BICEP – RAIN
Bicep released a new digital EP called Rain on Ninja Tune today.
The title track first appeared on their 2017 self-titled album, and is featured again in its original mix, as well as a shorter four-minute edit. It’s accompanied by a new track, called “Helix,” which is also the B-side to Four Tet‘s remix of their track “Opal,” available via white-label 12-inch on April 27th.
They’ve commissioned a new video for “Rain,” directed by Luke Wyatt, AKA Torn Hawk, the Brooklyn experimental artist associated with labels like L.I.E.S. and Mexican Summer. “As we ditch our snake legacy and find a way out of the maze, eureka moments fall down in a constant soft rain,” Wyatt says of the video.
Read the rest of this article at Resident Advisor
Teleman – Submarine Life
Teleman have always been intrigued by electronics.
The band’s standalone EP ‘Funf’ saw them work with a host of guest producers, adding digital abstraction to their florid psych-pop.
New song ‘Submarine Life’ is online now, and it continues the London four-some’s journey down into abstract digital depths.
It’s a curious concoction, matching their ever-so-English pastoral psych to some delirious electronics, swirling and spiralling into The New.
Read the rest of this article at Clash
Moodymann – GOT ME COMING BACK RIGHT NOW
An innovator, a bon vivant, and an utter enigma, Moodymann is a house music figure unlike any other. Across his 30-year career, the Detroit DJ/producer born Kenny Dixon, Jr. has only allowed himself to be interviewed a handful of times. When he performs, he is loathe to show his face, almost always keeping it masked and obscured. But he’s also the proverbial life of the party, a man who travels with an entourage and serves drinks to the adoring fans in the front rows of shows, where he plays music every bit as weird and fun as he is. And Moodymann’s new song, “Got Me Coming Back Right Now”—the first track from his first (as-yet-untitled) record in four years—filters all that mystery and delight into a sleek and beautiful package.
No fanfare, social media blast, press release, or warning was provided for “Got Me Coming,” which was uploaded onto the Youtube page for Dixon’s label two weeks ago. Some intrepid fans discovered the song and left their thanks in the comments section, but it only really circulated widely this week. This new song more than whets the appetite for new material: It’s a feast of artfully designed, intricately crafted house. Elements in Moodymann’s musical mosaic include a hallucinatory drumline, enveloping synths, revelrous backing vocals, and jazzy rhythms. Each sound shakes, slinks, and slides around the track in mind-bending, choreographed motion, resulting in a groove that just won’t quit. Its a credit to to Dixon that his house never feels rigid or machine-made, always organic and lifelike. But what makes “Got Me Coming” magical is its energy—it’s the kind of house song, in its sheer warmth and funk, makes you feel so good listening to it, relaxed and ready to submit to each note.
Read the rest of this article at Pitchfork
Dj Koze – Pick Up
There’s a particularly absurd song called “Goin’ Down” on Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s debut album that opens with the late rapper doing this sort of open-throated croaking kids do to annoy their parents. This sample of ODB’s disembodied voice looped over and over again provides the framework for “Real Nega,” from the experimental rapper and producer JPEGMAFIA’s new album, Veteran. The album’s title refers to both the time that the 28-year-old JPEG—born Barrington Hendricks—has put into his craft and his time in the U.S. Air Force. A four-year military bid took him around the world, but he also spent some time in the American south, which was clearly formative: He cites living in Alabama as foundational to his understanding of racism, and one of the covers for Veteran features JPEG’s own Louisiana driver’s license, evoking the mock food stamp card on the cover of Return to the 36 Chambers. ODB at his most formless would be an impossible model for most artists in any century. For JPEG, it’s just the starting point.
Veteran, his fourth solo record, is a glitchy, frantic, confrontational album on both a musical and political level. The record’s social commentary amounts to more than darts tossed at critical music outlets like Dead End Hip Hop and Pitchfork, rifles that get compared to Lena Dunham, and the scathing takedown, “Word on the street: You fucked Tomi Lahren.” There’s a sort of ideological rigor, an N.W.A.-ish promise that girds his provocations. Where MC Ren, Ice Cube, and Eazy-E mixed their politics with language that stoked the post-Reagan moral panic, JPEG—fluent in internet-native irony and bad-faith arguments—wields those tactics to serious, sometimes disarmingly earnest ends. On the grim “Williamsburg,” he opens the song “selling art to these yuppies” and burrows down a rabbit hole of Phoenix Suns jerseys and expensive coffee. It makes gentrification sound cold and creaky, empty and industrial, which it is.
Entirely self-produced, Veteran is a remarkable exercise in sound and texture. At its best—“Baby I’m Bleeding,” “Rock N Roll Is Dead,” “Panic Emoji”—the production makes the frayed edges of each element part of the atmosphere, a mess of distortion that works percussively and melodically. JPEG gestures at broad, propulsive flows but parcels them out in fragments. He sings on “Thug Tears,” then raps in heavy staccato, smooths things over, and loops back to singing again, all in brief, energetic bursts. At other points, like on the semi-sober “Macaulay Culkin,” he has the droll bounce of mid-period Cam’ron, casually melting “Orange is the New Black” references down to a grim reality. JPEG’s greatest trait is his ability to move from rap’s center toward its fringes by reimagining soul-sampling New York rap in a late-2010s internet wasteland.
Read the rest of this article at Pitchfork
Soulwax – Essential Four
Soulwax are set to release a new album called Essential. Comprised of 12 original tracks, the LP features music from the Belgian band’s BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix.
Last year, Soulwax became the first ever act to submit an entire hour’s worth of new music for the long-running mix series, basing their blend around the word ‘essential’. Out June 22 on the band’s DEEWEE label, this new LP is inspired by that concept, with tracks titled ‘Essential One’ to ‘Essential Twelve’.
Read the rest of this article at Fact
