There were plenty of reasons for Londoner James Mathé to simply keep course after the release of his well received debut album, Chemical Campfires in 2008 on Fence Records: a flourishing reputation as one of Britain's most exciting acoustic troubadours, a prominent spot in Johnny Flynn and Jose Gonzales' backing bands, the roar of applause from the audience at a sold-out show at New York's Bowery Ballroom still ringing in his ears. But Mathé had other ideas. “I loved the acoustic scene, but knew it was not all I was about,” he remembers. “So I dug out all my old Casiotone keyboards, drum machines and analogue synths and just started writing.”

Bloodlines, then, is a compelling reinvention and sees Mathé’s emotive missives from young adulthood rewired into elegiac electronic anthems, dusted with huge spectral gasps of reverb and soul-wrenching organ melodies. Unusually for such an electronic album, it was recorded on vintage analogue gear and straight to tape.  “I really fancied getting back to basics,” says Mathé “I was tired of trying to iron out all the mistakes in modern production. I wanted to record live to tape, keeping all the mistakes in, warts and all.”   

From the sultry ache of opener Bloodline – a nod to Massive Attack's Unfinished Sympathy “about not picking up the bad habits of the generation before you”, says Mathé – to the Pharrell Williams-inspired urban crunch of ‘Turbine’, all the way to ‘The Load’, written when Mathé was indulging in his love of Jurassic 5 era 90s hip hop, Bloodlines is a brilliantly varied listen that pulls and paws at your heartstrings.    If there's a gloriously loose, tenebrous feel to songs like the blue-eyed electro-soul ‘Pagliacco’, it might have something to do with the Londoner's organic approach to song writing. “I just sit down with my dictaphone and make sense of what comes out afterwards. The best stuff usually comes when I’m hungover or not really thinking. The minute I try to be clever with words, it just sounds shit,” Mathé laughs.  Instead, the album's lyrics burn with a simple, poignant immediacy and Mathé sings them with touching, soulful grace. 

Recently signed to iconic London label Memphis Industries (Field Music, POLIÇA, The Go! Team, Dutch Uncles), Mathé is influenced by everything from soul men Stevie Wonder, D'Angelo and Levon Helm to Dirty Projectors and Sufjan Stevens but points to one inspiration in particular for the overall mood of Bloodlines – Vincent Gallo’s cult '90s film Buffalo 66, a twisted romance about a tap dancer who falls for her convict kidnapper – “the end scene which features Yes's Heart of the Sunrise and the scene with Cristina Ricci dancing to King Crimson’s Moonshine at a bowling hall especially,” he notes. 

Tender yet triumphant, Bloodlines marks Mathé as one of Britain's most versatile and adventurous artists.


Channelled madness – the sound Dawn of Midi spent years shaping, culminating into their most mesmerising work yet

With Dysnomia, the Brooklyn-based group Dawn of Midi abandons improvisation in favour of composition, utilising sophisticated rhythmic structures from North and West African folk traditions to weave a sonic tapestry of trance-inducing grooves. From close up one may see only dots, but when stepping back an undulating image reveals itself. “We didn’t want to create anything cerebral,” says Belyamani, “we wanted something visceral, something that would awaken our instinctive dance impulses.”
Having met at California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles in 2006, bassist Aakaash Israni, pianist Amino Belyamani and drummer Qasim Naqvi found their original rapport through late night tennis matches on the campus court. The chemistry they founded there eventually led them back indoors to improvise together; something they did in total darkness to deprive themselves of all their senses except the crucial one – their hearing.
The manner, by which a trio of solely acoustic instruments ends up sounding like electronic music, has to do with the unconventional ways the group play their instruments on Dysnomia. The record comes to life in the trio’s critically acclaimed live shows, a test of endurance and trust that involves performing their hand-looped acoustic minimalism note for note, just as the compositions were recorded. Dawn of Midi’s sets are as energetic and rhythmic as a seamlessly mixed DJ-set, mesmerising fans in the same way the group’s favourite experimental and electronic acts have for decades.
The album was recorded to 2-inch tape at Waterfront Studios in Hudson, New York - a former church that was purchased and transformed into an analogue recording playground by the great engineer Henry Hirsch. Once the band visited the studio and met Henry, an expert in analogue recording equipped with a vintage Helios console, 16 and 24-track tape machines and a superb collection of microphones, it was obvious they had to record there; it was miles ahead of anywhere else they had visited. Rusty Santos then mixed the album to make sure it would hit as hard as the group’s favourite electronic albums do in spite of it being entirely acoustic.
“We wanted to make a record that sounded both musically futuristic and sonically vintage,” explains Israni, “and since the album never saw a proper international release, it is very exciting to see what might happen when more people are exposed to it. And to be aligned with Erased Tapes, whose enthusiasm for the music they release has done a lot for exposing unique instrumental and electronic music, makes it that much more interesting.”

Dysnomia will be released worldwide on June 1st, 2015 through Erased Tapes – available on 2x LP, CD and Download.

CONTACTS:
Sacred Bones records for North America-  irene@sacredbonesrecords.com
Bella Union records for the rest of the world- mark@bellaunion.com

For publishing, contact madison@terrorbird.com and josh@terrorbird.com

For concerts outside of North America, contact Steven -Steven@toutpartout.com

For concerts in North America, contact chris@anniversarygroup.com

For a press contact in North America, contact  patrick@pitchperfectpr.com
For a press contact for the rest of the world, contact  duncan@bellaunion.com

'Veneer - 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition' available now (2LP / DIGITAL) https://josegonzalez.lnk.to/Veneer20YD

More info: www.nilsfrahm.com

Management: 
felix(at)agentur-grimm(dot)com


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