Hannah’s Peel‘s original Rebox release featured the red-headed beauty’s ethereal voice accompanied by the sounds of a hand-cranked music box. For that EP, along with OMD’s “Electricity,” Peel covered tracks by New Order, Soft Cell and Cocteau Twins. Half a decade later, she’s ready to share Rebox 2 (Static Caravan), which updates the concept with covers of tracks by East India Youth and Perfume Genius, among other, more recent, artists. Pre-orders can be submitted here.
Touching the Void is a collaboration between Mark Warner of Rossetti’s Compass and Andy Oppenheimer, formerly of Oppenheimer Analysis. The project started up in 2010, when the pair were in Berlin, and has now yielded three releases. The most recent, Love, Longing and Loss (Sub Culture), is a full-length collection of down-tempo and ambient electronic music.
Oppenheimer is a member of the International Association of Bomb Technicians, so perhaps it is not surprising that the album is short on crashing rhythms and long on slow, evolving sounds. Even when Substaat and Machinista get in on the remix act, everything remains measured with sensitivity. On songs like “Parallel Lives,” the overall effect is akin to Dead Can Dance with synths.
One for those quiet moments in the evening, when the brandy is setting in.
Available now on Bandcamp.
There is a recipe for garmonbozia on the net, involving creamed corn and vodka, which ends with the warning that it is only to be consumed by members of the Black Lodge. The recipe is improvised, but the reference is clearly to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks series – a source of inspiration for the conspiracy- and mystery-steeped Swedish duo, Machinista. Although they have named their second album after the foodstuff of an evil order, Machinista may find it hard to remain outside of the mainstream for long: the new material is commercial, dynamic and cut out for chart success.
From the opening bars of “Picture Perfect,” it is clear that the band has been building on the template of last year’s Xenoglossy, finding space for guitars and strings among the pulsing basslines and driving rhythms programmed by Richard Flow. Singer John Lindqwister still has a hint of Nico in his vocals, but the fine tone of his chords really opens up on the album’s stand-out track, “Dark Heart of Me.” Machinista have refined their sound and gained new confidence, which takes their songs and production up a very serious notch.
None of this should be a surprise, as Machinista’s live shows continue to build in excitement. When they appeared at “An Evening with the Swedish Synth” in 2014, they delivered a master class in poptronica stagecraft for a UK audience. They clearly haven’t been resting on their laurels, even if they might have had an eye on Twin Peaks reruns.
Psyche were formed in Edmonton, Canada, in 1982. The same city has been home to legendary Beat poet, Brion Gysin, as well as Kurtis Mantronik, so there must be something blowing in from the nearby natural gas fields that spurs off-beat creatives. Of course, it should be noted that they all had to leave to fully realise their visions: Gysin went to Morocco by way of France to conceive the cut-up technique; Mantronik headed for New York City to kick-start electro and hip-hop; and Psyche eventually settled on Germany’s Baltic coast to create influential dark wave music.
The original incarnation of Psyche teamed up brothers Darrin and Stephen Huss, with Dwayne Goettel (Skinny Puppy) joining them for live shows. Their first album, Insomnia Theatre, was a self-released collection of electronic songs inspired by horror movies and the performance art antics of Fad Gadget. The combination distinguished the young band from contemporaries like Moev and Images in Vogue, with whom they nevertheless felt an affinity, and opened doors in Europe. A deal with the New Rose label and shows on the continent showed the way. With Skinny Puppy scratching their way out of membranes to claim the Canadian horror electro crown, Psyche moved to Europe, where music was appreciated more than pure spectacle.
In the years since then, Psyche’s line-up has evolved around the core of singer Darrin Huss. With a voice as big as Shirley Bassey’s, Huss is one of the best-known and respected fixtures on the dark wave scene. With thirty years of recordings behind him, counting from Insomnia Theatre, Huss has an unrivalled back-catalogue of alternative dancefloor hits to choose from in shows, and his keyboard players have long had to keep up with spontaneous changes to his set-list. Audience favourites, like “Unveiling the Secret,” “The Saint Became a Lush” and “Sanctuary,” are staples of a Psyche show, but they can be joined by “The Crawler” at a moment’s notice.
In the selection of songs for a Psyche tribute album, therefore, it is interesting to see both classic audience shout-outs and more obscure treasures being covered reverentially by fans and friends of the band. Unforgotten Rhymes collects no less than twenty-three songs reinterpreted and recorded by bands like Parralox, The Invincible Limit, Leaether Strip and Technomancer. The overall standard is very high, as it should be given the quality of the raw material, so picking highlights is difficult. In the Nine Circles version of “15 Minutes,” it is evident how well Huss works with both words and melodies, while the elegance of Parralox’s take on “The Sundial” emphasizes the fusion of lightness and darkness that makes Psyche’s songs sit so well on the knife-edge that is romance.
For everyone with a Eurovision hangover, we’d recommend taking a listen to this fine Spanish electropop and forgetting you stayed up to watch the voting. Destino Plutòn [EN: Destination Pluto] have a foot firmly in the space disco camp, and there are enough sweeps and bounces in here to satisfy fans of SMPJ and Vision Talk alike. This track, “Césped Artificial” [EN: “Artificial Turf”], is remixed from their most recent release, which translates as “The Importance of Virtual Contact.”
What does it cost to run a Laibach tour of North America? No need to look further than Laibach’s fundraising site for the answer! The band have opened the kimono to fans, so that they can see why the band needs support for their tour. Normally, this is information that tour accountants keep in expandable file folders, but Laibach have put it on the Web. Click on the graphic to enlarge it.
Keluar come from Berlin, where they are one of the most compelling of the new generation of warm wave acts. If the duo of Zoè Zanias and Sid Lamar seem familiar, it could be because Zoè was Alison Lewis of Linea Aspera and Sid is also known as Jonas Förster. This is the title track from their second EP, and it shows off Zoè/Alison’s magnificent vocals to fine effect.
You can catch Keluar live at the following events, which are curated by and feature Twice a Man:
A Warm Wave Concert (Stockholm): 30 May 2015, Facebook event page
A Warm Wave Concert (Göteborg): 29 May 2015, Facebook event page
Music misses Linea Aspera. The duo of Alison Lewis and Ryan Ambridge was founded in 2011, but broke up a couple of years later. They left behind some of the most exciting new dark wave material to emerge from the UK in decades, including an album and two EPs. This clip, from their 2013 appearance at the Grauzone festival, reveals them as an exciting live act.
Their name is inspired by a line from a Human League song, they make girl-meets-boy pop songs, and they have a knack of producing infectious grooves-it’s no accident that Sweden’s Train to Spain were invited to play at Cold War Night Life‘s event, An Evening with the Swedish Synth, in 2014. As one of a new generation of poptronica acts coming from the Nordics, the duo of Helena Wigeborn and Jonas Rasmusson are great entertainers in a live setting and just as much fun in their studio guise.
Just in time for summer, they’ve revealed their debut album, What It’s All About (SubCulture Records). Eleven tracks of fine poptronica are assembled in this virtual package, drawing on favourites from their live show and previous teasers. The Train is inspired by the synthetic sounds of the 80s, and these can be heard in tracks like “Keep on Running” and “Blipblop” to great effect. Wigeborn’s vocals cover a lot of stylistic ground, even getting a little Opus III on the acid-infused “Remind Myself.”
This is a playful album, which comes with a sense of humour. Depeche Mode fans will love their favourite banana-waving, hand-clapping member being name-checked in the deadpan tribute track, “Martin, David and Fletch”:
We’ve been waiting for some time to hear What It’s All About, and the results are worth it. Train to Spain have produced the soundtrack to summer.
Available on [ot-link url=”http://subculturerecords.bandcamp.com/album/what-its-all-about”]Bandcamp [/ot-link] and [ot-link url=”https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/what-its-all-about/id989266718″]iTunes[/ot-link].
Komputer were the duo of Simon Leonard and David Baker. They started out as I Start Counting, and were supposed to be Daniel Miller’s next big thing after Depeche Mode went supernova big. When that didn’t work out, despite creating exceptional and enduring material, they generated music for raves as Fortran 5, but it was with the creation of a Kraftwerkesque groove that Komputer was born in 1997. Their first album, The World of Tomorrow, contained this gem, which traces a route through North London along Archway, Muswell Hill and Alexandra Palace, by foot and public transportation.
This clip is from a 2011 live appearance.