Battles at the Apollo: A gaping hole where Imelda Staunton should be

Apart from the odd blog thing and a number plate I once won at secondary school, I don't tend to get many prizes.

So when I won tickets to Battles and Caribou at the weekend, courtesy of Now Wave and Chimp Magazine, I was somewhat made up.

It came on the back of getting a story into an anthology for the first time. You can read it if you want to. The tale will be especially pleasing for people who like speedboats, Lenor or guttering.

Anyhoo, Battles were superb, what with their complicated rhythms and unreasonably-constructed high-cymballed drum kit. It took me back to 1926 when I first discovered post rock, back in the days when music had to have subtitles because it was still all silent.

Manchester blogging legend The Pigeon Post got a shout-out from Star Slinger, which was lovely because it felt like "one for the bloggers". And I ended the night at the Greenroom for one last hurrah as that brilliant venue was finally mothballed.

It was strange, then, that there was a sour taste to the night. For that taste, we have to look to a curious no-show from one of the support acts: Actress.

You cannot underestimate the hugeness of Actress. He co-founded Hyperdub and through his Werk label has brought us Starkey, Lukid and Zomby. I called his Splazsh LP an "essential album for 2010". I was looking forward to his set more than the others.

Despite the hype (NewsicMoos pick of the week, for example), Actress forgot to put the date in his diary. He simply didn't turn up. It's not the first time, of course: he also failed to show at Deviation and Eastern Electrics' bank holiday bash in London a week ago.

My views on artists that don't do their jobs has been made crystal clear on these blog pages before now.

I'm not sure how to react. I can't tweet him because he's deleted his account. And he hasn't updated the Werk Discs website for a couple of years.

There's only one thing for it. I'm boycotting all actresses.

I now dedicate my life to the following:

- an entire absence of Nicole Kidman;

- approximately zero amounts of Michelle Williams;

- no Greta Garbo;

- not a single Halle Berry: not even one;

- a gaping hole where Imelda Staunton should be;

- no Whoopi Goldberg, although to be honest...;

- Grace Kelly? Not on your nelly;

- I'm even boycotting Frances McDormand. Don't try and stop me.

Actress has driven me to this. I'm prepared to unleash a torrent of similar boycotts, so watch out - especially Zomby, Deadboy and Border Community's Lazy Fat People.

NASA-bass p-funk synths bark like slow motion dogs: some recent(ish) 12"s and EPs

S>>D whiffs more than a little of Autechre, what with the ominous chords drizzling themselves over fuzzed-up snares, but I'm not complaining when the 33 EP cooks up delicacies like Protovision, a track which takes a vanilla breakbeat and drags its bleeding corpse across Satan's kitchen floor before funneling it into a pit of echoey, gooey melancholia. Lovely, even though it's left me with confused cookery metaphors.

Starkey's Space Traitor EP is the sound of this Philadelphia boy having an immmense amount of fun with the science fiction movie score that must be running through his brain all the time. NASA-bass p-funk synths bark like slow motion dogs. Ital Tek is among the numerous remixes, but best track is one of his originals - Holodeck - which also has a vocal sample that sums up this whole enterprise (yes, that was a sci fi pun): "the sounds of man in space." Roll on Captain Starkey's next mission.

Record of the week / day / hour / shake of a lamb's tail must go to the first in a series of collaborations from All City Records called, wait for it, Collabs #1. In this opening slab of electronic goodness, wafer-thin drum & bass exile Martyn (pictured above) gets his dubstep on with Lucky Me's son of a jazzman Mike Slott. It's housey but it's good house and is the sound of two brilliant producers dancing a dense fandango.


Photo adapted from one taken by The End.

Top ten best electronica albums of 2010: part two of four

This is part two. Please do read the other parts of this blog post: part one, part three and part four
To read last year's top ten best electronica albums, click here.

7 - Flying Lotus – Cosmogramma

There's something about the great nephew of John and Alice Coltrane that enables him to kidnap heavyweight vocalists with Guru-like ease (Erykah Badu, Thom Yorke, Outkast, Laura Darlington) and yet still beguile the casual listener with the strangest cacophony of polymathic twiddling whilst provoking bemused reviewers into penning juxtapositional metaphors of space travel and smokey 1970s jazz clubs. That and his beats are well phat.

So, among the laidback hip hop of Zodiac Shit, the shuffling funk of Dance Of The Pseudo and the swirling headnodding of MmmHmm, we have a multitude of influences: jazz, garage, hip hop, techno, classical, folktronica and Enrique Iglesias. Despite all of this, I can't help feeling Cosmogramma is an album none of us can quite understand yet and perhaps it should be enjoyed more some time in the distant future, maybe in a smokey jazz club in space.

FlyLo isn't just a comedy airline created by Matt Lucas and David Walliams. Buy Cosmogramma at Bleep or Boomkat or Piccadilly.

6 - Autechre – Oversteps

The Wills and Kate of Manchester electronic music produced three records in 2010. 3 Telepathics Meh In-Sect Connection was a banana-themed collaboration by Sean from Autechre, Move Of Ten was technically an EP (although it's longer than the Flying Lotus album, above), while the release featured in my top ten, Oversteps, gave notoriety to Altered:Carbon who dressed their own LP as Autechre.

Listening to Oversteps is a bit like cuddling up to your favourite hedgehog: it's sharp and awkward, yet you're allured by the familiar scent. I don't get the detractors who write this off as difficult. known(1) has harpsichord, qplay is as delicate as my tummy after a night on the rohypnol, whilst see on see and Treale (oh NOW they use capital letters) are bonafide Autechre hits. Kind of. Warmer than Quaristice, this is music that spikes the bloodstream.

Buy Autechre's Oversteps at Bleep or Boomkat or Piccadilly.

5 - Pantha Du Prince - Black Noise

Arriving on Rough Trade Records like a supercharged Sosumu Yokota, Pantha Du Prince produced eleven minimal techno masterpieces that were so fluid, so organic, they could only have been harvested as they were literally dripping from the trees. Minimal techno often bores me, so why on earth is this several leagues above places six to ten on my list?

Maybe it's the snarling acid on Behind The Stars, the heavenly rave chords of Satellite Snyper, or the clanks and bells and feedback and heavenly choirs of synthdom that eddy and whirl around crisp beats that couldn't beat more crisply even if accompanied by a Walkers advert starring Gary Lineker being thumped to a pulp by sixteen heavily-armed packets of Seabrook. I'm not sure if Black Noise can be topped, but there are four albums on my list that have done just that. Stay tuned.

Bring the Noise: buy Pantha Du Prince's album from Bleep or Boomkat or Piccadilly.

Not quite in the top ten (part two)

I'm pleased with my top ten, although excluding any amazing album is a bit like shepherding your ten favourite sheep into the pen then shotgunning the rest into blasted pulps of smoking mutton. Here are more lambs that have been silenced.

Gold Panda's glitchy Lucky Shiner (pictured) probably got bumped because a couple of artists in my top ten are doing similar things. Massive Attack's Heligoland probably got bumped because, although the album was an improvement, it still sounded like veterans keeping the life support going. Also on a mainstream tip, I never quite connected with LCD Soundsystem's swansong This Is Happening.

A notable omission from my top ten is Squarepusher's Schobaleader One project, but I couldn't separate how he could make some tracks on d'Demonstrator sound like Royksopp and then not expect to be compared to Royksopp. He's excluded because he sounds like Royksopp. There, I said it. Squarepusher sounds like Royksopp. Royksopp's funnier the more you say it.

Actress' Splazsh is an essential album for 2010, and I feel pained to exclude it. Oneohtrix Point Never received major acclaim for Returnal and again was a close call. And Starkey's Ear Drums And Black Holes, bringing ballads and grime to Planet Mu Records, also just missed the cut.

This is part two. Please do read the other parts of this blog post: part one, part three and part four
To read last year's top ten best electronica albums, click here.

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'".