When it comes to engaging record labels, it’s tough to find a team that is more proactive than Dirty//Clean. The label has racked up more than 15 proper releases since forming in 2012, and now the label is preparing to issue a compilation titled Archive on March 15 which will showcase nine artists from the label. You can register to download the album for free on the official Dirty//Clean website where you will receive a link to download the album on its release date.
The sounds on the album are immensely diverse and represent the expansive network of artists on the label—who primarily reside in New York, Colorado and California. The first notable track on the release comes from Denver-based producer Mosis who delivers the high-tension track “Don’t You,” which begins with a paranoid dancefloor exercise, before giving way to a full-on speaker workout. Gunkst’s echoing fog-horn track “Tugboat” and Bedrockk‘s hi-gloss rave anthem “Terminal” are another set of tracks that both stand out as prominent gems on the record. Dirty//Clean label co-founder Dawn Safari takes the album into a colorful place with his track “bb w/u,” blending triumphant horn bursts with a bouncy four-to-the-floor chorus and dashes of computer-harmonized R&B.
As a whole, the concept of Archive is imaginative, emotive, and intuitive. It does a great job of shining a light on the up-and-coming digital imprint and showcasing its stable of fresh and creative artists. You can register to download Archive for free over on the Dirty//Clean website by clicking here, and you can check out the label’s latest mix by clicking on the Soundcloud player below.
“Separate Lives” is taken from the band’s debut album, Full Circle, which is set for release on March 18.
London-based trio of Arthur Delaney, Dom Goldsmith and Lotti Benardout are HÆLOS, the latest band to be picked up by Matador Records. Having worked on separate projects for years, the trio decided to combine, and HÆLOS came as a result. According to the label, listeners can expect something along the lines of the “music of Massive Attack, Portishead and the rest of those electronic artists who spent the 90s finding the pain after the rave.”
This past weekend XLR8R made the journey to the Swedish capital, Stockholm, to take in the city’s third edition of Sonar. Having looked in on the impressive Reykjavik edition last February, we were keen to see how the other Nordic Sonar franchise stacked up. It would clearly be madness to expect a visit to Stockholm to compare with a visit to Iceland as an overall experience: few places on earth can rival the geothermal wonders to be found a short drive from Reykjavik, and Stockholm, despite being a great city, isn’t one of the places that can. It is fair to compare the two festivals, however, and what we found at Sonar Stockholm was an event with a bill of comparable quality to its Icelandic cousin, hamstrung somewhat by the choice of a less than impressive venue. Still, Sonar Stockholm had its share of upsides as well as downsides, and below we have gathered together eight of our most abiding impressions, both good and bad.
The festival’s new location was inconvenient and expensive to get to You can’t always expect to land right on a festival’s doorstep, but Sonar Stockholm’s 2016 venue, Nobelberget, was a serious downside to the whole weekend. Situated in an industrial estate miles from the center and inaccessible by public transport (unless a train ride, a connecting tram ride, and then a substantial walk were on your pre-party wishlist), Nobelberget pretty much necessitated paying for one of the Swedish capital’s eye-wateringly expensive cabs.
Without knowing much about the city’s other venues, it’s hard to believe that there isn’t somewhere far better-located that could house Sonar Stockholm. And if there isn’t, then it seems incumbent on the organizers to lay on a shuttle bus system to and from the center in future years. Having to drop $50-plus just getting to a festival venue with the promise of an even pricier ride home in a few hours’ time isn’t exactly an ideal start to a night out, and a lot of other people I spoke to seemed to agree. Sonar Stockholm could get itself an instant shot of goodwill by taking some simple measures to prevent people being put in that position.
It wasn’t a hugely prepossessing place once you’d emptied your wallet getting there… Nobelberget seemed a strange choice of venue from the get-go, and a look at the venues for the first two Stockholm Sonars only deepened the mystery. 2014’s was at a centrally located brewery-cum-conference center, and 2015’s was at the architecturally impressive and even more central Waterfront Congress Center, very much Stockholm’s version of the slick Harpa Concert Hall that Sonar Reykjavik has used every year so far. Nobelberget wasn’t awful exactly, but it had a dingy, humdrum quality that on arrival made you wonder if your fifty-buck taxi had taken you to the wrong place, and after a while inside made you vaguely wish that it had. A two-roomed warehouse-like venue housing the larger SonarClub and SonarHall spaces with the smaller SonarLab stage in a tent just outside, Nobelberget felt like the sort of place a successful festival should be moving away from using with time, rather than towards.
Compounding the venue gripes were the security detail, who were over-zealous and quite intrusive—on more than one occasion I saw a guard hoist himself up and peer into a toilet cubicle with absolutely no apparent justification, before dropping down and scurrying away before the wronged party could emerge and ask them what the hell they thought they were doing. Finally, Nobelberget was notable for having without doubt the worst method of separating rooms from each other that I’ve ever seen in a club: horrible PVC-strip butcher’s curtains that were extremely difficult to move through, and always carried a subconscious feeling that you were about to find yourself looking at a long row of pig carcasses on hooks when you finally did. Almost by definition, a festival in a cold country in mid-winter has a far bigger challenge on its hands to ensure that its patrons have fun than one that takes place in summer warmth. Pretty much nothing about Sonar Stockholm’s choice of venue for 2016 did anything to assist the cause.
It was very much a weekend of two halves Sonar Stockholm, more than any festival I’ve been to in a while, took until its closing stretch to get into gear. The first night really was something of a non-event, save for a Holly Herndon live set that we missed most of thanks to the venue’s distant location, and the ever-reliable efforts of The Black Madonna, who delighted a packed SonarHall early on with the likes of “Circus Bells” by Robert Armani and her own “A Jealous Heart Never Rests.” Aside from that Friday night’s pickings were slim, whether it was Drumcode fixture Ida Engberg‘s rather grim techno or Squarepusher‘s punishing noise assault, which would have been enthralling on another day but was simply too much like a winter migraine-in-the-making in what, for reasons delineated above, already felt like a pretty unsympathetic environment.
Saturday, thankfully, was the night the colour came back into Sonar Stockholm’s cheeks, with enlivening offerings throughout in SonarHall, some excellent Swedish bass music and house in SonarLab, and a rock-solid closing three sets in SonarClub. It was a bit of a rough journey at times, but we did eventually finish Sonar Stockholm with smiles on our faces.
SonarLab was a good place to check out the best Swedish talent on show—if you could keep yourself warm enough SonarLab was the smallest of the three spaces used by Sonar Stockholm, and being housed in an outside tent during a sub-zero weekend it was also a big call to go there, in spite of its semi-effective heaters. We largely avoided it on the particularly frozen first night, but our spirits and core body temperatures had risen sufficiently by Saturday for us to enjoy the bass-heavy delights of Yung Sherman, and Berlin-based house jock Johanna Knutsson. Both added a welcome streak of Swedishness to the weekend, even if we had to resort to chain-smoking and the nearby Indian food trailer to keep warm.
Jessy Lanza pipped Youth Lagoon as Saturday’s best “pop” offering Youth Lagoon‘s grand, sweeping pop in SonarClub certainly had its moments early on Saturday, but it was Jessy Lanza‘s set next door in SonarHall that really transfixed us. This was the first time I had seen Lanza play the exquisite electronic pop of Pull My Hair Back, her 2013 debut LP for Hyperdub, and it was one of the weekend’s real treats. Lanza is soon to embark on a long North American tour in support of her longtime friends, Junior Boys. This show, which included a pulsing rendition of the recent single-track release “It Means I Love You,” pointed up what an intuitive match she and the Canadian pair will be.
Oneohtrix Point Never’s live sets are just getting better and better As well as being probably the most musically enthralling thing we saw all weekend, Daniel Lopatin‘s live set on Saturday in SonarHall was also the most complete show visually. I had seen Lopatin present his landmark Garden Of Delete LP a couple of times before this, but the show was noticeably fleshed out from the autumn 2015 shows I had seen, with the addition of a live guitarist adding a lot of extra musical depth and a torrent of abstract projections joining the intense strobes that so complement rapid-blink cuts such as “Ezra” and “Mutant Standard.” A long, squalling end to the set was played out against back projections of strange words and phrases that felt like delightfully incomprehensible end-credits to a film. Lopatin in action is always a compelling sight; at Sonar Stockholm he was probably the most compelling sight of all.
A Glasgow one-two finished Sonar with a bang SonarClub was the place to be for much of Saturday night, especially during the festival’s home stretch, and two high-profile products of Glasgow were responsible. Hudson Mohawke‘s set was characteristically Kanye-heavy, but also detoured thrillingly into the likes of “Hard” by SOPHIE. Pro-celebrity festival closer Jackmaster, meanwhile, peppered his set with Detroit techno classics, rave and a welcome big-room return for Ricardo Villalobos and Butch‘s “Up.” Both added much to a Saturday night that largely found Sonar Stockholm closing on a positive note.
Sonar Stockholm is certainly worth a look, but only after you’ve done Sonar Reykjavik “It’s good, but it’s not Reykjavik,” confided a Sonar-affiliated friend and proud Stockholm native as we discussed the relative merits of the two Nordic Sonars soon after I arrived. That statement pretty much covers it when it comes to the overall experience, and a first-timer choosing between one of the two February Sonars should unequivocally make Reykjavik their first priority. Stockholm is a beautiful and vibrant place in its own way, however, and if some common sense breaks out between now and 2017 with regard to venues, then there’s no reason why Sonar Stockholm 2017 can’t be an excellent little winter distraction too.
You would be hard pressed to find an XLR8R reader who hadn’t heard of LA-based producer and performer Daedelus—in the past, he’s been featured on the cover of XLR8R magazine, appeared in countless articles, and provided the sounds for Podcast 313. And although he’s been at the forefront of electronic music for well over a decade, with over 40 albums, EPs, and a truckload of remixes under his belt—on labels such as Ninja Tune, Brainfeeder, Anticon, and Mush Records—the pioneering producer is still somewhat of a musical enigma. His notoriously hard-to-define sound, Victorian-era dress sense, and wealth of forward-thinking performance equipment all add to the mystique and aura that emanates from the man otherwise known as Alfred Darlington. A regular at LA’s notorious Low End Theory, Daedelus, alongside Flying Lotus,Gaslamp Killer, and Daddy Kev, is considered by many to be one of the founding fathers of the ever-expanding LA beat scene.
His latest project, Kneedelus��a collaborative act alongside Grammy-nominated funk-jazz band Kneebody—released its genre-bending, self-titled album on FlyLo’s Brainfeeder imprint back in November. Following Kneedelus’ performance at LA’s Echoplex, Daedelus visited XLR8R‘s downtown office—Monome and self-designed, open-source software in hand—for a 10-minute live set of feel-good jams for our latest Interpretations.
Electronic music mainstay Mark Pritchard, who is best known for his role in both Global Communication and, more recently, Harmonic 313, has announced plans to release a new album via Warp. On Under the Sun, the shapeshifting producer has enlisted the help of Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, fellow Warp signee Bibio, New York rap act Beans, and folk songstress Linda Perhacs, according to early glimpses of its tracklist. The record is due out on May 13; stream lead single “Sad Alron” below. (via Pitchfork)
Tracklist:
01. ? 02. Give It Your Choir feat. Bibio 03. Infrared 04. Falling 05. Beautiful People feat. Thom Yorke 06. Where Do They Go, The Butterflies 07. Sad Alron 08. You Wash My Soul feat. Linda Perhacs 09. Cycles Of 9 10. Hi Red 11. Ems 12. The Blinds Cage feat. Beans 13. Dawn Of The North 14. Khufu 15. Rebel Angels 16. Under The Sun
Dax J has shared a video for the title track from his forthcoming EP, The Invisible Man, which is out via his own Monnom Black imprint on March 4.
The Berlin-based producer is well-known for his tough techno sounds, and has released on the likes of EarToGround, Soma and his own Monnom Black. The Invisible Man marks his first new material since his debut album late in 2015, Shades of Black, a record that highlighted the variety he was capable of producing. According to the label, The Invisible Man is packed with “dark, acidic, 90’s and dubbed out inspired rave cuts.”
Check out the video for the EP’s title track below. You can pre-order the EP at Juno.
Building on the successes of their debutant outing last year, Naboo Festival will be returning to Tozeur, Tunisia in March.
This year’s edition invites international and local acts alike. Fans of minimal have plenty to look forward to — Perlon regular Fumiya Tanaka will be joined by Berlin-based acts DeWalta, Yakine, and Janina (famed for her Club der Visionaere residency). In addition, Valentino Kanzyani will be representing Slovenia. Rounding things off is Nu, as well as a host of Tunisian artists — Marwan Sabb, Kus’, Taïeb Chekir, Znaidi, and Anamorph. Furthermore, the festival is throwing an opening party on the Thursday, which “will be a collaboration of true talent that blends traditional African and Arabic music with electronic beats and live instrumentals.”
Set at an oasis just outside the historic town of Tozeur, the event also promises to shine a light on local heritage, with visual art expositions and open-air cinema screenings, as well as yoga, workshops and local food vendors.
Having recently done a mix for Ninja Tunes Solid Steel Radio Show while having also been premiered on both Boiler Room and FACT, the Detroit-native Rioux has recently announced the release of a dance oriented two-tracker on his Human Pitch imprint titled “Cold Sweat/Fluid Being.” The 12″ marks Rioux’s last dance singles release of the year before the artist embarks on his debut LP which will be release in the fall of 2016.
Fluctuating between rasping techno sounds and disarming instrumentation, these “contrasting movements” are meant to represent the “binaries of his own masculinity and femininity.” Rioux explains further by saying:
“I believe all human beings are comprised of masculine and feminine tendencies. I enjoy the push and the pull of each. I perceive music, just like I perceive life, in these terms.”
You can stream the single “Cold Sweat” in the player below and be sure to check out more from Rioux by visiting his SoundCloud page here.
Check out some previously featured downloads we’ve hosted from Rioux back in 2014-2015.
Vancouver’s Mood Hut crew has teamed up with Snaker, a Tokyo-based outlet geared toward releasing music for film, television, radio, and other types of media. As Resident Advisor reports, Pender Street Steppers’ Liam Butler and Jack Jutson handle opener “Love Festival,” while further contributions come from Hashman Deejay, Neo Image, Local Artist, and more. The news arrives shortly after the announcement of a forthcoming Disco Mantras LP on the imprint.
Before SNAKER 007 lands in April, get a taste of the record (and view its complete tracklist) below.
A1 Love Festival A2 Rain Dance A3 Spicy Dream A4 Crunchin A5 Infinity B1 Late Mantra B2 Lunar Milk B3 Heaven 9 B4 CCF B5 Peace Out
Based in Munich, the classically trained musician Martha Plachetka (a.k.a Panic Girl) has from a very early age spent her days either playing or creating music. Well-versed in both piano and guitar while sporting stunning vocals, her love of music eventually lead her towards electronic production as her sonic capabilities increased over time and she grew attached to her ever increasing collection of gear. Her studio contains a plethora of impressive hardware, such as the Marxophone, a Doepfer Eurorack system, ARP 2600, Juno 60, Casio CZ-5000 and a Virus synthesizer.
Having just recently released a six-tracker titled The Breeze via Infiltrator Records, Panic Girl has offered up the EP cut “75” as today’s XLR8R download. Escorted by her coaxing and gentle vocal work, the track’s resounding carillon-like aura rides alongside grainy soundscapes, drawling synths, and a clean drum pattern.
Download the track “75” below via WeTransfer.
You can check out more from Panic Girl by visiting her SoundCloud page here.
