Over the six year history of this site, Berlin, Germany-based producer, electronic music artist, DJ and Boys Noize Records label head Alex Ridha, best known as Boys Noize hs been one of the site’s earliest — and perhaps most written about — mainstay artists. Since the 2012 release of Out of the Black, an album that landed at number 8 on this site’s 2012 Best of List , Ridha has proven to be remarkably prolific as the internationally renowned producer and electronic music artist has collaborated with mega-hit producer, electronic music artist and DJ Skillex and pianist, composer, experimental pop artist and emcee Chilly Gonzales in two radically different musical projects. Additionally, Ridha’s label Boys Noize Records released the work of a number of up-and-coming electronic music producers and artists, including a tenth anniversary celebratory release that featured the work of a nubmer of contemporary artists including Tiga, Johnny Sack, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, Atom TM, Pilo, SCNTST and others.
Ridha’s fourth full-length effort
Mayday was released earlier this year, and the album has material that thematically focuses on government surveillance and its impact on freedom, and a call for individuality in the face of blind obedience and conformity while being an expansion of the signature sound that has won international attention — in the case of “
Overthrow,” glitchy and chopped up samples, tweeter and woofer rattling bass and beats and enormous drops were paired with industrial clang and clatter and ominously swirling electronics in a song that stomped, strutted, swaggered and threw a vicious haymaker.
Mayday‘s second single, “
Euphoria,” sounded as though it drew from the legendary house music pioneer
Larry Levan as a looped vocal sample was paired with skittering and propulsive drum programming and glitchy keyboard keys in a song that evoked a woozy rush of blood to the head. The album’s third single “
Starchild,” a collaboration with indie electro pop sensation
Poliça paired vocalist Channy Leaneagh’s sultry and plaintive vocals with glitchy and stuttering beats, gentle cascades of twinkling and shimmering synths in what may arguably be Ridha’s moodiest and most pop-leaning single he’s released to date.
The album’s latest single, album title track “Mayday” has the internationally renowned producer pairing layers of glitchy and stuttering cascading towards the listener, industrial clang and clatter, enormous tweeter and woofer rocking, boom bap beats, wobbling and tumbling low end and a wild array of vocal samples in a swaggering, club banger that feels tense and paranoid, as though its creator was aware of the fact that he’s being monitored every single moment of his life, whether he noticed or wanted it. Interestingly, along with scoring the soundtrack to
Oliver Stone‘s latest major motion picture
Snowden, about the controversial Edward Snowden, who revealed a complicated and invasive governmental surveillance, “Mayday” is featured in the movie and the recently released video, which was created by collaborators
LIL INTERNET and
Susboy combines footage from
Snowden with public global surveillance camera footage and some sobering facts about the NSA and their surveillance program. It should frighten the shit out of you.
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