It will come as no surprise to regular readers that I often like my electronic music maximally synthetic and artificial-sounding.
When you can call to mind CPUs singing themselves to sleep, or alien entities communicating via scatters of dueling thoughbursts, why settle for tunes that sound made here on earth by human hands or throats?
But there’s a long tradition of doing just that; and Irish duo Lakker have my full attention with their latest release, Tundra. It mixes sung samples and metallic, distorted industrial noise into a powerful brew.
Up top, the pulsing “Mountain Divide”.
Strangely, its howling whirlwhind of buzzing and clanking, plus swirling wordless voices, call to mind for me the closing track of Ministry’s epochal The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste – the forboding-yet-beautiful “Dream Song”.
For comparison:
As Ministry, Black Sabbath and AC/DC have taught us, the apocalyptic tolling of church bells calling us to our everlasting doom always sounds good.
Lakker make fine use of that fact on the towering “Pylon”:
The gorgeous “Three Songs” uses choral voices to great effect – to mortar together a pounding, rumbling, squelching bottom bed of sculpted sound, and a playfully-cerebral IDM-ish melody:
“Halite” is lovely, dark and delicate, a journey through an entire clockwork universe of tinkles, hisses and clinks:
Another contemporary act covering some of this same ground is F*ck Buttons.
One of the FB guys has a solo project, Blanck Mass. It’s somewhat in the same ballpark:
I personally thought FB’s last one, Slow Focus, was a snooze, but this track from the prior album Tarot Sport is gorgeous:
Lakker is pretty spiffy. How are you with The Knife? To go to some lengths to make organic sounds alien and uncanny. On their records, they’re not afraid to take a long time to get to interesting stuff, which is not a technique that endears them to everyone.
The official video for “A Tooth For An Eye” is neat, but cuts out part of the song.
Oh, you know The Fall has a new record out, with this practically bubblegum album opener: https://youtu.be/-Mo3XtaNH6EReport
I played the heck out of Silent Shout (I actually gave that album as a gift to quite a few people), but when Shaking came out, it was just too expensive. I actually picked up a cheap copy not too long ago, but haven’t really listened to it.
I’ve linked this before I think, but the guy in The Knife (who are, as I understand it, kaputt) also makes pretty-great techno under the name “Oni Ayhun”.
It’s interesting to me, the musical compromises you seemingly have to make in electronic music to get sung pop vocal melodies in there – I raved about that Ghost Culture album a while back, I love it; but that guy ALSO makes straight vocal-less techno, and I also love THAT so much, I can see someone wondering why he ever bothers with vocals:
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Odd. I have been listening to Blanck Mass all week.Report
In between Toto, that is. (Seriously, I can’t even tell whether my enjoying Toto is ironic. I do know that no one appreciates my Toto jokes on Twitter, though.)
Also, Ministry (who were here the other night apparently) have been reborn in this form:
https://youtu.be/HnEod0IozYwReport
Toto must be having a moment – the other day my wife was watching the “Rosanna” video with the three-year old girl, who said “This is good music!”
no one appreciates my Toto jokes on Twitter
No man with a good car needs to be justified. There’s your problem, right there.Report
I don’t keep a lot of music on my phone (maybe 3 gigs-worth), and I frequently shift things on and off the card. At some point, inexplicably (probably accidentally), I put Toto’s greatest hits on it. Because there are only maybe 200 songs on there, that means they come up what? 5% of the time, maybe. Over the course of a day, that’s a lot of Toto.Report
I do not understand why you do what you do.Report
Dude, no one does, and that includes me.Report
I checked and I have 22gb of music. Which is less than I expected, but considering I mostly listen to audiobook and have access to Rhapsody, maybe makes sense.Report
On your phone?! I have nowhere near that much available space for music, which is why I just use an SD card that I frequently swap files on and off of, depending on what I’m into at the moment.Report
On the (128gb) SD card on my phone. But since I never take the SD card out, I think of it as part of the phone. (Even if Android makes that less the case than it could be…)Report
Damn, that’s a big SD card. Mine’s 16 gigs, heh… My phone has 8 gigs of built-in storage, I believe. So that’s 24 gigs total, with Android itself, books, pdf journal articles, photos, text messages, and apps taking up probably 15 total.Report
Assuming you have the model we’ve previously discussed, you should have “16gb” of built-in, though an inordinate amount of that is taken up so it’s between 10 or 11. Not that it changes your point. I’m just really pedantic about such things (and have spent way too much time trying to fit the system files into 10.5gb.
Do you take the card out of your phone to transfer your files? If so, let me tell you, brother, there’s a better way…Report
No, usually just USB.
And you’re probably right about the 16 gigs. I’m too lazy to look, and my phone is probably 6 inches from my hand as I type this.Report
Lemme know if you want to know how to do it via WiFi. When Google pulled that stunt where I could no longer easily write to the SD card, my unability to copy things to my card was the thing I hated the most. Until I figured out the workaround. (Since you have Lollipop, it would be easier for you.)
But… something tells me you’re mostly “Meh. What I do works.” (which, power to ya!)Report
Also, I think you linked Youth Code before, but this particular track reminds me a little more of Nitzer Ebb. Maybe it’s just the two-man setup there, or something about the keyboard arpeggios.
(This is the song where we always changed the words to “Shout ‘donuts!’, shout!”)Report
Enjoying Lakker now.Report
I’ve been listening to it pretty much nightly for a while.Report