When Factory Floor emerged, back in 2008, with clanking robot arpeggios, iron-filing noise and steelwork beats, the ready money might have been on a short life for the trio. Dominic Butler, Gabe Gurnsey and Nik Colk Void made music so intense, the tension at their gigs so palpable that it seemed likely that they would implode before they ever released a record. Yet, against all odds, they found a place to hole up, a warehouse… more »
Like Krautrock and Northern Soul, Balearic Beat is a genre not recognized by those who created it. And, like the aforementioned musical categories, it was the Brits who bestowed this name on the sound they "discovered." As the story goes, UK DJs Paul Oakenfold, Danny Rampling and Trevor Fung holidayed in Ibiza, one of Spain's Balearic Islands, in 1987. Chicago's thumping house beats were sweeping clubland's most forward-leaning dancefloors while aggressive, four-to-the-floor house remixes started… more »
"I don't actually know how to do Skype," says Eric Copeland, warily, by phone from New York. That's not a huge surprise: Copeland's no Luddite, but his solo releases are resolutely lo-fi affairs, soupy with tape hiss and slurred frequencies. They count as "electronic music" insofar as they employ samples and loops and the telltale buzz of arcane hardware gizmos, but they don't sound much like electronic music as it's conventionally rendered; they sound like… more »
Daniel Lopatin’s work as Oneohtrix Point Never has been evolving in recent years to a fine point. R Plus Seven, his ninth Oneohtrix album overall, is ambitiously detailed, each tendril of sound — whatever its source, human voice or digital static — seemingly painted onto the aural canvas with a fine brush. Maybe he was inspired by his December 2012 participation, with visual artist Nate Boyce, in a multimedia evening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art; there’s a fine-art quality to R Plus Seven‘s gradations. But there’s a public-spiritedness… more »
Since the release of 1999′s multi-platinum, zeitgeist-defining Play, Moby has largely been on a trajectory of diminishing commercial returns. Innocents, his 11th studio album, may be the one to reverse that trend. Recorded entirely in his home studio, it shows the reflective electro-auteur is back on sublimely sure-footed form, balancing the euphoric glow of headphones techno at its most acute with the melancholic ache that has undercut all of his finest work. Where Play famously utilized samples of long-lost Delta blues and gospel alumni and Alan Lomax’s field recordings, this… more »
Now on his fourth album, Sweden’s Axel Willner, aka The Field, occupies a unique niche in electronic music. He’s signed to techno label Kompakt, but his sound is informed as much by rock — the ear-bending, sensual feedback of My Bloody Valentine and the Jesus and Mary Chain, for instance — as electronic music; the only thing missing are lyrics, though his songs are full of carefully textured vocal samples.
Cupid’s Head continues Willner’s exploration of the fertile common ground between shoegaze and the wide-open spaces of Manuel Göttsching, or the… more »
With his debut album as Ghostpoet, London MC and producer Obaro Ejimiwe declared his love of not only hip-hop, electronica and trip-hop, but also of blues, jazz, electro and straight-up indie pop. Peanut Butter Blues & Melancholy Jam heralded the arrival of a fresh, young voice that chimed well with then current enthusiasm for Jamie Woon and James Blake, but spread itself rather too thinly, its rampant diversity signaling a fuzziness of intent as much as broadmindedness. Nonetheless, it bagged a Mercury nomination. Now, the follow-up.
Some Say I So I… more »
This Month: Mollusk Jamboree Festival The grandeur of California's Big Sur is legendary -- a breathtaking expanse of verdant green hills, roaring waterfalls and the deep blue beauty of the Pacific Ocean. At the end of this month, Big Sur gets a soundtrack befitting its vistas, when Mollusk Surf Shop and (((folkYEAH))) present the Mollusk Big Sur Jamboree. To help get you ready for this fantastic combination of scenery and sound, we've compiled this radio station… more »
