Terre Thaemlitz (aka DJ Sprinkles) was one of the more illuminating surprises of this year’s CTM festival. Sitting down with Electronic Beats editor Max Dax, the musician, artist and intellectual called on his audience to consider the fact that browsers and operating systems affect usage and accessibility, as well as queer philosophy and her contempt for the music industry generally.
She also happens to play some excellent house music as DJ Sprinkles (when she’s not releasing the longest album ever) and will be appearing alongside other producers and DJs, Radioslave, Ripperton and Iam Pooley at London’s Oval Space on Friday, Oct 25.
Featuring a line up of artists aligned with, comparable to or good enough to be associated with the Future Bass and New Aesthetic art of the post-internet, it’s an event well worth checking out or tuning in to this Sunday, August 18.
New collaborative festivalVisions Festival is happening this Saturday, August 10 across three venues in east London. Oval House, London Fields Brewhouse and Netil House will present a range of artists including Haxan Cloak, Australian provocateur Kirin J Callinan and Molly Nilsson.
Most excitingly, Micachu‘s new production project with performer Tirzah will be appearing, following the release of their excellent I’m Not Dancing EP on Joe Goddard of Hot Chip’s Greco-Romanlabel.
Web 2.0 publication Muteis hosting a Summer Party at Limehouse Town Hall on Friday, July 26. The ‘In Search of the Mythical Party’ themed event will feature a performance by The Cult of Rammellzee, live PA from Atau Tanaka & Adam Parkinson and DJ sets from DJ Mavis and members of Break/Flow, Arcadia Missa and Spiritualized.
As the resident of the monthly ‘Deviation’ series, Benji B has championed the more experimental side of electronic music while embracing a full spectrum for a decade on the BBC. So between Al Qadiri’s Gulf War-inspired Desert Strike EP and Leary’s recent work on Kanye West’s Yeezus album, there’s certainly a lot here to draw from. Buy tickets here. **
There’s little doubt that South London has been a budding artists hub for some time now and Brixton is just another in its widening scope of cultural advance. That’s why we recommend checking out the Good GenesSummer Bash at Market House Brixton, this Saturday, July 27, not least for the fact its free.
I am not a man!/ I am not a woman!/ I am both/ I am neither/ If you don’t like it/ take a breather! So announces Miguel Gutierrez between work outs during his DEEP Aerobicsset. An acronym for Death Electric Emo Protest Aerobics, there’s no doubting the intention of Gutierrez’s celebration of the non-essentialist form and, by extension, the entire oeuvre of The Knife. Performing at London’s Roundhouse in support of the release of their explicitly Third Wave, post-structural opus to feminism gone AWOL, Shaking the Habitual, the Swedish duo give added meaning to the oft-quoted maxim of Gender Trouble author Judith Butler’s, “we are always in drag”.
As a band who’s very image is unclear -an outfit taken to hiding their faces behind masks, conducting interviews only through Skype -it’s no surprise that their second tour in 14 years and five albums would feature an interrogation of performance, authenticity and artifice. Hence, the enveloping ambient opener, cast into darkness and the following confusion of who’s performing what, if at all.
There are several people on stage in brashly glittering gowns and eye make up. The layers come off at times, back on at others –hanging limp on a coat hanger when uninhabited. A bizarrely shaped tuneless guitar is played through a rotating roster of dancers –male, female, ambiguous –while vocals are handled by all, occasionally taking turns in addressing the audience with the odd “hello London!” while Karin Driejer-Andersson’s voice is seemingly channelled through these flesh and bone vessels during songs. The lights go off for the droning ambience of ‘Old Dreams Waiting to be Realised’ and ‘Fracking Fluid Injection’, no staged distraction from the unsettling mood of frustration and urgency that the track generates as a twirling fluoro whistle tube becomes the focus and only light among the shadows. Performers take up drums sticks and pretend to drum, pose and mimic performance, with their silent instruments over a backing track.
Needless to say Dreijer-Andersson and Olof Dreijer are not there. At least not explicitly. It’s hard to say because no one’s wearing a name tag and having never been offered a photo, cross-dressing, wigs and masks make it impossible to distinguish fiction from reality. But then what is reality anyway? As Olof has repeatedly told press, everything’s a performance; pictures can be deceiving and captions misleading.
Depending on your disposition, you could interpret The Knife live as one big hoax perpetuated at the expense of its audience or a brilliant expression of the complexities of human interactions, the redundancy of categorisation and liberation of transcending them. Judging by the shamelessly cavorting crowd, trembling in unison with euphoria, it’s likely they’re of the latter camp. **
Whenever Colin Stetson takes one of his saxophones on his hands goosebumps fly all over the room, so it’s a highly gratifying surprise to learn that he will be bringing those long labyrinths of cyclic air to our European lands starting mid-November.
Visiting cities like Brussels, Madrid or Dublin (no London or Paris?!) Colin joins many other Constellation-affiliated bands in their winter European-conquest task, here in Madrid he’ll participate in the 4th edition of “Acoustic Space” taking place @ Reina Sofia on November 15th.
At the same time CST just published the following video from one of his performances last year @ Montreal’s Oboro Gallery in a cross-performance with mutimedia artist Brad Todd where he performs “The End Of Your Suffering,” from his EP “Those Who Didn’t Run”.
If you’re in France, The Netherlands, Norway, Finland, Ireland, Belgium or Switzerland then you maybe interested in knowing when he’ll be dropping by, more info this way.
There was an article in The Guardian earlier last month on the rising trend of “queer rap” and the uniqueness (and also intelligent move) in the way this new generation of American gay rappers have exploited and transformed the always influential ball culture into something mainstream.
And despite the critics and comments on the real lack of novelty last week was a pretty busy for the genre, LE1F presenting his clip for Wut, and Mykki Blanco doing the likes for Head is a Stone.
But funkier than these pre-defined clips was Ojay Morgan’s live @ Brooklyn’s Grand Streek Bakery store with the improvised percussion by Compton Timberwolf (needless to mention Njena Reddd Foxxx at this point). A couple of clips produced for The Fader which maybe, just maybe, you should consider watching.
If Django Django is the bedroom band they claim to be, then it’s clear they’ve been there a while. Even the domestic blinds they use for a backdrop to present Kim Coleman’s exceptional and in-vogue mystic computer graphics, on stage at Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen, comes to great effect. It offers the serrated projected imagery of a creepy, mutating smiley-face, cosmic scenes of intergalactic travel and virtual reality universes where the grass grows purple and the sky is a digitally generated illusion. Having wowed a Metronomy audience with their perfect execution and self-evident work ethic early last month, it’s hard to believe this is Django Django’s first headlining performance since relocating to London from Edinburgh in 2009. But immediately, following some of the primal Spiritualism of their soon-to-be album debut lead single, ‘Waveforms’, it becomes clear that this is a band with crossover potential.
Django Django @ Hoxton Bar & Kitchen - Nov 2011
Apart from the street cred-winning promise of diverse sonic exploration –with a dash of synth-operator Tommy Grace’s outlandish electro samples –there are what you might call some real rock n roll crackers of songs, like ‘WOR’. The riff-driven urgency of lead singer and guitarist Vincent Neff would have thrown down to Franz Ferdinand back in the early millennium. That, of course, is if ‘then’ was ‘now’ –where the US New Age vibe of weird 90s electronic artwork and sonic journeying is all the rage and David Lynch’s Transcendentalist music venture has made its debut. Of course, it could just be Neff’s Northern accent that brings said Glaswegian dance rockers to mind, as he amiably fills the air with banter as guitars are switched or a second synth is set up. Continue reading New New Age
Sorry for the ad on top of this great live performance by “Clinic” last week on “Morning becomes eclectic” (kcrw), but good videos have these kind of things….
Another poetry album for Antony…, a new beginning? So much to thank, so much to declare, so much romanticism embedded in his new album released tomorrow: Swanlights…
In its 10th edition Experimentaclub seems to have less of a push than its previous 2-3 editions, we’re noticing less advertising and communication from their main sponsor Caja Madrid (via La Casa Encendida) & a far less ambitious line-up brought by the director Javier Piñango… crisis maybe?
Anyway, we cannot ignore one of the best electronic & truly experimental music festivals that inaugurate the year in southern Europe: Experimentaclub ’10 in Madrid. It’s no Sonar ok? But the intimacy of listening to Chris Clark or Mouse on Mars (well known artists) in such a small venue (the Auditorium is barely for a couple maybe 3 hundred people at most and the terrace for around 100) for only 3€ is a unique and always aerial experience.
Experimentaclub is not only DJs & VJs, is also conferences & Workshops like a sound installation with Pablo Serret de Ena
This year the festival is focused on the memory and its power to create electronic music. Codes, sounds, instruments, aesthetics and previous electronic languages that the electronic of this new decade is reviewing in order to reinterpret from a new point of view… new electronic is always old re-dimensioned old electro?
This year will be a lot about how current electronic sounds play & experiment with the memory; present in the workshops but also brought by this year’s top artists: Carlos Giffoni (behind No Fun Fest) or Experimental Audio Research (E.A.R), the most experimental sounds from Sonic Boom.
A mix of past & present and a not easy way of mixing old & new…. Seefeel are making their comeback, Peter Rehberg’s dark project, black electronic metal by Stephen O’Malley (member of Sunn O)))… and the presence of Bernhard Günter one of the big names when it comes to art sound.
Most of you probably know Yann Tiersen only from Amelie’s soundtrack, but he’s about to release his 6th album “Dust Lane” next month, and we honestly can’t wait until October 4th (12th for USA, sorry)…. Continue reading Yann Tiersen live
