A confession: the return of Fluke in April completely passed me by. My excuse is two-fold – 1) I wasn’t expecting new music from the band, given we hadn’t heard anything in 15 years, and 2) it’s surprisingly difficult to keep up with new music these days, with so many digital outlets.
What a pleasure, then, to discover that both their April return Insanely Beautiful and this new single Real Magnificent are up to the same high standards of their 1990s peak – while staying nicely ahead of the game. Real Magnificent arrives in a number of guises. The original has a slight country accent to its vocals and riffing, while the two remixes from sLEdger, are a shimmering, atmospheric house take and a moody pared-back dub. The JC remix blends tough beats and blurry imagery, pumped up but losing a little of the atmosphere, which the All Buttons In version retains.
You can access all these versions at the Fluke Bandcamp site, the mixes delivered with the same no-nonsense effectiveness that the band have always shown. It’s great to have them back!
published by Ben Hogwood, using the press release.
Sasha returns to Night Time Stories with his latest project – Da Vinci Genius – an immersive exhibition celebrating the work of Leonardo Da Vinci, the great Italian Renaissance polymath.
His 2016 release Scene Delete’ on the same label, an imaginary movie score, saw an adventurous but logical left-turn for the veteran DJ/producer. Now he is fully embracing the world and structure of classical music, combined with the deep sonics for which he’s renowned. He used his experience as an electronic music producer – and movie buff – to re-frame his work, enlisting Scene Delete veterans Dennis White, Dave Gardner and Barry Jamieson to assist in this complex task.
“I’ve never written music for a project like this before, so it was really exciting and interesting to work with the show’s designers Flora and Fauna Visions (FFV) on this incredible brief.
The show is a past-present-future peek into Da Vinci’s mind, presenting a lot of his iconic work, using computers to play around with it, and creating a stunning visual experience. We needed the music to support and enhance that.
We wanted to capture some of the atmosphere of those incredible film scores we love, and the modern electronic composers we were inspired by. People like Nils Frahm, Jon Hopkins, Steve Reich, even Vangelis and Jean Michel Jarre. We were inspired by Kubrick’s approach to using classical music in his films, but also the modern film composers like Hans Zimmer, who use classical movements with amazing electronic sounds around them.
We also managed to find some beautiful medieval choral music of LDV’s era from a Renaissance composer Josquin des Pres, which inspired some of the more ambient sections. When we started the score we hadn’t seen any of the visual, so had to be guided by FFV’s mood boards. It was a different, challenging way of working.” Sasha
A dream-like journey from start to finish, the nuances, atmosphere and melodic layers of compositions such as Mosiac, Equality and Clouds are woven into soft melodies and emotive timbres, and are perfectly presented. It’s only with compositions such as the beatific Super Hero (with Sentre) and Into The Metaverse where Sasha reverts to more familiar sounds. Listen to the trailer below for an idea of how effective Sasha’s blend of his own language and newer influences can sound:
With Da Vinci Genius, it feels like Sasha is very much at home in unfamiliar territory – revelling in the simply beautiful and undeniably moving music he has created. He recounts, “I really wanted to take something classical but flip it on its head, make it modern. Although the show focuses on Leonardo’s original art, in most points of the show it’s getting messed with electronically. For instance, the Mona Lisa appears out of thousands of digital fragments, and some of his other famous portraits melt into electronic visual glitches. I wanted to frame the show with a classical mood, but then allow electronics to pulse behind it. It was a wonderful collaboration with FFV and I’ve loved doing this.”
Da Vinci Genius debuted in Berlin in 2021 and then transferred a year later to Amsterdam. The show is set to wow audiences in Florida, USA and India at the end of this year, with more details to be announced.
published by Ben Hogwood, text taken from the press release.
Bibio has announced the imminent release of Phantom Brickworks (LP II) on Warp Records on 22 November. The first excerpt from the album, DINORWIC, can be heard here:
PHANTOM BRICKWORKS is an ongoing ambient/drone project by English musician and producer Stephen James Wilkinson aka Bibio, inspired by nature, landscape and places haunted by the faint ghosts of industry. It explores the human echoes still present in various sites around Britain which Wilkinson visited, observing their gradual decline.
“Human beings are highly sensitive to the atmospheres of places, which can be enhanced or dramatically altered when you learn the context of their history… echoes and voices can sometimes be heard, in some way or another. Places sometimes have things to say,” says Wilkinson. He continues, “Since releasing ‘PHANTOM BRICKWORKS’ in 2017, I have come to realise that it is an ongoing project. Although elements of ‘PHANTOM BRICKWORKS’ have seeped into my other albums over the years, it feels like its own separate entity.”
PHANTOM BRICKWORKS (LPII) brings attention to new sites; some are intriguing, vast scars on the natural landscape, others survive only in local memories, historic clips and photographs. A few remain submerged from ordinary sight, while some exist purely as legends and stories. Under blankets of improvised evolving loops of piano and baritone guitar, the muffled spectres of working life can be heard, implying nature will come for everything and eventually hide the scars.
“When I announced the first ‘PHANTOM BRICKWORKS’ album, I discussed how places can be charged with meaning, depending on what they’d been through. That observation continues with the new album. It consists of mostly improvised music, using some of the same techniques as before as well as developing new ones that are unique to this album. Some familiar territory is revisited, both musically and in terms of the types of locations that interest me. North Wales plays a significant role, but this album reaches beyond – extending into the realms of legends, as stories passed down through generations can sometimes haunt a place more vividly,” says Wilkinson.
published by Ben Hogwood, text taken from the press release. Photo (c) Paul Heartfield
The much-loved band Tunng are returning, celebrating 20 years since their first release. In those two decades they have maintained a fascinating musical balance, with a blend of electronica, folk and leftfield pop that has consistently marked them out as a band of special interest. Now the announcement of a new album in early 2025 comes with the following press release:
“Time flies when you’re being Tunng. Can it really be over two decades since the band’s genre-blurring, self-styled ‘pagan folktronica’ first emerged from an east London studio. It surely can, and what’s more, January 2025 will mark the twentieth anniversary of This is Tunng…Mother’s Daughter and Other Songs, a debut longplayer whose acoustic guitars and poetic disquisitions on nature, mythology and the human condition, courtesy of Sam Genders, sieved through fellow band founder Mike Lindsay’s lattice of fractured beats and crackling electronics, still sounds like an impiously postmodern wedding of the rustic and the synthetic, the arcane and the futurist.
That 20-year-old signature sound makes a warm return on Tunng’s eighth studio album, Love You All Over Again, a winning amalgam of texture and melody, disconcerting imagery and shapeshifting production, predicated, Lindsay reveals, on a conscious reacquainting with the band’s first principles. “I went back to the first two albums just to listen to how we fused genres – things like Davy Graham, Pentangle, the Expanding Records catalogue and the Wicker Man soundtrack. Over the years, Tunng’s sound has varied and twisted, but at the root there is always a flavour of what Sam and I made on that first album. Rather than searching for a new avenue we went back to what we used to do, which, after all this time, felt like it was a new avenue… Love You All Over Again is our way of coming full circle.”
Lead single Didn’t Know Why, which you can watch above, is a dauntless face-off between metallic synths and pellucid guitar arpeggiation with lyrics about a familiar Tunng song character, Jenny. “It’s very Tunng: dark but then warm and melancholic. Sam heard this and immediately brought back the murderous Jenny, who has appeared on two previous Tunng albums”. Genders offers his take on Jenny. “She once represented a kind of romantic ideal – ‘the one’ – but now she’s a sort of every-person – a kind of archetype of all of us!”
Love You All Over Again is an album that gets to the very essence of Tunng. “For Tunng to work, it has to feel surprising, odd and unpredictable, and the new album has all that. It’s all about Tunng being back, as a family, within our original boundaries, bringing the love to all who have been a part of our journey over 20 years.” Lindsay sums up nicely.
published by Ben Hogwood, text taken from the Soul Jazz website
Soul Jazz Records’ new collection, Electro Throwdown – Sci-Fi Inter-Planetary Electro Attack on Planet Earth 1982-89, is described as “a journey into the outer reaches of electro, a galactic roller-coaster ride of turbo-charged sci-fi grooveology.”
The album is comprised of mainly private-press and independent label electro jams of the highest calibre (with some as rare as space ships landing on Mars) all created in the 1980s, at a time when a vocoder, a Roland TR-808 drum machine and a groove was all that was needed to get the party started.
With a few notable exceptions (Michael Jonzun’s Jonzun Crew and The Packman) the album features mainly under-the-radar killer tracks from a host of one-off artists and back-room electronic pioneers – including Pretty Tony, Planet Detroit (James McCauley, aka Maggotron) and Rich Cason – who together helped shape the sound of electro across the USA from Miami to New York, Los Angeles and beyond during the 1980s.
This album is released on super-loud double vinyl, packaged in gatefold sleeve complete with full sleeve notes (from Derek Walmsley of The Wire), plus download code and digital. For more information visit the Sounds of the Universe website
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