The talented multi-instrumentalist, Hannah Peel, has revealed the video for “Palace,” a Wild Beasts cover taken from her last EP, Rebox 2. A member of John Foxx & The Maths, Peel is well-known to electronic music fans, but her solo work in other styles has been as charming and iridescent as this track. Peel plays in London next on 17 September 2015.
The second album from Me the Tiger, the Swedish trio, has finally hit the shelves. Vitriolic (Repo) builds on the template established by their first, eponymous album: energetic sequencers, power chords, driving rhythms and soaring vocals, all swirled together like a Ben & Jerry’s special edition. The confection begins with “As We Really Are,” a driving belter with dystopian lyrics. Vitriolic would manage to get onto year-end highlight lists based on this track alone, but each scoop reveals new depths of flavour.
The obvious reference points for tracks like “My Heroine” or the current single, “What Promises Are Worth” are Crystal Castles without the lunacy or The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but other influences in the mix range from DAF in the sequences to New Order at their most unrestrained. Gabriella Åström’s vocals were a revelation at Gothenburg’s recent Electronic Summer festival, and the slower tracks on the album, “Dreams” and “Control, give us to a chance to hear them at a different pace. The instrumental elements, driven by Jonas Martinsson’s drums and songwriter Tobias Andersson’s synth and guitar lines, are taut, fierce and compelling throughout.
Gothenburg’s Electronic Summer event is the highlight of the music calendar in Northern Europe. The annual festival, which began in 2012, lines up international acts and local synthpop heroes for two days of dynamic performances and non-stop ecstatic dancing.
This year’s programme was headlined by futurepoppers VNV Nation and dark electro veterans Project Pitchfork, but shows by Marsheaux and Karin Park balanced proceedings with world-class melodic poptronica. Home-grown acts, like Me the Tiger, Presence of Mind and Destin Fragil, drew large and supportive crowds. With a regular rhythm throughout the weekend, DJs from the scene’s most influential clubs emerged from a sea of black-clad Vikings to share mixes before returning to immerse themselves in successive waves of EBM and poptronica. The forecast for Sweden’s second city had been for thundershowers, but the electricity in the air all came from a Tesla coil of expectations that was charged by the crowds gathered at the Brewhouse venue.
Sweden’s electronic music scene has held steady, over the years, against encroachments by EDM, Dubstep and Jungle. The country certainly produces world-famous DJs (Avicci, Andreas Tilliander) and pop producers (Max Martin), but it also nurtures classic synthpop acts and opens its arms to new ones. Visiting artists are welcomed with curiosity, while competing DJs and promoters from across the country are shown hospitality rather than hostility. The only aggro on display is a stylistic offshoot of industrial dance music, and the festival atmosphere is inclusive and celebratory.
Cold War Night Life participated in this year’s festival by conducting pre-event interviews with artists and performing a DJ set that included the world premiere of a new Rational Youth track. We also had writers and photographers on the scene. Our selected festival highlights are set out below, but also look for a review by our friends at The Electricity Club, who travelled to Gothenburg to find out what it is that makes the Swedish scene so special.
Me the Tiger
There was a buzz building about Me the Tiger well before Electronic Summer. In pre-event interviews, several artists cited the Falun-based band as one they wanted to check out for themselves, and it was a promising sign that they share DAF’s management. The soaring sounds blasting through the speaker stacks at the event validated the chatter about the indietronica three-piece: Me the Tiger easily bear comparison to Crystal Castles or The Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
Fronted by the charismatic and confident vocalist, Gabriella Åström, Me the Tiger rock the room with power chords and synth lines kicked out by Tobias Andersson, while drummer Jonas Martinsson hammers out solidly danceable rhythms. Their set opens with “Pocket Sized Edition Ending” and “Ariana,” two energetic tracks lifted from their first, self-titled album. They are followed by “What Promises Are Worth,” the uncompromising first single from their new album, Vitriolic (Repo). It’s been a crowd favourite in their live show for a couple of years, and its slow build into an anthemic stormer gets even the jaded aggrotech warriors in the back to move their feet.
After “Headlines,” Me the Tiger completely smash it with “As We Really Are,” the stand-out track from Vitriolic. With a little push from Herr Sprick, expect this song to crash its way up the indie charts. It’s testimony to Andersson’s exceptional songwriting skills, but Åström’s nitro-fuelled delivery is also one of the highlights of the festival. They return to “All We Had” to close the set, basking in the after-glow and leaving the audience needing more.
Vitriolic is released on RepoRecords on 4 September 2015.
Official Web site: methetiger.com
Karin Park
Newly married and fresh from a honeymoon tour of North America with Norwegian noise merchants Årabrot, Karin Park‘s appearance at Electronic Summer is cause for excitement. It’s her first major show in Sweden since a mini-tour for the release of her fifth studio album, Apocalypse Pop, way back in March, and the crowd has missed her.
The act is named for Karin, but she’s not alone. At the back of the stage, brother David Park, clad in his usual Slayer t-shirt, knocks out rhythms and strikes MIDI triggers. On his right, the most recent addition to the team, Kine Sandbæk Jensen (Pieces of Juno), works the keyboards and provides striking backing vocals. The performance is breezily powerful; taut with a touch of wildness. It feels like someone’s been working to refine the stage show, and in doing so they’ve expanded its possibilities while relieving some of the pressure on the Park siblings – not that they work any less hard, it must be said.
The set begins with “Restless” from Park’s previous album, Highwire Poetry, before reaching back to 2009 for “Ashes.” A cover of “Everything” by Maya Jane Coles, which Park sang on in 2013, is a side-trip into deep house territory; a reminder that Park’s own material often hovers between Beatport playlists and dark poptronica. “Stick to the Lie” from the new album, Apocalypse Pop, is a test of Park’s vocal range, which she passes emphatically.
“New Era” from Highwire Poetry follows, and it’s hard to think of another current performer who invests so much genuine emotion into her songs. “Hard Liquor Man” and “Look What You’ve Done” from Apocalypse Pop raise the pressure – the former seeming to invite references to Vladimir Putin with a slight change to “Hard Little Man,” if we heard it right. “Can’t Stop Now” from Ashes to Gold is escstatic poptronica, and “Thousand Loaded Guns” from Highwire provides a thunderous conclusion.
Karin Park’s performance is primal in all the right places, and as shiny as Brigitte Helm’s robot from Metropolis in others. It bears noting that the new album features writing contributions from Jim Eliot, who co-wrote most of Ellie Goulding’s Halcyon album and has provided songs for Olly Murs, Will Young, Ladyhawke and Kylie Minogue. Other contributors to Apocalypse Pop include Dan Brown, who has worked with Massive Attack, The The and Mark Stewart, and Dave McCracken, who is responsible for much of Ian Brown’s solo output and has recorded with Depeche Mode. The songwriting team behind Park is talented, but standing in front of a thousand Swedes it is her voice that makes hearts pause. It is her face that makes the lenses turn in sync. It is her pain that cuts through the air. And it is her smile that rises with the house lights, as if to say, “We made it.”
Psyche
Psyche arrive at Electronic Summer to mark the thirtieth anniversary of their influential first album, Insomnia Theatre. Tragically, shortly before the festival, news emerged of the death of one of the band’s founders, keyboardist and composer Stephen Huss. Although Huss had been prevented by health issues from performing with the band for many years, he had left a legacy of pioneering dark wave songs, and the shows quickly become a celebration of Psyche’s roots. Singer Darrin Huss and keyboardist Stefan Rabura have reworked a number of early tracks and added additional classics to their sets, which gives their performances an air of both respect and renewal.
The godfathers of dark wave, Psyche were one of Canada’s original synth acts. Inspired by the pantomime and politics of Fad Gadget, as well as the gothic influences of the UK post-punk scene, they sang about the consequences of teenage experimentation (“The Brain Collapses”), made suits from shaving foam and wrote soundtracks for imaginary horror films (“Eating Violins”). By the time they escaped Edmonton and started recording Insomnia Theatre, early keyboardist Dwayne Goettel had departed, leaving the Huss brothers as a duo.
Insomnia Theatre was the first step in a path that took Psyche to Europe, where their darker style was embraced by the alternative music scene. New Rose, a French label, licensed the album and released two more, which showed off the band’s ability to command the dancefloor. “Unveiling the Secret,” “Thundershowers,” “The Saint Became a Lush” and “Eternal” rapidly became electro classics and Psyche’s roots in the European scene grew deeper. More recordings followed, with labels and line-ups changing as business and personal circumstances moved on, and Stephen Huss’ retirement left brother Darrin to carry on the Psyche tradition.
The first of two Psyche shows at Electronic Summer draws on older material, starting with “Unbreakable” from 2001’s “Sanctuary” EP. “The Brain Collapses” rouses the crowd to sing along, a sea of hands reaching out towards Huss and Rabura. A series of other tracks written with Stephen Huss follow, including “The Saint Became a Lush,” “Eternal,” “Angel Lies Sleeping,” “Uncivilized” and “The Outsider.” Darrin Huss’ voice has the strength of a male Shirley Bassey, and he uses it to full effect on a set that ends with “Unveiling the Secret” and “Gods and Monsters.”
A secret show, held at the outdoor stage named after Psyche’s “The Outsider,” follows on the second day of the festival. An enthusiastic crowd, still buoyant from the previous day’s proceedings, cheers on “The Crawler,” “Mr. Eyeball Ooze,” “Krieg” (a track written by the Huss brothers with Dwayne Goettel in the band’s early days), “Thundershowers,” “Taking Chances” and “Insatiable.” The Swedish audience show their appreciation for the Psyche songbook by packing the stage area and singing along to even the lesser-known tracks. It’s all over too quickly, but it’s clear that the DNA of these songs can be traced into many of the other acts performing at the festival.
Official Psyche Web site: psyche-hq.de
Marsheaux
There was a time when Depeche Mode were adopted by left-leaning music journalists for their critical lyrics and Soviet-/Maoist-influenced graphics. That culminated with the release of Construction Time Again and the single, “Everything Counts,” in 1983, but more sensitive semioticians had already registered the symbolism of A Broken Frame the previous year. Brian Griffin’s striking cover photograph for the album showed a peasant working in a field with a sickle; Martyn Atkins’ graphics followed the theme with wheat-sheaf and sickle symbols; and Martin Gore’s lyrics for “The Sun and the Rainfall” seemed to channel the anti-Thatcher mood of UK youth with the repeated line, “Things must change!”
If the music press had high hopes for Depeche Mode’s political direction at the time of A Broken Frame, they were less impressed by their musical turn. Following the departure of Vince Clarke, who had penned most of the songs on their chart-baiting debut, Speak & Spell, the band had struggled to come up with equally commercial material. A couple of singles, “See You” and “The Meaning of Love,” rode the momentum generated by their early hits and hinted at Martin Gore’s emergence as a songwriter, but A Broken Frame was a transitional release, showing the band at its most experimental. With time, the band came to turn their back on the album, dropping even the singles from live shows. Looking back, Dave Gahan called it the band’s “weakest album by far.”
Many fans had a less harsh assessment of A Broken Frame, appreciating its off-beat but clever, purely synthesized, songs. While “Leave in Silence” was a peculiarly doom-laced song for a 12″ single, which couldn’t really be danced to comfortably, it fit with the darker musical atmosphere prevailing in 1982. Other songs, such as the instrumental “Nothing to Fear” or the moody “My Secret Garden,” were magnificent departures from the twee synthpop sounds that had dominated the charts a year earlier. The closing track, “The Sun and the Rainfall,” despite its critical-realist lyrics, was invested with as much optimism as could be wrung from a PPG Wave.
The gap between Depeche Mode’s assessment of the album and their fans’ enthusiasm has only recently been bridged by Marsheaux. The Athens-based band caused some controversy when it released a track-for-track cover of A Broken Frame on the Undo label, earlier this year. Dissenters grumbled about the potential similarity in styles, but Marsheaux’s interpretations turned out to be respectful and thoughtful. While the production of the original songs had disappointed Depeche Mode, they hadn’t revisited them. It was left to Marsheaux to deconstruct and reimagine the tracks, which they did true to the poptronica style developed over their previous four albums.
The genius of the project is revealed most fully in a live setting. Depeche Mode are never going to play “My Secret Garden” for their current audience, but fans who know the songs want to hear them played at high volume. The crowd at Electronic Summer is one of the best informed, so they know all of the tracks and have taken Marsheaux’s versions to heart. The Greeks oblige with performances of “My Secret Garden,” “The Sun and the Rainfall,” “Monument” and “Leave in Silence,” interwoven with Marsheaux originals, “Exit,” “To the End,” “Can You Stop Me?,” “Hanging On,” “Dream of a Disco,” “Breakthrough” and “Inhale.”
At the front of the stage, singers Marianthi Melitsi and Sophia Sarigiannidou manipulate microKORG keyboards and show off their vocals, while men in wolf heads work on the live mix. A video projection runs behind them, but all eyes are on Marianthi and Sophia and all ears are tuned to what Andy McCluskey of OMD called the duo’s “wispy, melancholic charm.” On “The Sun and the Rainfall,” Sophia’s breathy vocals transform the song into something more sophisticated than the original. Things must change, certainly, and sometimes they come out better for it.
Thirty years since Psyche’s first album, Insomnia Theatre, the godfathers of dark electro are still going strong. We caught up with Darrin Huss ahead of Psyche’s Electronic Summer show, which promises to be very special.
You have been recording new material at Psyche HQ in Germany. What secrets will you be unveiling at Electronic Summer?
We’re hoping to present one or two new songs, and also we will be doing something very special on the Saturday, but it’s still a secret for now.
What is in the pipeline for Psyche?
I have recently collaborated with Luminance (Belgian artist) and we have a 7” single with two songs coming out, limited and exclusive to ArtofFact Records. Also, I plan a 12” EP of my collaboration with Red Industrie from Mexico, and hopefully our new album tentatively entitled “Light Before Day” will come out by end of October. A limited new master re-release of our first ever 12” single, “Thundershowers (In Ivory Towers),” will also see its 30th anniversary as a collector’s issue, again on ArtofFact Records, later this year.
The Psyche tribute album, Unforgotten Rhymes, attracted a lot of artists. Was it surprising how much respect there is for Psyche’s material?
It was actually a surprise especially some of the song choices such as “Equinoxe” and Murder In Your Love” done by female vocalists of Future Trail, and Arcana Oscura respectively. I also like the way Come In Peace performed “Angel Lies Sleeping”, and Luminance’s version of “Prisoner To Desire”, and am quite fond of The Force Dimension’s version of “The Brain Collapses”. I am most happy with surprising twists and variations of interpretation that came about on some of the songs. I wasn’t even really sure I wanted to have this project happen at all, but other than missing out on contributions from Die Form, and Pankow, I feel “September Moon” by PsyGod, “The Sundial and “Gods And Monsters” from Parralox, as well as “Mr. Eyeball Ooze” from Echo West became equal highlights.
Psyche controls its own releases these days. Do you think that streaming helps or hurts independent artists?
It helps if you have at least your own publishing, or a company that works to make strong placement of your music through distribution. We have to live with this new format now, regardless of opinion, and learn to make the best of it. I think one actual benefit of Streaming is the democracy of choice. Anyone can get involved, but not everyone is going to stand at the top of the list of most seen or heard. Unfortunately there’s no real quality control with such a vast scale of competition, but I find it still more useful than harmful. One has to truly hone their skills to get attention these days. Cats or nudity? Choose your weapon!
You’ve been vocal in your opposition to the heavy-handed treatment of whistleblowers like Manning and Snowden. Why do you think that other artists have been more muted?
The whole point of calling my band Psyche was that I knew I was going to be documenting all aspects of human experience for the rest of my life. Sure I could just write about love, and only emotional aspects, but the mind also has intellectual concerns. I have always been close to the punk ethic, and outside of the mainstream, so I feel a kindred spirit with those brave enough to rock the status quo, and question what is going on behind the scenes of our system. As I also once wrote “the bible tells me what’s right or wrong, the government tells me what’s right or wrong, my mind tells me what’s right or wrong, but you tell me my mind is wrong!” and “it’s like a chess game where no one moves, and I won’t be your pawn” from “Wrench (In Your Plans)”. I think it’s important to stand up for your convictions even if it’s “non-commercial”. Obviously I prefer to communicate directly with my audience, and learn from life rather than just try and meet popular approval.
Psyche’s official Web site: psyche-hq.de
New Order have unveiled the first of their tracks recorded for Mute. “Restless,” which is taken from the forthcoming Music Complete album, is a breezy MOR rock song that certainly sounds like late-stage New Order but lacks the crackling electricity of their best work. Some fans have put this down to the absence of bassist Peter Hook, who is in permanent exile, but much of Bernard Sumner’s songwriting fits into this groove. The question is what is being held back for the release of the album on the 25th of September.
Michael Rother, the collaborator of Dieter Moebius, has announced his passing this evening.
The name of Dieter Moebius is inseparable from the history of post-war European electronic and experimental music. In 1969, he founded Kluster together with Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Conrad Schnitzler in West Berlin. The group came together in the Charlottenburg social scene, and after a short rehearsal they famously played a twelve-hour show. With time, Kluster became Cluster (with the departure of Schnitzler), then Harmonia (with the addition of Michael Rother of Neu!), and collaborations with the likes of Brian Eno, Holder Czukay and Conny Plank saw additional evolution of both organisation and form.
Although Cluster reformed in 2007, by 2010 it was off again and Moebius put his focus onto his solo work and a series of collaborations. His death follows the untimely passing of friend and producer, Conny Plank (pictured together with Moebius in the main photo).
The members of DAF have announced that they have resolved their differences, and that DAF will continue to perform live for the foreseeable future. Their current set of dates had been billed, informally, as a farewell tour, but both Robert Görl and Gabi Delgado have posted to their Facebook followers that there is more DAF to come. Delgado wrote:
Late News…Good News…
Robert Goerl & Gabi Delgado have agreed to carry on with the DAF project !!! Amigos Freunde Friends you can look forward to more exciting DAF concerts in the next years !!!
I am very happy that everything is sorted out now !!!
Immer weiter bis zum sieg – hasta la victoria siempre……
DAF fuer immer !!!
Both Görl and Delgado have solo projects, besides their DAF collaboration. Görl is writing his memoirs and has a new solo album in the pipeline, while Delgado has been busy making dance music. The news of their continued cooperation will be warmly received by their fans.
A TV presentation from 1981, this footage reveals Kraftwerk on stage to have a slightly kooky sense of humour. Robot dancing with smiles; audience participation in the use of the keypad controllers used in Pocket Calculator – it’s an easy-going Kraftwerk that appears to show off its accumulated body of music-work.
Victor Furbacken is a versatile and highly in-demand Swedish musician who has been heard regularly in a wide range of musical contexts, both with artists from Sweden and abroad, in recent years. Furbacken is currently starting his debut solo project. Stripped down and acoustic in the classic singer-songwriter tradition, following in the footsteps of artists like Nick Drake and Nina Simone through Elliott Smith and Steven Stills. With his own sound and lyrics, Furbacken captures and reflects the frenzy, changeability and volatility of our time.
This is a key week for Furbacken’s debut as a solo artist, as he is releasing the brand new video for “Jane II.” The photographer Johan Westerlind filmed it, and Furbacken was happy to give him a free hand:
I have great confidence in Johan and his work, and I thought it was especially exciting to work in this way. The basic idea was to give Johan Westerlind free rein and let him work based on his own experiences of the material. He got a few different songs from me, and after quickly choosing “Jane II” he took over and shaped things in his own way. My only contribution was, together with Johan’s girlfriend Sofie Alm, to sometimes hold the boom, make coffee or sit together in some scenes. We had fun when we worked closely, and that is the point of doing it together.
Furbacken says that songs are based on and evoke certain feelings within himself, but he believes that such a feeling is different for each one. The interesting thing, in this case, was how Westerlind felt the music and what it led to visually. According to Furbacken, the video is not aimed at a specific audience, but rather to every person who likes to feel, remember, dream or just watch beautiful pictures:
I have, as long as I can remember, been fascinated by film, particularly in combination with music. For whatever style and content, I think almost always that the association between sound and image leads to something exciting. The video has no concrete themes, and sometimes the abstract is more dominant than the concrete, but all are welcome to create their own interpretation and their own themes around what they see. Then it becomes something else – a bit like an exchange.
Victor Furbacken on Facebook.
Nepal is one of the world’s poorest countries. More than half of the nation survives on less than $2 per day. The earthquake that hit it in April not only killed 9,000 and left 23,000 injured; it also displaced 450,000 people and caused significant economic harm. While aid has been committed by better-off countries and the usual NGOs are working to help, reconstruction is a challenging task. In the aftermath of the disaster, Anni Hogan, the musician and composer, and her friend Cathy O’Dowd, the first woman to climb Mount Everest from both the north and south sides, took the initiative to organise a compilation of tracks from willing artists. It’s now been released as MITRA – Music for Nepal, a 75-track, 2 Gb (in FLAC form) mountain of digital music on Bandcamp.
The contributors include Ryuichi Sakamoto, Shakespears Sister, Dave Ball & Rick Mulhall, Matt Johnson/The The, Jarboe, Sarah Jane Morris, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Parralox, Billie Ray Martin, Scanner and Hogan herself. While some of the tracks have been donated from the artists’ archives, many have been composed and recorded specifically for this compilation, so will be good reasons in themselves to buy a copy.
Sakamoto-san’s “Kizuna World” took shape in the wake of the Japanese earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster of 2011, and it comes in solidarity with enough emotional depth and strength to draw comparisons to Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony. The first of two contributions from Hogan, a collaboration with Itchy Ear called “Climbing Mount Analogue,” ties back to their work on the soundtrack for Mountain, a film by Bob Wass: a frozen soundscape with piano keys tinkling like the sound of breaking icicles. Shakespears Sister’s “Cold” is lifted from Songs from the Red Room, proving that Siobhan Fahey has a heart as large as her vocal range.
The overall quality of the compilation is exceptional, and there aren’t many other places where Simon Fisher Turner and Scanner rub shoulders with Loretta Heywood and Kirlian Camera. There are no excuses not to pay over the asking price for a copy on Bandcamp, as proceeds go to reconstruction in Nepal and the price per song is far too low for material of this quality.