Colman
Daedalus

This, too, is a story about control. It’s a manual, maybe half Rosetta Stone, half bird guide. It was made the way they made electronic music in the good old days, all analog everything, right after synthesizers shrunk to a manageable size and you didn’t have to trek down to a university to use one anymore. Hard-earned. Tastes different. Our parents’ electronic. And its subject is staying together, that thing we thought was their province. It’s about trying to fix what hurts. It’s about knowing better. Black Noise is men talking to men about women; Lemonade is a woman talking to women about men, and they both orbit around a failure we take for granted like the sun: loving you is complicated. It’s a skill; we forgot.Adrian Younge calls The Electronique Void an academic album, by which he means it is both instructional and informational. There’s a problem at the heart of it, a woman who’s been told that she’s loved, but she doesn’t recognize that, can’t feel it, may have heard it all before, may be worrying about the wrong things. Jack Waterson, long a guitarist in Younge’s band, plays the role of narrator, sounding professorial and rather superior as he lays out for the woman where she’s erred. That vocoder you hear is Adrian, talking to her on a subterranean level, the way an artist must. There’s a strong sense of rules here, a prescription and a presumption that there is an agreed upon way to do it, and there is also a wrong way, or at least a way that won’t work. And the fact is, as didactic as that sounds, it might be the truth. Maybe everybody who’s alone can be cured. The discourse on the album is the kind of thing that happens when you go blonde and then you can’t keep ‘em off you. These truths are cold and hard, and our hero begrudges the well-meaning advice being rained down upon her as any independent woman would. The science of love, its formulas and if-then constraints, causal relationships and observable properties, is best taught experientially, but learning it hurts so, so bad. Music, especially electronic music, reliant as it is on abstraction and unrepentant as it is about hijacking your physiological responses to tempo and rhythm and dynamics, is a way to get there without going through it. Electronic music as practiced and developed by pioneers like Dick Hyman and Raymond Scott and Wendy Carlos is precise and intentional. In making his first electronic album, Younge took his cues from them, reminding a contemporary audience what a synthesizer, deep in its heart, really could be. The lady of The Electronique Void, only ever seen through a man’s eyes, who’s being told what to do by him, sounds trapped by her history and by her position, her ancestors’ trauma echoing through her lineage and booming out of her as a phobia, distrust, misapprehension, rational response to a fucked up situation. Waterson’s text here seems to say that if his character could go back in time, catch her before the damage was done, she would be able to love. And that’s reasonable. Don’t get hooked. Don’t do wifey shit for a fuck boy. Don’t let it go to your head, no. It’s also possible he has no idea what he’s talking about. The lessons for men in The Electronique Void are unspoken but plain as day. This music is an urgent tutorial. Adrian Younge looks at us and sees the frontline of a crisis, something we only have time to triage right now. This isn’t romantic and it isn’t about settling down. This is the fight of our lives: how to love.

from the artist's bandcamp: Over the course of nearly a decade of releases, Szarehave have been a mainstay of UK dance music,cementing their reputation through a string of essentialreleases for labels like Horizontal Ground, Idle Hands,Field, Project 13 and Different Circles. We’re extremelyproud to add another name to that list, with this diverse selection of tracks that comprise both new ideas and forgotten loops, re-visited and re-tooled.The first track, Miner, is named after a street in Downtown Stockton, CA. Whilst Miner isn’t directly about the Central Valley of California, the juxtaposed rhythmic and thematic iterations that outline its structure reflect the uncanny incongruence of the environmentthat birthed it. From the opening bar, the rhythms are pounding, frenetic, and totally unhinged… We won’t give away the payoff though; listen to the tune.Cut with Glass - written after a recycling mishap - perfectly encapsulates a vintage side of the Szare sound - minimal, free from ornamentation, and with an approach to uk sound system culture that exhibits a more westward-gazing sound palette than initially meets theeye.Drop Shadow rounds off the package; as much an exploration of concrète as it is bass music, the drop to 100bpm facilitates one of the most controlled and perfectly executed arrangements we’ve ever heard out of Szare. The spasms of noise throughout are used as a fundamental instrument, complimented by pointillist licks of dubbed out vocals andstrings that reach a fever-pitch in the closing third.

No Corner: ...Lowkey but pivotal Bristolian duo O$VMV$M supply No Corner with their first 12”, some 6 years after their debut ‘Memoryz Ov U’ in 2015Part of the sprawling but loose knit Young Echo collective, Amos Childs (Jabu) and Sam Barrett (Neek) have been in the shadows recently, producing for Manonmars and Rider Shafique, but ‘Weekend Saviour’ marks their sultry return to the fray via six slow and eazy downbeats in signature style. Chopped & screwed rap instrumentals, R&B, and dancehall inform the vibe, although skewed with a lilting South Western accent and perfectly skudgy, stoned appeal that oozes from every cut, working with a paucity of ingredients in an unshowy manner that’s made them clear favourites of red eyed night owls.The ghosts of Avon’s trip hop and heritage gloam large over proceedings, with perhaps obvious comparisons to be between Portishead and their dusty, creaking opener ’116 Greystoke,’ but there’s also something more fugged out to the likes of their dungeon bunkered title cut that’s more intimation, not imitation, as they pursue a perpendicular style of bluntedness between the slompy ‘Deathphone,’ plus the pastoral dancehall of ‘Bird Ride’ nodding to Equiknoxx, and an outstanding closer of cartoonish samples and groggy groove like a Metal Fingers meets Wiley screwball in ‘Codzilla Outro’ pointing to new angles of their sound.

U-Trax: ...U-TRAX presents some hi-energy old school electro and bass from Los Angeles turntablist and producer Nuklear Prophet, who follows up his recent EP on U-TRAX with the full-length album Prophecies 11:21.Formed of an eclectic and energetic collection of gems mined from his overwhelming archive, the album takes in genres such as Electro, Hip Hop, Footwork, Juke, and beyond.

Pointillist club rhythms and dense, porous dub clouds encircle the Wrecked Lightship as Laurie Osborne and Adam Winchester set sail for phantom islands once more. The nocturnal boatswains chart a course guided by pronounced percussive impulses, using physicality to navigate the looming atmospheric pressure that has become their signature style.Opening tracks ‘Arial’ and ‘Third Law’ speak to the roots of Osborne and Winchester’s respective work as Appleblim and Wedge, dealing in dancefloor abstractions where techno, electro and dubstep once stood, but there’s much more at play than simple genre tags could ever express. ‘Third Law’s electro-static interference calls back to Winchester’s work in Dot Product, while the twitchy urgency and gnarly bass echoes Osborne’s ALSO project with Second Storey.Wrecked Lightship is an anchorless concern, free to drift into experimental waters if the currents surge that way, and so ‘Kill Mirror’ and ‘Hydrotower’ head away from forthright structures to play around with sound design and full-frequency manipulation. It’s too kinetic and jagged to be considered ambient, even if it willfully shirks the dancefloor. But for every starboard swerve there’s a prevailing wind, and the likes of finely-tuned club weapon ‘Take It Back’ whip ahead with laser-eyed focus.Nailing their split interests between immediacy and the avant-garde to the mast, Wrecked Lightship deepen the reach of their project on their second album. Whatever shape a specific track might take, Oceans & Seas serves as a paean to the art of sonic manipulation and spatial processing.