Even by the standards of an age in which artists are encouraged to maintain a constant stream of new releases to ensure that they maintain a continual presence in an attention-deficit economy, there’s something pretty startling about Bassvictim’s work rate. Peace + War is the London-based duo’s fourth project in two years: 19 more tracks to add to the 31 they’ve already released since last January. It’s a lot, but then, reading Bassvictim’s interviews you wonder if they’re simply splurging out material in the knowledge that their time is limited. The duo – Polish singer Maria Manow and Brooklyn-born producer Ike Clateman – really don’t give the impression of a band built for longevity. They have already announced their split on at least two separate…
Category: electronic
In “Reevaluating You”, the seventh track on Ane Brun’s I Thought We Were the Same, the singer asks, “What is the opposite of trust?” She answers, “It’s not doubt… the opposite of trust is anxiety… the fear that closes us off from others, even from ourselves.” She goes on to elaborate, “In anxiety, we seek certainty before we commit ourselves. But in trust, we commit ourselves without certainty… trust won’t appear until we find ourselves defenseless”. This theme, of course, runs through literature, psychology, and religion: the idea that there’s no substitute for the “Kierkegaardian leap”, a psycho-spiritual movement beyond rational and/or logical thinking. In Brun’s new work, the above-quoted lyrics serve as a mid-project explication as she explores matters of love, loss, and identity.
About halfway through new album, We Can Rot Together, Kill Alters drops a karaoke rendition of “Toy Soldiers,” the 1989, U.S. chart-topping ballad from teen pop star Martika. This version was recorded in 1993 and it sounds like a dusty childhood memory unspooling in a now-vintage Walkman. That this intimate recollection comes after a 20 minute digital hardcore onslaught of frenetic beats and vocals that morph from chirpy to brutal is perfect. It gives the listener a few moments of respite before the pace picks up again with a cover of the Y2K trance banger “Castles in the Sky.” By the album’s conclusion, you’ll be grateful for that breather. We Can Rot Together is exhilarating. For Kill Alters’s third album, Bonnie Baxter works solo as the project’s vocalist,…
There’s something wonderfully old school about the hype that has propelled RIP Magic’s career thus far. Total frenzy. Whether it’s the Mascara Bar residency sold out on word of mouth alone (before the release of a note of music), tours with Fcukers and Tame Impala, or the Tyler, The Creator and James Murphy stamps of approval on their fuzzy, buzzy demos, RIP Magic’s entire existence has felt like an exciting secret that everybody’s in on.
Achieving some of these landmarks in a two-year lifespan would be an elusive, almost impossible challenge for most bands, but for RIP Magic, it’s been as easy as 1,2,3.
Although their rise has been rapid, RIP Magic didn’t spring up out of nowhere. This is not a psy-op. Repeat: not a psy-op. This project…
During the pandemic, Spanish DJ and producer Oriol Riverola, aka John Talabot, found himself feeling lost. Beyond losing his primary source of income as his tour schedule evaporated, the complete lack of dance floors also left him feeling creatively strained.
He wanted to make energetic, club-ready music to release his pent-up fear about the state of the world — but with no crowded rooms to play those tracks in, the exercise felt futile.
Talabot finds a fascinating middle ground on new album Music for Empty Stadiums, which he produced in the thick of isolation. He keeps the upbeat sounds of huge music events, but splatters them all over the place in a truly beautiful expression of what the producer was…
…Like many of the pioneers who would go on to inspire the genre, Hysterical Love Project are resistant to being boxed in as trip-hop at all. But that doesn’t mean they’re afraid to plunge headfirst into its bassy depths. While the Melbourne-based husband/wife duo of Brooklyn Mellar and Ike Zwanikken deploy a similar bedroomy fusion as the newer artists mentioned above, texturally they’re in much murkier waters.
After a handful of supremely mellow releases that blended lurching ’90s breakbeats with wintry, Mazzy Star-like songwriting, their third album dives into a vat of mercurial distortion and slippery, all-consuming bass. This is still swooning, dejected music designed more for the kick-back than the club, but even with…
…newly remastered and include five bonus tracks: rare single edits, alternate versions, and legendary electronic remixes from the archives.
It was pretty hard to guess what Primal Scream would do with a follow-up to their bombastic 2000 release, XTRMNTR. That record broke all kinds of ground for a group that had consistently shifted with popular culture since their Madchester/acid house success of Screamadelica. XTRMNTR offered up a maddening scope of aggressive beats and screaming politics that the group had not previously tackled. Jarring and off-putting at times (albeit a stroke of brilliance), the record is a tad difficult to sit all the way through. Evil Heat seems to attempt to bridge together the two worlds of their past club psychedelia and…
Songs for Sinners is drummer and producer Moses Boyd’s first album in six years, one he’s been thinking about since he was 16. Boyd’s project explores the tensions of spiritual faith and doubt as human forces capable of comforting, dividing, unsettling, and restoring balance via a highly individual meld of contemporary jazz, modern gospel, Caribbean rhythms, and soundsystem culture with individual voices, a choir, and deft musicianship over a dozen tracks.
“Precious” is introduced by Boyd’s shimmering electronics and drums, an electric bass, hand percussion, and organ before Donovan Haffner’s bluesy saxophone and the Kitchen Choir (family members and others recorded in Boyd’s kitchen) paint a blissfully sacred groove.
Timeless, and yet always fresh: utterly oblivious of any wiles of the pop business, Planet Yello has been turning on its orbit for nearly fifty years, plunging us into a world where past and future are one and James Bond joins forces with the Man in the Moon, Dionysos and Philip K. Dick. “To the future, through the past,” declares Dieter Meier. With their fifteenth studio album Time Lab, Dieter Meier and Boris Blank put this maxim into practice more than ever.
Blank constructs his imaginary soundtracks from a combination of freshly minted samples and a deep dip into his archive, which in the course of nearly fifty years of incessant creativity has accumulated innumerable song fragments, riffs and motifs. Meier then arrives to uncover the tales of anarchic romance, absurd robberies…
At nearly 40 years old Gold is the Metal (With the Broadest Shoulders) remains one of Coil’s trippiest and most ludic sets, beloved for its febrile fusion of field recordings (a drunken brass band in Mexico; a Muay Thai boxing arena) with a malfunctioning Fairlight synth and the pair’s homoerotic, eccentric energies. In the grand scheme of their catalogue ‘Gold…’ marks a line in the sand between their earliest work and the new decade advance of ‘Love’s Secret Domain’, a groundbreaking LP and huge influence on everyone from Æ to NIN, Surgeon and the electronic music at large. In key with a slew of posthumous Coil releases over the past decade, the remastered versions now better backlight the vastness of their sound, revealing ‘Gold…’ among their sexiest and most seductive.
An ascetic ideal put forth by Modern Love label boss Shlom Sviri led to Andy Stott making one of his most spellbinding albums, his first since 2021’s Never the Right Time. The producer accepted the challenge of disallowing basslines and reverb while limiting effects to a delay unit, leaving him to his drum machines and keyboards, plus familiar collaborator Alison Skidmore and fellow vocalist Elaine Howley — a new associate who enchanted Stott with her 2025 single for Modern Love. It doesn’t seem likely that Sviri or Stott imagined that the restrictions would give rise to something that is somehow nearly as tuneful as it is austere. “Cold Welcome” begins Late Loop with Skidmore plainly stating “I can still feel love” like she’s in triage for a broken heart. As the track…
By the early 1980s, the electric organ had started to infiltrate the iconic hotel bands that defined the Addis Ababa music scene of the previous decade. And so keys player, arranger and producer Teodros Makonnen took the leap. Using nothing but a double-manual Yamaha (with a built-in drum sequencer), he made this album of instrumental versions of classic Ethiopian songs.
Originally released on cassettes in the ’80s, it was all recorded in a single take under the shadow of curfews – and, in doing so, mapped out his version of the future of Ethiopian music. It’s a vibe: pop melodies with deep roots in Ethiopian folk music, dreamy runs doused in hazy reverb, and minimalist waltz rhythms shuffling from the tinny drum machine. Some tracks are…
…In a way, the Picture project is all about this kind of study, as applied to the tools of techno. Via careful filter sweeps, unconventional sample arrangements, and canny operation of the left-right stereo image, Dane Natal Zaks messes with the proprioception you’d expect from a tracky club record, as if turning dials inside your skull. Each track uses minimalist gestures to suggest cavernous inner dimensions.
“Quuuuuuu” bolts shakers and white noise to a high-stepping kick pattern, pulls a stuttering synth taut across them, plays catch-and-release with reversed snares in empty air, and sends ping-ponging percussion to reel off in the distance. Rarely does a techno record generate so many action verbs so elegantly.
veneration for the sacred action is the first compilation release by london-based independent record label life is beautiful records.
…The London collective — part label, part event series, part multidisciplinary arts project — has operated for the last three years as a porous, community-led platform where music collides with poetry, live performance and visual art. Favouring physical presence over perpetual online visibility, the seven-strong group has fostered exactly the kind of scene from which new musical languages tend to emerge.
“I think the sheer volume of shows, recordings and releases we’ve put on over the last three years — and even before that — has really helped shape the artistic relationships that have…
Djrum’s DJ-Kicks mix is one of the most far-reaching volumes in the series, pulling music from across several eras, spanning a multitude of genres. The artist’s own music has evolved into an ambitious melange of jazz improvisation, modern composition, ambient, and IDM, frequently incorporating live instrumentation, and his mixing style is similarly unconstrained. He often uses three turntables, and on this mix, he cuts and scratches some of the records, sometimes looping parts and manipulating them further in post-production. He erratically switches between tempos, frequently changing things up and at times erupting into moments of pure chaos. He also thinks beyond music and considers sound in general, incorporating several field…
When two paths to ecstasy unexpectedly converged in the middle of the Mediterranean, Maxime Denuc’s Club Imperiale was born. Two years ago, the French composer was sent video footage of a bride and groom walking the aisle on the small Spanish island of Menorca, but it was the soundtrack, rather than the scenery, that made an impression: Instead of the standard nuptial accompaniment — Vivaldi, Bach, Celine Dion — the organist performed Denuc’s own “Infinite End,” a minimalist epic from his 2022 album Nachthorn. Encountering his own music reverberating through the church’s majestic limestone arches, Denuc experienced a vision of gleaming whitewashed chapels perched above azure seas. But the Balearic connection also brought to mind…
Alice tumbles down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, Lucy enters Narnia through the back of a wardrobe, and Dorothy gets whisked away in a tornado to the Land of Oz. Literary theorist Joseph Campbell would define each of those moments as a “call to adventure,” the first step of the hero’s journey that underlies all storytelling.
Now we can add one more such odyssey to the list: Marina Herlop follows her muse into the world of Dja Dja.
After two relatively unadorned albums of piano and voice, Herlop made her name with the expansive Pripyat and the daring Nekkuja. For her follow-up to the pair, she wanted to put restrictions on her creative process — an effort, given her seemingly boundless energy,…
Dis Fig, producer and vocalist Felicia Chen, embraces every facet of heaviness. Chen is driven by a desire to express deeper emotions through meticulously crafted, innovative production and expressive vocals. On acclaimed collaborations with The Bug, The Body, and Asian Dope Boys, Chen’s sound is indelible.
Her solo work utilizes electronic, industrial, and bass-forward music as filters for sonic plentitudes, unbounded and wholly her own. Every granule of sound is in service of alchemizing intense emotion and vulnerability. What To Make Of These Mortal Hands is an ambitious widening of Dis Fig’s scope, traversing tectonic dynamic shifts and heartrending arrangements in a filmic study of humanity’s capacity to create both beauty and devastation.