Sweden’s Anna Öberg has released a video for the song, “Ich bin.”
Lifted from her current album, Vafan har jag gjort! [EN: What the Fuck Have I Done?], it was made together with her husband, Karl Gasleben (Twice a Man).
Öberg’s style can sometimes be called doom techno, and this video does nothing to dispel that label!
(Via Mute)
LEE RANALDO & RAÜL REFREE have announced details of their new album, Names of North End Women, out on Mute on 21 February 2020 on vinyl, CD and digitally. The new release will precede a series of dates that include a performance at the Milton Court Concert Hall on 7 April, as part of the Barbican’s music programme (full details below).
Watch the video for the title track here, a free edit of Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky’s 1999 film Outer Space, itself an appropriation of The Entity (1982, Sidney J. Furie) – https://youtu.be/-tYRA2WAapg
Ranaldo and Refree worked together Ranaldo’s last solo album, Electric Trim (Mute, 2017), and soon after the pair returned to the studio to record the follow up they realised that Names of North End Women would become what Ranaldo describes as “the beginning of a new partnership, a new configuration’”.
For one of the greatest guitarists, ranked by both Rolling Stone and Spin, of his generation (Ranaldo co-founded Sonic Youth in 1981) and an artist reinventing traditional flamenco guitar (Refree’s album with Rosalía continues to grow internationally), this is an album that features tracks with little or no guitar. Instead the duo composed using marimba and vibraphone, using samplers, a vintage 2-inch Studer tape recorder and a modified cassette machine Ranaldo had previously used in performances 25 years earlier.
“We were mixing in all these strange analogue sounds from old cassette tapes, dealing with tape hiss; using very new technology and very old technology and mixing them together,” remembers Ranaldo. Elements from a mysterious old tape Ranaldo found spooled on the Studer when he’d bought it years earlier – drum sounds, slamming doors, people talking – formed the backbone of tracks. The music, it seemed, could come from literally anywhere.
“This record began as playing with samplers and cassette players,” says Refree, “as experimental music, musique concrete, poly-rhythms.” As the process wore on, however, their abstractions materialised into songs, their elemental rhythms, ambient hums and sampler damage revealing hidden melodies and patterns upon deep listening. Ranaldo and Refree traded melodic ideas and added vocals to the tracks, singing in addition to the spoken word pieces they’d always planned these pieces to feature. The words came in a process akin to the music, a collagist philosophy prevailing, as Ranaldo recomposed poems from his archives, wrote new pieces and incorporated lines sent in by Jonathan Lethem – who’d helped pen the songs of Electric Trim.
The result is an album alive with the electric crackle of experimentalism, yet satisfying as a collection of songs.
The album’s title, and the title of the lead track came from an experience Ranaldo had walking through a neighbourhood in the North End of Winnipeg, Manitoba. All the streets were named after women: Lydia, Kate, Dagmar, Harriett, Juno, etc – first names only, which implied something anonymous, or universal. Who these women are or were is not indicated, which lends their choice a certain mystery… Men are often named in our society with their full names, but these anonymous names were perhaps stand-ins for the many unrecognised or un-specified in our society. Ranaldo jotted the names down, in poem format, and explains, “somehow it became an impetus for the lyrics in terms of the people that drift in and out of one’s life, some significant, some fleeting.” He continues, “I had this idea of using given names as a device that could inform some of the lyrics. It doesn’t play through all the lyrics, but quite a few employ this idea.”
“This album loosens the bonds from the idea of what songs can be, and both Raül and I are excited to see where we can push it further,” says Ranaldo. For now, take time to absorb Names Of North End Women, its hidden treasures and unexpected turns, and ponder where Ranaldo and Refree’s collaboration might take them next.
NAMES OF NORTH END WOMEN TRACKLISTING
Alice, Etc.
Words out of the Haze
New Brain Trajectory
Humps
Names of North End Women
Light Years Out
The Art of Losing
At The Forks
LEE RANALDO & RAÜL REFREE LIVE
5 April – Bruges (BE), Chamber Music Room – Concertgebouw Brugge
6 April – Utrecht (NL), De Heiling
7 April – London (UK), Milton Court Concert Hall, Barbican
9 April – Paris (FR), LE CENTQUATRE
10 April – Clermont-Ferrand (FR), Cooperative De Mai
11 April – Nantes (FR), Stereolux
21 April – Ljubljana (SL), Cankarjev Dom
28 April – Berlin (DE), Roter Salon – Volksbühne
29 April – Prague (CZ), Palác Akropolis
30 April – Krems (AT), Donau Festival
Pre-order Names of North End Women – https://mute.ffm.to/nonew
(Via Mute)
Goldfrapp have announced a UK tour for spring 2020. Felt Mountain: The 20th Year Tour will see Alison Goldfrapp perform tracks from the album for the first time since its original release in a brand new show featuring lush and intimate takes on classics from across their 20 year career.
Alison Goldfrapp explains:
Looking back, Felt Mountain represents a very special period in my life. It is the first album Will and I recorded as Goldfrapp, launching us in a new musical direction, and the moment for me, after 13 years or so in music, that I found a creative direction that I was truly excited about. Being nominated for a Mercury Prize was incredible and unexpected, and an affirmation that we were embarking on an important journey.
I listened to the entire album again recently – something I don’t really ever do – and it was a surprisingly emotional experience. The songs instantly take me back. The album is still relevant two decades on, and hopefully will be interesting for people to rediscover and maybe also hear for the first time.
In 2019, 1999 dystopian lyrics such as “I’m wired to the world, that’s how I know everything” from ‘Utopia’, and “no time to F***” from ‘Paper Bag’, have become more potent. I was intrigued then by the flawed concept of perfection which has become so much more intensified in our self-reflective social media era.”
A remastered deluxe edition of Felt Mountain will follow in autumn 2020 on Mute/BMG and will be released on double CD, coloured vinyl and as a deluxe box set. Originally released by Mute in September 2000, the album includes the singles ‘Lovely Head’, ‘Utopia’, ’Human’ and ‘Pilots’ and the reissue will feature remastered audio, unreleased material, b-sides, rarities, remixes as well as newly written sleeve notes and rare images.
Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory formed Goldfrapp in 1999 and released their Mercury Prize nominated debut album Felt Mountain in 2000. They have since released a further five studio albums (most recently Silver Eye in 2017) and a string of hits including ‘Strict Machine’, ‘Ooh La La’, ‘Lovely Head’ and ‘A&E’. The multi-platinum selling band have been nominated for several Grammy and Brit Awards and won an Ivor Novello for ‘Strict Machine’. Goldfrapp have also scored the soundtracks to the films ‘My Summer of Love’ (dir. Pawel Pawlikowski, 2005) and ‘Nowhere Boy’ (dir. Sam Taylor-Wood, 2009) and wrote the music for the National Theatre’s production of ‘Medea’ directed by Carrie Cracknell in 2014.
Tickets for the tour go on sale on Friday 15 November at 10am GMT from www.goldfrapp.com/live
GOLDFRAPP – FELT MOUNTAIN: 20TH ANNIVERSARY TOUR
25 March – Manchester, Albert Hall
26 March – Gateshead, Sage
27 March – Edinburgh, Usher Hall
29 March – London, Royal Festival Hall
31 March – Birmingham, Symphony Hall
1 April – Bexhill-on-Sea, De La Warr Pavilion
Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
– Morpheus, The Matrix
The machines pulse and buzz with tension. Rein straps into the producer’s chair, jacks into the Matrix, and engages with her whole being.
“Off the Grid” is the first sign of the new sound that the Swedish hard dance warrior has been developing together with co-producer, Carli Löf. The power of the bass is inspired by the proto-balearic sequences of Nitzer Ebb, but the combination of rhythm and rebellion is uniquely Rein.
As she breaks the chains that bind her, Rein emerges as herself; more authentic and more melodic. “Off the Grid” finds her waking up to the Matrix and engaging the machines. It is the sound of the red pill being swallowed.
A reminder: Rein headlines TEC 006 at London’s Electrowerkz on Saturday, the 30th of November, 2019. Also appearing are Komputer and IMI.