Hannah Diamond – Every Night
Any “label of the year” rundown worth its salt is likely to feature PC Music at the top. Where once the electronic underground traded in straightforwardly difficult sounds (static, noise, discordance) there’s been an impulse from artists such as James Ferraro and Oneohtrix Point Never in recent years to embrace the easy: home computer chimes, ringtones and crap 80s synths. PC Music takes this to its logical conclusion, using the absolute shiniest, most banal sound palette to reflect the overground directly back into the underground’s gloom. The reaction has often been the cowering horror of a vampire seeing the curtains opened – either that or bafflement, or indeed the assumption that it must be a joke. Some of the label’s releases, like Lipgloss Twins’ Wannabe, border on abstraction – imagine a Jeff Koons balloon animal being pulverised, sonically speaking, and you’re sort of there. But for the most part it’s just euphorically perfect songwriting. Beautiful, Hey QT, Bipp, Odyssey Pt 2 are modern classics, and Hannah Diamond’s new single Every Night now joins them. Between her karaoke delivery and the J-pop synths, it’s a song bursting with humanity and puppy love. This is the smartest dumb music out there.
James Blake – 200 Press
This new single, named after the number of copies that are to be pressed, is a stopgap while Blake finishes the follow-up to his spectacularly good Mercury-winning album Overgrown. Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA appeared on that album, and the new album may end up featuring Kanye West; meanwhile, here Andre 3000 crops up pitched down, in a nicely selected lift from his guest verse on meta-rap anthem What a Job by Devin Da Dude, as do Three 6 Mafia and their Late Night Tip. Like Blake’s Harmonimix remix series (which gets an unlikely new addition this week in Gorillaz’ Feel Good Inc), Blake is adept at picking out earworms from other songs and repeating them until they become koans. It’s that blend of minimalism and hook-focus that has become the cornerstone of his own songwriting, and which should hopefully make LP3 as much of a triumph as the first two.
Jackmaster – Mastermix 2014
For the uninitiated, Jackmaster is a Scottish DJ with the hunkiness of a Dream Phone character, the energy of a flaming barrel of tar, and the liver of a middle-aged wine critic. He’s the only possible choice to host a crazy golf tournament at the forthcoming Bugged Out Weekender. Despite his partying ways, Jackmaster is a scholar of dance culture, whose sets are just as likely to feature a blast of Dutch jumpstyle as they are some Minneapolis funk obscurity. With the Christmas party season looming, your go-to soundtrack should be his new Mastermix, which starts with loping Balearic, then imperceptibly moves up through the gears, cruising through classic electro, Donna Summer and house towards breakbeat techno.
TCF - 54 C6 05 1C 13 CC 72 E9 CC DC 84 F2 A3 FF CC 38 1E 94 0D C0 50 5C 3E E8
This is one of those records which could become a secret weapon for the middle of a trap or techno set, for someone to blast apart the groove, and shake the crowd with a moment of chaos. TCF is Lars Holdus, an artist and musician whose work seems fixated on the malleability of data, its torsion and its fragility. The track title is a mystery: is it a meaningless emission, or could there be something to decode? The music itself is similar, flailing and glitching only to cohere into something almost readable. The bewildered, skittering top lines are reminiscent of Evian Christ’s on Salt Carousel, while there’s also Arca’s sense of a melancholic, humanised kind of tech – and when it cranks into terrible focus around 2.25, it’s what Interstellar should’ve used for its most perilous moments.
Beats In Space 15th Anniversary mix
Finally, happy birthday to Beats in Space, the radio show from Tim Sweeney that’s been a central node of the flourishing disco and underground house scene in New York. Armed with the punkish attitude to genre that’s inherent to that city, Sweeney began just as the rather austere world of IDM was dissolving into electroclash, DFA etc, and as tastes were being broadened by growing internet access. Sweeney rode this bright wave across 757 shows and counting, hosting guests as varied as the Avalanches, James Murphy, Ame, Dâm-Funk, Juan Atkins and Dixon – but mostly centring around the nu-disco of Scandinavia and New York. He also published tracklists, which is truly valuable in the era of Boiler Room where cards can be played a little too close to chests. To celebrate, Sweeney has brought out an epic 145 minutes of mixes, split across two CDs (and in annoyingly incomplete form on Spotify). The first is full of new tracks, with pellucid deep house from David Hasert rubbing against disco re-edits. The second is a classics set, where ghetto techno from Quesh goes against emotional Prosumer remixes, Plaid’s camp broken beat against the serious grandeur of Carl Craig’s remix of Delia & Gavin. If you want to learn more, check out XLR8R’s oral history of the show with Sweeney alongside Kim Ann Foxmann, Justine D, Ron Morelli and others. Or just take two weeks off and immerse yourself in the archive.
