Category: electronica

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Ted Feighan is a Cleveland, OH-born and-based multi-instrumentalist, producer, electronic music artist and visual artist, whose solo recording project Monster Rally is inspired by vintage exotica and tropical imagery — and with Monster Rally, Feighan has developed a reputation for a sound centered around collaged samples collected from his vast vinyl archives.

Flowering Jungle, Feighan’s forthcoming Monster Rally album is slated for a December 15, 2017 release through Gold Robot Records, and the album is reportedly inspired by the sounds, visuals and animals of roughly half a century’s with of travel and nature documentaries, and reportedly the album was written as a sort of companion piece to exploring new and exotic landscapes, wildlife and communities. And the album’s artwork, devised by Feighan, who specializes in found paper collages will also reportedly mirror the concept by featuring portraits of jungle birds in flower-adorned “nests” superimposed over the abstracted flag of the “flowering jungle.”  But more importantly for this site, the album’s first single “Sunny Sloth” is a breezy yet slickly produced song centered around a series of looped, lush and shimmering guitar chords, stuttering boom-bap drum programming and trippy psych rock-like hooks. And while subtly kaleidoscopic, the song lushness evokes rainwater hitting against verdant greenery and the incredible array of colorful animals you’d come across.

 

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

TÂCHES (pronounced TASH) is an electronic music artist and producer, who has released material through a number of renowned electronic music labels such as Desert Hearts, Different Recordings, CRD, Nervous, Kitsune and Majestic Casual — and in fact, that material won him attention across electronic music circles for a sound and approach that’s been described as romantic, exotic and flamboyant; however, with his latest EP Move Mountains TÂCHES the producer and artist reportedly moving towards a much more accessible sound and approach, partially influenced by a relocation from Los Angeles, CA to Spain, as well as moving towards his new label home, Glitter Cowboy Records.

“I Still Think About You,” the EP’s opening track is reportedly influenced by a holiday camp teen crush and the track features a swooning yet minimalist-leaning production consisting of shimmering, arpeggio synths, soulful vocal samples, propulsive beats and brief bursts of Spanish-styled guitar to create a song that manages to be club rocking while being genre mashing as the song nods at breezy Tropicalia and house music.

 

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Andrew Hung Returns with a Plaintive Ode to Pushing Buttons to Get What You Want

Perhaps best known as one-half of renowned electronic music duo Fuck Buttons with Benjamin John Power, Worcester, UK-born, Bristol UK-based electronic music artist, multi-instrumentalist and producer Andrew Hung much like his bandmate has focused on a number of various side projects including  Dawn Hunger, a band he founded with Clarie Inglis (vocals) and musician Matthew de Pulford, production work, co-producing   Beth Orton‘s Kidsticks, as well as releasing solo material with his debut EP, Rave Cave. 

Now, as you may recall, Hung’s full-length debut Realisationship is slated for an October 6, 2017 release through Lex Records and album track “Animal,” found Hung exploring a more organic, lo-fi-like sound featuring a gorgeous and lush string arrangement, buzzing power chords, hard-hitting electronic beats and slashing synths paired with Hung’s primal, punk rock howling.  As Hung explains in press notes “Animal is a warning that oppression brings about consequences; we have bred fear and now we are reaping its effects. We cannot address the external without first addressing the internal.”

Interestingly, “Elbow,” Realisationship’s latest single may arguably be one of the more personal songs on the album, as it’s influenced by an experience Hung had as a small child. As the Worcester-born, Bristol-based electronic music artist, multi-instrumentalist explains in press notes, “Once when I was a small child and wanted to get a fake nose-ring from this shitty shopping-centre stall in Kidderminster but being young, I was really afraid of buying it. Consequently I stood there for a long while trying to pluck up the courage to get said fake nose-ring before the woman came out from behind the stall and told me to fuck off. I went home crying . . . ‘ Elbow’ is about pushing buttons. As for the stall, when my sister found out, she took me back and gave the woman a right bollocking.” 

Sonically speaking the song consists of a mischievous and almost childlike production featuring layers of twisting, turning and twinkling synths, swaggering, hip-hop-like drum patterns,  trippy blasts of guitar and swirling electronics paired with Hung’s plaintive and yearning vocals to simultaneously express the frustration, fears and humiliation of youth — well, of life, generally. But sometimes, you have to break out of your shell and take a ridiculous risk for the things that you really want in life, and the song serves as a reminder of that. 

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Videos: Sudden Beach Returns with a Creepy Minimalist Yet Cinematic New Single Paired with Equally Creepy Visuals

Last year, I wrote about the rather mysterious Istanbul, Turkey-based and currently Berlin, Germany-based multi-instrumentalist, producer and electronic music artist Sudden Beach.  And as the Turkish-born, German-based multi-instrumentalist, producer and electronic music artist told me in an email last year, the music he has created was meant to evoke suddenly coming upon a beach while traveling a long distance on a desert road; however, his debut single “The Beast” reminded me quite a bit of John Carpenter‘s retro-futuristic soundtracks and Pink Floyd‘s “On The Run” as the single consisted of layers of undulating synths, cascading shimmering synths and samples of children yelling and talking.
Now, as you may gather, a little over a year has passed since I last had written about Sudden Beach — as it turned out, the multi-instrumentalist, producer and electronic music artist recently relocated to Berlin and after the complex visa process was finally able to focus on music with his latest single “The Reason,” a single, which will further cement his reputation for crafting an icy, retro-futrustic, synth-based, cinematic sound thanks to a production that features layers of twinkling arpeggio synths that twist and turn around each other. 

The accompanying video, created by the artist is based on edited footage from the 1999 major motion picture Outer Space and the visuals are specifically mean to be psychedelic and downright creepy, further emphasizing the song’s creepy vibes. 

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Pete Sanderson is a New South Wales, Australia-based multi-instrumentalist, producer and electronic music artist, best known as Obvious Creature, who specializes in an ambient and atmospheric synth-based pop sound, complimented by hazy yet gorgeous memories and mathematically precise, drum programming —  and as you’ll hear on “Time,” the first single off It Ain’t Much Better In Here, Kid, Sanderson’s sound manages to nod at Trans Europe Express-era Kraftwerk and Brian Eno.

 

New Audio by William Ruben Helms

Chris Lamaro is an up-and-coming Australian multi-instrumentalist, producer and electronic music artist, best known as Diskodisco. And as Diskodisco, Lamaro specializes in a cinematic yet dance floor friendly retro-futuristic sound that seemed indebted to John Carpenter soundtracks, Giorgio Moroder‘s 80s output, Umberto and The Chemical Brothers‘ “It Began In Afrika,” as Lamaro pairs layers of propulsive, arpeggio synths, with layers of shimmering synths and a computerized vocal sample which spells out DISKO, as you’ll hear on “The Darkest Magic,” the first single off his forthcoming debut EP, The Game Within The Game.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Slum Sociable is an up-and-coming Melbourne, Australia-based electronic duo, who will be releasing their full-length debut on October 13, and as you’ll hear on the album’s first single “Castle,” the duo specializes in a sound that draws from and possesses elements of jazz, electronica, contemporary electro pop, hip-hop and electro soul paired with earnest and soulful vocals. And while some have compared the Aussie electronic duo’s sound to Animal Collective and Bonobo, there’s a subtle hint at J. Dilla, Portishead and Gnarls Barkley.

 

 

 

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Fuck Buttons’ Andrew Hung Releases a Primal New Single

Worcester, UK-born, Bristol UK-based electronic music artist, multi-instrumentalist and producer Andrew Hung is arguably best known for being one half of renowned electronic music duo Fuck Buttons with Benjamin John Power, an act that can trace its origins to when Hung and Power began collaborating together to create a soundtrack to a film that Hung had made but immediately after forming Hung and Power had started playing live whenever possible and soon began gathering a cult following for a sound that employed the use of a variety of instruments including Casiotone keyboards and children’s toys such as a Fisher-Price karaoke machine — and the result was a live sound that Time Out Magazine once described as an “adrenaline pumping, ear purging slab of towering, pristine noise.”

Their limited edition 7″ single “Bright Tomorrow” was released to critical praise from the likes of Drowned in Sound, Pitchfork, Mojo and Stereogum, and building upon growing buzz, Hung and Power played critically applauded live sets at 2007’s Supersonic Festival, Truck Festival and Portishead’s curated ATP Festival; in fact, after those sets, a number of media outlets named them as a Hot New artist for 2008 with outlets like The Observer calling their sound “a joyous racket of swirling atmospherics and percussive gunfire,” in an article highlighting them in a new, contemporary wave of intelligent, literate British pop music.  Since then the duo released three critically applauded full-length albums — 2008’s Street Horsing, 2009’s Tarot Sport and 2013’s Slow Tarot; however, over the past few years the duo have focused on various side projects and production work: Hung started a band Dawn Hunger with Clarie Inglis (vocals) and musician Matthew de Pulford. But he’s released a solo EP, Rave Cave and has co-produced Beth Orton’s Kidsticks. Power has released three critically applauded albums with his solo recording project Blanck Mass — 2011’s self titled debut, 2015’s Dumb Flesh and 2017’s World Eater.

Hung’s solo full-length debut Realisationship is slated for an October 6, 2017 release through Lex Records and the album’s latest single “Animal” is a tense and forceful track that finds Hung exploring a more organic, lo-fi-leaning sound featuring a gorgeous string arrangement, buzzing power chords, slashing synths, forceful electronic beats and drumming and Hung’s primal, punk rock-like howling. As Hung explains in press notes “Animal is a warning that oppression brings about consequences; we have bred fear and now we are reaping its effects. We cannot address the external without first addressing the internal.”

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Perhaps best known for a stint in synth punk act POW!, Aaron Diko is an Indianapolis, IN-born, Bay Area-based electronic musician, who recently returned to his hometown to record a series of solo material and collaborations with longtime friends’ Creeping Pink‘s Landon Caldwell, Mitch Duncan and Burnt Ones’ Mark Tester in a recording project that Diko has dubbed DDCT.

DDCT’s self-titled full-length debut is slated for release Friday through Empty Cellar Records and Medium Sound, and the album’s first single “Tracks” features undulating and cascading layers of vintage synths paired with buzzing power chords and a motorik groove bolstered by four-on-the-floor drum programming, and while clearly drawing from Trans Europe Express-era Kraftwerk and Brian Eno, the composition and its resulting recording manages to nod at space rock but with free-flowing improvised feel, capturing a group of musicians playing and grabbing onto a groove with a “you-are-there” immediacy.

 

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Darren Cunningham is a Wolverhampton, UK-born, London-based producer and electronic music producer, best known as Actress, who over the past decade or so has developed a reputation for crafting abstract yet churning and rumbling techno with pulsing kick drums, jittering percussion, chopped and looped samples; however, interestingly enough, the renowned British producer has publicly mentioned that he’s wanted to make classical music for a modern generation. And that desire has lead him to collaborate with the London Contemporary Orchestra, crafting expanding arrangements of his dark and brooding sound and new material, including “Audio Track 5,” which finds the renowned British producer pairing skittering beats and swirling electronics with a blasts of twinkling and shrieking strings to create a stark and icily minimalist yet entirely cinematic composition. But underneath the bracingly chilly surface, the producer reveals a subtle yet ambitious and progressive take on chamber music.

 

 

 

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US Tour Dates

Aug 23 – Seattle – Kremwerk

Aug 24 – Chicago – Empty Bottle

Aug 25 – Detroit – El Club

Aug 26 – New York – MoMa PS1

 

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

With the release of their critically acclaimed album Hide Before Dinner, the Melbourne, Australia-based electronic trio F INGERS, comprised of Samuel Karnel, Carla dal Forno and Tarquin Manek, have quickly become one of the Southern hemisphere’s most exciting and visionary electronic acts, as that album’s material were meant to evoke the thrill, and casual cruelty, of unsupervised childhood summers – a suburban gothic of grazed knees, hide-and-seek, nettle-stings; however, as you’ll hear on “All Rolled Up,” off the trio’s forthcoming album Awkwardly Blissed Out, the material’s sound is meant to evoke deeper, much more adult anxieties and fears — the daily struggles with passing time, of ghosts looming larger and lingering in strange and unexpected ways, of perpetually creeping dread and unease. And while retaining a chilly minimalist sensibility, the new material also manages to possess a slow-burning, almost painterly quality as gentle layers of swirling electronics, undulating synths form an icy surface from which ethereal vocals float over.

 

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: JOVM Mainstay Blanck Mass Returns with Surreal and Nightmarish Visuals for Album Track “The Rat”

If you’ve been frequenting this site over the past few years, you’ve come across a handful os post featuring  Blanck Mass, the solo side project of Fuck Buttons’ Benjamin John Power. His 2015 Blanck Mass effort Dumb Flesh was written and recorded over the course of the preceding year in several different locations — Power’s Space Mountain Studios, a windowless attic space in Hatch End, North London and Power’s Edinburgh Scotland home. And reportedly, frequently changing recording spaces influenced the album’s dark and sprawling compositions, which possessed elements of tense and abrasive industrial electronica with sensual, hard-hitting, deep house, complete with punishing, tweeter and rocker beats and shimmering synths seemingly bubbling from a hot, molten iron-like surface. Thematically speaking, the material focused on the inherent frailty of the human body — with the material evoking the painful sensation that our poor, dumb flesh couldn’t do more to protect us from certain catastrophe; however, World Eater, Power’s third Blanck Mass album, released earlier this year through  Sacred Bones Records was inspired by the our current, ongoing sociopolitical climate full of teeming anger, violence, confusion, frustration, hatred and despair — and as Power has publicly mentioned, the material is meant to evoke a wild, untamed beast chewing and gnawing at civilization, compassion, good, progression and the very bonds that hold us together. As Power explains in press notes, “The title is a reference to both the inner beast inside human beings that when grouped en-masse stops us from moving forward towards good.”

Now, as you may recall, album single “Silent Treatment,” built on the concept of human civilization being mercilessly ripped apart and stomped on, and of impending doom as the song featured chopped up choral and vocal samples, abrasive, industrial clang and clatter, stuttering drum programming, twinkling arpeggio synths and enormous, room rocking boom bap-like beats — and although the song managed to possess a subtly atmospheric feel, it retained the murky and punishing feel of the material on Dumb Flesh. The album’s latest single “The Rat” continues on a similar vein as it features punishing, tweeter and woofer rocking beats cascading down on the listener paired with layers of swirling, shimmering and buzzing synths — and while being one of the more ominous songs I’ve come across this year, there’s a strangely haunting beauty at its core. 

Edited by Dan Tombs, the recently released visuals forces the viewer to stare directly into his eyes and take a surreal and nightmarish trip through some of the darker and more foreboding recesses of a fairground, stopping through dancing doll towns, merry-go-rounds and warped flashbacks of maggots and decay. As Power says of the video, “The video itself is a bit of fun and filmed on a family vacation, but somehow I feel it represents discontent within a capitalist regime and a world full of sugar-coated shit.” 

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: The Kraftwerk Inspired Sounds and Trippy Visuals of Heart Years’ “The Field Trip”

Heart Years is a London, UK-based producer and electronic music artist, who has begun to receive attention for a sound that based around his love of vintage synths, tape machines and 70s electronica, and his latest single “The Field Trip” off “The Great Fades” single sounds to my ear as though it draws from Trans Europe Express and The Man Machine-era Kraftwerk as layers of shimmering and undulating arpeggio synths are paired with a motorik groove. And in similar fashion to “Trans Europe Express” “Metal on Metal” and “Abzug,” the track manages to evoke the sensation of forward movement.

The recently released video for “The Field Trip” is a fitting audio-visual collaboration between the British electronic artists and indie filmmaker Bailey. And as Bailey explains of the idea shot using Lomography’s lo-fi analog, hand cranked, LomoKino movie camera, which only produces 15 seconds of footage per 35mm roll, “The film is an abstract sci-fi where extra-terrestrial life forms represented by 3 primary colour shapes take a field trip to planet earth and observe nature, human infrastructure, behaviour and sound … before leaving unnoticed by the planet’s inhabitants.” Of course, what makes the video so fitting is that it captures the trippy nature of the song while equally evoking the sensation of movement towards something.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Now if you’ve been frequenting this site over the past couple of years, you’ve likely come across several posts on Blanck Mass, the solo side project of Fuck Buttons’ Benjamin John Power. 2015’s Dumb Flesh was written and recorded over the course of a year in several different locations  — Power’s Space Mountain Studios, a windowless attic space in Hatch End, North London and Power’s Edinburgh Scotland home. Reportedly, changing recording spaces influenced the album’s dark and sprawling compositions, which frequently meshed tense and abrasive industrial electronic music with sensual, hard hitting, deep house, along with punishing, tweeter and woofer rocking beats and shimmering synths bubbling from a hot, molten iron-like surface, and as a result it gives the material brief moments of stunning beauty bursting from a murky and uncertain mix. Thematically, the material focused on the inherent flaws and frailty of the human body — in some way, the album evoked the sensation that our flesh couldn’t protect us from what feels like certain catastrophe.

 

World Eater, Power’s third Blanck Mass album is slated for a March 3, 2017 release through renowned indie electronic label Sacred Bones Records and the material on the album was inspired by a year teeming with anger, violence, confusion, frustration and despair — and in some way, it evokes a wild, untamed beast chewing and gnawing at civilization, compassion, good, and progression. As Power explains in press notes, “The title is a reference to both the inner beast inside human beings that when grouped en-masse stops us from moving forward towards good.”

 

World Eater‘s latest single “Silent Treatment” builds on the idea of civilization being chewed apart and of impending doom as sonically the song consist of chopped up chorale and vocal samples, abrasive industrial clang and clatter, stuttering drum programming, twinkling arpeggio synths and enormous boom-bap beats — and although while managing to be a subtly more atmospheric, the song retains the tense and murky feel of Dumb Flesh; in fact, the song manages to emphasize the growing sense of impending doom, confusion, and destruction that many of us have felt over the past 10-15 days. Interestingly, as Power explains of the song “‘Silent Treatment’ is about the problems that arise when we don’t communicate. We often grow apart when we don’t understand each other. Being left int he dark can lead to fear.” May this song be a visceral warning — and may it remind us of all that we have at stake.

 

 

 

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Sofia Kourtesis is a Berlin, Germany-based DJ, producer and activist, who as a producer and DJ has developed a reputation for a sound that possesses elements of tech house, dream-pop, new wave and others while frequently using anything at her fingertips to create something unique — and interestingly enough has been described by some as falling somewhere between the minimalism of Aphex Twin and the ambiance of Jai Paul.

Over the holidays, Kourtesis released a sensual and atmospheric remix of Me Succeeds‘ “Cool Kids” in which she uses a chopped and reversed sample of her uncle’s voice, skittering drum programming and layers of shimmering and  gently undulating synths which gives the original a mischievous yet hopeful air — and a result, a completely different air from the slow-burning and industrial-leaning original.

As Kourtesis explains of her remix “The Cool Kids remix is really energetic and playful, I thought about our new generation, these people who are young and cool on their own special unique form. Kids wanna change things and maybe save the world someday.”