“The Girl And The Robot” gets a video

The Girl And The Robot is without a doubt one of the stand-out tracks on Röyksopp’s latest LP Junior; it shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that this will be their next single, available June 15th across the usual plethora of formats.

I have to admit, as someone that typically listens to music over lyrics (frequently to the point of not even remotely knowing what a song is about), I find that something about Robyn’s voice makes me aware of every word she sings, and this track is no different. It’s a fantastically fun and innocuous track about the trials and tribulations of being a 20-something Swedish pop star in love with a robot, with fake choral sounds and whirling synths layered over constant, compressed drums that remind me just a little of Boys Noize, only tamer.

Their video for the track has been floating around on Youtube for a while but it only came to my attention earlier today via Mixmag. It keeps the robot theme alive and well, with Robyn spending her days in a sort of The Jetsons-esque boudoir, idly watching TV, taking pregnancy tests and needlessly spilling drinks onto the floor while waiting for her horticulturalist robotic bf to come home from whatever futuristic synthetic farm he works in. Also watch out for the Röyksopp boys in the robot salesroom.

1,000,000+ Simian Mobile Disco Fans Can’t Be Wrong

BIT slow on the uptake for this one I must confess, given that this track was first ripped off Radio 1 by some crafty bloggers about two months ago. In case any of you haven’t heard it though, here it is: new Simian Mobile Disco material!! 10,000 Horses Can’t Be Wrong is firmly in the Sleep Deprivation/Wooden/System style - minimally-technoish beats and clicks, made all the more aurally pleasing by SMD’s use of vintage synths, modular racks and such, which seems to give everything a cosy warm sound.

And here’s Synthesise, a track they introduced just before 10,000 Horses Can’t Be Wrong. If you’re wondering about the videos, they’re by Kate Moross and Alex Sushon. The former is only 23 years old and has already designed t-shirts/videos/illustrations for La Roux, The Teenagers, Chromatics and Punks Jump Up, as well as various advertising materials for Cadbury and Apple - basically one of those incredible youth success stories that makes you question what you’re doing with your life. Or maybe that’s just me…? Either way, if you’ll please excuse me, I have to head to the kitchen and devour a tub of Ben & Jerry’s Caramel Chew Chew and a family-size bag of Minstrels.

A Taste Of Kitsuné Maison 7

French fashion house and record label Kitsuné have put out a little teaser video to give us a taste from their upcoming Kitsuné Maison 7 compilation, as well as their FW09 clothing collection. 6 was an absolute gem of a record so let’s hope 7 keeps the quality coming…

Radio Soulwax goes all hi-tech and Internet-y on us

Not content with blitzing almost every festival of casual interest over the last two years (and this summer), the Dewaele brothers have announced plans to bring their own special breed of danced-up pan-genred fabulousness under the 2manydjs guise online. In a move that made me instantly think of Richard Curtis’ latest offend-nobody lite-flick The Boat That Rocked (despite said film having nothing in common with what I am about to announce, apart from the common radio theme - such is the strange, strange way my brain operates) they will be broadcasting Radio Soulwax onto the interwebs via a dedicated site at www.2manydjs.com.

Ohhhh don’t click that link yet, you naughty, electro-mashup-hungry, impatient little people. The site will only be live for the month of June, but it will feature such goodies as themed hours, new mixes (naturellement), special guests, and, it being the Internet, some sort of mysterious visual element, which should make the whole thing more than worth the wait.

Fever Ray - Fever Ray

It must be fun being Karin Dreijer Andersson. If virtually any artist I can think of (apart from Björk; Björk can do anything) decided to sing about a friend they’ve had since they were seven and who they have conversations on the phone about dishwasher tablets with, it would probably come across as a sad attempt at being weird, quirky and avant-garde. But not our Karin. As one half of Swedish electronica ensemble The Knife, weirdness is de rigueur for her. In fact, the absence of weirdness would probably cause some kind of mass revolt among her loyal fans (myself included).

It should come as a relief, then, that for her debut solo release under the Fever Ray moniker Karin has remained true to weird, bread-and-butter The Knife material. Though now a happy mother of two young children, Fever Ray sees Karin make a welcome return to the bleak synth landscapes and relentless vocal effects that first brought her and her brother Olof to international stardom.

To be honest, the majority of Fever Ray’s tracks really don’t steer too clear of waters sailed by The Knife. The vocoder is still omnipresent, used for the vocal masculating effect that has become practically a staple of their sound. This can get tedious after a while, especially if you’ve already had Silent Shout on repeat for the last three years; it’s almost a relief listening to vocoder-free When I Grow Up and Now’s The Only Time I Know, for which Karin has allowed her incredibly unique, almost hauntingly harsh voice to reign free.

Across the album, extensive use has been made of instruments such as vibraphones and malletophones, or synthetic imitations of them. Many of the true synth instruments also have that same sharp-attack timbre, giving the overall impression of an aural assault from an army of musical drums.

A few tracks are refreshing for their surprising originality. Now’s The Only Time I Know veers into pop-like terrain in its form and melody, while Triangle Walks bizarrely might make you feel like you’re wearing an Armani power suit and eating a sushi lunch in an ‘80s L.A. restaurant. Don’t ask.

Stand-out tracks aside, what Fever Ray lacks as a whole is a general unifying structure. The concept of putting this on from start to finish is difficult to imagine; the songs aren’t really that distinctive when compared to each other and they all seem to involve variations of the same instruments and compositional flairs. I kept waiting for something drastic along the lines of We Share Our Mother’s Health to appear and make me go ‘Yesssss!’ but it just doesn’t happen. Everything seems to sound the same; even the aforementioned stand-out tracks don’t really stand out that much.

With that aside, there’s still plenty to appreciate in this album, even if this is your first foray into the Dreijer family music catalogue. However, despite the clear quality of the material, Fever Ray fails to explore territory that wasn’t already traversed by Karin’s work with her brother. Whether this will hold interest over time like Deep Cuts and Silent Shout have remains to be seen.

Buraka Som Sistema

illustration by Phil Dunne

Kuduro isn’t a genre known to the vast majority of the Irish populace. In fact, the chances are quite high that you weren’t even aware there was such a thing as kuduro until curiosity inspired you to read this article. Either that or you’re a die-hard fan of the stuff; my sincerest apologies for patronising you if this is the case.

Likewise, Buraka Som Sistema are a band you’ve either never heard of or are madly in love with. Analogue had the chance to sit down and have a chin-wag with these Portuguese beat-meisters at their pre-Christmas DJ set in The Twisted Pepper. Two of the band - L’il John and Riot - producer Conductor is sadly absent - and guest vocalist/pretty-much-member Kalaf have been busy touring Europe.

Riot, guitar in hand, idly strums some tunes as L’il John gives a brief explanation of what exactly kuduro is. “You can describe it as a sound that’s based on […] African DJs’ and producers’ attempts at doing techno and house music. It’s picking up on the different aspects that they created around their own interpretations of these things, and it’s developing that and giving our own European version of it at the same time.”

Fast tempos, frenetic African beats and pounding bass drums under a rapid fire of MCing are typical characteristics of Kuduro. The genre is almost exclusively of Angolan origin, and with a high concentration of Angolan immigrants in certain suburbs in Lisbon it’s no surprise that the city is essentially home to the movement.

L’il John and Riot, making music since their teens, hooked up with kuduro producer Conductor a few years ago and formed Buraka Som Sistema. Describing themselves as “progressive kuduro” (pretty much a meaningless term; “it was a joke in an interview” confesses L’il John) and with a handful of EPs under their belt, they managed to attract the attention of M.I.A., who quickly got in touch. “It got to a point where she knew about us because we met so many mutual DJs and producers,” Riot explains, “so basically one day she called our studio, she talked with Jo?o [Barbosa, a.k.a. L’il John] and that’s how we got together.” Their collaborations resulted in Sound of Kuduro, the most popular single off their debut LP Black Diamond, which was released in November.

The album title reveals a lot about the band’s approach to their craft and origins, according to L’il John. “In South Africa, they had all that apartheid stuff, black people were excluded from experiencing the whole country, they were restricted to areas. What they call a black diamond is… imagine, a son of a couple that lived in apartheid, a son coming up from nowhere and making it for himself. That’s called a black diamond.”

When the genre first began to emerge in the poorest suburbs of Lisbon, kuduro artists were essentially forced to use aging and severely limited equipment to make their music. “It actually comes from production,” L’il John says. “It was never traditional, it was a reaction to traditional music. It was kids with their parents and grandparents playing the same instruments throughout their lives, […] and, even though they can play the same instrument, they broke that link in a way and just grabbed a shitty PC from seven years ago, installed Fruity Loops or some software like that, and started doing beats.”

These days Buraka Som Sistema have managed to accumulate enough of a following to be able to afford a plush studio in Lisbon, complete with de rigeur studio software behemoth Pro Tools. While other dance acts may grow to obsess about analogue synths and vintage compressors, this clearly isn’t in the Buraka/kuduro spirit. “It’s not about having the ultimate kick drum or snare,” L’il John says, “it’s about trying to pass on an idea or a concept.”

When I ask them for their thoughts on illegal downloading and whether I think it’s hurt them or helped them, their response is refreshing. “In Angola, it’s more or less the same process; when you release a track, people buy your albums, but they also [illegally] copy the music,” Kalaf explains, “so if your music is really good, you’ll find bootlegs; if it’s crap, you’ll find bootlegs. Simple as that.”

Future plans for the band include the release of Black Diamond in the United States, though Kalaf is already looking onwards. “We really want to make the biggest show that we can make with our size,” he reveals. “To be able to throw a good show, thats the way you fight the downloading - to be able to make a show that people will like to see and will remember.”

Groove Armada Share The Love

You might despise them for being vastly overplayed and selling their slowed-down-jazz souls to Marks and Spencer in exchange for some Extremely Chocolately Chocolate Chocolate Pudding (I don’t - I know people that do), but you can’t deny that the boys of Groove Armada have oodles of hi-energy musical talent.

Thus, you will all be delighted to hear that they’ve made their new EP available, pre-release, on the internet for the consumption of share-happy rum drinkers. Confused? Well basically it goes like this:

Mr Bacardi and Groove Armada sit down for a chat. Mr Bacardi explains that his company, the globally-renowned rum manufacturer Bacardi, is setting up B-Live Share, an online platform for people to share music and discover new artists. Or something. What Bacardi needs is a high-profile artist to launch the whole affair. An artist willing to allow their new material to be made available exclusively on B-Live Share, thus encouraging people to join the site and share it with as many of their friends as possible. The more friends they share it with, the more tracks they can download. Groove Armada eye the briefcase of money that Mr Bacardi has placed on the table and is now fondling delicately with a wee glint in his eye, and chime in unison, “Sign me uuuuuppp!”

Slight amount of artistic license there - in reality the main thing Groove Armada get out of this is publicity, as well as a way of having some kind of control over how their music is shared by people online. The mp3s are in DRM-free format however, so obviously some of the tracks have ended up on naughty bloggers’ sites. The divils!

There are four tracks on the EP (Go, El Padrino, Pull Up (Crank It Up), and Drop The Tough), with a tiered system determining how each track is shared. The hardest track to get is Drop The Tough (remixes by The Twelves and Van She are floating around on Hype Machine) which requires each B-Live Share user to share with 2,000 friends before he or she can access the song.

There’s some kind of staggering process as well, whereby people that you shared with who then share the track give points to you because you shared with them, then when the people that you shared with who then shared the track who share the track get points, they share the track and… points… umm… such as, North Korea… The staggering thing hurts my head a bit really. Share, get points. That’s it in a nutshell.

If any of you want to get your hands on the EP, you can access B-Live Share here and get your hands on the first track, Go. No prizes for guessing whose account you’ll be doing that through… I’m shameless, I know.

I Feel A Fever Ray Coming On…

It’s been almost three years since The Knife graced us with their most recent album Silent Shout, and dedicated fans have been growing impatient as the band continues their hiatus. An upcoming opera will no doubt appease the more obsessive fans (of which, when it comes to The Knife, there are many), but while Olof Dreijer is busy recording in the Amazon, big sis Karen has taken it upon herself to unleash some solo material on the world.

Thus, I present to you - Fever Ray! Some of you will already be familiar with the first single, If I Had A Heart, produced by Karen with Christoffer Berg and released digitally just over a month ago. The Andreas Nillson-directed video floated onto the interwebs earlier this month, and is a suitably spooky accompaniment to the song’s relentless bassy synth loop and sombre vintage organ.

The self-titled debut album was released on Klicktrack on January 12th, in delicious, high-quality 320kbps mp3 format. The website gives you the extremely thoughtful ability to preview every track on the album; not just 30 seconds, mind, but the entire length. The physical LP is released across Europe and the U.S. at the end of March.

It doesn’t take a musicological expert to work out that this is one-half of The Knife. Their typical synth techniques crop up time and time again; putting the same synth instrument in fifths, for example, as heard on the bell sounds near the beginning of Triangle Walks and in countless other places on the album. There is also a liberal use of vocoders on Karen’s voice, another textbook The Knife sound.

At the same time, this definitely isn’t another Olof-and-Karen affair. Tracks like Now’s The Only Time I Know and I’m Not Done contain a sound that would have been out of place on Silent Shout. Fresher drums, more energy and - dare I say it? - happier chords. The Knife fans will still love this, but. much like Thom Yorke and The Eraser, Karen’s choice to (for now) branch out on her own has clearly granted her the freedom to explore a new, more versatile sound.

Fake Blood at the Twisted Pepper live review

Photo by Matthew Johnson

Bodytonic kicked off the grand opening weekend of their much-discussed new venue The Twisted Pepper in fabulous style by playing host to one of the most elusive producers and DJs around at the moment, Fake Blood. Attempts by yours truly to secure a tête-à-tête with this most mysterious of figures were fruitless; the man quite simply “doesn’t do interviews”.

This didn’t come as a surprise. Over the last eighteen months, Fake Blood has risen from obscurity to become one of the most talked-about remixers and producers on the electro scene without doing a single interview. The internet, and particularly the blogosphere, has worked itself into a flurry with theories abound as to who exactly the man behind the moniker is.

Why his face or identity matters so much is beyond anyone’s guess, though the more Fake Blood attempts to conceal his real persona the more the guessing intensifies. A simple browse across various blogs and forums reveals myriad of guesses: Diplo, Switch, Hervé, Sinden, Boy 8-Bit, Norman Cook and, bizarrely, Tiësto are among some of the speculations put forward by bloggers and dead-serious electro aficionados. A tongue-in-cheek blog even ran for a while.

Such rampant hype might lead to easy conclusions that Fake Blood is more style than substance, but his remixes have proven him to be an extremely adept and intelligent producer (perhaps the strongest argument that this is not a man who came out of nowhere and just started twiddling knobs and pressing buttons). His rhythmic preferences would definitely suggest a history somewhere in big beats; the drum loop in The Wiseguys’ 1998 hit Ooh La La is suspiciously similar to Fake Blood’s style. In fact, the theory that Fake Blood is, in fact, a DJ called Theo Keating, formerly of The Wiseguys and now of The Black Ghosts, is the strongest of the lot.

In each of Fake Blood’s remixes his name is uttered by the original artist, giving his works a tag or audio stamp; amazingly, this is done by cutting the original vocal part into tiny phonetic fragments (phragments?) and reslicing them to construct the words “fake blood”. This is careful, deliberate time in the studio; clearly he is spending a lot of time poring over his production, something backed up by the fact that his remix total from the last year-and-a-half has yet to hit the double digits. Yet even with this low output, he has successfully spread his gospel of “grindcore” far and wide.

With this kind of hype and anticipation, the atmosphere in The Twisted Pepper’s main room was already electric before Fake Blood had even stepped on stage. Dresses from an earlier NCAD exhibition were suspended from the ceiling at various positions, yet these additions could not distract the crowd as the man himself emerged and began dropping incredible bone-rattling tracks like pebbles in an extremely responsive pond.

This bone-rattling sensation wasn’t just thanks to the DJ. The Bodytonic guys are renowned for an incredible attention to detail, and doubtless they have spared no expense giving their newly-renovated jewel in the crown the most tinnitus-inducing audio configuration possible. Wobbly basslines pulsated and throbbed through the room, while Fake Blood’s extremely distinctive punchy bass drum, used in most of his remixes and definitely in his solo work, snapped through the room like a low-frequency whip.

Spoken/sung “fake blood”s were heard at least every thirty minutes; he incorporated most of his remixes into his two-and-a-half hour set, including the reworkings of Cheap and Cheerful by The Kills and Stuck on Repeat by Little Boots. There were also some remixes and re-edits that won’t be found on any blog or internet resource, including a version of Soulwax’s Teachers re-cut to say (surprise surprise) “Fake Blood is in the house” - unfortunately this results in the drums being sliced up as well, resulting in some messy rhythms and confused (but still extremely enthusiastic) dancing.

The last half-hour of his set saw the kind of incredible, potent, kinetically-charged atmosphere of mutual amazement and appreciation which is witnessed on the Dublin club scene once in a blue moon. Before you ask, there were very definitely no illegal substances flowing through my veins, nor was I under any significant alcohol-based influence. The tunes were simply that good. The robotic vocal lines from LFO’s Freak were combined with the manic snare attacks of Vitalic’s Valletta Fanfares, and thrown into a genre hot-pot that even saw Dr Dre make an appearance.

At 2.30 a.m. he finally played the track that many had been waiting for: his first solo effort, Mars, with its heavy, punchy drums and crunking bassline, though that organ sound definitely seems to be nicked from somewhere… *cough* 2 Unlimited’s Get Ready for This *cough*. This was followed by a track that’s still burning substantial holes in dancefloors everywhere - Soulwax’s remix of MGMT’s Kids. Suffice to say everyone present went completely insane, all the way till the song’s close. As the lights rose he dutifully played Blood Splashing (Fake Blood Theme), the B-side of his solo EP. Once again the room went nuts.

Upon retiring outside, a large majority of attendants found themselves covered in sweat, clothes firmly glued to selves, the product of a hectic set that had everyone dancing with little pause for over two hours. Crowds lingered, puffing on cigarettes and still beaming from ear to ear, knees still wobbling from the effect of being hit with so many crunchy basses and thumping drums. The verdict was unanimous. Who is Fake Blood? An incredible, incredible DJ, that’s who.

808s And Heartbreak review

Kanye West may not be the easiest artist in the world to endear yourself to, but you can’t deny that the man has talent. In his latest LP, Mr West has completely ditched rapping al-together, replacing it with beautiful melodies and AutoTune, a vocal-adjustment program that makes him sound like he’s channeling Cher.

The ‘808’ of the title is Roland’s TR-808 drum machine; a 1980s electro staple, and it comes to prominent effect in Kanye’s tribal rhythms on lead single Love Lockdown, and particularly the slow-but-powerful Say You Will.

The drum machine combined with lush analogue synths gives the entire album a warm, synth-pop feel, especially on tracks like Paranoid - without a doubt one of the strongest songs on the album, with an strong, incessant drum loop and gorgeous stabbing chords.

Certain die-hard fans will not be pleased with 808s and Heartbreak and Kanye’s radical change in direction. But for others, this will be a gladly-received slice of pop from one of the most talented producers around.