Musique Non Stop

Musique Non Stop - Jazz, Funk, Soul, Broken Beat, Electro, Electronic, Funk / Nu Disco, NU Jazz, House, Techno, Ambient, Lo-Fi, Downtempo... and Many More!

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His 2012 reimagining of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was huge hit. So why, a decade later, is Max Richter recording it once again – this time with period instruments and a vintage synth?

I fell in love with Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons when I was very young. It was one of the few classical records my parents owned and I listened to it constantly. I would line the needle up, wait for the crackle, and sit back as the music flowed magically into the room. The work is perfect for a child. There are wonderful melodies, lots of drama, stories and atmosphere. It’s a gateway into the classical music universe. I felt that I had discovered a secret, beautiful world.

Vivaldi wrote the four violin concertos that make up The Four Seasons between 1716 and 1720, and they were published in conjunction with four sonnets – one for each season, possibly also by the composer. The works are groundbreaking in many ways. He employed all kinds of effects to imitate what the sonnets describe: the buzzing of flies on a hot summer’s day, dogs barking, bird calls and drunken people partying. This idea that instrumental music could illustrate events or nature was completely new.

Continue reading... by Max Richter via Electronic music | The Guardian

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(Planet Mu) Remastering his classic LP Lunatic Harness – plus an Icelandic horse-riding trip – inspired Mike Paradinas to make this often sumptuous disc

The most apparent truth about Mike Paradinas’s glitchy, skittering music is that it doesn’t like to sit still. As μ-Ziq, Paradinas established himself in the arena of 90s experimental, abstract and tweaked-out electronica, his sense of giddy delirium and rhythmic playfulness distinguishing him from peers such as Aphex Twin and Autechre. Not content to melt down and reassemble jungle and breakbeat according to his own warped desires, he would mess with electro, hardcore and ambient techno styles under a number of different aliases and group projects. In 1995, he founded the label Planet Mu, which has been pivotal in bringing Chicago’s juke and footwork across the Atlantic while also giving a platform to a transformative new generation of UK bass-driven music.

For Paradinas, that legacy is a catalyst. His new album, Magic Pony Ride, was inspired by the process of remastering his classic LP Lunatic Harness, as well as familial introspection and an idyllic holiday horse-riding in Iceland. Parts 1 and 2 of the title track are the record’s most thrilling moments: the former all plush bass tones, rave fragments and sumptuous breakbeats, the latter an elemental adventure of arpeggios, irresistible melodies and dynamic momentum.

Continue reading... by Tayyab Amin via Electronic music | The Guardian

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On her brilliant new album, Orton ploughs her deepest emotions – and doesn’t hold back. She talks about living with Crohn’s disease, her identity struggles and the limits placed on women

In aspirational Hampstead in north London, Beth Orton says people don’t know what to make of her. “Everyone’s poking you with sticks,” she says. “‘What are you, are you successful? What kind of music do you make, what’s your thing?’ I don’t know, I’m just muddling through. I’m a fucking mess, all right? I’ve become a ‘mother’. I meet my children at the gates of the school. And I don’t know if I am that person, but I’m trying to be. I’m also a singer and a songwriter, and I’ve been famous – did that happen, I’m not sure? Trying to incorporate all those incredibly disparate bits of the self into one is ... I just don’t know any more. I don’t know who the fuck I am.”

Motherhood, waning fame and the strangeness of a new neighbourhood are just some of the challenges Orton has faced on the way to her darkest album to date, Weather Alive, along with grief, multiple chronic illnesses, label rejection and financial instability, all of them creating a centrifuge that flung apart but also concentrated her sense of self.

Continue reading... by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

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Angela Christlieb’s film captures the anarchic spirit of the musical collective based in the mad scientist’s lair of electronic equipment known as Janka Industries

With the fuzzy whirring of electrical machines in its underground cocoon, Janka Industries recording studio is a universe away from the hustle and bustle of Vienna. Sound equipment, retro monitors and miscellaneous gadgets sprawl into every nook, and the space resembles some mad genius’s cave in a 1950s sci-fi film. And yet there is magic in the chaos, as a steady flow of artists and musicians come to this otherworldly haven to record, or simply bask in its collaborative atmosphere.

Established in the 1980s by Chris and Ali Janka, the collective now based there has had many temporary homes, from a rat-infested air raid shelter to its current basement; the rodent threat now replaced by a soon-to-be expired lease. In an era when art and music are increasingly corporatised, the DIY ethos of Janka Industries feels like a relic from a bygone time. As an immersive descent into this subculture sanctuary, Angela Christlieb’s documentary emulates the punky grittiness of Janka Industries by giving a scratchy texture to its footage, which alternates between a digital look and the visual flourishes of 8mm film.

Continue reading... by Phuong Le via Electronic music | The Guardian

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Smith, who died this week aged 72, changed the course of music history by championing unity and collaboration, while his synths lit up Madonna, Radiohead and more

Dave Smith’s name may be ubiquitous enough to look almost forgettable on the back of a synthesiser – at least next to the distinctive monikers of his peers such as Oberheim, Moog, Linn and Rossum – but it fits the portrait of Smith painted by those who knew him and his work: that of an unassuming yet brilliant innovator, a quiet kind of genius. He didn’t just create iconic synthesisers, he united electronic instruments everywhere.

This week’s announcement of Smith’s death at the age of 72 was met with messages of grief and appreciation by musicians and producers the world over. Know him by name or not, you will have nodded your head countless times to the sound of Smith’s innovation: Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Madonna’s Like a Virgin, Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place – they all use his Prophet-5 synthesiser.

Continue reading... by William Stokes via Electronic music | The Guardian

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At 70, the groundbreaking musician is enjoying a late career bloom thanks to the internet. She talks about her prog rock past and escaping western influences

The sight of Midori Takada whiplashing between drums, cymbals and marimba is something few observers forget. She is a mesmerising performer of great physical intensity. So her billing as a “70-year-old percussionist” ahead of a performance at Melbourne’s Rising festival – a bit like calling Paul McCartney an 80-year-old guitarist – makes her smile. “It doesn’t quite tell the whole story,” she says, laughing good-naturedly. “I have a few more strings to my bow than that.”

Takada etched her name in musical history with the enigmatic ambient classic Through the Looking Glass, which she recorded over two days in 1983, engineering the album and playing gongs, ocarinas, chimes and every other instrument herself. Although the album fell into obscurity, Takada has in recent years become a cult figure, with her monk-like musicality and reverential cataloging of obscure world music. Her work, meanwhile, has been revived for millennials and generation Z by endless recycling on YouTube and social media, alongside her contemporaries Brian Eno and Steve Reich.

Continue reading... by David McNeill in Tokyo via Electronic music | The Guardian

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The Australian producer’s anticipated debut is something of a left turn from high-frequency techno, at its best when it holds back in favour of open space

Over the past few years, Sydney-born DJ, producer and songwriter Haai – real name Teneil Throssell – has become something of an underground star in her adopted hometown of London.

A two-year resident at the Brixton club Phonox, Throssell’s sets are renowned for their frenetic pace and euphoric peaks, largely comprising breakbeat-heavy house and techno, with sojourns into other more idiosyncratic styles. Perpetually clad in sunglasses and seemingly always bearing a cheeky smile, she is a preternaturally talented party-starter, an intuitive, crowd-focused DJ with wide-reaching taste.

Continue reading... by Shaad D'Souza via Electronic music | The Guardian

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Keyboard player and business brain of Depeche Mode who pushed the electronic band to long-lasting success

Bands could not function without a member designated the quiet standard bearer, and in Depeche Mode that was Andy Fletcher, who has died suddenly aged 60. Constitutionally modest, he was lucky inasmuch as the group had two members – singer Dave Gahan and guitarist Martin Gore – who were comfortable with being Depeche Mode’s public face. That allowed Fletcher, universally known as Fletch, to get on with being their backbone.

He was crucial to their makeup, pushing the band to achieve, chivvying them to get into the studio or on the road. Without his tenacity, exercised over 42 years, Depeche Mode would have splintered long before they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2020.

Continue reading... by Caroline Sullivan via Electronic music | The Guardian

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As well as a keyboard player, Fletch was a facilitator – and someone whose cheerleading demeanour helped fans feel closer to the band they loved • Depeche Mode’s Andrew Fletcher dies aged 60

Andy Fletcher was the last person to tell you why he was vital to Depeche Mode. In 101, the classic 1989 tour documentary directed by DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, he said: “Martin’s the songwriter, Alan’s the good musician, Dave’s the vocalist, and I bum around.” He knew there was much more to it than that, but the man they all called Fletch felt no need to shout about it.

Depeche Mode are one of the most popular and influential British bands of all time but nothing about them makes sense in conventional terms. It should not be possible to lose your chief songwriter (Vince Clarke) after just one album and then get bigger and better. There was no precedent for a synth-pop group evolving into a stadium rock band without actually playing rock music. It is unusual, if not unique, for one person to write the songs (Martin Gore) and another to sing them (Dave Gahan) with such conviction that it is hard to believe they are not autobiographical. They have sold more than 100m albums and had dozens of hit singles while retaining the outsider allure of a cult band – arguably the world’s largest, with no fewer than three documentaries made about their fandom. And all this from Basildon.

Continue reading... by Dorian Lynskey via Electronic music | The Guardian

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(NMC) Blending improvised samples with compositional prowess, the experimental musician and turntablist reimagines a concerto by Daphne Oram

London-born musician Shiva Feshareki has always blended two seemingly contradictory worlds. She is best known for creating improvisatory, sampledelic soundscapes using DJ equipment: Stanton turntables, a Roland Space Echo, the real-time sampling capabilities of a Korg Kaoss Pad, a theremin which spins on a turntable to create unusual electronic pulses. But she’s also a trained composer with a doctorate from the Royal College of Music, and has long championed avant garde works by likeminded women such as Pauline Oliveros, Éliane Radigue and Leslie García.

This album straddles both of Feshareki’s worlds. The main event is Still Point, a 40-minute concerto for double orchestra and turntables that was written – incredibly – in 1948 by a 23-year-old Daphne Oram, a decade before she founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Feshareki spent years exploring Oram’s archive in order to reimagine Still Point with fellow composer James Bulley before performing it at the 2018 Proms, and this is an eventful realisation. The first movement sounds like a grand, ominous film score, laced with high modernism; the second is a dystopian collage of 78rpm turntable sounds, discordant effects and air raid sirens. The final movement is the sound of a nation emerging from the ravages of war – shabby, end-of-empire grandeur and postwar uncertainty, all put through the dub chamber.

Continue reading... by John Lewis via Electronic music | The Guardian

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Fans of Throbbing Gristle with liner notes on the gender of vampires, the German synth-pop duo somehow broke into the mainstream. Now, after 37 years away, they’re back

In early 1983, a Düsseldorf band called Propaganda got a message: Trevor Horn wanted them to come to London. It was an enticing and deeply improbable turn of events. Horn was the UK’s hottest pop producer, a man who had unexpectedly turned the hopelessly drippy duo Dollar into a critical cause célèbre and piloted ABC’s debut The Lexicon of Love to platinum-selling transatlantic success, also making it the fourth biggest-selling album of 1982 in the UK.

Propaganda, however, were no one’s idea of a pop band. They were electronic experimentalists, a product of Germany’s burgeoning post-punk Neue Deutsche Welle scene. As vocalist Susanne Freytag puts it, they were attempting: “To go away from American music and find a kind of identity – there was a lot of shame in our generation in Germany, and it was a way of finding, or seeing people using the German language and making new music.” One of their members, Ralf Dörper, had previously been in metal-banging industrialists Die Krupps: he claimed to be less interested in music than he was in film. They had already caused a ripple of controversy in Germany by plundering imagery from the 1920s and 30s: a TV show refused to let them use a film featuring images of Zeppelin airships and Marlene Dietrich because, Dörper later said, “they didn’t understand that we might be questioning values of the past, rather than accepting them”. And they were not huge on melody. One of the songs on their demo tape was a German-language extrapolation of Throbbing Gristle’s entirely tune-free 1981 single Discipline. When the call from Trevor Horn came through, Propaganda scrambled to recruit a new member, Claudia Brücken, on the grounds that none of them could actually sing. “I felt a bit shocked,” says Freytag. “I thought ‘I’m not a singer, I’m happy to go and do something, but oh my God, we need a singer’. She is a very good singer, thank God.”

Continue reading... by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

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With music that ended up crossing paths with Jay-Z, Donna Summer and Rotting Christ, the late Greek composer’s creative mind was thrillingly open

Greek pop music of the 1960s is not an area of musical history where anyone who doesn’t fondly remember it first-hand is advised to dwell. There are a few exceptions – garage rock collectors have unearthed a string of obscure, impressively raw singles by the Stormies, the Persons and the Girls – but the archetypical mainstream Greek response to the rise of the Beatles might be Vangelis Papathanassiou’s band the Forminx, who dealt in novelty instrumentals, weedy Hellenic-accented stabs at Merseybeat and a side order of lachrymose balladry.

The Forminx were successful in Greece, but it clearly wasn’t enough for Papathanassiou, who claimed his earliest musical endeavours involved experimenting, John Cage-style, with the sound of radio interference. After the Forminx broke up, he took up a career writing film scores before forming Aphrodite’s Child with another refugee from the Greek beat scene, singer and bassist Demis Roussos.

Continue reading... by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

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At 21, music producer Harley Streten shot to global fame as Flume. Within a few years, he was alone, depressed and drinking too much. Then the pandemic happened – and ‘it was one of the best years of my life’

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In a trio of overgrown garden beds, tomatoes and chillies climb towards the sky. There are bite-size capsicums, both green and orange, plus bushy shrubs of parsley and rosemary. Somewhere in here, I am told, is pumpkin and sweet potato.

“I had a bunch of kale, too, but it died when I was at Coachella,” Harley Streten says.

Continue reading... by Katie Cunningham via Electronic music | The Guardian

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Greek composer topped US charts with Chariots of Fire’s uplifting piano-led theme

Vangelis, the Greek composer and musician whose synth-driven work brought huge drama to film soundtracks including Blade Runner and Chariots of Fire, has died aged 79. His representatives said he died in hospital in France where he was being treated.

Born Evángelos Odysséas Papathanassíou in 1943, Vangelis won an Oscar for his 1981 Chariots of Fire soundtrack. Its uplifting piano motif became world-renowned, and reached No 1 in the US charts, as did the accompanying soundtrack album.

Continue reading... by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

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From free jazz to doomy drones, outsider artists have always found a home in the Wire. Its creators reflect on upending the orthodoxy, coining genres – and their hatred of big-name rivals

“We were the last resort for a lot of music because nobody else would touch it,” says Tony Herrington, publisher of the Wire magazine. He also once said: “Most people would take the mickey out of some bloke making music by bowing away at the femur of a mountain goat, but we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.”

For 40 years – it is celebrating this anniversary with a series of events in July – the Wire has been covering bold, strange, noisy, genre-busting experimental music, in a crisp, sharply designed magazine.

Continue reading... by Daniel Dylan Wray via Electronic music | The Guardian

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Musicians and scientists armed with synths and electrodes are plugging in to mushrooms and cacti to encourage humans to reconnect with the Earth

To musician Tarun Nayar, mushrooms sound squiggly and wonky. Nayar’s “organismic music” project Modern Biology has only been active since last summer but, with his videos of mushrooms making calming ambient soundscapes, he’s already racked up more than half a million TikTok followers and 25m views.

The electronic artist and former biologist hangs out in mushroom circles, spending summers in the northern Gulf Islands of British Columbia with the Sheldrake brothers: Merlin, the author of the bestselling Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures, and producer-songwriter Cosmo. So it seems only natural that he would begin foraging mushrooms – not to eat, but to listen to.

Continue reading... by Naomi Larsson via Electronic music | The Guardian

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The DJ became a viral star for his music tips and streams of consciousness during lockdown, and has poured 37 years of joyous and painful late nights into a new compilation

‘I went crazy with it,” says Luke Una, of losing himself in his record collection during the pandemic. “I obsessively went into the archive. To the point where my missus and the kids were screaming at me because I didn’t stop playing music for the whole lockdown.”

Along with sellotaping bread to his face for rants about foraging, or mocking self-improvement gurus while delivering his own stream of positive affirmations, the DJ was zealously sharing his music on Instagram, and he became a lockdown hit. “I’ve always been a bit of a peacock,” he says. “There is a bit of narcissism with my Insta but traditional narcissism was liking your own reflection, not being a sociopathic bastard. So I’m more early-proto-narcissism.”

Continue reading... by Daniel Dylan Wray via Electronic music | The Guardian