphere). You've got your four-to-the-floor beats, your oonce-oonce hi-hats, and that's pretty much all you need to know.

M.R.: I think there are distinctions between electronically produced music and electronic music as a specific genre. You could argue that pop-dance, or mainstream club music, is closer to the electronic genre than, say, pop or hip-hop.

P.S.: Definitely, Mosi. I mean, mainstream club music basically branched off from disco and house in the same way that other genres, subgenres and tendencies in electronic dance music did.
Pitbull's dalliances with dance music definitely aren't new. Even crunk tapped trance for its synth sounds, and Pitbull sampled Rune RK's massive Ibiza hit "Calabria" for 2007's "The Anthem."

M.R.: But I think we're parsing here. Pitbull is seen as a hip-hop artist, not as a dance artist, but he and many others are blurring the lines between them.

R.D.: Something I kept wondering is if the kind of dance pop-icization of pop in general is different than the dance pop-icization of hip-hop. So like, The Black Eyed Peas are making similarly dance/electronic-music-inundated music, but they've been more closely associated with pop than hip-hop for a while now. Whereas Pitbull I think still continued/continues to have a closer association with hip-hop.

P.S.: So what makes Pitbull a hip-hop artist?

M.R.: Good question. I think it's his attitude as well as his past discography and history with Miami bass, Luke, Lil Jon and crunk, etcetera.

R.D.: Yeah, I think a lot of it is self-identification. I feel like B.E.P., for instance, have actively identified themselves with pop, whereas Pit continues to identify as a hip-hop artist to some degree.

P.S.: Mosi, you were in Miami for a time; did you see a lot of crossover between the hip-hop and dance scenes there?

M.R.: When I was in Miami (in the mid-2000s), the hip-hop and commercial dance scenes were fairly separate. In fact, I remember in 2009 when Diddy took Xzibit to Space, which is one of the bigger after-hours clubs there, Xzibit subsequently told rap blogs that he went to a gay club!
But it's interesting how dance music has replaced crunk and street hop as the genres of choice in nightclubs. And even guys like Pitbull want to be where the action is, as opposed to losing audience by sticking to street rap.

R.D.: Well, he's definitely something of an unabashed trend-jockey. And I don't mean that in a negative way. I think he's just been pretty pop-oriented for a while, and pop is a game of following trends, to some degree.
I wonder how much of the transition has to do with Pitbull's Latin music identification/influence, though. I feel like a lot of this album is very dancehall-, reggaeton- and Latin dance/hip-hop-oriented.

P.S.: I suppose it's arguable that Latino audiences may be more amenable to various genres of dance music than other segments of the American population.

R.D.: Well, I meant more musically/aesthetically, not ethnically/culturally.

P.S.: Fair enough. But electronic dance music has definitely been a much stronger force throughout Latin America than in the U.S., for years. And the reggaeton rhythms also intersect with what's popular from "Dutch house" right now. Possibly just an accident, but it makes the crossover much easier.

R.D.: I think reggaeton and dancehall have always been more dance-oriented and electronic music-friendly than a lot of domestic hip-hop-affiliated genres. It's a particularly syncopated four-on-the-floor — the way Pitbull kind of trips up to the off-beats. That's what sounds Latin to me.

P.S.: Right. And that's also what's big in Dutch house right now. Big, loping, reggaeton-style snares.

R.D.: Classic reggaeton is slower, but contemporary reggaeton has been speeding up considerably. Though that, too, may be the result of house/electronic music's influence — ?

M.R.: Can you mention a few songs with that style, Rachel?

R.D.: Sure. The "Shake Senora Remix," for instance. Yes, it's a play on this kitschy Harry Belafonte thing — "Jump in the Line (Shake Señora)" — but it's also got a really similar beat and sound to what, say, Don Omar is doing right now. But again, chicken or egg, you know? That's maybe not the best example since it's hard to hear it without hearing calypso. "Oye Baby" is a better one, maybe.

M.R.: Philip, what do you think of the Murk/classic Miami house sound on Planet Pit tracks like "Pause"? Is it viable from an aesthetic standpoint?

P.S.: Ha, nice way to phrase the question. I have to admit I really don't know Murk terribly well. Though "Pause" is, indeed, one of the more tolerable songs on the album, to my ears. On "Pause," to me, at least the sonics are interesting; I like what they do with the booming 808 in the drop.

M.R.: I think this is a good way to address the elephant in the room … I mean, is this music any good? Or is it just lowest-common-denominator stuff? To preface … there's a huge debate in hip-hop over whether this music is "real hip-hop," or just sellout material.
And yes, there are some shades of "anti-disco" and homophobia in the discussion, too.

P.S.: I mean, I really don't want to use terms like LCD, because everyone has the right to their tastes. But I also really don't like most of this stuff, and I'm trying to articulate why, without falling into a knee-jerk "the underground is more real!"-type argument.
Taking it back to Diddy — one interesting thing is that he has definitely logged his hours on the dancefloor at clubs like DC-10, which is sort of Ibiza's headquarters of "underground" house music. But most of what you're hearing here, and in B.E.P. et al, is a much glossier, more commercial sound.

M.R.: Is it too pop?

PS: What I don't care for is the predictability — the snare rolls, the rushing white noise, all these cues to trigger a reaction from the audience. I mean, Robyn is pop, but I hear a more interesting take on dance music in her songs.

R.D.: I don't love it either, and I'm the pop editor. But I also can't quite put my finger on why. I think part of it for me is that I kind of lose Pitbull as a figure/personality in it all. And pop is so much about personality.

P.S.: One thing I don't really care for is Pitbull's persona. Like, when he addresses the listener as "b*tch" in the opening "Mr. Worldwide," it's like … why am I supposed to care about you again?

M.R.: I mean, Pitbull is true to his name, right? He's a bit of a horndog, like the overly aggressive dude humping on all the girls.

R.D.: Yeah, but I feel like even that gets kind of drowned out by shtick, you know? Or just becomes folded into it. Even literally sometimes — you hardly hear him on some of his own tracks. Or at least you hardly recognize him.

P.S.: I think where he works best is as pure voice — he does have a great voice, and when he's growling and purring, it works really well, in terms of pure sonics.

R.D.: I agree with that, Philip. It's one of the things I always liked or was drawn to about Pitbull. And that's part of what I feel like gets railroaded here. I'm all for trend-jockeying in pop, but not at the expense of persona, if that makes any sense. Even the hyper-sexuality just feels a bit phoned-in here, you know? I don't know. I'm not sure that's exactly it either, but I also feel that something about this album just doesn't grab me.

P.S.: What did you guys think about the Diddy Dirty Money album?

M.R.: Um, I didn't care for it because of the Auto-Tune. I thought some of the female vocal arrangements, like "I Hate That You Love Me," as well as Drake's guest spot on "Loving You No More," were nice. Unlike some hip-hop fans, I really like dance music. But I haven't really found current rap that successfully fuses the two, with the exception of Diddy's work with DJ Hell and some of Kid Cudi's tracks.

P.S.: What you say is funny, because of course hip-house is a testament that they CAN work together.

M.R.: But hip-house is so '80s! I guess I'm talking about current rap.

P.S.: Sure. I can't think of a ton of successful crossovers — except of course for grime, which turned into a "purer" kind of hip-hop pretty quickly.

M.R.: Pitbull is like the modern version of hip-house, I guess. I hate to keep repeating this, but aggression is so ramped up in modern hip-hop that it doesn't allow for the kind of femininity that made hip-house so great.

P.S.: That's too bad ... those dudes need to listen to more Dam-Funk. Not that he's feminine, but his whole persona oozes humility. Dam-Funk is all about giving it up for his predecessors, as opposed to the macho world-domination fantasies of Pitbull et al.

M.R.: Rachel, what do you think? Have you heard any records that successfully blend electronic and hip-hop?

R.D.: Not really. I was trying to go through the charts to look for examples, actually, and there isn't a lot. The thing is, a lot of charting hip-hop artists aren't doing it, it seems. Would you agree?
And I did keep wondering if it had to do with the way genres are currently gendered — kind of in line with what you were saying, Mosi, about contemporary hip-hop being skewed so masculine-aggressive. The electronic music movement has been most closely associated with pop stars and with feminized pop genres in particular, I feel like.

M.R.: Lil Wayne, Drake, Kid Cudi, Kanye West ... they've all done dance tracks. But it has less to do with adopting the "softer" sounds of electronic pop that using it as an expression of macho sexuality. Kid Cudi is a notable exception.

P.S.: Although in Pitbull, a lot of the danciest elements are trance music in its fluffiest, most melodic form. A very "feminine" touch, I think it's fair to say.

M.R.: I think Kid Cudi actually fuses the "lose yourself" ethos of nightclubbing with a hip-hop sensibility. But I never get the sense that Pitbull ever loses himself in the music. He's always aiming for some kind of reward, whether it's women or money.

P.S.: That's something interesting to talk about — this ethos of nightclubbing. Because pop dance, lately, is all about "the club" ... "Dance tracks about dancing," I believe the Village Voice called it. I think it's instructive to compare Kid Cudi's "Memories" with Pitbull's "Give Me Everything" — they're both about anticipating events we'll remember later. It reminds me of an MIT professor who recently wrote a book about social media, noting how you used to experience something, then share it ... and now, on Facebook, people don't feel like they've had the experience until they've shared it.
Anyway, I was thinking specifically of Pitbull's lines "I might drink a little more than I should tonight, and I might take you home if I could tonight" … and how they compare to "Memories." It's all about the club as this free zone of libidinal impulses. And yet it's all in the future tense.

M.R.: But Philip, I think club music has always been about an adventure of sorts.

P.S.: Sure, but now it's like an adventure with CliffsNotes attached. "This is the part where we do Jäger bombs."

M.R.: Is that because rap lyrics are so specific that they spell out the impulses instead of inferring them?

P.S.: Sure, maybe. I mean, I've always gravitated toward instrumental dance music, so I'm definitely biased here. But it's like they're in the car with Rebecca Black, figuring out whether to choose the front seat or the backseat.

M.R.: Speaking of which, can we quickly address some other artists, like Dev and The Cataracs? Your phrase "backseat" made me think of the New Boyz' new song.

P.S.: First listen, The Cataracs sound like a vaguely hip-hop-influenced version of electroclash.

M.R.: Rachel, what do you think about The Cataracs, Ke$ha, etcetera? Do you see that as separate from this thread? Perhaps I'm casting the net too wide here.

R.D.: Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at way back at the beginning — is this movement in hip-hop different than the movement in music that's more closely associated with mainstream pop? (Ke$ha might be an interesting case study on both sides of the argument.)

M.R.: I think they're similar ... it all concerns a return to uptempo dance beats as a dominant club/pop style.

P.S.: And then there's also dubstep's incursion into mainstream pop, whether Britney or Katy B ...

R.D.: Right. I definitely feel like that's part of the same family tree, but not the same branch. I actually think Ke$ha and Dev come off (or want to come off) pretty hip-hop-influenced. Maybe dance/electronic music (and its current relationship to hip-hop) then becomes a point of entry for a white girl like Ke$ha? Whereas I feel like Britney, for instance, was specifically trying to align herself with dance music — and specifically, with gay club music. Or gay club scenes, anyway.

P.S.: Is it cynical of me to assume that much of this is determined by focus groups and marketing managers?

M.R.: Uh, perhaps :-)

P.S.: Dance music is hot, Ke$ha needs a differentiating factor, hey! We'll give her a "dance" angle. Pitbull's guest roster definitely has a whiff of the boardroom to it.

M.R.: I think a lot of this is more organic than you think. I've been to some of these clubs, and not to sound corny or anything, but this is how people live music.

P.S.: What kind of clubs does this stuff get played at? That's something I've never understood.

R.D.: Places where Kardashians get paid to go?

M.R.: Sure.
 
P.S.: Like, the Billboard Hot Dance Airplay chart has nothing to do with any club I've ever seen in my LIFE. I realize my perspective is limited, but still.

M.R.: I would say that club life in major metropolitan cities and smaller cities can be very different in terms of choices. For example, if you want to go to a dance club in Sacramento, Calif., you're going to one of those clubs where Flo Rida and Ke$ha get played every hour. Whereas in major cities, you can probably avoid them.
I also think that many people go to dance clubs for that kind of experience: lots of flirting, eye candy, dancing to loud music. Like you said, Philip, it's like a CliffsNotes version of "this is what I do at a dance club."

P.S.: I'm sure there are kids throwing underground parties in Sacramento, they're just not reporting to Billboard! But yes, point taken.

M.R.: But I want to summarize here before we go too off-track. It seems like you guys are pretty dismissive of this whole trend?

P.S.: Not if you mean the potential crossover between hip-hop and dance music, no. But it would help if the rappers would listen to better dance music!
I mean, Timbaland — here's a guy who could bring together strains of electronic dance music with hip-hop in a totally mind-blowing way. And even Kanye's last album has some breathtaking production on it. But I don't hear much taking of chances on the Pitbull album.

R.D.: I think the gendered aspects are really fascinating, but I just haven't found much to grab onto yet. Sonically, I mean.

P.S.: You know, I thought Marc Anthony was a woman on "Rain Over Me." Which made the whole "let it rain" all the stranger. Also, I totally imagine divas voguing during the breakdown on "Pause." But I think those gendered tangents are probably just in my imagination.

R.D.: I like that image for "Pause!" Now I'm going to see that every time!
But I mean, the gendered aspects of hip-hop artists taking up this kind of dance-pop, I guess. Which, to me anyway, is represented much more strongly and more closely associated with female artists and feminized pop genres on the charts.
I also — and let me reiterate here that I'm not really very knowledgeable about electronic music — cannot help but hear gay dance clubs in so much of this stuff. More so with the mainstream pop artists' take on it. And definitely more so with the dubstep-leaning stuff. But then it's hard not to hear the relationship of, say, Pitbull to J.Lo, especially since they reiterate it.

M.R.: Sure, and I think that you could look at Pitbull and, say, Ke$ha as two sides of the same coin, except that women still have the opportunity to make less rigid gender statements in pop music. I guess men's roles have grown so formulaic because their masculinity is constantly at stake.

R.D.: I totally agree — that's what's fascinating about it! Seeing someone like Pitbull try to negotiate these gender politics is really interesting. I just don't find the music on this album super-fascinating.
So maybe it's the threat to hip-hop and/or Pitbull's own brand of masculinity that makes him be more conservative in his explorations of the hip-hop/dance music overlap?
(p.s. I first totally accidentally typed "sexplorations!" ha!)

M.R.: I think people in the U.S. still don't get electronic dance culture(s). They see it as a one-dimensional thing.
]]> Surf 'n' Seagulls: Beach Pop Extravaganza tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.3848 2011-06-13T16:51:49Z 2011-06-14T15:20:20Z Nothing says "summer" quite like the murmur of the tide and the shrieks of seagulls wheeling in the setting sun. In fact, there's a long tradition of pop songs... Philip Sherburne Nothing says "summer" quite like the murmur of the tide and the shrieks of seagulls wheeling in the setting sun.

In fact, there's a long tradition of pop songs infused with those very sounds, from the rolling waves of Otis Redding's "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" to the electronic birdsong that opens 808 State's ambient-techno classic, "Pacific." Lately, the trope seems to be enjoying a renaissance, as chillwave artists build nostalgic sand castles studded with '80s relics, and house-music revivalists evoke the Edenic splendors of Balearic disco's heyday.

We've gathered a sampling of some of our favorite examples into a 90-minute playlist spanning Metronomy, Quiet Village, Natalie Cole, Kool & The Gang, Procol Harum, M83, The Shangri-Las, The Temptations, Talk Talk, PJ Harvey and more. (We cheat a little bit—Don Henley's "The Boys of Summer" may not have actual seagulls in it, but between the squealing guitars and memories of the song's iconic video, it's impossible not to hear at least an echo of the shore in it.) Check out the full playlist here, and see if you don't feel the sand between your toes.


]]> Cheat Sheet: Vox Electronica - Electronic Pop's New Voices tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.3802 2011-06-07T17:08:16Z 2011-06-07T16:02:27Z Electronic pop is the most vocal that it's been in years. Between acts like Planningtorock, Austra and Glasser, we're riding a wave of strong new voices wrapped artfully in... Philip Sherburne 20110607-voacl-electro-560x225.jpg Electronic pop is the most vocal that it's been in years. Between acts like Planningtorock, Austra and Glasser, we're riding a wave of strong new voices wrapped artfully in idiosyncratic sonics and synth-pop productions. Artists like James Blake and Gang Gang Dance, meanwhile, are using vocals as waveforms to be manipulated, tracing the human/machine interface with wires wrapped around vocal cords.

Some of it foregrounds its singers' impressively supple, versatile voices, emphasizing artifice and quirk, with kinship to not just Kate Bush and Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser but also Meredith Monk and Joan LaBarbara. Some of it relies upon heavy-duty digital processing — vocoders, reverb, AutoTune — to make strange and oblique something we normally consider essential and transparently expressive.

And some of it is really just synth-pop with some really good singers. I'm keeping things deliberately vague: I don't want to get hemmed into the usual distinctions of genre or underground-versus-mainstream. What's interesting is how prominent vocals are becoming in electronic music, across the boards.

]]>
The result is an unlikely collision of traditions, where the voice is one thing everyone can agree on. Explore a range of vocal-heavy electronica across the albums below, and sample even more in this playlist.

Planningtorock
W
Like peers Glasser and Zola Jesus, it's hard to know just what to call Janine Rostron. Is she a singer? A producer? In fact, the British-born, Berlin-based musician handles both equally compellingly. Combining acoustic instruments with synths and digital processing, her music can sound like Meredith Monk remixed. But once she starts singing, all thoughts turn to her powerful, mutable voice, which moves like a swollen river. Her beats and her singing both carry an echo of her collaborators The Knife, but there's no mistaking Planningtorock's vast, theatrical music for anyone else's. — Philip Sherburne

Austra
Feel It Break
Katie Stelmanis' voice is both anchor and horizon of Austra, her trio with drummer Maya Kotepski and bassist Dorian Wolf. Multitracked up and down the stave, it holds down the band's New Wave arrangements and arcs off in dreamy harmonic tangents. Like Fever Ray and The Knife, Austra tread a similar path between cyber-worlds and meatspace, pairing supersaturated, superhuman vocals with gleaming electronics; you can bet they're fans of Depeche Mode's Violator. Fortunately, they're more than mere stylists, giving songs like "Hate Crime" a magnetic quality that keeps pulling you back. — P.S.

Battles feat. Matias Aguayo
"Ice Cream"
The Chilean-German artist Matias Aguayo has long been one of the most innovative vocalists in the house and techno underground. In the duo Closer Musik, he was singing at a time when vocals were all but verboten; a few years ago, he gave the flagging minimal-techno scene a spirited kick in the pants with his gonzo anthem, "Minimal." His last album for Kompakt was almost entirely vocal, a woozy throb of multitracked crooning and beatboxing. Here, he hooks up with Warp's math-rockers Battles for "Ice Cream," a dizzy swirl of Afropop guitars, powerful rock drumming, chants and drones; just like the title promises, it hits like a brain freeze. — P.S.

Gang Gang Dance
Eye Contact
It's telling that Eye Contact begins with a man saying, "I can hear everything" — conversationally, confessionally — before continuing to mutter throughout all 11 minutes of the sunrise-hued opener, "Glass Jar." Gang Gang Dance try on any number of styles on their first album for 4AD — New Wave, Krautrock, drum 'n' bass, bits that sound Indian or North African — and the way they toss them around is as casual as a couple of stoned roommates playing each other YouTube clips late into the night. Voices provide the unifying thread. One interstitial sketch is nothing but a melancholic a cappella in an alien tongue, surrounded by delicate synth treatments; in "Chinese High," Chinese speech is chopped up into jittery nonsense syllables. The whole thing teeters like a top-heavy Tower of Babel, bolted together with whispers. — P.S.

Oh Land
Oh Land
Danish darling Nanna Oland Fabricius is like half fembot, half hippie chick. Programmed to write, sing and play nearly every instrument on her debut, the blonde bombshell utilizes sleek synths, glockenspiel and drum machines as shiny accessories to lure you into her electro-pop wonder world. In reality, Oh Land is quite poignant; Fabricius' crystal coos glide atop heavy beats that are sometimes trip-hop dark, sometimes disco giddy. In "Break the Chain" she opens up about a dance career ended by injury; elsewhere her flower-power side shines through with talk of moons, dreams and white knights. — Stephanie Benson

Zola Jesus
Valusia EP
Zola Jesus isn't really the goth that she's sometimes pegged as; her music is mercifully free of the kitsch that too often accompanies New Wave's merchants of gloom. Indeed, the dead-eyed intensity of her music can make for profoundly uneasy listening. ("I love the feeling when you hear a song that is so overwhelming and powerful it makes your veins hurt," she has said.) Over crumbling drums and worn-out synths, she sings like a woman possessed. Her Valusia EP, from October 2010, finds some light at the end of the tunnel, with a newfound luminosity in the keyboards and an almost optimistic tinge to the soaring "Poor Animal." — P.S.

Glasser
Ring
For its humble origins — she recorded her first EP on GarageBand — Brooklyn's Cameron Mesirow has lofty aspirations for her solo project Glasser. Her homemade art-pop is modeled on '80s icons like Siouxsie and Kate Bush as well as peers like Fever Ray and Wildbirds & Peacedrums, and her voice and ethereal production style are strong enough to give Glasser's music a character of its own. Despite its computer origins, revealed in sampled percussion, the music draws heavily upon warm, acoustic timbres, which are layered with unobtrusive electronic strains to create a supple sense of motion. — P.S.

James Blake
James Blake
James Blake's first few EPs featured chalky, crumbling beats and marbled veins of R&B vocals. His debut album, appropriately enough, feels like a seismic shift, as Blake proves himself to be as keen a songwriter as he is a conjurer of atmospheres. Blake's own voice carries the day, supple and expressive, multitracked into gospel-influenced harmonies or Auto-Tuned into a surreal warble. As a producer, he makes do with the bare minimum, running pitter-pat drum programming in loose rings around solemn piano chords. It's the rare album that creates its own world — indeed, its own genre. — P.S.

How To Dress Well
Love Remains
Layering spooky, processed vocals like some weaver of clouds, How To Dress Well's music is a fusion of ghostly R&B and ethereal synth pop, halfway between R. Kelly and the Cocteau Twins. The songs on his debut album are deliberately lo-fi, with spindly analog synths run through corrosive delay, and reverb so vast you can practically hear the cave's stalactites trembling in the wind. — P.S.



Beth Ditto
EP
You weren't expecting this one: Beth Ditto, the fiery frontwoman of Arkansas-via-Olympia dance punks Gossip, teams up with Simian Mobile Disco to record a heartfelt tribute to vintage club music. Think Madonna, Shannon, CeCe Peniston, Nu Shooz — it's all about chugging house grooves, bright synth stabs and Ditto's incredible voice, judiciously layered and processed to ever-so-slightly larger-than-life effect. It's a masterpiece of pastiche, but all four songs are also thrilling examples of dance pop at its purest. — P.S.


]]> Senior Year, 1978: Outside Studio 54 tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.3769 2011-05-24T17:25:17Z 2011-05-24T05:06:36Z While there probably weren't too many high school seniors that made it past the velvet ropes, in 1978, Studio 54 shone like a beacon to kids dreaming of bright... Philip Sherburne 20110524-studio-54-560x225.jpg While there probably weren't too many high school seniors that made it past the velvet ropes, in 1978, Studio 54 shone like a beacon to kids dreaming of bright lights in the big city. Just a few years before, disco had been a resolutely underground thing, but by 1978 and Saturday Night Fever, it exploded out of the gay community and into pop consciousness, where it was promptly mobbed with celebrities, wannabes and hangers-on. (For a contemporary equivalent, look to the backstage areas at Coachella, or any tabloid-ready hangout where there's a VIP within the VIP.)

Our Class of '78 may never have rubbed elbows inside with Halton and Bianca Jagger, or feasted their own eyes on Gilbert Lesser's infamous wall sign of a man in the moon sniffing sparkly crystals from a silver spoon. But these songs were the soundtrack to the fantasy. Check out 1978 as it sounded from the inside with our Senior Year playlist.


]]> Electronic Roundup: May Top 10 tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.3750 2011-05-17T17:10:06Z 2011-06-03T20:41:28Z Last month, we highlighted tracks in our roundup of the top 10 electronic releases of the month (or thereabouts); this time, we're mixing it up between LPs, EPs and... Philip Sherburne Last month, we highlighted tracks in our roundup of the top 10 electronic releases of the month (or thereabouts); this time, we're mixing it up between LPs, EPs and double-A-side singles. Why not?

There's no explicit theme; if there's a certain sun-kissed, Balearic vibe to many of these releases, chalk it up to the arrival of spring, and your correspondent's preference for the lush and psychedelic. Explore a range of stylistically promiscuous sounds from labels like Warp, DFA, Ghostly, Planet Mu and the Uruguayan disco imprint International Feel — and no, we're not making that last one up.


1. Bibio
Mind Bokeh
Bibio's early records flitted between electro-acoustic ambient jams and fingerpicked tributes to John Fahey; moving to Warp, he introduced swaggering hip-hop beats, squelchy funk synthesizers and occasional vocals without ever losing his pastoral vibe and gossamer detailing. Mind Bokeh, his best yet, has all that and more. Steely Dan, Nick Drake, J Dilla, Brian Eno, Stereolab, Jim O'Rourke at his sunniest: it all finds its way in. But it makes sense, bound by Bibio's bright-eyed curiosity and his brilliant sonics, so crystalline they could soundtrack a Lenscrafters ad.
See also:
Gold Panda: Lucky Shiner
Benoit Pioulard: Lasted
Floating Points: Vacuum Boogie EP

]]> 2. Morphosis
What Have We Learned
From Amsterdam's Delsin label comes one of the year's finest techno LPs, even for those who think they don't like techno. Lebanon's Rabih Beaini wends his way through a maze of patch cables and obscure machines, yielding an unusually supple, shape-shifting sound. Dark as a shuttered factory, it's illuminated by blinking LEDs and long arcs of pure electricity, while traces of dub, New Wave and Krautrock flesh out the panorama. Recorded in two days, it doesn't sound rushed, just spontaneous and alive, with drum patterns and pealing synthesizers evolving as if they had a will of their own.
See also:
Mike Dehnert: Framework
Redshape: The Dance Paradox
Conforce: State of Mind EP

3. Mark E
Stone Breaker
Birmingham's Mark E first made his name with a series of low-slung disco edits, but on his debut album for Ghostly's Spectral sublabel, he discards the crutches and steps confidently into it all on his own. There are echoes of Chicago house, Detroit techno and New York disco, but the inspirations never overshadow Mark E's own hypnotic take on classic dance music. From the punishing funk to moonrise reveries, there's a tune for every mood. And, contrary to the album's title, he makes it all seem effortless: club music with brains, brawn and uncommon grace.
See also:
Carl Craig: The Album Formerly Know As…
Various Artists: Best of Rush Hour 2009
Metro Area: Metro Area

4. Invisible Conga People
In a Hole/Can't Feel My Knees
It took Invisible Conga People three years to follow up their debut single, but these tracks were worth the wait. The New York duo still makes slo-mo disco with uncommon grace: "In a Hole" plays glancing chords against melancholy vocals over a muted 4/4 thump; the dub version is even spookier, halving the tempo and giving the vox a narcotic 33-on-45 treatment. "Can't Feel My Knees" limns Radiohead-caliber yearning with bare, buzzing electronics, while the dub earns its DFA pedigree (and tweaks the format) with buzzing synths, naked drum machines and cathedral-sized reverb.
See also:
Glasser: Apply EP
James Blake: Klavierwerke EP
Roll the Dice: Live in Gothenburg - August 7, 2010

5. Robag Wruhme
Thora Vukk
The moody producer Robag Wruhme gets the most out of his mopes on Thora Vukk. His first major undertaking since the breakup of his duo the Wighnomy Brothers, the album is a long way from the hyperkinetic antics of the group's drunken, marathon DJ sessions. In place of rhythmic trickery and manic sample play, he sticks largely to dusty Rhodes figures, ambient interludes and mossy beds of strings. Even comparatively upbeat cuts have a muffled, cottony thump — it's a heart-in-mouth thing, like the feeling that comes with the first shoots of green after a long, dark winter.
See also:
Pantha Du Prince: XI Versions of Black Noise
Isolee: Well Spent Youth
Lusine: A Certain Distance

6. Gatto Fritto
Gatto Fritto
The debut album from London's Gatto Fritto is right at home on International Feel, a Uruguayan label known for laid-back, left-field electronic dance music from DJ Harvey and Rocha. Long on sumptuous synthesizers and soulfully eerie falsetto, the record hits all the right Balearic references — Giorgio Moroder, Krautrock, New Wave, Chicago house, Alan Parsons Project — but the execution transcends any sense of roteness, abounding in hypnotic grooves and spine-tingling atmospheres. This is essential listening for fans of Lindstrom, Prins Thomas and the Permanent Vacation label.
See also:
Locus Solus: I Want It/Next to You
Various Artists: Permanent Vacation: Selected Label Works 2
Joakim: Monsters & Silly Songs

7. Prommer and Barck
Alex and the Grizzly
Two veterans of Germany's nu-jazz scene, Christian Prommer (Fauna Flash, Truby Trio) and Alex Barck (Jazzanova), come together for a captivating collection of low-key dance grooves and experimental pop with a warm, analog/acoustic palette. There's a hint of Arthur Russell in the echoing "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," which samples the like-minded French musician Henri Texier; you can even hear the influence of Penguin Café Orchestra in some of the dreamier stretches. Grinding and flushed, "Submarine Bells" is unabashedly Balearic, while "Gladys Knight" is delectable slow-motion house; "The Barking Grizzle (Detroit/Berlin)" might be the first Detroit-inspired techno track to feature oboes. "Journey" is another winner, with bright, billowing chords and vocals over a dusky acid line, flipping between major and minor like a sail in the wind.
See also:
Arthur Russell: Calling Out of Context
Glissandro 70: Glissandro 70
Jose Gonzales: In Our Nature Remixes

8. Boxcutter
The Dissolve
When Barry Lynn began recording as Boxcutter in 2005, the name suited his jagged, glinting beats like a sheath fits a blade. With his fourth album for Planet Mu, it looks like he might need a new name. Recalling his labelmates Oriol and FaltyDL, or the laid-back Floating Points, Lynn eases into a set of Rhodes-drenched funk and summery breakbeat fantasias as colorful as the record's sleeve. Instead of dubstep's coiled attack, rhythms swing between lackadaisical hip-hop and airy house grooves. Tinged with Stevie Wonder and Weather Report, it's a humid, tropical LP as refreshing as a mojito.
See also:
FaltyDL: You Stand Uncertain
Kuedo: Starfox EP
Dorian Concept: Her Tears Taste Like Pears

9. Com Truise
Fairlight
Preceding his debut album on Ghostly, New Jersey synth freak Com Truise drops an EP titled in homage to the Fairlight, a digital synthesizer that played a huge role in the glossy sound of '80s pop. Similar to his debut EP, Cyanide Sisters, it brings together lurching electro-funk beats with glassy, detuned keys, shuddering and warbling like an overheated car stereo. No wonder he was tapped to remix Daft Punk's Tron: Legacy soundtrack; somewhere between Boards of Canada, Dam-Funk and Oneohtrix Point Never, it's music for a fantasy future-past, garlanded with unspooled VHS tapes.
See also:
Boards of Canada: Music Has the Right to Children
Dam-Funk: Toeachizown
Oneohtrix Point Never: Rifts

10. Addison Groove
This Is It/Make Um Bounce
Addison Groove doesn't mess around with the two propulsive tracks on his latest single for the Tectonic label. Busting out the tightly looped toms and vocal samples of his breakout hit "Footcrab," he continues finding new ways to fold the hyperkinetic cadences of Chicago footwork into a bassy hybrid of U.K. funky and stripped-down house. "This Is It" is all strafing lasers and emphatic staccato beats, softened by liquid chords; "Make Um Bounce" loops the titular phrase over relentless syncopations and juicy acid squelch. One part London to two parts Chicago, it's like sipping on gin and juke.
See also:
Mosca: Square One EP
Chrissy Murderbot: Women's Studies
Bangs & Works Vol. 1 (A Chicago Footwork Compilation)


]]> Comic Electronica tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.3732 2011-05-10T17:06:06Z 2011-05-11T15:32:33Z Sprockets aside, comedy and electronic music don't initially seem like they have much in common. But there's actually a whole spectrum of the electronic genre that's shot through with... Philip Sherburne Sprockets aside, comedy and electronic music don't initially seem like they have much in common. But there's actually a whole spectrum of the electronic genre that's shot through with humor, whether it's the goofball antics of Crazy Frog or the political absurdism of Negativland. Between those poles lie the rave-rappers Die Antwoord, South Africa's answer to Borat; the stone-faced conceptualist Felix Kubin; and even that chopped-and-screwed version of the Olsen twins' "P.I.Z.Z.A.," a YouTube sensation.

Electronic processing has long played a part in novelty records — just think of the Chipmunks' sped-up voices. Maybe it's not a coincidence that Raymond Scott started out writing big-band jazz for Warner Brothers cartoons before he began developing his own outlandish electronic gizmos. The music he produced out of his Manhattan Research, Inc. laboratories — from commercial jingles to a series of ambient lullabies for babies — was no joke, but his otherwordly pings and swoops showed the color and movement of animation. Scott wasn't the only early electronic musician whose tastes veered toward the cartoonish. With their Moogs and their Ondiolines, Perrey & Kingsley crafted exotica that wouldn't have sounded out of place on George Jetson's futuristic hi-fi. For that matter, a number of cartoons and comedy shows have adopted the duo's songs as theme music.

]]> Bruce Haack, another electronic-music pioneer with a mad-scientist streak, turned his efforts toward children's music, a genre that overlaps with comedy. His 1969 album The Electric Lucifer, on the other hand, couldn't have been much further from children's music if it tried. It wasn't comedy either, but "Word Game" is nevertheless likely to elicit plenty of nervous laughter. Like they used to say: far out, man.

A cartoon aesthetic runs through plenty of contemporary experimental electronica, too, whether it's Dan Deacon's cackling "Woody Woodpecker" or Otto Von Schirach's B-movie-themed "Zombie Halloween." Even more common is a kind of absurdist parody, a genre that comes naturally to a generation raised on Saturday Night Live: consider the bizarre hip-hop of Providence, R.I.'s Hawd Gankstuh Rappuh Emsees Wid Ghatz, or Kid606's "Mr. Wobble's Nightmare," an over-the-top tribute to the breakbeat anthem "Mr. Kirk's Nightmare," which was itself a riff on the mass media's fear-mongering reaction to rave culture. Jason Forrest takes the satiric impulse to extremes in his alias (DJ Donna Summer), his manic stage presence and especially his music, which welds blistering breakcore to a twisted sense of humor: witness his gabber version of "Chicken Dance," a Swiss accordion hit from the '50s.

Performance can be a big part of the comedic impulse in electronic music: I'm reminded of a 2002 set at Montreal's MUTEK festival. Felix Kubin, a wry and inscrutable conceptualist, played blippy analog keyboards while covered head to toe in silver spandex; Nova Huta, an aficionado of Cold War camp, came down from the stage to bonk listeners on their heads with an inflatable baseball bat. The song was called "Politics"; the bat was printed with the stars and stripes. (Maybe you had to be there, but seriously: it was brilliant.)

Sometimes the gags are one-liners smuggled inside songs that aren't otherwise trying to be funny. Uwe Schmidt, the German-Chilean musician behind the Señor Coconut project, would swear up and down that there's nothing ironic about his salsa and merengue covers of Kraftwerk, but that's not to say they don't display a sly, cross-cultural sense of humor. Likewise, the Japanese singer MU's shrieking "Paris Hilton" funnels psychotic wit into ragingly funky acid house, much the way Peaches turns dirty jokes into hip-shaking electro. (She's hardly alone in this: while her veil of irony belongs to the electroclash decade, her raunch-rap has precedents in foul-mouthed types like Blowfly and 2 Live Crew, as well as XXX-obsessed genres like ghetto tech and juke. See also the Detroit Grand Pubahs' lovably raunchy "Sandwiches.")

A lot of the music I've highlighted is ultimately less funny-ha-ha than funny-uh-oh. (The playlist closes out with Winx' "Don't Laugh," whose rhythmic snickering surely sounded positively evil to plenty of the acid-tripping ravers who were its intended audience back in the early '90s.) But I wanted to single out one example of arty pop that doubles as deadpan comedy of the highest order: Gonzales' "I Am Europe." The song is part of his album Ivory Tower, the soundtrack to a feature film — which Gonzales also wrote and directed — about a Canadian chess champion who comes to Europe and invents a new style he calls "jazz chess."

You could write an entire dissertation on Gonzales' comedic tendencies. Upon leaving Canada for Berlin in the late '90s, the piano prodigy and erstwhile composer of musicals refashioned himself as Chilly Gonzales, a kind of Neil Hamburger of the rap game. "I still remember when it first occurred to me," he rapped. "F*ck it, I'm gonna move to Germany/ I don't speak German, screw it/ But hey! I'm Jewish/ And I need a new press angle and that should do it." (Gonzales also was a member of The Puppetmastaz, a hip-hop group fronted by — yeah, you guessed it — puppets. More recently, the self-professed "Original Prankster" set a Guinness world record for the longest solo piano performance: 27 hours, three minutes and 44 seconds.)

"I Am Europe" is the kind of song you might expect from Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, if they wrote music. Over chugging pianos that emphasize the film's debt to Rocky, Gonzales intones a series of charged non-sequiturs:

I'm a dogsh*t ashtray
I'm a shrugging mustache wearing a Speedo tuxedo
I'm a movie with no plot written in the backseat of a piss-powered taxi
I'm an imperial armpit, sweating Chianti
I'm a toilet with no seat, flushing tradition down
I'm socialist lingerie
I'm diplomatic techno
I'm gay pastry and racist cappuccino
I'm an army on holiday in a guillotine museum
I'm a painting made of hair on a nudist beach, eating McDonald's
I'm a novel far too long
I'm a sentimental song
I'm a yellow tooth waltzing with wraparound shades on
Who am I? I am Europe!

My girlfriend, who is Spanish, hates the song. She thinks it's making fun of Europe. But I read it a different way. I'm also an expat living in Berlin, and to me, it scans as a parody of North American jingoism — riffing, Stephen Colbert-style, on the corn-fed jokers who order "freedom fries" with a straight face, or decry the denizens of "Old Europe" as cheese-eating effeminates with Mentos breath. Whatever the case, it's brilliant. Pluck Tom DeLay out of Dancing with the Stars, drop him into the Eurovision Song Contest to perform Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger," and commission Woody Allen to direct the episode — that's what "I Am Europe" sounds like to me.

Listen to the entire playlist: Comic Electronica.


]]> Cheat Sheet: Chicago House tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.3707 2011-05-04T17:56:14Z 2011-05-06T19:18:46Z Chicago house never really goes out of fashion. Invented in the mid-'80s, it was a catalyst for both British rave culture and Daft Punk's "French touch," and its minimalist... Philip Sherburne 20110503-chicago-house-560x225.jpg Chicago house never really goes out of fashion. Invented in the mid-'80s, it was a catalyst for both British rave culture and Daft Punk's "French touch," and its minimalist machine funk comes back into vogue every few years, especially in the mercurial form of squelching, wriggling acid — a subgenre that's become synonymous with the sound of Roland's TB-303 bass synthesizer, first distilled by Phuture and Marshall Jefferson on 1986's "Acid Tracks."

With house and techno in a kind of holding pattern, bygone styles and retro fetishes are all the rage again, and from Los Angeles rooftops to the beaches of Ibiza, the jacking, chugging sound of Chicago reigns supreme.

For those interested in exploring its roots, a new compilation, EPM Selects: Chicago House, provides a good starting point, heavily weighted toward seminal classics like Mr. Fingers' "Can You Feel It," Farley Jackmaster Funk's "Love Can't Turn Around," Steve Silk Hurley's "Jack Your Body" and Mike Dunn's "Magic Feet." A few later tracks, like Gene Farris' 2002 "Black Satin (Miguel Migs Remix)," expand the compilation's remit beyond the strictly old-school, which is nice; many of the record's selections are already well known. The outliers do muddy the criteria slightly. It's too scattered to be a history lesson, too unbalanced to be a proper survey. Still, it's a solid collection, enlivened by rarities and forgotten album cuts like Gemini's "Z Funk" and Glenn Underground's "May Datroit."

]]> Trax Records: Acid Classics, Trax Records Classics Volume 1, Trax Records: The 20th Anniversary Collection, The House that Jackin' Built - The Roots of '80s Chicago House, The House Sound of Chicago - House Classics Edition and Chicago Trax all provide solid jumping-off points.

With that in mind, consider this Cheat Sheet neither a primer on the music's pioneers nor an overview of the whole sweep of Windy City dance music. Instead, it's a grab bag of some of my favorite songs from the tradition, and the stories behind them. Countering dance music's cookie-cutter reputation, these tracks typify the inventiveness that gave Chicago house its unique spirit — a spirit keeps the music sounding unlike anything else, all these years later, no matter how frequently or diligently imitated.

While reading, check out the entire playlist: Cheat Sheet: Chicago House.


Jesse Saunders
On & On (1984)
To get a sense for the way that house music evolved out of disco, look no further than Jesse Saunders' 1984 cut "On & On." The track's origins lie in a 1980 disco megamix (credited to Mach) that incorporated elements of songs by Munich Machine, Lipps Inc. and Donna Summer over a perky electronic bassline from Playback's "Space Invaders," an Australian single that modeled its bassline on Gino Soccio's "The Visitors." After Saunders' copy of the record went missing, he wrote "On & On" to replace it, copping a similar bass riff and Latin-inspired drum programming and adding embellished keys and grunted vocals. It's a great example of house music's recombinant DNA, and it lends credence to the old maxim about sticky-fingered genius.

Joe Smooth
Promised Land (1988)
These days, few house artists dare to stray from a narrow range of tempos and rhythmic patterns, clinging to a 120-BPM oonce-oonce like Linus to his security blanket. But many of house music's pioneers, themselves raised on disco and R&B, had no problem switching up moods and modes. Joe Smooth's 1988 album Promised Land is a case in point, ranging from uplifting house ("Promised Land") to devotional soul ("He's All I Need") to acid-rock house (the Jimi Hendrix cover "Purple Haze"). The record's most striking cut, "I'll Be There," weds spiky, minimalist drum programming and chugging piano chords to affecting falsetto melodies, resulting in one of the ricketiest tearjerkers ever recorded.

Steve Poindexter
Work That M*th*rf*ck*r (1989)
Most early Chicago house was by nature minimalist, availing itself of just a handful of synthesizers and drum machines. But Steve Poindexter's 1989 track "Work That M*th*rf*ck*r" took scarcity to an aggro extreme, banging out tight, martial tattoos on a single drum machine; looped over and over, the titular phrase sounded not so much like an invitation to dance as a call to arms. These days, you can hear an echo of Poindexter's woodpecker-like woodblocks and toms in the careening syncopations of Chicago juke music. (See here for an introductory juke playlist, and check out Planet Mu's Bangs & Works Vol. 1 - A Chicago Footwork Compilation.)

Kool Rock Steady
Ain't No Stoppin' Hip House (1990)
You could devote an entire Cheat Sheet to hip house, despite the brevity of its run. The marriage of jacking house beats with rapping only held up for a year or two, and you could count its enduring hits on one hand — the Jungle Brothers' "I'll House You," Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock's "It Takes Two," and Technotronic's "Pump Up the Jam" were among the few tracks that truly crossed over, bringing house beats to a global pop audience. (In many ways, those songs paved the way for the Black Eyed Peas' brand of house-infused hip-hop.) While it wasn't a strictly Chicago phenomenon, it flourished there, with obvious roots in the city's bashing 909s and squirming 303s. The fervor with which artists like Fast Eddie, Tyree and Kool Rock Steady advanced their agenda seems almost quaint today, with songs like "Hip House," "Hardcore Hiphouse" and "Ain't No Stoppin' Hip House" coming across like hi-NRG manifestos — scene partisanship raised to the level of an art form.

DJ Pierre
Muzik (Tribal Wild Pitch Mix) (1992)
DJ Pierre's place in Chicago house history would have been secure even had he quit making music after 1986, given the impact of "Acid Tracks." But he continued innovating as a solo artist, particularly with a style he dubbed "wild pitch." Unlike acid, with its squelching 303s, wild pitch had no single signifier; capable of accommodating breakbeats, drum machines, synthesizers and soul samples, it was less a subgenre than an attitude. But you can get a sense for its particulars on 1992's "Muzik," which lets a handful of elements unfold across nine leisurely minutes, drawing out dancefloor abandon into something like a state of levitation. That buoyancy is thanks in large part to keening, ostinato strings that soar above the track almost from start to finish — probably the closest thing to a signature you'll find in wild pitch.

Ron Trent
Morning Factory (1994)
Despite their similarities, house and techno — and, by extension, Chicago and Detroit — are often considered a kind of dichotomous pair, right down to the way the former is gendered as feminine to the latter's armored masculinity. But Chicago's Ron Trent and Detroit's Chez Damier collapsed that divide, both in their own productions and in their collaborative work. Trent's 1990 cut "Altered States" played out like a prize fight, with cutting, jabbing snares roped off by a four-note string melody; 1994's "Morning Factory," released on the pair's Prescription label, might have been made from the losing fighter's perspective, floating high on a cushion of airborne chords, delicate percussion winking like a cartoon halo of stars. Built around a single set of fluttering chords, it's a masterful study in repetition, using subtle filtering and delay to make time stand still across eight hypnotic minutes. It's the blueprint for hundreds, if not thousands, of deep house tracks to follow; it's so influential, in fact, that a Dutch house duo recently adopted the title as its moniker.


]]> Electronic Roundup tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.3671 2011-04-19T17:03:41Z 2011-05-18T22:27:26Z Here on Rhapsody's The Mix, we have the habit of emphasizing albums over singles. But when it comes to electronic music, that strategy kind of misses the boat, given... Philip Sherburne Here on Rhapsody's The Mix, we have the habit of emphasizing albums over singles. But when it comes to electronic music, that strategy kind of misses the boat, given that dance music, in particular, is a singles genre.

So here's an attempt to rectify that with a new format: the top 10 tracks in electronic/dance music from the past month (or so).

It's a highly subjective list: fans of commercial club music might not agree with it. Its parameters are also, admittedly, rather fuzzy: some tracks date from more than a month ago, and a few might only marginally qualify as "electronic music." But that kind of flexibility is both the beauty and the curse of the genre.

We've brought together disco, dubstep, techno and more; read on to discover fantastic new music from Bibio, Kode9, Metronomy, Actress and others, and check them all out on the playlist: Electronic Top 10: April 2011.


]]> 1. Panda Bear
"Surfer's Hymn (Actress Primitive Patterns Remix)"
I'm not entirely sure what this is doing on Rhapsody, as it was initially announced as a limited-edition, vinyl-only 7-inch release on the German label Kompakt, which we (sadly) don't stock. And yet! Here it is. I won't tell if you don't. "Surfer's Hymn," off Panda Bear's new album, Tomboy, is a woozy ballad mixing '60s pop with pachinko-parlor blips; complete with rolling ocean noises, it sounds a lot like an acid trip on a cruise ship. The remix by London producer Actress is an unsettling swirl of droning organs, kalimba and clip-clopping percussion that moves like horse hooves on slick ice.

2. Bibio
"Excuses"
The lead single from Bibio's new album, Mind Bokeh, "Excuses" covers plenty of ground in its four-and-a-quarter minutes. Beginning with a fizz of radio static, plangent strummed guitar and plaintive vocals, it shifts midway through into a kind of lurching, corroded hip-hop in the vein of his labelmates Prefuse 73 and Flying Lotus. Taken alone, each half could have served as the kernel for a perfectly fine track, but it's the unpredictable zigzag from Point A to Point B that really makes it sing.

3. Lone
"Dolphin"
"I could spot a Lone track by hearing one or two bars," Bibio has said approvingly of Lone, aka England's Matt Cutler. It's true: from his earlier, downtempo records to his more recent forays into rave nostalgia, there's something about Lone's music that's his and his alone. Echolocations, his new EP for R&S, is all jewel tones and silicon rush, revisiting classic techno and breakbeat hardcore through a sparkling, opalescent haze.

4. Kode9 and The Spaceape
"Love Is the Drug (feat. Cha Cha)"
Burial's new EP for Hyperdub may have enjoyed most of the hype, but don't forget label founder Kode9's latest single. Despite the title, "Love Is the Drug" isn't exactly a cover of the Roxy Music song. (This is becoming a habit for Kode9 and The Spaceape, who also kinda-sorta-but-not-really covered Prince's "Sign o' the Times" with 2006's "Sine of the Dub.") With queasy organ tones, detuned synthesizers, and creepy male/female muttering over a shuffling house beat, they manage to take the shine off both love and narcotics.

5. Bubble Club
"The Goddess"
Dan Keeling was head of A&R at Parlophone and managing director at Island Records; now, as Bubble Club, he sets the clock back to his days of promoting club nights in the early '90s. Following three acid-tinged EPs for his own eponymous label, he turns up on the DJ Harvey-related International Feel imprint with "The Goddess," a midtempo groover with a distinctly Balearic feel — lots of chiming guitars, soaring leads and easygoing breakbeats, all very Krautrock meets Café del Mar. It's not the most complicated thing in the world, but it balances its lush grooves with a knowing wink (and vice versa). A remix from Quiet Village (aka Radio Slave and Joel Martin) is a slow-motion haze of pulverized congas and ambient exotica.

6. Locus Solus
"I Want It"
As for DJ Harvey, he returns to International Feel — a shadowy nu-disco label allegedly based out of Uruguay — with a double-A-side teaser for the debut album from his Locus Solus project. "I Want It" is a dirty grind displaying all the qualities that made Harvey a beardo-disco icon in the first place, complete with flayed hi-hats, corroded blips and breathy boy/girl chants — all very DFA-like, but somehow more wanton.

7. Metronomy
"The Look"
The lead single from Metronomy's new album, The English Riviera, "The Look" might actually be less interesting than album cuts "She Wants" and "Trouble," which offer a more unusual perspective on indie dance: sunny and haunted all at once. But with its resemblance to Peter Bjorn and John's "Young Folks," it's not hard to see why "The Look" gets the spotlight. Fred Falke and Moonlight Matters remixes go for straight-ahead electro-pop gusto; it's Ghost Poet that really shines, with an eerie, echo-soaked reconstruction that brings out a hidden sense of unease behind the breezy synths and falsetto.

8. Matthew Dear
"Little People (Black City) [Mark E Remix]"
Matthew Dear's Slowdance EP gathers remixes from every corner of electronic music's left field, from How to Dress Well's ghostly R&B to Todd Edwards' jittery house to Sascha Dive's tribal minimalism. But the standout track is Mark E's "Little People (Black City)" remix, which stretches the original to nearly nine minutes of throbbing, midtempo synthesizer disco — an excellent teaser for Mark E's own Stone Breaker, coming soon on Spectral Sound, the Ghostly International offshoot overseen by Dear himself.

9. Mike Dehnert
"Klartext"
Berlin's Mike Dehnert crafts the purest kind of techno using scabrous drum-machine sequences, otherworldly synthesizers, and little else. His unadorned club tracks have a classic tinge to them, but they're not really retro; their modernity stems from their method of refining a style that goes back more than 20 years. Dehnert's new album for the Dutch label Delsin is a masterpiece of tough, emotive techno, and the keening "Klartext" is the album's highlight. Fans of Marcel Dettmann, Ben Klock, Sandwell District, et al, take note.

10. Genius of Time
"Drifting Back"
I don't know much about Genius of Time aside from the fact that they're Swedish and they like the sound of classic American house and techno in the vein of Moodymann or Pal Joey. "Drifting Back," from their new EP for Rotterdam's Clone Royal Oak label, is a masterpiece of midtempo house. Its groove, carved from drum machines and sampled congas, cuts through the mix with an unusual sense of presence; its looped Rhodes solo and vocal harmonies are an invitation to levitation. I can't get enough of this jaunty, hypnotic jam.


]]> Senior Year, 1995: Lowriders Club tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.3606 2011-03-31T17:02:03Z 2011-04-19T22:22:03Z Talk about "Hands on a Hard Body": for a certain species of auto-shop student, back in 1995, tricked-out rides were raised to the level of an art form. And... Philip Sherburne 20110329-SY-1995-low-rider-club-560x225.jpg Talk about "Hands on a Hard Body": for a certain species of auto-shop student, back in 1995, tricked-out rides were raised to the level of an art form. And while all kinds of hip-hop fueled their subwoofers, surely the most potent strain was G-funk, with its slinky leads and suggestive bounce, rolling and purring like an El Dorado.

Coming largely out of Los Angeles' Death Row camp, G-funk turned away from sampled breakbeats in favor of live and synthesized funk vamping, with laid-back drum-machine thump dragging tempos back while portamento synth leads slid mercurially over the top. It was perfectly calibrated to prove that gangstas could be lovers too — even if their rides were the true objects of their affections.

The sound first broke with Dr. Dre's 1992 album The Chronic and had some of its greatest moments with Warren G and Nate Dogg's 1994 song "Regulate" and Tha Dogg Pound's 1995 album Tha Doggfather. We've created our Senior Year Playlist around that year, but by all means, don't forget 1998's G-Funk Classics, Vol. 1 & 2 by Nate Dogg, who passed away on March 15 at just 41 years old.



]]>
]]> Cheat Sheet: Kranky Records tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.3583 2011-03-23T17:52:27Z 2011-03-23T20:01:40Z Chicago's Kranky label has had a handle on its aesthetic from the very beginning, when albums from Labradford, Jessamine and Bowery Electric staked out ground between inquisitive post rock,... Philip Sherburne

20110322-kranky-CS-560x225.jpg Chicago's Kranky label has had a handle on its aesthetic from the very beginning, when albums from Labradford, Jessamine and Bowery Electric staked out ground between inquisitive post rock, shimmering ambient and the dark undertow of less recognizable impulses. But I don't think anyone could have predicted how wide the label's horizons would grow between 1993 and now, thanks both to increasingly adventurous A&R and to its roster's collective evolution beyond categories like post rock or ambient. Kranky's maturation mirrors some of the most fruitful developments in independent music over the past two decades, and in many cases — Deerhunter, Atlas Sound, Tim Hecker — Kranky artists have been the pioneers of niches-turned-open terrain.

Running the spectrum from Greg Davis' minimalist drone to Atlas Sound's psychedelic pop, the catalog shows incredible range, one all the more remarkable for the fact that there's generally some kind of hidden current holding all its releases together, no matter how opaque or exuberant they can be. It's less a catalog than an example of a finely honed curatorial sensibility, where every record is cast in a different light by its companions. Not every release is guaranteed to fit every listener's tastes, but they're all worth checking out, offering compelling musical arguments alongside lush, almost indulgent sonics.

]]> Cheat Sheet: Kranky Records playlist.


Belong
Common Era
Like Disappears, New Orleans' Belong reside on the heavier end of Kranky's spectrum. Using guitars, drum machine and layered vocals, the duo throws up a wall of sound inspired by My Bloody Valentine, Daydream Nation-era Sonic Youth and even, faintly, The Jesus and Mary Chain. But there's a celestial cast to the music, suffused in cathedral reverb and powdered with dust motes, that's unique to Belong; the deep fuzz of "Keep Still" suggests they've spent just as much time listening to the ambient whorl of Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project.

Tim Hecker
Ravedeath, 1972
Despite the title, there's nary a hint of rave in Tim Hecker's Ravedeath, 1972, another installment in the Montreal musician's impressive catalog of rapturous ambient music. Recorded in a Reykjavik church, the album is based on thrumming pipe organs that are layered and processed in Hecker's computer, resulting in an almost overwhelmingly rich sound. Iceland's Ben Frost provided recording assistance, but the music here is more meditative, and occasionally ecstatic, than Frost's own bleak, blackened isolationism. For fans of Stephan Mathieu and Peter Maxwell Davies, it's an ambient masterpiece.

Disappears
Guider
Despite its self-effacing name, there's nothing restrained about this Chicago quartet. Controlled, yes: their garage rave-ups are held in check by the lockstep repetition and slowly surging energy of minimalist post punk. Wah-wah guitars lap against droning pedal tones, with sneering vocals — "This is not a bastard song" — suggesting The Stooges or the MC5 channeled through '80s punk. It's a far cry from Kranky's ambient releases, but it's also easy to hear how its psychedelic colors and fuzzy textures are cut from the same cloth.

Pan American
For Waiting, For Chasing
Originally released on Stefan Nemeth's Mosz label in 2006, Pan American's For Waiting, For Chasing gets reissued by their longtime home, Kranky. It's timely: abandoning their dubby, post rock foundations for crackling drones and incidental skitter, the band helped expose a vein of electro-acoustic experimentation that's still being mined today by all manner of ambient projects. In the vein of Oval, Supersilent, or Loscil, but with its own distinct sense of space and motion, it's sensual, engrossing stuff, as elegantly warped as driftwood.

Brian McBride
The Effective Disconnect
Brian McBride is one half of Stars of the Lid, a group known for its glacially paced chamber music, pairing strings and electric guitars at a midpoint between Glenn Branca, Morton Feldman and Sigur Ros. He appears solo here with the soundtrack to The Vanishing of the Bees, a documentary about the mysterious, ongoing collapse of bee colonies around the world. His lush, stately compositions alternate between melancholy and something harder to name — not so much pensive as dumbstruck by a scope that can only be called sublime. Surely, a fitting treatment of its theme.

Benoit Pioulard
Lasted
On his third album, Portland, Ore.'s Benoit Pioulard (Thomas Meluch) continues to refine his idiosyncratic style, fusing field recordings and ambient atmospherics with acoustic guitars and folk-leaning vocals. Running through 14 songs in just 40 minutes, the album nevertheless feels unhurried, balancing textural sketches with fleshed-out songs like "Shouting Distance," "Tie" and "Ailleurs," whose aching hush recalls Jose Gonzalez and, more distantly, Nick Drake. A beautiful record, sometimes overwhelmingly so, Lasted is the best thing Pioulard has done, and a highlight in the Kranky catalog.

Boduf Songs
This Alone Above All Else in Spite of Everything
Boduf Songs' third album for Kranky has all the hallmarks of doom folk: quavering voice, lo-fi tape hush, down-tuned guitars and subtle electronic otherwordliness. "I Have Decided to Pass Through Matter" sounds like Nick Drake with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and there are echoes of Philip Jeck's ghostly turntablism, cross-cut with narcotic drum breaks and intimate vocal harmonies. "Decapitation Blues" goes from ambient bell tones into shoegaze metal, while "The Giant Umbilical Cord" is seven naked minutes of droning feedback, plucked harmonics and subliminal whisper, as stark as a frostbitten field.

Jonas Reinhardt
Powers of Audition
The Kranky label is a steadfast purveyor of some of the finest ambient, electro-acoustic and post rock out there. Now add cosmic disco to the list. Powers of Audition's beatless intro (echoes of Oneohtrix Point Never's gleaming oscillator jams) doesn't prepare you for the astral boogie that follows. Half the album explores shimmering post-Italo that will appeal to fans of Lindstrom and Prins Thomas; the other is given over to analog fugues as lyrical as they are lysergic. It's proof that Krautrock never died — like mold, it just gets more potent.

Loscil
Endless Falls
You wouldn't know that Scott Morgan is a video game sound designer from his music as Loscil. There's nary a shrill bleep or laser blast on Endless Fall, just slowly chiming chords and liquid drones. His fifth album incorporates acoustic elements more directly than his earlier work, with cello and piano lines ringing clearly through a fog of delay and reverb. But as the shuddering pulses throughout make clear, he hasn't lost his connection to the ambient dub techno of Basic Channel. Simply put, it's lovely, engrossing stuff.

Atlas Sound
Logos
On his second album as Atlas Sound, Deerhunter's Bradford Cox peels away the layers of his spindly bedroom psychedlia and proves himself a master of pop songcraft. "Shelia" and "Walkabout," featuring Noah Lennox, are masterpieces of jingle-jangle economy, somehow overstuffed and razor-sharp all at once, like Guided by Voices with an extra burst of serotonin. Stereolab's Laetitia Sadier guests on "Quick Canal," which evolves from ambient pop into a shoegaze overload; Kompakt and Philip Jeck inform "Kid Klimax" and "Washington School," tipping the album toward a woozy, contemporary sparkle.

Greg Davis
Mutually Arising
In the tradition of Folke Rabe's What?! and Kevin Drumm's Imperial Horizon comes Greg Davis' breathtaking 2009 album Mutually Arising, a two-part, hour-long album that lives up to the track titles "Cosmic Mudra" and "Hall of Pure Bliss." Crafted principally from analog synths and effects pedals, its slow-burning thrum variously evokes pipe organs, overhead planes and third-gen tape dubs of Glenn Branca smothered with lead blankets, suggesting Richard Serra's monolithic forms filling Joseph Beuys' silent, felt-draped chambers. In the right frame of mind, it's bliss via IV drip.

Deerhunter
Cryptograms
Crossing up shoegazer noisy psyche with modern post-punk a la the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and even, at times, Black Dice, Deerhunter are anything but easy to nail down. Their second full-length album since forming in 2001, Cryptograms alternates between weirdo psyche soundscapes, delicate indie pop and crooning, anthemic songs reminiscent of the Catherine Wheel and Ride. So there is either something for everybody or nothing for no one. — Mike McGuirk




]]> Senior Year, 1995: San Diego Screamo Kids tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.3538 2011-03-09T17:04:22Z 2011-03-09T17:04:24Z Despite San Diego's reputation as a breeding ground for svelte, blond surfer types, it's also been home to plenty of musical misfits over the years — among them Iron... Philip Sherburne 20110308-SY-san-diego-560x225.jpg Despite San Diego's reputation as a breeding ground for svelte, blond surfer types, it's also been home to plenty of musical misfits over the years — among them Iron Butterfly, Trumans Water, GonjaSufi and some of emo's most treasured underground trailblazers.

Emo gets a bad rap as a perennially adolescent genre, by and for teenagers at their mopiest. But back in the early '90s, San Diego's Gravity Records helped turn the heartfelt flailing of bands like Dischord's Rites of Spring into the jarring, dissonant, balls-to-the-wall freakout that came to be known as "screamo." The local bands Heroin and Antioch Arrow were among the fiercest proponents of the style, with recordings and live shows that turned hardcore punk inside out, adding a healthy dose of free-jazz skronk and amps-at-11 feedback mayhem.

]]> Dashboard Confessional and the perky pop punk of Jimmy Eat World (and, truth be told, Antioch Arrow's conversion into guylinered "scene kids" didn't necessarily help matters). But, for a time, this stuff was some of the scariest-sounding music on the planet. In a tribute to all the misfits in San Diego's class of '95, we've rounded up crucial tracks from the era by Heroin, Antioch Arrow, Swing Kids, The Locust and Jenny Piccolo, plus other Gravity signees like Unwound and Born Against. Call it Bleeeeeeeeaurgh, A Music War: it doesn't get more primal than this.

]]> Electronic Roundup tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.3525 2011-03-02T18:50:30Z 2011-03-28T19:45:07Z This week, we're running down some of the best and brightest new electronic releases from the past few weeks. Our roundup is heavy on left-field pop, whether it's the... Philip Sherburne This week, we're running down some of the best and brightest new electronic releases from the past few weeks. Our roundup is heavy on left-field pop, whether it's the lyrical minimalism of James Blake and Nicolas Jaar, the dubby punk of Paris Suit Yourself, or the lush textures of Toro Y Moi, but there's also pipe-organ ambiance from Tim Hecker, thumping analog techno from Rude 66, and even garage-rock covers of Detroit techno classics, courtesy of the Dirtbombs. Fans of Radiohead at their most abstract should pay special attention to the winsome sounds of Stateless, a promising new act signed to Ninja Tune.

The Dirtbombs
Party Store
Worlds collide! Detroit's Dirtbombs make nice between their city's garage-rock and techno scenes with a collection of covers of Motor City club classics by Derrick May, Cybotron and Carl Craig, et al. What could have been a one-liner works shockingly well, rendering "Sharivari" as gumshoe ESG, "Good Life" as drunken dance punk, and "Strings of Life" as a minimalist blaster reminiscent of the Plugz Latin punk. "Jaguar" turns into roiling surf rock, and "Bug in the Bass Bin" is stretched to 22 minutes of skronking psychedelia. All told, a ringing endorsement for recycling.

]]> James Blake
James Blake
James Blake's first few EPs featured chalky, crumbling beats and marbled veins of R&B vocals. His debut album, appropriately enough, feels like a seismic shift, as Blake proves himself to be as keen a songwriter as he is a conjurer of atmospheres. Blake's own voice carries the day, supple and expressive, multitracked into gospel-influenced harmonies or Auto-Tuned into a surreal warble. As a producer, he makes do with the bare minimum, running pitter-pat drum programming in loose rings around solemn piano chords. It's the rare album that creates its own world — indeed, its own genre.

Nicolas Jaar
Space Is Only Noise
Having spent the past couple of years playing all-night Brooklyn loft parties, recording deep-house singles and studying at Brown University, Nicolas Jaar releases his debut album amidst great expectations. His response to all the hype is disarmingly low-key: Space Is Only Noise feels more like a sketchbook than a grand statement, with field-recorded rain patter blurring into incidental piano and ambient electro-acoustic detailing. Erik Satie, Ennio Morricone, Mulatu Astatqé and even Chris Isaak are clear influences upon his intimate, late-night meanderings.

Tim Hecker
Ravedeath, 1972
Despite the title, there's nary a hint of rave in Tim Hecker's Ravedeath, 1972, another installment in the Montreal musician's impressive catalog of rapturous ambient music. Recorded in a Reykjavik church, the album is based on thrumming pipe organs that are layered and processed in Hecker's computer, resulting in an almost overwhelmingly rich sound. Iceland's Ben Frost provided recording assistance, but the music here is more meditative — and occasionally ecstatic — than Frost's own bleak, blackened isolationism. For fans of Stephan Mathieu and Peter Maxwell Davies, it's an ambient masterpiece.

Paris Suit Yourself
My Main Sh*tstain
The French trio Paris Suit Yourself is an odd fit for Ninja Tune, a label synonymous with experimental electronic dance (and non-dance) music — but then, they'd sound like oddballs anywhere. Their style is a kind of bare-bones punk mixed with drum machines, dubby effects and occasional piano and organ, with most of the emphasis placed on bilingual vocals that feel more like performance art — shrieking, crooning, swooning and declaiming. It's as thrilling as it is bizarre, somewhere between a lo-fi hip-hop and L.A.'s Masque Club circa 1979.

Stateless
Matilda
England's Stateless make the jump from K7 to Ninja Tune with Matilda, their first album since their self-titled 2007 debut. Not to be confused with Stateless, the Swedish nu-jazz act (aka Andreas Saag), this group of border-jumpers specializes in melancholic downtempo delivered with brooding aplomb. If they had passports, they'd bear the entry stamp of the Radiohead nation, thanks to the album's skittering rhythms, lush beds of synths and guitars and singer Chris James' gritty purr, which bears more than a passing similarity to Thom Yorke's voice.

Toro Y Moi
Underneath the Pine
That titular pine must be one hell of a tree, because its shadow contains multitudes, cramming in elements of My Bloody Valentine, Phoenix, Steely Dan, Animal Collective, The Sea and Cake, Norwegian disco and Burt Bacharach. As those reference points might suggest, Toro Y Moi's Chazwick Bundick puts a primacy on swirly harmonies and lush production qualities. His sound is modest in scale and almost deceptively traditional; it's heavy on guitars, organs, and muted funk rhythm section, and the results are as transporting as the whiff of flowers on a summer's breeze.

Various Artists
ePM 10
The U.K. PR and artist management firm ePM celebrates 10 years with a compilation of deep, expansive, peak-time techno. The artists hail from Italy, Germany, the U.K., and beyond, but Detroit is the obvious influence here, from the rapid-fire chug of Floorplan's "Move It," reminiscent of Robert Hood, to the wild-pitch strings of Orlando Voorn's "Wiggle." Among the highlights, Italo-disco icon Alexander Robotnick offers melodic synths, Dirt Crew sink into comparatively slow-motion house, and Sandwell District stir up a dust storm of apocalyptic frequencies. A bracing collection from start to finish.

Rude 66
Two Worlds (1992-1998)
It's a shame that half the tracks on this anthology of the Dutch electro act Rude 66 are unavailable for streaming, but don't let that deter you from exploring the six tracks we do have rights for. A pioneer of the Hague's techno scene, long affiliated with Bunker Records, Rude 66 offers a darker, tougher version of the sound popularized by his labelmate i-F. Banged out on analogue machines, his tracks combine shuddering electro syncopations with squealing synths and metallic pings for results that are sometimes menacing, sometimes otherworldly; the closing "Smog" is an unexpectedly lyric detour into melancholic Krautrock.


]]> Senior Year, 1984: Goth Night tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.3516 2011-03-01T18:19:50Z 2011-10-14T18:37:57Z Back in high school in the mid-'80s, I did drama: not in the sense of throwing hissy fits (though I probably threw my fair share) — I acted in... Philip Sherburne 20110301-SY-goth-560x225-v2.jpg Back in high school in the mid-'80s, I did drama: not in the sense of throwing hissy fits (though I probably threw my fair share) — I acted in school plays. The Man Who Came to Dinner, Brighton Beach Memoirs, that kind of thing. Backstage, in the dressing room, the cast would listen to music in the hours before the performance began. When my turn came to commandeer the boombox, I put in a tape of Joy Division's Closer, figuring it was a natural fit for the occasion. After all, weren't we all darkly romantic types? Judging by the reaction from my fellow thespians, I figured wrong: Led Zeppelin was more their speed. I had only succeeded in outing myself as a misfit among misfits — no easy task in a room full of drama geeks, all of us coated in pancake makeup.

I don't know if it's easier being a goth in high school today; I suspect that it might be, given the way the Internet has helped disseminate and demystify any number of youth subcultures over the past 15 years. (If ever there were a kind word to be said about Hot Topic, it would have to be for the chain stores' role in taking the sting out of freak scenes.) But it was hell in my day, which was surely part of the reason that I gravitated toward records like Hell Comes to Your House.

By my reckoning, 1984 was the year that goth broke, thanks to the crossover success of records like The Cure's The Top and Depeche Mode's Some Great Reward. And, perhaps because 1984 was the year that I discovered it, I've always figured that it was all downhill from there — the truly great goth records (some of which weren't really goth, but were prized by that set anyway) were recorded mostly between 1979 and 1984, and after that, the menace of death rock turned to kohl-eyed kitsch. By that entirely subjective rationale, I've fashioned this Senior Year playlist of that year's tunes (plus a handful from '83) as a tribute to the O.G. goths one high school generation before me, in the class of 1984 — the kids who really suffered for this music.

Of course, there's also the time that slam-dancing to the Repo Man soundtrack in my high-school parking lot led to me getting busted for having beer in my car — and it wasn't mine, I swear — but that's another story for another time …

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: Senior Year, 1984: Goth Night


]]> Source Material: James Blake tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.3472 2011-02-10T15:56:38Z 2011-09-12T19:32:12Z Dubstep has been crossing over into pop music for a while now, but in all the potential ways the genre could have developed, perhaps the most unexpected line of... Philip Sherburne Dubstep has been crossing over into pop music for a while now, but in all the potential ways the genre could have developed, perhaps the most unexpected line of flight is traced by James Blake, who started out sculpting idiosyncratic, atmospheric tracks in Burial's mold and now delivers a debut album that establishes him as a very different kind of musician. Largely leaving dubstep behind, James Blake finds the producer forging a more personal sound out of scraps of club music, ambient and R&B.

Blake's supple, expressive voice carries the day, multitracked into gospel-influenced harmonies or Auto-Tuned into a surreal warble. As a producer, he makes do with the bare minimum, running pitter-pat drum programming in loose rings around solemn piano chords. Between the album's naked emotion and guarded sound design, the contradictions only reinforce its uniqueness.

]]> playlist.

Joni Mitchell
The Hissing of Summer Lawns
It's not hard to see why James Blake has cited Joni Mitchell as an influence, along with D'Angelo and Stevie Wonder. Beyond the obvious similarities to Mitchell's dusky, introspective moods, you can hear how her structural approach carries through in his music. Mitchell draws out guitars, percussion and voice in sinewy lines that wrap around the changes in unexpected ways and highlight the empty space within. For evidence, just listen to "The Jungle Line" and try imagining it as Blake might remake it. Between the coiled drums and background splashes of vocals and synthesizer, it's like a blueprint for his own method that just happens to be 36 years old.

D'Angelo
Voodoo
James Blake borrows many of his vocal techniques from D'Angelo — his muted melisma, multitracked close harmonies, even the way he swoops up to falsetto. But the production on D'Angelo's 2000 album, Voodoo, also provides important examples for Blake's style, as well. The "neo" in D'Angelo's neo-soul had a lot to do with the way his music balanced between live, full-band vamping and almost imperceptible studio finesse; the mix and arrangement emphasized space and texture as much as they did the songwriting. Just listen to the way each element stakes out its position in "Playa Playa" — the rimshot alone is a seed that's borne fruit in Burial and James Blake alike.

His Name Is Alive
Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth
There's something suspect about the way critics make a big deal out of white musicians — particularly men, it seems — working in a self-consciously R&B idiom. Still, that increased scrutiny, with its implications of inauthenticity, might also be a motivating factor for the convoluted ways that white artists often frame their engagement with the genre. James Blake's precise, crystalline productions have something in common with the dry, acoustic/electronic fusions that Warn Defever created on 2001's Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth. Featuring bluesy vocals from Lovetta Pippen, Defever (the principal force behind His Name Is Alive) sketched out a kind of approximate R&B using a skeletal setup of Rhodes, drum machine, synth and acoustic guitar. With one foot in indie culture's D.I.Y. aesthetics and another in The Neptunes' jiggy rhythms, it walks a careful line, but Pippen's voice and Defever's subtle production keep it compelling throughout.

Jamie Lidell
Multiply
Before he was an opening act for Elton John, Jamie Lidell was a firebrand on the noisiest fringes of techno, both in the duo Super_Collider (with Cristian Vogel) and as a solo act known for his incendiary live performances. Creating his sets on the fly with looped grunts and beatboxing, Lidell eventually discovered the soul-man persona that he's developed across his last three albums. Lidell's approach to soul is more pastiche-oriented than Blake's is, and not in a bad way. But you can certainly hear Lidell's experiments with complex harmonies carrying through Blake's album.

Burial
Burial
Of all James Blake's peers, Burial is probably most similar. He also came from dubstep's experimental wing, signed to Kode 9's restless Hyperdub label and is known for his ambient, melancholic interpretation of U.K. garage, dubstep's predecessor. Cobwebs and cotton are his stock in trade, and his misty-eyed breakbeat reveries helped blaze the path that Blake is following. After two albums and several EPs, Burial has largely stuck with the sound he introduced on his first record. With legions of Burial imitators knocking off his techniques, and with Blake striking out in a more purely pop direction, it will be interesting to see where Burial goes next.

Darkstar
North
As flexible as dubstep is, like any subgenre, it can be a closed system. And as in any scene whose followers often take an embattled and proprietary stance toward it, straying from the line can be taken as treason (or at least mild treason). Like Blake, Darkstar started out shadowboxing in dubstep's wings, putting the genre's trademark rhythms to tunes more quixotic than club-friendly. But their 2010 debut album veered abruptly into melancholic synth-pop; in interviews, the duo sometimes bent over backward trying to explain the shift. They shouldn't have had to; it's a fine album on its own terms. Blake, in any case, is already the recipient of a similar kind of backlash from bass-music diehards suspicious of his softer turn.

Matthew Dear
Black City
Matthew Dear also got his start in a pretty narrow subgenre, crafting twitchy, minimalist techno that split the difference between Berlin and his native Detroit. His first real hit, "Dog Days," got its force from an infectious, pitched-down vocal sample, and the music he released under his own name (as opposed to the more purist techno of his Audion alias) increasingly foregrounded his own voice, often harmonized and processed in a way that gave it eerie, almost disconcerting depth. Black City, Dear's album from last year, features his most ambitious vocal experiments yet.

How to Dress Well
Love Remains
An accidental beneficiary of all the buzz around James Blake's album is Tom Krell, the British musician behind the project How to Dress Well. Love Remains, his 2010 debut album, explores R&B in a fashion similar to that of James Blake, with a gauzy cushion of synths and sampled acoustic instruments supporting Krell's billowing vocals. Despite his debt to crooners like R. Kelly, Krell is a sloppier artist, for whom chops play second fiddle to mood; as with Blake, his melancholic sense of nostalgia is completely unironic.


]]> Simian Mobile Disco, Delicacies tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.3458 2011-02-03T16:00:31Z 2011-02-03T16:42:47Z Simian Mobile Disco mark the definitive break with their indie dance roots on Delicacies. Following on the coiled techno intensity of their Is Fixed mix album, the instrumental Delicacies... Rhapsody Editorial AOTD_banner560x60.jpg
Simian Mobile Disco mark the definitive break with their indie dance roots on Delicacies. Following on the coiled techno intensity of their Is Fixed mix album, the instrumental Delicacies avoids obvious hooks in favor of dark, rave-inspired synth riffing and hell-bent machine rhythms. The sound itself is exquisite, owing to the duo's analog gear as well as their expert knob-twiddling: For all the evil intent of their tritones, there's plenty of love in these immaculately crafted odes to the dark side of dance music. — Philip Sherbure

Hear It Now!
]]> Source Material: Air, Talkie Walkie tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.3432 2011-01-27T18:10:57Z 2011-02-25T00:19:56Z France's Air made their name with the 1998 debut Moon Safari, a seductive romp through downtempo beats and kitschy, easy-listening signifiers. They earned their cachet with their soundtrack to... Philip Sherburne France's Air made their name with the 1998 debut Moon Safari, a seductive romp through downtempo beats and kitschy, easy-listening signifiers. They earned their cachet with their soundtrack to Sophia Coppola's 2000 film The Virgin Suicides, which proved them unparalleled interpreters of the sexier side of ennui, channeling '60s pop tropes through '90s recombinant techniques — a little like Beck, without the irony. With the following year's 10,000 Hz Legend, their gauzy façade had faded and torn, as they struggled to put a real raison d'etre to their stylistic command — a familiar trajectory for so many buzz bands. And then, unexpectedly, they returned in 2004 with Talkie Walkie, an album that redeemed their alternately moody and starry-eyed approach with the strongest songwriting of their whole career. "Cherry Blossom Girl," "Run," "Universal Traveler," "Mike Mills," "Surfing on a Rocket" — pretty much the whole album overflows with hummable melodies, delivered in one of the most soothing altos imaginable and wrapped up in a gorgeous package of strummed guitars, unobtrusive drum-machine beats, rock-steady electric basslines and delicate filigrees of analog synthesizers and effects.

Air is an important antecedent for a host of bands that followed — Phoenix and their chiming indie pop, Delorean and their electronics-infused rock, plus the whole chillwave movement, with its emphasis on beautiful dreamers and windswept cool. But what came before Air? We unpack their influences across a spectrum of breezy, elemental acts.


Jean-Jacques Perrey
The Amazing New Electric Sound of Jean-Jacques Perry
The French electronic music of the '60s is often remembered in relation to IRCAM, the research institute that pioneered plenty of innovations in synthesizers and software while largely forgetting about music's pleasure principle. That wasn't the case with Jean-Jacques Perrey, a musician incapable of saying no to a pungent slice of fromage. This 1968 album may have been recorded on state-of-the-art Moogs, but his cheerful burble was anything but highfalutin'. Like Bruce Haack or Raymond Scott, he used his circuitry to channel childlike innocence. While Air's music is never quite as goofy, it's undoubtedly touched with the same playful, impish spirit.

]]> The United States of America
The United States of America
It might seem ironic that the tres French duo Air would take influence from a group called The United States of America. But forget what you think you know about freedom fries: in 1968, when the group recorded its one and only album, the same insurrectionary winds blowing through the French New Wave were stirring up a stateside revolution in avant-garde pop. The brainchild of the U.S. of A. was Joseph Byrd, a trained jazz player and experimental composer who lived in a Los Angeles commune and gathered a group of UCLA players to round out the combo; their music was a kaleidoscopic jumble of folk, pop, acid rock and primitive synthesizers, and their habit of pairing dulcet melodies with jarring noises is an audible influence in Air's arty, psychedelic pop.

Serge Gainsbourg
Histoire de Melody Nelson
Even on their soundtrack to Sophia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, Air have never been quite as randy as Serge Gainsbourg; their version of makeout music sounds positively chaste when compared to Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson, a 1971 album that's dripping with erotic menace, as the smoke-throated lech growls lusty come-ons to the Lolita-like character of the title, played with breathy innocence by Jane Birkin. Musically, though, Gainsbourg's tricks are all over Air's album, particularly his saccharine strings, pastoral guitars, and trim bass and drum work. Air simply couldn't have existed without a song like "Ah! Melody" to show them the way.

Pink Floyd
Meddle
For those of us who grew up knowing Pink Floyd only for their pompous later work, it might come as a shock to discover the experimental nature of albums like 1971's Meddle. Though Pink Floyd were often heavier than Air, with molten basslines and searing blues guitar, the dreamy, sun-drenched balladry of songs like "A Pillow of Winds" is an important antecedent to the French duo's wispy arrangements and feathery textures. Just as Air pulled back from the darker, less accessible sound of 2001's 10,000 Hz Legend when they got all starry-eyed with Talkie Walkie, Meddle was Pink Floyd's attempt to find a middle ground between the restless ambitions of albums like Atom Heart Mother and the shlockier, populist bent of 1973's Dark Side of the Moon.

Jean-Michel Jarre
Les Chants Magnetiques
However much the electronic music of the '90s and beyond was influenced by the pulse minimalism of Steve Reich and Terry Riley, early Detroit techno also owes plenty to Jean-Michel Jarre — which is funny, because his '70s synthesizer epics are about as far from minimalism as you can get. In keeping with his better-known albums Oxygene and Equinoxe, 1981's Les Chants Magnetiques arranges chiming, melodic sequences over proto-electro-pop beats, almost like a marriage of baroque music with the then-nascent New Wave. Like his over-the-top concert spectacles, the music rarely hews to the fashionable conceit that less is more, preferring instead to heap counterpoints upon counterpoints, with an emphasis on jaunty melodies that can be heard clearly in the quirkier aspects of Air's own songwriting.

Stereolab
The Groop Played "Space Age Bachelor Pad Music"
There's a fine line between kitsch and cheese, and few bands have parsed it with more precision than Stereolab. Using Krautrock's motorik beat as an anchor, something to ground them in a "serious" tradition, they focused their attentions on frothy harmonies, easy-listening affect, and a rainbow of perky la-la-la choruses. Nowhere was this more true than on this 1993 album, a manifesto of sorts celebrating '60s pop at its most ephemeral.
 

Money Mark
Mark's Keyboard Repair
Money Mark — aka Mark Ramos-Nishita, known for a time as the Beastie Boys' keyboard player — was a labelmate of Air's back in the mid-'90s. He released his solo debut, Mark's Keyboard Repair, on the pioneering downtempo label Mo Wax in 1995, a year before Air recorded their own debut single for the same label. Subsequently, they would jump to Source Records, an EMI subsidiary responsible for much of France's cutting-edge electronic music in the late '90s; Source, in fact, also licensed Money Mark's debut album for a domestic release. The Mo Wax/Source collaboration was a rare example of cross-channel solidarity, back when the rapid expansion of the post-rave electronic-music scene was doing as much as the Schengen Agreement to make borders obsolete. Musically speaking, Mark's head-nodding grooves, heavy on Hammonds and dusty breaks, are obviously indebted to California, but it's easy to hear the linkages between him and his Continental counterparts in Air.

Boards of Canada
Music Has the Right to Children
Someday, critics in the yet-to-be-invented field of synaesthesiology will reveal the connection between turn-of-the-millennium electronic music and the soft-focus glow of Swedish '70s softcore porn. After a few EPs and scattered tracks, when Scotland's Boards of Canada released their debut album in 1998 — the same year as Air's debut — they were heralded for inventing an unusually pastoral version of electronica, uncommonly expressive despite the lack of vocals. The blurry, plastic-camera quality of the cover photograph surely went some way toward propagating that idea, as did the oft-cited influence upon their music of educational soundtracks from the '70s. Eerier than Air, perhaps, the duo nevertheless tapped the same wistful, nostalgic vibe, conjuring soft-focus memories of peach fuzz, dandelion tufts and sunsets glimpsed through gauzy fabrics and feathered hair.


]]> Most Anticipated Albums of 2011: Electronic tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2011://1.3395 2011-01-12T20:15:02Z 2011-09-12T19:22:27Z Last year was an astonishingly good one for electronic music, and 2011 is looking like it's no slouch either. House music and dubstep are set to be the principal... Philip Sherburne Last year was an astonishingly good one for electronic music, and 2011 is looking like it's no slouch either. House music and dubstep are set to be the principal poles around which everything revolves this year, but don't expect that to mean that things will stay the same. The blogosphere is already agog over James Blake, a young U.K. producer who started off making experimental beats, amplified his buzz via an unexpected Feist cover, and will soon drop a lush, vocal-centric album with huge crossover potential. Find out what's in store for Blake plus new material from Isolee, Boys Noize, Siriusmo, Wolf + Lamb, Soul Clap, and Kode 9 with the Space Ape — plus an unexpected reissue on Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder label.

James Blake, TBA (February 7)
The debut album from England's young singer/producer James Blake promises to resonate far beyond the edges of the "electronic music" world. Pitchfork obsessively covered the dubstep upstart's every move in 2010, and his unexpectedly emotive cover of Feist's "Limit to Your Love" blazed like wildfire across the blogosphere. His debut album may polarize, but you can expect it to be huge, with a mixture of minimalist drum programming, taut synthesizers and, at the center of it all, that voice.

Wolf + Lamb / Soul Clap, DJ Kicks (March)
As American dance music digs into the recession-era spirit of house parties and local pride — spiced with a little bit of Easyjet-set Ibiza/Berlin techno tourism — Brooklyn's Wolf + Lamb and Boston's Soul Clap have emerged as leading figures on the scene, building a fan base that spreads from Brooklyn loft parties to Burning Man raves. For their eight-handed take on the DJ Kicks series, they pull tracks mainly from their extended circle, with the likes of Lee Curtiss, Nicolas Jaar and No Regular Play offering a bleary-eyed, after-hours disco vibe. (See the track listing here.)


]]> Mr. Oizo, Half a Mustache (Half a Scissor) (January 10)
Among the criminally underrated artists of the last decade, France's Mr. Oizo is certainly near the top of the list. The missing link between Daft Punk and Justice, he came closest to the big time with his 1999 song "Flat Beat," made famous as the soundtrack to a Levi's Sta-Prest ad. (A headbanging hand puppet helped.) Originally released on Laurent Garnier's F Communications label, Half a Mustache is a neck-snapping ride through lo-fi electronic funk. Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder imprint is behind the reissue, which might be even more surprising than the music itself.

Isolee, Well Spent Youth (February 7)
Germany's Isolee (Rajko Müller) had a bona fide crossover hit with his 1998 song "Beau Mot Plage," a track that found equal favor in Berlin basement raves, New York's soulful house clubs, and Ibiza foam parties. But that fluke success didn't turn out the way you might have expected. Rest, released in 2000, was a nervous, detuned take on house music, and 2005's brilliant We Are Monster went to opposite extremes of overstuffed funk. Both of them were too weird to reach the masses who had found "Beau Mot Plage" via some Ministry of Sound comp, the rare example of a dance artist blithely turning his back on a short-term sure thing. Six years after his last album, Isolee prepares to prove that he's in it for the long haul with Well Spent Youth, an idiosyncratic collection of scuffed house grooves for DJ Koze's fledgling Pampa label.

Boys Noize, Super Acid (February 14)
The shine may have gone off electro-house, but that hasn't stopped Germany's Boys Noize, who spent last year turning out steely, '90s-inspired techno anthems — that is, when he wasn't working with the likes of Kelis, the Black Eyed Peas and the indie-chess-rap savant Gonzales. Super Acid may not be Boys Noize's breakout smash; it's a lovingly overdriven tribute to acid house at its heaviest. But you can bet that his crossover moment is coming. (Check out a preview medley of the album here.)

Siriusmo, Mosaik (March 1)
Berlin's Modeselektor have been mixing up techno and dubstep (plus hip-hop, dancehall and more) since long before that fusion was a viable strategy. Now that a scene has grown up around them, they're devoting their energies to furthering cross-channel developments via their Monkeytown imprint. The label's inaugural artist album comes from their citymate Siriusmo, a longtime cohort whose discography runs from Sonar Kollektiv to Boysnoize Records; Mosaik is a sprawling ode to analog hijinks and cheekily tweaked electronic funk.

Kode9 and the Spaceape, Black Sun (April)
Hyperdub label founder Kode9 — the man who signed Burial and created a platform for an entire wave of restless producers dissatisfied with the strictures of dubstep as it was conventionally known — teams up once again with London emcee the Spaceape for their second album. No previews have been made available yet, but if recent singles are anything to go by, expect shuddering rhythms, soca influences and plenty of penetrating, low-end throb. ]]> Best Albums of 2010: Electronic tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2010://1.3332 2010-12-26T18:05:51Z 2010-12-27T01:00:27Z In putting together our list of the year's best electronic music, the criteria were, as always, rather fuzzy. These days, it's harder to find an indie band that doesn't... Philip Sherburne In putting together our list of the year's best electronic music, the criteria were, as always, rather fuzzy. These days, it's harder to find an indie band that doesn't use synthesizers than one with at least a token keyboard; hell, even some metal bands use laptops on stage these days. And when it comes to chart pop and hip-hop, those genres are every bit as CPU-intensive as the most avowedly digital dance music.

And so, as we usually do in such situations, we went with our gut. The list below represents what we found to be the most forward-thinking, successfully executed and sonically rewarding material to come from the broader spectrum of self-consciously electronic music in 2010. Most of it comes from independent labels and more or less underground milieux, though there are exceptions, like Robyn's Body Talk — a bright, brassy, radio-ready pop album that nevertheless engaged with the idea of electronic dance music far more compellingly than almost any other record this year, no matter the source or the scene. LCD Soundsystem's great This Is Happening, on the other hand, got left out because, at the end of the day, it felt more like a rock record, despite its many nods to classic disco, Detroit techno and Brian Eno.

What follows, then, may be no more or less definitive than any of dozens of similar lists to appear this month, but it offers an ample selection of exemplary work from across electronic music's wide, fractured spectrum, from Flying Lotus' mind-expanding "beat music" to Emeralds guitarist Mark McGuire's ambient meanderings, and from Pantha Du Prince's emotive minimal techno to Glasser's immaculately conceived electro pop.

For a rundown of the year's 50 best electronic tracks — from house, techno, dubstep and beyond — don't miss our Best Songs of 2010: Electronic/Dance playlist.


20.
Apparat
DJ Kicks
Berlin's Apparat uses his DJ Kicks mix as the opportunity to draw alternate trajectories for techno, stretching repetitive beats to their breaking points and sketching melodic lines well past the club's horizon. This unmixed version gathers left-field techno and dubstep from Joy Orbison, T++ and Cosmin TRG alongside less classifiable material from Scorn, Oval and Tim Hecker, finding common cause across the electronic spectrum. The final, single-track mix stitches it all together into something approaching a dream state. — Philip Sherburne

]]> 19.
The Chemical Brothers
Further
Icons of the big-beat boom, The Chemical Brothers have done a decent job of staying relevant over the years, both on the airwaves and in the clubs. But Further, their first album since 2007's We Are the Night, suggests something more ambitious. Dreamy cuts like "Snow" and "K+d+b" sound like amped-up answers to chillwave; "Dissolve" and "Horse Power" flirt with '60s rock and '70s prog; and "Swoon" and "Wonders of the Deep" go all-out in pursuit of the sublime. And "Escape Velocity" blows up gritty basement techno to stadium-rave proportions without losing any of its urgency. — P.S.

18.
The Knife
Tomorrow, In a Year
Having set out as a fairly straightforward electro-pop act, The Knife have evolved into one of pop's more unpredictable artists, fusing steely, gothic-tinged techno with absurdist performance art. But this is something different even for them: Tomorrow, In a Year is their score to a Danish opera dedicated to Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species. It's a jaw-dropping (and sometimes earsplitting) affair, with throbbing oscillators underpinning avant-garde vocalizations and otherworldly sound design — a thrilling tribute to evolution both in nature and in art. — P.S.

17.
Benoit Pioulard
Lasted
On his third album, Portland, Ore.'s Benoit Pioulard (Thomas Meluch) continues to refine his idiosyncratic style, fusing field recordings and ambient atmospherics with acoustic guitars and folk-leaning vocals. Running through 14 songs in just 40 minutes, the album nevertheless feels unhurried, balancing textural sketches with fleshed-out songs like "Shouting Distance," "Tie" and "Ailleurs," whose aching hush recalls Jose Gonzalez and, more distantly, Nick Drake. A beautiful record, sometimes overwhelmingly so, Lasted is the best thing Pioulard has done, and a highlight in the Kranky catalog. — P.S.

16.
Pantha Du Prince
Black Noise
On his third album, Berlin's Pantha Du Prince sticks with the template that made him a favorite with minimal techno's sensitive fringe, arraying delicate bell tones and dulcet synth melodies over beats that crunch like footsteps in deep snow. It's of a piece with his earlier albums for Hamburg's Dial label, bearing plenty in common with his labelmates Lawrence and Carsten Jost. (Fans of Kompakt's brand of wintry ambient pop will be all over all three of these artists.) But Pantha expands his potential fan base with guest spots from bassist Tyler Pope (!!!, LCD Soundsystem) and Animal Collective's Panda Bear, who gives "Stick to My Side" its eerie lyrical lilt. Recorded in the Swiss Alps, weaving plangent steeple peals with field recordings made atop a village crushed by an avalanche a century ago, the album thrums with a cheerful sort of longing. In keeping with the artist's suave romantic demeanor, it's a sly take on mood music. — P.S.

15.
GonjaSufi
A Sufi and a Killer
A Sufi and a Killer opens with "Rebirth," an extended loop of a Native American ceremony, with totem drums pounding as voices cry to its rhythm. GonjaSufi dreams of being a "Sheep" and a lion, interpreting the animals as prototypical vegetarians and carnivores as an Indian mantra hum. His voice cracks and wheezes, as if he were a dreadlocked mystic descended from a terrestrial planet. A Sufi and a Killer, largely produced by GonjaSufi with key assistance from Flying Lotus and The Gaslamp Killer, is magical stuff, but it isn't a spiritual exercise. He's all too aware of the hot and dangerous concrete jungle that surrounds him, as well as the endless sky of possibilities that lie above. — Mosi Reeves

14.
Gonzales
Ivory Tower
The chess-playing, endurance-world-record-holding, piano-playing, mic-rocking polymath Gonzales outdoes himself on Ivory Tower, the soundtrack to a film he also wrote and directed. Coproduced by Boys Noize, the record mixes up chamber pop, tongue-in-cheek rap and sneaky dashes of synth and drum machine; its influences include both Steve Reich and Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger." The Canadian musician's expat status in Paris informs "I Am Europe," a send-up of North American attitudes toward Europe that's as funny and insightful as Peter Sellers' The Mouse That Roared. — P.S.

13.
Hot Chip
One Life Stand
Hot Chip have never sounded sweeter than they do on their fourth album, which finds them taming antic urges in favor of a rich, rounded sound. "I Feel Better," "One Life Stand" and "We Have Love" all betray a penchant for the peak time, but Alexis Taylor's fluttery falsetto lends a unity of mood to the diverse song set, which ranges from the piano-led stomper "Hand Me Down Your Love" to the waltz-tempo "Slush." Their "mature" album, One Life Stand speaks to a desire to turn pop's pleasure rush into something longer lasting, and it amply rewards extended cohabitation. — P.S.

12.
Mark McGuire
Living With Yourself
It can be hard to hear the guitarist Mark McGuire's contribution to his trio Emeralds, at times, but it's there, beneath the squalls of analog synths, bubbling like a clear mountain spring. His solo work is more guitar-centric, multitracking arpeggiated pings and adding teasing layers of delay and effects; it's also more melodic than Emeralds' drone-based work, with unabashedly lyrical leads and heartstring-tugging changes. Steve Reich, The Durutti Column and New Age ambient are all reference points, but McGuire's chiming psychedelia is a world unto itself. — P.S.

11.
Gold Panda
Lucky Shiner
Ghostly International delivers one of its most promising new artists in the form of Gold Panda and his debut album Lucky Shiner. Recorded during two weeks in the English countryside, it betrays its pastoral origins in field recordings, strummed acoustic guitar and a breezy, sun-dappled air, but it's hard to imagine music this fully realized coming together so quickly. Drawing from dubstep, house, classical minimalism and traditional Asian music, and balancing electronic instruments with generous acoustic touches, it's diverse without feeling scattered and as refreshing as a walk in the woods. — P.S.

10.
Bonobo
Black Sands
On his fourth album under the simian pseudonym, Simon Green continues to refine his unique brand of downtempo music. Instead of sampling, Green creates most of his source material himself, laying down drums, bass, keys and horns and then arranging the parts into fluid, funky jams. His primary model is the orchestral soul of Isaac Hayes or Marvin Gaye, but it's updated by touches of dub, hip-hop and even U.K. garage. Like Four Tet, it's music that flaunts description — post-folktronica? neo-neo-soul? — and seduces you into meeting it on its own generous terms. — P.S.

9.
Terror Danjah
Undeniable
After toiling in grime's trenches for nearly a decade, London's Terror Danjah finally drops a proper artist album for Kode 9's Hyperdub label. It's intense stuff, torn between warm, enveloping waves of bass and jagged beats that chatter like teeth in winter. The massive low end can mask how minimal the music really is, with pizzicato synths and zigzagging arpeggios wriggling their way through empty space. But the vocal tracks assume blockbuster proportions, setting major-label swagger to the skittering rhythms of the British underground. — P.S.

8.
Matthew Dear
Black City
After his left turn with 2007's Asa Breed, there are no great surprises on Matthew Dear's Black City. Once again, it sounds like he's spent many a long, dark night holed up in his studio, channeling David Bowie and Ian Curtis through the mic while he fiddles with wine-soaked synthesizers. There's more of a full-band feel here, with ropy electric basslines and daubs of electric guitar, but it's typically broken into off-kilter electronic rhythms. Even in its moments of disco abandon, Dear's Black City is a claustrophobic place to live. — P.S.

7.
Luke Abbott
Holkham Drones
It's hard to imagine a more perfect label than Border Community for Norfolk, England's Luke Abbott; his delicately convoluted synthesizer music obviously takes after Border Community founder James Holden as well as longtime signees like Nathan Fake. But don't dismiss this as coloring within the lines: Abbott's music is as original as it is colorful, with warbling analog synthesizers tangling up in knots around trim drum programming. He's got a knack for tricky, three-against-four rhythms, and his counterpoints suggest baroque complexity. A spellbinding debut album. — P.S.

6.
Teebs
Ardour
If the debut album from Los Angeles' Teebs (aka Mtendere Mandowa) reminds you of Flying Lotus, that's probably OK: after all, FlyLo released it on his Brainfeeder label. Like other producers in his circle, Teebs' style is obviously hip-hop in its genetics, but it's evolved far beyond the genre's boom-bap roots. Rhythmically, his beats have as much to do with dubstep as hip-hop, but it's the textures that really set him apart. Full of bells, harp, flutes, strings and clicky percussion, his tracks thrum rather than thump, with a gentle rush like a rainstick filled with feathers. — P.S.

5.
Glasser
Ring
Considering its humble origins — she recorded her first EP on GarageBand — Brooklyn's Cameron Mesirow has lofty aspirations for her solo project Glasser. Her homemade art-pop is modeled on '80s icons like Siouxsie and Kate Bush as well as peers like Fever Ray and Wildbirds & Peacedrums, and her voice and ethereal production style are strong enough to give Glasser's music a character of its own. Despite its computer origins, revealed in sampled percussion, the music draws heavily upon warm, acoustic timbres, which are layered with unobtrusive electronic strains to create a supple sense of motion. — P.S.

4.
Caribou
Swim
Where 2007's Andorra offered a sunny tribute to '60s psychedelia, Swim finds Caribou inching back toward the dancefloor. Influenced by a season of clubbing at London's Plastic People, where his friend Four Tet was a resident DJ, Swim digs into the 4/4 pulses and flashing percussion of house and techno. But instead of club music's sleek, functional forms, Caribou emphasizes loosey-goosey grooves, squishy instrumental samples and supersaturated synths, with his cool, euphoric voice sailing over all of it. It's dance music for the grape harvest, a seductive bacchanal. — P.S.

3.
Flying Lotus
Cosmogramma
The follow-up to Flying Lotus' breakout album, Los Angeles, finds the L.A. producer making serious headway with his inimitable style. Running the Brainfeeder label and signing to Warp have made him an ambassador for the "beat music" scene, but barring his obvious ties to hip-hop and left-field club music, no one else sounds like him. Splattered with astral jazz and electro-funk, FlyLo's mostly instrumental tracks harness an array of crusty breakbeats and luminous timbres into music at once psychedelic and profoundly grounded: no-nonsense funk united with truly experimental sonics. 

2.
Four Tet
There Is Love in You
Four Tet's Kieran Hebden graduates from very, very good to something closer to all-out astonishing here on his first solo album since 2005's Everything Ecstatic. His approach remains much as it has been since 2001's Pause, looping chimes and bells and scuffed percussion into a porous, tentative clatter. But his deepening engagement with both free jazz and club music has led him to more finessed rhythms and more expansive timbres; scraps of techno and two-step are spun together with Steve Reich-inspired pulses and jaunty, stumbling cadences. Colorful as an aquarium and spongy as a crepe-paper rain forest, it washes over you like a dream. — P.S.

1.
Robyn
Body Talk
If there's one thing we can learn from Robyn's impressive Body Talk series (and really, there are many things we can glean from it), it's that the sonic iciness of Scandinavian dance-pop is not antithetical to a warm heart. On the five new tracks that complete the Swedish pop darling's series, the beats could not be cooler and crisper, her vocals could not be more distant and affectless. And yet the lyrics are sensitive, emotional tales of love and pain ("Call Your Girlfriend" may just be the most empathetic "other woman" narrative ever). It is, indeed, a living, breathing body of work. — Rachel Devitt


]]> Electronic Music Goes to the Movies tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2010://1.3318 2010-12-09T18:14:09Z 2011-01-04T20:38:57Z Aside from some characteristically superlative-drenched praise from NME ("If Tron: Legacy is among the most anticipated sequels in all of history, this score blasts away all previous frontiers of... Philip Sherburne Aside from some characteristically superlative-drenched praise from NME ("If Tron: Legacy is among the most anticipated sequels in all of history, this score blasts away all previous frontiers of excitement for what a movie soundtrack can be"), early reviews of Daft Punk's music for the film have been polite at best. The Chicago Tribune laments that the French electronic superstars "sound less like innovators and more like film-score novices, which they are"; The Guardian sighs, "It's hard not to feel a bit disappointed. As is so often the case with sci-fi, the future hasn't turned out quite as you might have hoped."

It's true: Daft Punk's soundtrack to Tron: Legacy, Disney's sequel to the iconic 1982 computer thriller, will leave most fans wanting. Working with an 85-piece orchestra, the duo has turned out a serviceably dramatic score, but also a surprisingly generic one. The strings don't seem to have evolved beyond John Williams' stolid '80s scores, and the tracks with a more electronic foundation aren't much more distinctive. Daft Punk are clearly inspired by the '70s soundtracks of bands like Vangelis (Blade Runner) and Tangerine Dream (Sorcerer), but you can find far more compelling updates of Krautrock's kosmische tradition in the work of artists like Oneohtrix Point Never and Emeralds' Mark McGuire.

If Tron: Legacy feels like a missed opportunity, it's because electronic music has such a long, proud history in film soundtracks. Way back in 1956, at a time when Stockhausen was unknown to all but a small circle of avant-garde academics, Louis and Bebe Barron's electronic score to Forbidden Planet introduced similar sounds to mainstream moviegoers; the theremin was in use even earlier, in 1945's Spellbound and Lost Weekend and 1956's The Day the Earth Stood Still.

]]> Wendy Carlos' score for the original Tron to Vangelis' Blade Runner, Giorgio Moroder's Midnight Express, and John Carpenter and Alan Howarth's Escape from New York.

In that spirit, we've assembled a playlist in tribute to the best electronic music for the silver screen.


]]> Electronic Roundup tag:blog.rhapsody.com,2010://1.3297 2010-12-02T01:18:49Z 2010-12-23T23:29:08Z November and December often seem to be bountiful months for electronic music, much to the consternation of music writers who find themselves scrambling to re-sort their year-end lists. Teebs'... Philip Sherburne November and December often seem to be bountiful months for electronic music, much to the consternation of music writers who find themselves scrambling to re-sort their year-end lists. Teebs' Ardour, released on Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder label, had that effect on me: fusing the left-field beats of his Los Angeles scene with Gamelan-like bell tones, it offers the kind of hybrid between hip-hop and ambient music that I've always wanted to hear, but never thought possible.

There are plenty such surprises in this month's roundup of new and recent releases, from Brandt Brauer Frick's acoustic chamber techno to Luke Abbott's jewel-toned electronica; and for those just looking to dance, the Phenomenal Handclap Band and Catz 'n Dogz have plenty to offer.

Teebs
Ardour
If the debut album from Los Angeles' Teebs (aka Mtendere Mandowa) reminds you of Flying Lotus, that's probably OK: after all, FlyLo released it on his Brainfeeder label. Like other producers in his circle, Teebs' style is obviously hip-hop in its genetics, but it's evolved far beyond the genre's boom-bap roots. Rhythmically, his beats have as much to do with dubstep as hip-hop, but it's the textures that really set him apart. Full of bells, harp, flutes, strings and clicky percussion, his tracks thrum rather than thump, with a gentle rush like a rainstick filled with feathers.

]]> Brandt Brauer Frick
You Make Me Real
On Brandt Brauer Frick's first album, three musicians with overlapping backgrounds in jazz, classical and the club scene decided to fuse their interests, but instead of sampling their influences, they went the other direction, writing house music for small ensembles of acoustic instruments — strings, winds, prepared piano and a mess of percussion. The results flit between Reichian pulse studies and full-blooded club tracks, and between digital cut-and-paste and a more fluid timekeeping. Neither jazz, chamber music nor techno, it's a savvy middle way between the three.

nosaj-thing_drift_remixed.jpgNosaj Thing
Drift Remixed
The 8-bit synths and lunging hip-hop beats of Nosaj Thing's 2009 album Drift were woozy enough; a diverse crew of remixers throws them even farther off their center of gravity on a collection that ranges from Dorian Concept's brittle, fluorescent dubstep to Dntel's molten electro pop. Teebs' bell tone rush is like the best ice-cream headache ever, and Jamie XX (of The XX) turns in one of his best remixes yet with a slow-motion house jam haunted by memories of 2-step. It's the rare case of a remix album actually improving upon its source material.

Simian Mobile Disco
Delicacies
Simian Mobile Disco mark their definitive break with their indie dance roots on Delicacies. Following on the coiled techno intensity of their Is Fixed mix album, the instrumental Delicacies avoids obvious hooks in favor of dark, rave-inspired synth riffing and hell-bent machine rhythms. The sound itself is exquisite, owing to the duo's analog gear as well as their expert knob-twiddling: for all the evil intent of their tri-tones, there's plenty of love in these immaculately crafted odes to the dark side of dance music.

The Phenomenal Handclap Band
Remixes
On their self-titled debut, New York's eight-person-strong Phenomenal Handclap Band translated the stage-crowding antics of acts like Arcade Fire into a funk-disco fusion somewhere between D.F.A. and Bonnaroo; now a diverse group of remixers turns that album's loose grooves into streamlined house, nu-disco and electropop reworks. The best, like T.H. White's and Munk's, preserve the band's airy psychedelia while carving out crisp electronic arrangements. Like most such projects, it's a mixed bag, but there's plenty here to fill out your Friday-night house-party playlist.

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
Love Is a Stream
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma writes a love letter to My Bloody Valentine and Fennesz on this album for the ambient-leaning Type label. Setting aside the post-rock inclinations of his band Tarentel, the distorted guitars and glowing atmospheres of Love Is a Stream sound more like the overdriven drones of Grouper, an act Cantu-Ledesma has released on his own Root Strata label. You can hear chords and even melodies deep in the murk, but omnipresent fuzz and cathedral reverb explode any hint of actual song into a fine, pink mist. You never knew "noise" could be this beautiful.

Luke Abbott
Holkham Drones
It's hard to imagine a more perfect label than Border Community for Norfolk, England's Luke Abbott; his delicately convoluted synthesizer music obviously takes after Border Community founder James Holden as well as longtime signees like Nathan Fake. But don't dismiss this as coloring within the lines: Abbott's music is as original as it is colorful, with warbling analog synthesizers tangling up in knots around trim drum programming. He's got a knack for tricky, three-against-four rhythms, and his counterpoints suggest baroque complexity. A spellbinding debut album.

Catz 'n Dogz
Escape from Zoo
On their second album for Claude VonStroke's Mothership label, Poland's Catz 'n Dogs prove themselves kindred spirits of the Bay Area imprint's upbeat, slightly unhinged take on house music. As on previous releases, the duo makes the most of juicy samples over tight, tech-house grooves, but the two never get stuck on nightclub autopilot, taking welcome detours through slower interludes and dubstep experiments.
 

Darkstar
North
England's Darkstar started out making crackling dubstep with a curious chip-tune flair, a bit like Burial re-created on a Commodore 64. But on their debut album, they sound like a different band entirely, losing the low-end pressure and wobbly lurch in favor of clean, melancholic synth pop, complete with aching (but fortunately, understated) vocals. Despite the change in direction, they sound like they've been doing this their whole lives, with a fluid, intuitive fusion of '80s signifiers and modern sound design, and a knack for melodies that get under your skin.

The Machine
RedHead
Normally known for his impossibly linear tech-house grooves, Radio Slave ventures a little farther afield on his first outing as The Machine. Setting aside his drum machines and synthesizers, he focuses his attention on the grooves of his records, pulling out odd, chirping phrases and tight drum patterns, and looping them into a dizzy swirl. He's clearly got Africa on the brain, drawing heavily from tribal chants and percussion, but the way he chops and screws his source material leads it far away from traditional "ethno" house.

Mark McGuire
Living With Yourself
It can be hard to hear the guitarist Mark McGuire's contribution to his trio Emeralds, at times, but it's there, beneath the squalls of analog synths, bubbling like a clear mountain spring. His solo work is more guitar-centric, multitracking arpeggiated pings and adding teasing layers of delay and effects; it's also more melodic than Emeralds' drone-based work, with unabashedly lyrical leads and heartstring-tugging changes. Steve Reich, The Durutti Column and New Age ambient are all reference points, but McGuire's chiming psychedelia is a world unto itself.

Space Dimension Controller
Temporaray Thrillz
Only 18 when he began putting out records in 2009, Space Dimension Controller must have some sort of time-travel device as well, given the way his productions evoke dance music of the past. While not an explicitly retro artist, S.D.C. (aka Jack Hamill) echoes Metro Area, Dam-Funk and Floating Points' obsession with electro-funk, West Coast boogie, Chicago house and gossamer Italo-disco, all woven together into lush, melodic arrangements for analog synthesizer and rippling drum machines.


]]> Electronic Roundup