New album perfectly tailored for parties of one
Glastonbury has been cancelled for the second year running, as festivals all over the world struggle to secure a future. Once a licence to print money, electronic music is wondering where its next meal is coming from.
Irish duo Bicep would rather be playing Splore or Electric Avenue this month, but instead their second album arrives without so much as a release party. However, when I played Isles very loudly at my place, the dance-floor was heaving. These songs are designed for much larger gatherings and sound systems, but they make for an excellent party-of-one.
Apricots rumbles around snatches of vocal sample that chirp into a frenzy, before the song drops its minimal house chorus. Songs such as Hawk would certainly be more fun in a large crowd, but great dance music also has quieter, dreamier sequences like on Atlas, which sounds tailored for kitchen parties.
More insular and isolated, yet still with his trademark sonic excellence, Four Tet mixes birdsong, ambient piano and the very occasional house beat on Parallel. It’s far from his most accessible work, and he knows it. In fact, these songs are a collection of tracks he’s released under different (mostly nonsensical) pseudonyms over a number of years.
But that’s not all the prolific Canadian is up to. Less than a year since his excellent Sixteen Oceans, Parallel has arrived the same week as another experimental album, 871, on which he seems to be playing guitar. He also has two new songs with Burial and Thom Yorke, and a collaborative album with Madlib called Sound Ancestors. For some producers, lockdown is going gangbusters.
And finally, most musicians who held back their music from streaming services, eventually capitulated to corporate masters. But The KLF are not most musicians. The oddball pair sold more singles than any other act in the world in 1991. The next year they retired from music in a blaze of glory (shooting blanks from an automatic weapon over the heads of their audience), and deleted their back catalogue.
Having vowed not to financially profit from the band, and with money still rolling in, these two then famously set fire
to a million pounds in a boatshed on an island off the coast of Scotland.
On January 1, The KLF surprised everyone and decided to grace the internet with their weird and wonderful presence. Eight glorious songs make up Solid State Logik 1, a collection of seven-inch singles created between 1988 and 1991.
It includes Doctorin’ The Tardis (as
The Timelords), which is just as off the wall today as it was when it went to No 1 in the New Zealand charts.
Justified and Ancient, 3AM Eternal, What Time Is Love?, it’s a psychedelic and thoroughly enjoyable trip down memory lane. It’s not just the songs either, videos popped up on YouTube the same day, and the enigmatic duo have hinted there is more to come.