New Music Friday Archive - 3

Stream 'Movie Night Cancelled (Domenique Dub Version)' : https://noireblanche.lnk.to/Movie_Night_Cancelled_Domenique_Dub_Version

Domenique Dumont is Latvian enigmatic producer Arturs Liepins. After a year of silence following his album 'People On Sunday', he blesses us with his comeback and this beautiful deep dub re-interpretation of 'Movie Night Cancelled'. This blend of carefree exotic melodies and cosmic sounds reminds us the early Antinote LPs vibes and brings us back to the beautiful summer afternoon we already miss.

All Inclusive Remixes

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Pool Boy - Movie Night Cancelled (Domenique Dumont Dub Version)

Legacy

Mister Unknown

Softboi

Sunset

No one has lived a life quite like Marcos Valle. He became an overnight international sensation, fled a military dictatorship, dodged the Vietnam war draft, had his music sung by Homer Simpson, made enemies with Marlon Brando, and became an unsuspecting fitness guru for multiple generations. But to truly understand the great Brazilian composer, arranger, singer and multi instrumentalist, one must listen to his music.

Between the release of his first album in 1962 and today, Marcos Valle has released twenty-two studio albums traversing definitive bossa nova, classic samba, iconic disco pop, psychedelic rock, nineties dance and orchestral music. He has also had his songs recorded by some of the all time greats, including Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughn, Sergio Mendes, Elis Regina, and (last but not least), Emma Button of the Spice Girls. He has also had his music sampled by Jay-Z, Kanye West, Pusha T and many more. With his twenty-third studio album Túnel Acustico, Valle set out to bring it all together.

“I believe my music is many things. It goes in different directions. I have many different ways of writing music, sometimes it’s melodies and harmony, sometimes the groove is the focus. But all the music I have made over my sixty year career is unified. It is all natural and it is all sincere. And this is what I wanted to bring to my new album.”

A prominent feature of Valle’s career has been his dual residence between Brazil and the USA. Originally moving over in the mid-sixties on the back of bossa nova’s international proliferation, Valle toured with Sergio Mendes and became hugely in demand as a composer and arranger. But the Vietnam War loomed and the threat of being drafted saw him return to Brazil. He spent the following years in Rio writing music for TV and film, as well as four cult favourite albums in collaboration with some of Brazil’s most groundbreaking musicians including Milton Nascimento, Azymuth, Som Imaginario and O Terco.

By 1975, Brazil's military dictatorship was at its most oppressive, making living and working increasingly difficult. Valle moved back to the US where he would reside in LA, writing songs for, and collaborating with the likes of Eumir Deodato, Airto Moreira, Chicago, Sarah Vaughn and Leon Ware, amongst others.

Túnel Acústico features two songs originally conceived during Valle’s time on the West Coast: “Feels So Good”, a stirring two-step soul triumph written in 1979 with soul icon Leon Ware, and the sublime AOR disco track “Life Is What It Is”, composed around the same time, with percussionist Laudir De Oliveira from the group Chicago.

On Túnel Acústico, Valle's core band features two members of the renowned Brazilian jazz-funk group Azymuth: Alex Malheiros on bass and Renato Massa on drums. The rhythm section is completed by percussionist Ian Moreira, with additional contributions from guitarist Paulinho Guitarra and trumpeter Jesse Sadoc.

The contemporarily composed music on Túnel Acústico features an impressive lineup of guest lyricists, including renowned Brazilian artists: Joyce Moreno, Céu, and Moreno Veloso, as well as Valle's brother Paulo Sergio Valle.

The album closes with "Thank You Burt (For Bacharach)", a tribute to the legendary composer who passed away in 2023.

Marcos Valle - Todo Dia Santo

Ripple On The Wing

Changes

The Rituals of Infinity

Sun Hat

Beamed out on Luke Una’s E Soul Cultura label, Transmission Towers first broadcast, Transmission One, has been causing a stir wherever it has been received. A debut album of music forged in a far-off dimension. Off-kilter, oddball yet deeply emotional machine soul, fused with an Afrofuturist touch courtesy of Mark Kyriacou and Eleanor Mante. Now Crooked Man reaches through the spacetime continuum to produce a set of brand-new, future-facing Transmission One remixes. Moving beyond the realms of your average remixes, Crooked Man sets forth a whole new album of transcendental, tripped-out productions that range from gravity-defying, cosmic meltdowns to brain-busting galactic dance workouts.  

A long-standing figure in the universe of electronic dance music, Sheffield-born Crooked Man aka Richard Barratt released one of bleep techno’s defining records back in ‘89. Landing on Warp, it came under the alias Sweet Exorcist with the late great Richard H. Kirk. Since then, Barratt has put out a slew of exceptional productions under a variety of different monikers from Crooked Man and Parrot to Earth Angel and Athletes of God. He has released on DFA, delivered countless remixes for Róisín Murphy and reimagined the likes of JIM and Joe Goddard. Every inch of that experience and expertise has been deployed on this Transmission Towers remix release.

Who better to rework an already off-kilter tour de force than the Crooked Man himself? Creating a new album's worth of material, he utilises the synthesised yet sentimental world of Transmission Towers yet flips it into ever more escapist dimensions. Take ‘Up’, once an early electro groover now a feverish, mutant dancefloor mind bender, or ‘Mega’, that’s twisted into a vocoder-led, sci-fi trance. Elsewhere, ‘Shadow’ morphs into a swirling breakbeat trip, ‘One’ becomes a marching, late-night, synth-pop foot stomper and ‘Everything’ is contorted from a post-punk guitar trip into a cybertronic, new beat heater. 

The album though is not all on a dancefloor trajectory, with tracks like ‘Roller Skater 23’ turned from an intergalactic cruiser into a dubbed-out dream state and ‘Cosmic Trigger’ leaning into a gravitational pull of space-echoed delays and sonic solar flares.

Every twist, every turn, Crooked Man plots new coordinates, yet the overarching journey is one of seamless synergy. This is music made in an alternate reality, that distorts time, warps minds, hits hard and sinks deep, leaving a lasting impression in an age of fading attention spans and throwaway content.

Changes

EllaThompsonMusic

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