Category Archives: Electronic music

Printworks London may reopen by 2026 after developers submit plans

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British Land and AustraliaSuper want to create cultural venue that will include offices and shops

Printworks London, the 6,000-capacity post-industrial superclub, could reopen by 2026 after property developers that own the site filed their plans to Southwark council.

British Land and its partner AustralianSuper, one of the country’s largest pension funds, submitted a detailed proposal to the council on Monday to redevelop the site in Rotherhithe into a permanent cultural venue just over a year after the cavernous club shut its doors.

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Ryuichi Sakamoto, Japanese pop pioneer and Oscar-winning composer, dies aged 71

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Sakamoto was one of Japan’s most successful musicians, acclaimed for work in Yellow Magic Orchestra as well as solo albums and film scores

Ryuichi Sakamoto, the Japanese musician whose remarkably eclectic career straddled pop, experimentalism and Oscar-winning film composition, has died aged 71.

Sakamoto’s management company said he died on Tuesday. He had been undergoing treatment for cancer.

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Trax Records faces lawsuit over alleged unpaid royalties and lack of payment

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Marshall Jefferson and Adonis are among more than a dozen artists suing the pioneering Chicago house label

More than a dozen artists are suing the pioneering Chicago house label Trax Records, the estate of co-founder Larry Sherman, and current owners Screamin’ Rachael Cain and Sandyee Barns, Rolling Stone reports.

The plaintiffs, among them Trax co-founder Vince Lawrence and musicians Marshall Jefferson, Adonis and Maurice Joshua – allege that the label owes them unpaid royalties and in some cases that the label never paid them anything at all, according to a copy of the lawsuit seen by the Guardian.

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Aria awards 2022: Rüfüs Du Sol and Amyl and the Sniffers among top nominees

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Dance group leads with seven nominations, with Flume, the Kid Laroi, Baker Boy and Vance Joy also winning multiple nods

Rüfüs Du Sol has dominated the 2022 Aria award nominations, featuring in a total of seven categories, followed by Amyl and the Sniffers and Flume.

The Sydney electronic trio’s latest album, Surrender, continues to pay dividends for the band, who won best group and best dance song for their track Alive at last year’s Arias. Alive also won them best dance song at this year’s Grammy awards.

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One dead and dozens hurt as stage collapses in high winds at Spanish festival

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Strong gusts hit the Medusa electronic music festival in Cullera south of Valencia in the early hours of Saturday

One person was killed and dozens were injured when high winds caused part of a stage to collapse at a dance music festival near the Spanish city of Valencia in the early hours of Saturday, regional emergency services said.

Other infrastructure was also damaged when gusts battered the Medusa festival, a huge electronic music festival held over six days in the east coast town of Cullera, south of Valencia.

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Klaus Schulze, German electronic music pioneer, dies aged 74

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Multi-instrumentalist who played with Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel before admired solo career is hailed for his ‘innovative spirit’

Klaus Schulze, the German multi-instrumentalist whose work with drones, pulses and synthesisers was hugely influential on generations of electronic music makers, has died aged 74.

Frank Uhle, managing director of Schulze’s label SVP, wrote: “We lose and will miss a good personal friend – one of the most influential and important composers of electronic music – a man of conviction and an exceptional artist. Our thoughts in this hour are with his wife, sons and family. His always cheerful nature, his innovative spirit and his impressive body of work remain indelibly rooted in our memories.”

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Jazz, Old Norse and ‘troll tunes’: the strange, stunning music of Shetland

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It’s 550 years since the islands became part of Scotland, and the archipelago is still not for the faint-hearted. But it has inspired its own diverse music, where fiddles and accordions meet the sub-bass of the sea

Five hundred and fifty years ago next month, the king of Norway lost a deposit he had put down to settle a debt: more than a hundred wild, treeless islands in the sub-arctic North Sea. The Scottish king, James III, had wanted Rhenish florins, but he had to settle for Shetland instead.

The archipelago eventually became part of the UK and has since developed a diverse, distinctive musical culture. This weekend, at the annual Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow, the Shetland 550 concerts will celebrate it, bringing together experimental composers, jazz performers, poets and players of traditional tunes. The series is co-curated by the award-winning fiddler Chris Stout, who was born in the three-mile-long Fair Isle (population: 68) before moving to the Mainland at eight (population: 18,765). “Although, even there, you’re still only ever three miles from the sea,” he says.

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Neo rhythms: why techno music and The Matrix are in perfect harmony

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The films’ heroes look like they’ve just stepped off the Berghain dancefloor – and the connection isn’t merely aesthetic. The series shares the genre’s philosophy of liberation

“We can’t see it,” says a character in The Matrix Resurrections, “but we’re all trapped inside these strange repeating loops.” Small surprise techno producer Marcel Dettmann was commissioned to write music for this latest film in the franchise. It’s a natural fit. Its director, Lana Wachowski, goes clubbing at Berghain, the Berlin techno club where Dettmann is resident and where, cut off from the everyday world, people have surreal, liberating experiences. Techno continues to inspire the franchise’s aesthetics.

When club techno arose in 1980s Detroit, African American producers were reimagining the deindustrialised city as a site of futurist fantasies. Cybotron’s dystopian 1984 track Techno City was inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the Tokyo of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s track Technopolis. “I extrapolated the necessity of interfacing the spirituality of human beings into the cybernetic matrix,” said Cybotron’s Rik Davis (using the word “matrix” before the film existed), “between the brain, the soul and the mechanisms of cyberspace.”

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‘I never worked in a cocktail bar’: How the Human League made Don’t You Want Me

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‘Philip turned up to meet my parents fully made up, with red lipstick and high heels. My dad locked himself in the bedroom and refused to come out’

I had intended to recruit just one female backing singer but when I walked into the Crazy Daisy nightclub in Sheffield, the first thing I saw was Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley dancing. They somehow looked like a unit while being clearly different individuals. I knew they were right.

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‘Music dug up from under the earth’: how trip-hop never stopped

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Fused from jungle, rave and soul, trip-hop filled the coffee tables of the 90s, and is now inspiring Billie Eilish’s generation. So why is the term so despised by many?

Nobody really wanted to be trip-hop. The stoner beats of Nightmares on Wax’s 1995 Smokers Delight album were era defining, but it carried the prominent legend: “THIS IS NOT TRIP HOP”. James Lavelle’s Mo’ Wax label flirted with the term after it was coined by Mixmag in 1994, but quickly switched to displaying it ostentatiously crossed out on their sleeves. Ninja Tune did print the phrase “triphoptimism” on a king size rolling paper packet in 1996, but only as a joke about escaping categories.

“I always disliked the term,” says Lou Rhodes of Lamb, “and I would always make a point in interviews of challenging its use in regard to Lamb.” Mark Rae of Rae & Christian similarly says: “I would give a score of 9/10 on the lazy journalist scale to anyone who placed us in the trip-hop camp.” And Geoff Barrow’s ferocious hatred of the term – let alone its application to Portishead – has become the stuff of social media legend.

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Countdown to ecstasy: how music is being used in healing psychedelic trips

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Jon Hopkins timed his upcoming album to the length of a ketamine high, while apps are using AI music to tailor drug experiences. Welcome to a techno-chemical new frontier

Two hundred psychedelic enthusiasts have converged in Austin, Texas for a “ceremonial concert” on the autumn equinox. People sprawl on yoga mats around a circular stage as staffers pace the candlelit warehouse, jingling bells and spritzing essential oils. While psychedelic drugs are prohibited, some attenders seem in an altered state, lying on their backs and breathing heavily as rumbles of bass from Jon Hopkins’ upcoming album, Music for Psychedelic Therapy, shakes the hushed space.

This is the first time Hopkins – known for acclaimed solo electronic albums as well as production for Coldplay and Brian Eno – has played his new record in public, and the crowd is visibly moved. As recordings of spiritual guru Ram Dass’s teachings fill the room on the final song, the woman next to me begins silently weeping.

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Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode: ‘Regret is a weird word. I don’t look back on my life like that’

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The Depeche Mode frontman answers your questions, on his new covers album, taking early dance lessons from Mick Jagger and the right way to load a dishwasher

Did you accomplish everything you set out to on [forthcoming album] Impostor? MrBeelzebub

I was really burned out after the last Depeche Mode tour, then Rich [Machin, long-time musical partner in Soulsavers] and I started talking about songs and artists who had influenced us. Before we knew it, we were making a Soulsavers record with me as frontman that paid homage to those songs, but was almost a new piece of work. I realised that the choices were songs that put me where I am, suggested where I have been and where I might be. They are songs [such as Dan Penn/James Carr’s Dark End of the Street or Bob Dylan’s Not Dark Yet] that reflect on lives lived. I would not have known how to sing these songs when I was 18.

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From hardcore to bardcore: Kedr Livanskiy, the Russian producer inspired by Tolkienists

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Livanskiy’s operatic vocals and hazy beats put her at the forefront of Moscow’s underground club scene. Now she’s retreated from the city to the forest to nurture her imagination

Yana Kedrina’s earliest exposure to music came in a wooden dacha in a pine-forested village 2,000 miles from Moscow. Kedrina’s grandmother, who built the summer cottage with her husband, would invite Kedrina and her seven sisters over to sing Russian folk songs and drink cherry leaf tea. The rustic surroundings and feelings of kinship nurtured in Kedrina an infatuation with her culture’s folklore and a devotion to community.

“A large family, gathering to connect to its ancestral heritage, was an experience unique to a time that predated this individualism we live in now,” Kedrina says, speaking in Russian. Her grandmother never lived to see her blossom into an internationally recognised musician under the name Kedr Livanskiy (Russian for the Lebanese cedar tree). But Kedrina, 31, takes solace in the fact that her career has spiritually fulfilled her grandmother’s dream of travelling beyond her village in Russia’s Tomsk region.

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DJ Carl Cox: ‘When I tell people my story, they don’t believe it’

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The three-deck wizard’s new memoir details a life behind the decks, from the Houses of Parliament to Honolulu – and tragedy in Venezuela. Now, he says, his baking is as popular as his music

In late November 2007, Carl Cox’s DJing career was over – or so he thought. A few days earlier he had played a set at a festival in Caracas, Venezuela, as part of a tour of South America. The vibe was good and the crowd was bouncing. “I heard all these fireworks go: ‘Bang, bang, bang.’ Everyone was going: ‘Woooo! Yeeaaaah!’” Cox mimics dancing behind the decks. “Then there were more bangs and I thought: ‘Yay, more fireworks!’ But then I looked at the crowd and something was wrong. They were dispersing. I realised: ‘Fuck, that’s not fireworks, that’s gunfire.’”

Two rival gang members had met on the dancefloor and begun shooting. Cox got down on the floor and crawled to a backstage locker room where he and his tour manager barricaded themselves in. After an hour, they were escorted out to a car, past scores of police vans and ambulances. Four people had died and nine were injured. “Seeing people shot on the dancefloor and dying in front of me, blood everywhere …” Cox says, rubbing his eyes. “One minute we were having the time of our lives and the next we were cowering for our lives.”

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DJ-producer Sherelle: ‘I feed off people’s unexplained anger’

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Black artists pioneered dance music, but the scene remains white-dominated. UK rising star Sherelle is dodging the trolls and trying to make change with her platform Beautiful

Wearing a fleece jacket covered in black and white acid smilies, Sherelle is a walking embodiment of dance music when I meet her. The 27-year-old north Londoner and self-professed “bocat” – a Jamaican slang term used in a derogatory manner to describe someone who enjoys giving cunnilingus, now proudly reappropriated by her on her T-shirts – is one of the UK’s most purely enjoyable new DJs. By blending various global forms of dance music, she is a catalyst for unrestrained raving who has stormed her way into the limelight at 160 beats per minute.

She grew up on dancehall booming out of her mum’s hi-fi system, and hip-hop and R&B music videos on cable TV. “In my house we had cable illegally, because we couldn’t afford to pay for it,” says Sherelle, whose younger self would cringe at her mother and older sister. “Whatever they were watching, they would dance to. I have a graphic image of Beenie Man’s Who Am I, around the time the tune came out, and my mum and sister having the greatest time. I was mortified.”

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Sex-positive pop star Shygirl: ‘I want to affect your equilibrium’

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After feeling sexualised even before her teens, the south London rapper wrested back her power. She explains how her disruptive club music creates a space where anything can happen

Shygirl’s tracks are, for want of a better word, filthy. The 28-year-old musician’s lyrics detail sexual exploits and disposable partners. “I like to glide, figure skate,” is not about ice dancing. This week she releases BDE, a collaboration with Northampton rapper Slowthai, and it’s less rapping on her part, more an intoxicating mix of cooed and snarled commands over ominous production. This is sex as chaotic workout, and if it ends up jarring the listener, the artist has achieved her goal. “I love it when art makes me uncomfortable, because I have to question where that’s from,” she says. “How can something affect my equilibrium like that? I want to affect other people’s equilibrium.”

Her domineering musical persona is worlds away from the chatty, pleasant woman I meet in a bar outside Cambridge University’s Union, where she has just given a talk about her artistry and the accessibility of the creative industries. About a quarter of our time is spent laughing; sharp introspections on owning one’s narrative as a public figure come as easily as self-deprecating tales of recording angry voice notes about previous partners. And it’s easy to see why she’s increasingly considered a fashion force: following a recent Burberry campaign and soundtracking runways for Thierry Mugler, she stands out majestically via orange hair, wholesome babydoll dress and eye-catching Telfar Clemens boots, noticed by wide-eyed students in our vicinity.

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Jazz-funk guru John Carroll Kirby: ‘When musicians are uncomfortable, it can be interesting’

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He’s worked with Solange, Frank Ocean, Harry Styles and more – and his own music is wondrously fun and spiritual. The LA artist explains why it sounds like butterflies and mountain lions

Amid the swirling sounds and scenes intersected by Los Angeles’ sprawling freeways, John Carroll Kirby is somewhere at the centre of it all, shirt open, hair slicked back. He circles the city’s buzzing jazz movement with his soul-dappled instrumentals and is a keysman, composer and producer who’s been enlisted by some of the most exciting names in contemporary pop: Frank Ocean, Mark Ronson, Harry Styles, Blood Orange, and Solange Knowles, whose incendiary past two albums, A Seat at the Table and When I Get Home, were shaped in part by Kirby.

He laughs as he describes his own work as “French cat burglar music”: it blends jazz with new age, funk and exotica, flutes often taking centre stage. Tracks are inspired by paintings of ayahuasca visions or stories about dolphins that turn into lost boys. Kirby is of a spiritual persuasion, but he has a sense of humour about it, too.

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Martina Topley-Bird: ‘I wasn’t trying to be famous. I was embarrassingly earnest about being authentic’

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The vocalist breaks her long silence to talk about grieving for her daughter, her pioneering work with Tricky on Maxinquaye and finally making an album she’s 98% happy with…

Martina Topley-Bird is struggling with her voice today. “It was awful last night,” she says, croakily, down the line from her home in Valencia. “My first interview in 11 years and then this happens!” As it turns out, Topley-Bird’s will hold out for well over an hour. But it won’t always take her to where she wants to go. She’s agreed to an interview to promote Forever I Wait, her first album since 2010’s Some Place Simple, but she doesn’t enjoy talking about herself; she’s fully aware of her tendency to let conversations drift, leave sentences unfinished, not quite pin down the message she wants to deliver. Speaking to her can be like listening to some of her dreamier music: captivating, meditative, yet somehow with a sense of her barely being there at all. A typical anecdote might grind to a halt midway through: “But yeah… I don’t know… sorry, vagued out again!”

There is also a subject that is never going to be easy to talk about. In 2019, Topley-Bird’s daughter, Mazy, also known as Mina, killed herself at the age of 24. She had suffered a psychotic episode following a gig with her band 404 and died after being admitted to West Park hospital, Darlington. An inquest led to the coroner saying he would make two prevention of future death reports to reduce the risk of patients self-harming on the ward. At the time, Topley-Bird put out a statement saying: “Sweet baby, life won’t be the same without you.” But she hasn’t spoken since. She’s said in advance today that the subject can be broached, but that doesn’t make it any less difficult. “I’m only just beginning to process it,” she later admits.

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