The hype for Neneh Cherry’s upcoming solo album—her first in 18 years—has been building for quite some time now. As we near Blank Project’s release date (Feb. 25th in the U.S.!), we’re getting another preview of the album by way of its closing song, “Everything.” The over seven-minute-long track is the slightly more subdued sister to the previously heard title track of the album, “Blank Project,” with both songs sharing Cherry’s primal energy and minimalist, slightly menacing production by Kieran Hebden (better known as Four Tet).
“Everything”’s lyrics feature lines like “Got my fingers in my ears I can’t hear you / What I don’t hear, can’t upset me,” a visual that corresponds with Blank Project‘s cover photo. At other points it sounds like Cherry is sort of speak-singing off the cuff, with lines like “Shallow water midget mountain high/ Beep me up trust me I’ll hold you down.” The repeating refrain “Everything is everything, good things come to those who wait” is often wrung into different melodies or cadences by Cherry’s rhythmic, poetic singing.
Four Tet outfits the song with a deeply reverberating, viscous bassline that contrasts Cherry’s bright yet raspy vocals. If Cherry’s lyrics and vocals are the song’s soul, Four Tet’s production is its pulsating, almost mechanical heartbeat. As the song comes to its end, Cherry breaks out in a staccato yell that soon turns into passionate, visceral “yeah yeah”s and “hey hey”s, with some laughter thrown in for good measure. Her vocals are cut out for the last minute or so of the song, at which point it loses it’s ominous edge and becomes an understated, twinkling hum before fading away.
In the spirit of giving thanks and giving back, we’re featuring Four Tet’s mesmerizing “Gillie Amma, I Love You” as this week’s track of the week. The song comes from upcoming double album BOATS, part of the ambitious Everything Is New project benefitting Dalit (“untouchable”) children in southeast India.
The track samples the dulcet voices of the Light of Love Children’s Choir, comprised of only some of the 600 children who reside at the Light of Love Home and School in Andhra Pradesh, India. Four Tet unwaveringly focuses on the children’s voices, some softly speaking, others singing or humming, all of them expertly and delicately layered so as to create an atmospheric, almost elegiac quality. Very little is added instrumentally—a velvety synth quietly thrums along, building up only slightly near the end as the voices become echoes. The song closes with a few raspy, indistinguishable noises and whispers, like ghosts. It’s an overall amazingly subtle but powerful effect—melancholy, meditative, and time-stoppingly gorgeous.
“Gillie Amma, I Love You” is the fourteenth track on the 29-track-long BOATS, featuring new original music from No Age, Deerhoof, Dan Deacon, YACHT, Son Lux, Bear In Heaven, El Guincho, A Sunny Day In Glasgow, and a whole slew of other artists. The double-disc compilation will be the second of two albums released Jan. 20 (the first being Scottish band Marram’s album Sun Choir featuring collaborations with Owen Pallett, doseone, and Jarvis Cocker) via Scottish-based arts collective Transgressive North, which is working in partnership with charity organization Scottish Love In Action to raise funds for the Light of Love Children’s Home. Proceeds from the two releases, as part of the six-year long effort behind the Everything Is New Project, will go directly to providing food, clothing, education, and medical care to the Dalit children cared for at Light of Love. Every track included on BOATS features samples of the Light of Love Children’s Choir.
The project describes itself as an “attempt to counter any inherited preconceptions the children might have about their own value and legitimacy by giving them the opportunity to ‘star’ in music and film works specifically designed to celebrate and empower their identities and means of expression.” You can learn more about the Everything Is New Project, and the organizations behind it, at these websites:
Musical virtuoso Neneh Cherry recently announced that she’s returning with her first solo album in 16 years, Blank Project, due out Feb. 25 on Norwegian label Smalltown Supersound. The highly anticipated album is a collaboration with RocketNumberNine, produced by Four Tet and featuring an appearance by Robyn. For a taste of the upcoming release, Neneh has shared the title track, “Blank Project.”
The track sounds antsy and angry, with Neneh’s soulful voice saying “Too many times, you come crawling, say sorry too late.” Instrumentally, it’s pretty sparse—a lot of throbbing percussion and bass, along with a few little embellishments here and there in the form of bell chimes or a tambourine—so her lyrics really shine. They come off as a sort of spoken word poem, with lines like “I feel so small / I hate you I hate you, I love you I love you, I love it all.” The ten-track record is said to have been born out of a recent personal tragedy in Neneh’s life, and subsequently recorded and mixed over a short five-day period.
After a long career experimenting with elements of hip-hop, post-punk, and jazz (among other genres), this minimalist aesthetic presents a new side of Neneh. Listen to the new track below via Soundcloud:
DATALOG (moniker of Brooklyn-based digital artist Conor Heffernan), is garnering momentum and buzz on the NYC indie electronic circuit for his recent live performances, many of which have included stunningly curated videography that rivals any I’ve seen in quite some time. His body of work is immense, and reflects the inclinations of an artist coming into his own, though he has yet to release a full-length album. The genre that he deals in—namely live electronic music that incorporates visual or performance art—is an increasingly compelling medium for performers and audiences alike, and hence includes its fair share of mediocrity. In fact so much mediocrity that you could say its heyday is up. Or needs to die and be reborn I suppose. From what I’ve seen, DATALOG is at the forefront of that rebirth, and people should be taking notice.
His tracks embody an expansive classical and jazz pedigree, often layering self-composed, complex instrumentals and polyrhythmic beats into thoughtfully arranged digital sequences that are at once ominous, chaotic, soothing and purposefully glitchy; they call to mind early Notwistalbums (minus vocals) and expand on the style of Four Tet, Underworld and the like. His older work, including 2011 EP Threads as well as his impressively thorough collection of singles tends toward the more formulaic aspects of deep house, with heavy beats underpinning jazz and funk infused melodic motifs. His newer tracks however, showcase a growing confidence in his own capacities as an artist, and perhaps more importantly underscore Heffernan’s exploration into darker, more untapped genres of electronic music. There seems to be more negative space in his compositions, in which silence is equally as important as noise, and through which tension is cultivated—not by an accelerating BPM, but by the inclusion of ambient noise and languid, extensive, drawn out expository themes which are often based on two or three notes of music. When performed live with video the result is as much dark and gripping, as it is accessible and visually gratifying.
AudioFemme was lucky enough to get its hands on an exclusive from him. “Everything Is Essential”, a brand new track from Heffernan, seems to signpost a new era in his creative life. It displays in equal measure his prodigious rhythmic abilities and eye for detail as well as his desire to edit and restrain his compositions to create a more sculpted and deliberate sonic narrative. The first minute or so is quiet for the most part, and plays entirely on three notes of a major scale. Then come just enough hints of bass to keep one guessing whether it might just be a dance track. When the beat finally cuts through, it amps up and resolves this quandary simultaneously. Frantic, like the pulse of an animal in flight, it hovers over the melody for a few minutes until the composition as a whole begins to dissolve into artfully conceived progressive house/trance. By the time it wraps up, right where it started with only a three-note melody, one is left breathless: a rare feat even for those artists who inhabit the upper echelons of electronic music. DATALOG is clearly just getting started.
For some, 2011 was just a year where seemingly every other girl/gay man in Brooklyn decided to shave a random swath of hair down to the scalp. But for me, it was a collection of moments that have inspired me to whole-heartedly evaluate the way I experience music and actually make something out of my passion.
i know what you did last year.
a collection of tracks representing the highlights of a year’s worth of live events.
by tiny_owl on 8tracks.
click band names in the text for youtube videos of select performances!
My meditations on this began out of a repugnance for getting older. I had tickets to see Washed Out with openers Blood Orange and Grimes, but the night of the show, a Monday, everyone bowed out, citing the old “have to be up early for work” excuse. It dawned on me that while I was still serving tacos in a tiny Mexican restaurant, these people, my friends, had careers, and that these careers were so important that they could not waste hours of sleep to see a once-in-a-lifetime lineup play to a packed house, everyone with dancing shoes on. I wrangled a friend who, like myself, had few daytime responsibilities, or at the very least could handle being a bit sleepy the next day. We had a phenomenal time, but even so I was bummed. Was I somehow immature or unaccomplished because I enjoyed this sort of thing? On Thursday, aheart-to-heart with a friend who had bailed resulted in the followingconclusion: the two of us were at different places in our lives, andapparently I was not the adult.
The thing is, it didn’t really matterto me. If being an adult meant forgoing unexpected Bastille Dayfireworks over the Hudson after a free tUnE-yArDs performance so thatI could efficiently alphabetize files in a cubicle for a steadypaycheck, then I was content to sling salsa for at least a few moreyears. I wouldn’t trade losing my shit over those first hauntingstrains of Dirty Beaches’ “Lord Knows Best” billowing throughGlassland’s papery clouds to change a dirty diaper, because Alex Zhang Hungtai is the coolest dudewho ever lived, and that night he vowed to “croon the fuck out”which is exactly what happened.
I wouldn’t want to miss the chance tojump on the Music Hall of Williamsburg stage for Star Slinger’sclosing cut “Punch Drunk Love” or to witness Phil Elvurum on thealtar of the gorgeous St. Cecilia’s church, his soft voicereverberating angelically around the cathedral. Or to have folk heroMichael Gira kiss my hand after the Swans show, which was theloudest, sweatiest, and single most transcendent rock-n-rollexperience I’d ever had. Nor would I miss the incredible stageset-up as it virtually came alive to Animal Collective’s ProspectPark set, even as the heat and hallucinogens caused teenagers allaround me to pass out. Had I not decided on a whim just a day before the show, I would never have seen Dam-Funk shred akey-tar as we sailed around Manhattan on a ferry, the sun settingagainst the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty waving hertorch over the deck. I braved the pollution of the Gowanus Canal tosee a Four Tet DJ in a garden that managed to be verdant despite allthe toxins pulsing through the ground.
This was my fourth year at CMJ, and itstands as one of my favorite events because in that moment, you’reright with those fledgling acts, waiting to see a performance thatwill build their buzz or totally break them. This year, at a TrashTalk performance replete with band members flinging themselves frombalconies, a friend of mine well into her twenties found herself in acircle pit for the very first time. Later that week, I watched PatGrossi of Active Child strum a person-sized harp, its stringspractically glowing as they vibrated against his fingertips.
Fiercely loving music is one thing thatdoesn’t get boring for me. As I age, it doesn’t get old. Seeing aParty of Helicopters reunion performance at Death By Audio inFebruary proved that. I used to see them religiously when I lived inOhio. In my veins was the same blood that was present when I wastwenty, and every muscle, every cell, remembered what to do – Idamn near gave myself whiplash, working myself into a frenzy.
And despite spending hours researchingobscure bands for music supervision projects I freelance, I stilldiscover bands just by attending shows. While dancing my ass off atthe 100% Silk Showcase at Shea Stadium, I discovered a whole label’sworth of material harkening back to club jams of the nineties, andthe Amanda Brown vs. Bethany Cosentino debate was forever settledin my mind in favor of the LA Vampires frontwoman; Brown is avisionary while Cosentino is just cute.
In roughly fifteen years of attendingrock concerts, I’d say I had the best one yet. I’ve decided thatsince growing up is not worth the trade-off of giving up live music,or changing the way I experience the music that I love, that I willhave to marry the two. While this trajectory began years ago, thisis the first time I’ve felt any sort of mission behind the fandom. Iam the person people call and ask “are there any good shows goingon tonight?”, the person with extra tickets who drags friends alongto see bands they haven’t heard of, the person who brings a hugegroup of old friends together for a show, the person who barring allthat will go to a show alone and still have a blast. I am one of thethousands of people who log on to Ticketmaster at 9:55am forRadiohead tickets and still won’t get any. I’m the person at thefront of the crowd, snapping a few quick pictures for those whocouldn’t make it, and then dancing like a thing possessed for therest of the set. For me, it’s dedication. It’s all part of beingsomeone who was there.
Ticket Giveaways
Each week Audiofemme gives away a set of tickets to our featured shows in NYC! Scroll down to enter for the following shindigs.
