Page 85 – XLR8R

Koreless’ Debut Album Took Five Years to Make

Lewis Roberts, better known as Koreless, will release his debut album on Young (f.k.a Young Turks).

Roberts grew up in the Welsh coastal town of Bangor, and began creating rudimentary tunes on an old desktop computer which had been gifted to him by an uncle. This gift proved crucial to Roberts; rural north Wales can feel very distant from any music scene, but this old computer’s hard drive contained an “encyclopaedic body of pop, electronica, and house” ranging from Moby to Lemon Jelly. This cache was essentially Roberts’ introduction to listening to electronic music, making him realise he wanted to be a music producer, and by the time he’d left school, he’d unlocked the processes that allowed Koreless to be born.

After a series of early releases, including his debut EP, 4D, in 2011, he started working with Young, then Young Turks, releasing collaborative work with Sampha and the Yūgen EP. And then he turned his attention to his debut album, which has taken five years to complete. “I work very quickly actually, but I’m also very thorough, and find it hard to leave stones unturned,” he says. “Some of the tracks on this album have been through hundreds of iterations. Getting from the start to the end of the track is such a twisted journey for me. I’m talking about spending 15 hours a day, seven days a week over a period of years.”

Agor is filled with hidden depths, we’re told, existing at sensory thresholds, helping guide the listener from one realm to another less visited. “It straddles various worlds of dance, ambient, and contemporary classical while not sounding like an example of any of them,” the London label tells XLR8R. Its title means “open” in Welsh.

To accompany the announcement, Roberts shared “Joy Squad,” a track that has been played by Caribou, Jamie xx, and TNGHT in their BBC Essential mixes. It’s Roberts’ attempt “to build a club rollercoaster that swallows you up and spits you out.”

The album cover features artwork by visual artist Daniel Swan, and it results from a trip to the mountains near Snowdonia, where he and Roberts hiked and built a sequence of home-spun portal machines threading a path through the mountains into the forest. “It’s like the idea of physical objects which link together,” Swan says, “taking you on a specific geographical journey, acting like lenses to view the landscape differently, kind of an analogue of the way the tracks of the record might change the way you experience specific places in a certain way.”

Tracklisting

01. Yonder
02. Black Rainbow
03. Primes
04. White Picket Fence
05. Act(s)
06. Joy Squad
07. Frozen
08. Shellshock
09. Hance
10. Strangers

Agor LP is scheduled for July 9 release. Meanwhile, you can stream “Black Rainbow” and “Joy Squad” in full via the player below and pre-order here.

Anika’s New Album is Incoming via Sacred Bones

Anika, the project of Berlin-based musician Annika Henderson, will release her first new album in over a decade next month.

The follow-up to 2010s Anika, released on Invada and Stones Throw, Change is “beautifully fraught,” we’re told. All nine tracks are filled with “a palpable sense of global anxiety” and the record’s central feeling is one of “heightened frustration buoyed by guarded optimism.” The songs offer skittering, austere electronic backdrops reminiscent of classic Boards of Canada filled with Anika’s beautifully plaintive voice.

After recording the initial ideas by herself at Berlin’s Klangbild Studios, Anika was joined by Martin Thulin, with whom she forms Exploded View alongside Mexican musicians Martin Thulin and Hugo Quezada, who co-produced the album and played some live drums and bass.

“This album had been planned for a little while and the circumstances of its inception were quite different to what had been expected,” says Anika. “This colored the album quite significantly. The lyrics were all written there on the spot. It’s a vomit of emotions, anxieties, empowerment, and of thoughts like—How can this go on? How can we go on?”

Anika spent the early part of her childhood in Germany, raised by music-loving parents before moving to Bristol which increased her appetite for discovering new music. While in the United Kingdom, she met Portishead’s Geoff Barrow through a mutual friend and, when it became clear that they shared the same love of punk and dub, they went into the studio to record her debut album.

Alongside today’s announcement, Anika has shared a video for the title-track directed by Sven Gutjahr.

Tracklisting

01. Finger Pies
02. Critical
03. Change
04. Naysayer
05. Sand Witches
06. Never Coming Back
07. Rights
08. Freedom
09. Wait For Something

Change LP is scheduled for July 23 release on Sacred Bones and Invada. Meanwhile, you can stream the title-track below and pre-order here.

Soccer96’s New Album is Inspired by Humanity’s Entanglement with Technology

Soccer96, the collaboration of Danalogue and Betamax, will release a new album in September.

The London pair, real names Dan Leavers and Maxwell Hallett, have become synonymous with the thriving London jazz scene and, through their mind-bending incarnation as the synths-and-drums pairing, they’ve traversed stylistic worlds. Launched in 2012 with a self-titled album, Soccer96 is a vessel for them to find clear water from their multitude of other collaborations, their most notable being as two-thirds of The Comet Is Coming alongside Shabaka Hutchings.

Dopamine, the third album, following 2016’s As Above So Below, is inspired by the idea of humanity’s entanglement with technology and artificial intelligence. We’re told that the record is darker in some senses than what they’ve put out before.

The title refers to the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure, which enables technology to hack into our minds and control us, creating addiction and dependency. It began life as a sonic reaction to the graphic novels of Moebius’ Jean Giraud. The duo started swapping reel-to-reel tape ideas through each other’s letterboxes during lockdown, before eventually convening in the studio where they displayed one of the revered French artist’s images in the middle of the studio for inspiration. “All musical decisions would centre around this image,” Betamax tells XLR8R. “It was a depiction of a cosmic traveller gazing across a desert at a sort of crystal city. If the music was resonating with the image then we knew we were on the right path.”

Alongside the announcement, Soccer96 have shared lead single “Dopamine” featuring Nuha Ruby Ra on vocals, who sings from the perspective of human and machine throughout the track.

Artwork comes from Phil Hale, with layout by Raimund Wong.

Tracklisting

01. Enter The Vortex
02. Prelude to the Age of Transhumanism
03. Speak To Me Only With Your Mind
04. Dopamine feat. Nuha Ruby Ra
05. Entanglement
06. Red Skies of the Anthropocene
07. Sitting On A Satellite feat. Salami Rose Joe Louis
08. Use Music To Kill
09. Perfect Dystopia
10. Telepathic DNA
11. Interplanetary Meditations
12. Carry Us Home

Dopamine LP is scheduled for September 10 release. Meanwhile, you can stream “Dopamine” featuring Nuha Ruby Ra in full below and pre-order here.

Podcast 698: Saka

With a new release, Penumbra, incoming on Los Angeles label Dome of Doom, Saka is an experimental beat-maker to keep your eyes on. It’s been a wild few years from the Hong Kong-born, United States-based artist, beginning with the six-track Slipstream EP on Bassrush Records, which followed a heady half-time cut on the second volume of the label’s Prophecy compilation series. Since then, he’s put out a handful of singles and, most recently, the Split Punch / Wing Chun EP on Gud Vibrations. His growing discography exemplifies a cutting-edge sonic quality that is both familiar yet unconventional.

When Saka began making music in 2017, he’d been talking about it for years. After a youth spent between Hong Kong and San Francisco, he attended boarding school in Virginia before college in Southern California, which is where he discovered electronic music through American festivals. Encouraged by his friend Sammy Legs, he bought some gear and set about making his own beats, drawing inspiration from the likes of quickly, quickly and Player Dave, before moving to experimental bass through artists like samsin, Alix Perez, and Vide. By fusing these west coast influences with those from his native Hong Kong, he wields a sound palette that is both intricate but chaotically destructive, built around broken beat patterns, rippling melodies, and roaring basslines.

On Penumbra, Saka presents his vocals on record for the first time. Built around the breakup with his partner, the EP is soaked in a wave of deep emotional resonance, and each track represents a different time period of the relationship. To accompany the release, he’s compiled an XLR8R podcast; recorded this past week, it pulls from Saka’s unreleased catalog, some of which will come out soon, and it also leans heavily on tracks from those around him. Expect 67 minutes of infectious, shapeshifting bass rhythms one of the genre’s most exciting talents.

01. What have you been up to recently?

In my spare time outside of music, I’ve been listening to this podcast incessantly. It’s called “mythology” and it’s basically retellings of mythological epics across different cultures. I’ve always been very inspired by mythology and lately I’ve been starting my mornings with a deep stretch to an episode; they’re about an hour long, so it’s perfect.

02. What have you been listening to during lockdown?

I’m really happy to say that I discovered a lot of my favorite songs during the lockdown. Many are artists I’m already familiar with, but never thoroughly listened to all of their work. Some recent favorites as of late Yussef Dayes, Kamaal Williams, Halogenix, Burial, Khruangbin, and Sam Gellaitry.

03. What are your earliest memories of music?

I grew up in a very musical family. All my sisters are musicians, and my mom was a singer when she lived in San Francisco when she was my age, toured with a band and all that. My first memories in general are often of my mother at the piano, singing to us.

04. What is it that drives you to make electronic music?

While I love all types of my music, and my musical background actually lies in instrumentation and singing, electronic music still excites me the most. It appeals to me because of the possibilities. The amount of high-level control you can exert over composing a song from scratch is profuse, and it still feels like there’s so much to explore after all of these years. Additionally, I love how community-focused and rife with dancefloor culture the electronic music scene is. I think it’s a beautiful thing to bring people together over.

05. How did your release come about on Dome of Doom?

I’ve been a big fan of the music that’s come out on Dome of Doom over the years, and Wylie [Cable] and I met a number of years ago when I had first moved to Los Angeles. I’m very excited to get this record out with them; it feels really full circle, especially something that’s a little more emotion-driven rather than dancefloor-driven. Both are equally important to me, but I feel as if they are distinctly different sides of my sound.

06. As the world opens up, how are you feeling about playing live again?

I am extremely excited about live shows and for them to return safely. Hearing tunes from the left-field electronic scene in general on a massive system is one of the most magical experiences to me and life over the past year has felt uncomfortably quiet for myself. I just played a show last week at the Midway in San Francisco and it was so special to get to play all of the sounds I’ve been working on throughout the pandemic. Dancefloors are so, so important for humans.

07. What’s next on your horizon?

I’ll be playing The Untz Festival up north in Browns Valley this upcoming weekend and there’s a few shows to announce over the next few months. Lots of new music coming soon as well, and you can get a little sneak peek in this very mix!

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.

Tracklisting

01. False Noise “Greys” (Upscale)
02. Saka “Lilac” (Dome of Doom)
03. Saka “Prescient” (Dome of Doom)
04. Saka “Yin” feat. Aido (Unreleased)
05. Saka “ID” (Unreleased)
06. Vide “Reflections ft. Saka” (Lost Dogz)
07. Mirror Maze “ID” (Unreleased)
08. Mindset “ID” (Unreleased)
09. Mirror Maze, Vide & Abelation “ID” (Unreleased)
10. Sumthin Sumthin “Eerie (Ilaman Acapella)”
11. Sumthin Sumthin “ID” (Unreleased)
12. Sumthin Sumthin “ID” feat Clozee (Unreleased)
13. Saka “Split Punch” (Gud Vibrations)
14. Saka “Stasis” (Inspected)
15. Vorso “Strung Out” (Riotville Records)
16. Saka “ID” (Unreleased)
17. Saka “Salvo” (Self-Released)
18. Sinic “Fickle” (Self-Released)
19. COPYCATT “ID” (Unreleased)
20. Kursa & Skope “Fade Out” (Self-Released)
21. Saka “Wing Chun” (Gud Vibrations)
22. Ivy Lab “Cake (Saka Edit)” (20/20 LDN Recordings)
23. Mirror Maze & Kromuh “ID” (Unreleased)
24. Mirror Maze & Saka “ID” (Unreleased)
25. Saka “Penumbra” (Dome of Doom)
26. Camo & Krooked “No Tomorrow (Tom Finster Remix)” (Hospital Records)
27. Connor Q & Saka “ID” (Unreleased)
28. Misanthrop “Deus” (Neosignal Recordings)
29. Arkaik “RD2101 ft. Skylark” (Flexout Audio)
30. Integrate “ID” (Unreleased)
31. Kings of the Rollers “Shella” feat. Chimpo (Halogenix Remix)” (Hospital Records)
33. Saka “ID” (Unreleased)
33. Saka “Let Me Live ft. Amethyst” (Dome of Doom)

Belgian Instrumental Hip-Hop Group 40Winks Next on Project Mooncircle

Project Mooncircle will release a new album from 40Winks, the instrumental hip-hop group made up of Padmo’ and Weedy, from Antwerp, Belgium.

Field Recordings is the group’s first new body of work since 2011’s It’s The Trip, also on Project Mooncircle, and it follows the deluxe edition release of Sound Puzzle, originally released in 2007 on MERCK Records.

We’re told that the pair recorded much of the album on the road, lacing their meticulously chopped signature sound with “accidental recordings” from their favourite Tascam. Across 17 tracks, jazz, soul, and gospel influences float beautifully to the surface, the Berlin label tells XLR8R.

Artwork comes from Afreux, with mastering by Sven Friederichs.

Tracklisting

01. Free Birds / Kalimba ’73
02. We’re Flying
03. PILFER JAZZ
04. Deeeep Diiiive
05. The Weeping Soul
06. Tried_so_harddd
07. We’ve Come This Far
08. GONE TOMORROW
09. Other World Prelude
10. Catch The Sky
11. Lucy’s Advice
12. TIME BENDS
13. Dark Hope OST
14. Way Too High For This
15. Mindful Harmonics I
16. Mindful Harmonics II
17. Mindful Harmonics III

Field Recordings lands on September 3. Meanwhile, you can pre-order here and stream “Gone Tomorrow” below.

Mano Le Tough Unveils New Album on DJ Koze’s Pampa

Mano Le Tough, real name Niall Mannion, will release At The Moment, a new album on DJ Koze’s Pampa Records.

After more than a decade of touring, Mannion has spent the past year at home in Zurich, rearing his young family amidst the uncertainty of the pandemic. In the face of these difficulties, he channelled the inspiration to produce his first album since 2015’s Trails, balancing the “ambivalence of the current moment with wistful streaks of unguarded optimism,” Pampa says.

Sonically, the synths and rhythms common to Mannion’s earlier works are complemented with jangling guitars and sun-bleached chords, which envelope his own tender vocals in a “dappled wash of summery pop.” On one track, he overlaps melodies with hip-hop beats, creating a hypnotic slice of slinky retro-futurism, we’re told.

“I’ve always liked that Mallarmé quote, ‘Poetry is the language of crisis,’” says Mannion. “It’s hard to make good music about everything being amazing. Everything is going great—who wants to listen to that? Anything I’ve done—anything which I thought had any kind of artistic merit, has been through struggles I’ve had in my life.”

The album’s first single, “No Road Without A Turn,” streaming below, is a contemporary exploration of dub disco. The title is about the fact that no situation in life stays the same forever but it’s also about being in the moment and accepting the change, Mannion says. Musically, it’s quite representative of the instrumentation on the album and although it doesn’t have a vocal, the guitar part is quite lyrical, he says.

For more information on Mannion, check out his XLR8R feature here.

Tracklisting

01. Man Of Aran
02. Empty Room
03. Snow On Bambo
04. Aye Aye Mi Mi
05. Moment to Change
06. Fadó Fadó
07. Pompeii
08. No Road Without a Turn
09. New/cycles
10. So Many
11. So Silent
12. Short Cuts
13. Together

At The Moment LP is scheduled for August 20 release. Meanwhile, you can stream “No Road Without A Turn” in full via the player below pre-order here.

Turkish Producer Nene H Mourns Loss of Father on Incienso Album

Incienso, the New York label of Anthony Naples and Jenny Slattery, will release the debut album of Istanbul-born Nene H, real name Beste Aydin.

Described by Aydin as a “living thing,” Ali was born as a tribute to her late father, and the album explores the personal odyssey she’s been through since his passing. “Representing my heritage and my personal loss in such way in such format would be something that I would be scared of doing couple of years ago,” Aydin says, “but I have also learned to own it during the past year, especially in these times of social movement against racism and discrimination, which is bringing to minorities so much power to be who they are and not try to blend in all the time.”

Like the identity of Aydin herself, the album is a cross-pollination of diverse elements. These compositions rely on organisational structures found in classical music but also those from the Middle East. Across the release, she uses both Turkish and German texts, written after the loss of her father, and in both “Rau” and “Reue” you can can hear whispered vocal improvisations, a traditional element in Turkish and Middle Eastern music threaded through with German language.

Aydin has previously released EPs on Intrepid Skin and, more recently, Possession in France.

The album follows full-lengths from DJ Python and Call Super on Incienso.

Tracklisting

01. Letztes Pech
02. Lament
03. We Wait
04. Rau
05. Reue
06. Gebet
07. The Hustle
08. How We Say Goodbye

Ali LP is scheduled for July 16 release. Meanwhile, you can stream “Lament” in full below and pre-order here.

Shaun Reeves’ Debut Album is Incoming via Visionquest

Shaun Reeves will release The Eye That Sees Us All, his debut album, on Visionquest in July.

The Eye That Sees Us All finds the now Los Angeles-based, Michigan-born artist circling back to intimate club world where he’s always felt most at home. After years touring the world as part of the Visionquest collective, he found himself in a musical place he no longer enjoyed. So when the other members—Ryan Crosson, Lee Curtiss, and Seth Troxler—decided to focus on their own thing for a while, he sunk back into his original community in Berlin, where he began to play cosy parties at Club der Visionäre and reconnected with stripped-back techno he’s always loved.

What followed was an intense couple of years of focused studio work. As he adapted to a new workflow and immersed himself in the world of modular synthesis, a bunch of new tracks and sounds that came out that subconsciously circled back to his earliest releases on labels like Raum…musik. All these tracks are heavily influenced by his time in Berlin and the lessons learned there, making this album what he calls a “musical statement of gratitude.” It lands with “eternal thanks” to Julien Bonnot, a friend of Reeves who shared a wealth of engineering knowledge with him to really elevate his sound.

Tracklisting

A1. The Eye That See U
A2. Lucy Sky Diamond
B1. Arethusa
B2. Temple Day
C1. Clair de Lune
C2. Morose
D1. 5 Signs
D2. Tropik Sadness

The Eye That Sees Us All LP is scheduled for July 23 release. We’ll add clips and pre-order links as they become available.

Los Angeles’ Sam Gendel and Josiah Steinbrick Deliver Album of Spiritual Jazz

Rising jazz star Sam Gendel has teamed up with Josiah Steinbrick for a collaborative album of woozy, spiritual jazz.

Gendel and Steinbrick are multi-instrumentalists and producers based in Los Angeles, California. (The former released Fresh Bread on Matthewdavid‘s Leaving Records earlier this year.) This is the first time they’ve released an album together, and we can expect a pair of “elliptical textural voyages,” named Mouthfeel and Serene.

The A-side, Mouthfeel, focuses on loose, pitter-patter rhythms, infused with woozy synth patterns and Gendel’s electronically treated, subdued horn. On the flip, Serene presents “two crisp, mouthwash-cool pieces” of freeform, glassy, synth waltz. It finds a “sedate, amorphous midpoint” between Sakamoto’s moment of float-tank ambience on the Fieldwork EP and an imaginary collaboration with Asmus Tietchens.

The record inaugurates Steinbrick’s Full Bloom Records.

Tracklisting

01. Mouthfeel 1
02. Mouthfeel 2
03. Mouthfeel 3
04. Mouthfeel 4
05. Mouthfeel 5
06. Serene 1
07. Serene 2

Mouthfeel / Serene is available now. You can order here and listen to it in full below.

Australia’s Sonny Ism Explores the Rhythms of Island Life on Second Album

Sonny Ism has shared details of Island Impressions, his second album, scheduled to land on his own Northern Underground Records in July.

Ism is an Australian house artist born Xavier Bacash. After growing up in Melbourne where he played in soft rock bands, he moved to Copenhagen, Denmark where he began to throw parties and DJ alongside Kasper Marott (who features on the album) and the Regelbau crew. After three breakthrough EPs, namely 2017’s C.E., 2018’s Plastic World EP, and 2019’s The System, he put out his debut album, Union: Integration Of The Shadow, last year, exploring his experiences moving to colder climates.

He started Island Impressions not long after the release of his debut, when Denmark was entering its first lockdown. Around this time, he and his fiancé moved to a Swedish island called Ingarö, in Stockholm’s archipelago. It was here that inspiration arose from his surroundings. As he explored his new island home, regularly taking treks to pick berries and mushrooms, going fishing and swimming in the sea, the grooves and rhythms of island life flowed into his music.

Title-track “Island Impressions” captures feelings from watching a sunset and hearing the island birds into sound textures. “Et Andet Sted,” the opener, was formed around the rhythmic sounds of the ocean lapping on the sand, field-recorded after falling asleep on the beach.

Sonically, the album feels like a folder of different mind-states or impressions from his time on the island and mentally processing being so far away from family and friends during what was one of the most challenging years of his life, Ism says.

Tracklisting

01. Et Andet Sted
02. This Modern Life
03. Alpha Rhythm
04. Time 4 Love
05. Island Impressions
06. Vibe Science
07. Planet B
08. Archipelago Balerico
09. Favoured State
10. This Modern Life (Kasper Marott remix) [Digital version]

Island Impressions LP is scheduled for July 16 release. Meanwhile, you can stream “This Modern Life” and “Time 4 Love” in full below and pre-order via Bandcamp here.

Page 85 of 3781

« Previous 1 … 83 84 85 86 87 … 3,781 Next »

Support Independent Media