CAPITOL K
Notes From Life On The Wire With A Wrecking Ball
FAI007
Faith & Industry 2008
12 Tracks. 41mins05secs

A true oddball and maverick artist, Kristian Craig Robinson has been carting his Capitol K funfair around for just under ten years, crafting genuinely exciting little electronic and electro indie pop gems onto four albums, five if the two different versions of Island Row are to be counted as separate records, and countless EPs. First a member of the rather exclusive Planet Mu club, he has, since 2003, set up his own imprint, Faith & Industry, and has been releasing his work via this outfit ever since. Robinson is a citizen of the world in the purest meaning of the term. Born in Malta, he grew up in Brunei, he now lives in squats in and around London. To suit his chosen lifestyle, the latest Capitol K adventures were recorded in rudimentary conditions in a squat situated on the east on London, with contributions from Italian jazz drummer Vladimiro Carboni and Brazilian guitarist Felipe Pagani, alongside who he played as part of Brazilian songstress Cibelle’s tour band a couple of years ago. Continue Reading »

Musician extraordinaire Fernando Corona, AKA Murcof, is set to return to the UK this autumn for a string of live dates during which he will perform a specially composed suite of music entitled Océano with members of Spanish classical ensemble BCN 216. Mexican-born Fernando Corona, who now lives in Barcelona, first emerged back in 2002 with his stunning debut album, Martes, on which he combined fine electronics, micro-beats and classical samples. He has since released three further album and toured extensively. Last year, Murcof performed tracks from his most recent album, Cosmos in planetarium across Europe, including at the newly re-opened Greenwich Planetarium in London.

This tour will be the first opportunity to see Murcof perform with a full set of classical musicians. Audio visual artist Flicker will provide visuals. The tour will coincide with the release of a new album, The Versailles Sessions, on The Leaf Label, although Océano and The Versailles Sessions are different pieces.

Full tour listing:

14/11: Reading, South Street Arts Centre
15/11: Bristol, Arnolfini
16/11: Birmingham, Hare & Hounds
17/11: Brighton, Duke Of York’s Picture House
18/11: Liverpool, The Bluecoat
19/11: Oxford, Holywell Music Room
20/11: London, Purcell Rooms, South Bank Centre
21/11: Norwich, Arts Centre
22/11: Belfast: Sonic Arts Research Centre

Murcof | Murcof (MySpace) | The Leaf Label

PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3

DD: You said you were going to get really geeky, but then you never did.

MS: Yeah, bring on the geek!  I see the word ‘IRCAM’ written in your notes.

Oh, we’ll get to that, but first, some other words.  You took this vow of synthesizer-chastity for Supreme Balloon – not even vocoders.  I came up with a bunch of cool ways to cheat – what about FFT? [FFT, a Fast Fourier Transform, is a synthesis which can deconstruct any sampled sound into a complex series of sine waves]

MS: Honestly, it wasn’t a synthesizer thing, really, the only rule was ‘no microphones’.  We were allowed to use any kind of signal generation, as long as it didn’t involve microphones.  Of course, the trick is the slip between what is a microphone, any kind of transducer?  Is a guitar pickup a microphone or not? Continue Reading »

PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3

So, as a side note, you’re both on ratemyprofessor.com [a site where students can anonymously weigh in on their professors].  Have you checked your hotness ratings lately?

DD:  I haven’t.  Last time I looked, Martin was ‘hot’, but I don’t think I’ve been rated at Hopkins yet.

MS:  Do you remember what he’s [Drew's] rated as?

I don’t remember, I just remember there was a really eerie post for you, Martin, which just said in all caps, ‘MARTIN WILL HELP.  MARTIN WILL HELP’.

MS:  [laughs] I always said to my students that it was a lifetime contract, and that they could call me any time and I would help them.  And sure enough, two weeks ago, the phone rang in Slovenia or some place, in the middle of the night.  It was a student of mine from five years ago asking, ‘I need to make a DVD, and I don’t have DVD Studio Pro.  What should I do?’  The answer was, sorry to her for saying so, but the answer was idiotically simple.  I asked, ‘are you using a Mac?  Use iDVD!’   She was like, ‘oh.  Thanks Martin!’  And I went back to sleep!

DD:  So she probably wrote that ‘MARTIN WILL HELP’ immediately. Continue Reading »

PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3

Before meeting with Matmos, Martin Schmidt called me to dispense some words of warning: ‘just so you know, we tend to go on’.  This would certainly be the case, as Schmidt, along with Drew Daniel, kept me thinking on my toes for the better part of an hour, traversing such topics as aestheticism, synthesizers, and, well, Zac Efron.  Presently on tour supporting their latest release, Supreme Balloon, Schmidt and Daniel, joined intermittently by tour mate (and longtime friend and collaborator) Wobbly, gave themilkfactory an engrossing earful, which is shared with you now, with great pleasure.  Do read on… Continue Reading »

Canadian music magazine Textura is embarking on a new venture with the launch of their record label. The first release is a very limited album entitled Kubla Khan, named after the eighteenth century poem Kublan Khan Or A Vision In A Dream, A Fragment by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The album features the exclusive work of four very different artists and formations: Alexander Turnquist, Ryan Francesconi, who contributes two solo tracks and one with Lili De La Mora, The Retail Sectors and orchestramaxfieldparrish.

Kubla Khan is not a compilation in the traditional meaning of the word as it features specially commissioned work and actually works as an overall listening experience. The CD, of which only 500 copies have been pressed, is available from the Textura website.

Textura

NIGHTMARES ON WAX
Thought So…
WARP159CD/WARP159LP
Warp Records 2008
11 Tracks. 53mins23secs

Nightmares On Wax’s George Evelyn is one of the original Warp artists. While his first releases, centred around the1991 A Word Of Science album, shared with the rest of the label’s early roster a taste for bleepy electronica, albeit tainted with occasional smokey grooves, his consequent work demonstrated a much smoother and soulful approach. With the seminal Smokers Delight (1995) and Carboot Soul (1999) Evelyn, now sole master on board the NoW ship following the departure of Kevin Harper, combined hazy hip-hop grooves and funky soul melodies into effective laidback compositions which seemed to feel most at ease deep into the night.

Nearly twenty years on from the first NoW twelve inch, Evelyn returns with his sixth album, Thought So… Continue Reading »

Electro/indie pop maverick Capitol K will follow his recent single Go Go Go/Libertania with the release of his sixth album, Notes From Life On The Wire With A Wrecking Ball on 8 September. The album, released on his own Faith & Industry imprint, was recorded in a lo-fi studio set up in a squat on Drum Street in London and is his first since his 2005 release Nomad Junk.

Kristian Craig Robinson first got noticed as Capitol K back in 1999 when he released a series of EPs and a debut album on Mike Paradinas’s Planet Mu.

Capitol K | Faith & Industry

MAJA S. K. RATKJE
River Mouth Echoes
TZ8051
Tzadik 2008
06 Tracks. 66mins41secs

Despite being only 34, Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje is one of the world’s leading modern composers and musicians and has been for well over a decade. Her extensive discography alone shows her multi-faceted approach, from her regular forays into noise, improv, electronic composition and avant-garde jazz to vocal experimentation and more traditional orchestral and chamber work. Her impressive solo work is dwarfed by the sheer number of collaborators she has worked with over the years, either as part of formations such as all-female improv quartet SPUNK, Fe-mail, the duo Ratkje formed with Hild Sofie Tafjord, and X,Y,Z, an electro-acoustic ensemble formed of Ratkje, Risto Holopainen and Asbjørn Blokkum, or on various projects with Jazzkammer’s Lasse Marhaug and John Hegre, Lotta Melin or Jaap Blonk to name but a few. Continue Reading »

LINDSTRØM
Where You Go I Go Too
STS153CD
Smalltown Supersound/Feedility 2008
03 Tracks. 55mins06secs

Hans-Peter Lindstrøm is pictured with an ear-to-ear grin on the cover of his first proper album, and on the strength of it, he has every reason to considering he has just produced the most ecstatic, uplifting and bloody perfect electronic record in years. End of.

Lindstrøm has been making serious waves all the way down from his native Norway to the coolest dance floors in Europe and beyond for some time now with his highly personal take on classic disco, fed on big dollops of Giorgio Moroder and Cerrone and seasoned with warm analogue electronics a la Ash Ra Tempel/Klaus Schulze. Lindstrøm’s first foray into the music scene dates back to 2003, and since, he has released a number of EPs, which were compiled into an album, It’s A Feedelity Affair, in 2006, an album with Prins Thomas in 2005, and has also been spotted remixing anyone from LCD Soundsystem to The Killers. Continue Reading »