July 26, 2017
Friday 28th of July sees a new album from the San-Francisco based artist that continues his trademark sound of distorted loops and grainy ambience he has perfected over the years. LIF is his first new work since Music For Raising and follows on from the excellent Sisters released last year.
Preorder digital at Bandcamp.
July 15, 2017
An album that was apparently five years in the making, Claude Speeed has delivered a work that in turns, mystifies and confounds all expectations. Drawing on many influences, Infinity Ultra is an album that will probably become one of my favourite titles of the year.
There is a lot to like on here from the early tracks that remind one of Oneohtrix Point Never and Leyland Kirby to latter parts that have a dreamy, 1980s quality which finds itself tapping into the vaporwave genre. There are nods to Boards of Canada on Moonchord Supermagic and the kind of hypnagogic pop that seems so popular these days on the final track, Dreamdream.
There are elements of post-rock on Entering The Zone and the keyboard programming gets a full workout on the powerful and uplifting Fifth Fortress.
Indeed, it is the final suite of tracks that begin with Center Tech that prove to be the album's highlight. Tracks such as Spirits and Contact are just beautiful pieces of thoughtful electronica. Essential listening.
July 11, 2017
Her new album is due later this year.
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith follows up a collaborative album with electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani and her breakthrough long player EARS with her latest journey, The Kid. A double album in length that portrays the earliest steps of life's journey through a majestic sense of awe, mysticism and wonder.
True to its childhood theme the album is split across four emotionally-inspired segments that take in the various stages of life's first moments through to the realisations of growing up and apart. The first quarter draws its focus on the newly found feeling of confused astonishment - everything is brand new and glistening in the morning sun. This traverses through an emotional focus that takes hold, Kaitlyn's lyrical content perfectly conveying these feelings of confirmation that turn into a sense of pure being, fittingly building further on the electronic experiments of her breakthrough EARS.
The second section starts up with an explorative feeling of reaching out and grasping the immediacy of the world around us, captured through a series of sonic experiments that reach deep into the soul and emerge armed with a range of sounds that stem from a Bollywood-esque low-end pulse melodies that call to mind the sound of Julia Holter's wonderful experiments within her Ekstasis.
The second half begins by confronting the ideas of giving back to the formative forces of one's upbringing, this is investigated with the range of influences that Kaitlyn's music draws from as an entity, from cosmic electronica to the most out there pop sounds, this cross-genre feeling is both vast within its otherworldly approach, yet retains a familiarity that will dazzle all that get swept up in its EMS Synthi 100 led tropical ambient sound.
Drawing The Kid to its final notes, the fourth segment gives itself into Kaitlyn's verdant orchestral moments that were all written and arranged for the EU-based Stargaze quartet. While the album reaches its final conclusion, the focus is drawn towards "a return to pure being, the kind of wisdom and peace that eludes most of us until the autumn of life". A bittersweet refrain holds us tight with the album's most striking line one day I’ll wake up and you won’t be there showing the way forward on a road that lies split between the closing moments of the record while shedding any melancholy resentment against loss that you may feel, overpowering these feelings with a grateful acknowledgement of life. These two roads crossing paths within the near perfect waves of sound, floating out of the speakers with an elegant flow while the music slowly unwinds to its end.
The Kid is another brilliant album from this unique talent, ripe with the imagined wonder and innocence of youth.
The album is due on the 5th of October.
July 10, 2017
There is a whole stack of stuff that I've yet to get through. I can now add to that the new albums from Claude Speeed and The Focus Group - both of which ship this Friday.
July 3, 2017
An artist recommended to me by a friend. Metro Riders is the project set up by Stockholm producer, Henrik Stelzer.
The album shares quite a bit in common with artists like 1991 and Sand Circles - it has that same dreamy lo-fi quality that I like very much.
Metro Riders Bandcamp:
Europe By Night is the gripping and intoxicating debut album by Stockholm, Sweden based Metro Riders (real name Henrik Stelzer) and the first release on newly minted contemporary global imprint Possible Motive. Employing outdated software and now obsolete analogue recording equipment, Metro Riders conjures a suspenseful and gloomy, true to the era re-imagining of lost sounds. A real labor of love, Europe By Night encompasses a very niche palette, everything from the prophetic visions of John Carpenter, to the warbled world of Troma films, to Italian horror flicks, euro-crime and the cybernetic sewers of The Skaters.
The album can be found here.
July 3, 2017
This is a great album of quite varied electronics that spans a variety of styles, calling to mind quite a few artists. Lenticular arrives from the Central Processing Unit and is totally recommended.
Bleep:
Central Processing Unit have a claim to being the label with the strongest identity in British electronic music at the moment. Each of their fifty-odd releases provide variations on classic acid and techno stylings. They never fail to deliver in sound and style, and each comes wrapped up in that pleasing white and black package. On Lenticular, Nadia Struiwigh softens the edges of the CPU sound while remoulding the core components into an LP of great deftness and beauty. Recalling Aphex’s best ambient works as well as top-of-the-range Boards of Canada, the tracks here mould well-worn analog stylings into the sort of late-night ditties that will bring wistful smiles to ravers of every generation.
Vinyl, Cassette and Digital Editions are available here.
July 1, 2017
There have been so many new albums lately that I don't have time to listen to them all. However, in the next few days I will be taking a listen to Lenticular by Nadia Struiwigh and Life of Love by Moon Diagrams. There is also a new Richard H Kirk album that I have yet to look at.
June 29, 2017
I recently finished reading Dragon Teeth and enjoyed it. Micheal Crichton has been a favourite author of mine for many years. His blend of technology and thriller has proved remarkably successful over the years, in particular Jurassic Park. This tale of genetically-engineered dinosaurs roaming a theme park has been remarkably successful, spawning a sequel, The Lost World as well as a number of movies.
Dinosaurs are still very exciting but long-dead ones - not so much. What I also found slightly disappointing was that the sections devoted to fossil-hunting were few. For much of the novel, it felt like nothing more than a slightly unbelievable western.
Of course this was an unfinished novel so it's more than likely Michael Crichton would have spent a lot more time on it before publication.
If you like Michael Crichton's books, you'll enjoy this but be warned, it's not the work it probably could have been.
May 26, 2017
Haven't we been here before? That was my first thought as I settled down with this latest from the pioneering German electronic outfit. Perusing the lavish box that this arrived in (with Blu-ray discs and a coffee-table size book), I was struck with the realisation that not only have we been here, we have been here many times. It was only back in 2009 that the band re-released their entire set of eight remastered albums.
Anyway, on this occasion Kraftwerk have chosen to release their live shows on 3D Blu-ray and it does look and sound wonderful. The audio CD edition is spread across eight discs and while most of these tracks sound practically identical to their counterparts from the Minimum-Maximum album released twelve years ago from their world tour in 2004, the main value of this set is the visuals and 3D sound which is stunning.
If you're new to Kraftwerk, I would advise checking out some of their albums before you make this heavy purchase. Their work pretty much defines electronic music over the past thirty years.
I do wish they could write something new.
May 25, 2017
This is the first new album from Bola (a.k.a - Darrell Fitton), an electronic music artist from Manchester, England in ten years and issued on the influential SKAM records label - also responsible for Hi-Scores and Music Has the Right to Children by the esteemed and elusive Scottish electronic music duo, Boards of Canada.
Bola first came to wide-spread attention and critical acclaim back in the late 90s, creating almost organic-sounding electronic music which was both fresh and exciting on records like Soup (1998) and Gnyase (2004). These are albums where one senses that absolutely every note has been pored over in exquisite detail - with tracks like Effanajor and Glink having a polished touch that gives them the auditory equivalent of intricately assembled jewels.
His last album, Kroungrine (2007) was a beautiful blend of intriguing textures and unusual atmospherics, coming a year after his 1996-2006 compilation of unreleased tracks called Shapes. One only needs to hear the dreamy sonar pulses evident on Squib (Nuclear) in order to fall under its spell.
His long-awaited new album, D.E.G. features ten tracks including a suite in three parts entitled Pelomen Vapour. Fans were were recently treated to a SoundCloud upload from the aforementioned title.
The album starts with the piano introduction of Fhorth and its long voice sample stretched out over everything. Herzzatzz is more familiar territory with Bola's signature rhythms allowing the melody to slowly develop in the background. It's not until the third track that one can appreciate why it probably took so long to produce D.E.G - Avantual has an intro that wouldn't sound out of place on a TV ident or commercial from the 1980s. It then builds really nicely with some alluring yet unusual textures that are the artist's trademark. Along with the final part of Pelomen Vapour (which is discussed further down), this is Bola at his finest.
Evensong is less successful with some synthetic vocals proving more of a distraction than a necessity. It is a fairly gorgeous track anyway so I cannot see why there was a need for it. Landor 50X2 sets the arpeggiators in motion but I found the drum patterns to be very harsh and while it's an okay piece, by Bola's standards it doesn't really hit the mark. Thankfully the last minute or two sees the brittle drum patterns fade away and some nice looping textures take their place. There is an utterly incredible sound right at the end that almost makes up for what came before.
I suppose the true heart of the album is the majestic Pelomen Vapour suite. This sees the artist stretch out his style employing all the techniques that have made his music so engrossing over the years. Part 1 builds a really enjoyable pattern of drums and keys while an addictive melody slowly creeps out of the mix. Part 2 continues with the same patterns but here they seem disjointed before resolving into Part 3 where endless cascades of crystalline, shimmering chords and falling synth lines finally carry the suite away along vistas of blissful oblivion. For me, it's the highlight of the album.
The penultimate piece, Kappafects features more synthetic vocals that don't really do anything interesting and once again ruin what might have been a good track. I appreciate the intention to do something a bit different, and I'm sure there is a great deal of technical programming involved in creating artificial voices but it comes across more as some sort of Kraftwerk homage than any identity of its own. It also feels about two minutes too long. This isn't the first time Bola has incorporated vocal samples into his work but it was a lot more successful (and dare I say, memorable) on a track like Aguilla from his first album in 1998.
The final piece is Maghellen which may be the lightest and most accessible track on D.E.G, gentle keyboards and guitar seem to meander without some ultimate purpose. You end up feeling as if you are waiting for some moment that never arrives. Maybe that was the intention. It does however feel like a rather inconsequential way to end the album.
As with all of Bola's albums, the music has a scientific feel as though cultivated and engineered inside some fantastic, secret laboratory. One must also make mention of the artwork. As with previous albums, the artwork on D.E.G looks like a diagram lifted from a medical textbook. The sound-design on D.E.G as with previous albums is both mysterious and inspiring.
Albums from Bola may be few and far between and one hopes that we do not have to wait a further ten years for the next one.
Overall, one comes away from D.E.G with the same impression as with all his work, the sense that Bola has coaxed machines to life and then simply let them give birth to sonic organisms with unique, internal lives of their own. This is an album that will repay repeated listening as you bury down into the details of incredible sound-design and exemplary production techniques.
D.E.G is available on Audio CD as well as Vinyl and 16Bit Lossless Digital Formats.
Skam Records can be contacted on Twitter for further enquiries.