56
Albums
17 13 16
06
12
MARK E Product of Industry Ghostly International
It now feels like a long time since Flying Lotus shimmied onto the scene, bringing his dislocated beats and the Brainfeeder label with him. Teebs was right there from the outset, with his debut album Ardour ticking some of the right boxes but somehow coming across a little floral and noncommittal. Behold, then, Estara – a quantum leap forward in confidence and a masterly set of sparkling, winsome electronica. Album opener The Endless is a gurgling beauty, while the ghostly, psychedelic Holiday (featuring Sydney-based artist Jonti) is a welcome progression for an artist who has previously eschewed vocal collaborators. The core of the album, though, is a pair of tracks – Shoouss Lullaby and SOTM – that Jon Hopkins would be proud to call his own. Intricate, looped acoustic guitars and twinkling, rhythmic bells nestle in the crackling fissures produced by machinery being bent to the emotional will of its operator. Although this is unapologetically gentle music, it takes balls to make tunes this reserved and refined. Dreamy and delicate, Estara elevates Teebs from Brainfeeder B-team to label leading light.
Last time we listened to Melbourne group HTRK it was on 2011 album Work (Work, Work), and they left us with the unnerving prospect that life is “only business baby, there’s nothing personal about it”. The sound on Psychic 9-5 Club is still sultry, impersonal and distant, but within more prominent vocals and instrumentation that occasionally borders on tropical there are glimmers of optimism. A HTRK album without the deceased, founding member Sean Stewart has a certain structure: Jonnine Standish’s breathy vocals, and Nigel Yang’s down-tempo, electronic soundscapes. And while Feels Like Love and The Body You Deserve are particular highlights, few individual tracks manage to make a strong impression due to the album’s consistently restrained formula. It’s surprising that a band who’re so self-conscious would release an album that feels like a collection of ideas or sketches rather than finished material. Maybe the sentiment of insecurity and instability created by something unfinished, unstructured or incomplete fuels this album. But given how far HTRK have come in the past few years, we’d hoped that they’d take this opportunity to push a little further.
Crown prince of the West Midlands dance scene Mark Evetts came to most people’s attention with his deft, floor-filling edits and remixes. Since the bountiful bundle compiled on the twin 2010 compilations on his own Merc label, the Birmingham based DJ/producer has pumped out exquisite material for imprints like Running Back, Spectral Sound and Needwant, each indelibly stamped with his signature blend of detail-heavy disco-suffused house. The PR puff that accompanies this full length debut for Ghostly International trumps up Evett’s geographical positioning, connecting the dots between Black Sabbath and the decline of the manufacturing industry and hinting at a record that thumps, pumps, and clumps along solidly. They’ve got it spot on, Product of Industry is just that: nine deep, dark, solid, ossifying groove-chassis’ that bask in the joy of repetition. It’s an essentially sturdy album, a set of low BPM rollers that chug through the fog of dry-ice cannons. A liminal space where innately euphoric piano house one-two chords mingle with spacey pads and ice pick sharp percussion; a heads down stomp of a record that, sadly, occasionally slows down into a plod. Happily, the highs like Kultra Kafe’s clubkosmische or the nearly-schaffel stomp of Myth of Tomorrow, just about outweigh the lows like the corny vocals that derail Being Hiding or the meandering weariness of Egamix.
! Adam Corner
! Gareth Thomas
! Josh Baines
TEEBS Estara Brainfeeder
HTRK Psychic 9-5 Club Ghostly International
FATIMA AL QADIRI Asiatisch Hyperdub
HERCULES AND LOVE AFFAIR The Feast of The Broken Heart Moshi Moshi
‘Sinogrime’ is a particularly ‘Asian’ – namely, Chinese-sounding – strand of grime. Pioneered by East London producers in the early 00s, sinogrime was defined by unhinged basslines and dramatic synth-strings, evoking images of the sound removed from its spiritual home of post-industrial London and placed in wildly exotic and whimsically ‘Other’ terrain. It’s remembered for being a genre that scarcely existed, passed on through early Wiley/Jammer tracks and later attributed the title by Hyperdub boss Kode9. While the sound is experiencing a renaissance of sorts in the UK due to the increasing level of hype surrounding a cluster of instrumental grime producers, this year none have endorsed the sound more than Kuwait-born multidisciplinary artist and musician Fatima Al Qadiri, who similarly channels the genre’s looming-yet-dreamy palette as she explores her own distant Asia. Following her vocal-led production as Ayshay (for which she twists Sunni and Shiite Muslim worship), the video game inspired gulf-futurism of Fade To Mind EP Desert Storm and the genre-busting Genre Specific Xperience, Al Qadiri presents a new exploration of musical lineage with debut album Asiatisch. Through Asiatisch’s warped orientalisms and distorted, faux-gerontogeous sounds she creates a vast and vivid world. Or, as she puts it, ‘a virtual roadtrip through an imagined China’. Whereas sinogrime arguably places its imagined China in the post-industrial future, Asiatisch nestles right into the clumsy re-appropriation of Asian motifs pervading Western media. As an album which weaves through the fabric of a fabricated mythology, Al Qadiri dissects the intricate tapestry of the Chinese musical world as seen through the ubiquitous Western lens. Dragon Tattoo, for instance, explores Hollywood’s muddled representation by spinning lyrics from Lady and the Tramp’s We Are Siamese into cooing RnB. Wudang – titled after the region from which the Kung Fu-indebted Wu-Tang Clan got their name – samples classic Chinese poetry, and the glistening Shanghai Freeway drives you through the city’s distant futurism. Haunting opener Shanzai, a cover of Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U that features nonsensical Mandarin lyrics, is as strangely addictive as it sounds. The album is at its very core an album to do with, and comprised of, cultural misrepresentation and sonic assimilation through various falsifications and mishaps. Yet by crafting her own enchanting and worryingly recognisable faux-oriental world, Asiatisch is Al Qadiri’s most insatiable statement yet.
Sometimes we think about 2008. Bianca came back to Eastenders, there was that weird new Indiana Jones movie and everyone thought the world might end because of that fucking massive scientific tunnel thing. DFA Records also released the thrilling self-titled debut from US disco/house project Hercules and Love Affair. Times have changed since then, and the group’s follow-up to 2011’s Blue Songs is now here. The nuances and intricacies that got people so excited six years ago are hard to find on The Feast… Any glimmers of raw sexuality or melancholic depth are overpowered by a senseless quest to see fists pumping. Melodies are stacked on top of lurid production in an on-to-the-next-one fashion that misrepresents the band and the genres they hold so dear. Hooks on tunes like Do You Feel The Same? and Think could work in a climate where they were hard to come by, but they aren’t. These kind of lifeless but easily digestable disco-house earworms crop up on the radio every single day. Hercules and Love Affair have shut down the party they started in 2008, and now it sounds like they’ve arrived late to one that’s been going on for a while.
! Anna Tehabsim
! Duncan Harrison