Fader strokers unite: some recommended compilation albums

Speaking as the UK's leading proponent of the Chicago footwork dance style, I was delighted to see Bangs & Works come out recently on Planet Mu Records.

If you're not aware of the footwork phenomenon, it's halfway between a breakdance stand-off and an epileptic version of the riverdance. Planet Mu, that UK staple of electronic music, spent over a year tracking down footwork proponent DJ Nate in preparation for this album.

Bangs & Works Vol 1 is 25 tracks of bad-talkin' dubstep-influenced dirty Chicago dance music, none of the artists I've heard of, but which brings to mind the evolution of nu skool breaks by Adam Freeland and Burial's more sample-heavy moments.

By the way, I lied. I'm not the leading proponent of the Chicago footwork dance style. If I was, the result would be somewhat akin to the punchline to the old joke, "what do you get if you cross an elephant with a kangaroo".

Another compilation worth its smelling salts is Ghostly International's retrospective We'll Never Stop Living This Way: A Ghostly Primer featuring 11 years of works by artists that have since become bleepists du jour:, including Gold Panda (glitchy and fuzzy), Loscil (floaty and melodic), Matthew Dear (robotic and dark) and Dabrye (laidback and loose).

If you get the album, you also get a Ghostly Book, which inevitably will carry a photo taken in the 1840s of someone you saw at the Morrisson's cheese counter last Sunday. That's how ghostly books work. You see someone in the book and then you die or your hair turns white or Jack Nicholson gets all axey on you.

Meanwhile, Manchester's greatest fader-strokers have come together for Mind On Fire's debut album proper, Great Minds (aka Mind On Fire 005). The bringers of Fire have been promoting nights in God's great city for six years. although this album feels very much like an opening salvo in the war against bad music.

It includes Detroit-smooth beats from XXXY (featured by Fabric before now), G Kut's bhangra-wobble Dance Of The Cuttlefish and Neko Neko's inappropriately-named Fast which takes Plaid's trademark synth sound and smothers it with Boards Of Canada dreaminess. More of the same, please.

The photo above is G Kut at the DPercussion festival and is one of a number of excellent photos taken by Flickr user Rufus A. My favourites are these Durham arches, and eerie singer and this picture of a floating dog trying to fold itself up.

Here's Stephen Hawking's less successful brother Paul to tell you more about Mind On Fire...

 

Painting 2010 beige: Eno, Orb, Hardfloor and Seefeel

It's not sepia: it's beige. When you look back on the past, you're looking through beige-tinted glasses. Don't go romanticising it.

A clutch of recent and upcoming releases offer several shades of light brown for those with nostalgia in mind. Let's start with The Orb, who have teamed up with 90s uber-producer Youth to put out a retrospective of the acid house label WAU! Mr Modo, called Impossible Oddities.

You may think you've never heard of WAU! Mr Modo, but you surely do remember their biggest hits Zoe's Sunshine On A Rainy Day and The Orb's Little Fluffy Clouds. Both tracks are here, albeit re-jigged. I'm more excited by the Orb's remix of Sun Electric from back in the days when an Orb remix was always called an 'Orbital mix', thereby confusing them with the famous but unconnected head-lamped techno duo that brought us Satan.

Also, ambient sandal-gazers Seefeel are to release their first album in 14 years (artwork pictured). The band was relaunched by their original pair of guitarists a couple of years ago and, after releasing the summer-crackled Faults EP (the title track is lovely) in September, they have slated an eponymous long-player for a February 2011 release on Warp Records.

And there's more. Hardfloor are back, this time with their eighth studio LP. Two Guys Three Boxes (the boxes referring to their beloved acid-making machines and not record boxes) will be out on bonfire night. And finally, we are moments from the launch of the Small Craft On A Milk Sea, Brian Eno's album on Warp Records and, for many, the most anticipated release of the year. Eno's album will be out on November 15th and you can listen to bits of it here.

The old school is very much alive, well, and unashamedly beige.

Luke Abbott's Drones: not so atonal now

Norfolk is a place that is only famous for producing slightly more than its fair share of formula one drivers. It also produced Luke Abbott (pictured), who recently popped us a debut album called Holkham Drones.

I've sort of ignored Abbott since 2006, when I praised his "manic atonal silliness", but this debut for the Border Community label has regained my fuzzy attention span like a happy slap, a Tango kiss and brain haemorrhage all rolled into one.

The album takes krautrock as its base (compare Abbott's Brazil with Neu's Hallogallo) and then weaves its repetitive curcuit-pumping machinery into a technoid tapestry of emotive, heartfelt electronica. Trans Forest Alignment is detuned pop melancholia, title track Holkham Drones is the very definition of sad disco, and the static beatbox of Hello Tazelaar dances a beautiful dance with melted synths that positively drip from the speakers. Stick that confused metaphor into your badger and smoke it.

It may be too reminiscent of Boards Of Canada in places (2nd 5th Heavy), and it may try too hard to be Clark (Baalnk), but this disc hooks the heart and the head more than most dance albums released in 2010.

Oh and in case you were wondering: Martin Brundle, Ralph Firman and that's about it. I did say "slightly".

Ultra-funkulent new band from Squarepusher

Squarepusher's got his funk on with his new project, Shobaleader One.

This ultra-violet super-funkulent video gives us mortals a taste of the eternal bassmasher's new sound  A mini-album with nine tracks (d'Emonstration) is due for release in mid-October. He won't tell us who's in his new band other than to say they are "a bunch of kids" who are "pretty frightening players".

Meanwhile, he has hopped over to Ed Banger Records to release the first track from d'Emonstration: Cryptic Motion is a Daft Punk work-out backed with a sharp-as-hedgehogs Mr Ozio remix.

'Pusher wanted this project to be a "clean break" from his past sound, which may be a relief to some concerned at his inexorable decline into terminal jazz. See what you think. Here's the track list, and snuggled below that is an album preview along with clickable play-bar of Cryptic Motion.

1. Plug Me In
2. Smash Unreason
3. Into the Blue
4. Frisco Wave
5. Megazine
6. Abstract Love
7. Endless Night
8. Cryptic Motion
9. Maximum Planck

Keep your scanners peeled for Lorn's Nothing Else

Emerging like a dense ash cloud from the volcanic Brainfeeder label (almost topical!) , Lorn has finally landed his album Nothing Else. The title is a reference to a question raised by John Milton in Paradise Lost, although if this long-player was literature, it would be something much more dystopian - Animal Farm or The Road, maybe.

As soon as the fat, fuzzy synth lines drop in Grandfather, the scene is pretty much set: cloggy beats and loping hip-hop instrumentals that, perhaps, sometimes take themselves a little too seriously such as when the ghostliness edging into pomposity on Army Of Darkness.

Oh but what ghostliness. Eerie, melancholic chords give way to thuddering beat patterns, giving us a soundtrack to a film in which Decker thought 'sod this' and went off to steam his head instead of tracking down replicants.

The sounds are solid, eighties pixels of pleasure too - the masculine, rolled-up suit sleeves of the biting stutter synth in Cherry Moon, for example. If you don't get the odd frisson of Knight Rider excitement, then you should go away and listen to Busta Rhymes' Fire It Up and then work your way up to Lorn.

But it's a modern album on a modern label. The best comparison I can give for this album is Clark's Totems Flare, and not just because it was mastered by the Clarence Park body riddler himself. It has the same boldness and playful fussiness - as well as vocals, which are more unusual than you'd realise on electronic albums like this.

For those that have followed Lorn for the past few months, there is one depressing realisation. There seems to be no Until There Is No End on this album. His epically evil take on r 'n' b was such a ground-shifter last year, I'm puzzled to find it missing. Of course, it's up to Lorn where he sticks his music, but that track's spectre looms over this album.

You see... there wasn't Nothing Else after all.

More crunch than Timbaland's cornflakes: Daedelus and Starkey album reviews

Daedelus 

The blurb from the label about Righteous Fists Of Harmony, an important new album from Daedelus, is hogwash, waffling about modernity and the end of an era and containing alliterations that would even make me blanche ("bygone battle", ""contemporary conundrum", "doomed to be destroyed by our ingenious inventions").

Thank goodness the album itself is technically much better. But despite Righteous Fists Of Harmony being the Brainfeeder label's first massive release, the liberal appropriation of disperate styles doesn't work.

On one album (it's a mini-album, really - more of an EP), we have sea-dog folk, Spanish guitar, claustrophobic psychedelia, soundtrack sweetness and pleasing loungecore thanks to the vocals of Laura Darlington, who also appears this year's much more successful Flying Lotus album.

What bugs me though is how dated it sounds when Flying Lotus has appropriated jazz to staggering lengths (note the free drumming on Daedelus' Tidal Waves, then compare it to Cosmogramma) while folk guitar techno has been nailed with stellar success on last year's Bibio album.

Daedelus should strip things down a bit: keep it simple, like the Ninja Tune video for Stampede Me, which does some really lovely things with red, green and blue.

Starkey 

Over to the world of crunkstep now, and Starkey's Ear Drums And Black Holes album has more crunch than Timbaland's cornflakes. It's an essential buy for Joker and Rustie fans and is already one of my Planet Mu highlights of the year.

Pick any track on Ear Drums and its more likely than not to sound epic, like it's the 'big single'. So hark ye the loping, grand chords of 11th Hour, the elastic band playfulness of Multidial or the synthesised orchestral fills of OK Luv.

The stark truth of Starkey is he isn't doing anything new, but America needs people like him to keep them oscillating in this strange, ghetto-crunk sub-genre that's genuinely giving a new meaning to the clubber's term "bangin'".

Flying Lotus' Cosmogramma embraces the cobblers

Do you remember all that cobblers in the '90s about the Aphex Twin's lucid dreaming?

If Flying Lotus hasn't spent the last two years in one massive lucid dream, I'll eat my trilby. His third album Cosmogramma sounds like every hazy memory and lazy Sunday spilled from his brain into shimmering, liquid gold.

Los Angeles, his influential 2008 album, was all about the head nods and the knob tweaking. It deep froze hip hop into crystalline instrumentals. The new album is not that. In fact, it blows his J Dilla manifesto out of the water as he looks further afield to jazz, to soul, to the weight of a musical history few artists manage to encompass in one record.

Cosmogramma seems ungrounded to the casual listener, spinning as it does from p-funk house (Do The Astral Plane) to shuffling workshop techno (Recoiled). It often jumps genres within one tune, but unlike that track-hopping scratchamentalist Prefuse 73 he plumbs emotional depths whilst snatching from different record boxes with breathtaking drive.

Confused

It's a difficult LP to hook into at first. The space jazz of Pickled confused me, and left me wondering if I was playing my mp3 at 45rpm instead of 33, while other tracks are pure lounge: Satelllliiiiiiiteee underwhelms, while Zodiac Shit is a laid-back summer afternoon.

But one you get used to the newness - free jazz and plenty and plenty of harps - the wooziness begins to lighten your head. Ravi Coltrane's tenor saxophone lends a smokiness to German Haircut and...And The World Laughs With You smothers Thom Yorke's vocals until they're musical chloroform. It's a dizzying ride.

Arkestry is the most leftfield, with mad drumming leading into moody choralwork, a dramatic edge that is only amplified by the descending melody and clockwork rhythm of MmmHmm. I can even forgive him the opening ping-pongs of a track called Table Tennis (what else?) despite dredging up the memory Enrique Iglesias' awful 'Ping Pong song'.

Spell

The deeper we fall into the spell of Cosmogramma, the more Flying Lotus' place in musical history becomes transparent.

Until now, FlyLo's great aunt, the jazz pianist Alice Coltrane came from another musical world: a different time with different ears. Until now.

The genre-busting Cosmogramma, encompassing nuyorican soul as much as hip hop, ties his history in with hers. It's that echo of the past that makes this a real producers' album, but in a very different way from 2008's Los Angeles.

Cosmogramma is a soulful kaleidoscope of genres, lending it a headiness not seen in his previous work - but its roots are deeep. FlyLo has drawn a line in the sand once again: it's time for his contemporaries to get dreaming.

A LoneLady among these dark Mancunian mills

LoneLady

Warp's wicked love affair with the guitar continued recently with LoneLady's debut album Nerve Up (LoneLady pictured above). I always wondered what happened in those smashed-window remnants of Manchester mills... well, here's the result.

Nerve Up is low-fi and immediate like the xx, and like that album it carries off the impossible task of sounding retro and fresh. Hear, if you will, the spirit of The Fall, Cabaret Voltaire, Joy Division and, to a larger extent I think, Gang Of Four, and yet it somehow explodes with potent energy.

Intuition is the immediate post-punk classic here, while If Not Now has the insistence of Tricky vocalist of Nicolette set to an unashamed '80s vibe. And she's not afraid to speed it up either, with the stomping disco of Army and the jangly, hand-clappy Early The Haste Comes.

Sharing a producer with My Bloody Valentine certainly helps LoneLady's album groove and ride and wiggle its way into your memory. Much of the record is reverbed to hell, I guess to reflect the huge mills in which it was created, and so adding a nicely apocalyptic touch.

My concern is if Warp can't convert this album into a sure-fire smash hit (the xx broke the top 40 last summer), what hope is there for any of their artists? I insist, dear reader, that this album is your guitar-rock purchase of the year.

Loscil

One for the guitar-phobic, now, and an album that is as equally atmospheric as LoneLady's long-player. Loscil's fifth album Endless Falls will envelope you, smother you and send your fuzzy mind spinning into that joyous place just before you drown with suffocated lungs.

Seven tracks of warm, glitchy looping ambience (nine tracks on the vinyl) make way for an epic closing piece of, um, spoken word poetry. Not a single string section, not the tiniest crackle, not a single moment of muffled melancholia is out of place on this beguiling ambient highlight of 2010 and a true successor to Global Communication's early work.

Massive Attack got soul but Ceephax got swing(ing lampshades)

Hey, look, there is some albums what just come out!

Ceephax Acid Crew

I'm swinging from the bloody lightshade.

United Acid Emirates, the new album from Ceephax Acid Crew, has got me prancing around my mansion like a brain damaged pixie. It's so lurid and colourful, like being stuck in an 8 bit Meg And Mog cartoon.

The drooling, looping trippiness of the acid, splattered all over this album, is a constant, giddy joy. The opener Cedric's Sonnet is a sharp, spikey melodic number reminiscent of his brother Squarepusher in Welcome To Europe mode. Castilian is dragged kicking and screaming by a full-on, bullying bass drum, while the dated click rhythm of Life Funk reminds me of Felix-era house music.

This is, however, not a stupid album. It's a serious step forward for Ceephax, where he demonstrates his various skills at chugging 80s techno anthems (Topaz) or off-kilter chord arrangements (Commuter). And all this with plenty of squelching acid moistness. Highly recommended.

Massive Attack

Are you bothered about a new Massive Attack album?  Of course you are: I can't believe you asked me that, you idiot.

Heligoland has finally, um, landed. It's a full seven years after the band's previous studio album ("If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing slowly," says their MySpace page) and nearly 20 years after their highly influential debut Blue Lines. And actually, it's that memory of Blue Lines that I can hear on Heligoland.

Yes, there are guest vocalists (which The Guardian had down as almost unique in the dance world, despite the Gorillaz, Fatboy Slim and Unkle doing that kind of thing for years). Yes, there is gloominess a-plenty. But what this has, which I think 100th Window missed, is... capital letters... SOUL.

It's an album that is destined for coffee tables, new year's parties and easy headlines about the vocal collaborators (hello, Guy Garvey), and therefore many serious music fans will brush it off their shrugged shoulders. Which is a shame.

What will really get me all excited are those Burial remixes the internet's been promising.

Pantha Du Prince

Also out this month is Pantha Du Prince's Black Noise. Oh, and look, he has vocal collaborations from the likes of Animal Collective, !!! and LCD Soundsystem people. Read this and weep, The Guardian.

Black Noise is awash with clouds. You know how some albums sound urban-y and some sound outdoors-y? This is Heidi the goat-herder's friend flatlining on heroin on the highest mountain in the world while buzzards perform a jagged dance of death around her.

With sharp techno, dizzying loops, spiralling bells and smoky, smoky atmospherics, this will appeal to Susumu Yokota fans looking to grab something a bit more substantial by the goat horns.

Gonja Sufi's a smokin' nomad in sound and soul: plus Friends Of Friends and Babe Rainbow

Gonja Sufi

Time for some single reviews. The haunting voice of Gonja Sufi will leave an indelible mark on 2010, especially with his second 7" single Kowboys And Indians. He's so unique, a nomad in sound and soul, that he hardly needs the production genius of eclectic LA beatcruncher The Gaslamp Killer. But it works like nothing you've heard before.

The track opens with a buzzing that will have you packing your speakers off to the repair shop. What follows is a stunning blend of eastern mysticism, slacker guitar, psychedelic rhythm and a vocal that swings loosely between Bollywood theme music and Method Man aged 95.

Gonja Sufi, that sinister, genre-smoking spirit of an electronic Hendrix, has produced the essential new sound of this year. The rats are already fleeing town in preparation of his all-conquering debut album A Sufi And A Killer (featured in the March section of my 2010 electronica preview).

Daedelus

Where do I start with the first volume of a split-single series from the Friends Of Friends label? They've given Ninja Tune's Daedelus and debuting double-act Jogger three tracks each on the Friends Of Friends Vol 1 EP, but then they've gone and drowned it all with no less than seven remixes. Flippin' heck!

Daedelus slaps down some disco house (C'est Super works nicely), then gets the guitars out and strums to a Smashing Pumpkins sample. Jogger concentrates on pumping house (Litre O' Colais is especially manly, grrr) and then goes and spoils it all with vague electric guitar noodling, demonic growling and speed techno silliness.

On the remix side, Prefuse 73 protégée Eliot Lipp puts Kraftwerk through an 80s disco mincer, while for his remix of Nice Tights, Nosaj Thing does a wonderful job creating a leftfield soundtrack full of guitar whimsy and minor-key boogie. A mixed affair - it could have been prettier without all the remix bling, as they'd no doubt say on Stockport's Next Top Model.

Babe Rainbow

I promised I would waffle about Babe Rainbow when the time came for his long-awaited Warp debut, the Shaved EP. It's time, so let's get the clippers out and inspect the scalp of Canada's premier dubstepper.

Sorry. I mentioned the d-word. The thing is, Cameron 'Babe Rainbow' Reed is kinda dubstep, but only in a slow-motion, life-slowly-melting-before-your-eyes way. His noise is so deep and deliberate, he makes Massive Attack look like Scooter (the hardcore German funsters, not the weedy muppet).

And so we have seven tracks of metallic, ringing percussion with vocals swamped with claustrophobic drizzle and an all-too-familiar whoomp bass. With the exception of sixth EP track Celebrate, I'm yet to fall in love with Babe Rainbow. Then again, I haven't used his music to get so stoned out of my face, my brain is melting on a toxic beach somewhere north of Jupiter.

Jóhann Jóhannsson, Simian Mobile Disco and a pants-dropping Skream: new and recent releases reviewed

Before I get stuck into February proper, please allow me to catch up with a few musical missives that I intended to waffle about last month but didn't get round to because I was too busy sniffing baby wipes.

Jóhann Jóhannsson

This is from a while ago, but I wanted to mention it because I saw him live last year. Swathes of swooshing strings is the order of the day for Jóhann Jóhannsson's album And In The Endless Pause There Came The Sound Of Bees.

Jóhann, who has a name that never seems to finish like Banarama, produces classical music with shavings of electronica and can often be seen playing to bleep-heads. His ostentatiously titled album is in turns delicate and flamboyant, but I can't be doing with the morning-has-broken cheery stuff and would much rather he stick to the murky ambience or the eerie foreboding of his most filmic tracks.

Skream (pictured)

A couple of tracks now. The cold refrain on Skream's remix of Instra:mental's No Future ("lies confusion government control") is nothing short of pants-droppingly brilliant. It's a lolloping half-stepper that stomps its metal legs until you're marching to the same, automatic beat. It threatens to fall into the wobble bass cliche so beloved of dubstep, but it remains purely minimalist.

Speaking of minimalism, Minimalistix is the name of the track on the b-side of the Skream remix. The paddy drums (as in drums that sound like soft pads: it's not me being racist) fight against airy soundclaps as the cut builds and builds and builds.

It reminds me a little of the strange alien isolation of Higher Intelligence Agency and despite its stubborn simplicity, I could play it repeatedly and not get bored: Skream's remix is definitely something to Munch on. (See what I did there?)

Simian Mobile Disco

Beth Ditto, her with the big gob, struck gold when she recorded Good Intentions with Simian Mobile Disco last year. You may want to know there are a couple of remixes doing the rounds, but to be honest former Hacienda resident Greg Wilson's retro stylings have far too much bongo (yes, you can have too much bongo), while Maurice Fulton's disco-tastic take on the track is the kind of generic funk groove that has me sulking in the corner of the club waiting for the good tunes to come on.

Picture from Nailler 9.

Album reviews: Shlohmo's clunky knobs, Ambient News's sepia hue and Mark E spluttering all over your face

Right then, enough about Autechre's leakiness for now. Time for some slap-dash album reviews.

Ambient News

The recent self-titled album from Ambient News doesn't push the envelope so much as snuggle inside it to avoid disturbing the postman.

The busy little beat smothered in vocoders on Moon On My Forehead is as energetic as this album gets. It will appeal to those who like looking at their ambient music with sepia-hued retinas: think Tangerine Dream, 1990's Plaid in simmering mode, or particularly the Feed Your Head compilations.

Hiding behind the Ambient News moniker is Cylob, the man who brought us a superb subversion of rave culture in Rewind. This alternative guise gives him the chance to mess around with harmoniums and gamelan-style 'earth' ambience.

Ambient News sounds incomplete. If it was BBC Ambient News 24, at the top of every hour, it would have about 15 minutes of newsreaders filing their nails. It's almost as if Cylob had been gathering ideas together for a long time, but never quite realised his vision...

Mark E

...unlike Mark E. This hypnotic house music peddler has also been hoarding tracks, but his resulting Works 2005 - 2009 compilation is a much grander affair than Ambient News. I wouldn't normally delve into disco house on this website, but this album splutters quality all over your face, licks it off with a big lizard tongue, then spits all the quality back in your face again.

You see, for someone who's made his diminuitive name giving us his take on Janet Jackson and Diana Ross (now there's a duet I'd like to see), a lot of these tracks are a bit too slow, a bit too subtle and dangerously hypnotic. And that's a good thing.

As for individual cuts, I'm not mad on the funkiness of Sun Shadow, even though Mr Scruff has been pummeling away at that track like a Daily Mail reader who's just discovered a hammer for the first time. But Mark E's reworks of Slave 1 and Plastic People are house music at its most sexy and sublime.

Shlohmo

Finally, us IDM fans have been dropped a cracking album from Los Angeles beat scientist Shlohmo (pictured above, not to be confused with the beatboxer with a similar name).

Shlomoshun Deluxe is an album of brittle lo-fi beats in the Hudson Mohawke / J Dilla vein. And when I say lo-fi, I'm not kidding. He plugged a mic into his laptop, along with his dad's ancient Jupiter 6 (an old Roland synth with clunky knobs) and, somehow, expected to produce a good album.
.
He did: it's my favourite album this week. The emphasis is all on the groove, and it has a David Holmes wideness to it - which is a remarkable achievement considering he made the whole thing from sellotape, string, splittle and sausages. Well, maybe not the sausages.

Autechre's Oversteps: fake leak scandal and a cellarful of gibbons

(Edit: see the comments on this post for a link to the real Autechre leak. Meanwhile, read about the February 2010 release of the album here.)

For a few giddy moments last night, I held in my hairy hands Autechre's glistening new album, Oversteps.

I wrote a brilliant review which described the album as a meistewerk: surprising, disorientating, devastating and effective. My writing was so brilliant, Shakespeare would have drooled on his ruff.

And yet, one of my hundred gibbon researchers leant close to me later in the evening and said, "Fats, it's a fake. The album leak is a fake."

I was devastated. I punched him hard in the face and sent him to back to his damp cellar without a banana.

Deflating balloon farts

Oh how the review trilled. I spoke of chiming frequency modulation, a playful whirr of whistles and bleeps like a pissed-up R2D2, ambient interludes effusing cold isolation and creeping horror, staccato hits that sounded like lip smacking or a deflating balloon fart.

It turns out the album, discovered by many people on file-sharing site Soulseek, was the eponymous debut by Altered:Carbon and was set for release on February 7th. The band are relative unknowns and, yes, they do sound a bit like Autechre.

To my shame, I went from caning the album on my gramophone to being no longer interested. I careered from simpering love to cold indifference. Just because it was no longer Manchester's finest electronic music duo.

Why? It's a storming old-school techno album full of analogue fatness and eerie four-chord melodies. Was it cheapened because it wasn't Autechre? Do I trade off names so easily? Why does my mind work like that?

Hooting

The clues were there. This was the sound of not-Autechre having fun in the studio, which seemed out of character. It was a move by not-Autechre towards solid beats and structure rather than difficult algorithms, which should have set alarm bells hooting.

But the biggest clue was in this not-Autechre album feeling much more part of a wider musical landscape than the usual, isolationist Autechre beloved of purists: a synth chime borrowed from In Sides-era Orbital; Windowlicker drum stabs; more than a brace of head-nods to Plaid.

If Altered:Carbon deliberately leaked the album pretending to be Autechre, they are reprehensible and should be sent into the corner of electronica.

Knock-down ginger

But I suspect it was some wag playing the online version of knock-down ginger to tease uber-earnest techno fans. I hope a new band gets a splatterful of extra listeners through this bizarre publicity.

Unless, of course, Altered:Carbon are Autechre in disguise. Ooooh, my head hurts. I leave this blog post saddened at my own fickleness. I'm off downstairs to shoot all the gibbons.

Get Altered:Carbon via creative commons label Section 27 when it comes out. Meanwhile, the best way of hearing Autechre's Oversteps is is by pre-ordering it now. While you're at it, read my other Autechre writings.

(Thanks to Rob for making this post possible in a way I didn't quite expect.)

Here's the skinny (dip) on Warp's Babe Rainbow and Flying Lotus

And now, some news from the Warp label.

Two of these facts are absolute hogwash and were written whilst I was high on methane. Three of these facts are 100% genuine leather newsbites about Warp Records and their artists.

Babe Rainbow

Babe Rainbow (pictured) is the newest act to sign to the label. He is a Canadian experimentalist sitting somewhere amid Req, Burial and anything ending in 'step'. This has been covered a-plenty by other websites, so I'll post more when his debut Shaved EP hits in February. Listen to loads of Babe stuff on Tumblr.

Achy breaky heart

Last week, Warp Records founder Steve Beckett announced to an astonished media that he was, in fact, Miley Cyrus. Tongues began wagging on the set of the 3D kid's film Bolt, where "Miley" would spend hours listening to mp3 demos from wannabe Squarepushers. Billy Ray Cyrus' first dubstep EP will be out on Warp in the spring.

Flying Lotus

I mentioned the release of Flying Lotus' DJ kicks CD in my 2010 preview, but I can add to that the release of a fully-formed FlyLo studio album too. Cosmogramma will be out on April 20th on Warp. He is quickly becoming the godfather of modern beat production, and all ears will be tuned in. There's even a Massive Attack remix on the way, according to this interview in Pitchfork. I know this is exciting, because on my notes for this blog post, I have scrawled "OH YEAH".

Warp Records for Dummies

This Dummy Guide to Warp Records is wonderful, and a definite must-read for Warp noobs and vets alike. I wish I had written it: Rob Gordon throwing the phone is classic rock 'n' roll angst. It finishes with a list of essential Warp albums, so if you're looking to fill up your virtual music shelves, here's where to start.

Skinny dipping

Warp Records is relocating to the house next door to me. They've decided London didn't really work out, so they've bought a modern semi-detached bungalow complete with swimming pool. I am allowed to skinny dip any time I want, and they have promised to furnish my villa with all-new furniture made with off-cuts from vinyl records. I hope the grooves don't chafe.

Autechre's new album confirmed for March 2010

When I revealed the existence of a new Autechre album last week, it seemed like I was whistling into a black hole.

Apart from a few enthusiastic retweets on Twitter (thank you!), no other blogs took up the story; the internet kept up a nervous silence, as though it was trying not to agitate the delirious drunk in the corner.

At last, hurrah and thrice huzzah, that silence has been broken. Autechre themselves have revealed details of their new album.

After a launching a live tour, Oversteps will stride out on Warp Records on March 22nd (a day later in the States). It is their first album since Quarastice two years ago, which, if I remember rightly, had one of the last album covers drawn by Designers Republic before they shut their famous studio.

The track listing is as follows. Because the titles are as obtuse as ever, I have suggested some rhyming slang to help you commit them to memory:

1. (porgy and bess) r ess
2. (stupid flanders) ilanders
3. (fancy a bonbon?) known(1)
4. (808 state) pt2ph8
5. (peter kay) qplay
6. (dribbler's knee) see on see
7. (ally mcbeal) Treale
8. (hear ye! hear ye!) os veix3
9. (cockney glow) O=0
10. (dappy's an n-dub) d-sho qub
11. (theme bar in rio) st epreo
12. (erm... john and paul) redfall
13. (um, not sure about this one) krYlon
14. (oh, for flip's sake, this is getting ridiculous, are you 'aving a pop?) Yuop

See my original post last week when I revealed the (ever-so-flimsy) evidence of Autechre's new album. Oh then, of course, there was the now infamous Autechre album leak...

Much love from Four Tet - but an icy silence from Monolake

Four Tet

Kieran 'Four Tet' Hebden ambled down some strange improvisational avenues for a while, but he's back on the main road behind the wheel of his perfectly programmed bus to bring us his first album for ages.

There Is Love In You will hit at the end of this month. It follows his massive tune Moth with Burial and the spinning, rolling nine-minute epic single Love Cry, a track which waited nearly six minutes to drop a driving techno bassline that would make Fluke puke with joy.

There is precious little audio rattling about the internet but judging by Love Cry and another album track, Much Love To The Plastic People, we should expect sharp, driving electronica that has that trademark Four Tet subtlety.

If you're not mad on Four Tet, you could do better than get the album for your budgie.

Monolake

That's not the only album worth stroking your speakers with this month. The other day, I posted some snow-themed electronica; it doesn't get much icier than Monolake's recent LP Silence (Monolake pictured).

With track titles like Avalanche and Infinite Snow, here's an album that will replace your spine with an icicle and stick your tootsies into a bucket of liquid hydrogen. The droning desolation (eg the screaming Shutdown) and barren voices (Null Pointer's autobot narrator) are saved from being utterly disconnected because of the warm, organic real-world samples.

Listen to Four Tet's Love Cry on Stereogum.  Listen to some Monolake Silence tracks on Boomkat.

Autechre will get-ya their new album in March 2010

Update: Since this blog post, Autechre have confirmed full details of their 2010 album. Jump to my latest piece on Autechre's new album.

In March 2010, we will get a new album from Autechre (other than this Sean Booth one, pictured).

The new album news is according to this Dutch plug for a gig taking place on 9th April. I'm no speaker of Dutch (I can manage as much as "ik ben gek op Amsterdam", which isn't even true.

But the wee bit of information further down the page reveals:

"In maart 2010 verschijnt hun tiende album."

which when mangled through Yahoo Babelfish, reads:

"In March 2010 their tenth album appears"

Then again, the next line, "Naar aloude gewoonte wordt daar tot op het laatste moment overbodig geheimzinnig over gedaan" ends up in Babelfish as:

"To ancient habit becomes there up to at the last moment superfluous mysteriously concerning done"

So it could be complete horse-blouse. But I have counted: Quaristice was their ninth album, so it seems AB Concerts know something I don't.

Thank you to We Are The Music Makers for the tip-off.

Meanwhile, Autechre's Sean Booth is working on a collaboration with architect-turned-ambienteer Kouhei Matsunaga. The album (artwork pictured above) has the snappy title 3 Telepathics Meh In-Sect Connection.

Update: Since this blog post, Autechre have confirmed full details of their 2010 album. Jump to my latest piece on Autechre's new album.