Bibio: "Excuses"

This week, with the help of Warp Records, we're giving away a prize pack from Bibio, the genre-flouting British electro maestro recently featured in This Week's Best Albums. One lucky winner will walk away with a copy of the new album, Mind Bokeh, on vinyl as well as a poster, a special camera filter to create "bokeh" (the blurry parts of a photograph), and a set of stickers.

Just fill out the form below, and you'll be entered to win.

Update: Contest has ended.

Seefeel: Seefeel (Warp Records, 1/31/11)

Seefeel: "Dead Guitars"

A largely forgotten mid-'90s band that was always ahead of its time, Seefeel has released its first album in 14 years. The self-titled record feels like a debut, and it is to a certain extent, considering the band's lineup changes. Seefeel explores the territory of electronic outfits such Battles and Emeralds, bands that were influenced by Seefeel’s 1993 debut Quique. It feels like some sort of weird déjà vu.  If anything, it’s an impressive rebirth, one that has the group deconstructing the sample-based post-rock style it pioneered before MIDI sequencers were even looked at as viable forms of instruments.

Formed in 1992 in London, Seefeel’s music was once stylistically situated between shoegaze pop and what people were calling “ambient techno.”  It had a smooth nonchalance to its music, with ambient electro-pop symphonies strung together by Sarah Peacock's sparse, dream-like vocals.

Noise pop is perhaps the best way to describe its music retrospectively — or IDM before IDM was IDM.  Though we must not forget those  higher on the electronic family tree (Kraftwerk comes to mind), Seefeel’s importance to the scene lies in fending off the “dance” label.  What's more, as the first “guitar” band signed to Warp in 1994, its use of live instruments also speaks to its groundbreaking artistry.

For the new lineup, founders Mark Clifford and Peacock enlisted Brighton-based producer Shigeru Ishihara (DJ Scotch Egg) to play bass and ex-Boredoms drummer Iida Kazuhisa.  Both additions have proved to be positive on Seefeel’s 21st Century dynamic, bringing in fresh, experimental angles to the group’s overall sound.

From the get-go, on opener “O-One One” and first single “Dead Guitars,” we hear Seefeel venturing deeper into left-field sounds, and showing no affection for the pop-centric electronica of its past.  The latter is as morose as it sounds, a track defined by skittish synth lines and brooding yet melodic hums.  Bass and drums pound in unison, sparse and eerily driving.

The rest of the album stays at this down-tempo pace, moved along by synth scratches that ride a fine line between endearing and electronic vomit.  But this is why the record is so absorbing: a tension lies within the beauty of the chaos, like when the dizzying “Step Up” is followed by the striking multi-layered vocals of “Faults.”  Quique’s catchy, looped guitar riffs are replaced by digital meanderings; Seefeel is able to turn glitches and dub-like wobbles into quasi-signature hooks propelled into a world of their own.

This loosely structured world allows the band to improvise. By locking into grooves, such as on “Rip-Run,” the rhythm section sets a deep template over which Clifford and Peacock run amok. The rhythm becomes meditative, leaving the more electronic-based elements to find tangents they feel comfortable in.

Fortunately, it doesn’t take long for these hazy melodies to find a good home.  Though they might be buried in estranged electronic chords, they’re definitely there.  More immediate gratification can be found on tracks like “Making,” where a catchy melody can be found somewhere between the constrained rhythm, Peacock’s smeared vocals, and the synth line that seems to mirror itself.  As disparate the track sounds, it’s perhaps the most conventional in the collection.

As a sonic experience, this self-titled record is ultimately a celebration of mechanical darkness and strange melody. It's a welcome renewal to a project that began almost 20 years ago. Seefeel is pushing the boundaries of its own sound while doing the same for the ever-evolving electronic genre.

Ireland and her music is really what this story is about.

When I think of Irish music, I think of Belfast and seminal artists like U2, Stiff Little Fingers, and Van Morrison who all weave a rich tapestry of the romantic poet traditions as old as the Emerald Isle itself and the modern problems that plague all divided nations.

But Northern Ireland and Belfast are also part of the UK as well as being Irish, so when acid house came sweeping across Britain it also came across the Irish Sea as well.

Us Yanks may not know it but Ireland does have a proud techno heritage rooted firmly in the Motor City as well and has spawned and nurtured a few of it's own DJ heroes along the way.

However at no time have Irish producers enjoyed such a high profile as Belfast has developed. The city now has its own sound which is finding deep kinship with us California techno heads (witness the genius of the new Timmy Stewart release on SF imprint Utensil to get thy bearings) and suddenly discovering love and open arms all over the world.

Desy Balmer, owner of Nice & Nasty, has been there since the very beginning and has an amazing perspective on this newish phenomenon. He hit it right on the head in our recent conversation-the Irish like it hard but not fast and with lots of melody.

I cannot think of a better way to describe the best releases coming out of Ireland (and therefore more favorite releases period) right now than that.

Without further ado I turn things over to Desy…

Give us a brief history of Nice & Nasty, the label has been around for a long time so please share a little background info first.

Nice & Nasty is 15 years old this year.

It was a dream of mine. At the age of 19 I got a local enterprise grant, some money from Prices’ Youth Trust and got a few heads together and decided to set up a label. Today I carry it around my neck like a cross. One day it will bring me salvation though.

The label was also a club promoter up until last year. We have released the first bits of music from Ubiquity (who went on to form Agnelli & Nelson); we released the first ever remix by Matthew B who then, with Layo Paskin, became Layo & Bushwacka; and alongside Dee Lynch’s Blue records, Mark Kavanagh’s Red imprint, and Holmes & McCready’s Sugar Sweet were the first labels to emerge from the Ireland post-rave scene.

I think that as Red, Sugar Sweet and Blue disappeared or morphed into something different we stuck around and until Eamon Doyle’s D1 and a few others that have since went off my radar.

Today though we are just the old man of the Irish sea. I have helped Richie Parker set up KKD and Diarmaid O’Meara set up Gobsmacked and through a deal with EPM got many local labels digital distribution, such as Acii Tone, Static, Skream Science, 0×3 so I think we deserve a little mention in the history of Irish electronic music.

As a DJ and promoter that’s a whole story for a different day involving touring with the Prodigy, fighting with Keith from the Prodigy (ten years later), going from acid house to drum & bass to techno. Playing techno and the odd back room session of funk and soul. Claiming to be a house DJ but playing techno. Supporting Garnier, Billy Nasty, Alex Smoke, Shades of Rhythm, DJ Sneak and Derrick Carter, N-Joi, Richie Hawtin, Octogen, and Nick Warren. Writing for various publications. Stalking Richie Hawtin (interviewed him 4 times now). Getting far too drunk. Being obnoxious and yeah getting more drunk, among other things.

Today, however, I am focused on the label 100%. I still DJ and yes I’ll play at your gig, but I no longer focus on my career as such as I really would like to have a label with a legacy of good music that fostered new artists, acts as a platform for Irish artists and stayed true to certain punk ethics, D.I.Y. traditions, and some good old fashioned parties.

Any time I got the chance of an interview I used to roll out the past achievements, but I intend on celebrating the bits we have done and concentrating on the next release, the next remix. It’s the only way, just keep moving forward, no real plan other than just find good music, get it together, maybe a remix and release it. See what the reaction is and move on to the next and the next and the next.

One day I’ll stop but until then watch this space.

he was making an album that could alienate his normally open-minded listeners. Some might even call it daring.

“Daring?” Herren asks incredulously. “No. Maybe dumb. Suicidal. It’s like jumping off a cliff. You don’t know what to expect. I think Warp [Records] are smart in the way that they’re marketing the record,” he continues, discussing his label’s decision to add the orchestral compositions as a fifteen-track bonus album, entitled Interregnums, that comes with the physical purchase of Preparations. “The beat-heads and the cats who are into Prefuse as Prefuse is can get this shit however they want, but if you really want the other disc, you can buy that too. Because I’m sure that there are lots of people who have absolutely no interest whatsoever in the other disc, and that’s fine.”
Pieced together over the span of a year and completed during time off from tours and various projects, Prefuse 73’s unusual double album breaks new creative ground for the man who almost singlehandedly reinvented instrumental hip hop. Herren took the genre by storm in 2003 with One Word Extinguisher, his sophomore full-length for Warp; the album’s stuttering samples and crackling electronics were unlike much else heard over hip-hop beats.

The last two Prefuse albums—Surrounded by Silence (2005) and Security Screenings (2006)—brought a variety of guest musicians and MCs that resulted in disjointed releases. Now four years since his breakthrough, he is returning to the insular, deeply personal heart of his craft.

“This is the sixth record, so I just wanted to do something other than ‘Prefuse is on his MPC again,’” he says, mentioning the beat-making equipment he has used to craft his idiosyncratic sound. “I left the sounds alone instead of editing, chopping, and sampling so much. I was more into arrangement and form and the construction instead of editing and splicing and deconstruction. It was sort of the opposite way around. I implemented more live playing on the beats instead of sampling. That’s why it gets really dense with live playing and live sounds. I just wanted to take that direction, because I never have before. I’ve always put a restriction on my level of live playing. But this time I went crazy and did it all.”
Doing it all included playing cello, piano, flutes, clarinets, and percussion for Interregnums, the orchestral material that laid the foundation for much of Preparations.

“Making the beat part—the actual beat side—was very natural, and it was exactly what I wanted as I was making it,” he says of Preparations. “The hard part came with side two. That was more of a challenge, like, ‘How am I going to do this without it being incredibly corny or over-the-top stupid?’ I didn’t want to hire other people to do it either. That was the hard part, doing things that I’m inexperienced in doing. That’s what made it fun and interesting for me.”

“It opened my mind up to a lot of stuff,” he admits. “I was listening to a lot of modern classical…a lot of movie soundtracks, just sitting there listening to how they were placed in movies. And then I went back and watched old movies to see how they were placed in those movies. I sort of went along with those guidelines. I wasn’t really following anything other than listening to too much [Ennio] Morricone or Italian soundtracks, just doing minimal versions of what I was hearing…just to see if I could pull it off.”

Put together, the two albums seem incompatible yet are made complementary by a similar textural depth and meditative spirit. They’re both layered with nuance and detail, they both are emotionally rich despite rarely mandating a mood, and they’re both meticulously arranged. Herren is creating an umbrella under which two kinds of listeners are bound to rub up against each other. Still, he doesn’t see himself as uniting the two traditions.

“I don’t really see them related in much of a way,” he explains. “Modern composers want to do things with electronic musicians, but I’m not involved in that scene so much. I just do my thing as I do it. You have people like Ryuichi Sakamoto, and he’ll work with someone like Alva Noto and do something electronic when you know he can write the most straightforward classical compositions. But he’ll go with someone like that and let them crush it to pieces. That’s another world than the one I exist in. I listen to it and appreciate it, but I don’t think with hip hop, particularly, there are any connections whatsoever. This is a very odd record in itself, and for them to go together is just what spilled out of my mind.”

The remaining question is whether Prefuse 73’s devoted fan base will prove resilient enough to embrace both Preparations and Interregnums. “In an ideal situation, each CD could be appreciated by the people that listen to that type of music,” Herren suggests. “I don’t really have expectations for anything that I release, because you never know how people are going to receive it. One thing one person says can set off a whole army of people. If one person says it’s bad, then a person who never listened to it might think it’s bad. That happens all the time,” he says solemnly. “That’s why I had to make a record like this blindly. I just have to keep going.”