Electronic Sound is the best electronic music magazine in the world. In-depth coverage of the current scene, the pioneers, the machines, and the current thinking of the electronic music world.
Pet Shop Boys Issue + ‘Love Comes Quickly’ / ‘Paninaro’ / ‘Always On My Mind’ gold vinyl seven-inch
Issue 111 is an oral history of the Blitz Club as this month’s cover feature… from punk to new romantic. The seven-inch is a booster edition, with John Foxx ‘Burning Car’ and Vice Versa ’New Girls / Neutrons’ on the A-side, and Gina X Performance ’No GDM’ on the B. All were regular additions on Rusty Egan’s Blitz playlist. There are also interviews with Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, William Doyle, Paranoid London, Woo, Robert Hood and many more.
Turn on, tune in, chill out. We’re diving deep into the world of Ambient Music for the first Electronic Sound of the year and we’re bundling the magazine with a superb double CD featuring 24 soundscapes from across the spectrum of this fascinating genre. The centrepiece of this month’s cover feature is a jam-packed A To Zzzzz Of Ambient encompassing countless artists and records alongside labels, sub-genres, events, installations, books, fanzines, radio shows, concepts and much more. It’s an entertaining as well as informative directory. Brian Eno pops up all over the shop, as does Alex Paterson, and the list also includes things such as Deep Listening, Whale Sounds, Drone Metal, Repetition, Tone Poems, Mark Rothko’s Seagram Murals, Hypnosis, Floating, Ambient Church and Reversing Lorries. Yes, you read that last one right.
This month’s Electronic Sound cover feature is the fascinating story of Tangerine Dream’s ‘Phaedra’ album. Tangerine Dream’s debut for Richard Branson’s still-shiny Virgin label, ‘Phaedra’ came out exactly 50 years ago and was greeted with a mixture of curiosity, excitement, confusion and contempt. While electronic music was nothing new by this point, the sequencer-heavy sound was electronic music as it had never been heard before. The album is widely and rightly recognised as a 24-carat classic now, of course, setting the Berlin group on the path to superstardom. They stayed with Virgin for the next decade or so, releasing a string of magnificent records that also included ‘Rubycon’ (1975) and ‘Force Majeure’ (1979).
We’ve got Soft Cell on the cover of this month’s Electronic Sound and the focus of our interview with Marc Almond and Dave Ball is ‘Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret’, the group’s glorious 1981 debut album. ‘Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret’ is a record that defiantly set the tone of the early 1980s and it’s just been reissued as an expanded double LP and a six-CD boxset. Both editions are loaded up with tons of fantastic extras. As well as delving deep into the heart of the album, which Almond describes as “mundanity with a technicolour touch – glamour in squalor” in the boxset notes, the pair talk about their art-school beginnings and their ongoing working relationship. It’s a scintillating read and a great way for us to bring this year to an end.
This month’s Electronic Sound cover star is Andrew Weatherall – pictured during the early days of his illustrious career – and we have an exclusive white vinyl seven-inch featuring two magnificently wonky tracks from his Woodleigh Research Facility project to accompany the issue. It’s hard to believe that it is almost four years since Weatherall died, robbing the electronic music world of one of its brightest, sharpest and most unique talents. Next week sees the release of his final recordings in the form of Woodleigh Research Facility’s ‘Phonox Nights’ album and we have spoken to his WRF partner Nina Walsh for our cover story, which is a celebration of Weatherall as an artist, a producer and a remixer. We are also reprinting his first interview with the music press, which he gave to Melody Maker just before the release of Primal Scream’s ‘Screamadelica’ in 1991, a record he masterminded following his pioneering remixes of tracks like ‘Loaded’ and ‘Higher Than The Sun’.
