Electronic Musician June 2020

Recorded in the legendary EastWest studios, Moby created this album in Studio 3 where Pet Sounds was recorded, using the same board that was used in the making of Ziggy Stardust and the same piano that Sinatra used to record some of his most notable hits. Keeping with Moby’s history of donating to charity (in 2018, he started selling off his records and collection of synthesizers and drum machines, donating the proceeds to charity), he is using this album as a sounding board to bring attention to a long list of charities dedicated to preserving our planet and all its inhabitants.

Following remix work for Björk and Zola Jesus, productions for serpentwithfeet, and her debut album on Tri-Angle, American experimental musician and producer Katie Gately moves to Houndstooth for her sophomore album Loom, dedicated to her mother, who passed away in 2018.

The project of experimental musician Daniel Lopatin, Oneohtrix Point Never explores how history, memory, and music intersect in retro synth reveries and more complex works. The flowing electronics of OPN's early albums - which were gathered in the acclaimed 2009 collection Rifts - suggested Lopatin was an heir to Tangerine Dream. However, he soon revealed other layers to his music with a string of releases that reflected his interest in high art as well as pop-culture artifacts including video games, science fiction, anime, and advertising (which Lopatin sampled cleverly on 2011's Replica). After signing to Warp Records, Oneohtrix Point Never only grew more adventurous with albums like 2015's Garden of Delete, an improbable yet moving fusion of metal, trance, R&B, and Top 40 pop. During this time, Lopatin also became an award-winning film composer…

One of the towering figures of 20th century's music, Alabama-born pianist and organist Herman "Sun Ra" Blount (1914) became the cosmic musician par excellence. Despite dressing in extraterrestrial costumes (but inspired by the pharaohs of ancient Egypt) and despite living inside a self-crafted sci-fi mythology (he always maintained that he was from Saturn, and no biographer conclusively proved his birth date) and despite littering his music with lyrics inspired to a self-penned spiritual philosophy (he never engaged in sexual relationships apparently because he considered himself an angel), Sun Ra created one of the most original styles of music thanks to a chronic disrespect for both established dogmas and trendy movements.

A re-interpretation so often comes from an impulse, even if subliminal, of one-upmanship – let me do better, wait ‘til you hear it my way. Sometimes though, and it happens too rarely, the cover is an act of devotion in which a musician’s humility produces something more beautiful than bravura could. When Erik Hall undertook his painstaking reconstruction of Steve Reich’s 1976 masterpiece of minimalism, “Music for Eighteen Musicians”, it was as much an exercise in modesty as ambition. With its repetitions and complex constructions, the piece makes great demands on stamina and concentration, and Reich himself advised that these challenges meant it should probably be performed with more than eighteen musicians. Hall, however, recorded every part himself in his small home studio, playing instruments he had on hand, in live, single takes.

Of course, you have already heard all of that: sometime, somewhere, somehow. Of course, it is again a piano trio, the most traditional, most often used, but also the most common collection of band members grouped together in one category in jazz…

Oxygène 3 is the nineteenth studio album by the French electronic musician and composer Jean-Michel Jarre. Announced via a post on Jarre's Instagram account, the album was released on 2 December 2016, on the 40th anniversary of the original Oxygène album. During the recording of his Electronica albums, Jarre composed and recorded a piece that he said "made me think about what Oxygène could be if I was composing it today." With the 40th anniversary in mind, Jarre decided to record another chapter of Oxygène, with the original minimalist approach in mind, but using new technology to create it.