This is future music. To London is an EP that perfectly captures the pleasures, the possibilities and the paradoxes inherent in being an electronic music producer today. Its warm, analog tones, its nervous 2-step shuffle, its heavy bass and deep shades of house and R&B all melt into one another, flowing, fusing, snapping, clicking and cutting in a perfect and succinct example of "forward-thinking" production.
New album by the Field due on May 25th via Kompakt. Expect "organic sounds" and Battles drummer John Stanier. No tracklist or cover art yet, but I can't even tell you how excited I am.
There's a whole lot of buzz building around Karin Dreijer Andersson's upcoming side project, Fever Ray. The self-titled album, released digitally in January and physically in March, is an altogether slower, moodier and more personal affair than her work with brother Olaf Dreijer as the Knife, but it won't disappoint. Staying true to both halves of the Fever Ray pseudonym, Andersson takes us through her fragmented inner world-- both haunting and illuminating-- that stands as a powerful personal testament and an evocative companion to Silent Shout.
As always, the videos for her work are top notch, playing with illusion, masks and dreams-- all adding a sense of mystery and spectacle to the music. There's a great Pitchfork interview with KDA from back in July 2006, where she speaks about the "theatrical" nature of the Knife's performances:
"It's a natural way of presenting what you do when you make music. It's fiction. A more unnatural way would be to stand there with your own face and with your private life-- that's not healthy or good for the music. It takes focus away from what's important."
Fever Ray - "If I Had a Heart" (directed by Andreas Nilsson)
Shed's Shedding the Past was released late last year to well-deserved critical acclaim-- it was a gorgeous hybrid of restless dubstep beats and warm, enveloping synths, of brutal four-four minimal techno and echoing, dubbed out atmosphere. In a word, it was the best record of last year. So what does Shed have to do with EQD? He's been pinned as the man behind the second in this series of "anonymous" singles, and it's hard to see anyone else but him in the music, both in sound and in quality. The A-side is solid but little more than a warm up for the magnificent B-side: a cold, celestial synth backs the buoyant blips and beeps that drive this track forward, which seem to move in and out of focus while building up to the tremendous, organic beat that makes this track so exceptional. A must-own!
Sometimes sifting through the heaps of bloghouse remixes that get unceremoniously vomited into the internet on a daily basis can reap some sweet rewards. In this track, La Roux's original-- a good song with an arrangement I don't really dig-- gets an epic reworking by the indefatigable Skream. He waits a cool two minutes before dropping the beat, highlighting La Roux's rich vocal track with a low, moody bassline and letting atmosphere and tension build in an electrifying way; when the breakbeats of the coda hit, it's like a sign from God.
Whenever I start to feel like my nerdy infatuation with post-punk is dying down, I come across some tracks that remind me just how much influence the period of roughly '77-'83 has had on pop music, and it gets me all worked up again. The first track tonight is by Neue Deutsche Welle (New German Wave) pioneers Liaisons Dangereuses. Their only album was scrapped together from a couple of cassettes recorded by bandmembers Beate Bartel (of Einstürzende Neubauten), Chrislo Haas (of D.A.F.) and singer Krishna Goineau in 1981. The whole album is fascinating, like a kind of This Heat meets Talking Heads meets Chicago house and Detroit techno hybrid. It's danceable(many DJs have indeed cited "Los Ninos del parque" as a huge influence), experimental and ominous but also highly idiosyncratic-- its goofy lyrics in French and Spanish are bizarre, to say the least. Here's one of the albums many slappers, "Los Ninos del parque."
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Next up is "I'm In Love With a German Film Star" by British one hit wonders The Passions. I'm sure this song will be getting all kinds of hype again when British artists Sam Taylor-Wood releases her cover of it on Kompakt later this month, but for now enjoy the ethereal original. Listening to it makes me feel like I'm in some kind of heroined-out dream encounter with a singer in a David Lynch movie. Wooh.
Buy Liasions Dangereuses' self-titled album at Amazon. Buy The Passions' 30000 Feet Over China at Amazon.
