Issue 41 of Electronic Sound is out now, and if you’re quick you’ll probably still be able to get hold of the exclusive Underworld 7″ featuring two unreleased tracks that accompanies it. Underworld are the major feature in this month’s magazine, yielding yet another incredible sleeve, this time with the headache-inducing moiré patterns of a Bridget Riley painting.

Like many people back then, I got into Underworld upon the release of their 1994 album Dubnobasswithmyheadman, which did that rare thing of managing to cross-over between the worlds of dance music and rock – so much so that fhe NME, at that time so focussed on guitar music that nothing else got a look in, put Underworld on the front cover of an issue around the time Dubno… was released. I went straight down to Music Junction in Stratford-upon-Avon to bag myself a copy and it was played constantly thereafter.

For this issue my main contribution was an interview with Robert Görl, formerly of Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft and whose first solo album was released through Mute (with contributions from Annie Lennox no less). The feature centred on Görl’s Record Store Day album The Paris Tapes, and recounts the story of how those tapes came to be created, taking in everything from threatened deportation out of New York, conscription, moonlight flits to Paris, car crashes and Buddhism. Erasure‘s Vince Clarke remixed ‘Part 1’ from The Paris Tapes, and his mix almost included sections of my recorded conversation with Görl, but that’s another story.

Elsewhere in this issue, I wrote reviews of Kaada’s moving rumination on farewells, Closing Statements, and a new release from Chicago’s The Sea And Cake called Any Day which isn’t really electronic at all, but which features so many guitar effects that it might as well be. I also reviewed a new interpretation of John Luther Adams’s Canticles Of The Sky by Oliver Coates and a very fine leftfield R&B album by Friends Of Friends’ Sweatson Klank which I wrote in the departure lounge at New York’s JFK. I was also introduced to the wonderful, eclectic music of the peripatetic, prolific Sad Man, who turned out to have grown up near where I now live, and who now lives near where I grew up.

Finally, I wrote a short introduction to the music of Ariwo, a Cuban-influenced group whose music crosses that fickle boundary between jazz and electronics and is among the most mind-expanding things you’ll hear today.

It’s rare that you get the opportunity to cover rock, classical, jazz and synth music for one publication, but such is the broadminded approach that Electronic Sound bring to the electronic music table. Issue 41 can be ordered here.

Spotify links:

Robert Görl ‘Part 1 (Vince Clarke Remix)’
The Sea And Cake ‘Any Day’
Sad Man ‘Slow Bird’
Ariwo ‘Ariwo’

(c) 2018 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence for Electronic Sound