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Memory Tapes made his name – or his various names (he's also recorded as Memory Cassette and Weird Tapes) – as a proponent of the style of music we loved to hate to call "chillwave". This third album, though, is not a warm wash of hypnagogia, but a strangely arid collection of tracks that register not so much as songs, but as experiments following arbitrary, sometimes aimless, courses. After the melodic and propulsive opener, Neighborhood Watch, and its elegant drum patterns, things lose focus; most of the flashes of grace overshadowed by confusing longueurs.
The Berlin minimal maven and Mobilee matriarch empties the contents of her psychic record bag
I think I can safely say all Mobilee records are dancefloor savers. Our mission when we started the label was that every release should make the listener want to dance. We like to think we haven't failed so far.
His new album is really funky and housey with a big feeling for the dancefloor. Ian's been around the block a few times but always produces interesting and timeless music. Very envious he's not on the label.
For me, Sebo K is the best there is. This is still the biggest hit on Mobilee and I never get bored of it.
This really shows how house music has developed. I was surprised it didn't do so much better as it made No 1 on the Beatport chart.
I love Ray, he's so refreshing and we're really excited to have him with us on Mobilee. He has a bright future.
Thank god they are all already married – it's a big responsibility to DJ at a wedding...
It came on the radio and I was dancing in my kitchen with my 15-month-old son. I think he got it. It would be a terrible thing if my son didn't like Depeche Mode.
It just really complements being on a hot beach in Ibiza, or any beach for that matter.
Where to start with Herbie Hancock? He is a multi-faceted genius and his repertoire is infinite. I used to play the flute when I was young and listened to a lot of jazz. This is when he first came to my attention with an album called Quintet.
All funerals are sad, but I do hope that somewhere in the sadness I have a good send-off.
Anja plays Mobilee Warehouse Session @ The Sidings, SE1, Sat
Alt-J's success may have become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but that shouldn't distract from the surprise of their music's reach and popularity
Almost from the day it was nominated for the Mercury prize, Alt-J's An Awesome Wave was the favourite to win – no surprise, given the judges' history of plucking the quirkiest album from the bag. But what was unexpected, when it took the trophy, was the extent of public support for a record so full of glitchy twists and turns. It quickly sold an extra 30,000 copies and has just passed the 100,000 mark, proving the band were right when they claimed An Awesome Wave was "accessible".
And, for an album that fully deserves the appellation "art rock", it really is accessible. There are oblique angles and opaque and ridiculous lyrics in abundance ("Tra-la-la, in your snatch fits pleasure, broom-shaped pleasure/ Deep, greedy and Googling every corner," from the song Fitzpleasure, is typical of what you'll find here), but it also offers a warm welcome. Never mind the inventiveness, feel the tunes. So while there's something new at every turn, from the jarring a cappella intro of (Ripe and Ruin) to Tessellate's geometrically precise electronica, the melodic side hasn't been neglected. The record is loaded with innocent little choruses that soon become full-blown earworms – Tessellate and Breezeblocks, both released as singles, even made it on to Radio 1.
The friction between experimentalism and pop catchiness makes An Awesome Wave different from any other top 20 album of 2012. Some have predicted that Alt-J's success will open the door for "boffin-rock", as if there were a cavalcade of bookish nerds jostling behind them, ready to transform the charts into an oasis of literary references with wonky time signatures. But their music feels too singular to be the starting point of a new movement. Though it shares a certain priapic undertow with Wild Beasts' Smother, and the dreamy abstraction of James Blake's debut, it's basically out there on its own. Put it this way, it's unlikely that major labels are telling their A&R departments to find the next Alt-J.
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The four members met at Leeds University, and after graduation decamped to Cambridge, where they spent two years rehearsing. The fact that they're exceedingly well-connected – keyboard player Gus Unger-Hamilton's brother runs Polydor Records, and they were signed by industry veteran Korda Marshall – undoubtedly opened doors, but nepotism only gets a band so far. If anything, An Awesome Wave is so oddball (and the band themselves so avowedly nerdy) that even the wildest optimist would have predicted a few thousand sales – if they were lucky – and a bit of blog coverage, before a return to their day jobs. Most of the mainstream press, this newspaper included, didn't even review it.
It contains a plethora of shapes and genres, which aren't flung together, but interlocked as precisely as a jigsaw. The term "folkstep" was invented to describe it, but fails to convey the breadth of what's going on. Electronica, jazz, dubstep, metal and, yes, even folk have gone into the pot, and find themselves prodded into interesting new shapes by a band who are simply curious to see what happens. If Heston Blumenthal were ever set loose in a recording studio, he would likely come up with something like this.
Books and films are referenced throughout. The love song turned murder ballad Breezeblocks quotes Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are; Matilda is named after Natalie Portman's character in the film Leon; Fitzpleasure was inspired by the prostitute Tralala in Hubert Selby Jr's novel Last Exit to Brooklyn. The subjects are an awkward fit with the music; nothing rhymes or scans, and singer Joe Newman's vocals are creepy and insinuating. Taken on its own cerebral terms, though, An Awesome Wave is remarkable and rewarding.
The doyen of folktronica has become the latest artist to turn to his fans to fund his music
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For his fourth album – due early next year – folktronica figurehead James Yuill has decided to release it on his own label, helped by money raised via Pledgemusic (there's a pretty hilarious instructional video on his Pledge page). By allowing fans to directly contribute to the creation of their favourite artist's latest masterpiece – recent signees have included Summer Camp, Art Brut and 2011's fifth place X Factor contestant, Janet Devlin – it strengthens the artist-fan relationship. Yuill told the Guardian about why he wanted to do it: "I first heard of Pledgemusic when my friends Summer Camp started the campaign for their debut album. I pledged, of course, and then thought about the process. By addressing the people who genuinely cared about their music, they had made a deeper connection with their fanbase. With this record, I'm releasing it on my own label. This gives me greater freedom over what I put out, when I put it out and also allows me to communicate directly with my fans." As a teaser for the whole thing, Yuill's releasing the first track Lost in California – premiered here – as a free download. Featuring sleek synths and booming beats, it's one of his more extrovert tracks.
Composer who used electronics to produce incandescent sounds pointing to a higher form of consciousness
The composer Jonathan Harvey, who has died aged 77 after suffering from motor neurone disease, was unique in the way he put digital technology and a strenuously rational approach to music at the service of a deeply spiritual message. In terms of international profile and honours, Harvey's status was almost on a par with his slightly older colleagues Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies. While they have always been in the news, thanks to their pugnaciously unfashionable views and hard-edged modernism, Harvey's rise was so inconspicuous that even the musical world seemed not to realise just how eminent he had become.
He was a quiet man, tall and slightly stooping, with the fluty and precisely modulated voice of an Anglican clergyman. His music, though not without its tumult and discord, on the whole speaks in a similarly quiet voice. What makes it distinctive is its otherworldly, incandescent sound and sinuous oriental-sounding melodies, which give it a sense of ecstatic striving for a world beyond this one.
Born in Sutton Coldfield, in the west Midlands, Harvey was joyously aware of that other world from early childhood. His interest in music started early on, and was stimulated by his businessman father, who had surprisingly unorthodox tastes. Harvey became a chorister at St Michael's College in Tenbury, Worcestershire, and it was here, during a concluding organ voluntary after evensong, that he had a life-changing experience.
"Usually these voluntaries were real milk-and-water affairs," he recalled, "but one day the organist did something really wild, which was thrilling. I knew in that moment that I wanted to be a composer, and do something similar." The years at Tenbury also gave him an enduring taste for unaccompanied choral music, shown in the modest liturgical works for Anglican liturgy that sit in his work-catalogue alongside big complex works for orchestra and electronics.
Harvey went on to study music at St John's College, Cambridge, and sent some of his early compositions to Benjamin Britten. On Britten's advice he went on to study privately with two doughty defenders of the European tradition, Erwin Stein and Hans Keller.
They instilled a keen sense in Harvey that music has to be unified to be coherent. It was a useful lesson; Harvey seems to have been touched by the prevailing flower-power ethos, and some of his early works, such as Ludus Amoris (1969, written for the Three Choirs Festival), have a kind of anything-goes exuberance, not so far from other quintessentially 1960s works such as John Tavener's Celtic Requiem.
By this time Harvey had become a music lecturer at Southampton University (1964-77), and was married to Rosaleen, a physiotherapist, with two children, Anna and Dominic; all three survive him. One of the remarkable things about Harvey was his ability to combine a busy composing schedule with an impressive academic career. He was then lecturer, reader and eventually professor of music at Sussex University (1977-95), and part-time professor at Stanford University, California (1995-2000).
Though teaching took up valuable time, it also gave Harvey the freedom to develop at his own pace, and pursue the intellectual and spiritual passions that had shaped his music. After imbibing Arnold Schoenberg's 12-note system of composing through Stein, Harvey came under the influence of Karlheinz Stockhausen's more heady and liberating concept of musical unity in the 1970s. Stockhausen's message – that melody, rhythm, harmony and tone colour were all aspects of vibration – held enormous appeal for him.
In 1975 he published a monograph on Stockhausen, and became an assiduous practitioner of Buddhist-inspired meditation, which was another way to access the all-encompassing One underlying the Many. "I try to practise Buddhism, but I can't say I am a Buddhist," he liked to say.
Harvey's music of the 70s reveals this new, more meditative outlook. Inner Light 1 (1973) mingles electronic sounds on pre-recorded tape with live music from seven musicians, and shows Harvey taking his first steps towards deriving melodic patterns from the overtones of instrumental sounds – a technique that he would later use in a much more single-minded way.
Also typical of Harvey is the way he makes its ingenious structural idea carry symbolic weight. The 12-note row that governs the latter part of the work is partitioned into a low, dark, four-note pattern; a high, light, three-note pattern; and a five-note pattern that mediates between those extremes.
In Harvey's First String Quartet (1977), his sense of colour and melody is even more explicit. For several minutes we hear nothing but a single pitch, endlessly re-coloured. Eventually this trembling note "breaks" into a single line, one of those ecstatic, luxuriantly decorated melodies that would become his trademark.
The idea that a musical discourse could be teased from a sound with complex timbres led Harvey to investigate electronic and digital sound synthesis in a much more thoroughgoing way than any of his contemporaries. He was one of the first composers to make use of the facilities on offer at the Paris-based musical research institute, Ircam, in the late 70s.
With the aid of its resources he produced the wonderfully evocative electronic piece Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco, based on sounds of a boy soprano and the great bells of Winchester Cathedral. The title is derived from the message etched into the largest bell, which means "I lament the dead, I call the living to prayer."
This work ushered in the summertime of Harvey's creativity, which lasted a good three decades. By now he had worked out a musical language that could embrace darkness and conflict within an overarching sense of consonance and unity. A fine and much-played example was Bhakti (1984), for electronic sounds and pre-recorded tape. The title is a Hindu term meaning devotion to God as a path to salvation, and the music is typical of Harvey in the way it combines dancing energy and stasis, light and dark. In later works Harvey took advantage of new digital-music technologies to bring live electronic transformation of instrumental sounds into his music.
A striking example was Madonna of Winter and Spring (1986), composed for the BBC Proms in honour of the Virgin Mary and her "soft, yielding influence on forces which are assertive, brutal or despondent". The second movement, entitled Descent, portrays Mary's voluntary journey to the darkness of earthly existence through the simple descent of one chord – an example of that sophisticated naivety that set some listeners' teeth on edge, while charming others.
Harvey's mature works include three operas, the most striking of which is undoubtedly the last, Wagner Dream (2006), premiered by the Netherlands Opera. It explores Richard Wagner's interest in Buddhism and takes place in the imagined final moments of Wagner's life, in which he has a vision of a Buddhist opera, which he would never compose.
The emotional entanglements of Wagner and his circle are juxtaposed with the myth of Buddha and Prakriti, the despised untouchable who longs to be united with him. Harvey's musical language proved equally adaptable to the dark, charged intensity of the Wagnerian menage, and the bright realm of the Buddhist myth.
One of the striking things about Harvey's later works is their hospitality to old-fashioned consonances, including the major triad. When asked why he didn't go "all the way" and write tonal music, he said self-mockingly that if he did, he would turn into a boring imitation-19th-century Anglican composer. But a deeper reason was that otherworldly electronic sounds were equally attractive to him, and for much the same reason: they were symbols of divine unity.
These were rooted in the complex vibrations of resonating bodies, and could be regarded as natural, whereas the triad is a deeply artificial product of culture. For that reason, some would find the idea of yoking them together inconsistent, but this did not bother Harvey.
He was refreshingly free of dogmatism, as was reflected in the many religious affiliations in his music: Christian, Sufi, Buddhist, Hindu.
During his last years numerous awards confirmed Harvey's status as an elder statesman of new music. In January 2012 the BBC promoted a generous survey of his music at the Barbican in London. The composer by this time had been ill for some years, and was unable to attend, but he sent a message of greeting to the audience.
The grand summation of Harvey's mystical ecumenism was Weltethos (a global ethos), which Harvey described as a "grand oratorio, a kind of total harmony of all the world's religions", with texts from the world's major religious scriptures chosen by the German theologian Hans Küng.
The world premiere was given on October 2011 by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and Berlin Radio Chorus under Simon Rattle. The UK premiere, given by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra on 19 June launched the nationwide arts festival London 2012. As with all Harvey's recent works, a predominantly meditative tone was enlivened by passages of startling vigour.
Radiantly still passages suggestive of heavenly peace sat cheek by jowl with dancing, almost angry, settings of Buddhisttexts, and delightfully literal imitations of the shofar or ram's horn in the "Jewish" movement. Harvey was too ill to attend the world premiere, but was able to witness it through a live internet
link. It was a fitting conclusion to a career dedicated to the idea that music can point towards a higher form of consciousness.
As Harvey put it in a lecture in 1992: "It's for music to articulate the true nature of man in his blissful, enlightened form. No less than that should be demanded. It's a way of charm and simplicity which no verbal concepts, least of all mine, can ever encapsulate."
• Jonathan Harvey, composer, born 3 May 1935; died 4 December 2012
London gallery's director says eight gigs in Turbine Hall in February will be 'true gesamtkunstwerk – a total work of art'
For a group so closely associated with a vision of the future, Kraftwerk certainly aren't afraid to look back. The German electronic music pioneers have announced they will play eight nights at Tate Modern in London early next year, performing a different classic album from their catalogue each night.
Kraftwerk: The Catalogue 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 – billed as a visual art presentation more than a pop concert – is a replication of the shows the electronic music pioneers took to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in April and will perform at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf in January.
The performances will feature 3D projections and animation, as well as "new improvisations". However, reviews of the New York performances did not dwell on improvisatory passages, and it remains to be seen how a band so dependent on technology – they leave the stage to be replaced by robots when performing their signature song, The Robots – can engage in musical flights of fantasy.
The first of the gigs, on 6 February, will be a performance of the 1974 album, Autobahn. That will be followed by recitals of Radio-Activity, Trans Europe Express, The Man-Machine, Computer World, Techno Pop and The Mix, before the residency concludes on 14 February with their most recent album, 2003's Tour de France Soundtracks.
Tate Modern's director, Chris Dercon, said: "As a former power station, Tate Modern's Turbine Hall is an ideal venue for Kraftwerk's explorations of technology, energy and rhythm. Bringing together music, video and performance, these events will be true gesamtkunstwerk – a total work of art."
However, it is possible the high ceiling and echoing acoustics of the Turbine Hall might make it a better place to present the visual art side of Kraftwerk rather than their music.
The Kraftwerk of 2012 is a markedly different beast to the group that released Autobahn. Only Ralf Hütter, who founded the group with Florian Schneider in 1970, is left of the lineup that recorded Autobahn. Schneider officially left the group in 2008. These days Hütter is joined on stage by Fritz Hilpert, Henning Schmitz and Stefan Pfaffe.
Kraftwerk's influence over modern pop is all but incalculable. Their influence can be traced through David Bowie's Berlin trilogy of albums, into the synthpop and new romantic movements of the early 1980s, through to the techno sound of Detroit in the 1980s. It continues to permeate music today.
Not for nothing have they been called the Beatles of electronic music for their pioneering approach to both the sound and creation of their albums; they record everything in their own Kling Klang studios in Düsseldorf. In recent years the reclusive Schneider is believed to have taken a closer interest in cycling than in music.
Tickets for the shows cost £60 and go on sale on Wednesday 12 December at 7.30am, limited to a total of four per person. It is not possible to buy tickets for the entire series.
The shows take place as follows:
Wednesday 6 February 2013: Autobahn (1974)
Thursday 7 February 2013: Radio-Activity (1975)
Friday 8 February 2013: Trans Europe Express (1977)
Saturday 9 February 2013: The Man-Machine (1978)
Monday 11 February 2013: Computer World (1981)
Tuesday 12 February 2013: Techno Pop (1986)
Wednesday 13 February 2013: The Mix (1991)
Thursday 14 February 2012: Tour de France (2003)
Each week we invite bloggers to tell us about what they do. Today, Diplo's much–admired music site
Who are you and what's your blog called?
Alberto Caballero AKA Caballo, and I am part of a blog called Mad Decent, which also is a label under the same name founded by Diplo.
Where are you based?
I am based in Canada, but most contributors are based in the US. They travel around the world, however, which gives them an insight into underground scenes worldwide. So I'd say we are a global blog, or at least we try to cover most underground scenes from all over the planet.
Describe your blog in a sentence
A great platform for underground scenes and artists.
How long has your blog been going?
Mad Decent was founded by Diplo back in 2005.
What do you write about?
I cover global underground movements – genres or trends that are known in certain parts of the planet, but somehow are still unknown for most European/North American audiences. This genres include azonto, tuki, 3ball, bhangra, tambutronic, Brazilian mangue beat and brega, leftfield dancehall, digital cumbia and many more.
Most of the other authors cover EDM/global bass scenes, including dancehall, trap, moombahton, dubstep, hip hop, 808bass and so on. So we create a good balance.
Why should people visit your blog?
Because it is a great way to understand and create awareness about underground scenes, plus most of the content can be downloaded free.
What's your top song right now?
There are too many great things going around. But one of the most exciting artists coming for 2013 is Carnnibal, and my top song is Which Crime Mi a Talk.
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What's your favourite music blog aside from your own?
My favorite blog is Tropical Bass. They are like Mad Decent but much more underground, covering lesser-known genres and artists. It is an endless source of fresh material.
Electronic music pioneers announce residency at Tate Modern in London, performing one album in its entirety each night
Kraftwerk are to replicate their New York shows of earlier this year in London, playing their back catalogue at Tate Modern between 6-14 February, performing one album in its entirety each night.
Kraftwek – The Catalogue 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 will see the electronic music pioneers perform with what are billed as "spectacular 3D visualisations and effects". The band also promise "improvisation", though reviews of the performances of the eight albums at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in April did not dwell on improvisatory passages, though they had been promised then, too.
The director of Tate Modern, Chris Dercon said: "As a former power station, Tate Modern's Turbine Hall is an ideal venue for Kraftwerk's explorations of technology, energy and rhythm. Bringing together music, video and performance, these events will be true gesamtkunstwerk – a total work of art." However, given the high ceiling and echoey acoustics of the Turbine Hall, it might turn out to be a better venue for Kraftwerk as an ongoing art project than as musicians.
Tickets for the shows cost £60 and go on sale on Wednesday 12 December at 7.30am, limited to a total of four per person. It is not possible to buy tickets for the entire series.
The shows take place as follows:
Wednesday 6 February 2013: Autobahn (1974)
Thursday 7 February 2013: Radio-Activity (1975)
Friday 8 February 2013: Trans Europe Express (1977)
Saturday 9 February 2013: The Man-Machine (1978)
Monday 11 February 2013: Computer World (1981)
Tuesday 12 February 2013: Techno Pop (1986)
Wednesday 13 February 2013: The Mix (1991)
Thursday 14 February 2012: Tour de France (2003)
Continuing our countdown of the year's best albums is the xx's second LP, which didn't break new ground so much as cover old terrain with even more delicacy and poise
The xx's first album had debuted a sound – a spectral melange of post-punk and R&B – that seemed unprecedented. It went on to soundtrack everything from Newsnight to Greece's Next Top Model, was sampled by Rihanna and won the Mercury prize. So the pressure was on for the follow-up. Coexist didn't manage to reinvent their sound – and it certainly wasn't the all-out dance record some had been anticipating – but it did refine the band's blueprint into something even more minimal, sexy and insidious.
Though it lacked the shock of the new, Coexist wasn't lacking in confidence. Slimmed down to a trio and jettisoning all outside help (even their managers didn't hear the album until it was finished), Jamie xx, Oliver Sim and Romy Madley-Croft brewed up a quiet storm. Some songs, such as Angels, weren't so much intimate as internal, like tuning into someone's thoughts. Others, such as Fiction, were so sparse that a guitar line packed as much drama as a thunderclap. Yet the record's shadows weren't so dark that the tunes got lost. From the surging Unfold to the yearning Try, they were uniformly strong and supple, while the atmosphere of unspoken desire was even more torrid than on their debut, but increasingly shaded with darkness and anxiety.
As the album slowly revealed its secrets, the sheer strangeness of the xx became more and more apparent – a producer and percussionist plus two singers (Sim and Madley-Croft) who never harmonise, don't sing to each other or even about the same person, yet are so tightly knit they seem like three aspects of the same androgynous whole. This second album showed them coexisting, beautifully and mysteriously.
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Our countdown of the year's best albums continues with Hot Chip's In Our Heads. On their stellar fifth album, the great British pop group combined fun, warmth and sincerity
What a lovely group Hot Chip have become. Quietly, unassertively – this is the most diffident of bands – they have crept up in music's outside lane, surpassing flashier and more boastful groups, accumulating a catalogue that now stands comparison with the best English pop has offered over the last 30 years or so.
I draw the line back 30 years because In Our Heads was their 80s album. "I've been listening to quite a lot of that music," Joe Goddard told me earlier this year, when I interviewed him and Alexis Taylor. "It wasn't particularly conscious, but I guess some of the instruments on it are from that period. We used a Roland Juno 60, which was an early 80s classic, on most of the tracks on the record. That wasn't particularly conscious; it's just that was the keyboard that was around in the studio were using that sounded amazing."
That was particularly evident on Don't Deny Your Heart, a piece of music so gloriously adept in its weaving together of various strands of 80s pop, underlaid by Al Doyle's scratchily Chic guitar line. It's a song in which no element is the result of chance, in which ingredient is layered upon element, all adding some tiny lustre to the song – from the yelps at the beginning to that punk-funk outro. Not one single second of Don't Deny Your Heart bores.
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The great triumph of Hot Chip has been to put the cratedigger mentality into the service of pure pop. During the course of our conversation about In Our Heads, they managed to refer to Harry Nilsson, Van Dyke Parks, 50 Cent, Chic, the Beach Boys, Madlib, Timbaland, J Dilla, Giorgio Moroder, the Esso Trinidad Steel Band, Pavement, Destiny's Child, the Beastie Boys, Nirvana, Prince, Oasis, Jamiroquai, Stevie Wonder, Blur, Klaxons, New Young Pony Club, Chicago juke music, Kraftwerk, Kate Bush, the Beatles and DFA. The music they love might sometimes crop up in their own recordings as direct references – their use of steel pans comes from being so impressed with their use in 50 Cent's PIMP – but more often it's incorporated seamlessly into their own DNA, in a belief that pop can be both adventurous and inclusive: that an indelible melody and an open-hearted lyric are not cheap tricks, but the heart of what has always made the best pop, not just the bestselling pop.
That's why the accusations that they're a musical equivalent of an archly raised eyebrow seem so very odd. There's nothing insincere about Hot Chip, with the themes of fidelity – between lovers, and among friends – that were developed on 2010's One Life Stand continued on In Our Heads. They sing of the quotidian experiences that are the source of our most profound feelings: the feeling of a loved one's warm skin against you as you wake in the morning; about how freedom is not all it's cracked up to be when you long for emotional security. Even the sex song, Flutes (which comes nearest to conforming to the namedropping nerds stereotype with its mid-section Abba/gabba/Zapp/Zappa rap), posits desire not as an end in itself but as a means to a greater intimacy: "If I could be inside you, darling," may be unusually blunt – but that use of the word "darling", an everyday endearment rather than a pick-up line, places it within a relationship, as does the desire to be "the centre of your life".
Crucial to all of this, surely, is the fact that Goddard and Alexis Taylor are both now fathers. And while Taylor told me he felt the themes of In Our Heads had been developing over the course of their career, he said it had also become apparent once the album was complete that "the joy of seeing new life" had informed their writing. And that the real idea motivating the album was "songs about optimism, songs about struggling to find a way to be optimistic".
The one thing Goddard and Taylor complained about when we spoke was cynicism. The cynicism, especially, of people who make music not because they love it, but because it's a vehicle for their ambition. What they adore, they said, is innocence and naivete in music. It's astonishing, and wonderful, that these men in their thirties – with families and responsibilities and careers and artistic ambitions – can make music that captures uncorrupted joy, without shirking more complex emotional terrain.
Hot Chip: the great British pop group.
We live in an age of finger drumming virtuosos, where drum pads are instruments. And so, while much of production is anything but real-time, here it makes perfect sense for three tracks to have accompanying live videos. The songs are each performances, something to be seen as well as heard.
Peppered with samples from Bollywood, the EP Sacred Sounds is due out December 23 from Detroit-based producer/rapper JUST Muziq aka Lion. The artist says it’s a “controllerism-inspired” EP release, with music videos for each track showing off the connection of fingers to composition.
Lion’s work is notable here, too, in that it uses some less obvious tools. While people eagerly point to something like Bitwig Studio, which looks promising but isn’t even publicly in beta yet, here the less-known Zynewave Podium performs all kinds of nice production tricks for US$50 – and it’s available now on Windows. Podium’s object-based, performance-friendly environment seems to work just fine for Lion. For sampling, he turns to the amazingly-deep, now completely-free Shortcircuit. So, let’s run up the costs here: one Windows PC, one Akai MPD24 controller (under $200 these days), one $50 host, one free sampler. Not too shabby.
More on Podium:
Podium is a modern production host that integrates audio recording, VST plugins and external MIDI and audio gear. An object based project structure allows for advanced media and device management.
Feature highlights: Hierarchic track layout, integrated sound editor, surround sound, spline curve automation, 64-bit mixing, multiprocessing and a stylish and customizable user interface.
But back to the music – proving that ultimately those tools can disappear:
“Different Game”:
“Ways Like Fire”
“INM (Incidental Nod Music)”
(Embedding not working for me at the moment, so head to the video directly.)
Nice stuff. Find more:
http://www.justmuziq.com
And yet again, put your hands up for Detroit.
The electronic music pioneer came online to answer questions from readers – here's what he said
Singer, composer, electronic music pioneer – dare we say legend? – Gary Numan remains a musical force to be reckoned with. After a string of hits in the 80s he has continued to tour and record, and is playing a number of dates this month ahead of the release of new album Splinter next year.
As he embarks on a UK tour this week, Gary will be dropping into the Guardian to answer any questions you might have for him – and will be commenting below the line here on Monday afternoon. Are there any questions you'd like to put to the synth sensation?
If you need some inspiration, take a look at this classic 1979 interview with Gary from NME, courtesy of Rock's Backpages – and join us from 2pm GMT on Monday, when he'll be answering your questions in the discussion thread below.
We'll also post his responses up here to make them easier to follow…
Do you feel that when you first broke into the music business it was easier to get "experimental" music played on mainstream media. It seems to me like a lot of bands from that era were able to take simple ideas (sometimes ideas that weren't even fully formed) and get them considerable attention because it was so forward thinking nobody minded the simplicity. A good example of thsi I think would be Kraftwerk or early PIL
It wasn't like that at all actually, quite the opposite. My first number 1 single was number 1 for 2 weeks before it was even play listed on national radio. I don't think it's any easier now though, it will always be difficult to find opportunities for more unusual music. The industry is, understandably, built around mass market taste.
I think it's brilliant how you've massively helped your support band 'Officers' by writing a song with them and making a music video together. What inspired you to do so?
It's their song to be honest, called Petals, I just sang the vocal for it. I think they're the best new band I've heard in years and I'm very proud to be involved with them. Great music, great people. It's not often something comes along that really blows you away. Officers have done that to me and they are a genuine pleasure to be around. We played Petals last night and it was epic. I love that song.
Would you say "We are Dust" is a good bench mark for what we can expect from Splinter? If so, I cant wait. Looking forward to the London show.
I would yes. Splinter will have a number of songs along the lines of We Are Dust with the heavy grooves and huge chorus's, but it will also have a lot of stranger, more haunting kind of things that we had on the Dead Son Rising album. It should be finished by mid March and so we are looking towards a late summer release for it. Very excited about that actually and very happy to be playing three brand new songs from Splinter on this tour.
Dear Gary, I'm wondering what initially got you interested in WWII era aircraft and made you want to fly? Also, when flying, do you think that for aerobatics pilots especially, the aeroplane becomes an extension of one's nerve endings in a way, like a trained martial artist might use a sword to extend his/her reach? Do you find that a sense of thrill and danger from flying expresses itself in the music you're making now? Good luck on tour!
Always loved aeroplanes, spent many years going to air shows when I was young and always had a real passion for the World War 2 era of aviation. Something special about that level of technology putting out such huge amounts of power. The aeroplanes are very demanding to fly and so very satisfying but a tad dangerous when you're zooming about at low level. Being a display pilot is probably the thing I've been most proud of in my life. Don't really fly anymore now though. I have three small children and as most of my friends were killed in different accidents I realised that it was probably just a matter of time before I went that way. I miss it though, but I prefer weekends at the beach with my kids more.
Tubeway Army were signed as a punk band to Beggars Banquet, home to bands such as The Lurkers and The Carpettes (and not to forget Ivor Biggun of course). What did the label think when you first presented them with a synth album?
They were not entirely happy. Martin Mills, to his great credit, decided to take a chance but I almost had a fight with the other director at Beggars at that time. Lost of shouting and swearing. To be fair they had put me into the studio to record a punk album as we had been signed as a punk band. When I got to the studio I found a Mini Moog lurking in the corner which I was allowed to borrow and so hastily adapted my punk songs to pul-elctro songs. It wasn't what the label expected or wanted. I think Martin agreed to release it because they couldn't afford to send me back to the studio to make the punk album but I could be wrong. It all worked out very well for everyone though.
Hi Gary. Had a fantastic night in Southampton, was really looking forward to hearing Pure and A Prayer for the Unborn, so I was very lucky. I was wondering if the inspiration for A Prayer for the Unborn came from a personal experience or someone you know? It is a massively powerful song and makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up every time I hear it. Kind Regards, Brian
It was personal. My wife Gemma and I tried for children for many years, eventually went to IVF. Our first try went well to begin with, so we thought we were very lucky, but something was wrong with the baby and it died. Then people started to talk to me about the baby being called by God and that just made me angry. That's where the song came from.
Martin Gore recently had a bit of a spat with one S, Cowell over what
the X-Factor has done to music. Do you have a view?
I don't think it's done much at all, for or against. There has always been talent shows bringing people to the public eye. X Factor etc are just the latest incarnation of things that have been around since TV was invented, so it's nothing new. The vast majority of music released every week, and that you see in the chart, has not come from these shows. I'm not a fan of them by any means but they don't bother me either. They turn out a certain type of act, groomed for a certain type of audience, and the music scene is much bigger than that.
Over the past number of years you've spoken about projects with Billy
Corgan and Andy Grey (the producer, not the footballer!!). I was wondering what happened to these projects as they both seemed to have gone beyond an initial idea. And if I can sneak in a second question - you've filmed and recorded quite a number of gigs and tours through the years that have never seen the light of day. Will these ever come out.
We are playing a song on this tour called 'For You' that I wrote with Andy Gray, and we also play Andy's remix version of A Prayer For The Unborn. In fact Andy was at the Southampton gig last night. Andy's a genius and I will always be working on things with him. It would be great to do an album or a film score together one day. As for the filming, we do film way too much stuff hat we then can't think what to do with it. But, better to have filmed too many things than not enough and missed something special. We're not filming this tour for example and that worried me, even though we still have about four films we've not been able to release.
Hi Gary, the two new Splinter tracks sounded amazing last night, are these near enough the finished articles and is Splinter going to be more electronic as the two tracks last night sounded like you are going that way?!
I think it will be more electronic actually. I'm not hearing the need for big guitars all over it at the moment. Some, but I think the emphasis is moving back towards heavy electronic.
Do you now accept that you looked way cooler with blond hair rather than black back in your Tubeway Army days
My wife thinks so.
What happened to that Minimoog you found in your loft?
It's in the repair shop as we speak waiting for parts. As soon as it's fixed I will sell it. I found another one a few months ago as well. It's amazing the things you find when you have a really good clear out.
Hello Gary. I've now been to two of your concerts but have missed Cars each time as I've been outside for a cigarette. Next time I come to a gig do you reckon you could give me a little signal to let me know you are about to play it so I can stay in the room? What do you think this signal should be?
I think you should give up smoking. Everyone's a winner then.
Will we be seeing a Machine Music live DVD soon?
Yes, we should have had it ready for this tour but we've had a few issues with the recording. It's all sorted now but we've obviously not been able to get it ready in time for the tour. I expect it to be released early in the new year.
Hi Gary, an old die hard girlie fan here ( I think you know who I am!) - do you miss seeing the old dressed up fans in the crowd on tour? I always found seeing what people were wearing this year and the lengths that some fans went to was all part of the Numan experience. Having said that enjoying the new stuff loads, cant wait to see you and the guys in Nottingham on Saturday! How you enjoying the freezing temperatures too!?
It was good when it was happening. I used to notice people in the crowd wearing the various images but when that faded away it didn't bother me really. It was all part of moving on to the next phase. I have been around for a very long time and change is at the heart of it all but I understand why some people miss particular parts of the way it was. The temperatures are just horrendous, and the wet. I live somewhere considerably warmer these days, with palm trees. I can't honestly say I miss the British weather.
Gary, being a massive fan of yours, (I have been since 1979 when ''Are freinds Electric'' came out and I was 14) are you coming over to Germany in 2013? And, what made you go so industrial, I like all your phases, but the industrial has to be my favourite.
We hope to tour the Splinter album in as many places as possible when it's released and Germany would be high on the list of priority countries to visit. The industrial thing came about mainly through giving up trying to write pop songs in the early 90's. I don't think I was ever very good at pop music and as soon as I stopped trying, and started to write more the things I loved, it became much heavier and more aggressive.
Had you not had electronic instruments and synthesizers, what musical instrument would you have preferred for composing?
I've written a lot of things on guitar but mostly I write on piano. The initial melody and song structure comes first, which is best done on piano, so I don't even start to use the technology until the later stages. I think any song should sound good just played on a solitary instrument with the vocal. If you have those basics you have all you need. The production then just polishes that idea into the finished thing. If you don't have those song basics the production just polishes a turd really. It will sound good for a few listens perhaps but it will have no substance, people won't be singing it in years to come. Melody is everything.
Hi I was just wondering if you prefer being in the studio or playing your music live? Also I saw you live in Dublin in May and you were amazing!
Thank you, always enjoy playing in Dublin. I much prefer touring to anything else. Studio work is great, and can be hugely satisfying, but live work has the excitement and the lifestyle that I love. I work with a band who are my closest friends, you travel all over the world, playing your songs to people that (mostly) already know and like them, and then you get paid for it. I can't imagine ever not doing it but I know that day will come. For me though it's not coming soon. I want to do this until I drop.
Hi Gary - Absolutely loved that footage with you taking the stage with Trent Reznor and NIN in London a few years ago. That NIN cover of "Metal", which you re-sang live with them, is the best thing I've ever heard.
Any plans for more co-operation with NIN? Your sound and theirs are made for one another, and I hear you guys are buddies.
We've talked about doing something together a few times but never got it together. We are almost neighbours now so it should be easier to sort something out. We've been out with Trent a few times since we've lived in Los Angeles so it's definitely easier to meet up now than when I was living in Sussex. I hope so, I'm a great admirer of his music and his entire work ethic so it would interesting to see what we would come up with.
What do you feel about current electronic artists? Are they as innovative as they were in the late seventies, or are they just rehashing what gone before
Some are, some not so. Electronic music has been around long enough now that it has it's own nostalgia. I hear a lot of people recreating that late 70's early 80's electro sound which I'm not keen on. We did all that before. I have always thought of electronic music as being at the forefront on new ideas, in a way, that's the reason for it to exist in my opinion, so it's slightly disappointing to see it being rehashed. Inevitable though I suppose. Luckily there are also plenty of people who are moving things forward and I would like to think I'm still one of them.
You've mentioned in the past that you would love to get into doing film scores and have commented that it's a pretty difficult thing to get into. It's also common knowledge amongst fans that the Replicas album (my favourite of yours) was originally a book you were writing. So, do you think that when the time comes and you stop touring etc, you'd maybe get back into the writing and finish the book? Personally I would love to see your Replicas ideas come to life in a film with either Replicas as the soundtrack or some new compositions.
I don't have any great interest in going back to Replicas I'm afraid although I do plan to start writing books in the very near future. For me Replicas was a string of little ideas that started out as short stories but came to fruition as an album. For me it ended there. I have a head bursting with ideas and I have rarely felt the need to revisit an older one. There is always something new and more exciting to be thinking about or working on.
In late 70's, artists like John Foxx, Phil Oakey and Daniel Miller started thinking about electronic music in new ways, or I could say 'in British ways'. You were a young Ultravox fan, and were in Tubeway Army making punk music. Talking about '76, '77, before TA release their first album, how aware were you of the electronic scene that was about to rise?
I didn't become a fan of Ultravox until I made my first electronic album, that's when I started to find out that other people were doing it. I had no idea that any kind of electronic scene existed at all. I don't think any of us did, we were all locked away in little rooms in various cities thinking we were the only people that had discovered synths. We were all wrong and it was just luck that gave me the first big electronic single. Plenty of other people had been doing it before I stumbled along.
The Windmill Hill Sessions feature stripped-back versions of songs recorded during the group's 2005 sessions with Callier
Massive Attack have released a free online mixtape, using material recorded with the late singer Terry Callier. The Windmill Hill Sessions are a "stripped back" version of the group's prior sessions with Callier, who died in October.
"Me and [engineer] Euan [Dickinson] reloaded the Terry Callier tapes from 2005," Robert Del Naja wrote on Facebook. "It felt right to honour the short time we had with him in Bristol … I also took the liberty of stripping them back to a more personal space and cut in alternative vocal takes and outtakes, in an attempt to share a little of the spirit of the great man."
The resulting 16-minute mixtape is streaming now at Soundcloud. As Del Naja intimated, it's a reimagining of material from Callier's sessions with Massive Attack and producer Neil Davidge. Some of these recordings were previously put to use on Hidden Conversations, Callier's final album, released in 2009.
Although at his most prolific in the 1970s, Callier's music became an important touchstone for the 1990s' soul-jazz scene, through which he had a late-career resurgence. The Chicago native recorded with Beth Orton, Paul Weller and finally Massive Attack. Their first song together, Live With Me, reached No 17 in 2006.
Callier died on 27 October 2012. He was 67.
