Helena Hauff – It Was All Fields Around Here When I Was A Kid
High fidelity has never been Helena Hauff’s bag. Once, in what she’s described as her most disastrous DJ experience, an angry clubgoer berated her from the crowd, shouting, “Can’t you hear how fucking shit all your bass drums sound?” But as any fan of Wolf Eyes or Black Flag or the Jesus and Mary Chain could tell you, for many listeners, “fucking shit” is the whole point. And the German DJ and electronic musician has crafted her entire career around precisely that: techno at its nastiest, gnarliest, and most ragged—as bracing as a mouthful of bees or a toaster on the edge of the tub.
The irony is that Hauff’s bedraggled beats are actually exquisitely crafted. Spend some time with her new album on both headphones and a proper sound system and it quickly becomes apparent that cans won’t cut it: Her bass and drums, degraded as they are, cry out for big, fat speakers. This is lo-fi music, made on battered analog gear, and swimming in the sounds of line noise, tape hiss, and tube distortion. But translating all that muck—the spring reverbs, the janky patch bays—requires a hi-fi listening experience. Making those sounds sing calls for speakers capable of pushing serious air. Like a ruined building in a vacant lot, her wreckage needs to breathe.
Qualm is the Hamburg musician’s second album, and it is largely of a piece with everything she has released over the past five years, including 2015’s A Tape, a sort of pre-debut LP collecting early sketches and stragglers, and her proper debut, Discreet Desires, from the same year. Her productions stem from her tastes as she honed them as a resident at her hometown’s Golden Pudel, a notoriously go-for-broke underground club. (DJ Koze told me about the time he jumped from an outdoor staircase onto the roof and fell clean through the ceiling to the dancefloor; the one time I went, I ended up in the emergency room with a gash in my head.) Working largely with hardware instead of computers—classic machines like the Roland Juno-60 synthesizer and TB-303 bass synth—she turns out a whorled mix of techno, acid, EBM, and coldwave with no obvious hallmarks to date it. Most of it could be from any point in the past 30 years.
Read the rest of this article at Pitchfork
SPELLLING – Hard to Please
Hard to Please is the debut Sacred Bones 7″ release by Bay Area artist Tia Cabral, aka SPELLLING. SPELLLING released her first full length Pantheon of Me in September 2017 and it was self written, performed and produced in her apartment in Berkeley, California. SPELLLING’s powerful vocal range dances over compositions that vary from rhythmic and ethereal to crunchy and hypnotic, while all remaining singularly cohesive to her distinct and enveloping sound. Pantheon of Me was Bandcamp’s #4 record of the year in 2017 and they raved: “Cabral has it, from her careful sense of composition to her charismatic presence to her ability to communicate with her music straight through to the listener’s heart.” Her newest tracks “Hard to Please” and “My Other Voice” (a cover of Sparks’ 1979 symphonic disco track) pair together to reflect on bittersweet passions of an obsessive romance. “Hard to Please” presents as dance music but journeys through a swirling climax to something more spiritual. On “My Other Voice” the power of SPELLLING’s voice elevates this cover beyond an homage and to a unique vision entirely its own.
Read the rest of this article at Rough Trade
Gabe Gurnsey -You Can
Factory Floor co-founder Gabe Gurnsey has announced a debut solo album Psychical which he describes as “a real departure from Factory Floor”. The new single ‘Ultra Clear Sound’ is exactly that – It’s a sensual pop song with some EBM leanings. ”I wanted to explore the more celebratory sound of dance music,” Gurnsey says; “I didn’t want to make a hostile record”.
The album itself new territory for Gurnsey. An exploration into songwriting and structure, according to him, “it’s a story. The way the 14 tracks are sequenced mirrors a night out from start to finish”.
Read the rest of this article at The Quietus
NxxxxxS – 1837UY273
NxxxxxS, that’s N five X’s, harnessing Red Bull Music’s Berlin studio, is an ace in the hole for pretty much any party if played loud enough. If you’ve been following NxxxxxS you’ve probably been waiting for something new since Fujita Scale or Synthetic Corp. As soon as the announcement was made that new visuals were incoming, the anticipation of a well deserved and highly anticipated come-up became real again.
Read the rest of this article at Kluid Magazine
SOUDIER – Can’t Back It Up
“Look, they are there, they are in the countryside, in cities, on social networks”. Grouped under nebulous appellations (phonk, trill, vapor wave) and like the gremlins watered after midnight, a whole generation of producers invaded the platforms in the 2010s, especially soundcloud. Their common points? A passion for Memphis’ demonic early rap, videos stuck in the sewers of Youtube, cartoons and computer software, all sprinkled with a big dose of DIY attitude.
Born from the thigh of Lil Ugly Mane or Dj Smokey (notably his work on the Basement Musik seriesby Yung Simmie), Soudiere is the spearhead of this neo chamber music and stands out easily in a current that easily falls into caricature by sanding the same drum kits and vocal samples from Memphis. Half thug half nerd, the work of French demonstrates both a sharp knowledge of rap which he sequences and edits the couplets of our favorite legends – current and old – as well as a rare sense of stalking samples drawn from a wide prism of influences (OST of horror film, music “ambient”, iniquitous quirks …). It appears from these associations way “the kit of the little chemist” music hyper versatile and “emotional”,
To celebrate the release of his latest solo, Fear No Evil , as well as the last volume of the ISSUE series of his crew PurplePosse , Soudiere kindly gave us some of his time to discuss, among other things, samples, skateboarding and his upcoming tour alongside the UFO Dj Smokey.
Read the rest of this article at SwampDiggers