BBC Live Lounge Florence + The Machine Covers Skrillex And Diplo’s Where Are Ü Now

While indie rockers may have once mocked Justin Bieber’s music back in his teen-pop phase, those days are certainly over.

Earlier this week CHVRCHES recreated his latest single “What Do You Mean” as part of BBC Radio 1’s Live loungue series. Now, Glastonbury headliner’s Florence + the Machine has covered his summer hit “Where Are Ü Now”.

The original – a collaboration with Diplo and Skrillex – hit number 1 on the UK dance charts. Florence’s version strips back the huge club sound, slows things down and adds some reverb laden guitars allowing her enticing vocals to take centre stage, emphasising the emotional complexity of the song…

Read the rest of this article at The Independent

Foals have revealed an interactive video for new single ‘Mountain At My Gates’.

The video is directed by Nabil (Frank Ocean, Kanye West) and was filmed using GoPro cameras. The band and director partnered with GoPro and used their spherical Virtual Reality technology for the interactive video.

To get the best results from the immersive video, which sees the band perform their song live while interacting with the viewer, it is advised that Google Chrome or the YouTube app is used. When accessed via Google Chrome, viewers can interact with the content with the use of a mouse or the A/W/S/D keys.

Read the rest of this article at NME

Hazel English Fix

If you’re a fan of guitar-laden, sun-soaked indie-pop, Hazel English is a name that you absolutely must know. Although she’s only releasing her third song today, we’re confident that she’ll be returning to our pages quite a few more times, since we’ve been immensely impressed with “Never Going Home” and “It’s Not Real” already. Her sound goes hand in hand with fellow Oakland-native Day Wave‘s, and, frankly, they’re two of the only artists who’ve been able to pull it off lately.

Read the rest of this article at Hillydilly

Ooooh Kelela! This new track is slicker than an wet otter. Its Janet Jackson vibes give us shivers. There’s a smidge of Jessie Ware in here too. It’s the way R&B should be: sexy as fuck with a beat that moves you from your groin, Kelela’s vocals curling round melodies like a black cat slinking through a room. She’s owning it.

It’s the first cut from her forthcoming Hallucinogen EP (out on 10.9 via her own Cherry Coffeeimprint in the States and via Warp, for the rest of the world). Co-produced by Kelela, Kingdom & Nugget, the singer had this to say about the song: “It speaks to the narcotic that is loving someone. It makes you exhilarated, it makes you feel drained, it’s in your body and it affects you so completely.”

Sublime.

Read the rest of this article at Vice

Madlib and MF Doom fans have been impatiently waiting for the follow-up to Madvillianyto drop, and considering it’s been over a decade since that record, they’re totally justified. In the meantime, though, Doom and Madlib have steadily released a series of one-off tracks — both alone and together — that often featuring other people as well. For instance, today’s latest song “Knock Knock” is off Bad Neighbor, a smattering of beats that Stones Throw MC MED (Medaphoar) and LA rapper Blu have requisitioned for their own use. The song flips familiar funk and disco grooves into a sinuous backdrop for Doom, Blu, and MED to deliver verses in broad strokes.

Read the rest of this article at Stereo Gum

The Complex Legacy of Oasis’ Classic ‘(What’s the Story) Morning Glory’

At a glance, it might seem as if Oasis is utterly indifferent to its legacy.

During a recent Dallas tour stop, Noel Gallagher, one half of the band’s famously combustible fraternity who found life after Britpop superstardom with his High Flying Birds, treated Oasis songs with all the respect afforded back issues of NME tossed to the curb. He performed the songs—”Fade Away” or “Champagne Supernova”—not as tributes, but as obligations, grimly acknowledging the roars greeting the familiar chords with more of a wince than a grin. Yet, when the encore rolled around, the final song of the night threw Noel Gallagher’s true feelings about his past into stark relief.

There’s a casual brilliance to so much of Glory that its stature as one of the landmark albums of the 1990s seems a given.

As he struck up “Don’t Look Back in Anger”, in all ofits John Lennon-aping glory, the 48-year-old singer-songwriter seemed to strike a truce with nostalgia, lending a line like “Please don’t put your life in the hands of a rock and roll band/Throw it all away” as much warmth as bitterness. It was this moment I remembered as I spent some time sifting through the three-disc reissue of the album that spawned “Anger”, Oasis’ seminal 1995 masterpiece (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? (In keeping with the idea Oasis doesn’t feel any particular affinity for its past glories, the 20th anniversary edition of Glory was actually released a year early, in late 2014.)

Like many of its contemporaries, the 11-track Glory, which has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide, has aged spectacularly well, especially in light of bands formed in its wake—the Killers, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys and so on—trying (and often failing) to recreate the record’s specific blend of ego, vanity, skill and attitude. That the album was also the band’s sophomore effort, following the 1994 breakthrough Definitely Maybe, only enhances Oasis’ already formidable reputation.

Read the rest of the story at The Observer

READ THE DETROIT TECHNO CHAPTER OF LAURENT GARNIER’S LEGENDARY 2003 BOOK, ‘ELECTROCHOC’

Techno icon Laurent Garnier has finally translated his 2003 book, Electrochoc, into English, which means you don’t have to bone up on your high school French skills to read this legendary DJ’s first-person account of the history of underground dance music. The book follows Garnier from 80s Paris discos to the seminal Manchester acid house scene in the UK and beyond. In this exclusive excerpt for THUMP, and Garnier makes his first pilgrimage to Detroit, the birth place of techno and a city reeling from urban decay.

The year is 1992, and over the course of his journey through Motor City, the author meets Underground Resistance co-founders Jeff Mills and Mike Banks. In relaying their personal histories, Garnier paints a picture of Detroit and the birth of techno as weird, woeful, and wonderful as the city itself.

Read the excerpt below, order a copy of Electrochoc here, and listen to an Apple Music playlist full of some of the seminal Detroit techno anthems that soundtracked these pivotal years.

‘Like Detroit, techno is a complete mistake. Like closing Kraftwerk and George Clinton in an elevator with just a sequencer for company.’

d e R R i c K M A Y

‘We created tomorrow and live in your imagination. We will never die.’

U n d e RG R o U n d R e s i s t A n ce

My plane landed in Detroit at around 5pm local time. I was questioned several times over at border control without really knowing why. Eventually, the US immigration officer got bored and stamped my passport. I passed through customs and stepped outside through the security doors. I jumped into a cab and gave the driver Kenny Larkin’s address. He was waiting for me at his house in the white suburbs of Detroit. The taxi pulled away and sailed onto the ring road. Once we had crossed the invisible boundary into ‘downtown Detroit’ I began making out the city’s wide avenues. It was getting dark. The headlights faintly lit the decrepit walls lining the streets. Buildings resembled crumbling mausoleums. In the distance I saw two towers bearing the letters G and M. The taxi driver pointed them out to me as if proudly showing me the ruins of a local monument, ‘You see right there, that’s General Motors!’ On top of the steel and glass towers, the red and blue letters overlooked the down-at-heel city.

Read the rest of the story at Thump

In Conversation: DJ Premier

“What’s going on, brother?”

The voice is, unmistakably, DJ Premier. But then, Clash could forgiven for taking a moment to tune in – after all, this is an artist who has spoken with his hands for more than two decades, who has defined and re-defined on a regular basis what hip-hop production is all about.

And he’s still progressing, still moving forward. In the past few months alone DJ Premier has taken his ever-evolving live show out on the road, collaborated on the expanded edition of Joey Bada$$’ debut album and contributed to Dr. Dre’s spectacular comeback ‘Compton’.

“I’ve been so busy, I’ve been finishing an album. Finally finishing up my album, working with Joey Bada$$, then I’ve been working on the official DJ Premier store, all kinds of merchandise – just keeping it official,” he explains. “I’ve been working on a whole lot of different things. I’m on the Compton soundtrack with Dr. Dre. I’ve been playing around, keeping doing different things.”

Keeping things fresh seems to be the name of the game with DJ Premier. Heading into the studio with Joey Bada$$, the Brooklyn prodigy’s gleeful dissection of golden age tropes kept the producer on his heels. “100% man. Absolutely. His mom is around our age, she used to come to our shows, and he said that she put him on to so many classic hip-hop albums, so as a child he grew up listening to what his mom was listening to. She’s a die-hard head from our generation – so she taught him well!”

But perhaps the biggest event in DJ Premier’s career of late is his cameo appearance on Dre’s ‘Compton’ set. The roots of the project go back to a Boiler Room set in Russia, and collaboration with BMB Spacekid – the beat found its way to Anderson Paak, sparking a new track. Premier and Anderson worked on it silently, patiently, until recent events in the United States forced their hand.

Read the rest of the story at Clash