electronic – Page 3

TRACK REVIEW: Throwing Snow ft. Adda Kaleh “The Tempest”

London-based electronic musician Ross Tones, better known as Throwing Snow, has just released a track from his upcoming EP Pathfinder featuring Bucharest vocalist Adda Kaleh. As you can tell a bit from the name, this new EP is intended to accompany a journey or trip. So, give “The Tempest” a try when you’re taking the train or driving to work.

The track is meant to reflect the sounds of a storm, opening with rather harsh, dissonant sounds. Clanging might be the appropriate word. The bass is full of an easy, if a bit mysterious, movement, and the rolling rhythm carries the listener along through the whole song.

Adda Kaleh vocals play foil to the dissonance, making the song more accessible to those looking for melody. Her voice adds a musical quality to “The Tempest”‘s atmospheric tones. Throwing Snow’s work has been described as having a “steely coldness,” a trait that’s certainly easy to pick up on with this new track.

An even more intriguing rhythm comes in at about two minutes, accompanied by a bit of viola, bringing acts like Flying Lotus and Tricky to mind. The end of the song is its peak. Kaleh sings a melody which is lovely, dark, and adds to the air of mystery. More so than a full-on storm, a windy mist or haze seems to fit here, with Kaleh trapped inside. It’s both fascinating and a little bizarre.

Look out for Pathfinder, coming out on March 25, and listen to “The Tempest” below:

TRACK PREMIER: LongArms “Following Me”

Youthful DJ and producer LongArms hails from Miami, but has centered himself in New York. He’s worked with B-Tips for the past two years as the co-founder of Famous NYC and CROCMODE, a series of parties held throughout the city, from the Lower East Side to Bushwick. With influences like Boys Noize, Bloody Beetroots, Justice, and Daft Punk, LongArms hopes to take Electro Funk to the next level. There’s not much funkiness to his new single “Following Me,” but it’s a great dance song nonetheless.

The listener can easily fall into the rhythm of the quick and catchy opening beat of this track thanks to a very recognizable play off of the Daft Punk/Justice sound–evident, but in a subtle automated, sci-fi vibe (squiggling, shapeless noises, spacey synth), while the Justice influence shows itself in the incredible danceability (namely, the beat and shifts in melody). A robotic “yeah” is repeated in rising and falling tones. There’s a swirling mechanical noise that circles over and over for a minute about halfway through the song. Then, real dance tones come in, almost what you’d expect from an 80s hit – the kind of beat you can really roll your arms and bob your head to.

The track is fun without the bashing you over the head with the hypnotic haze of most club music, and the rhythm throughout keeps the energy level high. Justice and Daft Punk have been building success off of this for years: something repetitive, but dynamic, and fresh enough to keep you awake and involved.

Here’s “Following Me” on soundcloud:

ALBUM REVIEW: Neneh Cherry “Blank Project”

Neneh Cherry is back with Blank Project, a collaboration with experimental electronic group RocketNumberNine and her first solo album in 16 years. Built on Cherry’s erudite life experience, this album weaves its way in and out of complex emotion with soul and aplomb. It’s everything you could want from a partnership between the weight of Cherry’s alt hip hop and Rocket’s minimal expressions. The songs range from sensual to spiritual to menacing, maintaining simple lyrics that deal with a more general language (“hate,””love,” movement, despair), while using sound in very unexpected ways, and making sure the listener is always invited into the space that is explored.

“Across the Water,” the first track on the album, may also be the best. It’s certainly the most striking emotionally – a song about fear and anger, a mother’s protest. A slow, hypnotizing beat follows Cherry’s soft, whispery Sprechgesang. The minimal quality to the music is so strong that Cherry’s words paint incredibly vivid pictures. “Dripping water,” she shows us, “Dripping down.” The rhythm is intoxicating and makes me want to sway and sing along. But there’s an attendant darkness that quickly worms its way in. Cherry begins to sing: “My hands across the water / My two feet in the sea / My fear is for my daughter / But will wash over me.” The lines rhyme and move together like a poetic chant or folk song. It stays minimalist through and through, without the rhythm intruding on the terrible, beautiful space that Cherry creates with her words. Her voice carries a menacing undertone during the more spoken-word verses. But there’s a great deal of fragility when she sings the chorus. I can’t imagine a more haunting song to open up this personal journey.

Cherry talks a lot about weakness in these tracks. “Blank Project”, the title track, is about a man she loves so much she “hates it.” It’s a concise song, hurriedly sung, with a beat that changes rhythm as often as her voice. She sings about being made to feel small, but opting to reject it. “I hate you.” She tells him, simply. But also, “I love you / I love it all.” Though these concepts are general, the complexity isn’t too difficult to grasp as a listener, especially placed alongside the music. All kinds of sounds are used through this track: dinging bells, vocalizers that drop Cherry’s voice super low, and a weird synthy, drone-like layer that makes the middle of the song uncomfortable. This is not about self-pity or even grief. There’s no sense that the woman behind the voice is not in control of her physical or mental self, even though she expresses weakness. The entire time she’s telling “[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][her] man” that he’d “better change.”

“Everything” is also about weakness, but inverted from the way she speaks about it prior. In this more electronic, stripped-down track, Cherry explores the ups and downs of defensiveness. It opens with muffled, soft vocals before the beat kicks in. When her voice enters the fray, it tells us: “I can’t hear you / What I can’t hear can’t upset me.” However, this defense mechanism obviously isn’t working. We can still hear the muffled voice. Cherry herself also seems to be struggling with her own voice, reaching for high notes, stretching it to its maximum. The listener follows as she finds it tougher and tougher to defend herself. By the end of the song some of the most strange vocal stylings on the album emerge. Cherry moves between a shaky, animalistic laugh and hoarse shouting. The rhythm continues to roll, but there’s something desperate and heart-wrenching in the narrative.

In tracks like “Naked”, more industrial motifs are explored. Cherry manages to create mechanical sounds without forfeiting any of the track’s emotional grip: if anything, she and Rocket somehow make transform the industrial into inviting and warm. Immediately Cherry asks that someone strip her naked and put her outside. Then, she urges us to “run a little faster.” Her vocals are absolutely gorgeous–soaring and capturing the listener in an almost mystical melody. I think it’s a brilliant idea to mix melodic tropes we associate with the spiritual with a very sensual song. There’s also an intriguing double tone that jerked me out of my comfort zone during the verses, juxtaposed to the soothing chorus.

A bit of happiness is occasionally touched upon during Cherry’s journey. “Weightless” begins like the prelude to a house jam, though it quickly diverts into a grungy, meticulous rhythm. Cherry uses crooning vocals from the start with notes that reach fairly high. When the chorus kicked in I suddenly realized this, in fact, is a dancing song. Though Cherry “can’t find [her] right moves” she keeps on dancing and she’s “weightless.” There’s a soulfulness to it, channeled through the vocals. By the end of the song there’s a great sense of catharsis. “Weightless!” Cherry sings with joy – “Come on! Weightless!”

This album is worth listening to for the varied soundscapes, alone. But the narrative is also deeply moving, the rhythms unexpected, and Cherry’s voice unique and electric. The story of a powerful, but sensitive woman is unraveled. We’re invited into all of Cherry’s complexities and it’s an uncomfortable, but gorgeous space

Blank Project comes on on February 25th. In the meantime, watch Neneh Cherry sing “Blank Project” at Studio 360:
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EP REVIEW: Jaakko Eino Kalevi’s Dreamzone Remixes

Helsinki-based Jaakko Eino Kalevi flaunts a sound as exotic as his name. Recently scooped up by Weird World, Kalevi has released his four-song EP entitled Dreamzone Remixes, much to the delight of myself and a supposed many others. The EP is split unequally when it comes to sonic consistency, the first quarter sounding nothing like the subsequent three, but this is an observation, not a criticism.

“Memories,” the EP’s introductory track, had me thinking Kalevi’s niche was electronic iterations of world music. The song opens with a throbbing tuba-esque melody that I would expect to find in the crevices of Tom Waits’ 1985 album Rain Dogs. In flood the whimpering tones of the keyboard, most likely on the organ setting, and gentle vocal harmonies reminiscent of Brazilian Tropicalia pioneers Os Mutantes. “Memories” eventually surrenders its lively horn to ticking drums, maracas, and receding voices. There is an element of folk music to “Memories” absent on the remainder of the release.

Despite the worldly references in “Memories,” the songs following suggest that Kalevi found nourishment in the film scores of the mid 80s. Each song is familiar to the point of becoming wordlessly narrative; each song summons vivid cinematic imagery. Track two, aptly titled “No End (Tom Noble’s Never-Ending Story Remix) ” introduces the evocative nature of the final three quarters of the EP.

Its soft, papery drums and faraway female vocals remind me of an ambient Flashdance…maybe the romantic rehearsal scene of some mid 80s dance dramedy. The steady snapping of disco, the eeriness of corporate muzak, and the grainy filter of dream pop all play a part in this track. I was pleased to hear a nod to French House as well, one that particularly brought to mind “Something About Us” by Daft Punk. This is without a doubt my favorite eight minutes of the EP, and a perfect song to end the night, a little drunk, dancing slack-limbed in a bath of blue light.

Track three, “ When You Walk Through Them All “ is no escape from the 80s, or my film references. Initially I’m hearing a somber Hall and Oates; the hooks are infectious, the vocals languid. The song omits a thumping walking pace of cosmopolitan, night time scenes-only after this impression did the title of the song register. Despite the vocals, the song’s bubbling keyboard effects bring back the scores of early video games as well as Tangerine Dream’s compositions for Risky Business.

Dreamzone Remixes concludes with No End (Vezurro Remix). This version of the song is punchier, and more synthetic sounding. The drums are more aggressively electronic, and the synths are at their sharpest. Since I’d assigned a movie scene to the preceding songs, my mind couldn’t help itself. This one would better suit a sex scene, maybe of the science-fiction genre, something along the lines of Tron getting down with Kate Bush. Need I say more?

I’d be willing to bet that the images conjured by this EP were perhaps only a reflection of my strange brain-scape, but the quality of this EP is less of a betting matter; it’s just really, really good.

Check out the video for Jaakko Eino Kalevi’s “No End” below, and make sure to catch Dreamzone Remixes for some innovative versions of the track.

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TRACK REVIEW: Odesza’s “Sun Models”

It’s mildly humorous that a production duo from Seattle would have a hit song by the name of “Sun Models.” Western Washington alumni Harrison Mills (aka Catacombkid) and partner Clayton Knight (BeachesBeaches) make up Odesza, the pair that’s accumulated almost five million SoundCloud streams in the two years they’ve existed. They’ve also been getting their fair share of radio play, and when I was visiting my native Washington State, I heard their latest single on the taste-making airwaves of KEXP.

“Sun Models,” which is fresh off of Odesza’s 2014 album of the same name, is a beachy and blissful track that I assume will be played throughout the summer months. It opens with the warm crackling of a dust caked record, as well as a few chicken-pecked keys peppering in a dull, tinny drum effect. The vocals, provided by Michigan soul singer Madelyn Grant, register as a languid ripple through still water. They are nearly recognizable as words, but morph into liquefied croons thanks to the shrill frequency of the vocoder. I can’t help but notice the proximity to the vocal manipulations of Grimes mastermind Claire Boucher.

The song is danceable without a doubt, but not in an aggressive way. It’s a relaxed track that drifts somewhere between melancholic and bright. Smears of twinkling keys glide over a crescendo of strobe-worthy synths of the European House ilk, while eerie calls float in and out.

In response to their ever-growing exposure, Odesza has kicked off a massive U.S. tour that will go into May. The pair have added a couple of Canadian dates for our friends up north.

Check out “Sun Models” and dates below:

Wed. Feb. 12 – Pawtucket, RI @ The Met *

Thu. Feb. 13 – Philadelphia, PA @ Theatre of Living Arts *

Fri. Feb. 14 – New York, NY @ Best Buy Theater *^

Sat. Feb. 15 – Boston, MA @ Paradise *

Sun. Feb. 16 – Baltimore, MD @ Soundstage Baltimore *

Tue. Feb. 18 – Leesburg, VA @ Tally Ho Theater *

Wed. Feb. 19 – Raleigh, NC @ Lincoln Theatre *

Thu. Feb. 20 – Asheville, NC @ The Orange Peel *

Fri. Feb. 21 – Atlanta, GA @ Terminal West *

Sat. Feb. 22 – Athens, GA @ Georgia Theatre *

Thu. March 13 – Spokane, WA @ The Bartlett

Fri. March 14 – Bozeman, MT @ Zebra Cocktail Lounge

Sat. March 15 – Missoula, MT @ Palace Billiards

Fri. March 21 – Boise, ID @ Treefort Music Festival

Sat. March 22 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Urban Lounge %

Sun. March 23 – Denver, CO @ Larimer Lounge

Tue. March 25 – Albuquerque, NM @ Sister

Thu. March 27 – Houston, TX @ Fitzgerald’s #

Fri. March 28 – Dallas, TX @ Club Dada #

Sat. March 29 – Austin, TX @ Stubbs Jr #

Tue. April 1 – Phoenix, AZ @ Rhythm Room #

Wed. April 2 – San Diego, CA @ Casbah #

Thu. April 3 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Echoplex #

Fri. April 4 – San Francisco, CA @ The Independent # (SOLD OUT)

Sat. April 5 – Arcata, CA @ The Jambalaya #

Sun. April 6 – Eugene, OR @ WOW Hall #

Wed. April 9 – Victoria, BC @ Club 9one9 #

Thu. April 10 – Vancouver, BC @ Venue #

Fri. April 11 – Portland, OR @ Holocene #

Sat. April 12 – Seattle, WA @ Neumos #

Fri. May 9 – Toronto, ON @ Tattoo (Canadian Music Week)

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BAND OF THE MONTH: Fenster

This month’s Band Of The Month is the Berlin quartet Fenster, whose new album we can’t quite get enough of. It comes out March 4th on Morr Music, and is garnering raves already. Be sure to catch these guys on one of their many tour stops (listed below) including a handful of SXSW shows. Here are our thoughts about the elusive German lo-fi group’s forthcoming album, The Pink Caves: International quartet Fensters sophomore collection, The Pink Cavescreates its own reality: self-contained, rich, surreal. Vocals and instrumentation feel entirely synched in their intent, and draw together a lush and layered aesthetic that’s as unspecifically visual as the soundtrack to a David Lynch film. That uniformity makes sense, considering the nuts and bolts of the way the album was put together: the group (Jonathan Jarzyna, JJ Weihl, Rémi Letournelle and Lucas Chantre) laid down the tracks on this album simultaneously, in an East Germany cabin with its wiring rigged to distribute different elements of the recording process over four rooms. So while the album retains all the polish of a studio recording—more polish than many studio recordings, actually—you do get the feeling of togetherness listening to The Pink Cavesas you might expect to find in an especially well-orchestrated live show. I wouldn’t call it spontaneity—on the contrary, every move the group makes in this album is palpably deliberate. However, the music maintains remarkable cohesion throughout. The Pink Caves‘ seamlessness makes it a little difficult to find a point of entry into the album. The world the group imagines is so self-sufficient, it’s hard to locate Fenster in any one era or style. The lyrics, while subtle, feel directed towards high philosophy, and a brief investigation will tell you that The Pink Caves seeks to grapple with an imaginary heaven that is at once both pointless and triumphant for the fact that it exists only in your mind. This idea weaves in and out of the music, but is often buried pretty deep: so closely do the instrumentals parallel this concept of spaciness and alienation that it’s often hard to grasp what the group’s aiming for. Without focus, the music becomes aimless and melts into a swirling, crushed-velvet panorama that’s mesmerizing, but leads to nowhere. The male-female call and response duets go a long way towards humanizing the album. In these sections, The Pink Caves takes on a sweetness that mellows out the stark, albeit beautiful, passages . Although I was too distracted by the gorgeously complex fabrications taking place in opening track “Better Days” and the suavely faraway vocals of “In The Walls” to crave more narrative, when the duet in “Mirrors” showed up, it occurred to me that having a more clearly delineated vocal line structure may be exactly what The Pink Caves is missing. There’s no danger of any listener mistaking Fenster’s musical landscape for ordinary, and there could never be, even if all of the album’s vocals were as accessible as they are on “Mirrors.” Using vocals as a foothold would strengthen the album’s philosophical bent, too: The Pink Caves’ message lies layers deep, like a shadow always turning around a corner before it’s fully in view. Though this contributes to the album’s dystopia, that aesthetic wouldn’t be lost if its foundation were more explicit. In fact, the experience of listening to the album would benefit from having a narrative guide through its dreamworld. Listen to “Mirrors,” off The Pink Caves, below via Bandcamp: We had the opportunity to chat with Fenster regarding life, love, inspiration and music, of course. Here’s what they had to tell us: AF: Bones is such a different sounding album than The Pink Caves. While the latter is difficult to assign to any genre, Bones seems to be more folk-pop influenced. What inspired digressing towards the abstract?

Bones was our first record, made in a state of pure naive bliss. We had never played a show before and it came from a world that was really all in our heads. I guess it was a record that really reflected that time, the influences we had gathered as individuals and the special chemistry between us and our producer. It was very much a winter record and very much a Berlin record for us. It was made in a basement and recorded with one old Russian ribbon microphone. We wanted to capture the simplicity and dark playfulness of morbid dreams, coupled with the sounds of the city and the sounds of objects we found that inspired us, like shovels and slamming doors. After that record came out and we started touring a lot, our world sort of exploded. Everything we thought we knew was kind of turned upside down, and we encountered so many extremes. We were exposed to so many new places and people and music and we just took it all in I guess, whether it was conscious or subconscious I think the world changed and shaped us both as people and as musicians. When we decided to take a break from touring and compose and record a new album, we found that the influences and instruments we had been inspired by simply changed and instead of trying to recapture that minimal innocence, we embraced this new world we felt emerging, following the different aesthetics we were drawn to, which were maybe more psychedelic and wobbly than before.

AF: You have New York and Berlin listed as places the band members hail from. What has been the most rewarding aspect of having those different perspectives? Do you find your sound changing in relation to the geography you inhabit?

JJ is a born and raised New Yorker, Jonathan is half Polish and from Berlin, Rémi and Lucas are from France and our producer Tadklimp is Greek. I guess the music has benefited from not really belonging to one place although Berlin is a sort of Never Never land at the moment where a lot of different people from different places seem to collide, so Fenster definitely owes its existence to what Berlin is right now. It’s hard to tell if that has really shaped our sound but I guess it always adds some kind of dimension when different cultural references and backgrounds meet.

AF: Your website is almost as dizzying as your music. What is the story behind some of that imagery? The bone-headed dinosaur, the man bent backwards, the religious icons…

The website was made by our friend and collaborator Florian Sänger who embodies a particular kind of understated genius that one rarely encounters. The inspiration for the imagery came out of long afternoons spent in junk shops trolling through crumbling children’s books, medical encyclopedias from the last century and religious propaganda pamphlets. We wanted the website to be an entrance into the world of the album which for us meant a creepy dream logic where Jesus is on street signs and men float through the air. After we handed over the piles of collected materials to Florian, along with some images from our own dreams, he basically channeled it all into that website. Word.

AF: What contemporary bands are you most interested in collaborating or playing with?

Ahhhh there is so much good music being made at the moment, but there are two artists that are particularly inspiring to us… Connan Mockasin and Sandro Perri.

AF: Your music exists in a space that is difficult to label; because of that it is difficult to imagine your songwriting process. How do you typically commence the creation of a song? Its kind of different every time…some ideas have been festering for years, some just appear out of the clear blue sky. But our process is that once we have collected enough little bits and pieces of ideas, we go somewhere and make little pre-recordings or sketches of each song with all of the arrangements mapped out. We write and re-write lyrics dozens of times, singing and reading them out loud to see if they stick. Its important for us not to judge the creation as its happening, that comes later in the recording process when things become more concrete.

AF: I attempted researching what Fenster meant. Aside from a last name it appears to refer to a tectonic window. Also, maybe some sort of tape? Where did you get the name? Yeah, Fenster means window in German. A window fell on JJ’s head when we were recording Bones, but other than that we just like that its kind of an empty word, an object you look through instead of at.

AF: I read in Morr Music that you are fans of post-apocalyptic novels. Any favorites?

The Drowned World by JG Ballard is a classic and as for post human novels, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.

AF: Given the change from your first album to your sophomore, where do you see your direction going in the future? Sonically speaking.

Sonically speaking, the next record will probably be completely different than the last two. We don’t like repeating ourselves, and at the same time we can’t force things…we like to sort of let them happen naturally and somehow be true to where we are in our lives at the time.

AF: What have you been listening to most recently?

Basically everything…Milton Nascimento’s 80s stuff, Fleetwood Mac (mostly Tusk), 70s Turkish disco, The Art of Noise, the new Japanther record, Caramel by Connan Mockasin, Impossible Spaces by Sandro Perri, sleazy french composer Francis Lai, Carol King!, Aphex Twin always, Kendrick Lamar, just discovered the album Trans by Neil Young, German krautrock legends Holger Czukaj and Irmin Schmidt…

AF: Do you find that what your listening to greatly effects your songwriting, or do you try to separate the two?

Everything that goes in has to come out somehow…The world and books and movies and music and stuff all play a part, but some things are more influential than others. Sometimes you hear, see or read something that unscrews something in your brain and you feel inspired instantly and other things leave you totally cold but maybe these things also contribute somehow. It’s mysterious and unpredictable and we like it like that.

AF: The Pink Caves is an interesting album because at on instant it is romantic, another mournful, and then the song changes and you want to dance. It also has so many digital and instrumental intricacies that it’d be a shame to miss them. Given the dynamism of the record what environment would you say is the best way to listen to it? Headphones? Live?

Wherever you listen to it, definitely listen to it loud! Maybe because we watch so many movies it feels like some weird soundtrack to a film, so listening to it while driving in a car or riding your bike or your horse around town could be cool. It’s definitely worth trying to listen to it as a whole album. That’s at least what we were going for because we personally really love records that take you on a trip.

AF: You mention finding interest in graveyards, and religious iconography. Surely being from Berlin and New York you must have some favorite cemeteries and cathedrals. Care to share for your fans with the same taste for the macabre?

There is a truly crazy and macabre cathedral in Portugal made of bones and skulls and decorated with a golden skeleton called Capela de Ossos and a church outside of Prague in Kutna Hora that is decorated with intricate sculptures made of human skeletons that were apparently designed by mad and blind monks. Paris is always a fun place for graveyards and Vienna has more dead inhabitants than living ones.

AF: Where does your fascination with the strange, morbid and mystical come from?

Its sort of engrained in everything…you just have to look for it. We like the autumn, its the time of year when everything dies. Dried flowers are just more beautiful, more timeless. We’ve always been really fascinated by cults, by movements of people that believe something so strongly they would die for it. The mystical is actually just another way of looking at the ordinary. Some people see a mirror and find it endlessly fascinating and mysterious and some people just look at themselves.

AF: I was watching your music video for “Oh Canyon.” It’s certainly proof of your sense of humor. I couldn’t help but be reminded of Wes Anderson’s imagery, but what did you guys have in mind while making it?

Our good pal and long time collaborator Bryn Chainey who has made three videos for us came up with the concept which was to make a sort of fake documentary about the “Amateur Cosmozoology Society” exploring questions like, “space, what is that?” and the history of animals being catapulted into the cosmos to try to figure out what’s out there. The found footage he incorporated of monkeys holding hands and cats freaking out in zero-gravity spaceships is absurd and fascinating. Science!

AF: You’ve been consistently lauded for your ability to render songs both sweet and eerie. Is there a band mate who contributes to one aspect of the sound more than the other? Basically, who is the creepy one in the band?

Maybe the band has a mind of its own that’s greater than the sum of its parts…we’re all huge Cronenberg fans and we like sci-fi a lot. Keep it sexy, keep it spooky and keep it real in 2014. Peace and love.

AF: WE SURE AS HELL WILL!! Thanks for speaking with us and congrats on being named AF’s band of the month. Much love to you, from NYC to Berlin.

The Pink Caves is out March 4th. Go here to read more on the band and listen to more of the new album! Below, watch the teaser for The Pink Caves.

AUDIOFEMME LIVE: Trabajo, 2/8

This past Saturday, we had BK electronic duo Trabajo stop by our office for a quickie. Set that is. Which we then live streamed to the whole wide world. Here’s what went down:

TRACK OF THE WEEK: Neneh Cherry & Robyn “Out Of The Black”

Swedish singer-songwriter, rapper, and all around renouncer of musical restrictions Neneh Cherry has returned with her first solo album in 18 years, Blank Project, due to be released on February. She is joined by fellow Swede and pop star Robyn on the song “Out Of The Black”- a beautifully produced, minimal piece that combines their voices into a declaration of self.

“Out Of The Black” begins with a breakbeat, recalling Cherry’s many dalliances with trip hop. Minimal synth and bass pick up, altogether forming simple, easy instrumentation. The music glides over you, pulls you along, but not forcefully. We hear Cherry’s strong, personal, and critical vocals first: “Just trying to mind my business // I see the wolf packs congregating on the corners”. It’s easy to recognize her acuity and wisdom in these lines. She doesn’t want to involve herself in what she observes, but by observing she’s forced to, anyway. Robyn comes in with the chorus and the song changes. There’s something dissonant about their voices together. It doesn’t sound right at first. But by the end of it you realize it’s actually completely brilliant.

Cherry and Robyn have different vocal stylings, not necessarily regarding disparate ranges, but certainly in terms of tone. Robyn is a pop singer: bold, sweet, feminine. Cherry is subversive, even in her singing, and more breathy than Robyn, even fragile-sounding. Robyn’s voice complements the electronic elements with its clarity and her enunciation. Cherry takes it out of the electronic and into the personal. I’m vaguely reminded of Dirty Projectors’ harping. If this song was all Robyn it would be unusually calm for her. If this song did not feature Robyn it would be an unusually mellow Neneh Cherry song. But the two of them together hold it in a space that’s entirely new.

“Behind our backs”, “Face the pack”, they sing. The bass follows these lines of thought with an evident, electronic pulse, but not one that is overwhelming or obnoxious. Though music is well composed, it seems almost secondary to the vocals. Robyn and Cherry are making statement of self: affirmations, declarations as successful, experienced women. “I’m Robyn on the microphone into the speaker”, she sings and it’s catchy and it’s true. She is Robyn with a capital R. She and Cherry come together with confidence as the song goes on. While the chorus begins: “Out of the black/ Out of the blue / I just want you / To want it to”, by the end of the song it has changed to: ‘“There are the facts / This is the news: / We just want you / To want it, too”. A melancholy conclusion, perhaps, but a sweet comedown nonetheless.

Pick up Neneh Cherry’s new album on February 25th and if you’re in Europe look out for her tour:

ALBUM REVIEW: Yellow Ostrich “Cosmos”

Since beginning his solo project Yellow Ostrich, singer-guitarist Alex Schaaf has been making music prolifically and with fanatical focus. Within a couple of years of its inception, while Schaaf was still a college student, Yellow Ostrich had recorded two full-length albums and three EPs, each of which barreled with blinders on in a direction that had little in common with that of the previous release. In 2009, one of Yellow Ostrich’s earlier releases, The Serious Kids EP, consisted of a six-track foray into acousti-fied electronic dance music. The same month, a Morgan Freeman tribute EP surfaced on the group’s Bandcamp page. Suffice it to say that Schaaf doesn’t shy away from experimentation, nor the prospect of devoting an entire album to that experimentation.

Yellow Ostrich has grown since those days. Having added drummer Michael Tapper, and then, later on, bassist Zach Rose and Jared Van Fleet on keys, Schaaf remains the center of the band. Though as a solo artist, the sheer amount of sound Schaaf was able to orchestrate was impressive, it’s difficult now to imagine Yellow Ostrich without Tapper’s drum work. But though beefier instrumentation makes Schaaf’s penchant for big, unpredictable themes a bit less obvious, those deeply delved-into concept albums are by no means an outgrown phase for Yellow Ostrich.

By way of preparation, Schaaf moved into the band’s windowless Brooklyn practice space for nine months before writing the songs on Cosmos. There, he studied astronomy, and artificially recreated of the cycle of daylight and night in lieu of going outside. When he did start to write, the album developed an obsession with darkness and light. “Pull the shades down and never let go,” Schaaf intones on “Shades,” and then inverts the image in the following track with the wearily repeated line “hiding under the brightest light.” Less poppy and more violent than anything the group had so far put out, Schaaf’s vocals cycle over delicate electronics and heavy guitars like waves crashing unenthusiastically against a wooden dock at nighttime.

For all its well-researched complexities, Cosmos retains the element that’s been threaded through all of Yellow Ostrich’s deviations: it assumes, for lack of a better term, a sense of wonder in its audience. It’s easy to find sections of Schaaf’s vocal track precious, his looping melodies boring. The group has, in interviews, expressed preference for playing college campuses, and it’s easy to see why: the ideal Yellow Ostrich fan is deeply enthrall-able and eager to suspend disbelief. Even if the group’s grand, far-flung scope won’t appeal to all listeners, the prospect of being invited to dig deep in this album adds an allure to the deceptively catchy, pulsing echoes of Cosmos.

Walk, don’t fly, over to Facebook for more Yellow Ostrich. Listen to “Shades,” off Cosmos, below:

ALBUM REVIEW: Roman Remains, “Zeal”

Zeal may not be the most dynamic album released this year, but despite any misgivings, Roman Remains’ debut full length (out March 4th on H.O.T Records Ltd) beckons us into an immersive, dissonant world. Not to mention it’s catchy, synth-filled fun. Liela Moss and Toby Butler, of The Duke Spirit, set out with this electronic side project to create something “playful, but never dumb”. Though some of the bass lines and melodies echo The Duke Spirit, Roman Remains has a disparate vibe. Butler switches from bass riffs to potent downbeats and Moss from english rock band to powerful femme fatale. The strong female vocals and atmospheric musical backdrop lends depth and menace to an otherwise less notable album. While Moss has a voice like Bjork, Roman Remains is more reminiscent of Ladytron or Portishead – propulsive beats and seemingly sweet, but commanding lyrics. With this album they’ve captured grungy, otherworldly sensations with simple words and sounds.

The titles range from pastoral (“Agrimony”, “Gazebo”) to more dangerous (“Apoidea”, “Tachycardia”, “Vulture Beat”) to narrative (“Nest In Your Room”, “Thursty As A Truck”). Most of the songs are quite similar in structure: a simple, often slower opening that jettisons into the club-like, laden with heavy bass. While they could definitely benefit from some variation between songs, the narrative is what really pulls the listener in. The lyrics, while simple and often repetitive, lend to the powerful atmosphere. They can be very visual – “Looking at the people / Moving in the space between”, “Hard to see early evening stars” – as if looking through the eyes of the narrator. There are many possible interpretations. Personally, I see that narrator in some shadowy, cyberpunk club. She speaks strongly but effortlessly of power plays, melancholy, and anger. Simple images evoke all of these sensations, and as a result it’s difficult not to be drawn into the mood.

Track ten, “Vulture Beat”, has one of the more interesting openings – dreamy, and environmental. But it moves into familiar territory with the chorus, which presents yet another catchy, repetitive melody. The words are great, though, direct and sensual: “Help me / Help you / To pleasure”, “Help me / Help you / More”. Tack nine, “Animals”, also has a unique start. The sounds aren’t quite dissonant, but they’re strong and harsh with vocals leading in. Moss commands: “Back off”, “Keep / Keep / Watching this”, leading into the simplest chorus: “Oh Woah / Animals / Oh Woah / Oh no”.

Tracks seven and eight are more visual and speak towards the narrative. “Gazebo” is a bit melancholy. The beat is obvious, but softer than many of the other songs. The vocals are blended, and a bit hazy. Moss pulls the listener in when she sings “One hundred ways to watch / The shadows lose their light,” and manages to sound both earthy and soft. “Influence and Atlas” is more menacing. It begins with a thumping beat and words that construct a vague setting: “Looking at the people there / Moving in the space between”. Then, they build a vague relationship: “I didn’t know if you would influence it / I didn’t know if you would ever try” with a bit of “Oh / Oh / Oh” in between. It was easy for me to lose myself to this space, ambiguous, perhaps even slippery, but distinct.

Roman Remains plays with dissonance and juxtaposition. They’ve succeeded in making an album full of dark, urging energy and a powerful, yet fairly intangible story. There’s simplicity and there’s intensity. I felt empowered and emotional after I listened, a little weary, too, but more so compelled. Perhaps the next release will be more well-rounded and try a few experiments with genre and composition.

Check out the album’s first track, “This Stone Is Starting To Bleed”, below.

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ALBUM REVIEW: Farewell Young Lovers

Todd Gautreau, the man behind Crushed Stars, left behind electronic music for more melodic, folky sounds demonstrating his exceptional talent as a singer, multi-instrumentalist and composer along the way. Crushed Stars released its fifth album, Farewell Young Lovers on January 21, 2014. Its nine tracks feature poetic, descriptive lyrics, intricate melodies and unorthodox instrumentation.

In Farewell Young Lovers, Crushed Stars draws from a number of musical genres to create its own unique sound. Gautreau extracted elements of folk, rock, jam rock, and even jazz, when creating this strangely complex album. Upon first take, the its overarching qualities consist of Gautreau’s haunting, deep and mumbling (often to the point where it’s inaudible) voice, spacey instrumentation, catchy melodies and guitar hooks. Take a harder listen and it’s clear that Gautreau’s unique combination of instruments with rich and textured instrumentation are common motifs throughout. Understated and unassuming, Farewell Young Lovers is definitely a slow burner, with Gautreau challenging you to fully grasp all of the intricacies of his music.

“Haters” and “Flowerbomb,” the album’s featured tracks, manage to balance mellow, ambient underpinnings and guitar-driven uptempo beats, while Gautreau’s signature haunting, deep and echoing vocals are showcased in full force making them both the most instantly accessible songs on the album.

With the whammy filled guitar part, the jam-band esque guitar solo, and Gautreau’s breathy and mumbling (often to the point of incoherency) vocals, “Our Interest in Claire” is one of the spacier tracks on the album, ending on a psychedelic note, with extended and mellow instrumentals. “Our Interest in Claire,” even more than the other tracks on the album, is able to exist without moving towards any final destination. “Fly” is one of the few tracks that’s truly anchored in melancholia from the onset. The piano enters about 30 seconds in, producing a chilling melody that interacts with Gautreau and the female vocalist’s accompaniment. The result is gorgeous. The textured, multifaceted and unconventional instrumentation on “Fly” makes it by and far the standout track on Farewell Young Lovers.

Gautreau’s electronic roots are most easily detectible on tracks like, the understated and mesmerizing “Poppies.” With a-typical instruments, Gautreau employs repetition while constantly adding new variations and intricacies to the music. “Supernova” is a mellow folk pop song, and the most “jammy” track on the album, complete with a meandering instrumentals that conclude the song–a perfect track to wake you up on a Sunday morning, perhaps.

On Farewell Young Lovers, Crushed Stars isn’t trying to be anything, but rather lives in the moment. We can all take a page out of Todd Gautreau’s book, and just put some music on and chill out.

VIDEO OF THE WEEK 1/13: Trentemøller “Gravity”

Danish indie-slanted electronic musician Trentemøller has debuted the video for “Gravity,” the second track off his 2013 album Lost. This video is the story of a day in the life of Mr. Carpool, played by Oscar Isaac (recently of Coen Brothers’ film Inside Llewyn Davis), as he walks the shoulder of a Los Angeles highway, advertising his services as an extra passenger for single drivers who want to fast-track into the carpool lane. Isaac’s title role in Inside Llewyn Davis depicts a down and out folk singer who hitchhikes to New York with no money; in “Gravity,” Mr. Carpool takes on the role of companion, road trip buddy, and confidant.

The relationship between driver and passenger begins ambiguously, with Isaac in disheveled businessman apparel, carrying a briefcase, as the sun rises over the LA highway system. Trentemøller’s staid, pulsing beats suggest a reflective loneliness, with a backdrop of a ticking clock and high vocals that trace placid arches over the music.

Mr. Carpool’s first customer, a harassed looking middle aged man, shoves a life-size doll out of the passenger seat as Carpool shoves into the car. From there on, Isaac’s character is privy to all the eccentricities of people alone in their cars: drivers scream on cell phones, blast their radios, make jokes, eat snacks, cry, and offer him hits off a joint. We don’t hear anything of this, of course; “Gravity” swells and harmonizes as it progresses, blurring together into a representation of the digressions and experiments of the day. By the video’s end, it seems as if “Gravity” has become the soundtrack to a life as viewed from the passenger seats of strangers’ cars. Though Mr. Carpool charges a ten dollar fee for his services, it quickly becomes apparent that he’s just as valuable as a companion as he is an extra body to qualify the car for a space in the car pool lane. We see his drivers soliciting his advice, shaking his hand, or asking him to check their make up.

Like “Gravity” itself, this music video speaks to themes of isolation and togetherness, and easily how a business arrangement gives way to personal interaction. The highway, an apt metaphor for being alone together, opens up to Mr. Carpool in this five and a half minute representation of a work day.

When day of hitchhiking is done, Carpool waits by the side of the road until a dark blue Volkswagen swings by–it’s a woman, one of his customers from earlier that day. He gets in the car and the pair, smiling and familiar with each other–although we saw them meet each other for the first time earlier in the day–drive off, in the right-hand lane of the highway. As the various lines of “Gravity” resolve into harmony, its visual component ends with an uplifting sense of peace–a literal drive into the sunset.

Watch the video for “Gravity,” out via Rolling Stone, below:

TRACK REVIEW: “Give It Up”

I wouldn’t consider myself an especially devout David Lynch fan, but I love Twin Peaks rabidly and uncritically, and I watch the show in its entirety at least once every winter. Never when the weather’s warm. My theory is this: something to do with frigidness, and the overarching quiet that comes along with a thick blanket of snow, demands a Lynchian blend of detached dreaminess and surreality. So maybe the recent snowstorms and having Laura Palmer on the brain is to blame for the way I feel about this track–it’s otherworldly, it’s vaguely sinister, and it’s an utterly appropriate backdrop for the weather these days.

Duo HTRK claim an affinity with Lynch’s aesthetics; you can hear a kinship in the hypnotic chilliness of the melody, the scratched-out echoing synthesizers that ripple outwards as if a pebble’s been dropped into the beat of the song. Church-organ reverberations in minor mode plod menacingly up and down in the periphery, like mystery men in black trench coats and low-brimmed hats. The repetitive, androgynous vocals add to the sense of uncanny that characterizes this track.

HTRK stir some real polish into this mix, too–with glitzy production and a beat that suggests driving fast on open roads late at night, in a deserted city or through an empty stretch of highway. The sultry and foreign landscape that the song creates provides a space in which to detach from the outside world, whether in the dubious isolation of a dream space or nestled into the warmth and stillness inside a fast-moving car. The group’s new LP, Psychic 9-5 Club, will be out in 2014 and promises an expansive and rich musical landscape. For now, listen to “Give It Up” below:

MIXTAPE REVIEW: “NO.SLEEP Mix.01”

Coming on the heels of September’s My Friends Never Die EP and its subsequent remixes, Seattle duo ODESZA (Harrison Mills aka Catacombkid and Clayton Knight aka BeachesBeaches) have curated NO.SLEEP Mix.01, the first in what is to be a series of mix tapes. The group has a penchant for sun-drenched harmony and music that feels less like melodic-based music than it does a three-dimensional immersive environment, a surround-sound experience of lush bass hums and trilling melodies that shimmer like wind chimes over a beat. Those familiar with ODESZA’s work won’t be surprised to hear that NO SLEEP, released November 20th, delivers an array of songs featuring warm vocal harmonies and re-assuringly upbeat bass lines.

Tracks wind together and morph into each other. The group maintains a more or less even tempo throughout this album–danceable, but not frantic, with ample space given for each beat to expand to its full reverberation–and strike a balance between catchiness and intimacy. KAASI & TÂCHES’S onomatopoetic “Heartbeats” features broken vocals and a pulse of beat that you can feel almost physically (and would feel literally physically, if you were hearing the track performed live). Catchy, often R&B-based vocal hooks mark the movement from track to track, punctuating a low-key bottom line groove common to nearly every song. Voices are commonly left undoctored, their organic warmth accentuated by a surreal, heavily re-mixed backdrop. This is especially effective on Laura Mvula’s “She (Eagles For Hands Remix),” a quietly powerful number with heavy soul influences.

The tracks “Not Giving In” by Rudimental and “Two Dots” by Lusine, two songs so complementary that, after having heard the mix tape, it would be difficult to talk about them separately, stood out on this album. Two experiments in simplicity–individual expressions, but integral to one another. A single act of setting a melody in motion and watching it cause a chain reaction, making harmonies with itself and generating a momentum that carries one song into another.

The juxtaposition between raw and artificial–the evocation of a single motif, coming from two different angles and several different artists, comprised the theme of this mixtape. Aided by the collection’s pondering aesthetics, NO.SLEEP explores the tensions within the songs to their fullest extent.

Listen to ODESZA’S “My Friends Never Die (Little People Remix),” their contribution to the NO.SLEEP mix, via Soundcloud:

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TRACK REVIEW: “Smash”

The person named “Most Likely To Be A DJ” in the high school yearbook is most likely to be a DJ, right? Those superlatives do come true!! At least in the case of Landis, who was his high school’s resident DJ. The difference now is that he has bragging rights after getting support from the world famous Tiësto. A southern Florida native, Landis grew up admiring the EDM scene and wanting insinuate himself into it any way he could. He interned at the music studio of Brass Knuckles and came in contact with the likes of David Solano, DJ Crespo, and Robbie Rivera. He subsequently honed his craft and began to create remixes of songs from popular artists such as Adele, Swedish House Mafia, and Alesso. This garnered a considerable amount of attention and soon he was opening for Hardwell and performing the main stage at Electric Daisy Carnival in Orlando.

Landis recently collaborated with Corporate Slackrs on the climbing electronic hit, “Smash”, now out on Juicy Music. It starts off with a steady escalating beat and at 1:44, we are told by an interjecting voice to “lose yourself”. And we do. The track promptly smashes (song title alert!) into a million pieces and comes back together with a bass heavy synth that keeps you going after the beat drops. The woozy feelings of the in-between-sounds in a house track emerge way through. The “Mortal Kombat”-esque rhythm continues and comes down with about 30 seconds to spare. Just in time for you to regain consciousness and get back to reality. The trailing ending could make for a seriously mind-blowing loop of the song.

Landis’ collaboration with Corporate Slackrs is a match made in house heaven. Their styles flow so effortlessly and create a playground of rough bass and hard hitting electro beats. A star on the rise, Landis is sure to make some serious dents in the EDM world.

Check out Landis & Corporate Slackrs on their electronic hit “Smash”:

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Tag: electronic