Category Archives: Links

Reminiscence by Hélène Vogelsinger

As part of the practice behind Hélène Vogelsinger‘s modular synth compositions, the French singer and sound designer explores abandoned places and connects with their energies to create immersive and suspended moments. “I love the fact that they have layers of stories and histories, with different occupants, often crossing times, and always full of beautiful and melancholic poetry,” she says.

A 45-Minute Drone for 2020

This is an album to start the year with. It is a single piece, just under 45 minutes in length, of dense, shuddering wave forms that track at a sedate pace and bring your pulse and your thoughts into alignment. The variations of the tones are so slow in their passing that your mind’s eye sees not only the shape of the waves, but the shape of the modulations within, warpy rivulets that take the overarching drones and apply to them accordion-like patterning, not to mention sheer layers that glide atop each other.

Read more about Evver’s work at Disquiet…

Knowle West Boy: Reading Tricky’s Memoir

Hell Is Round The Corner explores the contradictions of a music industry that was determined to profit from his outsider status in the wake of Maxinquaye’s release in 1995. It also displays his determination to maintain his autonomy in the face of shallow celebrity culture. But as well as being a finely-crafted document of several decades in the limelight, the book reveals how Tricky, now in his 50s, is a keen social observer, having spent his life mixing with gangsters, boxers and gunmen, as well as celebrities, models and intellectuals. 

Adam Quarshie for The Quietus

Currently reading.

Eurorack Pitch + Gate Sequencer Module Comparison

This is a pretty exhaustive and up-to-date basic comparison of fancy sequencers for Eurorack. There are many sequencer-related modules for Eurorack, and this comparison is rather picky, focusing on heavier-duty, melodic-oriented designs with fairly complete gate sequencing ability. It includes pretty much everything at the “high end” and excludes pretty much all simpler “utility sequencers”.

The art of production: Surgeon

“If I had to boil down my take on all of this, it’s about wanting to have people’s boundaries expanded somehow. They would come in with a certain idea about things and leave with that widened. That’s the aim of music and performance for me, to open people’s heads up, to give them an experience outside their normal routine or life, to make them think there’s something else out there. To reconsider the boundaries they set on the world they live in. Maybe these boundaries and ideas are not so fixed and solid? They’re really very loose, I believe. That’s the whole idea of music, to transmit that idea, to make them bend their idea of the world.”

A techno luminary outlines his approach to live performance.

37 gems by ruby yacht

we are bored by the generic mediocrity dominating the rap landscape at present.

[…]

the ruby yacht is a poet gang, a conglomerate of wacko’s who obviously love nothing more than life itself. we are the hoarders of cheat codes, the speakerknockers, the wellthunk monks. potent delivery.

Heavy Freestyle Fellowship and early Anticon posse cut vibes…Compounding creativity anchored in individual craftmanship.

Highly recommended.

Label of the month: Rephlex

Resident Advisor looks back…

It’s not easy pinning down Rephlex, the label founded in the early ’90s by Richard D. James, AKA Aphex Twin, and Grant Wilson-Claridge. While many labels have clear aesthetics—consistent visual design, a focused signature sound—Rephlex, in its 23-year run, swerved from nosebleed techno to luxuriant lounge pop, musique concrète to blown-out ragga, and of course, lots and lots of acid.

Old Rephlex rave flyers
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