Podcast 788: Dawn Razor

Dawn Razor, the alias of Ruslan Fomichev, has been a regular on the XLR8R pages since we launched our submissions portal in 2018. An enigmatic Russian artist, Ruslan grew up in a small town called Naro-Fominsk on the outskirts of Moscow, and he found house and techno through old school rap and hip-hop. His journey in music began around 2003 when he began playing records at local parties, with a focus on breaks and trance, but it wasn’t until 2008 that he started trying to actually make music. “I didn’t have any musical background so it was all kind of self-studying and a poke method,” he tells XLR8R. His first records, experiments in prog-trance, came under his Adam Antine alias, but his pathway changed in 2015 when he moved towards electro, techno, mutated bass, and modern breakbeat as Dawn Razor. After a handful of single-track compilation releases on Hypnotic Room, Intelligenzia Records, and ARTS, he has put out material on R & S Records and Planet Rhythm Records. Last year, he shared “20for20,” via XLR8R+, fusing broken-beat grooves with razor-sharp percussion alongside tracks from STL, Enrica Falqui, and Nemo Vachez—and we thought now would be a good time to get him in for a podcast.

As a touring DJ, Ruslan is an adamant explorer of breaks, bass, and trance, and this mix, recorded in his home studio earlier this month, is no different. Across its one-hour run-time, Fomichev sprinkles his soon-to-be-released work alongside some of his favorite heaters from close friends.

01. What have you been up to recently? 
Recently, I’ve been working on new music and preparing for upcoming performances. I’ve been collaborating with other artists in some exciting projects.

02. How was your 2022? 
2022 was a challenging year but I was able to keep creating music. It was hard to keep up with my studio production regime so lots of 2022 releases are the ones I completed years ago.

03. Where and when did you record this mix? 
I recorded this mix at my home studio in about few weeks ago.

04. What setup did you use? 
I used Ableton as my primary DAW with two Allen & Heath Xone K2 controls and an Ableton Push.

05. How did you choose the tracks you’ve included? 
I chose tracks based on what I felt would create an interesting journey for the listener. I wanted to present the variety of sounds that inspired me during recent years, including fresh stuff from my favorite artists together with some old heaters I always use in my sets. There’s lots of my own material, both released and forthcoming, but also tracks from my friends. This mix is mostly broken beats of all kinds, from UK breakbeat and electro to dubstep and even jungle-flavored stuff. There’s also some post-trance vibes.

06. How does it compare to what we might hear you play live? 
My DJ sets tend to be a bit more improvisational and can include more unreleased music and remixes, but this mix really shows all the influences that take place in my performances.

07. What’s next on your horizon? 
This year I’ve decided to pay more attention to my Adam Antine alias because I have lots of stuff with a more slow-groove house and breakbeat mood. I have some exciting music coming out soon on some great labels and I’m also looking forward to playing more live shows.

XLR8R Subscribers can download the podcast below. If you’re not an XLR8R subscriber, you can read more about it and subscribe here.

Tracklisting

01. Adam Antine & ArcheTEch “Gradient” (Unreleased)
02. Dawn Razor “Fatherhood” (Cosmo Lopez Remix) (Diffuse Reality)
03. Szare “Leaden Sky” (Original Mix) (Frozen Border)
04. Dawn Razor “Typhoon” (Scuffed)
05. Rnbws “Bounce Your Body” (Unreleased)
06. Zia “Fracture” (Alexi Delano Remix) (Turbo)
07. Dawn Razor “Arp it Up” (DEXT)
08. Kareem El Morr “How to Bring Down Your Government” (Rakim’s Stay in Bed Mix) (RFR Records)
09. Boulderhead “Golden Light” (Yellow Island Records)
10. James Shinra “Ekko” (Analogical Force)
11. DD 2 “Infinite” (The Final Experiment)
12. Dawn Razor “Dobroe Utro” (Unreleased)
13. Hatewax “ID” (Unreleased)
14. Dawn Razor & ArcheTech “Wide Open” (Unreleased)
15. Sensient “Madmans Playroom” (Sensient breaks remix)
16. Graze “Coax” (New Kanada)
17. CW-A “1212-Dehex” (Parachute)
18. Rnbws “54321 V2” (Unreleased)
19. Commoner “Gurumier” (Unreleased)
20. CRAZED (BR) “808 Do Vapo” (Yellow Island Records)
21. Inigo Kennedy “Tribulations” (Ultranoise Remix) (Bazovoe Techno)
22. Soul Edifice “Come On” (Vernacular Records)
23. Errortica “Welcome to the Family” (feat. Neverpais) (WARNING)
24. Low Tape “This” (Unreleased)
25. Justin Jay, beez & Nick D “Hi Yuhhh” (BangersOnly)
26. Pugilist & Tamen “Lithium” (DEXT)
27. Dawn Razor & ArcheTEch “Intervals” (Unreleased)

Jayda G to Release New Album on Ninja Tune

Photo: Nabil Elderkin

Jayda G is set to return with her album, Guy.

Guy brings Jayda’s own voice and words more prominently into focus than ever before, across 13 tracks that draw on her house, disco, R&B, and soul roots while emphasising her pop song-writing sensibilities. She produced it with Jack Peñate, who has previously worked with the likes of SAULT, David Byrne, and Adele, with contributions from Lisa-Kaindé Diaz (of Ibeyi) and Ed Thomas.

The album is interspersed with archival recordings of her late father, William Richard Guy. Those recordings, made shortly before he passed away when Jayda was just 10 years old, form the bedrock of the album’s narrative, capturing a small snapshot of the American experience, told through the eyes of a young African American man.

Through a combination of direct quotes and Jayda’s lyrics, she paints a picture of his life: growing up in a rough Kansas neighborhood and his various interactions with neighborhood bullies, the police, and local authorities (“Scars,” “Circle Back Around”); from being married and enlisted in the Vietnam War by the age of 18 and returning to find his wife with another man (“Heads Or Tails,” “Lonely Back In O”); moving to Washington DC where he had a side-hustle as a nighttime radio DJ only to be inadvertently caught up in the 1968 race riots (“Blue Lights”); and finally his new life in Canada where he married Jayda’s mother and sought to better not just his own life but those of his children and community too (“Meant To Be”).

The album also pays tribute to Jayda’s Grandmother, and the resilience of and strength of Black women (“When She Dance”), and examines not just the grief of her father’s passing (“15 Foot”) but also what researching his life and listening to these tapes posthumously has meant to Jayda (“Your Thoughts,” “Sapphires Of Gold”).

“I wanted the album to be a blend of storytelling, about the African American experience, death, grief, and understanding,” explains Jayda. “It’s about my dad and his story, and naturally in part my story, too, but it’s also about so many people who wanted more for themselves and went on a search to find that. This album is just so much for people who have been oppressed and who have not had easy lives.”

Guy is Jayda’s second album, following Significant Changes on Ninja Tune in 2019.

Tracklisting

01. Intro
02. Blue Lights
03. Heads Or Tails
04. Scars
05. Interlude: I Got Tired Of Running
06. Lonely Back In O
07. Your Thoughts
08. Interlude: It Was Beautiful
09. Meant To Be
10. Circle Back Around
11. When She Dance
12. Sapphires Of Gold
13. 15 Foot

Guy LP is scheduled for June 9 release. Meanwhile, you can stream “Circle Back Around” in full below and pre-order here.

AIDA and Nesa Azadikhah Spotlight Iran’s Female Producers with V/A Compilation

AIDA and Nesa Azadikhah, who recently delivered an XLR8R podcast of deep, psychedelic techno, have curated and released WOMAN, LIFE, FREEDOM, a compilation spotlighting Iranian female producers.

Available through the pair’s Apranik Records, the digital release spans 12 cuts of electro, techno, breaks, ambient, and experimental. AIDA and Azadikhah both contribute, as do Meshcut, Golbon Moltaji, Sharona Lico, and XEEN.

The goal of the project is to raise awareness of the bravery, talent, and limitations of female musicians under the Islamic Republic’s Regime, as well as the brutal killings of people who have been speaking up.

“As a group of Iranian women, this fight is closest to our hearts,” we’re told. “We release this collection in solidarity and towards a fight for a free Iran and aim to raise awareness about this revolution through music. The theme of this collection is power, defiance, and ferocity and can be heard across all of the tracks. This is the energy with which Iranian women continue to push for freedom.”

Proceeds will be donated to charities supporting struggling women in Iran. The first organisation is an Iranian charity dedicated to helping women and children recovering from domestic violence, addiction, homelessness, and societal distress.

Tracklisting

01. SarrSew “Wronka”
02. KUCHULU “Raven”
03. MENTRIX “BE MAHSA BE NIKA”
04. Roody “Nazanid o”
05. AIDA “None of Your Business”
06. ROW92 “Tensionless”
07. Sharona Lico “Freedom”
08. Golbon Moltaji “Sepahbod Xorshid”
09. Meshcut “Dream in Dream”
10. XEEN “Urn”
11. Nesa Azadikhah “Sarnevesht”
12. Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi “Emanation”

WOMAN, LIFE, FREEDOM is available now. You can order it here and stream it in full via the player below.

AD 93 Welcomes Joanne Robertson

AD 93, formerly known as Whities, will release the new solo album of Joanne Robertson, a musician, painter, and poet based in Glasgow, Scotland.

Robertson regularly collaborates with her friends, most recently with Dean Blunt on Black Metal 2 and Sidsel Meineche Hansen on Alien Baby. Her music forms from “improvisatory moments of expression,” we’re told.

Blue Car is a collection of songs from her archive of unreleased solo recordings. Similar to Painting Stupid Girls, her last solo album, released in 2020, these tracks attempt to record the moment, and where she was at emotionally that day, similar to diary entries. She wrote them over the last 10 years.

Tracklisting

01. Blue Car
02. Band Sit Together
03. Take Me In
04. Jeans
05. If It Feels
06. Crossroads
07. Street Empty
08. River Shock
09. Bay
10. Little Talkin Do You Know

Blue Car LP is scheduled for March 10 release. Meanwhile, you can stream the opening track in full below and pre-order here.

Avalon Emerson Launches Pop-Leaning Project Avalon Emerson & The Charm

Avalon Emerson has launched her new project, Avalon Emerson & The Charm.

Avalon Emerson & The Charm is the first time that Emerson has put herself, her emotions, and her voice into the spotlight. She sees it as an ever-shifting collaboration. On stage, it means performing live with her wife, Hunter Lombard, and old friend Keivon Hobeheidar.

“The Charm has no fixed roster and no fixed rules,” we’re told. “It’s a vehicle for expression and connection, with Emerson at the helm.”

To launch the project, Emerson has shared “Sandrail Silhouette,” which is co-produced with Bullion.

The seed of the track started in Los Angeles a couple years ago, with Lombard strumming on her Jazzmaster guitar and Emerson plucking some chords on her Hydrasynth. Emerson brought the snippets into the studio with Bullion and they added some drums and Emerson wrote some vocal melodies and lyrical thoughts of things that were on her mind. Then a couple of days later, Hobeheidar came into the studio and they played him the sketch and nearly instantly he wrote the cello parts.

“It really all came together basically that day,” Emerson recalls. “It was really encouraging to feel like we got to the heart of something like this so fluidly and beautifully.”

The track launches Another Dove, a new label Emerson has launched with long-term affiliate and AD 93 founder Nic Tasker.

“Sandrail Silhouette” follows 060, Emerson’s recent EP on AD 93, and Eternal September, her collaborative release with Anunaku as A+A.

Tracklisting

01. Sandrail Silhouette

“Sandrail Silhouette” is available now.

Tzusing Signs to PAN for Second Album

Tzusing will release a new album on PAN next month.

绿帽 GREEN HAT is the Shanghai-based artist’s second full-length, following 東方不敗 on L.I.E.S. in 2017. It spans 12 intense, club-ready tracks and marks his first album for Bill Kouligas’ Berlin label, which put out his joint effort with M.E.S.H., Split, in 2019.

Conceptually, the release meditates on China’s complicated history of patriarchal heteronormativity, and how these archaic double standards continue to “dominate the culture in pervasive, often invisible ways,” we’re told.

Growing up between Singapore, Taiwan, China, and the US, Tzusing was living in Chicago when his love of music turned into an obsession. After relocating to China for work, he cut his teeth DJing at The Shelter in Shanghai and began refining his musical signature. A slew of EBM-inspired 12″s on Ron Morelli’s L.I.E.S. imprint were followed by his 2017 debut album. You can read more about him in his XLR8R studio feature here.

Tracklisting

01. Introduction
02. 趁⼈之危 (Take Advantage)
03. 偶像包袱 (Idol Baggage)
04. Muscular Theology
05. 孝忍狠 (Filial Endure Ruthless)
06. Balkanize
07. Interlude
08. Clout Tunnel Feat. Suda
09. Exascale
10. Gait
11. 戴綠帽 (Wear Green Hat)
12. Residual Stress

绿帽 GREEN HAT LP is scheduled for March 31 release. Meanwhile, you can stream “孝忍狠 (Filial Endure Ruthless)” in full below and pre-order here.

Chris Korda Teams Up with André Baum on Foom

Foom, the Berlin label of Benjamin Freeney, today presents Forgive The Night, an EP of four raw, emotive club-tracks from Chris Korda and André Baum, a producer from New York who forms People People with Gulp.

Produced in Berlin, the EP was made using an ADX1 analog drum machine programmed on-the-fly with Korda’s polymeter sequencer, with Baum’s vocals added on a vintage microphone.

The EP comes with a remix from Korda, a Perlon artist whom we featured on XLR8R here.

Last year, Freeney contributed to the XLR8R podcast series, which was ripe with deep and dubby selections.

Tracklisting

01. Forgive The Night
02. While We Wait
03. Forgive The Night (Chris Korda Version)
04. Reprise

Forgive The Night EP is available today. You can order it here and stream it in full below.

Hakuna Kulala to Release Debut Album of French-Ghanaian Vocalist PÖ

Hakuna Kulala, based in Uganda, will release the debut album of French-Ghanaian vocalist PÖ.

Living between France and Uganda, Pö, who is member of electronic pop duo Poko Poko alongside Congolese producer Rey Sapienz, creates her enveloping soundscapes almost exclusively with her voice. Looping it into hallucinatory textures, she juxtaposes transcendent shimmers with raspy, post-punk bulletins and quick-fire industrial rhythms.

Cociage, which is her debut release, showcases a confident hybridization of vastly different sounds, from rap and noise to ambient and traditional folk. We’re told that it’s “steeped in cross-cultural history but feels frighteningly new.”

Tracklisting

01. The Harvest
02. Cociage
03. Over The Clouds
04. Wind
05. Klafouti
06. Pleasing You
07. Fuck Jungle
08. Nuit Blanche
09. Galivanting
10. Koundo

Cociage LP is scheduled for March 3 release. Meanwhile, you can stream “Cociage” in full via the player below and pre-order here.

Podcast 787: Nesa Azadikhah

Nesa Azadikhah, based in Tehran, Iran, is perhaps best known for her work as founder of Deep House Tehran, a platform dedicated to shining a light on her country’s thriving electronic music community. She has been playing traditional Iranian instruments since she was six and began DJing around a decade later. In the years since, she has established herself as one of the country’s most in demand DJ-producers, regularly touring through Europe and the Middle East. More recently, as a co-founder of Apranik Records, she teamed up with AIDA to curate a compilation entitled WOMAN LIFE FREEDOM, a collection of original music by all Iranian women artists, gathered in solidarity with the fight of Iranian women for freedom and justice.

For this week’s XLR8R podcast, recorded in Georgia at the start of February, she’s compiled a mix of deep, psychedelic techno and emotionally charged club tunes, pulling in music from Deniro, Skee Mask, Robert Hood, and more.

01. What have you been up to recently?
This month is going to be very busy for me I have some gigs I’m going to this weekend and next week also. I’m also working on my new EP.

02. What have you been listening to?
Classical and jazz until noon, then searching for new tracks to update myself. Electronic, house, techno, and electro mostly. This is my routine for every day.

03. Where and when did you record this mix?
I recorded this mix in Georgia at the start of February.

04. What setup did you use?
I mostly work with Pioneer CDJ 2000s with an Allen & Heath Xone:PX5 mixer. But when time is tighter I use Ableton Live as it gives me what I need faster!

05. How did you go about choosing the tracks?
This is the first time I’ve used mostly techno tracks. I never do that; I always try to mix and match but this time I wanted the whole thing to be more about techno music. It’s been a new journey for myself and I hope everyone likes it!

06. Where do you imagine it being listened to?
As I listen to these kinds of mixes in the car while driving, I imagine people can do that too. Also I propose listening to this set in the gym while working out.

07. What’s next on your horizon?
I’m the founder and creator of the Deep House Tehran and I have this label called Apranik Records with my friend Aida. What I want for these two is for them to grow and shine more every day. And as an Iranian woman I would love to have more opportunities to be the voice of women from my country.

XLR8R Subscribers can download the podcast below. If you’re not an XLR8R subscriber, you can read more about it and subscribe here.

Tracklisting

01. Rosa Anschütz “Polished” (Umfang Remix) (BPitch)
02. Skee Mask “A14 vs CB” (IIian Tape)
03. Taupe “Jigsaw” (ÆX x Delsin Records)
04. Kineta “Extensions” (Amniote x Ute)
05. Deniro “MPC Tracks 1” (Self Reflektion)
06. Stojche “Test of Time” (Tangible Assets)
07. T_st “Closer” (Loopdeville)
08. Bambounou “Cascade” (Bambe)
09. Errortica “Robot” (Global Warming Records)
10. Estella Boersma “The Wave” (Lobster Theremin)
11. Marcal “27-4” (Suara)
12. Robert Hood “A.M. Track” (M-Plant)
13. Justin Berkovi “Backshredding” (Perc Trax)
14. Georg-i “Tools” (Felt)

Photo: Leko Tchkonia

Rrose Unveils New EP and Album with a Studio Mix

Rrose will release a new EP ahead of an album.

Tulip Space, which is the first solo release from Rrose (a.k.a. Seth Horvitz) since 2019’s Hymn to Moisture album, “combines dancefloor and experimental elements with a confounding cohesiveness,” we’re told.

The opening track clocks in at 133 BPM and is generated from a single distorted kick drum sculpted to form multiple layers of percussion. With the addition of a single hi-hat and snare drum, Rrose proceeds to melt the dancefloor.

The Bandcamp edition of this release contains two exclusive, alternative versions of “In Place of Matter.” It precedes a new album called Please Touch, with more information to come soon.

Alongside today’s announcement, Rrose has shared a studio mix that contains tracks from both releases. The mix started with an initial live take but it was combed over meticulously with automated filters and effects.

“There is rarely a point when only one track is playing,” Rrose says. “I always try to find mixes that feel like a new track emerges from the combination.” Here is an overview of the automation session.

Tracklisting

01. A Row of Cylinders
02. Squared
03. In Place of Matter
04. In Place of Mortar
05. In Place of Matter Half Life 68 (Bandcamp Exclusive)
06. In Place of Matter (Mixed Matter 136+102) (Bandcamp Exclusive)

Tulip Space EP is scheduled for February 10 release. Meanwhile, you can stream a handful of the cuts below and pre-order here.

You can view a tracklisting for the mix here.

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