Free Pussy Riot.

In the latest fragment of news from the Pussy Riot camp, currently-jailed member Maria Alyokhina has begun a hunger strike in protest to the Russian court’s decision to prohibit her from attending her own parole hearing. Alyokhina’s Pussy Riot bandmate Nadezhda Tolokonnikova was denied parole last month, so it’s hardly surprising that she doesn’t have much faith in the system as it stands.

Forbidding her lawyers to take any further action in the parole hearing, Alyokhina has become the most high profile prisoner to date to refuse to take part in Russia’s highly-criticized justice system. She instead appeared by video-link, and was required to file all motions by fax, which clearly delayed proceedings. After a day of the hearing, Alyokhina announced her hunger strike, no doubt aware this would raise the profile before things continue on Thursday.

Alyokhina was wryly critical of the whole affair, saying ”Let the troika sitting here – the judge, the prosecutor and the colony employee – decide my fate,” a reference to the supposedly long-gone Soviet era where sentences were issued without trial. [via The Guardian]

The Los Angeles-based artist unexpectedly returns with Loud City Song.

Julia Holter‘s Ekstasis was one of those rare albums that managed near-universal praise, and now the fiercely singular producer is back with a brand new album, which sounds almost as ambitious as its towering predecessor. Holter has already proved herself with a run of two devastating records, but apparently Loud City Song is rooted in demos made before even her 2011 debut Tragedy.

Based on Collette’s 1944 novella Gigi, Holter used this to reflect on her own hometown of Los Angeles, and recorded with an ensemble of Los Angeles musicians we can’t wait to hear what it sounds like.

Loud City Song will be released on August 19 on CD, LP and digital via Domino.

Tracklist:

01 World
02 Maxim’s I
03 Horns Surrounding Me
04 In The Green Wild
05 Hello Stranger
06 Maxim’s II
07 He’s Running Through My Eyes
08 This Is a True Heart
09 City Appearing

House aficionados take note.

Chicago house pioneer Lil’ Louis changed dance music for good when he dropped ‘French Kiss’ back in 1989. It’s one of those rare tunes that still has traction to this day, and the producer is set to bring his sound to London’s Oval Space on Saturday June 13. Providing more than ample support will be Eglo’s Floating Points, whose intricate, compositional approach to house music has put him in a league of his own in recent years.

Rounding things out perfectly is NTS DJ Moxie, who will no doubt bring her unshakable, eclectic collection of funk, disco, house and more. Moxie put together a phenomenal FACT mix for us only last month, you can listen to it here.

For more information and tickets head over here.

FunkinGreat.

Celebrating this year’s Dimensions Festival in Croatia, Detroit techno prodigy Kyle Hall and funky Londoner FunkinEven are due to re-kindle their Funkinevil collaborative project for a special back to back set at London’s XOYO on Friday June 12. This should already be enough to get yer pulse racing at four beats per bar, but the night doesn’t stop there – Mercury Prize nominees Portico Quartet are also due an appearance, and will no doubt be bringing their unique Hang drum-led sound to a set of fresh ears.

Rounding off the night in fine style will be legendary Worldwide DJ Gilles Peterson, who has been instrumental in bringing the more underground strain of sounds to the Dimensions Festival line-up.

For more information and tickets head here.

Available on: Planet Mu LP

In many music scenes it’s possible to make the distinction between originators and popularisers. The originators have the ideas – in a simplistic reading, they are the authors of the style at hand – but they fall short in other respects: presentation, communication, plain old organisation. This is where the popularisers come in. They don’t invent so much as refine, but in doing so they bridge the gap between that which is already accepted and the tantalising but alien potential of The New Thing. Just look at the way Skream took the dark, austere garage template of Horsepower Productions et al and turned it into something with massive appeal.

DJ Rashad is arguably footwork’s populariser, pursuing an increasingly refined, outward-facing sound that resonates with the Chicago style’s growing global audience. His long-term running mate Kavain Space – aka RP Boo – is its originator. This is to be taken quite literally: Space is credited with pioneering the high-octane rhythmic refractions of juke that would come to define footwork with his 1997 track ‘Baby Come On’. But even beyond the bare facts, Space has all the trappings of an archetypal originator. He is an eccentric figure who stands outside of the Chicago scene’s rigid clique rivalries (as Planet Mu founder Mike Paradinas has said, “everyone says everyone else outside [their clique] is shit, pretty much, apart from RP Boo”), and is still very much a presence on the scene some two decades after first trying his hand at production. And yet he has often struggled to capitalise on footwork’s success, finding himself either exploited by those of a more ruthless disposition (as detailed here) or, in the case of the style’s recent global explosion, simply passed up for the producers who, one imagines, had an album’s worth of material ready to go and the chutzpah to make things happen.

It’s good news, then, that Space is finally getting his moment in the sun with Legacy, a collection of 14 tracks from the last decade of RP Boo output. Of course, both originators and popularisers have their place. But while Rashad has set about proving that footwork can have a global outlook – and very successfully, too – the tracks contained on Legacy seem the best possible embodiment of the hermetic, hyper-competitive world from which the style sprang. In fact, Space’s music is odd even by those standards – a counterpoint to the heritage-steeped output of fellow former Dance Mania affiliate Traxman. While both often draw from the same sources – pulpy B-Movie soundtracks and dialogue, instrumental jazz, dislocated divas – the way Space strings these samples together is singularly stark and surreal. RP Boo productions exist for the striplit world of the dance battle, and it’s the extreme specificity of their intended context that makes them so fascinating.

Legacy’s most obviously rewarding moments, then, are when Space pushes this alien thrill to its limit. ‘The Opponent’ and ‘Speakers R-4 (Sounds)’ are both highly distilled beat work-outs, sporting rhythms so asymmetrical that pinpointing where the downbeat falls is like trying to find the seam on a roll of sellotape. ‘Steamidity’ and ‘Invisibu Boogie!’, meanwhile, thrive on the interplay between languid halftime and twitchy double time; a dichotomy present in much footwork but rarely executed with such spartan flair. Space ventures into straighter four-four territory on occasion, too: with considerable success on the oddly jaunty ‘Robotbutizm’; less so in ‘Red Hot’ and ‘There U’Go Boi’, where a layer-on-layer approach to arrangement risks clouding the vivid weirdness of the initial ideas. But weightlessness is undoubtedly Space’s strongest suit – a fact best represented by closer ‘Area 72’, whose sampled breakdown seems to run at a different tempo to the pointillist percussion work going on up top, to oddly meditative effect.

In all cases this is combative music, its sounds – particularly those excoriating snares and claps – designed to assault the senses rather than caress them. But while that makes this record a fatiguing listen in places, it also means that the few fleeting moments of softness are all the more striking. ‘Sentimental’ is a particular highlight, its slushy Quiet Storm-style sample re-pitched and fractured into a marvellous stumbling beat, woody tomtom hits and hihats flying every which way. RP Boo’s music is not exactly an easy sell, but in a just world Legacy would be the moment when he begins to get the recognition he deserves.

Wiley‘s autobiography – if it’s ever written – will contain more interesting stories than a thousand Totally Franks or Wayne Rooney: My Story So Fars. One of them, we presume, will centre around the video shoot for ‘Wearing my Rolex’.

Wiley’s first truly major hit, and the track that got him signed to one of his many aborted record deals (Asylum, in this case), ‘Wearing my Rolex’ started off life as an electro-referencing club track before eventually hitting number two in the charts. Many, however, remember it most fondly for its video. Shot in London at night, it featured a team of dancing foxes with no Wiley in sight – prompting The Sun to report that Wiley had a phobia of the animal and was too scared to shoot the video; a claim that Wiley later denied in typically hilarious fashion.

A post on the Somesuchandco blog, from someone involved in the shoot, now tells the story from the inside, from initial meetings with Wiley and the track’s producer Bless Beats (choice quote: “Bless Beats is the most stoned man I’ve ever seen. Lean does not even begin to describe it. Chinese eyes peer from under a cap, bloodshot and wet. His eyelashes look like they’re encrusted with THC crystals. All he can say is safe. Safe. He is actually made out of zoots”), through the on site problems (“No good sweating into your Barbour. You need to sort this shit out. Then the full first AD shake down. Get him out. Now. The schedule’s already fucked”) to Wiley eventually walking out of the shoot, claiming that it was “white people’s vision… and then walking off.” You can – and should - read it all here.

In current Wiley news, he’s currently making it as public as possible that he wants to leave Warner, the label that released Wiley’s last album The Ascent - though naturally, he leaked it himself before release. You can read our in-depth interview with Wiley from the start of 2012 here.

Following on from our Best Bandcamp Releases Of The Month, we’re thrilled to announced a second new column, this time digesting the best contemporary cassette releases. The cassette circuit is a wellspring of inventive and surprising music – and more often than not, the best releases get minimal-to-zero coverage. In the first instalment of a new monthly column, Brad Rose – boss of nonpareil cassette and vinyl label Digitalis Recordings - picks out the cream of under-the-radar tape releases from the last month or so. 

The number of tapes being released on large and small labels alike these days is ridiculous, and trying to wade through all of it is an impossible task.

Worse is how many of these cassettes are nice enough but generally unremarkable.  As always, though, there are a handful that stand out from the pack, yet too often go unnoticed.

This month we dig into subterranean electronics from Black Hat, the industrial grime of Lavas Magmas, Beaunoise getting his remix action on, echo-heavy Pod Blotz, New Age stealth from Discoverer, and a weird as hell tape called Shampoing and Toner.

Use your keyboard’s arrow keys or hit the prev / next arrows on your screen to turn pages (page 1/7)

Manchester producer Sam Walton today announces his debut album for Hyperdub, Beyond. 

A contribution to Keysound’s All-Stars series aside, Walton has only ever released on Hyperdub, dropping a pair of EPs (Walton, 2011; All Night, 2012) and more recently announcing a vinyl only release for the label titled ‘Baby’. On Beyond, his productions really sparkle technically – there’s an impressive physicality to the whole album, with a woody texture to the drums creating cohesion – as he tackles 4×4 house, ghostly garage and, at times, grime. In Walton’s words, “I just wanted there to be a contrast between bright and dark, I didn’t want to stick to a specific genre either. Just a vibe.”

Beyond marks Hyperdub’s second full-length of 2013 following the instrumental version of LV’s Sebenza, with the announcement of a new Ikonika album set to follow.

Last May, Donna Summer, the queen of disco, sadly died. 

Best known for her Giorgio Moroder-produced hits ‘I Feel Love’ and ‘Love to Love You’, the news of her death prompted this tribute piece by Todd Honeycutt, a YouTube user who makes recreations of hits using just his voice; in his words, “all of the sounds are human – sound produced by me only, without pitch correction or auto-tune.” Although in his cover of ‘I Feel Love’ he breaks his own rules slightly, using pitch-shifting for one of the drum sounds and a bass note that “no human could hit”, it’s still damn impressive, and was brought to our attention this week by Moroder himself, on Facebook.

Check out the cover above, and stream Moroder’s first ever DJ set, from New York this week, here. New to Moroder’s work? Check out our beginner’s guide to him here.