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Germany’s Ulrich Schnauss has a knack for weaving together various forms of electronica, as he puts it in his Red Bull Music Academy interview, “in the widest sense of the term.” Schnauss is the self-proclaimed product of both 1980s German dance music, the likes of which had been started by Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, and other bands from across the spectrum of shoegaze such as The Cocteau Twins and Slowdive. But it’s Schnauss’ sixth sense for fusing these elements together which makes it work, the result of years of obsessive practice and label-hounding. While some of it verges on the sentimental side, there’s gems like “Stars”, where dampened percussion and a sort of ambient drone enhances the lyrics of a vagabond narrator, while “Between Us and Them” best captures Schnauss’ knack for capturing something between melancholia and restlessness, giving a sort of spectral feel to music that needs no words.

5.00 (1 votes)

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Hey all you blaspheming audiophiles! Here’s a nice and meaty list of new CD releases for March 9th.

Acrassicauda – Only The Dead See The End Of The War
Alberta Cross – Broken Side Of Time
Before Their Eyes – Untouchable
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club – Beat The Devil’s Tattoo
Broken Bells [The Shins' James Mercer and Danger Mouse project] – Broken Bells
Frightened Rabbit – The Winter Of Mixed Drinks
Gorillaz – Plastic Beach
jj – jj n3
Liars – Sisterworld
Monica – Still Standing
The Morning Benders – Big Echo
New Young Pony Club – The Optimist
Numero Group – Good God! Born Again Funk
Pavement – Quarantine The Past: The Best Of Pavement
Josh Rouse – El Turista
Standard Fare – The Novelle Beat
The Steel Wheels – Red Wing
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists – The Brutalist Bricks
Titus Andronicus – The Monitor

5.00 (2 votes)

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Anyone remember these guys? I have something to get off my chest: As a heterosexual male, I got a lot of crap in my youth for liking the Pet Shop Boys. Still I remained rock-hard and steady in my Showboats, knowing that in between my copy of Olivia Newton John’s Xanadu and the soundtrack to Yentl I could find a copy of the album with “West End Girls” on it. All you haters, laugh if you want but it makes for a kick-ass soundtrack to a game of frisbee football or badminton even if repeated blows to the head have forced you to keep it to yourself on your iPod. The PSB (as aficionados such as myself refer to them) first gained infamy through that aforementioned track, and  with New Order producer Stephen Hague playing on their team, that was all she wrote. Listen to Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe reminisce on Red Bull Music Academy Radio. Put on your (Domino) Dancing shoes, young man, and Go West!

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DJ Alfred Darlington’s pseudonym is no throwaway–this Daedalus is as much an inventor as his mythical Greek namesake; his wings are his rhythms and rhymes, his beats and freestyles–and the Santa Monica-born spinner soars on his own anarchic sound that is as genuine in its extolment of the contemporary as it is old-school. I’ve gone overkill with the literary comparisons, but the point is his knack for interacting with the crowd and keeping the listener on the club floor, even if vicariously–something nowhere more evident than in his show in Italy at the 2009 Dissonanze Festival, available on the Red Bull Music Academy site. You listen to his music, you go to his show, and you’re borrowing his wings. His gift is his beatmatching, which is most likely to solidify his signature sound– it’s a versatile canvas of moods from so many different genres sprawling into each other perfectly, and something sorely absent from the club scene of today, which seems tepid in its experimenting with different scenes. His only drawback is the occasional foray into monotonous and run-of-the-mill beats, but what an innate talent the man has for mixing jazz with R&B, hip-hop with 8-bit Nintendo noise– or pretty much whatever he feels like at the moment.

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Hervé, aka Joshua Harvey, is a UK-based producer and DJ with a penchant for mixing in a darker, more noir-ish side of jazz with the hip-hop beats he’s accrued and perfected over years of working with several different artists. Hervé also had a knack for finding new ways to make his live DJ attract a youthful, more rave-oriented audience, and set about remixing and/or producing everyone from MSTRKRFT to DJ Switch to The Prodigy to Kid Sister. All the hard work paid off when a lot of those artists began pimping his name all around the world, only helping to spread what would soon become a reputation throughout the rock world as one of the best producers and DJs to work with. Through his latest production and DJ artistry, he’s been working with some of today’s biggest acts like Shiny Toy Guns and genre stalwarts such as The Chemical Brothers. Here’s a little peek at his unique approach to producing on Red Bull Music Academy Radio.

5.00 (1 votes)

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Deerhunter’s one of those acts that could be either hit or miss for me. I feel like I should hate them, and part of me leans in that direction, but they’re also one of the better in the expanding legions of laid-back indie folky bands that are all over the place nowadays. There’s a sort of sprawling, progressive nature to their sweeping arpeggios and power chords — the closest the band seems to be able to get to, uh, aggro, I guess. This is really more for fans of The Lovemakers and The Daysleepers, etc. Maybe Hammock. Point being: there’s something uniquely unsettling, aggressive…yet chill, relaxed, perfect for those lazy hazy days of summer, or days in general, where you just, y’know, don’t want to do anything. Then again, perhaps they’re just better left to explain it themselves on Red Bull Music Academy Radio.

5.00 (1 votes)

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Here’s the complete list of new releases for Tuesday, March 2nd.

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It could be safely said there’s endless legions of bands with what one might call ‘lame’ names, or misleading monikers that seem anything but fitting when actually listening to their music. But it’s doubtful there could be a more fitting one for Hideaki Ishi, who hails from Tokyo and has lived a life that’s the stuff of a Hollywood (or Japanese Gangster!) films. A high school dropout, DJ Krush worked his way up from lower-level street gangs, only to become a full-fledged yakuza member. Based on that somewhat vague biography, one might anticipate rhythms of machine gun-fire or, at the very least, some ear-splitting drum and bass rhythms. But as things turn out, Krush is anything but aggressive. Instead, years of experience as one of Japan’s very first hip-hop DJs has led to a very ambient, laid back fusion sound, one that mixes a lot of sultry jazz with trip hop rhythms and stand-up bass, lounge music that intertwines with intricate time signatures and anarchic, across-the-board mixing of genres. Then again, he isn’t above mixing it up with heavyweights like Malik B and Black Thought. Here’s a peak at one of the genre’s innovators on Red Bull Music Academy Radio.

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If you’ve ever had the (dis)pleasure of seeing the movie version of Naked Lunch, you might remember that Mugwumps are the half-typewriter/half-beetle creatures that talked with British accents out of their buttholes to Bill Lee while he binged on skag, er, bug dust, and tried to avoid screwing his wife. While not quite as eccentric or visceral in imagery, there’s a certain surrealism to Geoffrey aka Mugwump, perhaps not to unlike a bug you’ve caught that makes you want to nod off and get lost in the sort of film-noirish world that William Burroughs created. Occasionally Mugwump veers into a hackneyed dance world of overused beats and rhythms, but when he’s on, he’s on — and at Red Bull Music Academy, you can get a brief glimpse of the ambient, trippy world Mugwump’s created, one that may make you think : Hmm, maybe I’ll try some heroin. I mean bug dust, hahaha.

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