Those ULTRAFLEX girls are in the holiday mood and their latest offering ‘Rhodos’ celebrates those favourite sunny destinations such as Mallorca, Ibiza and of course Rhodes.
Icelander Katrín Helga Andrésdóttir and Norwegian Kari Jahnsen take their wispy electronic disco pop to the Aegean Sea for their own 18-30 holiday, inspired by their own experiences of binge drinking Smirnoff Ice while laughing at boys with pale beer bellies and avoiding sunburn.
As playful as ever, the lip licking video directed by Sigurlaug Gisladottir sees ULTRAFLEX enjoying themselves during what appears to be a cloudy day in Athens, “OK”.
With a desire to escape and party, ‘Rhodos’ was written at the height of the pandemic in Berlin with the girls “Longing after people yelling in our ears, everyone bumping into each other, stepping on our toes and the sensation of cold beer flowing down our backs. Writing Rhodos immediately transported us to a hot and sticky beach, a place we loved and loathed equally.”
‘Rhodos’ follows up previous singles ‘Relax’ and ‘Baby’ in the lead up to a new album scheduled for Autumn 2022. Their sumptuous debut album ‘Visions of Ultraflex’ was released in 2020 and won ‘Best Electronic Album’ at The Icelandic Music Awards 2021. Although FARAO and SPECIAL-K have been respectfully Jahnsen and Andrésdóttir’s artier solo projects, the pair are simply have too much fun together as ULTRAFLEX.
With their kitsch and conceptual dancefloor weirdness and ambiguously sexy overtones, ULTRAFLEX are back to provide some groovy seductive distraction from the troubles of the world.
FIELD GLASS are brothers Dan and Jacob Mayfield; although they founded the School of Noise workshop as a platform for children and young people to explore music and the science of sound in 2015, FIELD GLASS is the sibling’s first creative adventure together.
Jacob was once in a dreampop duo with Vicky Harrison from POLYCHROME and a 2013 album to their name while Dan was in the folk flavoured combo ENDERBY’S ROOM who released a self-titled long player on Fika Recordings in 2017.
Issued on Happy Robots Records, home to Rodney Cromwell, Alice Hubble and Roman Angelos, the appropriately titled ‘Kin’ is a wonderfully sedate suite of electro-acoustic instrumentals, sharing an affinity with OBLONG and their rustic organically farmed work ‘The Sea At Night’ from 2019.
Doing as the title suggests, the opening track ‘The Bell Organ Company’ sets the album’s manifesto, mixing Victorian instruments with analogue electronics and drum machines. ‘Gardens’ takes this template further by adding even prettier keyboard runs and synthbass. Making effective use of Dulcitone and its plucky vibe, ‘Fulgurite’ gives the impression of an English AIR in the 19th Century, with a windy Dickensian air thrown in for good measure.
With the haunted moods of ‘59’, it’s no surprise to learn that the album was were recorded at deconsecrated chapel in Ramsgate, now the renovated base for Big Jelly Studios run by Mike Collins who incidentally mixed Alice Hubble’s ‘Hexentanzplatz’.
But the lively ‘Everyone Was Beginning’ adds subtle glitching which draws attention and plays with the mind of the listener. Continuing with the glitch techniques, ‘Rooftops’ is a stuttering music box interlude that leads into the nautical overtures of ‘Landings’ while the noise laden ‘A Boat Turned Turtle’ ends the album on a sombre note by soundtracking a disaster at sea as a vessel capsizes.
With many of the tracks improvised and recorded live in one take, ‘Kin’ captures a heartfelt spontaneity that can only come from centuries old traditions of musicianship while applying modern technological treatments to bring proceedings into the landscape of today.
The vehicle of Berlin-based Canadian musician Oliver Blair, RADIO WOLF’s new ‘Night Light’ EP aims to invoke a “cinema of the mind”.
Blair’s CV has included a stint in New Wave trio HOTEL MOTEL with Italians Do It better signing Jorja Chalmers and guesting as a guitarist with CLIENT under his KINDLE moniker. More recently, he collaborated with fellow Canadians PARALLELS to produce songs for the Sci-Fi movie ‘Proximity’, the directorial debut of Emmy Award-winning visual effects artist Eric Demeusy.
The debut RADIO WOLF EP ‘Rock N Roll Forever’ came out in 2017 and featured an illustrious cast of vocalists including Sarah Blackwood of DUBSTAR and former SNEAKERS PIMPS’ singer Kelli Ali as well as PARALLELS’ Holly Dodson and HOTEL MOTEL front woman Marika Gauci. But ‘Night Light’ is very different; for starters, it is entirely instrumental and constructed exclusively during the late hours of the night.
Blair says he felt an “inner glow” of inspiration while composing and producing these tracks. Having “scored to picture” on the award winning soundtrack to ‘Proximity’, the pieces of music on ‘Night Light’ are more contemplative “mind-pictures”.
Music for insomniacs, ‘Sleepless’ naturally plays on a grainy ambience, with sonic clusters and sweeps building inside an aural cocoon. But ‘The Lost Tape’ comes with bells in a dawn temple with atmospheric six string texturing in the vein of Robin Guthrie, reminiscent of the COCTEAU TWINS instrumentalist’s 2007 album ‘Before The Day Breaks’ with the late Harold Budd.
The haunting synth dominated beauty of ‘On-Screen Death’ recalls the floating passages Moby’s ‘Hotel Ambient’ while imagining a nocturnal journey in rainfall, the ‘Night Light’ title track takes in the influence of synthwave with sombre bass pulses, a minimal drum sample framework and a sparing FM friendly guitar intervention.
Primarily electronic and possessing the sort of musicality that can be expected from Blair, ‘Night Light’ provides an immersive snapshot into his synaesthesia and imagination to score without pictures.
The ‘Night Light’ EP is released digitally on the usual platforms
The legend of German quartet PROPAGANDA was etched into the psyche of the music cognoscenti with the 1985 release of ‘A Secret Wish’ on ZTT, a classic of the electronic era which heralded the advent of sampling and digital synthesis.
Among its fans were Martin Gore, John Taylor and Jim Kerr; over the years, ‘A Secret Wish’ has grown in stature with its influence felt on Michael Jackson’s ‘Bad’, produced by Quincy Jones. Meanwhile, the foursome of Claudia Brücken, Susanne Freytag, Ralf Dörper and Michael Mertens dubbed “ABBA in hell” were a forerunner of acts such as LADYTRON.
But it all ended acrimoniously and despite attempts to reform PROPAGANDA over the last 30 years, they have all come to nought, although the quartet performed together at the Trevor Horn celebratory concert for The Prince’s Trust in 2004, while Freytag and Dörper joined Brücken for her career retrospective show at The Scala in 2011.
More recently, Brücken and Freytag have teamed up with Stephen J Lipson, producer of ‘A Secret Wish’ and had introduced their new project as D:UEL – so it was a surprise when it was announced that the pair would be playing two London shows performing ‘A Secret Wish’ as xPROPAGANDA in 2018.
‘The Heart Is Strange’ is the first fruit of labour from xPROPAGANDA; with that classic widescreen Lipson sound, the impressive opener ‘The Night’ does not disappoint with a dancey cacophony of sequenced digitised bass, crashing beats and sweeping synthetic strings. Additional brass flourishes, orchestrated bursts and percolating percussive colours permeate over multi-minute intro before Claudia Brücken delivers a fabulous vocal.
The spacious metronomic template of ‘Chasing Utopia’ hypnotically builds with the addition of guitars from the pleasuredome and snappy live drums as Susanne Freytag provides a spoken harmony next to Brücken before an alluring German monologue and a flugelhorn solo. Although tapping with rimshot before packing a punch, ‘Beauty Is The Truth’ is more aggressive with Freytag sparring with Brücken as their contrasting styles provide the tension over the buzzy trance-laden air.
‘Only Human’ is less pacey, crossing six string strums with electronics, acting almost as a mid-album breather. However, ‘Don’t (You Mess with Me)’ provides a synthetic rock edge and a piano motif that could have come straight from the Gary Numan playbook but the end result actually comes over like ABBA although not quite in hell but more a jungle full of tigers. With an exotic swirl ‘No Ordinary Girl’ heads towards the Mystical East and is bolstered by some heavy guitar and choppy strings plus a reference to the past with a knowing “Don’t be a fool!”
A warning on the rise of the extreme right wing using Brothers Grimm imagery, ‘The Wolves Are Returning’ is back to classic Lipson. It’s a bouncy driving number with another superb vocal from Brücken, an enticing middle eight phrase from Freytag and a magnificent sax solo from Terry Edwards, processed to the point of sounding like a guitar. Over 9 minutes, the cinematic closer ‘Ribbons of Steel’ provides a fitting atmospheric backdrop to showcase Susanne Freytag’s poetry. With references to The Cold War that are equally applicable to today’s world events, it’s a starker 21st Century follow-up to ‘Dream Within A Dream’ declaring “I never heard The Division Bell… I’m trapped on the wrong side, or is it the right side”.
As Brücken and Freytag summarised: “We always thought it was a shame that an album as distinctive and acclaimed as ‘A Secret Wish’ seemed destined to be a one-off. It certainly meant a lot to us, and it never seemed right that the story stopped there. Working again with Stephen Lipson and means that we can turn our dreams about what the ZTT follow up to ‘A Secret Wish’ would sound like into a reality. The reality is ‘The Heart is Strange’”.
While the distinct pop approach of ‘The Heart Is Strange’ perhaps is missing the gothic industrial spike of Ralf Dörper and the classically schooled eccentricity of Michael Mertens that added some of the character to ‘A Secret Wish’, where it does not disappoint is vocally and sonically; fans of PROPAGANDA and ZTT will relish and savour this thoughtfully crafted work.
Surpassing both the Brücken-less PROPAGANDA long player ‘1234’ and ACT’s ‘Laughter, Tears & Rage’, ‘The Heart Is Strange’ can be considered a worthy follow-up to ‘A Secret Wish’.
‘The Heart is Strange’ is released by ZTT on 20th May 2022 as in CD, 2CD, vinyl LP, red vinyl LP, Bluray audio and digital formats
xPROPAGANDA perform at The Garage in London on 24th May 2022
The ‘Secretstrange’ 2022 tour of Germany includes:
Berlin Columbia Theater (2nd November), München Schlachthof (4th November), Frankfurt Nachtleben (5th November), Bochum Zeche (6th November), Hamburg Kent Club (8th November)
‘Two’ is the second album from DUBSTAR since Sarah Blackwood and Chris Wilkie reunited as a duo.
After several false starts, 2018’s six string slanted long player ‘One’ co-produced by Youth was a welcome return for DUBSTAR, but the impression was that Blackwood and Wilkie were just warming up.
Working with Stephen Hague acting as producer and an unofficial third member, DUBSTAR have returned to the electronic driven sound of their debut long player ‘Disgraceful’ and as a result, have recorded some of the best work of their career on ‘Two’.
Hague had co-produced ‘Disgraceful’ which spawned the hits ‘Not So Manic Now’, ‘Stars’, ‘Anywhere’ and ‘Elevator Song’, providing a musical bridge between Britpop and Synth Britannia. Largely recorded in the face of adversity during lockdown in a “pass the parcel” manner, Wilkie confirmed “Dilemmas and experiments which would normally consume an afternoon can take a week, when you’re recording remotely”. The necessary social distancing dictated the instrumentation as he added “We found ourselves naturally gravitating to our electronic side over the pandemic, because it lends itself more practically to remote production. We couldn’t sit around jamming with guitars or experimenting together in real time”.
Opener ‘Token’ immediately points to Hague’s productions for PET SHOP BOYS and ERASURE, a song about leaving behind abusive relationships and minor gestures, a topic that many can relate to. Full of resilience, it is possibly Sarah Blackwood and Chris Wilkie’s most overt synthpop statement yet. The anxious electronic disco of ‘I Can See You Outside’ evokes an unlikely liaison between Christine McVie and Giorgio Moroder in an exhilarating ride “beyond the fault lines”; it all hits the zeitgeist in a brave new world of unease, confusion, conspiracy and sadness.
Continuing with the seismologic analogies, ‘Tectonic Plates’ focusses on friction over a neo-baggy beat, with Wilkie bursting with rhythm guitar reminiscent of DUBSTAR’s former Food labelmates BLUR on their first hit ‘There’s No Other Way’, although the array of catchy synth riffs alongside are irresistible.
Going more downtempo, the moody ‘Lighthouse’ harks back to the days of Britpop with guitar inflections and a rousing chorus while the charming piano focussed ballad ‘Tears’ is supplemented by a virtual string section before a simultaneously sparkling and rugged combination of COCTEAU TWINS and SIMPLE MINDS comes in the middle eight.
Inspired by socially-distanced queuing at the height of the lockdown, ‘Hygiene Strip’ is wonderfully classic DUBSTAR characterised by Blackwood’s forlorn vocal presence but there is also the subtle lifting air of PET SHOP BOYS looming to offer hope a haze of melancholy.
Pacing up to an offbeat, ‘Blood’ again echoes BLUR and a snatch of XTC but is shaped by a more student indie aesthetic, while ‘Social Proof’ strums along as a stern Blackwood announces “I’ll tell you something…”
With Sarah Blackwood hitting some lovely high notes, the bittersweet ‘Kissing To Be Unkind’ reflects on former friends who turn unnecessary nasty while presenting a misleading friendly persona, and all because “Losing the hand has made you hard to please”. Ending with a haunting cover of REM’s ‘Perfect Circle’ and its absorbing piano from Stephen Hague, it goes full circle with the Portland-born producer’s past as he had worked with Michael Stipe & Co on the demo version of ‘Catapult’ in 1982, a song which sat later next to ‘Perfect Circle’ on the Athens GA quartet’s debut album ‘Murmur’.
Satisfying both their Synth Britannia and Britpop rooted fanbase, thanks to the return of Stephen Hague in the producer’s chair and displaying a common musical affinity, DUBSTAR have provided their spiritual follow-up to ‘Disgraceful’ in ‘Two’. The kitchen sink dramas continue with the usual cups of tea, so know these songs and sing them.
‘Two’ is released by Northern Writes in CD, 2CD, clear or black vinyl LP and digital formats, available from https://dubstar.tmstor.es
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Those ULTRAFLEX girls are in the holiday mood and their latest offering ‘Rhodos’ celebrates those favourite sunny destinations such as Mallorca, Ibiza and of course Rhodes.
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