IN THE STUDIO WITH… Nightmares on Wax George Evelyn talks 30 years of Warp, new album Shout Out! To Freedom and re-evaluating life’s important stuff.
IN THE STUDIO WITH…Sally Shapiro The enigmatic Swedish italo-disco/ synthpop duo emerge from hiatus for new LP Sad Cities. RETROSPECTIVE: Hard house It’s house and it’s hard. This pleasingly straightforward subgenre has never taken itself too seriously
We’re heading for the dark side of the krautrock kaleidoscope with this month’s Electronic Sound cover stars, the inimitable Can. We’ve a limited edition purple vinyl seven-inch featuring an excerpt from the band’s stunning new live album to accompany the magazine too. Prompted by the release of ‘Live In Stuttgart 1975’, the first in a series of archive Can gig recordings, we speak to Irmin Schmidt about the band he created with Michael Karoli, Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit towards the end of the 1960s. As we try to deconstruct their wholly unique brand of sonic voodoo, Schmidt reveals the inner workings of Can, together with his own memories of their powerful live performances. “We were constantly inventing collectively,” he says. “We came onstage and we didn’t have a plan. We just started. What we did was always a reaction to the whole environment – to the sound, to the acoustics, to the crowd, to our mood, and to the moment.”
We seem to say it every time we sit down to put together our end-of-year lists, but what a 12 months it has been for electronic music. Especially for our cover star Julie Campbell, aka LoneLady. As well as being the winner of our Album Of The Year award, she’s also partly responsible for a second record in our Top Five. She’s the first artist to achieve anything like that, by the way. We reviewed almost 900 albums in 2021. Not all at once, obviously, because that would be mad. But covering 900 releases is pretty staggering. And we’d have liked it to have been more. The wealth of incredible music out there means that for every record we did review, there was a big pile of others we weren’t able to include. That’s the problem with being a print magazine. There’s only so much room in each issue, so we have to draw the line somewhere.
We’re marking 100 years since the invention of THE THEREMIN in this month’s Electronic Sound. We have a fantastic yellow vinyl EP featuring four tracks by some of the world’s leading thereminists too. Russian boffin Leon Theremin was meant to have been constructing a sonar system when he came up with his iconic electronic instrument. Goodness only knows how audiences reacted when they first heard its ghostly wail, which had no real precedent in music. What’s more, you didn’t even have to touch the instrument to play it. You seemingly just had to wave your hands about somewhere in the vicinity. We have interviewed a host of contemporary thereminists for our in-depth cover feature, including top players such as Herb Deutsch, Gaudi, Dorit Chrysler, Bruce Woolley, Carolina Eyck, Charlie Draper, Javier Díez Ena and more. We also have a piece about the incredible double life of Leon Theremin by his biographer Albert Glinsky. As well as being the inventor of a bizarre musical instrument, Theremin was a key figure in the Soviet Union’s espionage activities, his other creations including a device that snooped on the American Embassy in Moscow for several years.
IN THE STUDIO WITH… Boys Noize Alex Ridha discusses his fifth album and the uncompromising techno style that has won him fans in high places Plus In the studio with Eris Drew Classic Album Seefeel, Succour
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