Electronic & Dance 27 Items

Datashader emerges from the shadows with a striking breaks- and bass-heavy debut release that challenges the fabric of our digital existence. Replete with a Dopplereffekt remix, it nods to the legacy of revered anonymous acts such as Scopex, Drexciya and Underground Resistance, pushing the boundaries of both electronic music exploration and its conceptual underpinnings. As a critique of the erosion of genuine human connection in the digital age, Datashader delivers a barrage of billowing subs, infectious electro, recontextualized jungle, and techno, serving as a poignant counterbalance to current dance floor-centric norms. It’s a contemporary anti-soundtrack that offers a haunting mirror to the societal costs of technological convenience.
In a world engulfed by the digital realm, where social media platforms thrive and dominate every aspect of our lives, the enigmatic project known as Datashader was founded to reflect on the pervasive erosion of authentic human connection through various virtual realities. Artistically, Datashader seeks to critique the impact of technology on human identity and relationships, breaking with an archetype of digital conformity and expressing a profound disillusionment with the superficiality of online interactions through music. Genuine human connection and art cannot be quantified by likes, comments, or followers but rather thrives in the visceral realm of shared sonic experience and human emotion. This idea is at the core idea of Datashader, whose artistic expression ranges from avant-garde composition and electronic experimentations to art, installation, film and more.
Expressed within the varied contexts of diverse artistic mediums, Datashader explores the concept of “technological gentrification”, which describes the gradual displacement of human interaction by technology. Just as gentrification alters the urban landscape, driving out communities and cultures, digital gentrification transforms the social landscape, replacing genuine connection with curated online personas.
Musically, Datashader’s practice confronts this dystopian reality, highlighting the alarming consequence of people becoming mere nodes in a network, reduced to a collection of data points. This is manifested sonically by a blistering assault of breaks, recontextualized IDM, abstract electronics and otherworldly synthscapes, conceived as the aesthetic counterbalance to much of contemporary electronic music’s dancefloor focus.
Datashader dives deep into genres and influences which stand for a form of sonic resistance: A contemporary anti- soundtrack – a sonic mirror of the price we pay for convenience and instant gratification. A self-image in constant flux. No false technological idols.

AnD Bio: Enigmatic Mancunian Act AnD brings a dynamic and raw take on modern techno in his dj sets. He maintains always strong analogue production ethics and showcase this in his heavy hitting live show. Alongside production work that takes in everything from techno to electronica to hip hop with the uncompromising AnD attitude towards sound design.Always expect the unexpected!!!” Embracing the shadowy outskirts of techno, AnD’s covert productions on his own self-titled white label series looks to push them even further into their own brand of sonic destruction. In doing so AnD follow in the footsteps of UK luminaries Surgeon, Regis, James Ruskin and The Black Dog by continuing to shape a genuine and unflinching vision of techno. – credits All music by AnD Mastering by Joe Farr

Electric Ballroom is proud to present our latest release, Thomas Schumacher’s remix of “Mayday Anthem” by Members of Mayday, the brainchild of Westbam and Klaus Jankuhn. “Mayday Anthem” was originally released in 1992 and quickly became a classic of the genre. The original version still resonates with fans to this day, and we are thrilled to bring a fresh perspective to this beloved track with Thomas’ remix. The remix will premiere at this years Mayday in Dortmund where Thomas will play the much coveted closing set.

This compilation exemplifies the label’s essence, featuring both established and emerging artists who define the new wave of French house music. From familiar names like Tour-Maubourg, Cosmonection, and Mira Ló to guest artists like Flabaire, bendrik, Maison Blanche, Groove Boys Project, EG, and Tatie Dee

Many female producers have emerged onto the French house scene in recent years, and Mira Ló is one such example. From house to nu-disco, she’s a producer on the tip…

Markus Popp is endlessly curious and his music as Oval is delightfully inventive. Since pioneering albums in the 90s systemisch and 94diskont., Oval has continually excavated new spaces in electronic music, leaving an indelible mark on the landscape. New album Romantiq finds Popp delivering his most light and delicate tones to date. Like the plucking of harp strings, Popp"s organic and playful approach to sound is warm and bright. Oval continually, confounds with his ability to conjure such lithe, evocative sonics from software. Romantiq evolved from an audio-visual collaboration with digital artist Robert Seidel for the grand opening of the German Romantic Museum, where a huge outdoor projection covered the museum building. Popp sought a more expansive definition of the romantic, conjuring flickering images that glitch, evolve and collapse in on one another - opulent neo-chamber music lit by the paradoxically heartwarming screen glow of social media flirtations. Popp crafted dozens of short vignettes that each sought to evoke a specific mood or emotion. Processed period instruments trace luxuriant spaces that shift from low-lit chambers to glistening palatial grandeur, glitching through past, present and future. Swelling atmospheres emerge like perfume, rich scents flooding the senses before evaporating on the breeze. Romantiq"s musical oxytocin is made from ancient instruments processed and edited by a modern electronic master with the utmost deftness and delicacy.

Sunergy brings together synthesists Suzanne Ciani and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith for the thirteenth installment of FRKWYS, RVNG Intl.'s intergenerational collaboration series. For this expanded edition, a panorama of the Pacific Coast provides the place and head space for exploratory Buchla synthesizer passages that meditate on a life-giving form vast and volatile with change. This Pacific Blue color edition includes bonus track "Retrograde" and a printed insert with photographs and artist essays.

Founded by in 2016, Pont Neuf has established itself as one of France’s leading electronic music imprints. Now six years in, the label will commemorate a milestone sixth birthday.

Triamb Music presents its 009 instalment with Saumeth ”Thema” Reworks and some of the most representative tracks from Saumeth’s second album “Thema”, reworked by Steve Parker, Mental Resonance and Marco Bruno on vinyl release. Digital includes a bonus from Kevin Villa. “Thema” original album has been released in 2019 making some waves within the specialised electronic music industry, getting the attention of Faze Mag and many other music media, and what better way to celebrate this long awaited album than with a vinyl release featuring some amazing reworks by Steve Parker, Marco Bruno and Mental Resonance. Steve Parker remixed “Port”, infusing some Acid vibes in the track, creating a groovy mind-washer. “Clinn” was Marco Bruno’s business, the Italian producer pushed on the bpm, providing a fast and energetic Techno banger. To complete the ep we’ll find Mental Resonance, who crafted two reinterpretations of “Awaking” giving his dark and percussive imprint to Saumeth’s track. Early support by Dvs1, Skaliger, Relic Radiation, Arweenn, Drafted, Cisco Ferreira, Yyyy, Anthony Parasole, Sciahri, Arnaud Le Texier, Raffaele Attanasio, Alfredo Mazzilli, Luigi Madonna, Hemka, SLV, Hd Substance, Dax J, Fragmentor, Slam, Chris Liebing, MTD, Paco Osuna, Secret Cinema, Dimi Angelis, Noir, Ilario Alicante, Angel Molina, Anika Kunst, Anderson Noise, Exilles, Radial, Kontal, Fixon, Juno Kusti, Marco Bailey, Sigha, Techno Cadeau, Takaaki Itoh and Mark August amongst others.

Dom Maker and Kai Campos have always known how to masterfully synthesise their talents into one singular yet ever changing vision. Since beginning in 2009, their work has morphed from their distinctly British sound of dubstep and techno to the boundaryless and densely packed collaborations of Love What Survives. Five years after that scintillating record, the two take their talents as Mount Kimbie to new extremes by splitting them in half entirely.

Having walked separate paths musically and physically in the world over the years since Love What Survives, Dom and Kai took a literal approach to their latest record, separating it into two distinct, independently produced albums - but linked through shared senses of sonic haziness and melody. Die Cuts shows Dom Maker at a collaborative peak, interspersing vocal cuts, samples, and urban sounds in swiftly stitched vignettes with a slowed down, lo-fi flair. Meanwhile, the chugging beats of City Planning mimic train tracks, as Kai Campos’ album contains rhythmic paintings of urbanity with detailed sonic architecture. These two sides of Mount Kimbie are as different as day and night, yet they inform each other greatly, speaking a simultaneous message from separate locations.

The opening track ‘dvd’ on Die Cuts features a mystical siren song fading in, before slowthai and Danny Brown’s expressive vocals cut through on ‘in your eyes’, trading bittersweet and apoplectic verses. An eerie alarm echoes on ‘heat on, lips on', subsiding with punchy beat and skittering keys, and a scathing, mercurial spoken word spiralling to jazzy loops depicting intimate struggles. City Planning in similar fashion shifts from tense, burrowing bass rumbles to fluttering synth droplets forming rivers of sound. The molten underground beat of ‘Transit Map (Flattened)’ lurches and groans, with piano notes sprawling like the many-coloured intersecting lines of a subway map.

Even when split in two, Mount Kimbie provide yet another total upheaval of their sound, combining their individual strengths for a roaringly creative album on MK 3.5.

Hudson Mohawke makes a powerful statement by pairing together both the sacred and the profane. Cry Sugar is a portrait of our time, as well as the state of club music in 2022, in that the truest art is that without boundaries. That said, when you put everything aside, what you’re ultimately left with is yet another LP full of titanic productions. Which may be its biggest most salient point of all.

Recorded in his adopted home of Los Angeles, Cry Sugar continues Hudson Mohawke’s recent mission to create aspirational music from the tools of the club, but with an even keener eye towards optimism and sustainability. Cry Sugar also includes even more of Hudson Mohawke’s push-pull between high and low culture: allusions to Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and John Williams rub up against the huge swinging bass of the “trap music” he (deliberately or not) helped codify on his earlier records. That battle of motivation is also played out thematically within the songs themselves. Tracks like ‘Stump’, ‘Expo’, and ‘Some Buzz’ nod towards environmental disaster while ‘3 Sheets To The Wind’ revels in debauchery. Who’s to say which mode is more important to focus on.

Hudson Mohawke is prioritising health. He’s still out at 7AM with the ravers mind you, but he’s grilling food next door to the club to hand out to exhausted punters as they emerge into the sunlight following an all-nighter. True story or not, he had made a habit of a different kind of early morning session by giving back to the dancers, the nightlife warriors, the people who make dance music culture so enveloping. That spirit of revestment and of paying tribute to the lifers is reflected throughout his new LP Cry Sugar.

Working backwards from the expanded 2020 edition of ‘Grafts’ and the first vinyl appearance for 2015’s ‘Aftertouches’, Kara-Lis Coverdale finally presents a first time vinyl pressing of her 2014 debut album ‘A 480’, giving a breath of new life to five sublime virtual choral synth studies rendered in the digital sphere. Entirely made up of “virtual choirs” - synthetic versions of actual recorded singers that were disembodied, disfigured, and displaced over forty times before finally reappearing through a convoluted process of digital reincarnation - ‘A 480’ essentially catalogues the birth of one of the most distinctive artistic voices of our time. Using fine editing, layering, and convolution of the original material to reshape meaning via minute shifts of repetitive arrangements, the pieces here function effortlessly as a sort of environmental music, but really come into their own on closer inspection, where the slightest alterations ripple with something like a butterfly effect to create cosmically scaled harmonic changes and unique expressions of compressed melodic counterpoint.

Jaga Jazzist have gone back to basics on their new LP Pyramid … well, as back to basics as an eight-piece instrumental prog-jazz ensemble can go. Eschewing the studio tinkering which characterised their previous LP Starfire (2015), Jaga Jazzist wrote and recorded the four lengthy opuses of Pyramid in a fortnight. This approach has helped them to make a more immediate and driven record, one that combines their typical sonic adventurousness with some of the most potent grooves of any Jaga Jazzist LP.

The spontaneous approach to writing is most apparent in the work of Pyramid’s rhythm section. ‘The Shrine’ is named after Fela Kuti’s legendary venue in Lagos, and the track certainly lives up to this association with some limber, Tony Allen-inspired drumming. ‘Apex’ has a cosmic disco flavour which channels Jaga Jazzist’s former remixer Todd Terje, ‘Spiral Era’s nimble lilt combines both half- and double-time, and there is an urgent stomp which underpins the second half of epic opener ‘Tomita’.

Atop these polyrhythms, the other members of Jaga Jazzist show themselves once more to be instrumentalists of the highest order. There is certainly plenty of Kuti’s legendary Africa 70 to the aforementioned ‘The Shrine’, but this track is also played with the panache and thrust of fellow post-jazz crews The Comet Is Coming and The Physics House Band. One also detects the influences of both library music, space rock and Plaid on ‘Spiral Era’ and ‘Tomita’, tracks which also balance technical pizzazz with the deft compositions of bandleader Lars Horntveth.

Norwegians Jaga Jazzist channel post-rock, jazz, prog, disco, Afrobeat and many other styles to paint new sonic landscapes on their latest full-length Pyramid.

The Cinematic Orchestra are back with a definitive new album that explores a timeless question of vital importance in 2019 - what to believe? Founding member Jason Swinscoe and longtime partner Dominic Smith have enlisted album contributions from collaborators old and new: Moses Sumney, Roots Manuva, Heidi Vogel, Grey Reverend (vocalist on Bonobo’s 'First Fires’), Dorian Concept and Tawiah (Mark Ronson, Kindness), Miguel Atwood-Ferguson (Flying Lotus, Anderson Paak, Thundercat, Hiatus Kaiyote) features on strings and photographer and visual artist Brian “B+” Cross collaborated with Swinscoe and Smith on the album’s concept. The record was mixed by multiple Grammy winner Tom Elmhirst (David Bowie, Frank Ocean, Adele) in Jimi Hendrix’s legendary Electric Lady studios. The album artwork comes courtesy of The Designers Republic™ (Aphex Twin).

Following the release of “Joined Ends” in 2014 – a deeply intimate and textured project he describes as his “chamber music” record – Dorian Concept performed everywhere from Glastonbury to Sonar to MoMA PS1’s Warm Up and then deliberately took himself off the radar. The time since has been spent meticulously un-learning his prodigious production process and developing a brand new sound that even the most clued-up won’t be expecting – showcased on ‘Promises’, in the most prominent use of his voice to date. The recording and processing of his vocals represent not only a more human expression of his highly technical sound, but also an inclination toward recursion – the challenge, ephemerality, and demand for attention of “unequal repetition” which shapes the build and deconstruction of energy throughout the record.

Taking inspiration from multi-generational eclecticism (‘60s jazz, ‘70s fusion, ‘80s neo prog-rock, ‘90s electronica), Dorian Concept sought to replicate “modern” music elements with old-fashioned methods, live-playing and hand-recording deceptively digital sounds in service of a tongue-in-cheek “parody of nostalgia”. Having produced the record largely in the years 2016 and 2017 – widely characterized as periods of a cultural reckoning throughout the democratic world – he ambitiously took timely themes of cumulative error, shortening attention spans and subjective experience and transposed them into his making. As is to be expected from him by now, for all the considered, high-concept musing, the result is refreshingly unpretentious: dizzying swells, cacophonous breakdowns and formidable rhythms are both expert and childlike, hyperactive and hyper-focused.

Born Oliver Thomas Johnson, the self-taught keyboardist and producer should be no stranger to those in the Brainfeeder orbit. He first caught the attention of the crew in its infancy, when head honcho Flying Lotus discovered Dorian Concept’s MySpace profile and swiftly included a remix in his lauded debut Essential Mix (2008). Dorian Concept went on to tour with FlyLo’s live band, appeared at some of Brainfeeder’s earliest international label nights in 2009 (Off-Sonar in Barcelona and the infamous Hearn Street Car Park session in London), and released a string of celebrated EPs and albums for Kindred Spirits imprint Nod Navigators, Affine and Ninja Tune – as well as remixing Taylor McFerrin, contributing production to Thundercat’s “The Golden Age of Apocalypse” and playing keys on Flying Lotus’ seminal “Cosmogramma”.

Eight years after its original release in 2015, and sold out upon release, Umor Rex finally presents a vinyl repress of Sirens, by Kara-Lis Coverdale and LXV. This new edition is limited to 500 copies and comes with revised artwork.

Inspired by the link between seduction and violence, Sirens comprises a series of timbrally vast anamorphic pieces that poise the voice as a newly imagined tool of multiplicity. Processes of sample manipulation, signal processing, routing, and source design inform instrumental writing and performance in feedback until intertwined, flickering between states of conflict and consonance. Apparitions of the schizophrenic voice are at one moment fractured and cold and at the next full of warmth and vivaciousness, embodying velvet rituals of romanticism in the digital age.

Ultimately, Sirens is music for ambitious dreamers: surreal sound portraits sound like the warmth of the world laid over an ice cold virtual altar. LXV’s vocal truncations and fleshy sound palettes depict the archivation of the breath and aural fantasies of the flesh which Coverdale sets amongst a vast and unconfined landscape of deeper and unknown force. Harmonically active and dynamic orchestrations underpin post-sacred tonalities while brooding pipe organs, sphinx flutes, and hailstorms of metallic percussion characterize uniquely disjointed discussions between disparate compositional ontologies. At times violent and at others serenely peaceful and seductive, these pieces, at their most powerful moments illuminate a felt space between cybernetic energy and the body.

Composed and recorded by Kara-Lis Coverdale and David Sutton. Mastered by John Tejada. Cover photograph by Cody Cobb. Layout by Daniel Castrejón.

Warp & LuckyMe unite for a mixture of minimal, bass-bleeding hip-hop beats!