Page 50 – XLR8R

Yu Su, Hidden Spheres, and Speaker Music Have Remixed Francis Harris

Francis Harris has released Thresholds Remixed, a package of remixes of his Thresholds album.

Released on Harris’ own Scissor and Thread label earlier this year, Thresholds is an album steeped in drone textures and electro-acoustic explorations. It’s also far removed from the dancefloor, and to remix it Harris has enlisted some of his favourite boundary-pushing artists from the fringes of electronic music.

First up is Manchester’s Hidden Spheres’ remix of “Earth Moves,” which is flipped into a pulsating slice of electronica. Yu Su, the up-and-coming producer currently living in Canada, takes the same track on a different journey, resulting in a slinky, affecting piece of music that eventually falls into a deep groove.

Speaker Music, the moniker of DeForrest Brown, Jr., wraps up the package with two reworks of the album’s title-track.

The “Rhythm Remix” focuses on the original’s brass washes, and adds a thick, playful bass rhythm.

The “Studio Soul” remix is more a free-form piece of audio manipulation and editing, resulting in a transportative piece of work that compliments the original track.

For more information on Harris, check out his XLR8R podcast here, and his long-form interview here.

Tracklisting:

01. Earth Moves (Hidden Spheres Remix)
02. Earth Moves (Yu Su Remix)
03. Thresholds (Speaker Music Rhythm Remix)
04. Thresholds (Speaker Music Studio Soul Remix)

Thresholds Remixes LP is available now. You can stream the release in full below and order it here.

Rochelle Jordan Delivers Remix Album Featuring Kaytranada, LSDXOXO, and More

Rochelle Jordan will release Play With The Changes (Remixed), a reimagination of her 2021 album, Play With The Changes.

Defying easy genre categorisation to create a project full of slinky, dancefloor burners that channel her UK roots, Play with the Changes is reminiscent of the Los Angeles-based artist’s childhood nights spent listening to her brother’s 2-step hymns from the other side of the bedroom wall. Sonically, it spanned sampledelic ’90s pop, vintage UK house, and garage.

Now, one year later, Jordan delivers a remix package featuring Kaytranada, &Me, Machinedrum, LSDXOXO, Soul Clap, and more.

To coincide with the announcement, Jordan has unveiled the package’s lead single, “Something” remixed by Byron The Aquarius, who flips the track into a twinkling four-to-the-floor groove, reiterating Jordan’s original thesis for Play With The Changes: “without experimentation, innovation is impossible.”

The album lands on TOKiMONSTA’s Young Art Records.

Tracklisting

01. Situation (&Me Remix)
02. Dancing Elephants (DJ Minx Remix)
03. Got Em (Sango Remix)
04. Count It (KLSH Remix)
05. All Along (Kaytranada Remix)
06. Nothing Left (Kingdom Remix)
07. Lay (Machinedrum Remix)
08. Love You Good (Remix) feat. LSDXOXO
09. Next 2 You (Sinistarr Remix)
10. Already (Things You Say Remix)
11. Broken Steel (Soul Clap Remix)
12. Something (Byron The Aquarius Remix)

Play With The Changes (Remixed) LP is scheduled for September 16 release. Meanwhile, you can stream “Love You Good” (Remix) feat. LSDXOXO and “Something” (Byron The Aquarius Remix) in full via the player below. Pre-order is available here.

Sun Ra Arkestra’s New Instrumental Album is Geared Towards Post-Covid Healing

Sun Ra Arkestra will release their new album in October.

Living Sky marks the American jazz group’s first new recording since their 2021 Grammy-nominated album, Swirling—which was their first studio album in over 20 years. Recorded in June 2021 at Rittenhouse SoundWorks in Philadelphia, it features a total of 19 musicians, including a strings section. It was mixed and mastered by three-time Grammy winner Dave Darlington.

The album was commissioned by producer Ahmet Ulug, who has a long history with the Arkestra, dating back to the 1980s when he regularly listened to the group in Philadelphia and New York, and promoted their Istanbul show in 1990. After retiring from the music industry a few years ago, the current state of the world moved Ulug to step back into the fold, launching Omni Sound.

Omni Sound quickly reached out to Marshall Allen, Sun Ra Arkestra’s musical director, to commission an instrumental album from the group, requesting sounds that were “spiritual and hypnotic” and to that effect “downtempo, melodic, and grooving.” The music is geared towards healing in the post-covid era.

Living Sky includes the the first instrumental recording of the Arkestra’s “Somebody Else’s Idea,” today’s lead single, originally recorded in 1955 and again in 1970 for proper release on 1971’s My Brother The Wind, Vol II.

Tracklisting

01. Chopin (Frédéric Chopin)
02. Somebody Else’s Idea (Sun Ra)
03. Day of the Living Sky (Marshall Allen)
04. Marshall’s Groove (Marshall Allen)
05. Night of the Living Sky (Sun Ra)
06. Firefly (Marshall Allen)
07. Wish Upon A Star (Leigh Harline)

Living Sky LP is scheduled for October 7 release. Meanwhile, you can stream “Somebody Else’s Idea” in full below and pre-order here.

Podcast 758: Damian Lazarus

With the latest Ibiza season in full swing, Damian Lazarus is back at the decks. For several decades, Lazarus, the London-born DJ-producer and label head of Crosstown Rebels, has used the Spanish island as a canvas upon which he can share his most exciting club music. Since sneaking onto the decks uninvited at Space in 2001, he’s carved his name into local folklore with his residencies at CircoLoco at DC10, where he’s closed the season for years. On any given Saturday this year, you can take a cosmic trip with him in Hï Ibiza’s club room, alongside Black Coffee.

As anyone who knows Lazarus as an artist can attest, his inspirations are deep and varied, traversing drum & bass, jazz, electro, soul, house, techno, and everything in-between. You can see this across his releases, including Flourish, his latest album, and Crosstown, where he’s welcomed anyone from Irish singer Róisín Murphy to Jamie Jones, Maceo Plex, Laurent Garnier, and even Craig Richards. In April, he released the soundtrack to Beijing Spring, a documentary film that is written, produced and directed by Andy Cohen and co-directed by Gaylen Ross. But it’s perhaps most evident in his DJ sets, and all of it harks back to Lazarus’ immersion in a multitude of scenes, from his early days in London’s drum & bass movement, to his role as a figurehead in the Electroclash scene, and more recently house and techno.

For this week’s XLR8R podcast, Lazarus has delivered a segment from his opening at Hï Ibiza, in April. It was his first set on the island in some time and his USB sticks were filled with new and original music that he’d either been sent or found, and he couldn’t wait to play out. The best Lazarus sets are not so much wild parties but deep, sensory experiences, and this particular recording falls into that latter category: expect just over 90 minutes of previously unheard tribalistic house music coming from the likes of Pale Blue, Matador, Serge Devant, and Jonathan Kaspar, curated by a master of the genre.

01. What have you been up to recently?
Summer is in full swing and I’ve spent the last month or so based in Ibiza. I’ve been busy in the studio working on some new remixes and I’ve been traveling around Europe playing some amazing parties.

02. What have you been listening to?
Demos have been coming in thick and fast these last few months, so much of my time has been listening to new unreleased music and signing some of them. Other than that, I’ve been enjoying the forthcoming debut album from Miraclis on the new Secret Teachings label.

03. You recorded this mix live in Ibiza. What made this particular set so memorable?
For most people this was the first set heard back on the island following two years off due to the pandemic. It felt like a huge relief to be back and a great opportunity to reset musically and introduce people to a snapshot of where my sound is at in 2022.

04. Specifically where and when did you record this mix?
At the opening party of Hï Ibiza, which was called Better Together, where I played a 90-minute set in the main room alongside The Martinez Brothers and Black Coffee.

05. You’ve told us that this mix is full of unreleased exclusives. Can you talk to me about the tracks you’ve included?
I had spent the first four or five months of the year gathering new music, much of which will be released on Crosstown Rebels and Rebellion later this year. The set includes music from Pale Blue, Matador, Senzala, Rosalia, Serge Devant, Dennis Cruz, and Jonathan Kaspar. There’s also something from myself and Gorgon City.

06. What’s up next on your agenda?
My weekly residency with Black Coffee every Saturday in the Club Room at Hï Ibiza continues to go from strength to strength and our plans for Day Zero Masada on September 16 are coming together nicely. I have a very exciting year going on and the music I am continually finding and playing seems to be getting better.

XLR8R has now joined Mixcloud Select, meaning that to hear the podcast offline you will need to subscribe to our Select channel to listen offline, or subscribe to XLR8R+ to download the file. The move to Mixcloud Select will ensure that all the producers with music featured in our mixes get paid. You can read more about it here.

Full XLR8R+ Members can download the podcast below. If you’re not an XLR8R+ member, you can read more about it and subscribe here.

Loraine James Reinterprets American Composer Julius Eastman on New Album

Loraine James will release a new album in October.

Building Something Beautiful For Me pays homage to American composer Julius Eastman, who quietly passed away in May 1990, out of the spotlight and still a young man. Only a portion of his music remains but, across eight new tracks, James has reinterpreted, reimagined, and responded to his key works for the Phantom Limb label.

Phantom Limb are long-term fans of both Eastman and Loraine James. Speaking in similar tongues as young, gay, Black creatives in a challenging environment, the two musicians are “bound closely together,” the Brighton label says, despite a six-year gap between their lives ever intersecting. Using their connection with Eastman’s surviving brother, Gerry, the UK label began this project last summer.

James was offered a zip drive of Eastman originals, courtesy of Gerry Eastman, plus Renee Levine-Packer and Mary Jane Leach’s illuminating 2015 biography, Gay Guerilla, and transcribed MIDI stems courtesy of Phantom Limb founder James Vella.

We’re told that the resulting album “carries the Eastman torch with finesse and sensitivity,” and that James employs samples, melodic motifs, and inspiration from Eastman’s canon. James includes the original Eastman title in many of her tracks, appending the source material in parentheses to mark the lineage of the work.

James is a London-based producer who has released a string of albums and EPs since 2015. She released her third album, Reflection, on Kode9’s Hyperdub. More recently, she adopted the moniker Whatever The Weather and released a self-titled ambient album for Ghostly. You can read more about her in her XLR8R podcast here.

James will be playing selected tracks from the album for a special live performance, collaborating with the London Contemporary Orchestra at Queen Elizabeth Hall in the Southbank Centre, London on October 2. Tickets are available here.

Tracklisting:

01. Maybe If I (Stay On It)
02. The Perception of Me (Crazy Nigger)
03. Choose To Be Gay (Femenine)
04. Building Something Beautiful For Me
05. Enfield, Always
06. My Take
07. Black Excellence (Stay On It)
08. What Now (Prelude To The Holy Presence Of Joan D’Arc)

Building Something Beautiful For Me LP is celebrated for October 6 release. Meanwhile, you can stream “Maybe If I (Stay On It)” in full below and pre-order the release here.

LYZZA Explores Her Experiences as a Black Woman in the Music Industry on Alt-Pop Mix-tape

Amsterdam based, Brazilian-born producer and vocalist LYZZA will release a new alt-pop mix-tape.

All 10 tracks of Mosquito capture LYZZA’s experiences as a Black woman within the music industry.

Having felt misunderstood and unaccepted in the past, recalling the feeling of “being too loud” in situations, LYZZA explores the notion of preconceptions, social dynamics, and how so many people are misunderstood in their day-to-day life.

“The way you look can bring so many preconceptions that don’t apply,” she says, “but you can end up playing into it without meaning to if someone talks to you in a certain way.”

While exploring this observation, LYZZA found inspiration the mosquito. “Because I am black and make alternative music, I identify with the disruptive and intrusive nature of a mosquito. The fact that I look the way I look, make the music I make, and you know who I am means somehow I’ve been able to penetrate through the noise and bias.”

Mosquito comes shortly after LYZZA shared “Lucky You,” which marked her debut release for Big Dada, the Ninja Tune sub-label that relaunched last year.

As part of the announcement, LYZAA has shared “Deserve It” featuring Spanish trap singer La Zowi, alongside a music video directed by Thyago Sainte. In the video, we see LYZZA exploring different dynamics of power in which a helicopter represents what would be the mosquito.

Tracklisting

01. Blush Me Out!
02. Lucky You
03. For When I Fall Again
04. Deserve It (feat. La Zowi)
05. Cheat Code
06. Eraser
07. Mind 2 Lips
08. Hold Me
09. Heathens Call (feat. Backxwash)
10. Ressaca

MOSQUITO is scheduled for September 16 release. Meanwhile, you can stream new single “Deserve It” today and pre-order here.

Four Tet’s Text Records Welcomes Hagop Tchaparian

Four Tet’s Text Records has released a new EP from Hagop Tchaparian.

Tchaparian’s music mixes techno with field recordings of his travels through Armenian and Mediterranean culture. He has been gathering these sounds for years, accumulating them with his phone or whatever he had to hand. He would isolate sounds from videos that his friends sent, like an Armenian wedding clip that showed members of the party jumping over a fire while a drummer played in the background. He would also regularly stop street musicians to ask if he could record their playing, like the women playing the qanun, a harp-like Arabic string instrument, and sometimes he would record with professional musicians playing specialist instruments like the zurna.

Tchaparian also visited places important to his family, like the Lebanese village of Anjar, where his father’s family took refuge after being driven out of the Armenian-Turkish town of Musa Dagh in 1939, documenting his own steps on the gravel roads his father once walked. The result is the sound of a man “chasing his heritage around the world,” we’re told. The release hangs on the notion that lo-fi techno can be the “right canvas” for conveying these experiences.

Through his teenage years, Tchaparian played guitar in Symposium, a ‘90s punk band. Symposium had a few years of success, and there were big enough to open for Red Hot Chili Peppers, but it was just enough for Tchaparian to become disenchanted with the music business.

Before that, though, he’d enjoyed a misspent youth in London’s club scene, where he became friends with a tour manager to Four Tet. Tchaparian would make the occasional remix that friends like Four Tet would play in their DJ sets, but working on original new music wasn’t a priority. That was until he’d gathered these little snippets of recorded sounds.

GL / Raining is Tchaparian’s first original music, and it precedes an album, Bolt.

Four Tet included one of the tracks, “GL,” in last week’s Essential Mix, as well as another Tchaparian track called “Round.”

Tracklisting

01. GL
02. Raining

GL / Raining EP is available now. You can stream the release in full below and order it here.

Pantha Du Prince Reflects on the Natural World on New Album

Hendrik Weber, better known as Pantha du Prince, will release a new album, Garden Gaia.

Garden Gaia is the German artist’s first solo album since 2020’s Conference of Trees. We’re told that it adds a new, forward-looking perspective to his work, which began in 2004 with Diamond Daze, his first album.

Like Conference of Trees, which was Weber’s first album on Modern Recordings, Garden Gaia is an “artistic exploration of nature.”

Weber describes the release as “an investigation with the means of music about the earth as a vision of a perfectly functioning garden.” He collaborated with different musicians in different locations on each track.

“My music is about raising consciousness, about describing the reality of life and the lost paradise through the means of music,” Weber adds. “It’s about entering a free space and developing a maximum degree of openness and sensitivity to our bodies, to our mental states and the atmosphere that surrounds us. It’s about mindfulness and a high level of awareness towards what’s happening around and within us.”

Alongside the announcement, Weber has shared “Golden Galactic,” which he recorded “during a really special moment,” he says. “I was awake and this golden shimmer slipped through my fingers and turned into sound. I kept playing and playing on a synthesizer while listening to myself play. Then I listened to this music with Friedrich Paravicini. Afterwards, he composed strings for it: it’s like a musical dialogue.”

Tracklisting

01. Open Day
02. Crystal Volcano
03. Start A New Life
04. Blume (Bendik HK Edit)
05. Mother Drum
06. Heaven Is Where You Are (Bendik HK Edit)
07. Liquid Lights
08. Alles Fühlt
09. Golden Galactic

Garden Gaia LP is scheduled for August 26 release. Meanwhile, you can stream “Golden Galactic” in full via the visualiser below and pre-order here.

Young Fathers Share First New Music in Four Years

Young Fathers have shared “Geronimo,” a new single.

“Geronimo” lands four years after the Scottish group released Cocoa Sugar, their third album.

The group, comprising Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole, and G. Hastings, recently reconvened in the studio for a run of uninhibited, open-ended studio sessions. “Geronimo” is the first song to be completed from these sessions, and it lands as a standalone single.

“It’s a track about contrast, because life is contrast, pushing through, giving up, all at the same time,” the group explains in a statement. “Wanting everything and then wanting nothing, then wanting everything again. It’s kind of reflective of where we are at the moment, trying to remember how to do this again.”

Young Fathers won the 2014 Mercury Prize for their debut album, DEAD.

Tracklisting

01. Geronimo

Geronimo is available now.

Podcast 757: Quimbie

There’s little we can say about Quimbie, other than that he’s a mysterious artist who forms part of Janx Records, based in Germany. He crossed onto our radars last year with Sunday Fiction, a riot of warm chords, dusty samples, booming bass, and infectious rhythms. Earlier this year, he shared via XLR8R+ “Gloria Fake,” a refined sketch from the album’s sessions, alongside exclusive tracks from D:fferent Place and Ana Helder.

In terms of background, all we know about Quimbie is that he was introduced to music through his father, who’d pull him away from playing with LEGO to show him his favorite records. He currently works as a sound engineer and makes music on the side. Towards the back end of 2020, he reached out to Philip from Janx, whom he’d known for a while, and told him that he had a concept album filled with music that he’d made over the last few years.

“I kinda like that I am not a professional musician,” Quimbie tells XLR8R. “Most of my life time I am doing other things than sitting in the studio modulating bass drums or chopping samples, but somehow I am ending up a few weeks a year and trying to express everything that’s in my head.”

For this week’s XLR8R podcast, Quimbie has compiled a podcast featuring a collection of emotional tracks from some of his favorite artists—so you’ll hear Radiohead, Squarepusher, and The Postal Service. Much like his own productions, Quimbie’s selections across this 60-minute mix are wistful and engrossing. Press play for a heartwarming mix of “hopeful love songs,” that’s imbued with a charisma and vibrancy that appeals as much to the mind as it does to the body.

01. What have you been up to recently?
Two days ago I finished a remix for Carsten Jost to be released on the fabulous Dial Records. And I’ve been doing a lot of glitchy and dreamy trance house bits on my computer recently, though I’m not really sure if they will ever see the light of day!

02. What have you been listening to?
I’ve been re-listening to a lot of emotional music I’ve been feeling over the past 15 years. A lot of them actually made it into this mix! It was a kind of a spontaneous inspiration just before I recorded this mix.

03. Very little is known about you. What can you tell us about your route into electronic music?
It was through this CD I got from my parents around 2000, when I was nine years old.

04. Where and when did you record this mix?
I recorded a lot of old CDs and had a closer look through my hard-drive and the music folders that have been laying there for years. As I mentioned above, I recorded it just after re-discovering a lot of stuff I’ve been emotionally attached to.

05. How did you go about choosing and sequencing the tracks that you’ve included?
All the tracks combine a certain sad feeling, but they are also hopeful love songs. I chose them quickly and recorded them right away.

06. How does it compare to what we might hear you play out live?
I can’t really tell. I am always struggling to strip music I have collected down to a certain selection. It will always depend on my mood and the atmosphere of a place and time and people.

07. What’s next on your agenda?
Deleting or saving the trance house bits I’ve been working on! And catching a lot of sleep in the next months.

Tracklisting

01. Cut Copy “The Waves” (Modular)
02. Future 3 “The Boy from West Bronx” (April)
03. Radiohead “Bloom” (XL Recordings)
04. The Postal Service “Natural Anthem“ (Sub Pop)
05. Flying Lotus “You’re Dead!” (Warp)
06. Squarepusher “Tommib” (Warp)
07. Boards of Canada “84 Pontiac Dream” (Warp)
08. Destroyer “Kaputt” (Merge)
09. Washed Out “All Over Now“ (Sub Pop)
10. Midnight Sister “Shimmy” (Jagjaguwar)
11. Sakamoto & Scott “The Left Bank“ (Epic)
12. The Radio Dept. “Pet Grief“ (Labrador)
13. OTTO “Rain Jacket and Shorts” (PLZ Make it Ruins)
14. The Week That Was “All Gone Quiet” (Memphis Industries)
15. Smagghe & Cross “Le Soleil Levant” (Offen)
16. Sun Kil Moon “Beautiful You” (Caldo Verde)
17. The Blue Nile “Broken Loves” (Confetti)

Full XLR8R+ Members can download the podcast below. If you’re not an XLR8R+ member, you can read more about it and subscribe here.

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