Qobuzissime

Following a fallow period in 2017, the German producer of Italian origin David August launched his own label in 2018 (99CHANTS), on which he this year released an ambient album called DCXXXIX A.C., as well as this album, D'ANGELO. Inspired by Italian master painter Caravaggio, David August uses the light-dark technique throughout the six tracks (+ an interlude). The 9-minute-long THE LIFE OF MERISI  starts with a 90s techno/trance beat, a Moroder synthesiser and a deep, hollow voice, before dying off and coming back to life with the clear harmonics of an acoustic piano, his favourite instrument. The ballad 33CHANTS and the title song D'ANGELO were composed with the same electro/acoustic approach. An approach David August has embraced since his very first album Times, in which he reconnected with the piano following a few “functional” maxis for Diynamic Music, Solomun’s label. Prior to D’ANGELO August showed off his talent with two exceptional live performances at the Boiler Room in 2014 and 2016 (accompanied by the Berlin Symphony Orchestra for the second performance). This album envelops us in a bubble that feels just right. If we were to remain trapped in this bubble for eternity, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. © Smaël Bouaici

Kiddy Smile wants to bring house to the masses. While vintage house has come roaring back over the last few years, and twenty years have passed since French Touch conquered the charts, this totem of the ballroom scene and Parisian voguing makes no secret of his ambitions for this first album. After putting audiences on notice with 2016's Let A B!tch Know, Kiddy Smile, on the much-publicised label Defected, is aiming higher and brings in Robin S, Armand Van Helden and Mojo, his points of references for songs, aiming perhaps for a career like that of Sylvester, American gay icon who wrote the global hit You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) in 1978. But that doesn't mean he's giving up on house, which forms the foundation of almost all the tracks on this album, in particular the vocal house of Ron Trent and Frankie Knuckles in particular, who sent the genre mainstream in the US of the 1990s, with their remixes of soul/pop hits. Can the model work in France? We'll see. But Kiddy Smile, assisted by Julien Galner of Château Marmont on production, brings all his talents to the table, like on Be Honest featuring Rouge Mary, a superbly soulful track, or One Trick Pony, produced by Boston Bun (Ed Banger), an alluring pop/R&B crossover. Two tracks with great potential, accompanied by club hits that are sure to fill dancefloors (House of God, Burn the House Down), and the single Dickmatized, which recalls the powers of the Italian fidget duo Crookers. All the elements of success are brought together here. © Smaël Bouaici/Qobuz

His second EP You’ll Understand, released in 2016 on Distant Hawaii, a sub-division of the London label Lobster Theremin (spearhead of lo-fi house) and his melancholic yet rousing track Talk To Me You’ll Understand made it clear: Ross From Friends has gold at his fingertips! He has spent his time over the past two years fine-tuning the tiniest details for this 50-minute album that is sure to satisfy those who have fallen for the charm of his silky house, as well as ensure him a new base of devout fans. Ross From Friends’ music is somehow addictive, as confirmed by Thank God I’m A Lizard, a shamanic house with Pink Floyd-like guitars, while Wear Me Down sounds more fluid and reminiscent of the Argentine Ernesto Ferreyra and Luciano's sweaty dancefloor label Cadenza. In addition to the hypnotic aspect of his minimal techno, Ross From Friends adds an extra touch of soul, drawn from his family history. His parents were keen travellers, the kind of Englishmen to roam around Europe in the 80s with a sound system to diffuse the first electronic experiments (hi-NRG, italo-disco…). The Knife offers a kind of soulful synth-pop that plunges us straight back into the atmosphere of the 80s, before he switches up the BPM for the techno track Project Cybersyn. "Every time I started working on a song, I was immediately caught up in the most emotional aspect of things," he explains. It's certainly one of the most important parts of the work around the album, trying to tap into those emotions, that emotional instability." This approach is reminiscent of that of another British producer of the new generation, Leon Vynehall, who built his latest album Nothing Is Still around the history of grandparents with an equally moving result. The superb track Parallel Sequence and its breakbeats also show that the Englishman is not fixated on the kick and that, unlike so many others, he does not put the drum machine at the centre of his music. It would be difficult to define a rotary axis, as his songs seem to emanate from an idea, from a concept. The rest of the album is just as bewitching, and we let ourselves be carried from one end of the twelve tracks to the other in this cotton blanket that Ross From Friends has wrapped us in. It's only summer, but this is probably already one of the albums of the year and for sure a perfect Qobuzissime record. © Smaël Bouaici/Qobuz

A specific and a lasting reading disorder that occurs during childhood and adolescence, dyslexia is recognized as a dysfunctional learning disability. No doubt that 10LEC6 just learned ... differently? The Afro-post-punk collective has first and foremost digested a number of influences quite impressively. From funky post-punk like ESG and Liquid Liquid hailing from New York in the 80's. But also disco, house, punk from Bad Brains, afrobeat, high-pitched electro and very solid tribal rhythms. Since 2004, the group of varying geometries formed around the street artist Simon and the producer and DJ Jess (a member of the duo Jess & Crabbe) and they make fusion like no other! A fusion that was formed with the arrival in 2014 of a new voice, Nicole, who sings in Bulu, a Bantu language which is spoken in the south of her native Cameroon. With Bone Bame, rhythm takes control of the body and the brain. This third album that appears on Ed Banger, the label of Pedro Winter, is above all a long percussive and electronic trance where the heavy bass and the incantatory voice of Nicole makes it totally elusive. All that is left to do is to let yourself go with delight on this singular and cosmopolitan dancefloor that is like no other. An all round Qobuzissime! © Marc Zisman/Qobuz

At first glance, post-rock and techno were hardly made for one another. Guy Andrews would beg to differ. By fusing his two passions, the two major influences on his music, the young British producer has created his second album, Tåke, which means fog in Norwegian. This is an atmospheric journey, viscerally linked to nature. Andrews says plainly that the single Fjell was inspired by a walk on Cadair Idris, a Welsh mountain. It was inspired by the climbs. The challenge of the ascent. And the pride in reaching each peak... Another escapade, this time in Norway, offered added fuel for his record. It gave a power that has influenced this captivating work from beginning to end. Guy Andrews plays with atmospheres (his first works were very much rooted in ambient music) and alternates between Northern Lights and violent hurricanes. Each composition on Tåke is in fact a kind of miniature sonic documentary, inspired by the writer's many wanderings. Here, even more than on his 2016 debut album Our Spaces, Andrews is a painter. He is sketching out an electro landscape with diverse textures and hypnotic effects. No surprise that the Londoner's art has been hailed by big names such as Massive Attack, Scuba, Bonobo, Max Cooper and others. Tåke depicts a vast sound tapestry, mottled by rhythms and lit up by the colours that Andrews offers. Fog has never looked so radiant. © MD/Qobuz

A French house producer who rarely offers French house music, Brodinski launched his career as an electro don who perfectly fits with Bugged Out! or Southern Fried, but his later work is left-field hip-hop of the highest order, the kind of stuff that attracted mavericks like Danny Brown and Kanye West. Here, the indie electronica DJ with two productions on West's monolithic Yeezus LP makes his album debut with an unexpected and excellent blast of fractured tracks, some so skeletal and wobbly they sound like the Chicago genre of footwork as heard through a nu-disco remix. "Bury Me," with Maluca and MPA Shitro, is a good example as it jerks like a zombie while shining like a diamond, but a more downtown version is "I Can't Help Myself," where SD stutters over trap booms and blasts before disappearing in a whirlwind of rave-rap beats. The weird "Need for Speed," with Louisahhh and Bloody Jay, sounds as if Giorgio Moroder called for Lil Jon, got Trinidad James instead, and was happy the mistake happened; then there's the pounding acid number called "Hector," which is one-part Mad Decent and one-part happy hardcore. With dark bass, aggressive attitude, and the word "bitch" used for emphasis, both Three 6 Mafia and Pimp C's influences are in full effect throughout the album, but even with all these touchstones and special guests, Brava has a unique voice, one that's choppy, quirky, welcoming, and likely smells of blunts when it burps. Think of Mr. Oizo signed to Hypnotized Minds, or Chief Keef as Erol Alkan's hype man, and the delightful, wobbly magic of Brodinski's debut will come as less of a shock. ~ David Jeffries

The Australian-American-UK trio The Acid bring soulful electro into dreamy territory. Now, acid is a chemical substance defined by its reaction to another kind of chemical with a complementary composition. But with this Acid, the ingredients list is a bit longer and more complicated... Behind The Acid there is a triumvirate led by the Australian Ry Cummings, aka Ry X, the young guru of a mind-blowing, diaphanous electro-soul, with his two henchmen, UK DJ Adam Freeland (whose 1998 mix Coastal Breaks II is considered as one of the highlights of breakbeat) and the Californian producer Steve Nalepa (who is most famous for his work with The Weekend and Drake, and who spends most of his time teaching music). With their début album Liminal, The Acid has given the world a brilliant, spartan record which will enchant fans of James Blake, Sohn, Bon Iver and all those outfits from the 2010s which brought together electro textures, breathtaking ambiances, pop melodies, and heavenly voices. This is a futuristic, dreamy Qobuzissime. © MD/Qobuz

After a decade of releasing singles, remixes, and edits to large amounts of acclaim among in-the-know dance music fans, Norwegian whiz kid Todd Terje finally made an album of his own in 2014. It's Album Time is a pretty self-explanatory title, though it could have been called "I Love Many Different Styles of Dance Music and Will Proceed to Put My Warped Spin on All of Them." Well, that one would have been a mouthful, but it does sort of explain what was in Terje's head as he whips from one style to the next over the course of the record's 12 tracks. Stylish neo-disco is what he's best known for, and if any one style dominates, it's that. Bouncy dancefloor fillers like "Strandbar," "Inspector Norse," "Swing Star, Pt. 2," and the light-as-a-feather "Oh Joy" set the dials for the heart of the disco ball and form the shiny center of the album. Terje's unerring grooves and the sophisticated and melodic sounds he lays over the beat make them the easiest tracks to love. He's less successful when heading off the floor and into the chillout lounge ("Leisure Suit Preben"), the tiki room ("Preben Goes to Acapulco"), or whatever strange place the impossible-to-describe (or listen to more than once) "Svensk Sås" resides, though he does get lucky with a guitar-strumming electro '80s style ("Delorean Dynamite") that begs to have some vocoder vocals over the top. The sweeping, ice-colored synths get the job done fine anyway, and it seems like a path Terje would be wise to follow on future releases. The same can't be said for the one vocal feature on the record that finds a sepulchral Bryan Ferry croaking a version of Robert Palmer's "Johnny and Mary" that Terje decides to take at "Chariots of Fire" tempo and with the same level of portentous drama. It's a huge misstep that threatens to derail the album and wipe away all the good that exists. Take it out, along with a couple of filler-y tracks, and It's Album Time is a solid debut. As it stands, it's a hard album to get your head around and it's a hard album to fully embrace. Terje should set aside the experiments and just focus on making sleek and shiny electro-disco tracks; the rest only gets in the way of a good time. ~ Tim Sendra

3 stars out of 5 -- "[T]he French duo are as synonymous with hazy Parisian grooves and dreamy vocals as central London is with artisan coffee houses."

Rewarding as it was for most lovers of 1983 and Los Angeles, Cosmogramma was so complex and knotted that Steven Ellison's next step could have gone beyond the challenging and into the self-parodic. On his fourth album, Ellison not only peels away layers from his sound but organizes his tracks into a gracefully flowing sequence. The producer once again draws from numerous instrumentalists and vocalists, from Brainfeeder associates Stephen "Thundercat" Bruner and Austin Peralta to the likes of Erykah Badu and Thom Yorke. Bruner has the most presence. His tremulous basslines are on nine of the album's 18 tracks, and his spaced-out, quasi-oracular vocals poke through on occasion, such as on an 80-second track that is titled after a natural psychedelic compound and references the title of Ellison's 2010 EP. True to Flying Lotus form, Bruner's voice, as well as those of everyone else, is made to sound phantasmal rather than spotlit. While much of the material on Ellison's previous three albums came across like brief and isolated ideas with an impact unaffected by the shuffle function, the shorter pieces here act more like true connectors or proper set-ups/interludes. The 12 minutes from "See Thru to U" through "Only if You Wanna" make for the album's least divisible section. It begins with lithe and slightly unsettling pattering and closes with a futuristic, organic-synthetic jazz trio piece. Somewhere in the middle, there's "The Nightcaller," the closest the album gets to dancefloor funk like Cosmogramma's "Do the Astral Plane" -- that is, until the last minute, when the gliding/chugging beat stammers and switches to a delirious strut. For all the elegiac and turbulent moments, several tracks, including the majestically wistful "Getting There" and the cascading "Until the Colours Come," are gorgeously starry and even lullaby-like, laced with ear-perking flourishes. And then there's the alien critter voice on "Putty Boy Strut," and the bizarrely bleak and comical "Electric Candyman," featuring Yorke, which arouses some serious cognitive dissonance by provoking thoughts of Tony Todd and Beyoncé ("Say my name, say my name, say my name"). Ellison's trademarks -- skittering and rustling percussion atop slightly irregular drums that knock and thud, for instance -- factor almost as much as ever, but his slight adjustments and increased restraint make this his most accessible and creative release yet. ~ Andy Kellman