Monthly Archives: September 2017

Electronic Sound 33

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Issue 33 of Electronic Sound is now available, complete with an extensive cover feature on Gary Numan and an interview with the inimitable Sparks. The special print edition with 7″ includes a two-part Meat Beat Manifesto remix of Gary Numan’s ‘My Name Is Ruin’.

I wrote two features for this issue. The first was an interview with Sanaya ‘Sandunes’ Ardeshir about her Different Trains 1947 live collaboration with Liverpool’s METAL, Jack Barnett from These New Puritans and Darren ‘Actress’ Cunningham; Different Trains 1947 takes Steve Reich’s 1988 composition Different Trains but changes its context from being about American and European train journeys during World War II to being about the thorny topic of Indian independence and partition from Pakistan. You can catch Different Trains 1947 at the Barbican in London on 1st October.

The second feature was an interview with Graham Sutton about his band Bark Psychosis and their landmark post-rock album Hex. I love features like this and the Different Trains piece above, mostly because they cover topic areas I knew very little about before picking up the phone to speak to both Ardeshir and Sutton. Bark Psychosis were a band I was aware of from reading The Wire in the 1990s but who had never quite made it from my Long List – of bands I’ve read about, know I must listen to, but never have – to the Short List. The objective of the Bark Psychosis feature was to lift the lid on a band and tell its story, which I humbly think we did rather well.

Elsewhere in issue 33, you’ll find my reviews of new albums from Mary Epworth, Mute alumnus Zola Jesus, a remix compilation on Sheffield’s wonderful CPU imprint, Khalil and a lovely new record from Jaws Of Love, the solo debut of Kelcey Ayer from Local Natives.

Electronic Sound can be ordered here.

(c) 2017 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence for Electronic Sound

Tricky feat. Alison Goldfrapp – Pumpkin (from Maxinquaye, 4th & Broadway album, 1995)

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Back in the day, Alison Goldfrapp could occasionally be found adding her vocals to all sorts of tracks, the most prominent of which tended to be by Orbital and where, for no discernible reason, she went under the name ‘Auntie’. One of my favourite pre-Goldfrapp Alison Goldfrapp collaborations is this track with Massive Attack alumnus Tricky. I can’t fathom a word she’s saying since it has that jazzy wordless style that Orbital liked to deploy as a textural component of their tracks, but which is here presented as a foreground to this sluggish trip-hop piece. Her strange, Shirley Bassey-esque vocal is the perfect foil to a delivery from Tricky that rasps with a stoner’s ramblings. In the background, the samples run from folksy ethereality (something Goldfrapp would investigate years later with Seventh Tree) and a scratchy grunge passage not dissimilar to Butch Vig’s mix of Depeche Mode’s ‘In Your Room’. It might not be patch on other tracks on Maxinquaye, but it all adds to the quiet confidence exuded by Tricky on his first solo record.

Elsewhere on the album, occasional Mute producer and Rhythm King stalwart Mark Saunders adds his production nous to most of the tracks here, including the seminal, much-quoted ‘Brand New You’re Retro’.

(c) 2017 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Alison Moyet – Other (Cooking Vinyl album, 2017)

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Other should be heard as a companion album to Alison Moyet’s The Minutes from 2013. Both carry with them a sense of freedom and experimentation thanks to the fluid working method Moyet has serendipitously developed with Björk and Madonna producer and classically-trained multi-instrumentalist Guy Sigsworth. Moyet herself believes these last two albums represent the best material of her career, and, in the case of ‘Other’ specifically, proves a contended reflection on what it’s like to be a middle-aged woman observing the world instead of being observed in the limelight of success.

Central to Other’s, er, otherness, is a deeply poetic approach to lyric writing and phrasing that means these songs are loaded with intrigue and complex, often impenetrable and highly personal ruminations. Moyet prefers not to explain the themes at play in her songs, and that somehow adds to the slightly curious way these songs appear to us as listeners.

However, we know that the languid, soulful trip-hop of ‘English U’ is a tribute both to her mother and the English language generally; that the stirring, towering ‘The Rarest Birds’ deals with diversity and the right to be whoever you want to be, and was a product of watching life go by in her adopted home of Brighton – the evocative line ‘navigate the city walks by gum-grey constellations’ coming after watching a woman walking along a gum-strewn pathway in the town. References to Brighton also pop up in the deeply affecting reflections etched into ‘April 10th’ and the opener ‘I Germinate’, itself a metaphor for new life, something which feels apt given the way that upping sticks to the south coast seems to have given Moyet something of a creative rebirth.

If Other showcases the many fibres and facets of Moyet’s voice – the raw, bluesy intonation, the complicated balladry, the West End-honed chanteuse – musically, we find Other delving carefully into electronics, atmospheric soundscapes and clever, almost glitchy beat structures which enrich these songs with varied textures and hues. For anyone desperate to know what a 2017 version of Yazoo might sound like, the skittering, dense, moody synthpop of ‘Reassuring’ or the angsty, stop-start disco euphoria of ‘Happy Giddy’ are about as close as one might ever get.

The talented Sigsworth, like, say, Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory, is adept at blurring the lines between the programmed and the organic, imbuing these songs with as many pianos, strings and guitars as he does carefully-wrought electronics. The vaguely dubsteppy ambience of ‘April 10th’ sets a spoken-word poem to an exciting tapestry of noises and non-rhythms, with cadences in Moyet’s delivery that would have made this a compelling addition to Rufus Wainwright’s recent collection of reimagined Shakespeare sonnets. The creeping, edgy ‘Alive’ that concludes the album nods to Sigsworth’s work with Massive Attack, setting Moyet’s aching vocal to a haunting, cinematic noir-ness that feels like it’s where her voice belonged all along.

With an album as deftly-executed as this, It would be all too tempting to see Other as Alison Moyet’s creative nadir; instead it has the feel of a new beginning, of an artist working furtively with a like-minded collaborator and approaching her unique talents – as a vocalist and as a songwriter – in utterly unexpected and enthralling ways.

This is the second of three pieces I wrote to coincide with the release of Other, but it is only now being published. The first was a full interview with Moyet that ran in the issue 30 of Electronic Sound. The third piece, which focuses on her influences, will be published in a later issue of Electronic Sound. The two feature articles were drawn from an interview with Alison a bar in Chelsea in May 2017.

(c) 2017 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Originally written for This Is Not Retro – previously unpublished

Vince Clarke’s Very Records announce Alka ‘The Colour Of Terrible Crystal’ album

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Very Records are delighted to announce details of their third album release, The Colour of Terrible Crystal by US artist Alka, which will be released on October 13th 2017.

“… and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. They move through the firmament which is the colour of a ‘terrible crystal’, and around a throne like sapphire, on which sits Metatron, suffused in the radiance of the rainbow.” – Peter Lamborn Wilson, Angels (1980)

The fact that the name of Philadelphia-based Bryan Michael’s third Alka album, his first since 2009’s A Dog Lost In The Woods, was named after a quote from anarchist philosopher Peter Lamborn Wilson’s vast study of angels says a lot about the diverse interests of its creator.

Bryan Michael is not an artist to be conveniently pigeonholed within electronic music, and The Colour Of Terrible Crystal showcases the many facets of its creator across 12 captivating tracks. “It happens with music in general, but specifically in electronic music – people get caught up in this strict need to identity something with a specific genre. That’s good in some ways, but I always prefer to hear a much larger cross-section of things,” he says.

Here you will find the same melodic sensibilities that coloured the two earlier Alka albums, but you’ll also hear the sound of a restless, mercurial musician unafraid of crashing together diffuse elements – faltering stop-start rhythms, glitches, drifting ambience, near-pop and crisp beats inflected with the boldness of early electro. The serene ‘Melancholy Lasts’ is the closest Alka’s music is likely to get to delivering pure vocal synth pop, while the paranoid textures of ‘Collusion’ feel like the nervous, fear-inducing synth horror score that never was. The unexpected upbeat disco-funk of ‘Truncate’ marries a robotic instinct with a human looseness that serves as a full revolution away from Bryan Michael’s IDM roots.

Amid all of that are two interlinked soundscape pieces, ‘Over Hills And Vales’ and ‘Under Waves And Seas’, taking the form of reverential nods to musique concrète and the early pioneers of electronic music, back when making machine music was much more of a science than an art. “I really wanted to get to the roots of what electronic music was doing back then, in the late Forties, early Fifties, into the Sixties,” says Bryan Michael. “It was more experimental. When Wendy Carlos released the Switched On Bach album, electronic music creators and aficionados at the time were pulling their hair out because the synthesizer, with this endless range of possibilities, was being confined to this classical music tradition. Those two tracks were a direct connection to that earlier electronic sound.”

The Colour Of Terrible Crystal is an exercise in electronic eclecticism; dark and moody, at times broodingly cinematic, at times carrying subtle layers of delicate optimism alongside edgier, experimental moments. Few can make albums where so many apparently incompatible stylistic switches appear so coherent, or make music whose clashing juxtapositions continually reveal themselves with successive listens. With The Colour Of Terrible Crystal, Alka just did it.

About Very Records

Very Records was founded in Brooklyn by Erasure’s Vince Clarke in 2016. We are a small record label dedicated to releasing very fine electronic music. The label was launched with 2 Square by Vince Clarke and Paul Hartnoll, which was then followed by Buchla & Singing by Reed & Caroline. Alka’s The Colour Of Terrible Crystal will be the third Very Records release.

Press release (c) 2017 Mat Smith for Very Records