electronica – Page 2

Glasys | Back to Reality

“GLASYS (Gil Assayas) is a pianist, synthesist, producer and vocalist who melds many genres and influences including Electronic Music, Alternative Rock, Jazz, Classical and Video Game Music,” (from Glasys’ site). “This album (Tugging on My Heartchips) is mainly inspired by the Gameboy games from my childhood. As a kid, the only gaming console I had was the original gray Gameboy, which I spent countless hours playing.

Some of those games had incredible soundtracks (Zelda: Link’s Awakening and Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge are two examples) and I’d often turn on my Gameboy just to listen to the music! No joke, some of those themes would make me tear up. I tried to capture those magical, nostalgic feelings in this 7-track album.”

After starting with a theme in an A dorian scale, the same passage is repeated in C# dorian at 0:59 on “Back to Reality” (2023). At 1:39, a bridge falls gradually downward, leading us back to A dorian at 1:54; the pattern repeats from there. Throughout the video, the virtual and the real world fight for prominence, until the timbre shifts from electronic keyboards to acoustic piano at 3:19, visiting the same territory with more expression and rubato. However, the digital world seems to get the last word as the end fade brings a subtly deflating tonality (4:20).

Sanna Nielsen | Undo

“Undo,” written by Fredrik Kempe, David Kreuger, and Hamed “K-One” Pirouzpanah, was recorded by Swedish singer Sanna Nielsen and selected as Sweden’s entry in the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest. Nielsen later included the track on an EP, also released in 2014.

The song begins in Eb minor and shifts up a half step at 2:21.

Royksopp | Royksopp Forever

From MotD reader and first-time contributor Max Willard comes the track “Royksopp Forever” (2009) by the Norwegian electronica duo Royksopp.

The duo’s album The Invitable End (2014) was widely considered to be the duo’s swan song; quite a few years of radio silence followed. In a 2022 Billboard interview, the duo describe their return: “The current scene is, luckily, a lot of things. That hasn’t changed for us. Some people look at the scene as music that crosses over, because electronic dance music became pop at some stage in the last 10 years … On the flip side, because it’s so saturated with music, there is a lot of crap as well. I have to be blunt and state the obvious. But as far as electronic music goes, for example, the genre of traditional rock was proclaimed “dead.” Those kinds of statements are so redundant. It’s just not as prominent, but it’s obviously still there. It’s just shifted a bit. Electronic music is now mainstream pop music. It’s just a little shift, but nothing really dies. It just becomes a bit more specialized and disappears and reappears. I like those shifting trends.”

Max’s take: “I think this modulation merits consideration because the entire song builds to the moment of key inflection.” After starting in D minor, the track transitions at 3:10 to a behemoth E major/A minor vamp, repeating onward to the end as it fades and shapeshifts.

Chloe Martini | Love You The Right Way (feat. KWAYE)

“Love You The Right Way” is featured on Polish producer Chloe Martini’s 2019 EP Daydream. Heralded by Spotify for its “blistering electronics fused to soulful R&B textures,” the EP includes five tracks — two with the British-Zimbabwean singer KWAYE. Martini, who is completely self-taught, counts Prince, Jimmy Jam, and Terry Lewis among those who have influenced her most.

The track begins in B and winds its way up a whole step at 3:01.

Fol Chen | No Wedding Cake

“Since 2009, the Los Angeles-area collective has created their signature sound from field recordings and an electronic junk drawer, splicing compound beats and sending warped vocal transmissions,” reports AsthmaticKitty, Fol Chen’s label. “The band calls their genre ‘Opera House,’ a name lifted from Malcolm McLaren but recoined as beat-driven electronica with grand, operatic gestures and lyrically dense storytelling … think of it as pop music for people who aren’t sure where or when they are, but who know it’s nowhere they’ve been before.”

NPR reviewed the electronica/pop tune “No Wedding Cake,” from the band’s debut 2009 album Part 1: John Shade, Your Fortune’s Made: ” … How can you not develop an immediate fondness for an art-rock experiment that delivers sentiments like, ‘I could never break your heart,’ and simply beseeches us to just ‘listen to this song’? … charm and a knack for memorable melodies is what lends Fol Chen an energy too many self-consciously hip bands lack.”

The band experiments with multiple shifts in instrumental texture on the track, from an occasional burst of up-the-neck 16th-note funk guitar to gently undulating keyboards whose slow sine-wave pulse is entirely separate from the relentless eighth-note groove. 1:33 brings a casual, unprepared whole-step modulation so guileless that it’s barely noticeable. Many thanks to our regular contributor JHarms for this submission!

Childish Gambino | Sober

“Donald Glover doesn’t need your approval. He has always had plenty of admirers, be it through his standup, TV work, or his music, which he makes as Childish Gambino,” Consequence declares in its review of his 2014 EP Kauai. “Fans of his comedy routines and 30 Rock and Community episodes followed him to the mixtape circuit, a world which rewards humor but not necessarily Gambino’s particular brand of pop culture-dissecting kind. In turn, depending on who you ask, he’s one of hip-hop’s smartest MCs or a short-shorts-wearing outsider who’s unable to see why he’s unwelcome.”

Glover’s come a long distance since 2014. As Childish Gambino, he’s been extremely prolific, releasing multiple albums, EPs, and “mixtapes,” growing in prominence as he goes. His track “This is America” (2018), which went to #1 in the US and many other countries, was released with a single-take music video which Time described as “laden with metaphors about race and gun violence in America.”

After starting in a F major, 2014’s “Sober” drops a break (2:50) comprised of only scant background vocals, the buzz of heavily distorted electronic bass, and percussion, which somewhat obscures the whole-step modulation to G major at 3:09. The break’s contorted landscape continues until 3:29, when there’s a return of Glover’s clear, seemingly effortless falsetto over pulsing eighth-note synths and major 7th voicings at just about every opportunity.

Many thanks to Mark L. for this submission — his first!

Owl City | Peppermint Winter

Adam Brown, the creator of the electronic music project Owl City, described this song as being about his “…own participation in snowball fights and sidewalk shoveling. Sleigh rides, present-giving and receiving and of course, the ingestion of marvelous Yuletide nutrition (or lack thereof), namely sugar cookies, hot chocolate and peppermint candy canes…”

Released in 2010 as a stand-alone single, the track has a lilting waltz-like feel, and modulates from C major to D at 2:39.

Louis Cole | Tunnels in the Air

More often than not, electronica/funk/pop artist Louis Cole writes uptempo tunes about downer subjects. AllMusic calls him “a left-field pop musician whose energized material often puts an ebullient spin on everyday pitfalls.” Louis Cole is the co-founder of Knower, has written for Seal and co-written with Thundercat, has played with Snarky Puppy, opened (along with Genevieve Artadi, the other half of Knower) for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and collaborated with celebrated jazz pianist Brad Mehldau on a recent track “Real Life.”

Pitchfork‘s review of Cole’s 2018 album, Time, can’t be improved upon:

“The mark of a great chord progression is a peculiar mixture of surprise and inevitability. On first listen, you find yourself confused by the way that one chord follows another, refusing to follow the well-trodden path: jumping when they should step and bounding when they should glide. Eventually, once the song has burned itself into your brain—once its course has remapped your own neural pathways—you’ll have trouble imagining a world where these curious patterns didn’t exist. But even then, even after no matter how many plays, that harmonic dodge-and-feint will still produce the tiniest frisson of wrongness. It’s among the sweetest dopamine hits that music is capable of producing.

Louis Cole’s instrument of choice is the drums, but he definitely knows his way around a killer set of changes. Time, his third album, is brimming with strange, counterintuitive progressions—chords that seem to slip sideways, tumbling into one another, jostling and pivoting just when you don’t expect. An unusual mixture of hard funk and soft pop, like Zapp and Burt Bacharach stuck in an elevator together, Cole’s is a sly, jubilant sound; it makes good use of the way funk also thrives upon a sense of wrongness, a screw-faced delight at things gone awry.”

“Tunnels in the Air” (2018) starts in G minor; at 2:26, the track modulates up to Bb minor. The outro gives us a space-age church pipe organ at 2:57 — right down to a traditional plagal cadence into a closing Eb major.

Knower | Trust the Light

In a departure from its trademark uptempo jazz/funk sound, electronica duo Knower‘s “Trust the Light” (2010) is a gentle waltz. Full of harmonic pivots, the tune features a simple but compelling 5-note melodic motif, first heard at 0:06 – 0:08. The motif is the only constant as the harmonic ground falls from beneath our feet between 0:24 and 0:50. At 0:51, we’re back in the original key for a second verse of this engaging miniature; starting at 1:08, the motif echoes again over the outro. This tiny jewelbox of a tune runs for a total of only 1:40.

Many thanks to MotD fan Jonathan JHarms Harms for this submission!

AJR | Weak

AJR is an American pop band led by three brothers, Adam, Jack, and Ryan Met. The New York Post describes the band’s sound as an “electric” mix of “pop, doo-wop, electronic, and dubstep.” In 2019, the band’s third album debuted at #8 on the Billboard 200 and reached #1 on the Top Rock Albums chart. In an interview with Allaccess.com, the trio said “…our songs might be known, but we are not famous.” The band’s 2016 single, Weak, “came from balancing the need to give into temptation with the importance of staying strong.”

“Weak” features a whole-step key change at 2:56.