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	News Reviews Events Listen Feature Charts Credits		August 29 - September 10 Earplug is a twice-monthly email magazine, delivering a handpicked selection of news, sounds, videos, and original features to the international electronic-music community. Summer is popping off in fine style with a slew of releases and events that proudly brandish the pop-music baton. With 30-minute tracks and epic atmospheres, Hans-Peter Lindstrøm might not seem the most obvious candidate for pop accolades, but his songwriting is uncannily connective. Earplug's Andrew Stout talks to the Norwegian musician about putting the melody back into club music. Review subjects Stereolab, meanwhile, have never lacked for melodies, but their new album, Chemical Clouds, still surprises, leaving behind the hypnotic drones for short, sweet bursts of song. Australia's Gotye, no slouch in the songwriting department, drops a top-ten list that rides the line between single-swallow morsels and music you can chew. And, in Events, Doug Levy asks whether All Points West might be just what the northeast United States needs: a festival that can unify. With Radiohead holding court, it certainly seems that way.



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New Life for Cale/Eno Doc
Words for the Dying to be released on DVD

John Cale's creative process can be as puzzling to other artists as it is to his audience; whether as a catalyst for the Velvet Underground or as a celebrated producer and solo artist, he's often leaped blindfolded into the deep end. To be released on September 30, the new Words for the Dying DVD offers a revealing cinema-verité portrait of Cale in collaboration with equally enigmatic producer Brian Eno, exploring the forces that propel and prolong the creative process. In the film, the pair prepares to record "The Falkland Suite," the work at the core of Cale's 1989 album Words for the Dying.

Given its limited run when released in the early '90s, Words for the Dying had gone largely unseen until Provocateur Pictures and Microcinema International teamed up to distribute the picture on DVD. Instead of a typical, "making-of" movie, director Rob Nilsson — a winner of both the Camera d'Or from Cannes and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance — fashions the narrative as a character study, following the collaborators across Moscow, London, and Wales while struggling with Eno's increasing reluctance to take part in the film. For Cale, meanwhile, the film proves an experience as enlightening and frustrating as the creative process itself. - Steve Marchese

Pole Vaults into the Canon
~scape to reissue landmark album trio

Call it the second coming of clicks-'n-cuts: everywhere you look, '90s glitch classics are being reissued, from Vladislav Delay's careful exhumations on Huume to the uncanny drones of Wolfgang Voigt's Nah Und Fern box and Basic Channel's BCD2 collection. Riding the wave into more rootsy terrain, Pole's programmatically titled 1 2 3 series revisits the early era of Stefan Betke's dubwise project. Reissued on July 25 via Betke's own ~scape imprint, the records document Pole's aesthetic at its most pragmatic and focused, using the distressed output of the broken Waldorf 4-Pole filter from which he takes his name to frame depth-charge bass drops and deliciously tactile, plastic dub motifs in whispery reverb.

Listening back, you can chart the development of the project, from the moiré patterns of 1998's 1 through to the roots-n-cuts divinations and ghostly voices woven into 2000's 3. Three extra tracks culled from compilations and singles seal the deal alongside a bonus edit of "Spaß" from Mille Plateaux's first Clicks + Cuts compilation. The only thing missing is the infamous Pole counterfeit track, sent by an impostor to FatCat in 2000 — a symbol of fin de siècle electronica if ever there was one. - Jon Dale


	MORE HEADLINES Freeing the Dragon AGF offers free new album, Dance Floor Drachen more » 80808 ZTT re-issues four 808 State classics more » Black Secret Technology, Retooled A Guy Called Gerald remasters landmark album more » Gang Gang Dance House House You XXXChange funks up Brooklyn noiseniks more » All He Got Was This T-Shirt Squarepusher preps Just a Souvenir more » Saving Cascadia Decibel Fest adds Supermayer as closing act more »

Artist:

Stereolab

Title:

Chemical Chords

Label:

4AD

Release:

August 19

No strangers to trial and tragedy, Stereolab's Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier have spent the last 17 years shuttling between labels, flirting with mainstream success, and, more recently, mourning the loss of longtime member Mary Hansen. Despite personal hardships, they're known for a distinctive combination of bright, '60s lounge and bittersweet Krautrock. On their first record for venerable imprint 4AD, Stereolab unfurl what may be the purest pop record they've made in well over a decade. "Self Portrait With Electric Brain" and "Valley Hi!" burst with optimism, stacking up amongst the band's most accessible moments, while similarly condensed nuggets like "Nous Vous Demandons Pardons" and "Cellulose Sunshine" embody the record's "less is more" philosophy with nary a misstep. - Steve Marchese

Artist:

Tricky

Title:

Knowle West Boy

Label:

Domino

Release:

August 8

Former Massive Attack collaborator Tricky's LA digs may be miles from the Bristol housing estate named in Knowle West Boy's title, but who says memories can't be compelling? Ragga ballad "Bacative" addresses the artist's mixed-race background, pairing dancehall toaster Radanna's lyrics with melancholy chamber strings. The similarly anguished and duality-obsessed "Joseph," named for the track's vocalist, laments, "They want to see me cry / I would rather fly." Utilizing several guest singers, the record touches on blues, garage rock, and gothic pop, with producer Dave "Switch" Taylor keeping the sound cohesive. The results can be messy, but you'll still find yourself listening intently. - Tomas Palermo

Artist:

High Places

Title:

High Places

Label:

Thrill Jockey

Release:

September 23

Like water trickling through outstretched fingers, the found-sound melodies of Brooklyn duo High Places suggest escape. Warm, rippling, reverb-heavy beats bump into each other, bending and bowing like waves on a pool filled with pebbles. Dropping in the wake of a scattered series of 7-inches and a compilation, the group's self-titled debut has more cohesive rhythms and a more mystic air than its earlier work, conjuring up hazy, nameless nostalgia. The high, haunting echoes — cavernous spaces, heavy bass — mesh with singer Mary Pearson's sunny, nursery-rhyme delivery ("I'll buy a plot of land / One full of trees / Where I can practice taxonomy") in the makeshift, gorgeous manner of a less austere Young Marble Giants. It's private and playful, quiet and quirky pop that's utterly engulfing. - Pat Sisson

Artist:

Secondo

Title:

A Matter of Scale

Label:

Soul Jazz

Release:

July 1

Given Secondo mastermind Radovan Scasascia's compositional method — chopping house, disco, and boogie tracks into microscopic samples and then re-assembling them into glitch-riddled house, disco, and boogie tracks — his debut LP, A Matter of Scale, is something of a crate-digger's guessing game. Of course, spending more than a few minutes sifting through vocoder blurps and bass pops, waiting for something to betray Scasascia's source material, is likely to give you a headache. It's more rewarding to focus on the big picture: the Swiss-watch precision funk of "Kuwait" and "Distrails" maintains the gaudy tonalities of a dollar-bin disco 12-inch, but regularly departs into tightly crafted microhouse syncopations. With its CD-skip sighs and choppy bass, "Burns Me Up" could pass for a Fluxus-inspired remake of Janet Jackson's "Control." And, for all we know, that might be the case. - Aaron Leitko

Artist:

John Matthias and Nick Ryan

Title:

Cortical Songs

Label:

Nonclassical

Release:

July 21

While many will find their way to Cortical Songs via Radiohead's Thom Yorke, be forewarned: his is but one track — a three-minute remix of the composers' source material that doesn't bear a particularly Yorkian signature (aside from a pervasive air of doom and gloom). As a whole, the four short originals on John Matthias and Nick Ryan's new album sound more like another Radiohead side project — Jonny Greenwood's oily, oppressive score for There Will Be Blood. The mini-suite is tidy, from its 15-minute length to its controlled melodic gestures, which smear late-19th century Romantic sensibilities into a late-20th century drone. Yorke's remix offers minimal intervention, chopping up string phrases and giving them a hard, staccato attack, but it's effective. More atonal reworks, from the likes of Gabriel Prokofiev and John Maclean, pile passage upon passage in unstable assemblages. The best of the lot is David Prior's, which re-imagines the material as an underwater game of slow-mo Pachinko. - Philip Sherburne


	EARPLUG FAVES AGF Dance Floor Drachen AGF ProducKtion Petar Dundov Escapements Music Man Âme Fabric 24 Fabric Pr Psygrooves Foreign Pulses & Borderline Dubs Jarring Effects Bogdan Harmony Within Repetitive Structures Arhiva7 Deadbeat Roots & Wire Wagon Repair Various Saturday, I'm in Love Connaisseur Basic Channel BCD2 Basic Channel Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog Party Intellectuals Pi Hatchback Colors of the Sun Lo

PREVIEW: Minitek
September 12-14
New York, NY
www.minitekfestival.com

The enviable mission of the inaugural Minitek Festival is to stage a serious dance party in post-Giuliani New York. As such, the three-day techno event puts an emphasis on the crosscurrents of music and technology, and a dark, dirty edge pervades the lineup, which includes a heavy M_nus contingent, Audion, Adultnapper, and a M.A.N.D.Y. vs. Tiefschwarz set. While a few of the headliners make routine visits to New York, Minitek's vision of club music remains underrepresented in the States. For minimal fans in the US, that makes this a rare chance to see the genre's heroes all together. For the curious, meanwhile, Minitek offers the closest approximation to the Berlin clubbing experience you're likely to find on these shores. The technological side of the festival includes installations, interactive music gear, and a remix contest. For those who just can't wait, an ongoing series of free podcasts from the likes of Berlin duo Pan-Pot and Argentine collective Fase Miusic Sender help us count down the days. - Pat Sisson

REVIEW: All Points West
August 8-10
Liberty State Park, NJ
www.apwfestival.com

While the United States' Midwest and West Coast summer-festival scenes have grown to rival those overseas, the East Coast has been sorely lacking a megafest to call its own. 2003's Field Day was a disastrous attempt to rectify this, a New York event plagued by the loss of the original event site, the shortening of the schedule to one day, a move to Giant Stadium, and, to top it all off, torrential rain. The only real glimmer of light to come out of that affair was a transcendent set from Radiohead, who not only miraculously cleared the skies, but somehow managed to make the whole thing seem worth the trouble. In bringing us the inaugural All Points West fest, the organizers clearly learned a lesson from that affair: book Oxford's finest, and odds are you can't fail. Book them two nights in a row, and you double those odds.

From the start, APW was pushed as the East Coast's answer to Coachella. But, while there were indeed similarities (onsite art exhibits, the lineup itself, and an appropriately scenic location, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty), the bill was significantly smaller — at barely over 40 acts, it presented only about one-third of the artists of this year's California counterpart, on two fewer stages. On the one hand, that meant less variety; on the other, it made thoughtful curation that much more integral.

Keep reading »

REVIEW: The Big Chill
August 1-3
Eastnor Castle, UK
www.bigchill.net

It's the Big Chill's seventh year at the sprawlingly scenic Eastnor Castle, and its first following the departure of co-founder and ambient prince Pete Lawrence. Can it be coincidence that the capacity has been upped, the organization tightened, and the detritus factor increased (particularly for a festival that encourages its guests to "leave no trace" around Eastnor's beautiful deer park)? Even with new rules, the Chill remains suitably reclined, retaining a remarkable sonic blend. Where else could we receive spiritual enlightenment from Leonard Cohen, followed by a bassy burst of Benga?

Three or four years back, you could take along a novel, leafing through a few chapters while luminescent bits bobbed above your head and leaked seductively into your eardrums. There's no time for that now. The electronic performers are mostly situated at the hyperactive end of the field, and there are so many "live" bands on, many with guitars, that it's possible to have two entirely different festival experiences according to one's electro/acoustic tastes. This isn't necessarily a negative condition: this year's program is so dynamic that pausing for contemplation is not a possibility. As it happens, Pete Lawrence himself provides the most restful oasis, DJing in the early Sunday afternoon on the Castle Stage, which is always a desired spot for daytime cloud-gazing. Even he gets restless towards set's end, though, spinning jaunty ditties by Russ Conway, the Andrews Sisters, and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band; it feels utterly revolutionary to hear such quaint sounds reverberating across hills and dips at high volume.

Keep Reading »


	MORE EVENTS P.S.1 Warm Up Through September 6 New York, NY Numusic September 3-7 Stavanger, Norway SF Electronic Music Fest September 3-7 San Francisco, CA A Day in the Life September 13 County Wicklow, Ireland ZXZW - Independent Culture September 14-21 Tilburg, the Netherlands Decibel Festival September 25-28 Seattle, WA The Warehouse Project September 26 - January 1 Manchester, UK Pop Montréal October 1-5 Montréal, QC This Is Not London Festival October 3-25 London, UK Amsterdam Dance Event October 22-25 Amsterdam, the Netherlands DEAF October 22-27 Dublin, Ireland

DJ Wonder: Isaac Hayes Mix (MP3)
Originally aired on the Shade 45 morning show, DJ Wonder's tribute to Isaac Hayes blazes through classic cuts that sampled the man, including bangers by Wu-Tang, Dre, Biz Markie, and more.

LISTEN

Hatchback: Hatchback Mix (MP3)
Hatchback's forthcoming album, Colors of the Sun, is about to give Lindstrøm's new CD a run for Balearic disc of the year. As a teaser, he whips up 80 minutes of cosmic grooves for Allez-Allez.

LISTEN

The Presets: Get off the Beach Mixtape (MP3)
Sydney's Presets turn out to be as irrepressible behind the decks as they are on stage, with a hyperactive mix roping together Von Südenfed, Sparks, Aphex Twin, Raymond Scott, and even Sepultura. (Registration required.)

LISTEN

Dinky: Get Lost 3 (MP3)
Dinky's contribution to Crosstown Rebels' mix CD series would have been one of last year's best minimal mixes — if it hadn't gotten buried in the fallout of its distributor's bankruptcy. Fortunately, she's made it available for free in anticipation of her album on Vakant.

LISTEN

Speedy J: DJ Mix August 2008 (MP3)
Don't expect melodies, guitars, or Balearic excess from the Netherlands' Speedy J: this is pure techno, as minimal, machinic, and possibly malevolent as it gets.

LISTEN

Looking for more hot mix sets and fresh new tracks? Check out Blentwell for an ongoing document of the evolution of blended music online.


	WATCH If Six Was Sin Evil Nine, "They Live!" watch » Sliding Into Home Fujiya & Miyagi, "Knickerbocker" watch » An Ode to Tapeheads YACHT, "Summer Song" watch » Sekt in the Afternoon Blender's "A Drink With Booka Shade" watch » Primary Colors Pop Levi, "Never Never Love" watch »

Lindstrøm Takes Disco for a Long Drive
Where You Go I Go Too redefines "epic"

After Hans-Peter Lindstrøm's set at this year's SXSW in Austin, Texas, the buzz surrounding his debut full-length, Where You Go I Go Too, reached piercing levels. Leaks of track edits by frequent collaborator Prins Thomas only increased the hype. After several delays, Oslo's Smalltown Supersound finally released the album on August 19, but its epic soundscapes had previously added an esoteric subplot to this year's neo-disco story. Earplug's Andrew Stout caught up with Lindstrøm via telephone from Oslo to discuss what disco did right, the virtue of half-hour title tracks, and how classical training engenders an appreciation for classic Queen.

Earplug: In past interviews, you've described the beat as the "wrapper" of the song. What do you mean by that?

Hans-Peter Lindstrøm: Well, I think club music typically places too much emphasis on the beat. I've found that the way the beat and bass are used in a lot of dance music is really repetitive, really boring. My frustration with this might be due to my background, which has more to do with proper songwriting. When I was getting into music, I was inspired by '70s disco, which is the perfect combination of beats, melody, and chord changes. It's all of that stuff happening in the arrangement — the background singers and string arrangements — that makes the four-to-the-floor beat in disco so powerful. It's not just the beat alone. Unfortunately, a lot of club music has lost that melodic element.

EP: What happened between the height of disco in the late '70s and house in the '80s to make that occur?

HPL: I think it was the backlash of disco. Also, in the early '80s, computers just took over the way people made dance music. There were no more session people — like the orchestras and brass sections — and the result was a kind of flattening of the sound. That isn't true across the board; early Prince records, like "Controversy" or Michael Jackson's "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," seemed to use computers in interesting ways that didn't hurt the overall sound.

EP: Beginning your debut album with a half-hour track is a bold move.

keep reading »


	MORE FEATURES Back to Roots Deadbeat talks about his new album more » Wot Do U Call It? The Guardian discovers "funky" more » KLF Eternal David Stubbs gets busted with the art-pranksters more » Donna Summer Digs BMore Cock Rock Disco founder's ten club jams more » Heavy Breathing Lindstrøm explains Where You Go more » Mash Note 17 dots quizzes Girl Talk more »

Each issue, Earplug sneaks a peek inside the crates of our favorite DJs. We'll even help you beef up your own bag: click on selected titles to preview tracks, download MP3s, or purchase vinyl.

Gotye
(Lucky Number)
Merricks Beach, Australia
www.gotye.com

Outside of Australia and the South Pacific, Gotye (aka Wally de Backer) is best known for a record that doesn't officially exist: Michael Mayer and Superpitcher's sprawling "Supermayer Supermess" remix of delicate pop gem "Heart's a Mess." His label declined to release the rework, but rather than wasting time scouring forums for the bootleg, listeners are better off just checking out Gotye's originals. His 2006 self-released debut, Like Drawing Blood, is about to be reissued by the UK's Lucky Number. It's a charmingly eccentric collection of quirkily earnest electronic pop, tinged with shades of Jamie Lidell, Beck, and Talk Talk. Gotye's Earplug-exclusive playlist gives a few indications of where he got his sense for songcraft.

The Chap, Mega Breakfast (Lo/Ghostly International)

Air France, On Trade Winds (Sincerely Yours)

Kelpe, Ex-Aquarium (DC)

The Har-You Percussion Group, The Har-You Percussion Group (CuBop)

Ryan Adams, Easy Tiger (Lost Highway)

Pivot, Make Me Love You (Sensory Projects)

Gonzales, Soft Power (Mercury)

MGMT, Oracular Spectacular (Columbia)

Ratatat, LP3 (XL)

The Presets, Apocalypso (Modular)

Managing Editor
Philip Sherburne

Deputy Editor
Andrew Phillips

Contributing Editors
Michael Byrne
Doug Levy
Patrick C. Sisson

Cover Art
CJ

Production
Axel Anderson
Tom Starkweather
Andrew Steinmetz

Founder
David J. Prince

Contributors
Todd L. Burns
David M. Cotner
Andy Cumming
Jonathon Dale
Rachel B. Doyle
Marc Gilman
Jorge Hernandez
Aaron Leitko
Martin Longley
Steve Marchese
Michaelangelo Matos
Colin James Nagy
Nick Parish
Tomas A. Palermo
Tim Pratt
Bernardo Rondeau
Joe Rudkin
Jesse Serwer
Oliver Spall
Andrew Stout
Bruce Tantum

	About Us
	Earplug is an email magazine dedicated to electronic music and its many dynamic styles and influences. Published twice-monthly, it features a handpicked selection of music news, cultural spotlights, tip sheets, CD reviews, original reporting, and music festival previews and reviews. Earplug offers only pure editorial and unbiased news — no money is accepted from any artists, labels, promoters, or companies seeking mention.

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	Tell us what you think is exciting and worth including in Earplug by dropping us an email at tips. Writers interested in getting even more involved should reach us at contribute. To criticize, praise, or generally comment on this publication, please send an email to feedback. In addition to this twice-monthly digest of new electronic music, Flavorpill publishes a series of online magazines, covering ART, BOOKS, NEWS, and cultural events in NEW YORK, LOS ANGELES, SAN FRANCISCO, CHICAGO, and LONDON. Coming soon: STYLE/DESIGN and FILM. Subscribe now.

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