Now, to begin: I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of minimal per se. It has its moments, sure, but a lot of the output that might well be considered the bread and butter of minimal tech has always left me feeling, well, bored as shit, really. Which I guess is what separates those genres you love with a deep and abiding passion from those about which you simply know enough of the surface layer so as to appear loosely knowledgeable should the topic come up in conversation. “Oh yes, Reginald, that Dutch house sure is everywhere. I say, have you heard the track ‘Riverside’? What a bangor!” And such. For me, minimal has generally slotted in to the latter of these categories though; a realm of electronic music that I’ve flirted with periodically but have never been sufficiently intoxicated of/around as to actually get to the point of active label recognition. Kompakt/BPitch notwithstanding, but that’d be kinda like saying you were down with electro because you knew Ed Banger.

But – and with minimal I’ve found it is a hefty but, much like Roseanne’s (ZING!… I’ll let myself out)- when it’s good, it’s really good. Really, really good. Although, that notwithstanding, I do get the feeling that the sorts of minimal I tend to find myself enamoured of are probably those varieties largely scorned by the true fan. Not for me the skittering drums and subtle permutations of a Ricardo Villalobos LP (seriously, have you listened to Thé Au Harem D’Archimedé? Masterwork or not, it’s like dance music for the sedimentary rock set), no, what I want from my minimal is a healthy dose of stately melodic fruition. The Field nailed it. Gui Boratto ain’t half bad either. And now British newcomer Max Cooper is making a steady tilt at this maxed-out-minimal throne. Yep. He’s all like Simba from the Lion King taking down Scar with a drum machine and classical sensibilities.

Max’s music is exactly what you expect from a producer operating in the field – subtle, affecting, massively pretentious – but there’s still something immediate and raw about a lot of his output. These tracks somehow manage to be both melancholy and propulsive at the same time; they’re introspective but built to party, much like a chubby teenager in a Hawaiian shirt jacked up on bourbon and unleashed on an unsuspecting public… God, now there’s a night I wouldn’t want to remember even if I could. Yikes. Quite unlike that evening, Cooper’s techno is deep, moving, precise and filled with a compelling, dark energy. Which is to say, the tracks unfurl slowly, spending their first half inching ever on toward a state of sonic immensity before cresting the breakdown and suddenly dropping in to a resurgent bass thrum and nostalgia-ridden melody line that I could imagine tearing the living emotion out of your average 6 am Berghain punter. There would be tears and everything. They’re also produced with an eye for detail and texture that could perhaps be labelled ‘symphonic’, although maybe that’s just an overblown way of saying he uses strings an’ shit. Nonetheless, Cooper has recently finished up a remix for Michael Nyman, which I do feel goes some way toward shoring up his orchestral credentials. Of course the man has produced his share of more straight up tech offerings too, but I’ve found that even those seem somehow more compelling by contrast with the rest of his output.

But, really, all of that is three paragraphs of needlessly waffly prose to just say one thing: Max Cooper makes beautiful, hypnotic techno that should be listened to by anybody with even a passing interest in intelligently geared dance music. Now, with that out of the way, get it in ya’

Domink Eulberg – Daten Ubertragungs Kusschen (Max Cooper Mix)

Max Cooper – The End Of Reason

Portishead – Roads (Max Cooper Remix)

And because it was the first track of Max’s that I was exposed to, and potentially still the best, his just released remix of Hot Chip’s ‘I Feel Better’ is fucking superlative and should be listened to by absolutely everybody.

His tracks are all over Beatport, Juno, iTunes, et al, so go, explore, purchase and make Max Cooper a part of your life.

[Image courtesy of glass magazine]

My suggestion: don’t classify London three-piece Dark Sky under the heading of ‘Dubstep’, but rather under ‘Dubstep, because no-one’s really sure where else they should go’. An offshoot of London 2-step revivalists The Boogaloo Crew, Dark Sky find themselves kicking about in the hazy, electronica-laced outer boundaries of the dubstep canon. Their productions play to those increasingly widespread zones of dubstep where Rusko-esque danceability stops being the primary concern and the genre as a whole becomes a dumping ground for cheeky references and honest homage to the territories fought for and won by earlier generations of dance music.

Their first release, the double sided Something to Lose/Ghost Notes 7″/MP3 (out now on Black Acre Records), is a case in point. In the space of these two tracks, Dark Sky hove readily between loose ambience and bass-driven beatworks; they’re part Burial’s throw toward atmospheric two-step, part Ikonika’s blip-pop and part Zomby’s assiduous recreation of 1992 high rave. Which makes them sound awfully derivative, but their music still manages to be remarkably refreshing. Perhaps because they’re taking on so much at once. And, you know, actually succeeding.

Attached today is their underplayed, skittering and quite wonderful take on The xx’s ‘Crystallised’, as well as a garage meets new wave remix of a band named Mirrors Mirrors (according to the ID3 tags) about whom I can find, precisely, nothing. Cool track though…

The xx – Crystalised (Dark Sky Remix)

Mirrors Mirrors – Change (Dark Sky Remix)

As you could probably tell from this post, I had no end of love for Fuck Button’s ‘Tarot Sport’ last year, and even went so far as to crown it my Album of the Year to anyone who’d listen. And I’ll tell you something for nothing, sure it can be kinda tough to pin them to the ground, but once you do, septuagenarians make for great listeners. They loved my lists. The album itself was almost unimpeachably brilliant, but the demands of the modern music world mean singles must be released, so a few weeks back the Buttons put out the fourth track, ‘Olympians’, on super pretty coloured 12″, replete with band designed Magic Eye cover art. Oooooh. Ahhhh. The track itself is 11 minutes of soaring, cascading, almost overwhelming electronica, so it’s not really the most “radio friendly single” on the planet, although the release does include a sub-4 minute edit just in case an adventurous radio station feels like butchering what is a really quite remarkable piece of sonic art for the demands of the audio broadcast format. NOOOO! MAKE THEM LISTEN TO THE WHOLE THING, YOU FOOLS!

There’s also a couple of obligatory reworks included, the most notable of which is a gorgeously understated and almost antithetical take on the piece by J. Spaceman of British shoegaze demigods Spiritualized. It’s a quiet, guileless and warming song, although the latter of those might just be because of the included fireplace crackles. Either way, a more different aural experience to ‘Olympians’ it is hard to imagine, but perhaps because of that it feels like a perfect and necessary counterpoint to the relentless assault of the original. Music for the long, hungover drive home, or for a silent moment with a new lover. Both of which really, really could not be said about ‘Tarot Sport’.

Fuck Buttons – Olympians (Spaceman vs. The Olympians Remix)

And just because it’s a) an incredible piece of dance music; and b) a fairly succinct symbol of how much influence the mighty Andrew Weatherall had on Tarot Sport, here’s his remix of ‘Sweet Love for Planet Earth’, off the ‘Colours Move’ single taken from their debut album ‘Street Horrrsing’. In a word: epic. In another, less real word: awse.

Fuck Buttons – Sweet Love For Planet Earth (Andrew Weatherall Remix)

The single is out through ATP Records, and can be purchased in 12″ and digital formats.

So, when are they coming to Australia then?

My last post on The Glitch Mob, wasn’t exactly high on subtlety when it came to my my feelings regarding the West Coast’s premiere glitch trio (currently comprising of edIT, Ooah and Boreta). The phrases “the best and most exciting dance music I have heard all year” and “completely reformatted my approach to dance music” were both used, quite honestly and seemingly without irony, within the same 500 word article. So, understandably, I have met news of the impending May 25 release of their debut album ‘Drink the Sea’ with quite a significant level of excitement. Although admittedly it’s excitement mixed in with no small amount of apprehension: The Glitch Mob boys have made their names as remixers par excellence, and if the past few years of bloghaus mania have taught us anything its that exceptional remixers do not necessarily a good solo artist make.

Fortunately, the first single, ‘Drive It Like You Stole It’ has dropped and it’s pretty rad. Perhaps nothing of the level of say their STS9, or Nalepa or Matty G remixes, but hey very little is. Those three tracks easily outrank pretty much every piece of dance music I’ve heard over the last year, so it’s quite a pedigree to be measured against.

The eponymous A-side is The Glitch Mob in familiar overdrive mode – pounding war drums, dweeziling funk keys, grinding guitars, suction synths, a healthy dose of melodrama, creeping builds and their formidable brand of relentless, half-pace energy. It’s unarguable and reassuring: they can create their own ideas and have them stand of their own accord. The B-side, ‘Between Two Points’ is perhaps a little less convincing, seeming to be the obligatory “dance artist album” downbeat female chanteuse track, although with edIT onboard it’s at least a cut above the usual standard. His 2003 album ‘Crying Over Pros For No Reason’ did nocturnal atmospherics as well as anybody and there’s enough detail in here to save the track from being automatically relegated to the usual dustbin of such efforts, although to my mind it could easily have stood to be further glitched up. I’ve attached ‘Drive It Like You Stole It’, but you can buy both tracks over at The Glitch Mob store. I’m also including edIT’s magnificent ‘Dex’ from the ‘Crying Over Pros…’ album, just to show you what the man is capable of when left to his own devices.

The Glitch Mob – Drive It Like You Stole It

edIT – Dex

And as a final bonus, here’s ‘Here For Now’, a track from Of Porcelain (Ooah’s side project). It’s a simple affair, but moody and compelling nonetheless.

Of Porcelain – Here For Now

Now, who wants to bring these dudes out to Australia? Their live show is supposed to be fucking mental. No, wait, is fucking mental:

Album’s out on May 25. Keep your eyes peeled.

-luke

I have been meaning to write a post about Rainbow Arabia for quite some time. And now I am.

Good lord, what a redundant opening.

Not really sure what has precipitated my finally getting around to it; the initial oversight was perhaps more a symptom of having fallen off the music blogging bandwagon than anything else. As far as I can tell there’s nothing imminent due from husband and wife Danny and Tiffany Preston (besides a loose promise of a full-length in the second half of this year) and beyond that they only have two EPs to their name, totalling between them nine original songs since 2008. But, despite this, there’s no denying that Rainbow Arabia have been making some truly compelling dance music to date: semi-absurd, moody confections of Arabic instrumentation and African drums lensed through the prism of good ol’ fashioned indie electronica. The results are always curious and curiously funky, swinging beats coursing underneath an array of Arabic and Caribbean instrumentation with Tiffany’s oddly animalistic yelps sucking the tracks back into an uneasily primal groove. I guess it might loosely come under the ‘tropical’ banner (especially on last year’s Kabukimono EP), but it’s still quite unlike anything else I’ve been able to unearth and its novelty alone makes it worth checking out. The fact they’re as good as they are can really just be considered an added bonus.

First up today is perhaps Rainbow Arabia’s best known track ‘Omar K’, the first tune off 2008′s The Basta EP. Truth be told, it’s still probably the best thing they’ve done, but it’s a song of such ass-shaking inventiveness that it almost justifies the band’s existence in and of itself. I’ve also included the Kabukimono-era Ghosts on Tape remix to show off the track in a more straight-up environment. By which I mean throwing the vocals from the original over a kicking bass and break-laden nouveau dancehall backing. It’s still pretty strange, but a lot more slamming.

Rainbow Arabia – Omar K

Rainbow Arabia – Omar K (Ghosts On Tape Remix)

And for your further edification, here’s the loosely terrifying filmclip to Omar K. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: kids are evil.

And as a complete contrast, here’s the almost ironically named ‘Holiday in Congo’ (a holiday in Congo these days being next best thing to an oxymoron – nostalgia for the good ol’ days of Kurtz and friends perhaps?), a more regulation tropical effort that wouldn’t seem a million miles out of place on a collection of recent Swedish sunshine pop. Still not entirely sure where the Swedes get off producing music that summery, but this track really makes you feel like a holiday in Congo could be as simple and whimsical as a trip to the beach in high summer. With the woman who pretends to be your girlfriend but is actually A HASHSHASHIN FROM 11TH CENTURY PERSIA. It’s… peculiar stuff.

Rainbow Arabia – Holiday in Congo

Both The Basta EP and the Kabukimono EP are available from the usual sources. They’re worth checking out. And keep your ears open for the full-length due later this year. It’s going to be thoroughly intriguing to see how Rainbow Arabia flesh out their sound over the course of a more sustained offering.

-luke

What do 19th century French author Émile Zola and all round good guy Jesus of Nazareth have in common? They both loved the shit out of pseudo-gothic, shoegaze fuelled, electronic lady balladry, that’s what!… I don’t think it was in any of the regular gospels, but when all the disciples left him alone at the end of an exhausting day of miracle making, Jesus would crank that shit on max volume. It just helped him relax you know. Also, Mary Magdalene totally loved it.

Which is, I’m almost positive, why 21 year old wunderkind Nika Roza Danilova decided to produce under the name Zola Jesus. Because if there’s one phrase you might choose to describe her music, it would be ‘pseudo-gothic, shoegaze fuelled, electronic lady balladry’. Or PGSFELB for short. And to prove it, Danilova has just released the six-track and quite wonderful Stridulum EP on Sacred Bones Records. Sounding a bit like Bat For Lashes trapped in an echo chamber, Danilova’s music is a smeared out, slow burning exercise in atmospherics and longing. Her songs ooze by as an almost undefined mass, one folding into the next through a sea of desperately shadowy vocals, endless reverb, 80s power drums and melodramatic chord changes. It’s music for an empty night, or a full one; music that drips through the speakers in a smokey haze, both cold and inviting, seeming to render the world static in its wake.

It’s really very good.

In some ways her music is so of a piece that the question of which song I should attach feels almost like a moot point, but that in no way, shape or form should suggest that this is anything less than a gorgeously cast, well-rounded and hypnotic release from Zola; her music meshes without bowing to repetition, is captivating despite its monochromatic oeuvre. But still, for the sake of argument, here’s the third track ‘I Can’t Wait’. It’s perhaps one of the more straightforward ballads on the release, so probably as good a place as any to kick things off.

Zola Jesus – I Can’t Stand

You can procure the Stridulum EP from iTunes, Amazon and eMusic. Listen to it with a glass of wine in your hand while staring off into the middle distance. Which I’m actually doing right now. It seems to have been designed almost entirely for that state of affairs.

-luke

Melbourne’s premiere alt-electronic hub Roxanne has come a long way over the last three years, going from being a semi-derelict, fifth floor fire trap to being a semi-derelict, fifth floor fire trap with a lift, an absolutely kicking soundsystem and an impeccable line in local and international DJs and events. Boy, the number of brain cells that I have sacrificed at this venue. It reminds me of this time that I… I… I’ve forgotten what I was going to write. Oh well, nothing to worry about I’m sure *eye twitch*.

And to celebrate this momentous occasion, Roxanne are of course throwing a party. THIS FRIDAY i.e. FUCKING TOMORROW, PUT IT IN YOUR DIARIES PEOPLE. FOR TOMORROW. Oops. I’m shouting AGAIN. I wonder why that KEEPS ON HAPPENING. Mmmm, brain cells.

In keeping with their grand tradition of killer DJs, Roxanne have managed to finagle the mighty Golden Bug as the headliner, with more than able support from local heroes G.L.O.V.E.S. And a shitload of others. As you can well see above. Best thing about having Golden Bug and G.L.O.V.E.S. on the same bill? Golden Bug remixed G.L.O.V.E.S. last year. And it was rad. How rad? This rad:

G.L.O.V.E.S. – PYX (Golden Bug Remix)

For more of the above make you sweet way down to Roxanne TOMORROW NIGHT. Tickets are $15 and there’s going to be an hour’s worth of FREE Coopers Clear to get proceedings started. So you know, get down early and get into it. It’s almost definitely guaranteed to be better than lying at home in the foetal position, crying and masturbating while you clutch a half-empty goonbag to your chest like an Academy Award for loneliness.

Yeah, it’ll probably be better than that.

-luke

Sometimes these days I feel like the only time I swing through these pages is when I’m violently ditching something at you with the triumphant cry of ‘LOVE THIS LIKE I LOVE YOU’ (see Mob, Glitch and Buttons, Fuck). Which is part of the point of blogs I guess, but I do worry that you may construe my reckless effusion as being insincere. I assure you, it’s not. This has just been a good few months for music. That, and I FUCKING LOVE EVERYTHING.

But, ironic exaggeration aside, ‘Teen Dream’, the new Beach House album, is just… stunning. Really stunning. It’s not due out until late January next year and already it’s jockeying for my best album of 2009/2010 (leaks make for hazy ranking periods). I enjoyed their first major offering, ‘Devotion’, but had found it a little too wintry and sleepy overall, like the sole intention of the name ‘Beach House’ was to make a joke out of the album itself. It was beautifully produced certainly, and signposted a lot of the elements that make ‘Teen Dream’ such a profound pleasure, but in the end I found myself reducing the album down to being merely sleeping music. A role it filled very well, but in retrospect this may have been an ignominious end for quite a remarkable record.

Not so with ‘Teen Dream’, with which I’m willing to say Beach House may well have turned in the crucial album of this summer. Whereas ‘Devotion’ seemed to traffic in rain-drenched waves and overcast holidays, ‘Teen Dream’ coasts on hungover and hot Saturday mornings, lazy Sunday beers and summer girls. It’s like Delorean made a special effort to get his glum mate out of the dumps and inadvertently caused him to produce the best music of his life. Whereas once Beach House drifted from track to track, covering their songs in a monochromatic, icy blur, now they soar towards their choruses, each song an expression of some new-found confidence and optimism. The album title is indicative too; ‘Teen Dream’ owes a lot more to the nostalgic, John Hughes-tinged optimism of ‘Saturdays=Youth’-M83 than it does Atlas Sound (which may be a patchy comparison, but I discovered the two at the same time and they share a certain resonance in my mind). Although fans of their previous work will still be able to wallow in the familiar array of fuzzed out edges and tentative sentiment; despite this shift toward dreamwave/glo-fi/et al, the sonic template and songwriting aesthetic has remained largely stable.

The end result is a lush, gauzey and gorgeous album, filled with gentle crescendos and vocals of velvet softness. It’s music that you want to backstroke lazily around as you flirt awkwardly with the girls you used to love. The kind of songs that make you see your life as a film recorded entirely in Super-8, filled with dull lighting and hipster asides. Music containing the cautious optimism of your teen years and suffused with the occasional longing you have to feel that strongly and abruptly once again. An album that will prompt you to write as pretentiously as those past few sentences look on the re-read. Yikes. But all this and more awaits you when you listen to Beach House’s brilliant new album ‘Teen Dream’ (especially the pretension). It’s available on January 26th, but in the meantime I’ll leave you with my primary obsession from the record, the gloriously restrained anthem ‘Walk in a Park’. The song itself is beautiful enough – and certainly showcases Beach House’s new attachment to the world of major chords and semi-traditional songwriting – but when the final climax kicks in, you suddenly find the song recast in shimmering euphoria and endless longing and you begin to realise that you might actually be listening to something quite remarkable. Which the entire album is. Do keep your eyes out for it. I guarantee you, it will define your summers.*

Beach House – Walk In The Park

-luke

* Really, really, really not a guarantee

It’s been a big few weeks for Bertie Blackman. First she won Breakthrough Independent Artist of the Year at the Australian Independent Record Label Association Awards (a.k.a. the acronym defying ‘AIR Awards’. It’s sponsored by Jagermeister. Perhaps they just forgot some of their name). Then she won Best Independent Release at the Australian Recording Industry Association Awards (a.k.a. the far more semantically legitimate ‘ARIA Awards’). And now her next single ‘Black Cats’ has been remixed by Perth prodigy Shazam (previously seen here, here and here) and Sydney based party-starters Calling in Sick. I know which one I’d be more excited about. The ARIA. But the remixes are pretty rad too. Even better, we have them for you not one, not two, not even four, but FIVE days before their broad release.

That’s right, dear readers. You have yourselves an EXCLOOSIV. Stunning, I know.

Bertie by herself is an endearingly rambunctious indie-pop proposition with an edge of grit. With Shazam she’s a lazy afternoon assortment of arpeggiated sunshine synths. And with Calling in Sick she makes you feel like banging 2007 electro never ended. And with me, she’d be totally awesome, but she won’t respond to my very, very nice and in no way weird or intimidating sequence of love letters written in naught but Tolkein’s Elvish and magazine cut-outs. Bitch.

But the remixes are pretty rad too. Enjoy:

Bertie Blackman – Black Cats (Shazam Remix)

Bertie Blackman – Black Cats (CIS Remix)

-luke

Oh this is so good. This is so, so, so good. I’ll admit that I had wilfully avoided Fuck Buttons up to this point, partially due to the decidedly average name, and partially due to the fact that the entire idea of ‘noise’ as a genre makes me break out in hives. It’s kinda like my attitude to math rock – I can appreciate the art behind it, but when listening to it I am always faced with the burning question: when would I ever play this album for my own enjoyment? Noise-wise, everybody lost their shit for HEALTH recently, but I always found them a bit too fuzzed out, a bit too ragged to really enjoy; I could never properly settle in to what they were trying to do. Which is all part of the point, I guess, but that doesn’t necessarily make for a pleasurable aural experience. And from what I can understand, Fuck Buttons’ debut album, the critically lauded ‘Street Horrrsing’, was a bit more in this vein, albeit with a semblance of melodic overlays that have become their hallmark. Well, at least their hallmark within the noise scene; this shit ain’t Bach.

But now we have their sophomore effort, the cryptically titled ‘Tarot Sport’, and goddamn if they haven’t turned it on for this release. While a certain ‘noise’-iness still pervades the seven tracks on the album, the melodic drive has leapt to the fore, guiding the tunes through a stunning midpoint between the jagged, soaring electronica of ‘Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts’-era M83 and the relentless builds and sprawling climaxes of Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky. The triumphal key changes beloved of so much dance music charge most of the offerings on the album, but they’re buffeted on every side by arching waves of folded feedback and heavy, rolling drum lines. ‘Tarot Sport’ is essentially split into five songs that fit that profile, mingled with a couple of shorter offerings that show off the band’s more abrasive side. Not that these tracks are in any way bad, but when thrown up against the monument of the other set pieces on the record, they seem to pale into insignificance. All in all, quite amazing.

But enough rapturous description, here be music. I’ve attached penultimate track ‘Space Mountain’ for your perusal today. It pretty much does everything I’ve already alluded too but, potentially, better. It begins with drums pounding and echoing across the track, while an array of sharp, pulsing synths oscillate and shimmer over the top. Then, bar by bar, new drums, new synths and new progressions get steadily added in, before a bending, distorted guitar enters the mix after a couple of minutes, steadily blanketing everything in an almost overwhelming cloud of ragged noise. And then finally, exultantly, a dimly perceived high-end drops in at the five minute mark and goddamn if I didn’t nearly start crying when I first heard it. Shit was visceral. May I recommend listening to this very, very loud on a good set of headphones. Such is the nature of the track that you just want to keep on turning the volume up and up to try and fully understand what’s going on underneath it all. Which, at its best, is probably the miracle of noise. And this, I think, is noise at its best. Anyway, I provide this track with my highest recommendation. Enjoy.

Fuck Buttons – Space Mountain

This song pretty much shot them to the upper echelons of my ‘must see live’ list. So great. ‘Tarot Sport’ is out now. Buy it. If you like this track, when stacked up alongside everything else on the album it becomes truly magnificent.

-luke