Boston Globe, May 18, 2013 Every summer all across North America, Native Americans get together for powwows. At these intertribal social gatherings they sing, dance, discuss, and celebrate their traditions and their survival. Every weekend in cities across the land, youth assemble in nightclubs for their own intertribal communion. Electronic music, built of massive bass […]
Tag: electronica
Star Slinger finds sweet spot between headphones, dance floor
Boston Globe, May 6, 2012 Even by today’s accelerated standard of Internet-amplified music fame, this one happened pretty fast. Two years ago, the producer Star Slinger was just Darren Williams, age 24 at the time, another provincial British kid messing around making beats, albeit with a degree in music technology from a college in Leeds. […]
Modeselektor capture the varied sounds of Berlin on ‘Monkeytown’
Boston Globe, April 13, 2012 There’s a track called “Berlin” on “Monkeytown,” the new album by German electronic music duo Modeselektor. Considering that the pair of Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary grew up in Berlin, and are among the top ambassadors of the city’s vibrant arts scene — with three albums, their own record label, […]
CD review: Filastine, “Loot”
Boston Globe, April 3, 2012 A found-sound quality pervades “Loot,’’ the third album from Filastine, a Los Angeles-raised, Barcelona-based musician-activist who wanders the globe from warehouses to squatters colonies to ecological danger zones, forging ties with fellow dissidents along the way. Pushing a shopping cart rigged with microphones and speakers, he makes and manipulates field […]
No masking his minimalist approach
Boston Globe, March 30, 2012 It’s never a bad idea to strip the clutter away. Valid from home upkeep to personal relations, the principle holds equally true in pop – particularly electronic music, where layers of effects and flurries of adornments threaten dissipating the signal into noise. This has been an issue of late, as […]
Spoek Mathambo brings the future sound of South Africa
Boston Globe, March 23, 2012 “It would be nice if you call me Nthato. It’s how I introduce myself.’’ Nthato Mokgata is trying hard to manage his identities in the face of his blossoming fame. By day he’s Nthato, the low-key, well-spoken 26-year-old from Johannesburg who dropped out of medical school to make his career […]
Getting down with dub
Boston Globe, September 3, 2011 In the beginning there was dub. Well, in the beginning there was reggae. But from the early 1970s in Jamaica, sound engineers led by now-historic figures such as King Tubby stepped out of the shadows and became performers in their own right. Using controllers, mixers, and effects, they generated a […]
Kuduro shakes things up: Buraka Som Sistema
Boston Globe, May 9, 2009 So you’ve grooved to house, tranced to techno. You’ve shaken to ghetto-tech, Baltimore club, and Miami booty bass. Perhaps you’ve undulated to Brazilian baile-funk or hard-charged the floor to London grime or dubstep. In the process you may have noticed dance music getting faster – and its geographical origins blurring […]
More than bliss: Federico Aubele
Boston Globe, August 29, 2008 Loungey, downtempo electronic music is everywhere these days; it’s the international late-night sound of our time, at once product of a hyperkinetic global culture and antidote to its agitation. The swirling soundscapes, the layers of polyglot melodies riding supple rhythms, convey a kind of new cosmopolitan sensibility and feed the […]
Siddhartha Mitter 