Jon Hopkins' new single: Light Through The Veins

Jon Hopkins’ new single Light Through The Veins is the first from his new album Insides – his first in four years and his first on Double Six records, a branch of Domino.

‘Light Through The Veins’ comes in at nine minutes. It is an epic piece of electronica, one which Coldplay were so taken with on hearing it that they used a reworked version on their latest album Viva La Vida and got Jon Hopkins to open for them on the final six months of their tour.

If their endorsement isn’t enough, then you can add mine to it, too. The opening of ‘Light Through The Veins’ is appropriately evocative of flashing lights or the pulsing and rushing of blood through the veins.

The crescendo isn’t rushed though, and the sense of anticipation that builds through the track leads to the unbearable expectation of an ecstatic, climactic peak, not followed by an explosion, however, but by the continuation of this peak, the track becoming a hypnotic and trance-like groove before finally relaxing into a melodic piece of ambient electronica.

‘Light Through The Veins’ is an exciting and beautiful release from Jon Hopkins and foreshadows a great new album, Insides.

‘Light Through The Veins’ will be released on 12” Vinyl and as a digital download on April 27th.
Jon Hopkins will be playing on May 15th in London at the Roundhouse (Short Circuit, A Taste Of Sonar/Erol Alkan Presents Disco 3000, with Moderat, Roland Olbeter and Tim Exile) and on the 26th at Dingwalls as a headline show.

Visit his website here and his MySpace here.

NYC by Kieran Hebden & Steve Reid - album review

NYC by Kieran Hebden & Steve Reid – album review

Before cementing his name in the world of electronica under the guise of Four Tet, Kieran Hebden found praise as part of the alternative, contemporary jazz-induced electronica of Fridge; and with jazz percussionist Steve Reid, Kieran Hebden finds a perfect partner for experimentation outside his solo remit.

NYC is Kieran Hebden & Steve Reid’s fourth album in three years which suggests they both get much enjoyment from the sessions they have together.

NYC was recorded over two days earlier this year at Avatar, a studio in the infamous Hells Kitchen location of New York.  The concept was to record an album that expressed Reid & Hebden’s impressions of New York, Steve Reid’s hometown.

NYC comprises of six tracks where Steve Reid is credited with playing percussion and Kieran Hebden credited as playing ‘electronics’. Hebden’s electric guitar screeches and loops along with keyboards, samples, loops and plenty of live knob-twiddling.

As with other Hebden / Reid collaborations, NYC is interesting, deep and emotional; and generally less commercial and more an acquired taste to the Four Tet releases.

NYC by Kieran Hebden & Steve Reid tracklisting:

1. Lyman Place
2. 1st & 1st
3. 25th Street
4. Arrival
5. Between B & C
6. Departure

NYC is out now on Domino Records

For more information visit www.KieranHebdenandSteveReid.com

Yo! Majesty

Club Action is the track that originally made Yo! Majesty a hit in the blogging world. It is now out as a single following the completion of their UK tour with Neon Neon. Club Action has been newly mixed for release and the 12” comes with four other remixes including one from Arctic Monkeys’ Matt Helders and one Stanton Warrions.

Yo! Majesty have been charged with the future of hip-hop. People expect big things from them. Some expect them to challenge male chauvinist dominance in hip-hop (Yo! Majesty are an all female,  Christian, lesbian group), some expect them to reinvent the stagnant scene, some just to send club dancefloors into ecstasy with their spitting words, intense sounds and challenging rhymes.

Club Action is the first single from “Futuristically Speaking…Never Be Afraid”, their debut album which was released to high critical acclaim earlier this year. It is an in-your-face speedy rap single.

Over fairly tinny beats and simplistic, Shunda K and Jwl B aggressively spit out their lyrics about ‘Club Action’. In the background, the girls holler and shout, making this sound like a universal call to arms, though against what abominable force never particularly becomes clear.

For those expecting a revolution, you will have to wait a little longer before Yo! Majesty really hit their stride, though the makings of a revolution are there. I can’t see a huge gap between this and Missy Elliot, for instance, but it is already a huge step to be moving away from the 50 Cents of this world.

Club Action is released on Domino Records on 12” and digital download. To hear Yo! Majesty, visit their MySpace.

Optimo (Espacio), the Glaswegian nightclub

The Glaswegian nightclub Optimo (Espacio) has put out a mix on Domino Records by their resident DJs and founders Twitch and Wilkes called Sleepwalk. It creates an individual listening experience outside of the usual subterranean possibilities of their nightclub.

Celebrating ten years of Optimo (Espacio), Sleepwalk is eclectic whilst remaining firmly ambient and spiritual. Unlike the ecstatic, sweat-filled nights of Optimo, this is firmly for the individual, and is best listened to in solitary surroundings – an autumnally damp West End flat in Glasgow, a wintry city café, a grey seascape.

The mix promises to be a wonderful blur; a psychedelic experience; a conceptual mix that binds the genres – looking at the tracklisting Duke Ellington, Arthur Russell and a version of ‘Ring of Fire’ all jump out and you wonder how they will emerge from the cold, sparseness of the opening tracks – a glorious recording of sea-sounds seamlessly becoming an electronic ambience track by Nurse With Wound.

Well, for the most part, it works. The progression through these sounds is mostly well achieved. The move from the distance of the opening tracks to the inner-psychadelia of the later songs is pulled off well.  A fantastic song by Future Pilot AKA called ‘Nothing Without You (Terry Bina)’, and one by Ethiopean jazz artist Mulatu Astatke follow the move from cold to warm without much deliberation. The consistent clarity of Sleepwalk also promotes this solitary world where nothing is spoken, only sung. Less consistent are the inclusion of earlier tracks where the vocals dominate, and the cover of Ring of Fire to sound like a 1950s Kraftwerk appears out of place at the end of the mix.

Overall, this is wonderful mix by Twitch and Wilkes, that shows their recognition of the individualist nature of music as well as the shared element (shared music, shared sweat, shared lips) that comes in clubs.
It is as if it were a mixtape put together by an unknown part of yourself in order to show you that self. And at the end, it wishes you a loving goodnight with the final track ‘Sleepwalk’ by The Lady Vanishes.

Optimo’s Sleepwalk is out now on Domino Records on CD and is perfect listening for those who love downbeat electronica, ambient and conceptual music, and exemplary mixtaping. With Christmas approaching, it’s an art we could do with being reminded of.

Optimo have several dates around Scotland listed here and they will also be playing Fabric in London on the 12th of December.

Un Día is Juana Molina’s fifth album, in a career dedicated to following a most inspired and inspirational muse. It’s twelve years on from her debut, ‘Rara’ and, if that album perhaps struggled at first to find an audience, then that audience has grown surely and strongly with the albums that have followed.

But it’s not that Juana Molina has made concessions to the marketplace, or chased a more accessible sound; as is often the case with visionary artists, instead the world has caught up with her, the pop landscape shifting to create a new context, where the joyous ‘pop’ elements of her music make immediate sense.

Juana Molina’s new album is something of a peculiar experience for its listeners, as well as, perhaps, for its creator. The album is best listened to as a whole, and as in its title, meaning ‘One Day’, there arises a great sense of joy and hope from the album. At just eight tracks, the fifty minutes of music, though not particularly varied in style or pace, transport you into Juana Molina’s world, and help you to imagine your own.

The songs move seamlessly from one to the next, the human voice being their primary instrument. At one time, Juana Molina can be heard as an accompanying drone in the background, in offbeat notes more rhythmic than tuneful, and singing both melody and harmony (Listen to ‘¿Quién? (Suite)’ and ‘Vive Solo’). This is human music, coming from a human background, offset against a digital, electronic background. But it’s not a clash of sounds; on ‘Un Día’ electronica finds its place alongside the human voice – both are inextricably and hypnotically intertwined, so much so that at times it is difficult to tell what is human and what is electronic.

Being Argentinian, I guess it would be easy for Juana Molina to be pigeon-holed into the neglected ‘world’ genre, where great music ferments in a sub-underground before being released into the underground, then possibly making it into the mainstream. However, artists such as MIA, Amadou & Mariam and Sigur Ròs, for whom this to a greater or lesser extent has been the case, have severed the barriers between Western pop music and so-called ‘world’ music, and this may allow Juana Molina’s actually quite Western music to be less indiscriminately sidelined.

Juana Molina sings in Rioplatense Spanish on all of her five albums, which even if you can speak, is fairly difficult to understand in her lyrics here, as her voice tends to get lost in the mixes.

However, not understanding appears to be the point. Take these lyrics from the subtle title track ‘Un Día’: “One day I will sing the songs with no lyrics and everyone can imagine for themselves if it’s about love, disappointment, banalities or about Plato.”

It is for the listener to take from it what he will, and the multitude of layers of electronica and voice means that you will most probably find what you want on this record. Think an earthier, more rhythmic version of Sigur Ròs.

‘Un Día’ is out now on Domino Records

Benny ‘Adventure’ Boeldt

Adventure – Adventure album review (Carpark)

Adventure is the pseudonym of 24-year-old Benny Boeldt from North Carolina, USA.  While Benny Adventure is a member of the Wham City Arts Collective in Baltimore, Adventure is his debut solo album.

Adventure is a sure fire return to the early 1980s where analogue synthetic sounds were the order of the day.  But Adventure owes more to those early computer game consoles ZX Spectrum and Sega Genesis than to Depeche Mode or the Silicon Teens.

Lo-fi synth melodies play happily over driving drum machine beats and bouncing synthesizer basslines.  This is nostalgic feel-good factor music for those old enough to be revisiting their mis-spent youth or introducing retro analogue electronic soundscapes to a generation of polythonic ringtones, the Crazy Frog and Nintendo Wii’s.

Tracks like Travel Kid would be more at home on an 8-bit computer game soundtrack for Manic Miner or Jet Set Willy than an album released in 2008 – which means this release is wonderfully out of time.   I love every track.  In fact I love everything about this album.

Benny ‘Adventure’ Boeldt has captured the essence of this sound perfectly.  For someone so young I can only assume there is a real love and affection for what he has discovered.

If you like the retro synth pop and nostalgia of Hot Chip but want to explore further and veer away from commercial sounding underbellies, check out Adventure.  But be careful it might be the start of a slippery retro gaming slope.

How can it fail to raise a smile with titles like: Travel Kid, Battle Cat and Jurassic Park City?

Listen to tracks from Adventure.

Max Tundra – Parallax Error Beheads You

Max Tundra – Parallax Error Beheads You – Album Review

A parallax error is a discrepancy between what you see and what is really there, due to the line of view.

This conflict between reality and subjectivity epitomises Max Tundra’s current album, “Parallax Error Beheads You”, as you are plunged into a fantastical world of lo-fi blips, retro analogue sounds, and Nintendo 64-esque break-neck speed tunes, contrasted next to the lonely, very much worldly sounding voice of Max Tundra a.k.a. Ben Jacobs.

Track two, the current single, “Will Get Fooled Again” (great title) darts between this real and virtual world both lyrically and musically.

“Will Get Fooled Again” opens with the standard distortion of a guitar, followed by tinny electronic drums, finally to be completely replaced by the glitches of what sounds like some kind of toy keyboard.

Equally, the lyrics “I found a girl on Google image search” contrast, in the bizarrely effective way that Max Tundra somehow manages to pull off, the clash of virtual and real worlds.
It is six years since Max Tundra’s last album “Mastered By The Guy At The Exchange”, but age has by no means mellowed him. Trying to define each song is a nightmare.  In each new track a thousand, instruments, riffs, time signatures, and genres are to be heard. Track four “My Night Out” starts off with a definite jazz angle; “The Entertainment” begins as an indie ballad but turns into a 90’s dance track after fifty seconds; and on “Which Song” Jacobs messes about with a gloriously melancholy sounding pop melody, contrasted by synth sounds that could easily be from a Mario Kart race.

“Parallax Error Beheads You”comes with an endorsement from Final Fantasy (Owen Pallett’s pseudonym shows his mutual inclination for virtual gaming). For me this comes as little surprise – the extrovert violinist’s description of the first time he saw Max Tundra pretty much sums up how it feels to listen to Parallax Error Beheads You:

“He put on a mask, wrapped himself up in tape and played forty minutes of music made mostly using Amiga sampler tracker software from the late 1980s [...] I was completely wasted and ended up passing out on a beach in my underwear.”

Max Tundra’s “Parallax Error Beheads You” is not an easy album to get into, and at times it is hard to ‘get’ Max Tundra. But there are two ways in which to really enjoy this album. One, you get wasted, listen to it like you are trapped in a game of Super Mario, pass out and wake up on the beach in your underwear; or two, as a quite touching and disturbing depiction of the clash of the real and fantastic in the head of a lonely child. Unfortunately, I live quite far from the beach.

Highlights are “Which Song”, “The Entertainment” and ten minute epic “Until We Die”.

The album is out now on the Domino Records label, and upcoming shows with Hot Chip promise to be quite an experience.

Will Get Fooled Again is taken from Max Tundra’s forthcoming third album Parallax Error Beheads You, which will follow on 13th October.

When asked about working with Max Tundra, Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy, ex-Arcade Fire and Last Shadow Puppets arranger) said:

“Max and I met in Barcelona in 2005 at Primavera Sound.  His slot was  at 4am. He put on a mask, wrapped himself up in tape, and played  forty minutes of music made mostly using Amiga sample tracker software  from the late 1980s.  There was virtuosic melodica playing, Pointer Sisters-style singing, and an eight-minute version of “So Long,  Farewell” from The Sound Of Music. I was wasted and ended up passing  out on a beach in my underwear. When the sun rose, I woke up with dried merengue and sand glued to my hair, and in a daze, I realized that I had just witnessed nothing less than the best music performance of my life.”

To listen to the wonderous world of Max Tundra visit www.myspace.com/maxtundra

The Count & Sinden - new EP Hardcore Girls

The Count & Sinden are set to release Hardcore Girls, a brand new 3 track EP on13th October showcases their love of all sorts of club music, from garage to r n’b, from hip hop to grime.

‘Hardcore Girls’ is the sound of the much hyped Baltimore breaks scene, evolved, displaced and mutated as only The Count and Sinden know how. Fronted by the hottest thing out of Baltimore since The Wire, 17 year old wild child of the mike, Rye Rye.

She has been touring the states with MIA and, now signed to Interscope, she is set to do big things. Her unique and energetic vocal is treated to one of the duo’s best bumpy bass grooves and the combined effect is nothing short of devastating.

Another new school talent picked up on by The Count and Sinden is Ny. Bubbling on the UK underground, she fronts the hardcore, jungle inflected soul that is ‘Fool In Love’. This is pop music for the now and tomorrow, a classic love song set to a raucous jungle inspired backing track which has become a live favourite over the summer.

Yo Majesty – Kryptonite Pussy 12″ US Import & Digital Release Only

The new five track EP from Yo Majesty, the Tampa Florida based hip hop girls with attitude is available on 12″ US Import.

Forget Salt n Pepa, this is Shunda K. and Jwl B. – bass in yer face.Two girls ready to punch down the male dominance of hardcore hip hop with a real punk arse attitude that Afrika Bambabaata would be impressed with. This is the most exciting hip hop I’ve heard for a long time.

The music of Yo Majesty is widely speaking a mash of hip hop, rap and electro beats. Hip Hop meets 80’s electro beats, hard and raw. Shunda K.and Jwl B. with their crude, sexploitative lyrics are given a real raw production by London-based electronica duo Hard Feelings UK (David Alexander and Richard Winstanley).

Yo Majesty pressed their first official release, the Yo EP, in 2006, and in 2007 they toured alongside CSS and The Gossip. Now in 2008 they have released a 12″ vinyl available on US import only – Kryptonite Pussy.

Break Bread & Hey There Girl are favourite tracks. But all 5 tracks are worth listening to. There’s no time for slacker tracks. All five tracks on the 12″ EP are available to listen to on the Yo Majesty MySpace site.

The 12″ precedes their debut album which is due for release in September.

Yo Majesty is hard as nails. But I bet in real life they are kittens.

For more information visit www.yomajesty.com