New Order have unveiled the first of their tracks recorded for Mute. “Restless,” which is taken from the forthcoming Music Complete album, is a breezy MOR rock song that certainly sounds like late-stage New Order but lacks the crackling electricity of their best work. Some fans have put this down to the absence of bassist Peter Hook, who is in permanent exile, but much of Bernard Sumner’s songwriting fits into this groove. The question is what is being held back for the release of the album on the 25th of September.
July 2015
Michael Rother, the collaborator of Dieter Moebius, has announced his passing this evening.
The name of Dieter Moebius is inseparable from the history of post-war European electronic and experimental music. In 1969, he founded Kluster together with Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Conrad Schnitzler in West Berlin. The group came together in the Charlottenburg social scene, and after a short rehearsal they famously played a twelve-hour show. With time, Kluster became Cluster (with the departure of Schnitzler), then Harmonia (with the addition of Michael Rother of Neu!), and collaborations with the likes of Brian Eno, Holder Czukay and Conny Plank saw additional evolution of both organisation and form.
Although Cluster reformed in 2007, by 2010 it was off again and Moebius put his focus onto his solo work and a series of collaborations. His death follows the untimely passing of friend and producer, Conny Plank (pictured together with Moebius in the main photo).
The members of DAF have announced that they have resolved their differences, and that DAF will continue to perform live for the foreseeable future. Their current set of dates had been billed, informally, as a farewell tour, but both Robert Görl and Gabi Delgado have posted to their Facebook followers that there is more DAF to come. Delgado wrote:
Late News…Good News…
Robert Goerl & Gabi Delgado have agreed to carry on with the DAF project !!! Amigos Freunde Friends you can look forward to more exciting DAF concerts in the next years !!!
I am very happy that everything is sorted out now !!!
Immer weiter bis zum sieg – hasta la victoria siempre……
DAF fuer immer !!!
Both Görl and Delgado have solo projects, besides their DAF collaboration. Görl is writing his memoirs and has a new solo album in the pipeline, while Delgado has been busy making dance music. The news of their continued cooperation will be warmly received by their fans.
A TV presentation from 1981, this footage reveals Kraftwerk on stage to have a slightly kooky sense of humour. Robot dancing with smiles; audience participation in the use of the keypad controllers used in Pocket Calculator – it’s an easy-going Kraftwerk that appears to show off its accumulated body of music-work.
Victor Furbacken is a versatile and highly in-demand Swedish musician who has been heard regularly in a wide range of musical contexts, both with artists from Sweden and abroad, in recent years. Furbacken is currently starting his debut solo project. Stripped down and acoustic in the classic singer-songwriter tradition, following in the footsteps of artists like Nick Drake and Nina Simone through Elliott Smith and Steven Stills. With his own sound and lyrics, Furbacken captures and reflects the frenzy, changeability and volatility of our time.
This is a key week for Furbacken’s debut as a solo artist, as he is releasing the brand new video for “Jane II.” The photographer Johan Westerlind filmed it, and Furbacken was happy to give him a free hand:
I have great confidence in Johan and his work, and I thought it was especially exciting to work in this way. The basic idea was to give Johan Westerlind free rein and let him work based on his own experiences of the material. He got a few different songs from me, and after quickly choosing “Jane II” he took over and shaped things in his own way. My only contribution was, together with Johan’s girlfriend Sofie Alm, to sometimes hold the boom, make coffee or sit together in some scenes. We had fun when we worked closely, and that is the point of doing it together.
Furbacken says that songs are based on and evoke certain feelings within himself, but he believes that such a feeling is different for each one. The interesting thing, in this case, was how Westerlind felt the music and what it led to visually. According to Furbacken, the video is not aimed at a specific audience, but rather to every person who likes to feel, remember, dream or just watch beautiful pictures:
I have, as long as I can remember, been fascinated by film, particularly in combination with music. For whatever style and content, I think almost always that the association between sound and image leads to something exciting. The video has no concrete themes, and sometimes the abstract is more dominant than the concrete, but all are welcome to create their own interpretation and their own themes around what they see. Then it becomes something else – a bit like an exchange.
Victor Furbacken on Facebook.
Nepal is one of the world’s poorest countries. More than half of the nation survives on less than $2 per day. The earthquake that hit it in April not only killed 9,000 and left 23,000 injured; it also displaced 450,000 people and caused significant economic harm. While aid has been committed by better-off countries and the usual NGOs are working to help, reconstruction is a challenging task. In the aftermath of the disaster, Anni Hogan, the musician and composer, and her friend Cathy O’Dowd, the first woman to climb Mount Everest from both the north and south sides, took the initiative to organise a compilation of tracks from willing artists. It’s now been released as MITRA – Music for Nepal, a 75-track, 2 Gb (in FLAC form) mountain of digital music on Bandcamp.
The contributors include Ryuichi Sakamoto, Shakespears Sister, Dave Ball & Rick Mulhall, Matt Johnson/The The, Jarboe, Sarah Jane Morris, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Parralox, Billie Ray Martin, Scanner and Hogan herself. While some of the tracks have been donated from the artists’ archives, many have been composed and recorded specifically for this compilation, so will be good reasons in themselves to buy a copy.
Sakamoto-san’s “Kizuna World” took shape in the wake of the Japanese earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster of 2011, and it comes in solidarity with enough emotional depth and strength to draw comparisons to Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony. The first of two contributions from Hogan, a collaboration with Itchy Ear called “Climbing Mount Analogue,” ties back to their work on the soundtrack for Mountain, a film by Bob Wass: a frozen soundscape with piano keys tinkling like the sound of breaking icicles. Shakespears Sister’s “Cold” is lifted from Songs from the Red Room, proving that Siobhan Fahey has a heart as large as her vocal range.
The overall quality of the compilation is exceptional, and there aren’t many other places where Simon Fisher Turner and Scanner rub shoulders with Loretta Heywood and Kirlian Camera. There are no excuses not to pay over the asking price for a copy on Bandcamp, as proceeds go to reconstruction in Nepal and the price per song is far too low for material of this quality.
Silver Ghost Shimmer, the collaboration between John Fryer and Pinky Turzo, has released one of the contenders for Album of the Year. Soft Landing is a lush, sensuous package, and “Suffocated” is one of its stand-out tracks. It has now been given the video treatment, and it’s all Cool Americana with abandoned housing and desert scenery. Turzo doesn’t break a sweat, although the guitar lines and her glances at the camera are hotter than a Nevada nuclear test.
The latest release from Finland’s Lau Nau is the album, Hem. Någonstans [EN: Home. Somewhere], which is also the soundtrack from a film of the same name. As with Lau Nau’s previous work, the boundary between modern classical music and experimental electronics is blurred in a haze of strings and chorus. The sounds make as much sense on a hot summer day, when the heat is bending the light, as on a frozen winter morning, when the sap cannot move in the trees, because they stroke your senses with the most sensitive of timbres.
If you want to immerse yourself in cold war counterculture, ground zero on Thursday, 9 July 2015 is the Sage Club in Berlin. Under the rubric, “Cold War Night Life,” a full evening of film and music is planned. B-movie, the tale of underground Berlin as told by Mark Reeder, provides the focus, and it will be followed by DJs across the multi-level club’s rooms. The event will examine the situations in both East and West Berlin, including the allure of the West for creative tourists like David Bowie and Brian Eno.
Before the party begins, a panel discussion will take place, moderated by Anja Caspary of Radio Eins. The panelists include Reeder (MFS), Dr. Motte (Loveparade founder and DJ), Ronald Galenza (East German club promoter) and others, providing a range of perspectives from key figures in the alternative music scene during the 1980s and 1990s.
See the event page for details (which include free admission before 22:00 hours).
It seems like only yesterday that John Fryer and Louise Fraser released Tales from a Silent Ocean, the first EP from their Muricidae project, but here they are singing back to the Sirens with another set of elegant tracks. Tears Are Stronger Than Waves is a collection that will transport listeners to islands of imagination, carried on the gentle wave(form)s of “Home” or swept away by the tidal surge of “Morphine.”
The journey begins with “Strange,” which echoes the mysterious resonances and rhythms of the sea while Fraser sweeps the air above into misty apparitions. As with Fryer’s previous work with This Mortal Coil, Muricidae is triple-distilled romanticism infused with essential oils of melancholy and euphoria. It’s a volatile mix, but the balance is maintained by allowing the individual elements to breathe: sounds swell and dissipate into vapour, revealing and releasing tension. Fraser’s vocals are sensual and rich, coming in waves.
With “Morphine,” Muricidae switch from sails to engines, cutting through the surf with diesel-fuelled riffs. One of Fryer’s strengths is his ability to navigate rock conventions without ever sounding conventional, so we find guitars yielding to synths in the middle 8 before reclaiming their space. This is music for wakeboarding by tattooed kids who don’t want to work as financial analysts but could if they wanted.
“Should I Stay” appeared in a different version on Tales from a Silent Ocean. Reworked by Fryer, piano and strings are brought into the foreground but synthetic brass and percussive elements provide additional dimensions. As with the other songs on this EP, it’s a reminder of the closeness with which Sigur Ros must have studied his earlier material. If there is more of this in the ship’s hold, we’d love it to be unloaded soon.
Tears Are Stronger Than Waves is available on iTunes and on Arena.