When reviewing Bayonne’s 2016 album Primitives, PopMatters described how “If Debussy and Phil Collins fell in love, Bayonne would be their baby. (That’s a good thing.)” The allusion remains apt. The Texan multi-instrumentalist has continually cited adult pop-rock luminaries such as Phil Collins and Enya, and that fascination with expansive, polished pop remains present on Bayonne’s fourth album, Filters. Yet Bayonne doesn’t simply recreate the sounds of the 1980s. He filters them — appropriately enough — through the loop-based production techniques of contemporary bedroom pop.
On Filters, as with much of Bayonne’s music, the dominant instrumental pairing is a resonating piano accompanied by vibraphone. The piano…
Category: electronic
RAP have nothing to do with hip-hop. Or do they? In the 1990s, after a series of landmark court settlements brought an end to the genre’s sample-tastic golden era, producers began creating their own melodies. Many did so using the Korg Triton, the Japanese synthesizer released in 1999 that gave birth to Clipse’s “Grindin’,” Terror Squad’s “Lean Back,” Jay Z’s “Dirt Off Your Shoulder,” among many other immortal tunes.
In the late 2000s, as Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” (another Triton classic) faded in the rearview, British producers Guy Gormley and Thomas Bush met somewhere on Britain’s South Coast. Gormley was making sample-based music and Bush loved it. They set about making “humorous big room techno, but with folk singing”…
Donatell is the alter ego of Los Angeles-based artist and producer Daniel Memmi.
As Donatell, Memmi explores the discarded sounds, forgotten techniques, and dead-tech gestures of pop’s past, recombining them into uncanny future possibilities.
…If Italo Calvino had dreamed up Water for his Invisible Cities, he might have imagined it as a place with more screens than people, a city populated solely by screens: screens talking only to one other, faltering unison voices falling out of sync, a daisy chain of recent pasts and slightly less recent pasts, a time loop with a lazy, elliptical flow. A city of screens, and thus also a city of tropes — signs and symbols that have lost all interest in pointing to anything beyond…
Two years after debuting on Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder label with Mahōgakkō, an over- whelming and fascinating collision of breakneck rhythms and giddy yet tender avant-pop melodies, Hakushi Hasegawa released Honest Feeling Album, another chaotic, boundary-smashing effort that plays by nobody else’s rules. Hasegawa’s music has always mixed tightly arranged live instrumentation with breakbeats and samples, but this album features the newly formed HaHa and the Hairpins, giving the music more of a full band feel, which still blurs the lines between live and programmed. With music as maximalist as Hasegawa’s, it’s only natural that the artist would continually push their music further with each successive release, and there’s simply more of…
Emerging from Baltimore’s incredibly energetic hardcore scene, TURNSTILE have always displayed a penchant for eclecticism. Last year’s album NEVER ENOUGH epitomised their magpie-like eye for glittering sonics, exploding their hardcore palette into something that could be blissfully melodic and crushingly intense all within the same song. Very much an international breakout moment, the band toast 12 months of NEVER ENOUGH with VERSIONS, a staggering broad selection of re-workings which serves to illustrate the ongoing impact of the parent record.
As a collection, VERSIONS is led by the highs: Porches re-crafts the title song into a spectral slice of after-hours introspection; Blood Orange transforms ‘LIGHT DESIGN’ into a zero…
Into the Sky is the realisation of a project six years in the making. With the need to keep active during lockdown, former Late of the Pier singer Sam Eastgate – aka LA Priest – made a dance record entirely from sampled material, devising his own form of house music in the process. Yet the finished product sat in the studio while Eastgate completed his guitar-based third album Fase Luna in 2023.
More recently, however, Eastgate revisited his work in the company of producer friend Alex Ridha, aka Boys Noize. Their challenge was to wring as much emotion as possible from the voice and just two accompanying instruments. These are a drum machine – a Gene built by Eastgate himself around a decade ago – and a synthesizer,…
Pioneering Arabic/Western fusion singer Natacha Atlas returns alongside creative and life partner Samy Bishai – a violinist and composer who has served as Atlas’ musical director since 2010 – with an album dedicated to the people of Palestine.
The lead single, ‘Unchanging Game’, sets a suitably sombre tone. Processed beats and hand percussion mix with subtle electronics and keyboards. Atlas’ voice remains as smooth and compelling as ever. ‘Zar’’s experimental edge trickles and bubbles with cut-and-splice vocals.
‘Wana Leih’ displays an ultra-modern R&B gleam yet sacrifices little to commercialism. ‘Dawsha’ ticks, clicks and sways across an ambient, trip-hop landscape. ‘Bahlam Biyoum’ rains stirring melodies over a romantic, digital…
When an artist breaks away from the path they know best, there are two expected directions they can take: either they’ll continue to make the same kinds of music they’ve always made, or they’ll sprint in the opposite direction. When the robots known as Daft Punk decided to call it quits, the humans behind the masks became free to make that choice. For Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, at least so far, the choice has been to step away from most acts of musical creation beyond acting as a producer for the likes of Sébastien Tellier, Travis Scott, the Weeknd and Rosalia. It’s hard to blame him for not working harder; after all, when you and your creative partner become one of the most iconic electronic music duos in the history of the genre, you don’t really need…
…features a compelling remix package, alongside original demos of the album tracks, including new single, “Together (Demo)”.
British electronic duo Maribou State came into their own with Kingdoms in Colour, their exceptional 2018 full-length. With that album, they evolved from a melancholy post-dubstep act to a more exuberant, hopeful group with a fleshed-out, globally influenced sound. Kingdoms in Colour was a U.K. chart success, and the pair toured extensively throughout Europe and North America. However, both Chris Davids and Liam Ivory faced health issues when they returned from touring, not to mention the worldwide lockdowns and everything else that happened during 2020. The duo kept writing new material…
Art is rarely as orderly as a gallery — or a rock album, for that matter. Even when restraint is involved, even when it’s finished, shit’s all over the place in the studio. That’s kind of the point, really: There’s always a bit of chaos in getting the ideas down. Tyondai Braxton understands this. Those who existed, perhaps lived through the late 2000s, recall his stint as frontman of experimental wunderkinds Battles. But his path was never truly meant to be with a rock band, as the aftermath of his exit indicated. Rather, it was to revel in the discord of music in different forms through composition. He’s the type of guy who fits in more with collaborators Kronos Quartet and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma than, say, Grizzly Bear. Braxton was more at home with orchestras and museum…
On Melting Days, the tenth album by Lusine, Seattle’s Jeff McIlwain brings two decades of production experience to bear.
His particular brand of ambient electronica has a wonderfully tactile quality, juxtaposing warm surges of thickly textured synth against crisp rhythmic and melodic details. Counterbalancing the macro with the micro, there’s a sense of both suspension and subtle movement, simplicity on one level and complexity on another, which keeps these ten tracks immersive.
“Bird’s Eye” has a rapidly whirring clockwork intricacy to its bright arpeggiation, while its slow chord changes muster a feeling of humbling grandeur. “Apparition” conjures the radiant luster of Michigan trio Kiln, while the glitchy…
Visions of Sodal Ye, is eerie and disorientating – the sound of ecological dread – and named for the prophet character in Brian Aldiss’ 1962 novel Hothouse, who realises that life on a far-future Earth is doomed. The record was released by a vanity publishing label who never said ‘non’ as long as they received a fee and a tape. While this should be inconsequential it reveals much about the French counterculture at the end of the ’70s.
Claude Cuvelier and Jean Skowron, the two provincial northern French music nerds who created Mar-Vista, wanted to reach a big audience but suffered countless knockbacks from ‘real’ French labels. The pair came to the conclusion that “the recording industry in France wasn’t interested in our kind of music” and could…
A running theory: The youth yearn for breakbeats. The frenetic electronics of Nineties dance music have rumbled beneath the surface of indie rock and pop for some time now. The current wave of new acts — think Fcukers, Underscores, and of course, PinkPantheress — wield the sound with an uncanny magnetism, as if communicating from a post-digital future. Ear, the London- and New York-based duo comprised of Jonah Paz and Yaelle Avtan, who met while students at Bard College, have become the type of buzzing indie band you used to hear about in the mid-2000s, fitting as the renaissance of that era’s sounds points to a more spiritual than aesthetic concern.
Following the release of their debut single, “Nerves,” in 2024, the pair have built…
In 1923, the young French novelist André Malraux trekked through the Cambodian jungle to Angkor, the ruins of the ancient capital city of the Khmer Empire, to steal bas-reliefs from the Banteay Srei temple. He intended to sell the art in London or New York, but was caught and sentenced to three years in prison.
That is, until France’s leading writers, among them future Nobel laureate André Gide, petitioned for his acquittal by arguing that Malraux’s potential as an author was simply too great to squander because of a youthful indiscretion.
This example of cultural colonialism is key to Saphy Vong’s new album as Neo Geodesia, Oknha Stamina. Born to Cambodian parents, Vong grew up in Nancy, France — right near…
In the digital era, it’s rare to encounter a project as ambitious as this: a triple-LP concept album available as a boxed set, including a book with a short story (in Italian) and 180 illustrations. Un Sequestro Lungo 10,000 Anni is the love child of Samuele Gottardello (Blak Saagan) and Iranian illustrator Majid Bita, the second in a series of Opale Editions by Maple Death Records and Canicola Edizioni.
The concept is dystopian, the illustrations vibrant despite their dual tones, portraying a world overrun by monsters and monstrous humans, a savage police force keeping a terrified and often angry populace at bay. In one scene, a bus rushes headlong toward a gaping maw. The apartments are jammed and often infested; Big Brother…
James Ellis Ford’s second solo album joins a small and exclusive list of records that were made in hospitals. There’s J Dilla’s Donuts, there’s The Wind by Warren Zevon, and now there’s Lost in Another World, in this case recorded at Saint Barts in the City of London between intensive sessions of chemotherapy over a nine month period. At times it’s heartwrenching, but never mawkish, and throughout there’s a sense of dignity that often comes with the knowledge that death could be just waiting around the corner. Given a less than 30% chance of survival, it’s heartening to report that Ford is still with us and seemingly making good progress.
Perhaps most striking is the stark honesty of these songs, where irony falls away and there’s…
