SECURE SHOPPING
Techno deities James Ruskin and Mark Broom will release a collaborative album entitled Light Box in November.
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Walls’ self-titled debut set was one of the surprise success stories of 2010, a curiously atmospheric set that somehow felt both gloriously old-fashioned and unashamedly current. Dreamed up by Allez Allez man Sam Willis and Alessio Natalizia (Banjo Or Freakout), the first Walls album gently tip-toed between krautrock flavoured dark ambience, crackly electronica and occasional bursts of pin-sharp beauty. It was arresting stuff, all told – downtempo music that sidestepped clichés in favour of altogether more interesting sonic visions.
Here the London-based production partnership continue their rapid ascent with a second impressive full-length. This time round, they seem to have opted for a far more bright and breezy approach, largely giving the darker themes an elbow in favour of dreamy compositions that could easily be described as Balearic. That’s not to suggest that they’ve abandoned their founding principles, though; Coracle is every bit as experimental, daring and otherworldly as its predecessor, it just carries a more positive message.
Opener “Into Our Midst” is a good case in point. The backwards guitars and classic ambient noises recall the long forgotten Orb/Robert Fripp collaboration FFWD>>, but its steady pulse and quietly bubbling electronics evoke memories of Kompakt’s best slow trance releases. Throw in some discordant harmonizing and you’ve got something that’s more aesthetically pleasing than strangely unsettling. Elsewhere, there are more moments of divine inspiration. “Heat Haze” is hypnotic and blissful, all droning krautrock guitars (put, of course, through the mangler), pedal steel and drifting vocals, somehow drawn together by the most subtle of beats. “Sunporch” tiptoes towards the dancefloor impressively, adding the pair’s favoured guitars, pianos and wailing vocals to heavyweight Italo disco back end. It’s Kosmiche all right.
And so it goes on, variously referencing ambient, avant indie (think Animal Collective), wide-eyed electronica, cosmic disco and – texturally if not sonically – German techno. It’s an aural mix that impresses and inspires in equal measure, throwing up highlights with efficient regularity. “Raw Umber/Twilight” sounds like a chiming cosmic disco re-make of Bowie’s “Heroes” imagined by acid-fried musicians recalling a lost night with Terrence McKenna, whilst “Drunken Galleon” boasts so much simple beauty you’ll be hard-pressed not to raise a smile. Throughout, Coracle shuffles between sun-flecked Balearic beauty and quiet contemplation with consummate ease. It’s dreamy, out-there, odd and, at times, ecstatic. If you’re anything like us, it will make your heart sing.
Matt Anniss
With the Indian summer in full effect throughout London this week, it’s been a mercifully quiet week for news in the electronic music world, allowing the Juno Plus editorial a chance to ease out the hangovers accumulated from our second birthday last Friday.
Micachu will provide an EP of remixes to accompany Matthew Herbert’s forthcoming One Pig album, it has been announced.
On point New York label Minimal Wave have announced details of their next release, from Japanese synth artist Sympathy Nervous.
Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer/Peverelist Meet Tshetsha Boys review
by Juno Plus on 29.09.2011 at 17:23pm
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Compiled by Honest Jon’s co-owner Mark Ainley and Mark Ernestus last year, Shangaan Electro: New Wave Dance Music From South Africa collected several tracks of Shangaan, the electronic version of a traditional South African music with a massive following, despite its localised nature. When it was announced that Honest Jon’s were planning a series of Shangaan remixes, it probably had many wondering how its typical 180bpm speed could possibly be reconciled with the west’s more conservative 100-140bpm range. The results have been impressive, with Ernestus, Anthony Shakir and Oni Ayhun previously supplying reworkings that have used the source material to rebuild the tracks from the ground up, concentrating on tone and colour than more literal reworkings, and it’s telling that the series actively avoids the word “remix”.
This third 12” sees the unlikely pairing of Peverelist with Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer reworking the Tshetsha Boys. Following their album of reworks from German jazz label ECM, Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer are perhaps the ideal choice for a project like this, with a result that is far more danceable than that collaboration. The minimal bassline and hypnotic bounce on their rework of “Nwampfundla” is typical Villalobos, but the appeal lies in the snatches of melody and vocals from the original track which float in and out of audible range. These fragments capture the original’s melodic charm whilst filtering out its gaudier excesses and almost trick you into believing you’re listening at the original speed, such is the disassociative trickery of the production.
Peverelist’s remix is a complete curve ball – clocking in at under 120bpm it’s certainly not his usual fare, its nonchalant handclaps taking its cues from the more shuffling bass infused house that’s been coming out of Bristol recently from the likes of Kowton. His rework of “Uya Kwihi Ka Rose” goes even further into micro elements than Villalobos does, isolating a specific tone and subjecting it to a syncopated stutter that appropriates Shangaan’s body shaking marimba rhythms, and using his particular talent for stripping tracks right back, leaves a loose skeleton of the original. Like Villalobos & Loderbauer, he isolates enough melody to convey the spirit of the original, but shambling within a spectral reverb it takes on an eerie new quality.
Scott Wilson
Pioneer today announced the DDJ-ERGO-V, a USB-powered controller featuring a built-in soundcard which will carry the retail price of £429 including VAT.
Latterday R&S Records alumni Blawan and Pariah further cement their working relationship with the news of a new record label from the duo entitled Works The Long Nights.
Not content with releasing some incendiary music for the Eglo imprint, ace London producer FunkinEven has announced news of his own record label entitled Apron, with the first release from the man himself set for release next month.
Revered UK label Hyperdub has just posted the first instalment of a two part documentary about arch dub artists King Midas Sound.
Juno Plus has a pair of tickets to offer to the forthcoming Bedlam party in London, featuring a live performance from Kollektiv Turmstrasse.
Philly based psychedelic doods Pink Skull man the decks for the 18th mix in our podcast series with a near hour long all-vinyl excursion through recent disco and house burners.
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Despite his residency at London’s Plastic People, his championing of the current crop of young UK bass artists, and an obvious love for good dance music of all types, Four Tet (aka Kieran Hebden) isn’t really known for being a DJ. It’s probably fair to say that general conception of Four Tet’s sound stems from his Rounds era productions, but his career trajectory over the last few years has seen has material become gradually more dancefloor friendly, and anyone who has had the fortune to see him DJ will know that he just gets it. His Fabriclive mix is arguably up there with the most interesting in the series, and it’s clearly a statement of artistic intent from Hebden in the way that previous mixes certainly haven’t been.
The mix takes a strongly conceptual approach; moving between Fabric’s “rooms”, each half of the mix is joined by field recordings of the club itself. However, the mix’s joy lies not in its approach, but the sheer quality of the tracklisting. Anyone who has seen Hebden DJ will probably know that he has a love for UK garage, (that he has been known to unironically play the Shanks & Bigfoot hit “Sweet Like Chocolate” at Plastic People is proof of this) and garage makes up the majority of the mix. But there’s no dayglo chart hits here: instead the first half of the mix is devoted to dusty underground UK garage tunes lost in a pre-YouTube black hole.
There’s no real lead in as such, aside from the electro-acoustic tones of Michel Redolfi’s “Immersion Partielle”, and the mix begins in earnest with garage, and Crazy Bald Heads’ “First Born”. Surprisingly for a man whose productions are so steeped in melody, the first half is monochrome; even the inclusions from contemporaries Floating Points and Caribou, usually known for their own colourful excesses, are distinctly bass driven. In this sense the mix owes as much to techno as it does garage; the basslines are kept simple, beats are often clipped and glitchy, especially on KH’s “101112” and Genius’s “Waiting”, and offers a fascinating insight into the obvious influence of techno in early garage music.
The second half of the mix sees techno come to the fore, with selections from WK7, C++ and Ricardo Villalobos keeping things distinctly straighter. But the centrepiece to this section is undoubtedly Hebden’s own “Pyramid”, a straight up techno track which is possibly one of his most balanced productions to date. It also functions as a microcosm of the mix as a whole; being primarily steeped in murky bass tones, it mangles and clips its vocals in a similar fashion to the rest of the mix, whilst offering only a hint of melody – it’s undeniably one of the mix’s most exhilarating moments, and its scale perhaps conveys better than anything else on the mix the feeling of being in Fabric’s room one. Finishing with another Hebden original, “Locked”, it offers a particularly effective end to the mix; its melancholy, sun-drenched tones capturing the moment of stepping out into the unexpected light of a Farringdon dawn.
This mix has come at just the right time – the revival and re-appraisal of older UK garage sounds among younger producers has never been so popular, but its dark, mature tone shows that there’s more to this sound than saccharine vocals and neon synths. More importantly however, there’s no fetishisation of the music; quite simply Hebden has lived it, and it’s a mix that offers a love letter to his most treasured memories and influences.
Scott Wilson
Metro Area man Morgan Geist will follow up his 2010 Storm Queen hit “Look Right Through” with a second single featuring the vocalist Damon C. Scott.
Live At Robert Johnson, one of this year’s most consistently excellent labels, continue their Meilensteine compilation series with this unmixed selection of tracks from label boss Oliver Hafenbauer.
Parisian producer Onra will release his fourth solo album, entitled Chinoiseries Pt 2, via Irish imprint All City.
Any one who’s recently viewed the Steinberg Sequel Three promotional video will agree that the whole affair (incorporating a love story within a sequencer commercial) is a wee bit far fetched. However, we won’t let this cloud our judgment of a product that has been described as the Garage Band of Steinberg’s range.
We’ve got a pair of tickets up for grabs to this weekend’s Voodoo bash in East London, which will feature the first ever DJ set from Sully.
Cult cartoon network Adult Swim have teamed up with automotive company turned musical entrepreneurs Scion AV to present {Unclassified}, a free compilation of “rare or never-before-released tracks” from the world of dubstep and beyond.
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After the seductive, haunting tones of the Waiting For You LP, a full album’s worth of recreations of King Midas Sound from a barrage of powerhouse knob-twiddlers was always going to be an exciting prospect. Ahead of the Without You release, Hyperdub slip out this taster 12” to whet the appetite, and there’s few fans of the space Kode9’s label inhabits that won’t be salivating over these two versions alone.
With his own album twitching at the gates ready to be unleashed on Planet Mu, Kuedo brings his synth-laden delirium to “Goodbye Girl”. The former Vex’d man starts proceedings on a tart melodic line that is quickly underpinned by some monolithic bass tones. The somewhat mournful quality of the original manages to pervade the day-glo nature of the tools Kuedo employs, acting as just the right counterbalance to make for a bombastic slice of emotive beat music.
Mala, unsurprisingly, opts for a bleak, dread-fuelled take on “Earth A Kill Ya”, and does so to great effect for one of his most striking efforts in recent times. A menacing, drawn out intro peppered with ghostly tones kicks into gear with a minimum of fuss over a persistent sub stab. With typical flair, Mala lets an occasional lick lifted from a reggae track shed the briefest ray of light into the track before the creepy synth hook takes things back into the dark again. If you appreciate music written to conjure up demons then this has everything you need.
Oli Warwick
