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sophie p.8 animal collective p.10 balam acab p.12 holy other p.14 expo 70 p.16 clams casino p.18 onehotrix point never p.22 MELODY’S ECHO CHAMBER p.26 com truise p.28 HOLLY HERNDON p.36 BJORK p.38 panda bear p.40 fatima al quadiri p.44 tame impala p.57visual sinewaves// p.6
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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It’s not every day that you hear music that sounds totally and wholly new—that is, music that you’ve never heard anyone make quite like this before. And in the oftentimes retro-fixated arena of modern dance music, true uniqueness can be an even rarer find. And while the enigmatic London-based producer Sophie’s aggressively bright style carries elements of other producers’ hallmarks—the jagged melodic textures of Glasgow’s Rustie and Hudson Mohawke, the airtight syncopation found in James Blake’s early work, the lollipop synths of French Touch acts like Fred Falke and Alan Braxe—his work thus far transcends mere pastiche. It’s fascinatingly strange stuff, and it’s fun as hell to listen to, too. The producer is currently taking the anonymous route, but it’s seemingly not out of fear or shyness; rather than offering shadowy, face-obscuring press photos, Sophie—who is assumed to be male—takes the visual opportunity to bolster his colorful tracks with fizzing shots like the one above. “The music is not about where someone grew up, or what they look like against a wall,” the producer writes in an email (he declined to speak on the phone for this piece). “Therefore, you should try to use every opportunity available to say what you’re trying to say, instead of saying, ‘Here’s my music and this is what I look like.’ Nobody cares.”
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Based on his typed-out answers, what he’s “trying to say” involves knowingly sly jokes, which, true to form, do work well with his funhouse sonics. When asked about his influences, for example, Sophie claims to draw from “shopping, mainly—things prohibited in hand luggage,” and when I ask if there’s any significance behind choosing the name Sophie as a moniker, the response is even more oblique: “It tastes good and it’s like moisturizer.” Nevertheless, bass producer Skream hinted that Sophie’s first name is Sam and that he hails from Scotland during a BBC 1 interview with the mysterious artist last month—not that you could tell from the brief, strange phone call that aired, in which Sophie spoke in a high-pitched, processed-sounding voice that resembled a mewling cat or a sick child. (When Skream asked what was wrong with his voice, Sophie’s answer appropriately took the piss: “I have a bit of a cold.”) In that same interview, Sophie said that he’s “not really into remixes”—a statement that carries a hint of irony, since the first sliver of buzz he caught was off of a typically abstract remix of house producer Auntie Flo’s “Highlife” that made the rounds last year. This past February, London-based label Huntleys & Palmers released Sophie’s debut single, “Nothing More to Say” b/w “Eeehhh”; the A-side is a pulsing, shape-shifting house cut with ululating vocals and a staccato bassline, while the hard-to-pronounce B-side was a more straightforward floor-filling electro jam.
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By Alex Petridis There are two opposing schools of thought regarding Animal Collective. One holds that the Baltimore quartet are adventurous sonic pioneers, whose restlessly exploratory oeuvre has succeeded in carving out an entirely new, 21st-century take on pastoral psychedelia, deserving of solemn appreciation and the most purple of praise: “[They mean] to create a dream land where music can sound equally gorgeous and transcendent if the anemone doesn’t sting you. Thus, the manatee stings sharply anyone who
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expects his danse to sound accessible or in any way like reality,” as one reviewer said of their 2010 album Danse Manatee. The other views Animal Collective as tiresomely smug, pretentious hippies, whose music has less in common with the fearless psychedelia of the 60s than the self-indulgent noodling of latter-day jam bands: they’re the Pitchfork Phish, and something ineffable about their music suggests its authors are the kind of people who insist on telling you about that time they went camping and took mushrooms every time you meet them.
You don’t need to be a fanatical student of rock history to know that this is very much the kind of thing that, 40 years ago, provoked otherwise reasonable people to stick safety pins through their noses and gob at each other. We really do appear to be inches away from Yes recording an album based on the shastric teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda in a studio filled with hay bales and a model of a cow. Punk’s great argument against progressive rock was that prog represented a triumph of virtuosity over feeling, which is certainly a criticism that could be levelled at parts of Painting With. It’s an album big on a vocal technique in which Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox and Dave “Avey Tare” Portner duet by singing not alternating words, but alternating syllables of each word, a disorientating effect presumably intended to approximate having your brains tossed like salad by hallucinogens. It crops up over and over again, on Hocus Pocus, Summing the Wretch, Lying in the Grass and the closing Recycling, and is obviously a feat involving either considerable agility or technical skill. But after a while, the sound of it becomes almost supernaturally annoying, like a bore who won’t stop doing his party trick. You can be impressed by the dextrous way the rhythm of The Burglars rolls and shifts in constant, skittering motion, but the result sounds absolutely horrible. Worse, it isn’t horrible in a deliberately confrontational or creepy or cathartic way. It sounds self-consciously zany, a state of affairs compounded by the fact that – in search of a succinctness lacking in Animal Collective’s more expansive albums – almost everything on Painting With zips along at breakneck pace: they’ve compared it to the work of the Ramones. Natural Selection has a lovely melody, but it’s lashed to the kind of fast, funkless, four-to-the-floor thud you hear in awful Mitteleuropean oompah pop-techno. It’s hard to listen to the opening FloriDada – with its punning title and its brilliant, inventive hookline (a gleeful
Beach Boysish vocal backed by an unlikely surge of gothic, Dracula-at-the-keyboard organ) buried amid a landslide of 80s computer game noises, chattering vocals and samples of the laugh from the Surfaris’ Wipe Out – without imagining its authors seated in the studio control room, dinosaurs on the walls, listening back and making conspiratorial “we’re nutty” faces at each other. But, for all that, you can’t just dismiss Painting With. Amid the stuff that seems to be going out of its way to drive you up the wall, there are moments when the album works to pretty dazzling effect. Vertical achieves the album’s aim of making concise, direct music without sacrificing any of Animal Collective’s originality: the vocals wrap around each other in a way that doesn’t make you want to reach into the speakers and bang their heads together, the tune lurches forward in a way that’s both unexpected and weirdly satisfying. Golden Gal is a song in which Animal Collective empathise with women who feel objectified, but is nothing like as ghastly as that sounds: it dials the tempo and sonic clutter back to reveal a really beautiful melody, and it feels sincere rather than smirky. Bagels in Kiev opens with precisely the kind of droning ambience that was supposed to be verboten on Painting With, then unfurls into a song on which the busy musical backdrop sounds sumptuous rather than messy. You’re left with an album on which smug self-indulgence is matched with genuine inventiveness. Painting With won’t change anyone’s mind about Animal Collective, or even help the undecided make theirs up. The devotees will doubtless be more devoted than ever after listening to it, objectors can still find plenty of reason to object, and perhaps that’s what the band want. “We want to have our own sound, and we understand that it’s for some people and not others,” said Portner recently; on those terms, at least, Painting With succeeds.
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BALAM ACAB “CHILD DEATH” Thu / 7 Jan 2016 Words / Patric Fallon
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n the Bandcamp page where Balam Acab released his second album, Child Death, you’ll find a handful of genre tags, including devotional, ambient, experimental, psychedelic and punk. Surprisingly, every descriptor fits well with the music on the young Pennsylvanian artist’s five-song full-length. Only one of them, however, would’ve been appropriate for Balam Acab’s first LP. Back in 2011, Wander / Wonder rolled together R&B, folk, classical, bass music, ambient and triphop into something altogether magical, like Disney’s The Little Mermaid reimagined by Aaliyah, Grouper, Vashti Bunyan and Burial. And yet Alec Koone makes a great effort to distance Child Death from that sound, as if to say the 19-year-old kid who made those early records is no more.
ing. Of course, growth and change are good things, but Child Death is more an album of awkward growing pains than a complete metamorphosis. Singers are timid and obscured, guitars sound spindly and basic, drums often feel stiff and mixes can verge on overcrowded. (On that note, kudos to Sam Haar of Blondes for mixing “ANDIWILLTELLU” into something that mostly makes sense.) Where Koone hasn’t faltered is melody, and to his credit, Child Death is propped up on more than a handful of gorgeous passages.
oone took to Twitter to point out some of what’s different about his new process, which involved far less sampling, lots of live vocals and his own guitar play-
hich is to say there is good, maybe even powerful music within Child Death’s dense 32 minutes. “Glory Sickness” and “Spent Lives” echo the rich, choral beauty
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of Wander / Wonder in places, though the former also dabbles in fauxblack metal and indie, while the latter boldly encroaches on Rival Dealer’s block. For its intro, “Underwater Forever” floats in bubbles, harps, hymns, birdsong and other heavenly arrangements, but soon gives way to blast beats, squealing synth and fuzzy power chords. It’s actually one of Child Death’s most coherent (and best) songs, which says something about the amount of ideas Koone crams into each track. The trancey, orchestral breakdown in the third quarter of “ANDIWILLTELLU” is among his best work, but he ditches it to end on a whiny, four-chord plod. For every part you love in Child Death, there could be one just around the corner ready to subvert it.
time, instead of retrofitting his music with live instruments, Koone spun them into Child Death from the start. “Do Death” was written and recorded “from scratch,” using only real performances and zero samples. It understandably doesn’t sound much like any other Balam Acab song, draped instead with Radiohead’s lulling, guitar-borne mysticism and synthy psychedelia. It’s nice, actually, and might even make you wish Koone hadn’t relegated the idea to a quick four minutes. But the other live touches don’t come off as naturally, even sounding amateurish at times. They’re the stark, mediocre reality of an adolescent band waking us from the lush, wide-eyed dreamscapes Koone has always enchanted with.
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here’s a clear reason why Koone has reimagined his sound: he wants Balam Acab to be a live band. Touring was kind of an afterthought when he wrote Wander / Wonder. This
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Holy other
Holy Other’s debut EP on the Tri Angle label uses tools common in the post-Burial witch house scene but manages some intriguing new twists. Depending on which article or news story you read, Holy Other could hail from Manchester, Gothenburg, Stockport, or Berlin. The fact-shy producer is apparently now settled in Manchester, but there’s a sense of disconnection that remains integral to his ghostly productions. There’s a strong sense of loneof the more noticeable signifiers from witch house and aligns liness in the swarm of sampled vocals that make up the spine Holy Other more strongly with other Tri Angle Records artists of the tracks on With U, reflecting both in the way Holy Other Balam Acab and oOoOO. treats his sources and the mixture of genres he pulls from. The glacial drag of those artists is reflected again on closing Take the title track, which shuffles out from a poppy, electrack “Feel Something”, with its starkly contrasting bass and tronic piano sample in a motif that is at once disarmingly gen- trebly keys. It shares the listlessness and detached atmotle and slightly creepy. As skittering rhythms pan from left sphere common in this scene, but once again Holy Other’s use of to right, a pitched-down vocal bathes the track in darkness, vocals pulls the track somewhere unexpected. This time, the and “with you” is the only discernable lyric as the sample sample hews closer to its native pitch and feels all the more repeats. The track has a yearning sound, each element working striking for it. Transplanted out of its original context, the to intensify that feeling, from the off-kilter piano line to latent sensuality and drama in the vocals are squeezed down the vaporous layers of reverb. That echoing atmosphere is to their stark essence. abundant on the EP and has a knack for making Holy Other’s production seem tantalizingly half-solid and transient. On first listen, the haze of With U can seem pro forma, but diving deeper beneath the surface reveals a deceptively “Touch” uses the same kind of tricks with a lithe vocal line fragmented record made up of enticing titbits and interesting at the heart of the track. This time, the voice sounds closer juxtapositions. It’s a strangely affecting synthesis of sounds to the kind of manipulations Burial mined so successfully on and marks Holy Other’s short debut out as a darkly oppressive Untrue. That kind of skewed affectation has been a common but ultimately rewarding piece of work device in electronic music since then, but something about Holy Other’s cloud of overlapping vocal samples gives it a different, more romantic feel. While that busier vocal work makes up the bulk of the track, an ominous bass line thunders deep in the mix, gliding slowly from note to note. The drop is one
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Justin Wright's Expo Seventy Natalie Gallagher November 11, 2014
“I feel like my music is an acquired taste,” Justin Wright tells me over beers at Dave’s Stagecoach. “It won’t relate to everybody, but if people are really into music, they’ll understand where I’m coming from.” It’s early on a weeknight, and our conversation is audible to the handful of patrons at the bar. One or two occasionally cast sidelong glances our way. Wright, 39, seems unperturbed by this. He sits stoically, looking more like a long-distance trucker than an artist, with his reddish beard and his vintage puffy vest over a western shirt. Tattooed forearms lead to freckled hands that form gestures as he speaks. Wright is the frontman — often the only man — of Expo ‘70, which he calls an “art project” that involves experimental, psychedelic music. In conversation, as in performance, he’s intense. His speech is tentative and soft, and he answers questions in long, careful detail without ever straying from the topic. He has been working as Expo ‘70 since 2003, when he still lived in California. He relocated to his native Kansas City two years later, but much of the sound encompassed by his project is taken from what he discovered in his seven years on the West Coast: midcentury classical music, krautrock, minimalism, Brian Eno, Ash Ra Tempel. This is what Wright means when he says his music isn’t for everyone: It isn’t the kind of thing you pop in your car stereo on a road trip with other people. “When I was in the band Living Science Foundation [in California from 2000 to 2003], I started acquiring a lot of effects pedals, and I got really interested in experimenting with using them and playing guitar,” Wright says. “I started going into the studio on my own and looping things and playing with textures. I had gotten into minimal drone music, and that was kind of my inspiration. When I moved to Kansas City, I started getting into alternate tuning, and that’s really the basis of the sound that I have, from how my guitar is tuned and then going into the effects.” By the end of this month, Wright hopes to have in his hands remastered vinyl editions of Expo ‘70’s first recording, July 18, 2004. (The title is simply that album’s original release date.) The package — which will also be available on CD and cassette — ideally was going to be ready on the 10th anniversary, this past summer, but there were, he says,
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holdups at the pressing plant. In any format, it’s a big listen; five of the six songs stretch well past the 10-minute mark (the final track is more than 23 minutes), and each moves past mere strangeness or psychedelic acid trip toward something closer to an attempt at communicating with an alien life form. The album could be a post-apocalyptic SOS. But the Expo ‘70 live experience, Wright says, is entirely separate from how it sounds on record. The recordings — around 30 albums’ worth, by Wright’s estimation — are never translated fully when Expo ‘70 performs, whether he’s playing solo or performing with occasional bandmates bassist Aaron Osborne and drummer Chris Fugit. (That trio goes by Expo Seventy.) The songs take on their own characteristics, determined by the venue and the energy of the night. It’s not improvisation, but no audience gets the same show twice. “Because I use so many effects, it is really hard to go into a live situation and re-create everything that I’m doing,” Wright says. “I don’t use samplers or computers or anything. I think it’s better to be organic when I’m playing live, to listen to the room, and the way that I’m playing is affected in it. When I’m at the studio, it’s a really different environment — being isolated with no one else around versus playing for an audience.” It’s also for that reason, Wright says, that he often faces away from his audience when he’s performing solo. In April, when Expo ‘70 opened for legendary U.K. psych-rock act Loop, Wright was almost completely obscured by a fog machine that engulfed the venue in continuous billows. It made for an oddly paralyzing experience, knowing that any sudden movements might result in a collision or a face plant. We were rooted for a half-hour, focusing on Wright’s ever-diminishing silhouette and surrounded by enigmatic, amorphous sounds that came closer with each new wave of smoke. When I bring up the Loop show, Wright laughs lightly, flashing a rare, shy smile. He hit the wrong button on the fog machine, he tells me. The whole thing was an accident — one he was fine with. “It’s really not about me performing. It’s about listening to the music and how it evolves and spans my set,” he says. “I think it worked out OK.”
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Cla ms C a s i no Any Type of Vibe At All: The Clams Casino Interview
“I will just throw things around until I hear something special and run with it.” I’m starting to feel like a broken record here, but for the sake of legacy, here we go again. Several years ago I was lucky enough to interview hip-hop producer/live electronic music performer Clams Casino (Government Name: Michael Volpe). While he’s been a little too quiet lately for my liking, Volpe had, and still has, the potential to be one of the guys who redefines the sonic landscapes we associate with mainstream hip-hop production. Actually, scratch that, he IS the guy who redefined the sonic landscapes we associate with mainstream hip-hop production. A young 23 years of age, by day, North New Jersey’s Michael Volpe is a mild mannered physical therapy student and avid mini golf enthusiast with a seemingly robust sense of humour. By night, and on the weekends, he writes beats as Clams Casino, rattling the foundations of his mother’s house while he tirelessly works away on an old PC in her attic. Initially a drummer and a casual upright bassist, Volpe got his start in the beat-making game ten years ago in high school. His initial equipment of choice? A Yamaha SU200 sampler and a Casio CZ-101 keyboard before making the shift to software based production platforms. Relatively unknown until this year, Volpe is best known for crafting haunting sound collage ambient rap productions for the likes of Lil B, Soulja Boy, Havoc, Young L and Mad Lion. The sort of beats which draw acclaim from music nerds, hardened hood rappers, dancing girls, niche record labels and trendy internet music websites; all at once. Reflecting, Volpe explains his process, “I will just throw things around until I hear something special and run with it. And it could be anything. Any type of vibe at all.” A formalist rap enthusiast who describes his listening schedule as, “The Diplomats, The Pack, Lil Wayne, G-Unit, Repeat,” Volpe trawls the internet, throwing random phrases into programs like LimeWire or BearShare and pulls down the results. Chopping, twisting and bending them into textural, ambient soundworlds with a heavy emphasis on hip-hugging grooves, he creates music which is more or less the inverse of his recreational listening quota. As it turns out, mixing Bjork, Adele, bird calls, field recordings and Imogen Heap with hard drums really does the damage. Debuting under the Clams Casino name in 2006 through a remix tape, in late 2007 Volpe in his words, “…got serious about trying to get my music out there.” Linking with a rapper called Sha Stimuli, Volpe produced the majority of Stimuli’s 2008 Stevie Wonder tribute mixtape Hotter Than July, which as you may guess, an Volpe explains, “every song has a Stevie [Wonder] sample on it.” “It’s a different sound of mine, ” he continues. “I guess you could say, more ‘traditional’ hip-hop.” A huge fan of The Pack, once Volpe had his MySpace game tight, he contacted Lil B, who as Volpe says, “hit me back a few weeks later with an email to send beats to.” So, as you can probably guess, Volpe kept on sending those beats. The result was production placement on Lil B mixtapes like 6 Kiss, Angels Exodus and Illusions of Grandeur, mixtapes which could be described as defining moments in Lil B’s career. As Volpe elaborates, “It’s lead to so much, getting the opportunity to work with Soulja Boy, and basically just getting my music heard, especially by other artists.”
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In the process building the hazy, sample heavy warped instrumentals which serve as bed to the narrative, or Naked Lunch-esque rhymes of Lil B, through his production on tunes like ‘I’m God’, ‘Motivation’, ‘Cold War’, ‘What You Doin’, ‘Realest Alive’ and ‘Real Shit From A Real Nigga’, Volpe has been crucial in crafting the emotive musical side of Lil B’s Based aesthetic. And as many producers and musicians will relate to, building this mood or feeling wasn’t even a goal for Volpe. “I don’t think too much about it,” he says. “A lot of my tracks sound similar, but I usually don’t aim for a specific sound. I like to just kind of let it go naturally, zone out. Sometimes I will get so into it and not even really remember exactly how I did something. It’s sort of like blacking out, which is weird, haha.” Earlier this year, Volpe collected up some of the best of his instrumentals, bundled them in a ZIP file and threw them up on Mediafire. Unsurprisingly, the blogosphere holla’d back. “I did it for everyone that had been asking for certain instrumentals for so long,” he explains. “I would read comments on YouTube and everywhere my work was posted and the demand for the instrumentals of all the tracks was like out of control. I knew people would enjoy it, but the response has been like overwhelmingly positive and so much more than I expected.” Aside from getting an incredible amount of blogosphere love, Volpe’s ZIP file also lead him into communication with two record labels. Tri-Angle Records and Type Records, both of whom will release music by him on vinyl later this year. Volpe elaborates, “The instrumental tape that is already out is coming out soon on Type [Records] on vinyl only. A new instrumental EP called Rainforest will be coming out on Tri-Angle [Records] on June 27th.” Despite having been blindly unaware of either label prior to communication, Volpe is very happy to be involved, and digging in. “I wasn’t aware of either before they contacted me. But after listening to what they have put out, it seemed like my projects were a great fit and I’m happy to work with them. Also, I got put onto a lot of cool artists that I didn’t know about.” He also notes the importance of having physical releases for fans to purchase, despite as he admits, “mostly downloading MP3’s nowadays,” incidentally noting that his last album purchases were Hustlers P.O.M.E by Jim Jones and Come Home With Me by Cam’ron. Under-reported for too long, Volpe and his music represents one of the most compelling new voices in modern underground music. Paired up with labels like Tri-Angle and Type, he sits perfectly next to both the damaged pop of oOoOO, Balam Acab and How To Dress Well, and the extended, textural exercises in physicality of emotion within sonic environments of Richard Skelton, a rare feat indeed. Where he turns his hand next however, well, that remains to be seen. Only time and sustained listening will reveal the future pathways of sound which Volpe is probably unconsciously crafting on some level or another at this exact moment.
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onehotrix point never
Oneohtrix Point Never, electronic music’s most seasoned uncanny-valley explorer, is returning in November with his eighth and hardest-hitting album, Garden of Delete — a brave yet wholly idiosyncratic step towards a more “rock”-based sound. The sound-sculptor born Daniel Lopatin has spent nearly a decade making critically acclaimed, impressionistic, uneasy music that smears synthesizer globs between the lines of real and synthetic, nostalgic and cutting edge. But sometime after nine dates opening the Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden tour in 2014, Lopatin wandered towards what the diligent theorist calls “one-point perspective” and “antagonistic” — but ultimately sounds like abrasive electronic music stretched like Silly Putty. 18
Instead of the headphone-assisted home recording that has traditionally powered his work, Lopatin rented a hot, windowless studio underneath a natural-food supermarket in Brooklyn and blasted his music from amps. “Yeah, it was like Maxell Tapes–guy style,” says Lopatin. “I got into it . . . . I had this dungeon reality and it was also kind of like I was uninhibited, like I would just get into the zone, work for like 17 hours. I was just, like, tweaking out in this windowless room and it encouraged this rock vibe.” While maintaining his defiantly unsettling textures and harsh editing techniques, Garden of Delete really does have the feel of rock songs distended and malfunctioning — including sad-robot ballads (“No Good”), industrial-tinged kotostep (“Sticky Drama”) and Aphex-tweaked acid minimalism (“Mutant Standard”). First taste “I Bite Through It” feels like a quiet-verse, loud-chorus grunge song performed by a skipping CD. The song’s inhuman hook emerged after Lopatin typed words into voice synthesis plug-in Chipspeech and manipulated the results. Rolling Stone met with Lopatin in Brooklyn to discuss his move away from the murk. How did you approach this record differently than the previous stuff you’ve done? The easiest way to put it is, I spent a lot of time writing at the piano with no kind of sound in mind. If I can construct a song and then deal with the arrangement and whatever abstraction I want to subject it to later, then even if all those decisions are wrong, I’ll have these songs. I so wanted the challenge of moving myself with these songs, to feel that they were worthy of other people. I just wanted them to be songs where if there was an MTV Unplugged version of 0PN, I
could get a band together and play these fuckin’ songs. Are there versions of these songs floating around where it’s just a piano? Yeah, completely. Because I would start with MIDI in the piano roll and basically get a very raw arrangement together with whatever instrument felt like a good writing tool at that moment: organ, piano, Rhodes, whatever. And if I felt like the thing moves and flows through the parts in a way that feels like . . . a rock song, basically, to put it really bluntly. I try to imagine, like, “Okay, if David Gilmour were here, could he sing on this, or what? Is this a fuckin’ short Floyd song from, like, ‘84 or whatever?” What rock music in particular inspired it? Well, just that they’re fully contained ideas that, for better or worse, never deviate from what they are. Okay, well, now how do I mutate that? How do I deviate that form? How do I combine the best things about that and introduce something that’s idiosyncratic, that’s me. Rock is one-point perspective music. It’s like a Stanley Kubrick shot or something. Here’s the monolith, here’s everything around it and we want to you think about this one really black-and-white thing and make your choice. Are you with us or against us? There’s something unfuckwithable about that. That anthemic approach to life, where, as naive as it is, it just kind of decides to be something. So I was like, well, how did I get so far away from that train of thought?
epicness of what they’re doing [laughs]. And are like, “We’re down, dude! We’re gonna go for it!” Like The Wall or something like that. Also all that stuff, it’s like programmatic music, in the classical-music sense. It’s where you use music to affectively generate this message that’s extra-musical. At its cheesiest, it’s a rock opera or something, but at its best, it’s like . . . the best shit ever! You know when Queensrÿche got all concept album-ed out? There’s something about that that I’ve always done, but I never fully committed myself to an opinion or a point of view or a feeling. Like I’m always fucking around. What if I’m just pissed? What if I’m just horny? What if I’m just that? Yeah, your music is definitely like, up to this point, very open to interpretation and very hazy. Totally. And I was like, “There’s nothing about my life that feels hazy right now. Everything feels like it’s on edge, like a wire that’s as tense as it can be . . . .” Again, it’s so weird that things just happen in your life and you realize that you have a ways to go. Like, on tour with Nails and talking to Trent [Reznor] about real, practical aspects of making kick-ass music brought to surface some of the things I thought I was deficient in and needed to work on. And it also got me kind of pumped up to do some basic rock experiments that I hadn’t really fucked with since I was 16 or whatever.
A lot of the record sounds like the electronic music that leans closest to rock music. Like Aphex Twin, the Prodigy, contemporary dubstep . . . Even Daft Punk! They, to me, were kind of a rock band. I just call it this lineage of one-point-perspective bands that realize the
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What would we want to know about “I Bite Through It,” the first song to be released from Garden of Delete? I want to make like three-minute songs, self-contained, kind of formally contrasting between what I regard as new electronic music that’s interesting and my need to rage. I’m exposed a lot to different, “cool” underground music when I’m on tour in Europe, that I usually hate it all. And the underlying theme in a lot of that music, without throwing anybody under the bus, is there’s this “dread.” But dread is affectively imprisoned in this one cliché that film uses all the time. Like if you watch True Detective or something, it sounds like a lot those dudes I see at festivals that are like . . . scary? I feel nothing from that stuff! I’m so dead! Dread to me is like the clown from It. It’s not like this foggy plume of black ink. Dread is a fucking psychotic, sour, yellow, bilious thing that gets under your skin and has a weird-ass voice. So, well, “How do I do that my style?” How do I take the best aspects of contemporary electronic-music formalism: weird sample truncation and my editing style, and things that I’ve been developing, but then also make it feel like a little bit like, I don’t know, like a psychotic clown or something?” So is this your psychotic clown song? Yeah, there’s a little bit of a psycho-clown vibe to it, in the A section.
It has a little bit of a Slipknot vibe. In fact, Slipknot has some masterful editing technique . . . . In watching some of their music videos, I was shocked by their crazy, tangential, like, “Pause the song, here’s some fucked up shit,” and that was inspiring. Because that’s a form. That’s a formal technique. . . . The other thing is, when I started slicing random some shit up for the song, I heard lyrics. It was the result of just coincidental splices that sounded like “I bite through it.” So the title is a coincidence? By coincidence, it sounded like “I bite through it,” which, in of itself, is a totemic one-point perspective. I could spend 180 pages on just what biting through something is, in terms of horror, the abject, fear, violence. To me it’s like making an anthem out of something that’s indexical. Are you planning on playing this material as a band? Yeah, in our way. So Nate Boyce, who’s a sculptor and he does video for 0PN live, is a fucking killer guitar player. He just got a Steinberg and he’s been practicing all the songs. We’re going to have 10 days of rehearsals and basically see which parts we can break out, what is he going to thrash on, and I’m going to do vocals. And we’ll try it out, because I feel like I can’t stop. I put so much of myself in the record, in terms of just physical input. It’s a physical record. It’s made it with my hands and my voice to some degree. And I want to see if I can do that onstage. We’ll see.
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MELODY’S ECHO CHAMBE ME ME M
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ER ELODY’S ECHO CHAMBER ELODY’S ECHO CHAMBER MELODY’S ECHO CHAMBER MELODY’S ECHO CHAMBER MELODY’S ECHO CHAMBER MELODY’S ECHO CHAMBER Melody’s Echo Chamber is the name given to the work of Paris-based multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Melody Prochet. Possessing a penchant for wild-eyed psychedelia, homespun motorik rhythm and an effortless flair for the sort of melodic classicism redolent of chamber song, Prochet is at once both an aficionado of pop’s outer limits and off-kilter to its expectations. With her smoky, sensual voice and romantic presence, Prochet embodies a distinctive kind of elegance and bold sense-of-self long associated with France’s more notable musical exports. But as much as her national identity runs through the fibre of the eleven tracks that make up Melody’s Echo Chamber, there’s worldliness at play too; a looking beyond the fringes of personal experience to trawl through Europe’s art pop lineage – kraut, space-rock, dream-pop, electronica – in a way that’s as much cinematic in its scope as it is musical. The likes of Debussy and Spiritualized are seldom quoted in tandem when it comes to touch-points of an artist’s debut album but for Prochet, a classical music student of some twelve years, this sense of disparate influences makes a lot of sense. For all its blown-out boom and electronic wear-and-tear, a song like ‘Crystallized’ unfolds with a sweeping grace and poise that is deceptively complex, and the album is peppered with moments of melodic illumination that feel almost like movements in the way they frequently elevate the song up and away from the heavy, damaged break-beats and mesmeric bass loops that typically drive them.
The intriguing combination of more confrontational, roughshod instrumentation and stirring compositional scope present in Prochet’s work is in part attributable to the album’s origins. Predominantly recorded and mixed with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker in Perth and finished off solo in France, the collaboration, struck up after the two met on tour when Prochet was playing in a previous band, proved a perfect chemistry. “I’ve been surrounded for many years by the idea of classicism as I studied viola and it’s all about formal and restrained music, and when I started re cording my own songs I was kind of stifled by that restriction and tended to not be as extreme as I wanted to be in sound or structure,” explains Prochet. “I think at some point I had a click and I naturally ended up collaborating with someone with a Rock ‘n’ Roll background such as Kevin. We worked as kind of complementary opposites – he helped me destroy everything I’d done up to that point and then put it back together piece by piece, to sculpt it with the right balance of classicism but also the psychedelia and wildness I wanted.”
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Inspired by Parker’s free-spirited approach and the unconventional provisions of his home studio (“we had to mic-up on piles of bricks in the backyard”), Prochet describes her process in Perth as a childlike, exploratory one; for a record so deeply textured and layered its genesis was surprisingly less a case of studious knob-twiddling and more of playful, wide-eyed instinct. “Some Time Alone, Alone’ is one of the songs I wrote in Perth when Kevin was on tour and I was on my own in his studio. He’d left these notes everywhere to explain how to use the gear but his room-mate had used it just before me in the morning and messed up all the instructions, so I was in there and I didn’t know how anything worked”, remembers Prochet. “So I basically just plugged into a pre-amp and played this really saturated guitar on top of my Yamaha drum machine in a way that felt natural. Of course, it was technically ‘ totally wrong’ but at the end we kept all of my guitars cause the sound was so special and uniquely textured that it wasn’t worth it try doing it again. So, in general, there was no real process, more a day-to-day sense of experiment.” Leaving behind Parker and his riotously messy Perth home-studio, Prochet then travelled back to France, and isolation in her Grandparents’ beach house in the fittingly gorgeous climes of Cavalière, in order to add the beaming vocals that soar high over the record’s heady landscapes. “I needed the isolation for that part of the recording”, says Melody, “I’m so self-conscious singing in a room full of people so retreating to such a beautiful, quiet place really helped coax it out of me.”
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The result of this process of “complementary opposites”, to use Prochet’s own phrase, is exemplified by “Endless Shore”, one of the first tracks from the record made available, a song that is wistful but totally commanding; cosmic but muscular, and as strange and singular as it is immediately arresting on a gut level. Likewise, lead single ‘I Follow You’, with its loose, laconic guitars and instantly memorable, resignedly romantic hook swings closest to out-and-out pop but still manages to retain a friction and vulnerability. Whether starting with a seemingly straightforward song-structure and then pushing its edges outwards or going the other way and making something dense and unlikely completely contagious, Prochet’s instinctive feel for inventive songcraft is relentless.
Fittingly for a record defined by its multiple identities, Melody’s Echo Chamber finds Prochet skipping between her native French and English with gleeful fluidity and uniformly moving results, such is the innately emotive quality of her voice. “Those songs were also the first time I ever sang in French”, says Prochet, “I never had wanted to before, it never felt natural – I’ve listened to so much English music, and you are able to sing more ridiculous things in English. I’ve always been a fan of French singers but I never really considered myself capable of living up to them. But when I was in the beach house by myself I just found myself coming out with these melodies in French almost without thinking. I found a way to write really simple, poetic, lyrics – almost child-like and it felt extremely natural. I think I was able to find the right balance.”
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Com Truise L.A. producer Seth Haley remains devoted to spacey slow-funk synth excursions with a whiff of ’80s nostalgia.
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As Com Truise, Los Angeles-transplanted producer Seth Haley uses a narrow palette, but it works on a remarkable variety of canvases. Early EPs such as 2010’s Cyanide Sisters and 2011’s Fairlight introduced a project devoted to spacey slow-funk synth excursions with a whiff of ’80s nostalgia— an approach Haley continued on Com Truise’s 2011 fine debut LP, Galactic Melt, and 2013’s rarities grab bag In Decay. Over the years, though, this “Com Truise sound” has seemed equally suited to remixes for pop stars like Charli XCX or Maroon 5 as well as for Ghostly International labelmate Tycho. PARTYNEXTDOOR even sampled Galactic Melt’s “Hyperlips” for the highlight of the Drake protégé’s self-titled 2013 debut. Working with other artists gives Haley a vocal presence that can go in front of his cleanly designed backdrops. Plenty of instrumental or nearly instrumental music can dominate the foreground, of course, but listening to Com Truise often feels like listening to a movie or videogame score. Which makes sense: Haley has described these releases as “like a film score... from the mind” for a storyline involving the interplanetary journey of “the world’s first synthetic/robotic astronaut.” On Galactic Melt, samples of dating advice (“Brokendate”) or orgasmic moans (“VHS Sex”) served as additional entrypoints, and the standout on 2014’s Wave 1 EP was a guest vocal turn that had Ford & Lopatin’s Joel Ford sounding like a cyborg Scritti Politti (“Declination”). Follow-up EP Silicon Tare sounds once again like vintage Com Truise, but it would have benefited from having more of a focal point.
The five tracks here differ from their predecessors only by degrees, so if you liked the previous records there’s little here to find too upsetting, but as an EP it feels like a stopgap ahead of the next Com Truise album. Most enticing, unsurprisingly, are the two tracks shared in advance: the drifting, jittery flicker of “Diffraction” and the languid sweeps of the title track. But opener “Sunspot,” with its busy drum programming, and the subsequent “Forgive,” punctuated by squeals of synth, are of a piece. The closest the EP comes to an outright failure is the draggy finale, “Du Zirconia,” which at six minutes takes too long to shift from its high opening bleeps to its eventual midtempo groove. What’s a shame is that these tracks do little to expand on their initial ideas, let alone do more than set a vague, unblinking mood for their ostensible subject, the robot astronaut on its voyage through space. Artists whose work shifts only subtly between releases have some welcome precedents, this year alone including the likes of Julianna Barwick or the Field. What raises bigger questions about Com Truise is the durability of this particular sound. From the soul and funk records that became “disco” to the varied post-punk sounds later boiled down into “alternative,” genres often have more to offer before they’ve become codified; the homebaked synth-funk of Neon Indian or Washed Out didn’t really have a name in 2009’s deadbeat summer, but popular opinion coalesced around the name “chillwave” by the time Com Truise came to embody many of that YouTube-retro style’s basic points. With Neon Indian — Com Truise’s former tourmate — recently resurgent, Lindstrøm mastering similar sounds from more of a disco angle, and Chromatics dutifully parceling out dusky gems every several months, how much room is there for ’80s-harking synthscapes?
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Holly Herndon is straddling a strange intersection. One night she’s DJing a musty basement club, the next she’s reviewing her Masters thesis with a teacher. Then she is the teacher, facing a sea of students on her mission to secure her doctorate from Stanford University. She sets up temporary studios nearly everywhere she goes. She has a hundred ideas itching to get out, and as both her album release and graduation date inch closer, she’s finally on the brink of setting them all free. The electronic musician and performance artist earned an MFA from Oakland’s Mills College, and is now a few months shy of receiving her PhD in composition. She has three full-lengths to her name: 2011’s cassette-only Car, 2012’s Movement, and now Platform, in addition to last year’s Chorus EP. Her packed schedule might lead you to believe she’s as tightly wound as her trademark braid, but when we meet in her label’s cozy office in New York City, she’s relaxed. If I didn’t know better, I would believe she’d been strolling through the city over the past few days, taking in the skyscrapers. Herndon was in Europe the night before, she informs me, and she flies back home to California in less than 24 hours. She has a lot to do and a lot to say, and it isn’t reserved for her fellow academics.
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The difference between academic music and non-academic music is exaggerated, according to Herndon. Making music frowm a scholarly background isn’t about staying within an elite academic context. It’s not even about reaching a hand down from the ivory tower. It’s about using what you learn to make something that can be interpreted in multiple ways by anyone. Herndon’s new album, Platform, samples her Skype activity, YouTube clicks, and fridge door slamming; it also flaunts original coding in the visual programming language Max/ MSP. Her music takes cues from the compositional theories of German electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen, as well as her instrument, the computer, and its ability to annotate modern life. The album’s title is inspired by writer, designer, and strategist Benedict Singleton. While Silicon Valley’s overarching philosophy is “solutionism,” or creating a new technology to solve a problem without fully understanding what happens if you solve it that way, Singleton believes in platforms as communication modes for people to improvise together. “Instead of trying to project answers to future problems and pre-solve things,” Herndon explains, “you shift and answer problems as they go.”
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Before her world started whirring in time to a laptop fan, Herndon enjoyed the local acoustics in her hometown of Johnson City, Tennessee in the ‘80s. She was effectively cut off from the Internet until her senior year of high school, as were most of her peers. She began playing guitar in the church where her father was a preacher. Her first run-in with electronic music came at age 16, when she visited Berlin on a class trip. There, at last, eurotrance consumed her upon first listen, and when she returned to the city two years later on an exchange visit, she stayed put for a year to better figure out the culture.
Back in the States, Herndon applied to Masters programs and got a job at a children’s museum developing interactive media exhibits, work that later influenced her playful music videos. The job consumed too much time, so when she bailed, she decided to pursue music full-time through the postgraduate program at Mills College. It was immediately clear that she’d made the right choice. Weekly lessons on performance systems and building programs allowed her to dive into complex sound sculpting, even as a newly minted programmer. When she returned to Berlin yet again to spend five years working at a music placement agency, she found her groove, and later decided to uproot for the electronic music capital of the US: Oakland, California. West Coast culture was the opposite of Berlin’s urban crunch, but it gave her a forceful push. “A lot of people think of the Bay Area as the tech bro side, the Googles and the Facebooks and corporate tech, but there’s actually a huge community of DIY tech there as well. It’s a very savvy and oriented place that’s not all corporate,” she says. “There’s a lot of really smart, highly skilled people who are interested in
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“There’s something about hearing really good techno on your laptop speakers while you’re cooking dinner or listening to it in a club with a certain energy on the dance floor,” she says. Club life began reeling her in. In Berlin, where parties rage nonstop through the weekend into Tuesday morning, electronic music is the norm. Even her ex-boyfriend’s mother would flick on hard techno before hopping in the shower.
skill sharing, so it was a good place to start using technology to learn how to code.” Herndon is constantly looking ahead with a hungry brain, grasping at texts and sounds available both in and beyond the classroom. Two of her biggest influences, Donna Haraway and Katherine Hayles, were discovered through her own extracurricular reading habits. In a sense, she’s handing herself the hardest test possible: Create music that will reach people it wasn’t entirely designed for.
“ I definitely block out my calendar,” she laughs, explaining how she schedules time to write songs. “I can’t teach and go home and write music. It’s too exhausting. I’ll try to on the weekend, but it gets hard. This album I wrote during my winter break and my summer break.” Now, after two years of paperwork and grading, Herndon is finally done with the two-year teaching commitment her doctoral program requires. There’s no more “Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music, 1980 to Today” work to grade. Naturally, she treated herself by moving to Los Angeles.
Platform feels in some ways like the amassed highlights of Herndon’s work to date. “Morning Sun” chirps like a tiny alarm clock, “DAO” reeks with the sounds of grinding metal, and “Locker Leak” samples advertisements about terracotta and Greek yogurt in a lively artificial voice. Then there’s “Chorus”, where Herndon hands over the reins to a software program, letting it eavesdrop on her browser and pull out audio from her browsing history. It then chops, folds, and smooths the samples into a glitchy, repetitive slices that play intermittently throughout.
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so weird and wonderful that strangers are anony Platform also gave Herndon the opportunity to bring mously connecting in such an emotional and physivarious collaborators on board. In addition to her cal way over the Internet.” The phenomenon has partner, Mat Dryhurst, contributing ideas and code been around for decades without a proper name, but to the tracks, she brought on Dutch design studio recent reports from the New York Times and Salon Metahaven, producers Amnesia Scanner, artist have brought it into the spotlight. A quick YouTube Spencer Longo, and vocalists Colin Self, Amanda search bears fruitful results. For most, the sound DeBoer, and Stef Caers. Each worked to add different of a brush running through hair, the raking of sand, vocal parts like opera, tweak a song’s final producor the gentle pouring of water into a glass does the tion, or insert lyrics Herndon couldn’t have othertrick. For Herndon, it’s the tapping of acrylic nails on wise composed. By what she considers a stroke a smartphone screen. of luck (and what I consider an indication of her personality), every collaboration went effortlessly. On “Lonely At The Top”, Herndon casts Claire Tolan “That’s not normal,” she laughs. “We did all of [“Unand her delicate whisper in a comical script. Forget equal”] in three days over the internet. It’s creepily about the everyman patient practices on YouTube: too easy.” This piece is for the Donald Trumps and the Charlie Sheens. “We both love ASMR, but wanted to One of the album’s most intriguing numbers, do something a little bit different with it, not just a “Lonely At The Top”, captures the wonderful world spot scene,” she says with a grin. “We wanted to do of autonomous sensory meridian response, better something critical and decided to write an ASMR for known as ASMR — a neologism for the perceptual the one percent, someone who’s like, ‘Yes, I deserve phenomenon of a pleasurable tingling sensation in this and everything great that’s happened to me is your head, scalp, and back that’s triggered by certain because I am totally amazing.’” sounds. All around the world, people film homemade ASMR videos, upload them for free, and comfort strangers in a selfless, therapeutic way. “A lot of people think it’s creepy,” she says. “I thought it was
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Tolan hosts an ASMR radio show, educates others about privacy issues at an NGO, and archives intense videos of war footage to piece events together and hold war criminals responsible. She’s also witty to boot. The two hashed out the script over the course of one night while perched on a balcony Herndon rented in Berlin last summer. “How do you write a script for someone who’s not speaking?” Herndon recalls. “You have to describe that person, but they can never say anything. It was hard to twist it around.” Her hands move quickly in the air when she talks. Of all the Platform collaborations, Tolan’s seems to be the one still fresh in her mind.
With the majority of ASMR videos being made by younger women — many of whom role-play as nurses, hair stylists, or close friends — ASMR is typically seen as a feminized, nurturing form of labor. Electronic music, by contrast, is not. The field is dominated by men, and when women claim their spot behind the board, they have to fight to be taken seriously (as Björk made clear earlier this year).
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mother-32
The Moog Mother-32 is the first tabletop semi-modular synthesizer from Moog. It is a distinctive analog instrument that adds raw analog sound, sequencing and extensive interconnectivity to any electronic or modular ecosystem. 34
All skies Anthology Releasing summer 2016 on Changarro records 35
At Moma
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The Museum of Modern Art presents a retrospective of the multifaceted work of composer, musician, and singer Björk. The exhibition draws from more than 20 years of the artist’s daring and innovative projects and her eight full-length albums to chronicle her career through sound, film, visuals, instruments, objects, and costumes. In the Museum lobby, instruments used on Biophilia (2011)—a gameleste, pipe organ, gravity harp, and Tesla coil—play songs from the album at different points throughout the day. On the second floor, in the Marron Atrium, two spaces have been constructed: one is dedicated to a new sound and video installation, commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art, for “Black Lake,” a song from Björk’s new album Vulnicura (2015); and the second is a cinema room that screens a retrospective in music videos, from Debut (1993) to Biophilia. On the third floor, Songlines presents an interactive, location-based audio experience through Björk’s albums, with a biographical narrative that is both personal and poetic, written by the acclaimed Icelandic writer Sjón, along with many visuals, objects, and costumes, including the robots designed by Chris Cunningham for the “All Is Full of Love” music video, Marjan Pejoski’s Swan Dress (2001), and Iris van Herpen’s Biophilia tour dress (2013), among many others.
Entry to the Björk exhibition is included with general Museum admission. Timed tickets are required for the Songlines portion of the exhibition, and are available same-day and on-site only, at no additional charge, on a first-come, first-served basis, beginning at 10:30 a.m. daily. MoMA members may reserve same-day tickets for Songlines on-site only, at no additional charge, on a first-come, first-served basis, beginning at 9:30 a.m. daily. Exclusive Member Early Hours will be held daily between 9:30 and 10:30 a.m. (for Songlines only). Member Early Hours are open to MoMA members, with the exception of Global members. Space is limited. For information on Corporate Member access to Member Early Hours, consult the Corporate Membership ticketing guidelines.
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Animal Collective member and Daft Punk collaborator Panda Bear has spoken about working on the French duo’s new album ‘Random Access Memories’ – scroll down to watch it.
Talking to Vice as part of their Creators Project series, Panda Bear revealed that he was invited to work with Daft Punk in Paris after having asked the duo to remix one of his solo songs and an Animal Collective song. Speaking about his time in Paris, Panda Bear says: “They set up a bunch of microphones to see which one would sound best with my voice and then it was like, ‘OK, do something good’. It was right at the last moment that we came up with something that we all liked.”
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Speaking about his work on the album, Panda Bear says: “It’s a huge honour for me, but to talk about it is still a little difficult for me. Something I like about Daft Punk is that every album is a little bit different.” Adding: “Instead of sampling an old piece of music it was like recording things in an old way to make something that sounds like it was sampling something old which, in turn, makes it sound new. It’s repetitive like a sampler but it has these sonic imperfections too. It’s wanting to remember something old that’s good but has been forgotten in some way. It’s a cool way to say thanks for the inspiration.”
Panda Bear is one of a number of collaborators Daft Punk have pulled in for ‘Random Access Memories’, which is released on May 20. Synth pioneer Giorgio Moroder, Todd Edwards, Pharrell Williams and Chilly Gonzales are set to appear on the LP. Speaking about working with Daft Punk, Todd Edwards recently described the new songs as “future classics”, before going on to say: “They reversed gears and went back to a time that no-one’s really focused on. They’re fulfilling their vision on all levels.”
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“I believe in djinns,” says Fatima Al Qadiri. “I believe in evil spirits that haunt the earth. I don’t smell or see them, but I feel them – especially in Kuwait: it’s one of the most haunted places on earth. Even with all the concrete and highways and esplanades. It’s very creepy. We have Greek ruins in Kuwait. Alexander the Great built sacrificial temples on one of our islands. I always feel some kind of dread there. Even inside my house. It takes me hours to get to sleep. And music is a kind of ghost too: it’s about conjuring memories, apparitions, something that reminds you of your past.” It’s odd to be talking about ghosts and revenants with Al Qadiri. After all, we’re sitting inside PS1, MoMA’s contemporary art hub in Long Island City, New York, that’s meant to be an incubator for newness. And Al Qadiri, born in Senegal in 1981, is herself often seen as an icon of newness: she makes and curates conceptually inclined, drily satiric art; she’s written for influential art and fashion journals Bidoun, Frieze and DIS; she’s one of a growing band of producers – among them Holly Herndon, Laurel Halo, Maria Minerva – who have made waves in what often seems like the Boys Own world of international electronica. Yet it’s hard to talk to Al Qadiri for any length of time without the spectres and demons of old Kuwait leaking into the conversation. “Kuwait in the 1980s was a utopia. It was extremely comfortable and sheltered. I constantly had a feeling of it as sublime: the country is very flat, the sky is huge, and the buildings very low, so you’re always looking up into this expanse. And, like the majority of middle-class Kuwaitis, I’d go to London every summer to escape the 50-degree heat. I’d go to Woolworths to buy candy and comic books. Andy Capp!”
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Everything changed on 2 August 1990. “I woke to watch a Japanese cartoon dubbed into Arabic and suddenly a black-and-white film kicked in. Some guy I’d never heard of: Saddam. I remember thinking, ‘Who is this guy?’ I didn’t even know the word occupation.” Iraq had just begun its invasion and, over the next seven months, more than 1,000 Kuwaitis were killed and 300,000 fled the country. Al Qadiri’s parents stayed and, at great risk to their lives, joined the resistance. “My mother would distribute forbidden newsletters by wearing an abaya – which she would never normally do – and pretending to be pregnant, so she could conceal the leaflets on her body. On one occasion she was stopped at a checkpoint where one of the soldiers told her, ‘There is an occupation, but you Kuwaitis are still fucking like rabbits.’ If she’d been detected, she’d have been shot dead on the spot. Advertisement “All the phone lines were monitored by the Iraqi police. My father was once half an hour late to a meeting and when he arrived everybody at the safe house had already been murdered. Our family was moving from house to house almost every week, but still my father was eventually a prisoner of war. He was taken from our house to a concentration camp in Basra for a month.”
Al Qadiri says it was this period of conflict and chaos, of everyday extremism, that helped give birth to the music – icy, machinic, almost post-human – she currently makes. “Kuwait was burned to the ground. It was an ashtray nation. In that alien landscape, I’d wake up and see the illuminated darkness that was the daytime burning of the oil wells. The black sky was lit by the sun. I felt I was living in a sci-fi movie, as if I was in Blade Runner. You’d hear machinegun fire, airraid sirens. After I moved to America, it took me years to get over my fears about fireworks on the fourth of July. They sounded like bombs falling.” For Al Qadiri, not yet a teenager and increasingly unable to leave bed or attend school, video games became a lifeline. “Me and my young sister played them during and after the war. Even Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf! We were lords of the universe in video games. We had power. They were an alternative universe where we could react against traumatic adult reality. We could escape. And the music was so hypnotic! Little 8-bit melodies that lulled you into a waking sleep while playing the games.” Advertisement Living in a ravaged nation about which few westerners cared (French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, critiquing postmodern society’s cult of the spectacle, claimed the Gulf war had not actually taken place; most TV footage focused on the Allied bombing of Baghdad rather than daily reality for Kuwaitis) and often retreating into the virtual and electronic worlds of gaming, Al Qadiri felt increasingly out of time and place.
“There’s a strong bond between language and national identity, but my education was very English and colonial. I felt an outsider. I always felt lost, inferior, supremely alienated by Arabic. The written version of it is like Chaucer’s English. Reading comic books in Chaucer’s English is a mindfuck! I thought Arabic was bizarre, dusty, absolutely irrelevant. It gave me a continuous identity crisis until I studied linguistics and found the magical word ‘triglossic’.” This means the existence of different varieties of a language in different situations: so Arabic, for instance, can exist in modern, journalistic fashion as much as in more classical variants. “It was like unlocking the biggest puzzle of my life. Later, when text-messaging came into play, I was like, ‘Woah!’” Al Qadiri felt equally out of place when she moved to America. “I thought the country would be like Saved By the Bell or The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and that everybody had bleached teeth, good hair, and smelled of Gio Armani. I landed at Penn State University, which is right next to the state penitentiary and has the largest fraternity system in the world. I had one millimetre of orange hair, blue contact lenses and a giant orange fake-fur coat. I really looked like an alien. When I told people I came from Kuwait, they’d reply, ‘What state is that?’ I lasted one semester.”
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Nations as mythologies, as fantasies, as erratic aggregations of commerce, junk-media, fabricated fictions: all these feed into Al Qadiri’s debut album Asiatisch. Its title is derived from the German word for Asia, but it’s actually about the concept of China. Song titles such as Shanghai Freeway, Hainan Island and Szechuan may reference real places, but the use of synthesised voices and digital snares alongside “traditional” gongs and bells, the toggling between classical poetry and nonsensical Mandarin, and the creation of a moodscape that moves seamlessly between cheesy, eerie and darkly erotic suggest that Al Qadiri is more interested in Chinas of the mind. “I’ve never been,” she says unapologetically. “The record is trying to posit a notion of an imagined China. This imagined China is for me something that has been brewing for centuries. It started with the opium wars. It’s like a garbage tapestry: you don’t know what the fabric is; it’s not something that’s easily identifiable or quantifiable; there’s a catalogue of films and cartoons and comic books within it, but one that many authors have contributed to. The Asia in Asiatisch is a nexus of stereotypes that have been perpetrated, elaborated, embellished and weaved, each time further and further dislocated from the original misrepresentation.” This sounds rather like Edward Said’s concept of orientalism which, in his celebrated 1978 study, he characterised as a “cultural apparatus that is all aggression”. But where Said saw himself as a debunker and exposer of those phoney versions of the east peddled by novelists, historians and diplomats, there’s little sense of protest in Asiatisch. Al Qadiri doesn’t claim – or perhaps even seek – to stand outside of that “nexus of stereotypes”. “I don’t know the real China,” she says. “Only the China the west has been feeding me: this elaborate, simulated roadtrip through virtual China that has been developed over centuries.”
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The China that Al Qadiri creates isn’t a source of ancient wisdoms. It is thrilling, hyper-sleek, as glistening, eager to delight and designed to ensnare as a shopping mall or the duty-free concourses of a modern airport. It’s an emerald city, a sci-fi wonderland, a themepark simulation of China – a utopia that, like all utopias, doesn’t exist. Or should that be a replicant China? “I always think in architecture,” says Al Qadiri. “The China on this record would be brutalist architecture … made of jade. There’s something very dainty and delicate about my melodic compositions, but they are made by digital tools, which also render them clunky, cold.” The record bears the imprint of grime, especially a fleeting micro-genre of it christened “sinogrime” that circulated as a mix CD put together by Steve Goodman, aka Kode9, the boss at Al Qadiri’s label Hyperdub. “Grime immediately hit me in the gut,” she recalls. “I felt it was the most futuristic music I’d ever heard. The most macho genre of western music. It was martial! The most apocalyptic and the most childlike music! And as a child who’d lived through the apocalypse, it resonated with me. And as a videogame fan, I knew some of the earliest grime tracks were recorded using PlayStations.”
What’s striking about a lot of art currently coming out of the Middle East, and the Gulf states in particular, is its relative lack of interest in tradition, reverence, continuity – all values that the west foists on other cultures. In her 2012 memoir The Girl Who Fell To Earth, Qatar-born film-maker Sophia Al-Maria, who has collaborated with Al Qadiri in the past, elaborates on her “Gulf futurism” theory: “If you think of history as something defined by the laws of physics, and the discovery of gas and oil wealth as a sort of event horizon from which there is no going back … what’s happened is a wormhole stargate mindfuck.” The scale and intensity of the warp-speed modernisation programmes in so many Gulf states – their steel-and-glass citadels under baking hot suns, their labour camps full of imported labourers from Asia – are perhaps better chronicled by science fiction, video games and HD entertainment than by more traditional forms of journalism or sociology. “There’s been a generational quantum leap in Kuwait,” says Al Qadiri. “The houses are not made of mud any more, but of concrete. People don’t sleep on the roofs of their houses. There’s AC
“My grandmother would get water from the well, waking up at 5am so that nobody would see her and so that her honour wouldn’t be in question. Then she’d come back before anyone else had woken up. She was illiterate, like most women of her generation. The idea of going to a university in America, as I did, was alien. She thought white people were demons, blueeyed devils, thought they were djinns and evil spirits. Then my parents saw the transformation from a medieval lifestyle to a nation state. My generation went one step further: many of us studied or moved abroad. Now the majority of the Gulf population is under 24. It’s a very youthful area.” Navigating the circuits of the international art world, making formally bold, genre-splicing, electronic music, being part of a two-man, two-woman production unit suggestively titled Future Brown (named after a metallic version of that colour that doesn’t exist naturally), Al Qadiri might seem to be an ambassador for future-lust amnesia. But certain memories can’t be wished away. Memories of arrests and disappearances, of dystopias and ashtray nations, blood in the desert, lingering apparitions. They lie, seething and barely suppressed, beneath the super-flat surfaces of her music. Asiatisch is out on 5 May on Hyperdub
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Currents maintains a different mood than the echoing moonage daydreams that made up Tame Impala’s first two LPs. While Parker made his name off of recordings that you could float in and out of—such was the beauty of their surfaces—this one invites a closer listen. On the whole, it’s a more heartfelt exercise, incorporating both the measure of Parker’s inward-looking examinations, and the pains they may have caused him. On the album’s emotional core, “Eventually”, big drums drop out and shimmering synth washes put a spotlight on Parker as he sings: “I know that I’ll be happier, and I know you will too—eventually.” I suggest that this is his breakup record—after all, since his last album, he parted ways with French singer/songwriter Melody Prochet—but he shoots the idea down. Kind of. “I wouldn’t say it’s a breakup record in the literal sense,” he half-dodges, before getting a little cosmic. “It’s more about this idea that you’re being pulled into another place that’s not better or worse. It’s just different. And you can’t control it. There are these currents within you.” Perched in a chintzy bar while a 60-year-old man in a tuxedo vest shakes two margaritas nearby, Parker is46hesitant to clarify who or what his songs are about, exactly.
But he’s more than willing to elaborate on the notion of transition, of breaking up with old ideas, of how being inside the music industry has given him a new perspective on how strange and fucked up that world can be. “Your morals on things change,” he explains. “When you start out you have this very black-and-white idea that people who are playing down-to-earth music are the ones that are keeping it real, and the ones making music for the masses—those ‘commercial pop sellouts’— are fake, so you pick a side. But the longer you’re in it, the more disappointed you get meeting people you had these high expectations of, and you realize it’s nothing like that at all.” Perhaps this moral realignment is in part due to plagiarism charges levied against Tame Impala last year, or issues involving missing royalties, or the fact that he was able to set up his home studio thanks to the money he made from placing a song in a Blackberry commercial. It’s all made Parker more willing to embrace making music for the masses: “If I could’ve had more conventional pop songs on this album, I would’ve.”
While Parker can talk equipment or studio tactics for hours, he’s much more reserved about his personal life. His father and mother divorced when he was 3, and Parker grew up with his dad and stepmother in Perth, the fourth biggest city in Australia. While his father dabbled in music—and was gifted with a Lennon-style singing voice—he also discouraged his son from doing it as a career, which led Parker to an unsuccessful and unfulfilling college stint studying engineering and astronomy. While his father passed away before he began recording Innerspeaker, Parker says he admired the inherently ‘60s feel of the first Tame Impala EP. As far as siblings, Parker says, “I have a full brother, a half sister, a half brother on the other side, a pretend sister, and…” I stop him right there—pretend sister? “My dad had a daughter in a marriage previous to my mom,” he explains. “But he went to war in Africa for a few months and when he got back his wife was pregnant. Five years later, my dad started getting ransom-style notes at work saying, ‘That’s my daughter.’ We got it checked out, and it turns out his wife had an affair while he was away at war, and it wasn’t really his daughter.” He pauses. “And my dad only told me when I was a teenager, so that’s why she’s a pretend sister.” Tame Impala bursted out from relative obscurity with Innerspeaker, a vivid debut LP that built the bridge to the festival stages from which they now dispatch their wavy roar. That album brought about all of the touchpoints that a revivalist rock record could hope for: strong melody mixed with Blue Album Beatles psychedelia, tugging basslines that gave the floaty music a little more weight, and a distinctly sharp drumming style that lent the music unexpected definition. In an era of anonymous rock frontmen, Innerspeaker established Parker as an unlikely star, the type of musician who inspires imagination. His gear is cataloged and fawned over. His romantic life is tracked on a fairly lively SubReddit. He’s sometimes heralded as the closest thing 2015 has to Jim Morrison, but, in real life, he’s a sheepish dude who could probably be a case study in next week’s “Rise of the Beta Males” thinkpiece—a chill rock guy who is actually pretty stressed out about stuff he’s not going to die from. Though his approach is studied and proprietary, he does not exactly radiate the sex-soaked intensity of a Rock God.
felt deeper, thicker, and more assertive, even if the lyrics could be hopelessly vague. Parker sometimes likes to think of himself as more of an electronic producer and arranger than a rock musician, which makes sense given his trajectory thus far as well as the less riff-hungry sounds of Currents. The new album feels more insular and personal while exuding a newfound sexiness, typified by the slow fingersnap funk of “‘Cause I’m a Man”. While Parker won’t admit what he’s made is good, per se—it’s part humility on his part, part pathos of a serial perfectionist—he admits that his horizons stretched in ways that feel like gigantic leaps executed on a specific scale. “I’m aware that there will be fans of my previous stuff for whom [Currents] doesn’t resonate with as much, because they’ve got their values set,” he says diplomatically. “But if I can convince a few diehard rock fans that ‘80s synths can fit over a ‘70s drum beat—if I can help them to look outside the square of traditional psych rock—then at least one mission is accomplished.” At a Coachella warm-up show in the artsy enclave of Pomona, Tame Impala’s typically unusual crowd shows up: college girls, old dudes with ponytails, a guy who works at a warehouse and is still wearing his Carhartts overalls. A teenager screams, “We need help! Someone just passed out!” and security guards reluctantly roll to the aid of some underage kids who got too fucked up, presumably on excitement and mushrooms. There’s a lot of people wearing face glitter. Everyone is revved up for the band, abandoning the conversations they performed during the opening acts. The crowd loses its mind as a pitched-down version of Elton John’s Lion King ode “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” blasts from the PA, and Tame Impala crawls onto the stage. Parker manages a “who me?” wave as he unhinges his guitar from its stand. For a guy who’s about to scorch the ceiling of a ballroom, he’s loosey-goosey. At one point, a bra floats up to the stage. Parker hangs it on a drum mic, and then, a few moments later, a thought hits him. “I almost forgot!” he calls out. “There was something written on it!” He nabs the bra. “There’s a phone number!” he exclaims. The entire room can feel him blush.
His second album, Lonerism, increased Tame Impala’s scope without diminishing its returns and made it clear that Parker was gaining a better sense of himself as a producer and engineer. These songs
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