Danimal Cannon [Interview]

Danimal Cannon (Interview)

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Doing something different is difficult.

In a world obsessed with trends and fads that last a microsecond, the pressure is always on to deliver something palatable to a mass audience with the attention span of a brain-damaged goldfish. With his new album Lunaria, Danimal Cannon is ignoring the seductive pull of the same-but-slightly-different, and delivering something really different.

Danimal Cannon is a chiptune master, capable of blending multiple genres, timbres, instruments, and moods into a long-player that is an acquired taste, but a legitimately rewarding taste nonetheless. After I listened to Lunaria in its entirety and reviewed it here, this interview could only kick off with one question…

Your new album Lunaria broke my brain, in a good way! So my opening question has to be: Just how the hell did you make it? How did the tracks on Lunaria go from idea to reality? Read more…

Posted on 24 February 2016

Danimal Cannon – ‘Lunaria’ [Review]

Danimal Cannon - Lunaria Review

And now for something completely different.

Completely different.

Danimal Cannon’s Lunaria is a mostly instrumental industrial-prog album, composed on a 1989 Nintendo Game Boy and loosely based around a conceptual story inspired by the Giant Impact Hypothesis.

Whether you’re new to the chiptune world or a die-hard veteran, you’re unlikely to have heard something this relentlessly left of centre before.

Acclimatising to Lunaria’s claustrophobic, digitised-to-the-nth-degree universe is challenging, to say the least. But once you get past the initial sense of sonic culture shock, its true nature as Read more…

Posted on 16 February 2016

For Astronauts And Satellites – ‘Then, By The Light Of Our Own Creation’ [Review]

For Astronauts And Satellites

Originality is rare in music – but For Astronauts And Satellites have it in spades. These guys are gradually carving out a global-scale niche of their own, merging chiptuned electronica with gritty and epic post-rock and winning fans across the world in the process.

Then, By The Light Of Our Own Creation takes retro gaming soundtrack tones, drops them into syncopated rhythmic layers, and adds more than a few tasty (and often mixed-meter) grooves. It is challenging, but also rewarding – music made for those who crave Read more…

Posted on 16 September 2015

Princess Slayer – ‘Passion Alley’ [Re-Review]

princess slayer passion alleyLast week, I expressed a few reservations about this track. As predicted, they’re all gone now. Passion Alley is officially cemented in my mind as a Read more…

Posted on 10 March 2015

Princess Slayer – ‘Passion Alley’ [Review]

princess slayer passion alleyAlthough I’m a big Princess Slayer fan, and I’m used to instantly loving everything they come out with, this track will take a while to grow on me. Passion Alley has been a PS live set mainstay since I first came across these guys – and this latest on-record version is a lot more  Read more…

Posted on 07 March 2015

Beardyman [Interview]

beardyman press

Imagine you’re a beatboxer. You’re pretty good, so you enter the UK Beatbox Championships. You win. You eat, breathe, sleep and sweat beatboxing for a solid year before returning. You win again. Things get a bit crazy. A comedy video you made in a kitchen gets uploaded to YouTube (as freshly purchased by Google). In time, it will attract over 5 million views.

Over the next several years, you take solo beatboxing as far as it can possibly be taken. You play underground comedy clubs, TV shows, festivals. Your YouTube presence grows. You begin experimenting with live looping technology, battling not rival MCs but inefficient circuitry and user interfaces in the name of getting the ideas in your head into other people’s earholes. You find yourself in a studio, recording an eclectic collection of tracks that takes in everything from dubstep and hip-hop to almost every international folk music style recorded by history. Your debut album gets released; it sells nicely.

Finally, you hit on a pair of serious problems.  Read more…

Posted on 26 February 2015

For Astronauts And Satellites – ‘A Homing Light’ [Review]

coverBeyond the fuzzy opening grind of They Should Have Warned Us Years Ago, For Astronauts And Satellites’ new mini-opus drops straight into the Yellow-Magic-Orchestra-go-post-rock sublimity of title track A Homing Light. Read more…

Posted on 15 December 2014

Beardyman [Live Review – KOKO, London, 28/11/14]

beardyman press

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On the walk from Waterloo station to Camden, I passed at least three busking beatboxers. The faces were different, but the acts were the same – a combination of robot impressions, oppressively generic beats, and faithful and flawless impressions of a variety of non-percussive instruments. By the time KOKO’s dramatic facade came into view, the novelty of solo beatboxing had more than worn off; London was beginning to feel saturated by Beardyman wannabes. Read more…

Posted on 01 December 2014

Beardyman – ‘Distractions’ [Review]

beardyman distractions

In an age of instant gratification, where everyone wants everything yesterday, dropping a sophomore album over three and a half years after your debut can be an anxiety-provoking event. It can be argued that music fans are more fickle than ever, easily susceptible as we all are to distraction and immediate amnesia – and under such conditions, almost any musician could reasonably expect the world to have moved on over the course of 42 minutes, let alone months. However, Beardyman is no standard-issue artist. Read more…

Posted on 08 November 2014

For Astronauts And Satellites – ‘For Astronauts And Satellites’ [Review]

for astronauts and satellitesWhen I discovered this band, they were opening a show at The Boileroom. Judging by that set and this seven-tracker, it won’t be long before you’ll spot them playing much higher up the list. Read more…

Posted on 14 July 2014

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