Hype Williams – Distance

Mysterious duo Hype Williams uploaded new music titled ‘Distance’ to their SoundCloud last night with a typical lack of information.

A silky, acoustic track characterised by emotive strings and gentle percussion, it’s the first bit of new music from Inga Copeland and Dean Blunt since 2012 album ‘Black Is Beautiful’ on Hyperdub, while label boss Kode9 hinted last year they could have another on the way.

Read the rest of this article at Mixmag

Post-rock legends Tortoise are back with their first new album since 2009’s Beacon Of Ancestorship. The record is called The Catastrophist, and it was inspired by music they were asked to write back in 2010 by the City Of Chicago that was inspired by the area’s jazz and improvisational music communities. “When we finally got around to talking about a new record, the obvious solution to begin with was to take those pieces and see what else we could do with them,” John McEntire explained in a press release. “It turned out that for them to work for Tortoise, they needed a bit more of a rethink in terms of structure. They’re all pretty different in the sense that at first they were just heads and solos. Now, they’re orchestrated and complex.”

The new album will also see them forgoing their usually instrumental tendencies for two songs: One will feature vocals from Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley, and the other will be a cover of David Essex’s “Rock On” as sung by U.S. Maple’s Todd Rittman. Today, they’re sharing the lead single from the record, the 7-minute “Gesceap,” which McEntire notes is “more of a reflection of how we actually sound when we play live.”

Read the rest of this article at Stereogum

Nicolas Jaar – Fight (Nymphs IV)

Staying true to the expansive and freewheeling energy of his other brilliant 2015 singles,Nicolas Jaar’s latest one-off, “Fight (Nyphs IV)”, takes the producer’s precise hand and extends it all across the keyboard, sampler, Ableton, drum machine, whatever. Jaar’s M.O. has always been to find the space in between the Venn diagram of funky and sexy, and here he does it by experimenting with a mess of sounds that seem to take as much from J Dilla‘s quick collage aesthetic as they do from any music produced in the city of Berlin. That diversity gives the track a mini-mix feel, as though Jaar is giving a bird’s-eye view of what’s happening in all of electronic music within the confines of a single song. And if these eight and a half minutes are any indication, the genre is in a very fun place.

Read the rest of this article at Pitchfork

Newcomers Tender are a brand new UK act, so fresh in fact that there is little out there about them at the moment.

What you can discover on their Twitter and Soundcloud pages, however, is that this London-based duo are lifelong friends who have come together to create a sound that blends spacious grooves with experimental melodies.

So far they have released just two tracks, with their latest song ‘Armour’ released only days ago.

It’s worth keeping an eye on Tender if this introduction is anything to go by, I am definitely interested to see how they will develop..

Read the rest of this article at The Listening Post

It’s not every day that a new act can garner online praise and pack a New York City music venue to the gills on a random weeknight. But that’s the kind of success rising dream pop artist Jackson Phillips, aka Day Wave, has managed to achieve in just a short time. (Having done this music thing for the last couple of years, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen borderline depressing turnouts for so-called “next big thing” buzz bands; the struggle is real.)

Next month, Phillips is set to return with his “Come Home Now” 7-inch — the follow-up to last fall’s well-received Headcase EP — and, judging by the newly unveiled B-side, it’s shaping up to be another solid release in the young Oakland native’s growing repertoire. The intoxicating atmosphere of “You Are Who You Are” recalls elements of Beach Fossils and Wild Nothing, but mostly evokes that muggy/cool transitional period when summer’s last grip really begins to fade and fall’s blissful crispness slowly creeps in.

Read the rest of this article at Consequence of Sound

Ryan Adams by Taylor Swift – Authoring ‘1989’

On the night of the Super Blood Moon and Total Lunar Eclipse, the sky was covered by clouds here in Ohio. Nothing to see, not much to say. Around midnight, as I sat on the back porch, a possum ambled by. For a couple months he’d been passing through our backyard regularly, workmanlike, and this night he looked at me, seemed to shrug, and kept going.

That’s not to say Ryan Adams covering the entirety of Taylor Swift’s 1989 isn’t noteworthy. But if we’re all looking for a Super Blood Moon and Total Lunar Eclipse when we listen to music, I’m pretty sure Adams’ version of 1989 is cloud cover. Musically, it’s conventional. What’s more compelling is the concept.

Dig this: In the history of pop and rock ‘n’ roll artists, there are almost no examples of a male musician covering a female musician’s album. Beck covered The Velvet Underground and Nico for his Record Club project, Camper Van Beethoven recreated Fleetwood Mac’sTusk in 2001, and Rufus Wainwright covered the entirety of Judy Garland’s 1961 Judy at Carnegie Hall. The full-album tribute is the most loving, most obsessive homage you can pay, even when it’s an extended joke or filled with rage. So until now, judging by the evidence, male musicians have not felt terribly compelled to pay explicit homage to female musicians.

Read the rest of the story at popMATTERS

A Matter of Mentors: In the Studio With GoldLink and Rick Rubin

“If it sounds too new, then tomorrow, it will sound like yesterday,” Rick Rubintells his mentee GoldLink during a critical listening session for the D.C. rapper’s upcoming debut album, And After That, We Didn’t Talk. “But this has a new, timeless feeling, which is the best of all combinations.” The 52-year-old producer is famous for these types of mystically earnest expressions about music—koans that would not mean much if they didn’t come from a guy who played an essential role in popularizing the artform of hip-hop and has creatively guided the likes of Johnny Cash, Beastie Boys, Adele, and Kanye West over the last three decades.

It’s late September and Rubin and GoldLink are sitting inside of a bus that Bob Dylan used to live in; the vehicle has since been converted into a studio and is now parked in the backyard of Shangri La, Rubin’s Malibu studios. “We probably mixed half of Yeezus in this room,” Rubin says, introducing the space. “Good history.” It’s a history that Rubin seems to think GoldLink has a place in, and a history that, for the moment, the 22-year-old MC can’t avoid: Tonight, Rubin is taking GoldLink and his crew to see West play his 808s & Heartbreak show at the Hollywood Bowl. And while the art for GoldLink’s breakout 2014 mixtape, The God Complex, referenced Kanye’s famed Margiela masks, the new album’s cover takes cues from Yeezus’ minimalism and idolatry with its line-drawing of head wearing a crown of thorns smeared by a red streak that might be lipstick, or blood.

Read the rest of the story at Pitchfork

Mercury prize 2015 : ‘A shortlist that offers no sense of a prevalent trend in British music’

The most striking thing about this year’s Mercury shortlist might be how few household names it contains. For some – aghast that English Heretic have been overlooked and that there’s no nod for the punishing avant-punk of Fuck Off by Good Throb – any Mercury shortlist will always be woefully mainstream. Yet this is clearly not a selection of albums compiled by people overly concerned about one august rock critic’s damning assessment of the 2014 winner, the eponymous debut by Young Fathers, as “an obscure Scottish hop hop [sic] mash up that nobody bought”.

The sales gulf between the first and second most commercially successful albums on the list is striking: Florence + the Machine’s How Big How Blue How Beautifulwent to No 1 in eight countries and sold more than 200,000 copies in the UK and US its first week, while its closest rival, Jamie xx’s In Colour, had a combined UK and US first-week sale of less than 40,000. The 2015 Mercury shortlist tends far more to the critically acclaimed than the big selling: eclectic Zimbabwe-born singer-songwriter Eska; 18-year-old Bridie Monds-Watson’s debut album as Soak;Benjamin Clementine, whose chart-topping success in France has yet to be replicated over here; Architect, by Glaswegian composer C Duncan. The latter is an entrancing work that’s the closest the Mercury prize has come in years to nominating a classical album, albeit one that bears closer resemblance to the oeuvre of indie label 4AD than to Harrison Birtwistle.

Read the rest of the story at The Guardian