rescuing musical virtue in distress.
I remember a time, although I must admit that I am older than most, when the rock fraternity and the dance camp were sworn, enemies. Or at least the music press and a few shallow-minded buffoons would have us believe this to be the case. But rock and dance, it turns out, make for the... Continue Reading →
Downbeat, chilled and delicate, Fragments is a track well named. There is a sparseness and understatement to its form which might perhaps suggest that it is just a fragment of a song, a work in progress or a sonic sketch to which more is yet to be added. But that is also its charm. By... Continue Reading →
Dance music should be the most eclectic sonic form. It covers such a broad sonic spectrum, is less concerned by genre or form than any other style of music out there and its use of digital technology means that it should always be ahead of the curve. So why does so much of it sound... Continue Reading →
Oceans Away and the story behind it is the perfect example of the mindset which seems to have evolved due to the restrictions of lockdown. As musicians have found themselves shut out from their traditional workplaces, they have retreated more and more into home recordings and distanced collaborations. Ironically, as the physical walls closed in... Continue Reading →
I've never really known where the sonic demarcations in dance music lie, where Downtempo merges into Ambient, where Deep House gets so blissed out it becomes Chill-wave, but then, I suspect not many people have, certainly not those who make the music. To such creatives, it is just music, and the sounds, styles and samples... Continue Reading →
Music, that made by musicians worth their salt at least, has always been able to talk about more than one thing at a time. In the case of alternative-electro artist Rick Christian, this duality of conversation takes the form of a cool and groovesome musical rhetoric, one that is just concerned with getting your feet... Continue Reading →
I suspect that Star Goes Nova isn't hoping to do anything as crass or conceited as trying to invent a new genre, after all, what would even be the point? Rather, this sounds like someone making music unburdened by such baggage in the first place. And, once such concepts have been dropped, the sonic world... Continue Reading →
Shackles set out the sonic stall nicely for this latest ep from Seattle duo Sugar Addikt, but one song, as great as it is, can only say so much. And if you liked that first single, and why wouldn't you, then embracing the sonic charms of this 5-track offering is the logical next step. As... Continue Reading →
Seattle synth duo, Sugar Addikt, take elements from 70's disco, 80's mainstream pop, 90's dance music and 21st-century electronica and use those wide-ranging influences to forge music that is both familiar and infectious yet unique and forward-thinking. Shackles, from their latest ep, Phoenix, is a song that wanders between pulsating dancefloor energy and the highly... Continue Reading →
As soon as the almost a capella delivery of the lyrics greet the listener, there is a feeling of freedom writ large across the sonic canvas. On My Own is about the twin feelings of escape and freedom, that sensation of being untethered and breaking free of the shackles of the past mixed with the fear of... Continue Reading →
From the primordial soup or the depths of the ocean, the listener is drawn into a bubbling aquatic world of subsea sounds. Dub, dubstep, house and electronica are all featured on this record. It's a mix that I would normally find annoying listening to in isolation and not in the context of a club or... Continue Reading →
Opting for more beguiling elements than the straight-forward punch, the hypnotic rather than the more obvious sonic tricks, the understated and hazy rather than the clean lines of mainstream pop, Running is a track that seems to invade your sense using a form of musical osmosis rather than the usual sensory methods. It is a... Continue Reading →
Although the original version of the song became popular after being featured on the hit tv series Grown-ish, that doesn't mean that there isn't room for it to change and evolve, and so Naomi August has returned with a new remix of the track courtesy of Kameo. And if the original was a sparse and... Continue Reading →
It's a couple of years since The Pink Dust first blipped on my radar with the single Fathom and then the EP of the same name. Dark Seas is their new full-length album and it is a glorious affair. Each release has felt like walking through an ever-broadening sonic landscape. If Fathom, the single, offered... Continue Reading →
Buni Milani's latest track is a wonderfully strange and beguiling experience. Whilst being built from all the musical building blocks that you associate with modern pop and dance, it moves at such a slow and sultry pace that it seems to be creating a new genre as it plays out. Ambient R&B? Is that a... Continue Reading →
Sitting somewhere between chilled dance music, beguiling pop and drifting experimental ambient electronica, Stay Close has crafted a fascinating song. It saunters seductively before the listener, moving in careful and considered steps for maximum effect. The groove is created by a pulsing and provocative bass line and on to this, is hung all manner of... Continue Reading →
I always believe that whatever the mainstream can do, the underground scenes do it better. Sadly, we live in a world where corporate gatekeepers decided what is cool and permissible and so many fine musicians working without budget or backing spend their whole careers not getting the recognition that they most assuredly deserve. That, in... Continue Reading →
What if indie music could be as infectious and attractive as its big sister, pop music? What if it could be as groovesome as the most addictive dancefloor offerings? What if it made clever sonic choices and had something to say? What if it oozed underground cool as easily as it vibed with all the... Continue Reading →
To most people "instrumental music," a term really too broad to have any significant or specific meaning, is the stuff of background listening, a mood enhancer or perhaps a soundtrack to something more engaging such as a film or a video game. Brain Bleach, the latest album from Samvridh, proves that it can be something... Continue Reading →
Combining hi-energy, dancefloor-ready grooves with the sort of lyricism that you normally find more in the indie spectrum, Just Another Day feels like the best of both worlds. It comes as no surprise that at the core of Monotronic you find someone who has wandered the world and studied how it works, this is most... Continue Reading →
If the previous album, Alternate Realities, from which much of the core material for this follow-up is drawn, was an exercise in musical cross-pollination and genre-hoping, Into The Multiverse is doubly so. It takes the already eclectic nature of the original music and then re-imagines the songs through the prism of re-mixing. A process which,... Continue Reading →
There was a time when the musical demarcations separating musical style and genre were fixed, immutable, to be crossed on pain of death. Well, not death but perhaps ridicule and ostracisation from the gatekeepers of the tribal sound. You were a raver or a goth, a hip-hop head or an indie kid, popster or rocker,... Continue Reading →
Words paint pictures. You hear words like Dance or terms such as EDM and your mind conjures images of packed clubland dance floors moving to euphoric and bombastic electronica. Hear the word ambient and you think of drifting minimalism and gossamer light sonic threads. Yet Present Paradox manages to blend both of these mutually exclusive... Continue Reading →
If Rollcall, the first piece of succulent sonics from this artist to find its way to my ear, seemed to be built from swirling, tendrils of music gradually teased from a raw, hazy industrial-ambient drift, Allinputs is a song which gets to work immediately. It is also immediately conjured from more robust and complicated stuff.... Continue Reading →
Music as a whole generally evolves and finds its way forward through unexpected collisions, left-field genre-splicing and half-planned creative fusions. Some are the obvious merging of music which has long been easy travelling companions, other times opposites attract, meld, battle, blend and give creative birth and what emerges from the sonic wreckage is a totally... Continue Reading →
Well, it is the season for the cover song, a time when everyone from the established mainstream music-maker to the reality show, also-ran celebrity…and I use the word celebrity quite wrongly… is crooning out a Christmas tune in an effort to pay for a new wing on their Cheshire manor or perhaps pay off their... Continue Reading →
Too many artists spend too much time looking backwards, hoping to trade on nostalgic sounds and past pop glories, that they forget to embrace the future as it rises up to meet them. JPOPD1 is not one of those artists and Deep End is definitely the sound of someone looking forward rather than behind them.... Continue Reading →
Trying to work out exactly where 5G4B’s music fits in to the scheme of things depends entirely upon which thread you pull at first. Tug at one funky rhythm and you get a slight inkling as to what’s going on but grab another and you might find yourself holding a soulful break or a hip-hop... Continue Reading →
Evolution is the sound of 80’s sonic glitter being scattered over a wonderfully modern alternative dance track. It may be easy to draw a line between Julian Shah-Tayler’s latest creation and earlier, post-punk, keyboard pioneers but only in the same way that you can connect an Umberto Eco novel with an illuminated medieval manuscript. Everything... Continue Reading →
There is no denying that we live in a world of polar opposites, of entrenched beliefs, of conflicting ideas and clear points of demarcation. It is an attitude which affects, or perhaps infects, every aspect of life from which football team you support to which political camp you fall into. Thankfully, music seems to have... Continue Reading →