Showing posts tagged house music

On Tycho’s subtle and fluid Dive

Scott “Tycho” Hansen has been making wordless electronic music for years, building each piece with organic accompaniment that’s often treated to make it sound both warm and worn. The acoustic guitars that roll through Dive, his debut LP for Ghostly International, mimic the temperate folk progressions on the early Simon and Garfunkel LP Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. Sea-spray sonics and unearthly keyboard squiggles splinter off into endless directions, sometimes finding their way around impossibly cylindrical basslines. Read more of my piece on the Tycho album at The Brooklyn Rail.

Even as they’re busy with equally provocative electronic records in separate solo side projects, New York City producers Travis Stewart and Praveen Sharma dealt an aurally dense and lively full-length as Sepalcure in 2011. I wrote about their absorbing EP called Fleur earlier this year, and the self-titled LP follows strongly the ambient house/bass-driven beat sound they’ve been turning out since 2009. Read my PopMatters piece on Sepalcure’s debut LP

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In woozy synth swells and mangled vocal samples, Holy Other’s With U EP plays like warped house vinyl, each somber moment unrolling at a snail’s pace. The Manchester, UK-based producer’s debut for NYC’s hip Tri Angle Records is dense, uncomplicated beat music — there aren’t significant melodic shifts to speak of, nor are there grandiose, unexpected bridges. Read my review at BLURT magazine.

PopMatters review: Kate Simko’s ‘Lights Out’

The only prominently available full-length that bears Kate Simko’s name is Music from the Atom Smashers, a hypnotic and specifically not dancefloor-oriented 2009 film score built on trailing ambient forms with crackling electronics. However, the Chicago producer has been active within the dance music community for years, having issued well-received house and techno singles and EPs for a handful of labels such as Ghostly International’s Spectral Sound imprint. Read my review of Lights Out at PopMatters, and my post about Music from… is here.

PopMatters Best Electronic Music of 2010. Thrilled to have shared a byline with these fine writers.

PopMatters Best Electronic Music of 2010. Thrilled to have shared a byline with these fine writers.

Played 22 times

London’s abstract techno purveyor Max Cooper took on Portishead’s “Roads” — it begs for headphones. He maps out the original’s deep melody with distorted synth swells and what sounds like manically E-bowed guitars (?). I wrote about his Chaotisch Serie in April.