d_rradio release their fifth album Parts on 2nd August

d_rradio release their fifth album Parts on 2nd August, if you count Underscore released in 2004 as their debut album and not an extended EP, and not Making Spaces, a collaboration with Lianne Hall released earlier this year on Sentence Records.

With every release,  d_rradio have moved their music goalposts.  It’s not as straightforward as saying, like other artists their music has progressed, that’s simply not true.  It’s as if they are continually evolving or reinventing themselves.

If you are familiar with their beautiful, spacious forms of ambient electronica then you will possibly expect the forthcoming album, Parts, to continue in this vain though like myself, be uncertain what path that change may take.  The only common thread I hear throughout all d_rradio studio albums, Underscore, d_rradio, Leaves and Parts is that they are all exceptional, light, minimal and contain some of the most beautiful music I have ever heard.

Parts sees d_rradio move even further away from song structures and err towards orchestral, classical music. Here are 19 tracks, some short interludes, some akin to beautiful yet dark film scores.  But always with an attention to detail so fine that d_rradio are in a league of their own.

The crackle and hum accompanying the tracks evokes an old dusted down, well-played 78 found in the attic and reminds me to file this under electronic not classical in my record collection. Though the intro to the title track Parts is reminiscent of my favourite piece of music Bailero from Canteloube’s  opera Songs Of The Auvergne.

Parts goes so much further into ambient solace than Dif Juz, Brian Eno and Susumu Yokota that when I finished listening for the first time I simply sat in silence not wishing to spoil the sense of calm and beauty that had washed over me.

d_rradio began releasing recordings in 2003. Their odd name (pronounced D. R. Radio) stands for deathrowradio – the intention of their music is to bring comfort and light to the most dark and difficult hours, and to make you feel alive.

You can listen to Parts by d_rradio by visiting www.distractionrecords.com

Parts by d_rradio is released on 2nd August on Distraction Records.

Black Moth Super Rainbow lynchpin Tobacco, returns with Maniac Meat, follow-up LP to his 2006 debut Fucked Up Friends.

Tobacco, Maniac Meat

Rumour has it that as a teenager Tom Fec had no interest in any music; nothing synched with the young man’s strange cranial waves. But then he heard The Beastie Boys and everything changed. Morphing into Tobacco, Fec started to play with old school analogue synthesisers, drum machines, effects pedals and a vocoder.

After featuring in a number of weird and wonderfully named bands, Fec found what appeared to be a permanent home with Black Moth Super Rainbow. The band’s psychedelic electronica has been honed over seven years and peaked in 2009 with sell-out SXSW shows and a fourth studio album, Eating Us, produced by David Freidman. And then Fec decided that it was time to be just Tobacco again.

“Mostly everything I’ve done with Black Moth Super Rainbow is made to be pop. And a lot of people say Black Moth Super Rainbow is bordering on hip-hop beats. So with Tobacco, I wanted to embrace my beats and get darker and sleeker with it all. I want to make you feel paranoid in a good way.”

Compared to the polished and, at times, tranquil pastures of Eating Us, Maniac Meat is a psychotic, bewildering beast, boasting two cameos from Beck and a mutant-eyed wink in the direction of Aphex Twin.

Opening track Constellation Dirtbike Head rushes in on a pounding backbeat with vocodered vocals riding helium high, pillion posturing with words of wisdom: “Don’t let the fairies clone you”. Tobacco revs six throttle lyrics in and out of gear and the track speeds and skids around a screaming synth line. As the distorted groove fizzes and fuzzes to a climax he throws down the challenge “burn all your things”. In the flame-flowered aftermath of this opening onslaught no doubt.

Beck makes his first appearance on second track Fresh Hex, the crazed, angry doppelganger of The Beta Band’s The Three E.P.’s. And Orpheus has dragged this blistered spirit to Hades, along with the opening refrain from DJ Shadow’s High Noon, letting them swelter and warp before returning back top for Beck to wax unlyrical with unfathomable intent; words shunted together, scraped and bleeding.

Throughout Maniac Meat Tobacco slips from beatbox to live drums, introducing swamped analogue synth stabs before switching to melodic pulses and electronic, harmonic waves. The results are often alarming but strangely addictive. Keep the headphones on long enough and you’ll find yourself trapped in an eight-bit psycho killer Atari game, where claustrophobic, hallucinatory voices compete with unholy, demonic rhythms.

From Aphex Twin to Air and even Jean Michel Jarre, there are plenty of sonic sign posts on Maniac Meat. But this is no cut and paste rip-off. Tobacco has his own intoxicating sound. The fuzz and static is surprisingly warm and despite the guttural exhalations, from both artist and machines, there are melodies lurking under the surface of most tracks.

Tobacco is more than happy to let his music do the talking….and when you possess a voice tinged with gravel-dust from the outer reaches of the universe, why not. But it makes finding out about future tours incredibly difficult. An extensive European outing is promised, so to find out when, I’d suggest keeping in touch with his Anticon page. In the meantime…enjoy the meat on youtube…

Four Tet @ Village Underground photo: Daniel Hutchinson

Kieran Hebden aka Four Tet played a live set at the excellent Village Underground venue in East London on Sunday 30th May 2010 ably supported by a DJ set from Joe from Hot Chip and the emerging and talented Roska.

The club is an old brick walled Victorian basement with a high ceiling and full of sweating bodies ready to enjoy the undisputed English king of electronica.

As I’m waiting for the main event I look around at those gathered.  Some forty-somethings but mainly twenty-somethings made up of student types not yet able to grow goatee beards to scratch.  Standing next to me is a tall geeky looking white guy with a white man’s unkempt afro sporting a plain white long sleeved t-shirt, jeans and a rucksack; a typical look for a Four Tet gig.

Understated like his music, it was Kieran Hebden.  He asked the guy next to us if he was ready, removed his rucksack and walked through the crowdto a purpose-built plinth in the middle of the dance floor & immediately took centre-stage as he launched into his set with the heavenly Angel Echoes from his latest wonderful album, There Is Love In You.

Unlike the last time I saw Four Tet play, the audience were pretty motionless. Those in touching distance stared up as if in total awe of this genius as he twiddled nobs and flicked switches on two laptops and a mixer.

The set built evenly and included the tracks Love Cry and Circling from There Is Love In You; and by the time he finished his set with the perfect Sing everyone has loosened up and smiles and shapes were being thrown by everyone.  A net of coloured balloons fell from high over Kieran Hebden and for a time Four Tet led a merry dance like the Pied Piper of underground dance music.

With nowhere to go Hebden appeared a little awkward as he stepped off the makeshift stage soaking up the rapturous applause before stepping back in true rock n roll style for an encore he delivered an experiment in how fast could he play Spirit Fingers from the Rounds album and not lose the audience.  I personally dipped out at about 180bpm though others without facial hair appeared more in tune with the experiment which peaked somewhere near a Napalm Death onslaught.

Four Tet’s music amalgamates so many strands that you’re never quite sure what is going to happen.  But on this occasion it was the right choice for the set to be more upbeat than atmospheric and moody.

The crossover from mixing a track from behind a desk in darkness and a live spot-lit ‘performance’ where you feel compelled to stare at the artist is a strange one; and something that can be a complete damp squid – boring to watch but great to listen to (see The Chemical Brothers).  But Four Tet pulls it off.  To be honest, the set had several peaks and a few troughs for me personally, but the experience, the venue and the sound was spot on.

The gig followed the death of Steve Reid, Hebden’s close friend and collaborator who died in April after a long battle with cancer.

Washed Out - Life of Leisure

Washed Out is Ernest Weatherly Greene, a 26-year old from Georgia. His debut EP, Life of Leisure, is a pop-bleached, synthesised journey into the ambient outreaches of his mind.

Crafted in Greene’s bedroom, the EP’s six tracks are wrapped in a woozy, woolly mix, where simple, soaring melodies, low-slung frequencies and sunset synthesisers bleed into one reverb-drenched wash of the wave.

Life of Leisure opens with Get Up, which swaggers with a hazy dance floor funk, before gliding into the ethereal thermals of New Theory, a track that blends the psychedelic strains of MGMT with the otherworldly whispers of Angelo Badalamenti.

Based on a sample from Gary Low’s 1983 single I Want You, Feel It All Around perches on the cusp of eighties cheese; the synth vocal, popping baseline and Caribbean percussion interludes all move close, dangerously close depending on your tastes, to Phyllis Nelson.

However, the only bodies touching in Greene’s work are those of a celestial nature. The track is powered by so much reverb that it leaps from Nelson’s grasp on a never-ending, upward trajectory, where it floats free in time and space among the star-burst echoes of Chapterhouse and Slowdive.

Washed Out play six UK dates around the bank holiday weekend and the proposition of seeing Greene live is a fascinating one. If outputs are channelled through the motherboard of all reverb units then expect to take an untethered helium-balloon ride to the other side of consciousness. 

These are Greene’s first European dates, coming on the back of critically acclaimed performances at this year’s SXSW Festival.
Thu 27th May - LEEDS Nation of Shopkeepers
Fri 28th May - GLASGOW Stereo
Sat 29th May - BRISTOL Dot to Dot Festival
Sun 30th May - NOTTINGHAM Dot to Dot Festival
Mon 31st May - MANCHESTER Dot to Dot Festival
Tue 1st June - LONDON Cargo
Wed 2rd June - BRIGHTON Freebutt
Thu 3th June - AMSTERDAM Trouw
Fri 4th June - HAMBURG Indra
Sat 5th June - GENT Charlatan
Sun 6th June - PARIS Villette Sonique

 Visit Washed Out’s Myspace site.

Listen to Get Up, by Washed Out.

Gold Panda: You 7"

What makes Gold Panda stand out from other artists creating digital music from found sounds, manipulated samples and blips? Musically I’m not sure – it has a rawer texture, perhaps, it is rhythmically slightly more pressed, maybe. Emotionally though, the Chelmsford producer’s music is something of a revelation, taking the introspection of Burial and Four Tet and mixing it with the collective ecstasy of The Go! Team or M.I.A..

At times his music are the words you only ever wrote for yourself, at others it is the love you irrevocably spilled in nightclubs, in parks, in bedrooms. At times his music is the pulse of late night suburban pavements swathed in an orange glow of street lights, at others it is a rainforest.

Gold Panda featured in the BBC’s list of nominees for the Sound of 2010 award, something he should feel honoured to have missed out on if we are to judge by Ellie Goulding’s strangely vacuous music and success. He followed this success with the brilliant Quitter’s Raga 7” and Before. His music has been influenced by, variously, living in Japan, B movies on VHS and minimal techno.

His single ‘You’ on his own NOTOWN label is to be released on 7” vinyl with the B-side ‘Before We Talked’ on 10th May and the digital version will see his contemporaries create those annoyingly ubiquitous and unexceptionally uninteresting remixes that fill up the EPs on iTunes Store.

Appropriately, Gold Panda will support Caribou across Europe as well as performing at various festivals.

UK Live Dates:

May

15th Brighton, Great Escape
21st Liverpool – Sound City
22nd Glasgow – Stag & Dagger

July
30th Dorset – Camp Bestival
31st London – Field Day

Follow me on Twitter

Gold Panda’s MySpace

Making Spaces by d_rradio & Lianne Hall

Making Spaces by d_rradio & Lianne Hall on Sentence Records

The latest d_rradio (pronounced ‘d r radio’ & short for death row radio!) album sees Newcastle’s finest collaborate with Brighton’s singer/songwriter Lianne Hall.  The result is a beautiful, wonderfully charming album full of electronic acoustic soundscapes perfectly accompanied by Lianne Hall’s beautifully soothing, velvet voice.

I hear whispers of Portishead (most clearly in the title track, Making Spaces), and echoes of The Cranberries & a hint of The Sundays (in Lianne Hall’s voice) along the way.  Her innocent and naked voice is a perfect accompaniment to d_rradio’s drifting calm.

Making Spaces errs towards double-bass jazz funk with tracks like Stormy Weather; and a vocal  that had me humming Donna Summer’s I Feel Love (never a bad thing!)

This collaboration is the first release following a chance meeting at Amsterdam’s famous Paradisco Club, and hopefully is the first of many.

Over 30 minutes and across the nine tracks there is experimental pop sensibilities, fused with ambience, electronica, stripped down folk and shuffling jazz funk rhythms; all brought together under one astonishing album full of evocative strings and uplifting choruses.

As well as tracks offering more jazz and folk paths Making Spaces also includes d_rradio’s now trademark ambient electronica freshness with its relaxing orchestral waves and calming drones. The addition of Lianne Hall brings a human touch and focal point to the otherwise perfect experimental electronic music of d_rradio.

John Peel once described Lianne Hall as “one of the great English voices.”  How right he was.

Making spaces is the first release on d_rradio’s own Sentence Records label.  It is a beautiful album and will undoubtedly be in every “Best Albums of the Year 2010” list, come December.

Making Spaces by d_rradio & Lianne Hall Track list:

1.    The Moral At The End
2.    Under Water
3.    Stormy Weather
4.    Full On
5.    Berlin winter
6.    Dressing Up
7.    Up
8.    Making spaces
9.    Spring

For more information and to listen to tracks from Making Spaces visit myspace.com/sentencerecords

Holiday for Strings

Take three former professional chefs, add a dash of John, from Peter, Bjorn and John, season with Pony from Thieves Like Us and what have you got? Holiday for Strings…and on the first few listens to their second long player, Favorite Flavor, it’s a dish best served under hazy moonbeams, where the horizon splits the mind and every shooting star is a potential starter for ten.

Opening track Favorite Flavor, rises like a Software Slumped soufflé; concave and hinting at complex ingredients. The chord changes have the aroma of a Grandaddy epic but the dub-heavy arrangement and dissonant tones are more like Kid A on a lysergic, midnight run from the maitre de.

As the album unfolds it becomes clear that the ingredients are actually rather simple and the album’s two cover versions are a clear indication of the band’s underlying influences. Seconds up is a take on Calling Out of Context, by American composer and disco artist Arthur Russell.

And Favorite Flavor closes with an arrangement of I Cry/Night After Night, by The Egyptian Lover, a leading figure in the LA dance and rap scene almost thirty years ago. Synthesised disco beats and wisps of dancefloor electronica are never far from the surface. However, it’s how Holiday for Strings use these textures as a base that makes Favorite Flavor a beguiling and often enchanting proposition.

Like New Order, who famously spent many months in the early 80s getting high on the scent of New York’s club scene, Holiday for Strings have the ability to synthesise floor-filling, hedonistic tastes with the subtle nuances of a psychedelic, post-punk dish.

The low-slung riffing on Two of You is rises like a phoenix from the ashes of Joy Division, while Particles is the disco-beat extension to Pink Floyd’s Breathe, which builds into a measured, arpeggiated cacophony.

Depending on your usual a la carte choices, Favorite Flavor is not an instantly accessible album. The space cadet reverb that chimes throughout and sparse arrangements may leave the palate dry. But it’s well worth persevering with, as one-by-one the sonic taste receptors are switched on and a mouth-watering space odyssey ensues.

Holiday for Strings have a few European dates lined up in May, find out more…

Visit Holiday for Strings’ website

Watch Holiday for Strings perform Two of You live

Jason Urick - Fussing & Fighting 12" EP

Jason Urick – Fussing And Fighting 12″ EP is a limited edition vinyl release from Thrill Jockey.

Limited to 500 copies, Fussing And Fighting EP is presented with a 10″ x 6″ high-gloss photo print hand-pasted to the EP jacket.  There are 250 white jackets and 250 black jackets.

The title track is a perfect adventure in trance minimal dub electronica. Watch the promo video for Fussing And Fighting.

Unlike Husbands’ gentle washes of ambience, the songs on Fussing & Fighting are Jason Urick’s first in a very long time to incorporate any sort of rhythmic element.

With this release Urick appears to have made a conscious effort to slowly steer away from the experiments with density that were utilised on the album Husbands, opening up his music sonically and allowing things to breathe.

As with Husbands, all three of the original tracks were recorded by Urick himself at the famous Floristree Space in Baltimore.  The fourth and final piece on Fussing & Fighting is Matthew Papich of Ecstatic Sunshine’s reworking of the title track, recorded with engineer Craig Bowen.

Jason Urick is highly regarded in the Baltimore music and arts scene, through his work in WZT Hearts at the Floristree Space where he has curated many shows and festivals. Fussing and Fighting follows his solo album debut Husbands, and finds Urick pushing his music farther forward with new experiments in rhythm and sonic space.

“Husbands is a very compelling and enjoyable listen…it’s near faultless…these four tracks are certainly worth 43 minutes of anyone’s time” (8/10) – Drowned In Sound

The original tracks on the Fussing And Fighting 12″ EP were spawned during the period just after Urick completed his work on Husbands. After not listening to little else as he finished that album, Urick dove deep into some old faves, including Pita’s Get Out and also became obsessed with videos of London reggae linchpin Jah Shaka.

The three compositions included on this 12″ are experiments in trying to combine these influences into Urick’s working methods established for Husbands – manipulating sounds and samples on his laptop, mostly recorded using its built in microphone.

Jason Urick – Fussing And Fighting 12″ is released on 19th April on Thrill Jockey.

West Coast album artwork, by Junk Culture

West Coast by Junk Culture will be released on 22 March on Illegal Art

Illegal Art is a backstreet home for Okapi, Tank Girl, Steinski and The Bran Flakes, creators of spray-painted soundscapes and gritty, sampled pleasures. A perfect fit then for Junk Culture, the label’s newest inhabitant.

Deepak Mantena has spent almost a decade operating under the Junk Culture banner, capturing sonic snapshots on a budget, hand-held recorder and melding them into synapse-searing collages. On his debut ep, West Coast, Mantena mixes old-skool hip-hop beats, found sounds from the streets of America or TV commercials and snatches of songs by artists including Animal Collective, Aphex Twin and Patti LaBelle.

The result is a compact lysergic lullaby, flitting between fast-paced flashbacks and brief passages of respite. Mantena says he is more interested in evoking certain moods or feelings than perfecting fidelity and on opening track, West Coast, you can hear why.

Beats brake and accelerate under a late-night, neon glow as the pre-dawn fallout from underground clubs stumble with a swagger. Unfathomable signposts flash by, all pointing to the inevitable comedown on a beguiling road to nowhere. And the AM station tunes in and out to the spectral sounds of Jazzmatazz and DJ Shadow.

Containing nine tracks and clocking in at 17 minutes, the West Coast ride is all too brief. But it’s a journey well worth taking. The album’s longer compositions give you just enough time to take in the brain-waved vistas while the off-road short cuts in between offer freeze-frame glimpses; lasting for just 28 seconds, the squelching sidewalk strut of Watson’s Glassy Stare shakes a leg in the direction of the fractured pastures frequented by ambient-techno artist The Field.

The thought of a night with Junk Culture in a small, sweaty, projection-lit club is a tantalising one, with staccato beats breaking in front of strobe-lit faces. However, in living room isolation, chose your moment carefully; this west coast trip is best experienced with the promise of a DIY, dusk-slung adventure on the horizon.

Junk Culture has just finished a US tour. No further live dates published at the moment.

Fore more information visit www.myspace.com/nojunkculture

High Places new single is called 'I Was Born'

After the hype that surrounded the initial appearance of some of High Places individual songs on the web, their 2008 compilation and release was somewhat mutely received. The fact that most of the songs were already in circulation  meant that their effective re-release was unlikely to create seismologically significant aftershocks among  those already raving about the band. Equally, their first, self-titled full length of new material from the end of the same year appeared, due to the official release of this old material, somewhat watered down.

After some time off and a move from Brooklyn to L.A., High Places are back and look ready to repeat the unorthodox releasing programme that probably thwarted their rise to prominence among the offbeat indie greats, planning to release this single I Was Born and one further before compiling them on a 12” and then releasing an album in spring 2010. Yet despite their apparent commercial incapability, High Places show once again on I Was Born that they belong among the most inventive, interesting, and listenable bands of today.

This second phase in the High Places’ history also marks a change in their sound. Gone are the Animal Collective backings, the hints at Asian influences, the tropical chimes and beats; now High Places sound distinctly colder. The opening bassoon line, played by one half of the group, Mary Pearson, and the icy entrance of a pulsing electric bass beat makes this High Places single sound more like minimalist Madonna; like The Knife or, more recently, The XX than the warped West Coast band of earlier recordings.

It’s absolutely brilliant – a perfect shift in sound that retains the basis of that home-made, spacey sound that High Places are known for, whilst sounding like an entirely different band. It remains to be seen if High Places fade once more into the background after their spring releases, but who cares if they do. They can be our little secret.

Here is the video

High Places’ MySpace