At the old Afterword site I posted a series of playlists around electronic and experimental music I enjoyed listening to. Here’s a new playlist of tracks released over the past few months that I’ve been enjoying. I know next to nothing about most of these artists but that is often integral to my enjoyment of the music. Hopefully you’ll enjoy some of the tracks as well.
Armchair Electronica Volume 7: It’s a (Smor) gas-gas-gas (bord)
by 9 Comments
ooh, I’ll give this a listen, thanks. A question if you don’t mind – what are your sources for discovering this stuff? I get most of my electronic music news via FACT, but there’s an awful lot there that doesn’t really chime with my taste, and I wonder what other sources might have a higher hit rate for me
Wow, the Federation Against Copyright Theft are cooler than I thought!
Google really. I type in artists I already like and then look for recommendations, blogsites and playlists that include them and then click through to YouTube, Soundcloud etc. to listen. Then I put a playlist together for those available on Spotify to help me filter down to buying the albums/tracks I really like.
The Moritz Van Oswald Trio I found through my love of Tony Allen who drums on the album for example. John Tejada I fond because someone said it reminded them of Orbital (very true!). And so on.
At the risk of being like grandmothers and sucking eggs and stuff, electronic music is often as much if not more about the labels than it is about the artists. Also, you tend to discover a lot of stuff through mixes, and also through following up an artist’s progress.
Moritz Von Oswald is a good example of the latter. If you look at the progression of Techno it moves from Detroit to Berlin in the early 1990s, with the Detroit-Berlin axis centred around Tresor. Berliner Oswald was in 3MB with Juan Atkins, and then went onto become Basic Channel and Maurizio, from which you basically have the evolution of dub techno and minimal techno. I can’t offhand think of a more important and relevant figure in modern techno than him, so pretty much anything he turns his hand to will be worth a look.
I love Basic Channel and I never knew that! Quadrant Dub et al
It makes sense really. That jazz/dub/afro beat percussion. I’m just an amateur compared to Poppy!
In some ways it underlines why I don’t dwell too much on the artist. It’s the spark for me with electronic music, the sense of the moment whether it’s mine or the artist’s. But that’s weird, how it’s come around like this with his Trio.
Yegads no! I’m just lucky that I’m ancient enough to have got into techno when it was new. Anything prior to that (i.e much of your AE series) and I’m out of my depth!
“techno when it was new”
That’s made me feel old.
And to add to that point above, the labels with which he’s involved, Basic Channel and Chain Reaction, are both supremely collectable and ace and stuff.