Far out sounds from the Far North: the new 20Hz single combines the electronic mastery of Erik Ångman (Göteborgselektronikerna, Octolab) with Per-Ivan’s vocals. Sprawl, the new 20Hz album, hits the racks in a couple of weeks. On the strength of this track, it should be a flowing, poptastic affair.
Not the Rubenesque drag queen who paired up with John Waters, no. “Divine” is the latest single from Shannon Hemmett’s Leathers project. Co-written with her Actors partner, Jason Corbett, it’s a fine slice of pop with the imprint of Canada’s Left Coast.
Ireland’s Lucy Gaffney has released a five-song EP. Pitfalls, named for the lead track, features two new songs and three of her recent singles: “Forgive to Forget,” “Big Love,” and “Locked Up Never Fade.”
The release serves as a reminder of the extent to which there is a 90s 4AD vibe to Gaffney’s work. There are points of comparison with Throwing Muses and Lush. Recorded in Stornaway, the songs have absorbed the atmosphere with sparse, clean arrangements. Despite their elegance, they maintain resonant emotional qualities.
Gaffney has explained the connection between them:
The EP represents a journey, and “Pitfalls” itself is about how endings interact with new beginnings, like the dawn radiating and emerging from the night. The EP reflects on embracing the passing of time, revealing the beauty in both the dark and the light of our past, present and future.
“Pitfalls” doesn’t fall into the pop traps set by the charts. It has the quirkiness of The House of Love’s “Safe,” but there is nothing eccentric about Gaffney’s breathy vocals. Hers is a voice that deserves to be heard more widely.
It is hard to pick a stand-out track from this set, but “Saw Your Chaos” has the uni-student angst of the Wedding Present and the knowing sophistication of Mojave 3. Essential listening for breaking hearts.
How did Yello function as a dictatorship? What does Dieter Meyer think about pornography? Should he have received a Grammy for the lyrics of “Oh Yeah”? These are the issues that came up when Front 242 interviewed Meyer.
Sofi Bonde returns with an unapologetically pop song about choosing life. There is a heaviness behind the track, but it soars with anthemic qualities. The Swedish star co-wrote the song with her long-time collaborator, Stefan Lebrot.
As a working partnership, the collaboration between Emileigh Rohn (Chiasm) and Jean-Marc Lederman (Fad Gadget, The Weathermen, Kid Montana) is productive. The evidence is that they have a double CD album on release.
Black and Bleu collects no less than twenty tracks that demonstrate the Rohn-Lederman work ethic. From the samples we have heard, it is on par with their ability to craft quality songs that bear repeated listening.
The album is released on 3 May 2024 via Bandcamp as a double CD with a 44-page booklet featuring illustrations by the artists. The cover art comes from the Belgian artist, Erica Hinyot.
The label informs us:
20 tracks – 10 Black, 10 Bleu – that focus on the artists’ devotion to emotional content and creativity over predictability and security; each color presents different thematic focus, with the Black symbolizing the chaos and tension of the world, while Bleu represents calmer resolve in the face of uncertainty” as pointed by a famous German outlet.
They are probably right: the double album “Black And Bleu” is a whirlwind of emotions and the songs will take you and won’t let go, no no no.
Just in time for Valborg comes a love song written by Eivør on her new Prophet 5. Lifted from her forthcoming album, ENN, it has an 80s vibe. Romancing the machine, indeed.
If they followed the path of many 1970s peers, A Certain Ratio would be on the nostalgia trail, playing Rewind events alongside China Crisis and Howard Jones. Instead, they are churning out gritty new songs with exposed post-punk roots.
It All Comes Down to This is the band’s fifth album on Mute. Coming only a year after the brilliant 1982, ACR could have been forgiven for coasting a little bit. Instead, they have generated a short but compelling set that serves as a master class in industrial funk. The clarity of the sound is miles from the Tony Wilson-produced “Shack Up,” but the lineage is easily traced between the group’s indie hits and their current material. Jez Kerr’s vocals sound smoother than ever, but there is enough dirt in tracks like “Surfer Ticket” to recall that ACR were contemporaries of both Cabaret Voltaire and The Pixies.
What sets ACR apart from their peers is their sense of rhythm. Listening to “Out from Under,” the glow of the city is menacing but your hips move in response to the threat. Try not to nod to “Where You Coming From.” Your feet will shuffle to the groove of “God Knows,” which has a summer psychedelic feel like later XTC and Wire.
The title track is the one that will get all of the attention in the mainstream press, but the most glorious refrain is in “We All Need.” It’s like Superfly filmed in Moss Side.
If Portishead and DAF had a love child, this new track from Sweden’s Emmon might be the result. Conceived for the forthcoming EP, XCEPTION (out on 31 May 2024), the lyrics grew for two decades before being paired with the melody. Classy and compelling stuff.
(Via Mute)
Simon Fisher Turner has announced details of a new album for Mute, Instability of The Signal, out on 2 August 2024 on limited edition vinyl and digitally.
The composer, musician and Zelig-like artist who has worked and performed in groundbreaking and underground music, film and art scenes since the 1970s has created a lush, soothing and intimate album, a landmark in his ever-expanding catalogue of projects. The 13-track album features Fisher Turner singing for the first time in many years, accompanying compositions built from tiny snippets of sound along with piano, classical strings, a detuned Fender Telecaster, and his magpie-like collecting of field recording.
Instability of The Signal pulls together four strands of Fisher Turner’s sonic experimentation: Slivers, Sounds, Strings, and Singing. The ‘slivers’ are tiny snippets of audio he used as source material for the tracks, all created by Salford Electronics (aka David Padbury), and reworked by Fisher Turner into foundations for entire tracks. The ‘sounds’ that pepper these tracks are sourced from Fisher Turner’s relentless field recording, and include a rhythm created from the sound of a spinning bicycle wheel recorded in Berlin; the percussive sounds of objects on hard floors inspired by his collaboration with artist potter and writer Edmund de Waal; a hand-made mechanical pencil sharpener made by Tilda Swinton’s father (recorded while working on a film with Swinton and the Derek Jarman Lab), along with an extended index of guerrilla field recordings and sonic textures. The album’s ‘strings’ are recordings made with The Elysian Collective (who have recently been performing live with Pulp). Fisher Turner’s voice is the centrepiece of this album – it is the ‘singing’ that draws all these sounds together into a complete and distinctive album of songs. “I was making these tracks with Padbury’s slivers one day, and then the penny just dropped,” he explains. “I just knew I wanted to sing over them: to use my voice again.”
His lyrics scramble Burroughs cut-ups sourced from two of Harold Pinter’s poems; words from a book on the video work of Czech filmmakers Breda Beban and Hrvoje Horvatic, flashes of memories of riding buses in London, cycling topless in jeans around the city. The intimate, soft vocals feature his own memories, pulled extracts from diaries and other texts, some of which are political and subtly delivered the frustrations he felt at the beginning of the project. These lyrics, he says: “reflect how I feel without standing on a soapbox and screaming.”
The album is rooted in the intimate sound space of a small studio, where he recorded with producer Francine Perry. The intimacy is mirrored in the album’s artwork – a photo of his regular collaborator and long-time friend, the filmmaker Isao Yamada listening to the album for the first time. Film plays an important part in telling the visual story of the album, with several filmmakers, including the documentary filmmaker Sebastian Sharples (who previously collaborated with Simon Fisher Turner for Lana Lara Lata (Mute, 2005) invited to create short films to accompany tracks from the album.
Like Fisher Turner’s long and varied career, Instability of The Signal is an accumulation of experience, effervescent memories, sounds and textures. It contains hidden learnings. It is about how restorative singing of ourselves and to ourselves can be but is also a document of times and places delivered in beautifully impressionistic palettes of sounds and voices. It is also another document of Fisher Turner’s remarkable life and unshakeable curiosity about sound. “I’m now a 69-year-old man and by hook or by crook, and some good luck, this album has turned into something which really sounds like me,” he reflects. “I’m singing how I feel I truly sound; this time, I’m not hiding anything.”