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TRACK: Cabaret Voltaire – ‘What’s Goin On’: a pertinent enquiry, eerily couched
…. IT’S WELL a question we could all be asking. What, indeed, is goin’ on? Society riven; the ‘rona running riot; politicians brazenly self-serving and at new peaks of mendacity. And it’s with a characteristic precognition that Cabaret Voltaire have just dropped a track full of that South Yorkshire industrial-era monochrome, the title repeating as …
TRACK: MP Productions – ‘In My Heart’: Global Comms man returns with crisp IDM EP for Warp
A PROPER old-skool British IDM general, Mark Pritchard, the man behind Reload, one half of Global Communications (just buy 76:14, OK? Just … buy it), Harmonic 33, so many other greats of the British tronica and dance music scenes over the past …no, I’m not gonna count actually; well, he’s back wearing the guise of …
TRACK: Marie Bashiru – ‘Joyride’: a little Afrofolk-soul sun to help us through
DEARLY beloved, gathered here today: let’s let a little smooth Afrosoul sun into our lives to keep the harsh bite of Lockdown 2: The Return at bay. And what better antidote for crawling those winter isolation walls than the first taste of what we have to come from Marie Bashiru, a singer-songwriter who has signed …
TRACK: Maps’ ‘Sleep Today’ teases for a new four-tracker
AFTER the brilliantly varied series of remixes of his work he commissioned and dropped throughout the summer – featuring artists as diverse as soundtracks scion Simon Fisher Turner, Andy Bell of Ride under his GLOK alter-ego, New Order’s Stephen Morris and Barry Adamson – Maps is already busy looking forward to the next thing – …
Track: The Clockworks – Enough is Never Enough
One of the most inventive and exciting bands around at the moment, Galway’s The Clockworks have released another blistering track ‘Enough is Never Enough’, which combines a driving musical assault with acerbic lyrics and an assured swagger. Swimming in the same stream as bands like compatriots The Murder Capital and Fontaines DC, The Clockworks have …
ALBUM REVIEW: Gabriel Ólafs – ‘Absent Minded Reworks’: Icelandic piano prodigy receives very fine electronica rerubs
ICELANDIC composer and pianist Gabríel Ólafs – who wrote his debut LP, Absent Minded, aged just 14 – is always happy to offer his beautiful music for reinterpretation – by himself and others. After Absent Minded was released to widespread critical adoration on One Little Independent in 2019, he refashioned much of the work therein …
TRACK: The Damn Straights – ‘The World’s On Fire (Let It Burn)’: new collab drops a fiery banger
THE DAMN STRAIGHTS is a transatlantic collaboration between Exeter’s Adam Gibbons, aka the connoisseur’s modern soul connoisseur, Lack of Afro, and Maryland rhymer Herbal T, who’d actually shared musical admiration and had decided to hook up and make some bangers quite a while ago. Adam, of whom one tweeter replying to a single drop we …
Track: Tourists release another shimmering single ‘Another State’ and announce news of album
‘Another State’ is the new dreamy and hypnotic single from the very exciting Tourists, and accompanies news of the release of the eponymously titled debut album due out on 20 November through Modern Sky. ‘Another State’ creates a mesmerising fugue – awash with gurgling and bubbling synths and layered vocals, ultimate dream pop to assuage …
TRACK: The Dawdler – ‘Sign Of Growth’: a sad, cruciverbalist shoegaze rush
THE DAWDLER is the low-key musical alias of Tyneside singer-songwriter John Edgar, who describes himself on his Twitter profile as “Ambient pop. Sad.” He’s more than made us sit up to attention with the brace of songs he’s released since signing to London indie Akira Records: the heart-wrenchingly sad “Lava Lamps”, about the collection of …
PREMIERE: Kazumichi Komatsu – ‘Orca’: textural dreamstate IDM
KAZUMICHI KOMATSU is a Japanese electronicist and multi-media artist who you can place quite firmly in a grand tradition of sonic playfulness and interrogation that also includes microsound artist Ryoji Ikeda (with whom he’s shared a stage – as well as The Field and Julia Holter) and the free-roaming IDM of Susumu Yokota. He’s been …