With all the hoo haa surrounding end of year polls Liam and Gem decided to just use it as an excuse to play all their favourite music from the year and chat about melodic based highlights across the board alongside playing some other little gems. Those highlights include tUnE-yArDs, Vlooper, Atomic Mama, Joe Goddard, Youth Lagoon, Julio Bashmore, Ramadanman, Daughter, Jamie XX & Gil Scott Heron and much more. It’s always wonderful to have an excuse to re-wind and re-spin but only once a year!
It’s been a mad year this one, topsy-turvy for sure, but as always I’ve lived everyday of it with music. There’s nothing left to do than to try and incapsulate the year within a radio show, impossible really, but here it is, The Electronic Tonic 2011 Round-up show……..
No ‘best album of the year’, ‘best track of the year’ or any of that nonsense (I honestly wouldn’t know where to start), just the tracks that out of all the music I have bought over the last 12 months have done something to me.
Thanks for your support over this year, there will always be more music to discover!
In this month’s show Adrian is joined by three guests to cast a squinty eye back at the music, gigs, films, books and events of 2011. Topics include “thousands of ponies”, monster servings of Colombian food, farming whales and getting into an argument with the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Jim Reid over just exactly how Scottish you are.
My guests are:
Mei Yau Kan, from Hong Kong in the 60s, whose album, My Fantoms, is one of my favourites of the year;
Anika Mottershaw, who works for the Bella Union label, books groups for Bandstand Busking, promotes shows in London and this year published a book of comics and drawings;
Euan Hinshelwood is one quarter of Younghusband, who released a cracking EP last month on Sonic Cathedral. He also plays with Emmy the Great and can be heard on This is Christmas, the album she has released with Tim Wheeler.
The Words into Wires show hosted by Harmony Skateboards boss Adam Mondon features tracks from Shit Robot, The Rapture, British Sea Power, Feist, Sleigh Bells, I Break Horses and lots more.
For full track list and details on the show click HERE
The show features down tempo grooves from the likes of Shabba Ranks, Ded Prez, Augustus Pablo, Blackout JA, Popcaan, Gappy Ranks & more. With Daniel Turner.
After listening to our regularly reliable machine based radio show The Electronic Tonic there it was: The return of Death in Vegas.
We all know what happens to bands after their first album, they get rich and fat, start frolicking with some modern fancy that was the fit one in a TV show where people sat around moaning about being hungry and slagging each other off. But ultimately they often stop releasing exciting, edgy music. It’s not true of all bands; with Radioheadand The Fall being constant exceptions (there are lots more) but it is a recurrent theme that’s difficult to put your finger on. Fortunately Death in Vegas have joined the gang bucking the trend.
bands after their first album, they get rich and fat
With the band project Black Acid behind him Richard Fearless, the man behind DiV has rediscovered the equipment he used on the influential Contino Sessions and in some ways started again, think 909s, 808s, Korg synths and a dusty old cupboard of racks. It’s pushed him in a direction he knows well, but the real art is to be yourself whilst being different.
Death in Vegas have always been a band that produce progressive songs that don’t bore, but inspire. Nowadays though, it’s hard to be a band that do ‘buildy’ songs without disappearing into the hinterland of stark banality, and unfortunately up your own arse. However, DiV are pre- and present masters, and know how to add atmosphere and flow without boring the listener.
progressive songs that don’t bore, but inspire
The Underworld-esque droney atmospherics loop and lull the opening of the track, soon joined by harmonious pads and gentle claps. Hi-hat percussion adds its rhythm a little way in and the track begins to find its groove. Standard fare you think. But then the sucker punch comes, an old school house bounce of the highest order mixed with a 2011 twist and suddenly you’re in the mood.
The buoyant loop is coupled by the aforementioned hi-hat that adds the groove, is dance music anything without a Hi-Hat loop? Slowly the percussion ups the tempo, revealing again the dance music influence, when in come the vocals and they’re somewhat reminiscent of …Death in Vegas.
definitely DiV, but not old men looking for a pay day
The tune does sound self influenced but is fresh and new at the same time, definitely DiV, but not old men looking for a pay day. The vocals begin dry and without effect, pure and present ‘I can feel’. Then gradually, ‘Fearless’ ups the tempo and the vocal begins to disappear into reverb and wash with decay, backed up by rising tides of keyboard pads and loops, an omen to a much greater presence later in the track.
The voice is that of the Canadian solo artist Katie Stelmanis, her ethereal vocal gives the track its edge over contemporaries. The repetition of the lines highlights again the influence of minimal dance music alongside the timed drop of rhythm that allows a breather before the enjoyably suffocating vocal bathes its warmth unto the listener.
the influence of minimal dance music
Stelmanis’s voice pushes through the octaves as the arpeggiated backing track pushes through the filters. The summit is nearing. Key layers are added and melodic dives accompany. Fearless harmonises the vocal with itself, as is all too common, an intoxicating recording destined for the movers and shakers.
It’s the song the DJ waits to play, the one that makes you wait until 5am, never sure but always hoping for that elusive play. When all around you are losing energy and beginning to think of bed it drops, bringing back that elative mood boy and girl all yearn for.
From the album Trans Love Energies released back on September 12th.
Roy Wilkinson is the author of Do It For Your Mum, a book about his time managing two of his brothers in British Sea Power. But it’s much more than a mere rock biography, featuring as it does the enthusiasms of his father, the band’s biggest champion. And what other rock book do you know that features digressions on World War II, being mugged in Russia, and Ronnie Corbett being harangued by helium-sucking teens. Every page is a sheer delight.
Tracks include British Sea Power’s Fear of Drowning, their cover of Múm’s Green Grass of Tunnel and their track with Czech band The Ecstasy of St Teresa, A Lovely Day Tomorrow.
This interview was first broadcast on You and the Night and the Music with Adrian Arratoon on 13 October 2011. The interview sound quality is “charmingly lo-fi” so you might want to listen with headphones.
Do It For Your Mum is published by Rough Trade Books and is available from www.doitforyourmum.com
An interview with Paul Gregory and Adam Sykes from longtime DCR favourites Lanterns on the Lake, recorded a couple of hours before they went on stage at the Royal Festival Hall, London, in support of John Grant.
Tracks include: A Kingdom and Ships in the Rain from the album Gracious Tide, Take me Home (Bella Union)
This interview was first broadcast on You and the Night and the Music with Adrian Arratoon on 13 September 2011.
