I first saw Erol Josue on stage in Essaouria, Morocco, during the Gnawa Festival of 2011, when he fronted Jazz-Racine Haiti. The Haitian-born voudou priest turned R&B singer struck me as one of the most flamboyant frontmen ever to hit a stage.
This album promises to be an expansion of the sound and ideas of its 2021 predecessor Heart Shaped Scars, and boy does it deliver. HSS was the Scottish singer-songwriter Dot Allison’s first album in some nine years, and only her seventh in the 28 years since she first appeared with the space-dub-country-torch-song trio One Dove.
“This wasn’t the day to wear white suede boots,” says Django Django’s singer Vincent Neff, midway through the band’s Friday evening set.
He’s not kidding.
Blackbox Life Recorder 21f may have been originally touted as a mini-album but, in reality, it’s an EP with four tunes spread over just under a quarter of an hour and one of those is a remix of the title track. However, it is also the first new material released by Richard James, under his Aphex Twin moniker in five years.
The broken beat movement, centred on West London around the turn of the millennium, wasn’t super press friendly. Its complex rhythms were eclipsed in the populism stakes by its close cousin UK garage, and serious commentators didn’t really know what to do with a broadly working class, multicultural scene that was aspirational and privileged virtuosic production and musicianship. Indeed there was a distinct inverted snobbery in the refusal refusal to treat it with the respect afforded other electronic music which fit into a scholarly vs “street” dichotomy.
VINYL OF THE MONTH
Pere Ubu Trouble on Big Beat Street (Cherry Red)
One of the most striking scenes in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 outer-space allegory Solaris is psychologist Kris Kelvin’s first encounter with a being which seems to be his wife, who had died a decade earlier. The unsettling incident’s inherent tension is heightened by its sonic backdrop: rumbling, a peculiarly musical pink noise, lightning-like bolts of sound. This was created on the ANS synthesiser (AHC in Russian script), a device invented in Soviet-era Russia.
TUESDAY 27TH JUNE 2023
I wake up around 11.00, get outta bed around 12.00.
There are whole books to be written – indeed, hopefully being written – on how hip hop has interacted with dance music culture in North America over the past decade plus. From the overblown mania of rap megastars jumping on David Guetta tracks in the heat of the EDM explosion at the start of the 2010s, to the far more sophisticated fusions done brilliantly by Beyoncé and slightly less so by Drake on big albums last year, it’s created some of the most ubiquitous sounds globally.
