Various Artists, Real World Records Label Sampler

Since its inception in 1989, the Real World label has been home to some of the most forward-thinking, boundary-shaking music from around the globe. Founded by Peter Gabriel as a kind of recorded complement to his WOMAD festival, the label soon took on a life of its own, releasing records by giants like Tabu Ley Rochereau, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Jocelyn Pook and more. This sampler is a good place to start if you’re looking to discover the label’s all-encompassing sound.

Orchestra Super Mazembe, Mazembe @ 45 ROM Vol. 2

In the ’70s, it wasn’t unusual for soul and funk singles to be so long that one track was split over both sides of the record. But in Kenya, in the ’70s and ’80s, every single was like that. Five minutes was never enough; the audience wanted a track to last eight or nine minutes and the artists were happy to comply. And there was another, more important, reason: people didn’t have the money to buy entire albums, but they could afford singles.

Orchestra Super Mazembe, from Zaire via Nairobi, were the kings of this Kenyan pop scene. They hit it big in 1977 with their infectious “soukous” style, a sped-up descendant of Congolese rumba. Their lilting vocal harmonies and cascading guitars struck a chord across East Africa, and once they reached the top they stayed there until the mid ’80s, releasing more than 40 singles, all of them hits. The fact that they sang in Lingala, a language from the other side of the continent, was immaterial. This was all about the music.

These nine tracks from the late ’70s and early ’80s are glorious and uplifting, with glistening lead guitar, fiery horns and percussion that defy the feet to stay still. There’s a formula to the Super Mazembe sound: each track has a four-part structure, starting off restrained before catching fire around the two-minute mark, then fading out halfway so the record could be flipped over. Then the main riff returns, fast and frantic. Sometimes, as on “Yo-Mabe” horns trade lines with the guitar to send the music spiralling higher and higher. On “Mwana Nyiau,” the singers miaow like cats, while the music teeters on the edge of chaos, a piece of brilliant madness.

There’s so much warmth here that it almost feels like it raises the temperature a couple of degrees. The pleasure is palpable — you can almost hear the smiles. Yes, there’s a formula to the music, but the effect is so joyful it really doesn’t matter.

Who Are…MS MR

“We fear rejection, prize attention, crave affection/ Dream, dream, dream of perfection!” That’s the refrain of “Salty Sweet,” a song MS MR wrote about signing to a major label — but on their stellar debut, Secondhand Rapture, it would seem that the duo’s fears didn’t materialize. Not only do Lizzy Plapinger and Max Hershenow deliver an array of haunting, period-skipping pop gems: They strike a rare balance between maintaining their DIY background and opening up their sound for a larger audience to enjoy. By meshing classic pop with more experimental sounds, they’re making up their own rules, as well as borrowing from the playbooks of some of the bands Plapinger helped launch on her label Neon Gold, like Passion Pit, Gotye, Ellie Goulding and Icona Pop. MS MR’s approach is similar — as they put it: “Pop rooted in an indie ethos.”

eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller spoke with each of them about the transcendent power of pop, embracing Tumblr as a way to give listeners visual context, and their ambitions for this project.

On keeping their project under wraps:

Max Hershenow: So much of this record is about the fact that no one knew that we were doing it. Our friends didn’t even know. No one but the two of us was hearing these songs for a really long time, which means that the music comes from a genuine place.

Lizzy Plapinger: When I started writing on my own, it was a very private thing — it didn’t feel appropriate to let other people know that I was exploring music because of my work on the industry side of things. I had started to make a name for myself with Neon Gold. We didn’t want the music to be judged, for better or for worse, by my reputation and name. We wanted to let the music come out. There was no pressure.

Hershenow: Nothing about the project was premeditated. It all came very organically. It wasn’t until after we had collected enough material to release an EP in May 2011 that we thought, “OK, maybe we are a band and need to figure out a name.” We liked the anonymity of MS MR and the fact that it’s formal but also really informal and genderless.

Plapinger: There was something sacred about that experience, and Max and I bonded more because it was a secret. The other side of it was that Max and I are very much a pop act — we love pop and totally embrace it — and we talked a lot about pop music [getting] a bad reputation because it becomes so much more about the personalities or the celebrity aspect of a project rather than the music itself. That’s not something that we’re interested in — and it’s not our personality. So we wanted the music to stand on its own and be recognized, I hope, as credible pop artists that weren’t coming from a machine.

On the darkness of their standout single “Hurricane” and the rest of the album:

Hershenow: We wrote the album in 2011-12, years shrouded in potential apocalypse and impending doom. We write our best songs when there’s a storm coming or a sense of unease in the air. New York City becomes electrified in those moments. “Hurricane” is obviously the most exaggerated example. I wrote the track the morning after Hurricane Irene passed, sent it to Lizzy, and she sent me lyrics and the melody within an hour. We recorded it the next day. It was the fastest we’ve done a song. It just kind of poured out of us.

Plapinger: Max and I love this juxtaposition of extremes: Really dark elements combined with the lighter pop sheen. Sometimes the music offsets the dark lyrics and sometimes the lyrics brighten the music. It’s all about combining those unexpected elements, just like our love of collage and visuals. We’re always hoping to bring together things that shouldn’t fit together but do. When people meet Max and me, we’re much lighter and normal than people would expect but I think there’s a real darkness in us — in everyone — that’s difficult to communicate right off the bat. But, because we were writing in secret, I think we allowed ourselves to really go there and explore those darker sides of ourselves because there was no pressure or fear of exposing that.

On the story behind the gorgeous strings-laden “BTSK”:

Hershenow: From “Hurricane,” I really loved the French horn and became obsessed with that sound. I wanted to continue to explore that on “BTSK” and let it be super orchestral and ethereal. It’s a MS MR take on a power ballad. It’s pretty poppy at its core but the melody is so weird and the lyrics put you off balance because they’re not what you expect.

Plapinger: As we were writing this album — it sounds cheesy, but — I fell in love. It was nice for me to explore that other side of my personality and write a pure love song. “BTSK” is about the process of me [going] from a sadder place in my life to finding someone who made me happy.

On bending pop into new shapes:

Hershenow: One of our goals is to push the boundaries of pop — what you can include and still [call] it pop. We’re just starting that exploration. As we develop as artists, we’ll continue to bring in new things. We both have very different backgrounds in music and most of the overlap is pop. I grew up listening to lots of folk and rock like Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, and Natalie Merchant — that range of things has given me an appreciation for good songwriting. As I grew up, I started listening to more pop. I have a deep love for pure pop like Robyn and Beyoncé. I think Charli XCX has a really incredible, interesting ear for melodies that I think Lizzy has.

Plapinger: Max and I come from different backgrounds in terms of our relationships with different genres but we overlap in our love and appreciation of pop. Pop is an awesome term because it means everything and nothing at the same time. It can be found in any genre, whether it’s electronic, R&B, rock, punk, folk, country. So for us, it felt like the door was wide open to experiment. I feel like every song on the album has its own personality in that way. It’s an experiment with all of those different genres and time periods. I can’t shirk the bands that are deeply rooted in my listenership: Beach House, the Weeknd, Lauryn Hill, Cocteau Twins and Boards of Canada. We’re using our own voice to put a spin on the artists we grew up listening to.

On pairing their music with a fully-formed aesthetic:

Hershenow: Tumblr allows us to create an environment in which we want our music to be listened to, for free. Making music in the 21st century, people are going to be listening to your music in the environment of their computer screen no matter what so I think artists have the opportunity to control what that environment looks and feels like.

Plapinger: We’re always looking for interesting avenues to relate to an audience, whether that be Tumblr, or a physical CD or vinyl. It’s about creating a balance between those industry personalities.

Hershenow: We’re both very visually inclined and that possibility excited both of us, so we really took it to the next level with Tumblr. We created a rich landscape that mirrors [our] sonic landscape, so they work in tandem. What’s cool is that because we could do it for free, and make the record so cheaply, we worked in secret for so long that we developed a core identity as artists both musically and visually. That’s allowed us to maintain control over every element of the project — even though we’ve continued to bring more people to the team. Even now with our major-label record deal and a lot of people helping out, every decision and creative choice comes from us, which is an opportunity I don’t think a lot of artists at our level have.

On the merging of indie and pop:

Hershenow: I think it’s a healthy push for both things. That’s happening in mainstream pop as well. Gotye, Foster the People, Mumford & Sons, or even Adele — 10 years ago you couldn’t have imagined those musicians being in the Top 10. There is a shift combining [to] indie elements in pop music. I think it’s a really exciting time to be making pop. There’s no limitation on what you can do or what you want to bring into it.

On taking career cues from Arcade Fire and LCD Soundsystem:

Hershenow: We’re really proud of the fact that our music is DIY and independent. That’s the impetus for our project but we also have big aspirations. We want to make this a long-term thing and we want to make it a career. Those things are balanced in that relationship. For me, it’s important to maintain that sense of exploration and curiosity. When people ask us, “Who are your inspirations?” It’s hard for us to nail them down but the artists we look to are Arcade Fire and LCD Soundsystem, who played the long game and stayed really true to their visions while becoming increasingly popular and building it in a really organic and healthy way. That’s sort of the trajectory that we look toward.

Plapinger: We’re incredibly proud of our indie and alternative roots and that’s something we always hope to stay true to but Max and I are ambitious people and we have massive aspirations. We’re always like, “How are we going to do this for the rest of our lives? How are we going to grow as a band? How are we going to get to headline Glastonbury?” — which is, like, my ultimate dream in life. We really want to prove that we’re much more than a buzzy band. The careers that we admire in other people are Arcade Fire and LCD Soundsystem. Those are bands that have always stayed true to their left-of-center aesthetic but write great music and have really grown with their audience. It’s not about choosing whether we need to be indie or mainstream. Those worlds are colliding more than they ever have. There’s an opportunity to bring those universes together so I think we’ll always play to those extremes.

Deafheaven, Sunbather

There are few commonalities between the melancholy drone of shoegazing and the furious assault of black metal, which makes finding common ground tricky work. Even hybrid groups like France’s Alcest and China’s Dopamine tend to downplay aggression for atmospherics. But with their second full-length, Sunbather, San Francisco’s Deafheaven carve out the perfect middle ground between Slowdive and Marduk. Three of the songs clock in at nine minutes or more, giving the band plenty of space to ebb and flow between brutality and bliss. The opening track “Dream House” sets the pace with nearly 30 seconds of hazy guitar distortion before bursting into grinding guitars, effect-saturated hooks, thunderous blast beats and roaring demonic vocals. As schizophrenic as the blend sounds on paper, the album coheres beautifully because Deafheaven have discovered the point where delicate enervation and furious despair meet, and they’ve mapped it from every angle.

Parts of Sunbather, like the undistorted instrumental “Irresistible,” are reflective and textural, while the title track is more aggro, contrasting ringing guitar melodies with a swarming distortion and shifting between slow, tumbling drums and blastbeat tempos. “Please Reminder” melds three minutes of Skullflower-style chainsaw noise collage with another three minutes of soft, lazy strumming, while “Windows” combines apocalyptic spoken word with haunting ambient feedback. But it’s the longer tunes, including “Vertigo” and “Pecan Tree” where Deafheaven discard any sense of artsy pretension for mesmeric compositions filled with yearning, violence and beautiful sadness.

New This Week: Portugal. The Man, Quadron, Jon Hopkins & More

Quadron, Avalanche: Like the smooth R&B debut from Rhye earlier this year? Quadron’s latest features half of that duo in a record that draws from both classic jazz and contemporary pop. Barry Walters says:

Like Rhye’s Mike Milosh, singer Coco O sounds as if she spent her tender years wailing along to nothing but Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu and Billie Holiday. And like Milosh, she’s not purely imitative: A growly throatiness, combined with far more idiomatic phrasing than most ESL vocalists can usually pull off, adds subtle twists that set Coco apart from less distinctive students. And her lyrics are similarly uncommon, full of playful quirks: “If for one day I could be any bug/ I’d let him kill me for a taste of his blood,” she sings of the man she’s love-stalking in “Crush.”

Portugal. The Man, Evil Friends: Portland’s Portugal. The Man team with Danger Mouse for their seventh full-length, and second on a major label. Barry Walters says:

Portugal. The Man dig drama: Any band that combines Robert Plant-ian yelps with Ziggy-esque combos of acoustic strumming and power chord thunder while shooting synth lasers toward the darkest side of the moon doesn’t shy away from theatricality. Danger Mouse’s cinematic sensibilities are a fine match, and they set the tone audaciously with opener “Plastic Soldiers”: The rhythm repeatedly drops and reenters as guitars, keys, dubby bass, strings and even horns similarly drift in and out of the mix.

Jon Hopkins, Immunity: He’s worked with the likes of Brian Eno and Coldplay, but Jon Hopkins’s latest finds him asserting his own voice as a musician and producer. eMusic’s Philip Sherburne says:

It’s heavier, and even clubbier, than one might have expected from his resume, underpinned by thundering kick drums and heaving waves of sub bass. Hopkins has said that the album’s sweep is intended to encapsulate the feeling of an epic night out, and that certainly comes across in the music. Stylistically, both Four Tet and James Holden’s deconstructed techno are obvious influences, but what Hopkins brings to the table is a knack for fusing narrative arcs with an almost sculptural sense of form.

The Lee Thompson Ska Orchestra, The Benevolence Of Sister Ignatius: Members of Madness and Nutty Boys band together to cover classic-era ska songs. Andrew Harrison says:

From the opening version of the Baba Brooks Band’s “Gun Fever” (party-time ska in its rude essence, all gunshots and spry electric organ), via a sinuous take on Desmond Dekker’s “Fu Manchu,” through deliciously woozy vibe-ups of “Napoleon Solo” and the “Mission Impossible” theme (’60s Jamaica was always big on spies) this is impossibly infectious music, played for the joy of it. Guest singer Bitty McLean aside, the vocals are best characterized as charmingly amateur but this stuff was always life-affirming first and professional a distant second. This is why ska never dates.

Thundercat, Apocalypse – The return of the madcap cartoon genius who made The Golden Age of the Apocalypse. This one, on first listen, sounds pillowier, more chilled-out and unzipped-intimate, than the manic and Technicolor Golden Age. His command of the areas between jazz-fusion, R&B, Quiet Storm, and straight-ahead bachelor-pop pop. It’s gorgeous, and makes a nice hardcore-jazz-nerd companion to the recent Daft Punk album.

Stephen King, John Mellencamp, T-Bone Burnett, and Guests, Ghost Brothers of Darkland County – Wow, that is a marquee right there. Yes, that is the creative team for this project, a musical based in a parched, John Steinbeck-style cruel American heartland; John Mellencamp writes the music and lyrics, Stephen King the libretto, and the project, with a revolving door cast that features Sheryl Crow, Rosanna Cash, Elvis Costello, and MANY others, is overseen by the master T-Bone.

Rogue Wave, Nightingale – Hushed, lovely, modest and classical indie-pop from this early-’00s mainstay.

Jonathan*Fire*Eater, Wolf Songs for Lambs -An old one, showing up on t he site today again for some reason: the debut of Jonathan*Fire*Eater, the band that would later, with a few adjustments, become The Walkmen.

Rhett Miller, The Dreamer – Sixth solo record from Miller, and first for his own Maximum Sunshine imprint, a mix of some live, some demos, some live stuff. Warm, rough, intimate, lovely.

The Spinto Band, Biba! 1 Island, 879 Votes (Original Soundtrack) – The long-running indie-pop band provides the soundtrack to a documentary about two rival groups on the tiny Pacific island of Tinian. Lets Spinto step completely outside of their “eclectic indie rock band” realm and truly embrace some different styles: Hawaiian slack-key, Spaghetti Western. An interesting curio.

Capital Cities, In A Tidal Wave of Mystery – L.A.-based indie-pop outfit; electro-poppy in an OK GO-ish way.

City and Colour, The Hurry and the Harm – The former Alexisonfire guitarist continues his evolution as a solo artist with some chunky, pleasingly straight-ahead rock music, grace with his dulcet, quavering tenor.

Ben Folds Five, Live – In the “what it says on the on the tin” department. Featuring renditions of “Brick,” “Song for the Dumped,” and most of the fan favorites.

GRMLN, Empire – Sun-baked, beer-can crumpling Wavves/style pop-punk. Good if you like that sort of thing.

June Tabor, Quercus – Wow, this album is BEAUTIFUL. Renowned folk singer June Tabor joins with saxophonist Iain Ballamy and pianist Huw Warren for a glassy-still, gently bone-chilling take on a series of folk standards. An evocative, misty little clearing where jazz and folk get to put on Renaissance Faire clothes and dance gracefully together.

Giorgio Moroder, From Here To Eternity – 1977 classic Moroder album, hitting the site just as Giorgio is basking in the glow of Daft Punk’s lovely tribute to him on Random Access Memories. Get this if you liked that.

George Benson, Inspiration: A Tribute To Nat King Cole – The beloved jazz guitarist and singer George Benson pays tribute to the King, with help from guests like Wynton Marsalis and Idina Menzel.

Latvian Radio Choir with Sigvards Klava, Rautavaara: Missa a cappella – The world premiere recording of the Mass from the popular Finnish composer, whose music is always richly melodic and haunting.

Dorothy Hindman, tapping the furnace – A collection of works by the Miami-based composer Dorothy Hindaman, whose music has the bustling, squawking energy of a busy city block. Cellos crunch with an almost punk-rock gusto, pianos hammer with sweaty, panicky exuberance, and electricity, literal and figurative, courses through every note.
Daniel Wohl, Corpus Equis – The Transit new-music ensemble joins up with an all-star contemporary classical roster – So Percussion, Julia Holter, Nadia Sirota – to record the works of up and coming composer Daniel Wohl.

Hot Chip, “Dark and Stormy” – Hot Chip single! The opposite of its title, unless of course they mean the rum drink.

Jacques Greene, “On Your Side” – Collaboration with How To Dress Well.

2 Chainz, “Feds Watchin” – New single from the gangly, shouting, rope-haired clown prince of Atlanta commercial hip-hop.

Quadron, Avalanche

Can’t get enough of this year’s instant soft-soul classic, Rhye’s Woman? Before there was Rhye, there was the 2009 debut of Quadron, the similarly sultry Danish duo of singer Coco O and multi-instrumentalist Robin Hannibal, the latter also half of Rhye. Having charmed Jay-Z, Coco O recently appeared on the Great Gasby soundtrack, and now the cognoscenti-approved pair returns with their major-label debut. Avalanche offers more of what makes Woman so sublime — plush R&B that draws from classic jazz as much as it does from contemporary pop — but with Coco’s feistier, more diverse delivery.

Like Rhye’s Mike Milosh, Coco sounds as if she spent her tender years wailing along to nothing but Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu and Billie Holiday. And like Milosh, she’s not purely imitative: A growly throatiness, combined with far more idiomatic phrasing than most ESL vocalists can usually pull off, adds subtle twists that set Coco apart from less distinctive students. And her lyrics are similarly uncommon, full of playful quirks: “If for one day I could be any bug/ I’d let him kill me for a taste of his blood,” she sings of the man she’s love-stalking in “Crush.”

Hannibal, as her producer cohort, once again proves himself a superlative studio rat. Producing, arranging, engineering and also playing all the instruments he hasn’t shrewdly assigned elsewhere, Hannibal creates some of the loveliest textures to grace R&B this millennium. Like ’70s Stevie Wonder, he combines technology with a broad palate of real strings, horns, woodwinds, guitars, and percussion. Alternating synthetic rhythm sections with live bass and drums but generally favoring acoustic instrumentation over electronics, he switches the combinations subtly while staying closer to chamber music than grandiose orchestrations. Always he supports rather than obscures Coco, and although each hold their own, their collaboration on swelling, rainbow-hued cuts like “LFT” and “Neverland” is sweetly symbiotic. This Avalanche feels like one long leisurely embrace.

Interview: Rodion Rosca

If things had worked out better, Rodion Ladislau Roșca might have been the Lee “Scratch” Perry of Romania.

Working in his bedroom during the 1970s, Rodion Roșca invented an immediately identifiable style of electronic music with only a pair of Tesla Sonet Duo reel-to-reel tape recorders, guitar, and a Soviet-made Faemi organ with flanger, phaser and fuzz pedals. Like his equipment, Rodion’s sound was a relatively complex assemblage of fairly simple parts obtained from Anglo-American rockers and German electronic experimentalists. Sometimes it sounded like Tangerine Dream performing Black Sabbath; at others like Kraftwerk as interpreted by Emerson Lake and Palmer.

The good news is that the powerful East European sounds of Rodion and his ever-changing band, Rodion G.A., were rediscovered in 2012 (by blogging filmmaker Luca Sorin) and have subsequently been anthologized by the Strut label as The Lost Tapes. Unfortunately, Rodion feels his recognition is way past due. As he told an interviewer in a promo documentary for the project, “It hurts me because it’s too late. Even if I became a millionaire now it will be too late…[My] life was destroyed.”

Rodion was under the weather but eager to relate his story when we spoke recently over the phone from Bucharest. “I’m a little bit ill because I have a very big problem with my liver,” he explained in halting English. “I have cirrhosis.”

Born in 1953, Rodion spent nearly his entire life in Romania’s second largest city, Cluj-Napoca, in the Transylvania region. As a teenager, he was an avid record collector devoted to the Rolling Stones (especially “Paint It Black”), the Beatles (especially “Hello Goodbye”), Frank Zappa and his favorite hard rockers, Black Sabbath. “Caravane” and other tracks demonstrate a marked Kraftwerk influence as well. His local listening included Romanian rockers such as Phoenix, Chromatic, Iuliu Merca and Beat-Grup 13, the first band he played in.

The first iteration of Rodion G.A included bassist Gicu Fărcaș, a friend from the boiler factory in which they toiled, and drummer Adrian Căpraru. It was not a permanent relationship by any stretch, and the group’s “G” lasted two years, its “A” only one. “I played with 16 keyboard players, eight drummers, and 10 bass guitarists,” says Rodion of his revolving-door lineup. “The problem was that they did not like to play somebody else’s music; they all wanted to be the chief.” Although Rodion found teaching the band how to play his electronic works frustrating, tracks like “Disco Mania” and “Citadela” suggest how potent they must have sounded onstage. With the end of the so-called “open” period in 1972, Romanian bands were under intense pressure by the secret police and neighborhood snitches to soften both their message and volume, and Rodion self-censored the protest music he wrote.

Rodion’s music is modular, with most of his relatively short tracks containing from three to six sections. “I don’t like the long songs of six or 10 minutes,” he says. “My music is very active, with many changes and many ideas.” After learning how to bounce parts between tracks on his reel-to-reels to create echo and other effects, he began to recycle sounds like a Jamaican dub producer, all without benefit of either a mixing board or synthesizer. The tracks “Caravane,” “Paradoxe,” “Stela si Lumini” (Stars and Light) and “Imagini Din Vis” (Dream Images), for example, were all based on drums sampled from an earlier track, “Ora” (Hour), which was recorded during a rare session for Romania’s state-owned Electrecord label. In the ’80s, Rodion’s palette expanded to include an East German Vermona drum machine, a toy Casio VL Tone (as heard on Trio’s “Da Da Da”), and a Soviet-made Faemi organ he augmented with flanger, phaser and fuzz pedals.

When Romania’s national radio station played his music, Rodion says, the songs inevitably topped the charts. He recalls being fascinated by the annual military parades in Cluj-Napoca, and it’s understandable why his Martian martial music was sometimes heard during news and sports broadcasts on Romanian national television — although he was never paid for its use; likewise for his Olympics-caliber “Diagonale,” which a local instructor commissioned as a gymnastics accompaniment.

Rodion stopped making music entirely when his mother died in 1989. “She was a most happy person when my songs were played on the radio and TV,” he says. He worked in another factory after her death, repairing audio equipment on the side (“There are no loudspeakers in the world I cannot repair”), until four years ago, when he once again began to compose music, for his daughter.

“I never thought I would be in this situation,” says Rodion of his recent reemergence. “Romania radio stations and magazines say that I am the father of electronic and new-wave music in Romania. And when I read this, I am very, very surprised. It’s very strange for me. I cannot understand how that is possible. Still today, I cannot believe that is true.”

Who Is…Jenny Hval?

Jenny Hval’s second solo album — fourth, if you count the two she recorded under the pseudonym Rockettothesky — opens with the Oslo-based artist illuminated by the glow of a computer screen as she watches internet porn. “It’s late and everything turns a white kind of dirty,” she says, setting the scene over a curious cascade of synths.

Forty minutes later, the album ends with Hval envisioning her voice as a second flesh. “My body is the end,” she sings on “The Seer,” as a psychedelic keyboard unspools into infinity.

The ideas on Innocence Is Kinky are bold, but the music itself takes even more risks; Hval combines synth-pop, performance art, drone, garage rock, skewed folk, spoken word and wordless ragas into a constantly mutating sonic palette. It’s the combination of music and concept that drives Hval, an academic and critic who wrote her master’s thesis on Kate Bush, penned a novel called Perlebryggeriet (The Pearl House), and designs sound installations such as the recent “A Continuous Echo of Splitting Hymens.”

Innocence Is Kinky grew out of Hval’s installations, yet the songs took on a life of their own as she played festivals and clubs around Scandinavia and Europe, where a new aggression snuck into her performances. By the time she recorded the album with producer John Parish (P.J. Harvey, Sparklehorse, Grandaddy), the songs had morphed into all new arrangements that allowed Hval to bend her dexterous voice into all new shapes and sounds.

As she prepared for tour, Hval spoke with eMusic’s Stephen M. Deusner about film close-ups, European nationalism, the male gaze and the challenge of writing pure sound.

On working with John Parish:

A friend of mine from Australia had almost worked with him, and she was saying how nice he was, so I decided to contact him — but I’m very shy, so I had to get someone else to do it. He was very nice and incredibly balanced and very open, and he was not in any way judgmental about the music, which allowed me to be more spontaneous. He was just this wide-open ear, and was brave with the music. Plus, he threw himself into playing with my band as a band member, so it was very much a creative collaboration. It was very relaxed and we had a lot of fun. It was very positive and almost like a cheerful process, and there’s actually a lot of humor on the album. I have this tendency to get stuck in this weird way of thinking, where I find that something must be serious to be experimental. How dumb. When I got home from recording, John sent me one of Captain Beefheart’s albums — Doc at the Radar Station — and I’ve been listening a lot to that and learning a lot from that.

On writing and singing in both English and Norwegian:

Obviously, my Norwegian is superior to my English. I only started writing in English when I moved to Australia. But sometimes I feel like I’m a grown up in Norwegian but I’m a teenager in English. I’ve grown up listening to pop music with English lyrics and almost nothing with Norwegian lyrics, so English was always the language to be sung and Norwegian was the language in which teachers told you what to do. I remember listening to a lot of the Velvet Underground, and I didn’t understand any of the drug references. That came later. When you listened to pop music, you didn’t understand a single word for years, so you just invented your own meaning. It’s very far away from what the actual meaning is, but you have this amazing process of just listening to language and not even thinking that it is language. It’s this quality of seeing straight through the words and into the sound. English was always freer, and I still tap into that freedom when I write. But recently I’ve written a couple of new songs where I sing in both English and Norwegian. For me, this is just crazy. I have no voice in Norwegian, so I find myself sounding like I’m doing traditional Indian singing. So I’m still trying to learn how to sing in Norwegian. It’s very new. But I’m of two minds about using Norwegian, because it’s very hip at the moment to return to your own language and to me I can’t help but think of what’s going on in Europe with this new right-wing nationalist movement. I find it very frightening.

On accidentally writing more aggressive songs:

My previous album was much more of a quiet, inward-looking album, and I got fed up with “inward-looking.” When I played live sets that were much more quiet, I got really sick of my own songs very quickly and had to stop playing them. I could never go back to them, ever. But I think it’s changed a lot for me, I think just from doing a lot of improvisation. I just played a lot, and songs like “I Called” are songs that I would have gotten rid of before. I played that song as an improvisation and thought, “What is this about?” It was like writing a blog. Quite a lot of songs were like that, and I guess I was just trying to get my head around this new aggression — singing louder and playing louder. So I decided to keep that song instead of moving on to more refined songs. The aggression was there at that moment, and I found it to be interesting as an expression.

On not trusting her instincts:

I’m not sure that I always trust my songs. I just play them anyway. I was talking with someone about this last night. We were discussing if we were thick. I said to her, I don’t think I have thick skin, but there’s this stupidity in me. Even if I’m affected by everything, I just don’t know how I can react to it. I’m almost like a grunge artist — I am full of self-hatred and I don’t trust what I do at all. Yet I have no problem doing it. But I think that’s why I change the way I play live. I have a moment of trusting a song, and then I go, “No! I have to change it!”

On looking outward to look inward:

Innocence Is Kinky is an outward-looking album, but what it’s looking at is a world that is very much a mirror world. It’s a world of visuals that are just telling you to look at yourself, to identify with everything. This has been my experience watching a lot of films over the years, as a female spectator, and seeing the objectification of the body in all different kinds of genres. As a young girl, you’re asked to identify with being an object or identify with being looked at. It can be painful to look at things and realize that everything is about looking back at yourself. Visual culture is just this mirror. There’s nothing else. There’s nothing behind it. It reminds me a little bit of the dangers of capitalism, which lays everything on the individual so that no one is to blame. Everything is your own fault. If you didn’t make it, it’s your fault. There’s no system.

On being ready for her close-up, Mr. DeMille:

I watch a lot of everything. I have no boundaries. There is nothing I do not watch. My interest is so nerdy that I don’t care so much about gender, and I’ve always been so obsessed with film and also sounds and voices on film. There are no voices in Joan of Arc, but you have that face, which is so close. It’s very much like pop music where you always have the voice with the microphone very close, so you have this ability to be huge. This is something I find very interesting on stage, where I can whisper and it will be enlarged It’s like a magnifying glass for the voice.

On dividing her time as a musician, novelist, critic, and essayist:

I see things as very connected, so it’s hard for me to separate between writing an essay and writing a song. Sometimes an essay becomes a song, which doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be a song or that it could only be an essay. On the other hand, I find it very hard to write music criticism. The more I write, the harder it gets and the more I realize I’m just saying the same thing over and over. As for fiction, I’ve written one novel and a book that I would just call a book because it’s trying to be much closer to the music and the way I work with sound and voices. It was an attempt for me to get closer to the speaking voice and the sounds I hear in language in my head when I write, which was great. But writing a novel is very distancing from that directness that I’m very fond of in my songwriting, and there’s so much more writing of words obviously than in a song. The music is gone and then you have all these descriptions in a novel that replace sound. Where is he? Which way is he looking? What’s the color of this? Rather than just the [sings] daaaaaah of sound. And to me the daaaaaah is much more interesting. So yeah, I’m trying to write more like sound.

Who Is…Marques Toliver

If Marques Toliver comes across a bit brash, it’s because there’s little precedent for him. Both a classical violinist and R&B singer-songwriter, this 26-year-old world traveler boasts talents too big and broad to fit into any one box. On his stunning London-recorded Bella Union debut album Land of CanAan, Toliver combines literary and historical influences — among them,Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin — with music that ably blends an unlikely combination of Bach, Bobby Womack and Antony and the Johnsons. His voice may be urgent, but his virtuoso playing, elegant melodies and heavenly arrangements are the height of refinement. It’s not pop with strings tacked on: Violins supply the heart of nearly every song and Toliver plays all of them plus cello, guitar, keys and more. The result is southern soul mixed with equally intimate chamber music to create a third deeply spiritual, yet-to-be-named thing.

Barry Walters talked with Toliver about busking, determination and his status as Adele’s favorite new artist.

On how he spent his teenage years:

I was in orchestra from the age 10 all the way up until I was about 20. I was just immersed in the classical setting, the classical doctrine and classical foundation of music starting with the Suzuki method. When it was time for middle school, there was only one school in the county that had a string program, so I had to wake up at 5:30 to get to school before the bell rang at 7:30, and I did that for three years. I just kept studying the violin and going to specialized schools for the instrument. I was a part of the university and youth orchestra, which was about 45 minutes away from my home town, so I was always taking long trips to be a part of these musical ensembles that were a part of my public school training.

On his ultimate goals:

I would like to sell enough so that I can invest in property and create music schools and ensure that student programs won’t diminish because of budget cuts. [I'd like to] become the male version of Oprah and introduce cultures to one another. I take it for granted that I can live in Belgium and two days later go to Paris and then be in London and then go to Berlin. I know we all have computers, but there’s a difference between having a screen show you photos of a world far away, and going to a concert and being transported to one of these worlds. And [I'd also like to] collaborate with musicians I’ve looked up to, such as Quincy Jones or Herbie Hancock or Beyoncé or, I don’t know, Katy Perry. Or just go very traditional and do things with Smokey Robinson or Adele. I’m really at the beginning of my career, so it’s hard to say, but I definitely want to be playing music and composing.

New This Week: Eliza Carthy, Big Deal, Goat & More

Eliza Carthy, Wayward Daughter The first lady of folk celebrates 21 years in the business with this career-spanning best-of. Mixing gusty versions of traditional songs with striking original tracks like “Britain is a Car Park”, it’s a showcase for the daughter of folk legends Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson that proves their combined talents have been passed on. Recommended.

Big Deal, June Gloom The London-based Anglo-American duo of Alice Costelloe and Kacey Underwood return with a second album of sweetly intoxicating scuzz-rock, this time with added noize. Their blissful duets join the dots between dream-pop and Dinosaur Jr. Recommended.

The Lee Thompson Ska Orchestra, The Benevolence of Sister Mary Ignatius Lee Thompson is the saxophonist with Madness, and this is his homage to the raucous dancehall tunes that gave birth to ska. Andrew Harrison says:

“The album is named after the Jamaican nun who encouraged future conquering lions of ska Don Drummond, Rico Rodriguez and John “Dizzy” Moore — founder of The Skatalites — at the Alpha Boys School in Kingston. But it’s no arid tribute. Though projects such as these risk losing something indefinable to the vain precision of modern recording, Thompson enlisted modern ska guru Mike “Prince Fatty” Pelanconi to produce and the result is full of original Studio One grit, grind and gusto.”

Wax Idols, Discipline & Desire Wax Idols are a sarcophagus-cold post-punk band from Oakland, powered by dominatrix-turned-singer Hether Fortune. Jayson Greene reviews the second album:

“Fortune’s deep, throaty voice is a powerful instrument, one that generates melodrama all by itself. On “Stare Back” and “When It Happens,” she bounces it off of vicious meat-hook guitar leads and blankly pistoning drums that recall Pornography-era Cure. She paints her lyrics in open-palm smears of devotion and subjection: “I love him twisted in hideous places/ I love him dead most of all,” she moans on “Stare Back.” But the album is not some grand guignol exercise; on “Stay In,” Fortune goes airy and wistful. “You said you’d always love me/ But I don’t feel it/ You said you’d always love me/ I wanna feel it,” she sings longingly… Discipline & Desire is a rich experience this way, whirling between emotional extremes. Like Fortune herself, it contains multitudes.”

Frankie & The Heartstrings, The Days Run Away  The Sunderland band’s second album was produced by Bernard Butler, who adds a sense of melodrama to their sound that was absent from their Edwyn Collins-produced debut. You can hear echoes of The Smiths and The Libertines on tracks like “Right Noises”, while the joyful, pogo-ing pop of “That Girl, That Scene” recalls Futureheads.  Short songs — most are around two minutes — big on fun.

James Skelly & The Intenders, Love Undercover The frontman of The Coral anchors his imaginative impulses to the serious art of tune-crafting on this solo debut, a set of songs with a classic, vintage, ’60s R&B sound.

Goat, Stonegoat / Dreambuilding The masked experimental collective release their first new material since last year’s World Music, one of eMusic’s albums of the year. More psych-Afrobeat damage from the experimental Swedes.

Shadow Shadow, Riviera Also from Sweden is Shadow Shadow, aka producer Mattias Friberg, whose debut slowly came together over four years in a remote country cottage. This is a lovely set of dramatic, synth-driven pop.

Portugal. The Man, Evil Friends

Portugal. The Man seemingly came out of nowhere — well, Portland, actually, by way of Wasilla, Alaska — with a potent sound that evokes everyone while following no one. Frontman John Gourley and bassist Zachary Carothers are the only constants of a group who’ve drawn from psychedelia, hard rock, prog, glam, post-hardcore, Brit-pop, and several shades of indie since 2006 to join the big leagues with 2011′s major-label debut In the Mountain in the Cloud. Now teaming with super-producer Danger Mouse for their seventh proper album, they consolidate their eclecticism and heighten its impact.

Portugal. The Man dig drama: Any band that combines Robert Plant-ian yelps with Ziggy-esque combos of acoustic strumming and power chord thunder while shooting synth lasers toward the darkest side of the moon doesn’t shy away from theatricality. Danger Mouse’s cinematic sensibilities are a fine match, and they set the tone audaciously with opener “Plastic Soldiers”: The rhythm repeatedly drops and reenters as guitars, keys, dubby bass, strings and even horns similarly drift in and out of the mix.

As the title suggests, Evil Friends is concerned with clashes and contradictions. Gourley draws from gospel music on “Modern Jesus” and “Holy Roller (Hallelujah), but uses it to attack rote applications of religious beliefs. His lyrics depict struggles with apathy and alienation, and yet he wails with the passion of someone who unmistakably cares. He may take on the role of a “Creep in a T-Shirt” and cynically pine for prefab celebrity in “Purple Yellow Red and Blue,” but he nevertheless yearns for the enlightenment implied by the album’s swelling, deeply emotional arrangements. Portugal. The Man remain a band unafraid to embrace their own contradictions, and on the fascinating Evil Friends, they’re all the better for it.

Jon Hopkins, Immunity

For much of his career, Jon Hopkins has been better known within the community of musicians and producers than he has to the public. The classically trained pianist’s first two albums (2001′s Opalescent and 2004′s Contact Note) were under-the-radar affairs, but they got him noticed by Brian Eno, who recruited him for his 2005 album Another Day on Earth and then brought him on board Coldplay’s Viva La Vida. Hopkins worked again with Eno for 2010′s Small Craft on a Milk Sea, and the following year he lent his studio prowess to the Mercury-nominated Diamond Mine, an electronic folk album made with Scotland’s King Creosote. But Immunity finds him definitively asserting his own voice as a musician and producer.

It’s heavier, and even clubbier, than one might have expected from his resume, underpinned by thundering kick drums and heaving waves of sub bass. Hopkins has said that the album’s sweep is intended to encapsulate the feeling of an epic night out, and that certainly comes across in the music: The slow gallop of “Open Eye Signal” comes on like a rave encountered in the open fields, building steam as it draws near until suddenly, without even realizing it, you’re deep inside and there’s nothing left of the landscape but strobing lights and throbbing low end. The contemplative “Abandon Window,” a cinematic sketch for piano and reverb, and the closing “Immunity,” a blissed-out collaboration with King Creosote, both provide welcome opportunities for rest and reflection, but the majority of Hopkins’ hour-long album — and it’s really meant to be heard in one sitting — is all about finding abandon inside awesomely proportioned sound worlds. Stylistically, both Four Tet and James Holden’s deconstructed techno are obvious influences, but what Hopkins brings to the table is a knack for fusing narrative arcs with an almost sculptural sense of form.

The Lee Thompson Ska Orchestra, The Benevolence Of Sister Ignatius

Like disco, Northern Soul and the Chunky Kit-Kat, ska is one of Mother Nature’s few absolutely unimprovable phenomena. And those who get the bug for syncopated, horns ‘n’ Hammond proto-reggae at an impressionable age tend to be drawn back to it. Hence this album of classic-era ska covers from Madness saxophonist and songwriter Lee Thompson, aided by Nutty Boys bassist Mark “Bedders” Bedford and a suite of collaborators including Madness associates Terry Edwards and Seamus Beaghen. They play the raucous dancehall tunes that changed their lives with sufficient verve and spirit to make you understand that, if you’d heard them in the right place and time, they’d probably have changed yours too.

The album is named after the Jamaican nun who encouraged future conquering lions of ska Don Drummond, Rico Rodriguez and John “Dizzy” Moore — founder of The Skatalites — at the Alpha Boys School in Kingston. But it’s no arid tribute. Though projects such as these risk losing something indefinable to the vain precision of modern recording, Thompson enlisted modern ska guru Mike “Prince Fatty” Pelanconi to produce and the result is full of original Studio One grit, grind and gusto. It’s just a little easier to hear what’s going on here.

From the opening version of the Baba Brooks Band’s “Gun Fever” (party-time ska in its rude essence, all gunshots and spry electric organ), via a sinuous take on Desmond Dekker’s “Fu Manchu,” through deliciously woozy vibe-ups of “Napoleon Solo” and the “Mission Impossible” theme (’60s Jamaica was always big on spies) this is impossibly infectious music, played for the joy of it. Guest singer Bitty McLean aside, the vocals are best characterized as charmingly amateur but this stuff was always life-affirming first and professional a distant second. This is why ska never dates.

Perhaps a few novice ravers searching for Skrillex will discover TLTSO’s “Bangarang” by mistake — Thompson and co.’s version of the oldie by Stranger Cole and Lester Sterling has all the upsy-downsy euphoria of Toots and the Maytals’ “Monkey Man,” plus the new clarity imbued by Fatty’s mix. You can imagine a whole new generation falling in love with it.

My Life In Philly Soul

I was born into the Sound of Philadelphia family in 1974. My father, Larry Gold, was a cellist in TSOP’s house band, MFSB (the letters stand for Mother Father Sister Brother, or Motherfucker Son of a Bitch, depending who’s asking). Later, he wrote string and horn arrangements for Teddy Pendergrass and McFadden & Whitehead, sitting at our Yamaha upright with his friend Jerry Cohen, the brilliant keyboard player — and co-writer of “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now.” I fell in love with this music listening to that piano, and going to sessions at Sigma Sound Studios when I was little.

Songwriters, producers and soul music impresarios Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff and Thom Bell had been working together long before founding Mighty Three Music in 1973. They’d known each other since they were teenagers, singing and playing together in the Romeos, a prototypical ’60s R&B band. With little more than a song in their hearts and local garmento Ben Krass as investor, the Three began producing local acts such as the Soul Survivors (“Expressway to Your Heart”), as well as older stars looking for a comeback (Jerry Butler, Wilson Pickett). By the time Gamble and Huff signed their groundbreaking deal with Columbia in 1971, Philadelphia International Records, was already a sure thing artistically. But their vision was bigger: they wanted to retain both creative and financial control of their company — something that no black-owned label had ever been able to do. Gamble and Huff ended up not only changing soul music; they changed the face of the record industry.

With its combination of gutbucket soul vocals, orchestral strings, and jazz rhythms, Philly Soul ruled the charts through the seventies and early eighties. Gamble and Huff wrote and produced a record-breaking number of smashes, making Philadelphia International Records one of the most successful companies in the city, as well as one of the most profitable black-owned businesses in the country. The hits didn’t stop: Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs Jones,” the O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money,” and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” to name a few. The iconoclastic Thom Bell stayed independent, writing and producing for the Delfonics, Stylistics, and the Spinners.

The Sound of Philadelphia is the sound of home to me. Growing up on the edge of North Philly, it was almost impossible not to hear “The Love I Lost,” wafting over my family’s back fence, or “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” blasting from a passing car Caddy. Hanging out with soul singers clad in head-to-toe lizard skin, feeling my family’s fortunes rise and fall with the charts… Well, it might not have been a typical childhood, but it was mine.

My Life In Philly Soul

I was born into the Sound of Philadelphia family in 1974.  My father, Larry Gold, was a cellist in TSOP’s house band, MFSB (the letters stand for Mother Father Sister Brother, or Motherfucker Son of a Bitch, depending who’s asking). Later, he wrote string and horn arrangements for Teddy Pendergrass and McFadden & Whitehead, sitting at our Yamaha upright with his friend Jerry Cohen, the brilliant keyboard player — and co-writer of “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now.” I fell in love with this music listening to that piano, and going to sessions at Sigma Sound Studios when I was little.

Songwriters, producers and soul music impresarios Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff and Thom Bell had been working together long before founding Mighty Three Music in 1973.  They’d known each other since they were teenagers, singing and playing together in the Romeos, a prototypical ’60s R&B band.  With little more than a song in their hearts and local garmento Ben Krass as investor, the Three began producing local acts such as the Soul Survivors (“Expressway to Your Heart”), as well as older stars looking for a comeback (Jerry Butler, Wilson Pickett).  By the time Gamble and Huff signed their groundbreaking deal with Columbia in 1971, Philadelphia International Records, was already a sure thing artistically.  But their vision was bigger: they wanted to retain both creative and financial control of their company — something that no black-owned label had ever been able to do.  Gamble and Huff ended up not only changing soul music; they changed the face of the record industry.

With its combination of gutbucket soul vocals, orchestral strings, and jazz rhythms, Philly Soul ruled the charts through the seventies and early eighties. Gamble and Huff wrote and produced a record-breaking number of smashes, making Philadelphia International Records one of the most successful companies in the city, as well as one of the most profitable black-owned businesses in the country.  The hits didn’t stop: Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs Jones,” the O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money,” and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” to name a few. The iconoclastic Thom Bell stayed independent, writing and producing for the Delfonics, Stylistics, and the Spinners.

The Sound of Philadelphia is the sound of home to me.  Growing up on the edge of North Philly, it was almost impossible not to hear “The Love I Lost,” wafting over my family’s back fence, or “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” blasting from a passing car Caddy. Hanging out with soul singers clad in head-to-toe lizard skin, feeling my family’s fortunes rise and fall with the charts… Well, it might not have been a typical childhood, but it was mine.

Interview: Adam Mansbach

I first met Adam Mansbach in college. We were DJs together, sharing a love for classic soul records which, in those pre-iPod days, were only available in dusty thrift store crates or the trash-picked piles of homeless guys who sold them on the street. Adam, like me, considered himself a writer, even starting his own magazine, Elementary, dedicated to covering what we then loftily called “Hip-Hop Culture.” Did I want to write for it? Hell yeah. That’s how Adam wound up publishing my first piece, about the sound of Philadelphia — something I’ve also written about here.

We ended up in grad school together, both writing about music and about being white people in love with sound not obviously our own. Adam was a drum tech for the legendary jazz drummer Elvin Jones and traveled to Europe to interview graffiti writers. Soon enough, he published his first novel, Shackling Water (2002), about a young saxophonist.

After moving to the Bay Area, Adam had a daughter and published — a lot. In 2011, in the midst of managing the incomprehensible sleep-wake cycle of my own new baby girl, three separate friends emailed me PDFs of Go the F**k to Sleep. Once I stopped laughing, I realized it was written by Adam. By that time, it was No. 1 on Amazon’s bestseller list and a full-blown phenomenon.

What does a writer do after becoming the voice of Generation X parents? In Adam’s case, he returned to his first love: writing about hip-hop. Rage is Back‘s protagonist is Dondi, a teenage Dante on our tour of New York City’s b-boy past. Dondi’s father, Rage, was a graffiti writer who disappeared around the same time as the city’s bombed trains. When Rage reappears, seeking revenge for the supposed police murder of a member of his crew, Dondi joins him and the ragtag survivors of hip-hop’s golden years in one last brilliant caper. The novel’s language and lore will remind old heads of the glory years, educate young seekers, and make everyone laugh. And in true DIY hip-hop fashion, the book comes with a bonus: an “official” Rage is Back mixtape produced by J.Period with contributions by Black Thought and Common, among many others.

Adam and I caught up via phone on one of the first days of New York spring.

What were you listening to while you were writing?

I listened to a lot of dub and Nuyorican salsa stuff — Ray Barretto, Eddie Palmieri. That music is in hip-hop’s DNA and in New York’s cultural DNA so heavily. Also, foundational breakbeats: “Apache,” by the Incredible Bongo Band, and “Scorpio,” by Dennis Coffey. These have become household staples, because it’s important that my daughter understand breakbeats!

Why does Dondi identify so much with the golden age of hip-hop?

Dondi makes passing references to Jay-Z, Nas, and Biggie. He mentions Jay-Z less as a musician than as a cultural icon, in the context of the kids selling drugs on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. He sees the disconnect between what they’re listening to and what they want to be.

Did writing Rage is Back make you nostalgic for New York?

It made me nostalgic for New Yorkers, especially the graffiti artists I know — their speed and wit, the way they riff and talk shit, their grasp and compression of history. New Yorkers can have this weird provincialism, where everything that happened within the five boroughs is of monumental significance. Paying tribute to graffiti writers made me miss being there, getting to hear those stories.

How did you first get interested in graffiti culture?

I was always a graffiti head, but when I moved to New York for college in ’94, I met a lot of these guys and started hearing their stories, which were inevitably about someone who had disrespected the storyteller in some way. Graffiti writers are kind of unique cases, because their entire history has been eradicated. They’ve had to be the voices of history for so long. They all have their own stories, but it’s fascinating the level of detail and memory these guys have.

Can you talk a little about the roots of the music in the book? For example, why was an artist such as Afrika Bambaataa so important to the people in the book?

New York was a compressed, seething environment where this music and culture came to life. It’s easy to forget, given hip-hop’s global dominance, that it’s only 30 years old. Most of the pioneers are still around, and so are the people who made them what they are: fans, listeners, early adopters. Bambaataa is enormously important to my characters, not just because he made Planet Rock, but because he is one of the main figures who ushered New York City out of the gang era and into the hip-hop era — and from the position of being a gang leader. He had an amazing record collection and thought about music in an incredibly democratic and free ranging way. At his parties, he would play current disco hits, the Pink Panther theme song, old vaudeville routines. If a song didn’t go over well, he would play it again and again until people understood what he was hearing. But the reason he was able to get to that level was that he was the warlord of the Black Spades from Bronx River. When he transitioned into music, he could guarantee the safety of kids from other parts of the Bronx to come and hear him play. The force of his personality and the politics of what he did were totally transformative.

I think something that people don’t get now is what it felt like to be a kid then and how if felt when new record came out.

In the novel, Dondi tries to explain to the reader things he’s unearthed, not being a part of that generation. He’s taking his cues from his parents and their friends about what was important. ’87, ’88, ’89 — he cares about that time so deeply because it was pivotal to his father’s life, and the way guys marked time was by what music came out when. For example, you waited for a new album to drop, you copped it that day, and then you went home and started to dissect it. I was buying records at that time with my allowance money. I might have $8 left over and not really be sure what to buy. I’d pick an album because the guy on the cover looked a certain way, or the Stop the Violence logo was on the cover.

In the novel, there’s that amazing scene where Kid Capri is DJing on a boat…

As someone who DJs myself, I love the idea that DJing is all about that perfect ethereal moment of song selection. In Rage is Back, when the police show up, Kid Capri throws on “Police in Helicopter” and galvanizes this moment of protest. Kid Capri was an iconic DJ. He used to personally sit up on 125th St. and sell his mixtapes, back when being a mixtape DJ did not mean having a bunch of exclusives but actually doing interesting things with blending and mixing music. He’s one of the guys who got known for putting R&B vocals over a hip-hop beat, so you could argue that he ushered in an entire new era of R&B — New Jack Swing. I don’t think you would have gotten En Vogue singing “Hold On” over a loop of James Brown’s “The Payback” if Kid Capri hadn’t been selling mixes exactly like that years earlier.

Tell me about the mixtape for the book.

I got introduced to J.Period, who’s a renowned mixtape DJ. He creates these narratives, and goes the extra mile to paint a portrait of the artist. We both realized we lived in Fort Greene at the same time back in the day, and used to be the only two guys who would go to this one record spot in a little dusty store on Fulton Street.

You never told me about that record spot!

Yeah…J’s recently been made the musical director for the Brooklyn Nets, but I think he was also looking for something totally new to do. The tape includes part of the audiobook, with Danny Hoch and GZA. J and I discussed the form the mixtape could take, and he started giving copies of the book to people like Black Thought and Common, who have tracks on the record.

Sounds like a dream.

For sure. If you’ve been in hip-hop for a certain length of time, you have common reference points; you’re geeky and nostalgic about the same things. Whether it’s with J.Period or some graffiti artist from Stockholm who I end up quoting every line from Style Wars with, that remains really fun for me. Despite all of the millions of directions hip-hop has gone in, it still provides such a clear basis for friendship.

My Life In Philly Soul

I was born into the Sound of Philadelphia family in 1974.  My father, Larry Gold, was a cellist in TSOP’s house band, MFSB (the letters stand for Mother Father Sister Brother, or Motherfucker Son of a Bitch, depending who’s asking). Later, he wrote string and horn arrangements for Teddy Pendergrass and McFadden & Whitehead, sitting at our Yamaha upright with his friend Jerry Cohen, the brilliant keyboard player — and co-writer of “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now.” I fell in love with this music listening to that piano, and going to sessions at Sigma Sound Studios when I was little.

Songwriters, producers and soul music impresarios Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff and Thom Bell had been working together long before founding Mighty Three Music in 1973.  They’d known each other since they were teenagers, singing and playing together in the Romeos, a prototypical ’60s R&B band.  With little more than a song in their hearts and local garmento Ben Krass as investor, the Three began producing local acts such as the Soul Survivors (“Expressway to Your Heart”), as well as older stars looking for a comeback (Jerry Butler, Wilson Pickett).  By the time Gamble and Huff signed their groundbreaking deal with Columbia in 1971, Philadelphia International Records, was already a sure thing artistically.  But their vision was bigger: they wanted to retain both creative and financial control of their company — something that no black-owned label had ever been able to do.  Gamble and Huff ended up not only changing soul music; they changed the face of the record industry.

With its combination of gutbucket soul vocals, orchestral strings, and jazz rhythms, Philly Soul ruled the charts through the seventies and early eighties. Gamble and Huff wrote and produced a record-breaking number of smashes, making Philadelphia International Records one of the most successful companies in the city, as well as one of the most profitable black-owned businesses in the country.  The hits didn’t stop: Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs Jones,” the O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money,” and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” to name a few. The iconoclastic Thom Bell stayed independent, writing and producing for the Delfonics, Stylistics, and the Spinners.

The Sound of Philadelphia is the sound of home to me.  Growing up on the edge of North Philly, it was almost impossible not to hear “The Love I Lost,” wafting over my family’s back fence, or “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” blasting from a passing car Caddy. Hanging out with soul singers clad in head-to-toe lizard skin, feeling my family’s fortunes rise and fall with the charts… Well, it might not have been a typical childhood, but it was mine.

Who Are…Mt. Wolf

When Kate Sproule started Mt. Wolf in 2011 with her childhood friend Stevie McMinn and his college mates, she’d hardly sung a note. Still, she was so committed to pursuing music that she turned down her first post-college job offer to stick with the band. It’s a risk that seems to have paid off: Mt. Wolf’s delicate indie rock stands out among London’s current sound sculptors, savvily blending bass music, folktronic and indie R&B. Only two EPs into their career, Mt. Wolf have already established a signature sound that’s organic and soothing even while Sproule’s lyrics tackle emotionally-abusive relationships and the drabness of 9-to-5 life.

eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller spoke with Sproule about the darkness underlying their Hypolight EP, the far-out space where it was recorded, and how it felt to receive props from Diplo for their cover of Usher’s “Climax.”

On bringing together their knowledge of different genres:

I’d never been in a band before, but my brothers were always handing me amazing records like Radiohead, Jeff Buckley and Massive Attack. I had formal training, [both] classically and in jazz piano and violin, and I did a bit of vocal [training] at university. I had a classical choral scholarship at Cambridge, so I sang quite intensively. I’m sort of still obsessed with vocal harmony and the range that you use in classical; it’s rare in mainstream pop music. I had to learn how to let go of all that training, but there are definitely undercurrents of it. The guys all used to play in guitar bands. Our drummer played heavy rock and Stevie took me along to see him. It was so loud, I had to put my headphones in. So we’ve tamed that side [of him] since we’ve become Mt. Wolf.

On rebelling from her classical roots:

My mom and dad were very musical people. They met when they were classical singers in London, so that was quite an influence growing up. The school at which I trained was well known in the UK, and quite intense. We were made to practice extensively, and it was quite a rigid classical music regime. By the end, I had grown tired of that and wanted to be a bit more expressive and write my own music rather than interpreting other people’s compositions. There’s a definite catharsis I found in writing something from scratch that I didn’t find with the more formal stuff. I guess Mt. Wolf is a rebellion from that; letting go and doing what you want is quite freeing when you’ve trained extensively. This was the first time I’d ventured into actually making three-minute, four-minute songs.

On differentiating their music from London’s sounds right now:

London has just exploded electronically over the last few years. As much as I think it’s really interesting to draw influence from what’s going on in London right now, we like to keep our own methods.

We like to draw on lots of different stuff and play around with it. Our songs are very structured in a lot of ways, and they come across more like a band’s than some of the more sprawling electronic compositions. When we play live, we play everything live. We don’t need any kind of backing track or decks. So for us, it’s more a case of picking from different things that we like. Our sound is very sample [based]. Rather than using synths and programmed sounds, we try to manipulate acoustic recordings. We’ll have a guitar line or a vocal line that is sung in, and then we chop it up. We can play around with it in Logic, play around with it electronically, reverse it, sample it again, and make a rhythm out of it. So we’re basically trying to recycle acoustic sounds to create the soundscape that you hear.

The story behind the title of the Hypolight EP:

I got a bit obsessed with the idea of the space that’s created just beneath light, where it’s almost darkest. I thought of a street lamp, and how you get that dark space just under the glare of the street lamp, and what that meant across a number of themes. The EP sort of muses on how to break free from that really dark space. So it’s quite solemn and it’s quite somber. I always find it interesting and surprising when listeners get a lot of positivity from our songs, or find them quite relaxing. For me, these songs are the inner workings of something dark and difficult. It’s quite emotional for me, and almost disturbing. So it’s funny when people say they find it relaxing, because I find it quite the opposite. Musically, it’s more confident than our first EP but it’s a lot more fragile, in terms of [the] darkness and sadness it talks about.

On their melancholic lyrics:

I get obsessed with imagery that weaves its way in and out of my life. “Veins,” for example, I wrote quickly in the confines of an office space looking over the City of London — all the busy people dressed in black wandering around. It’s basically a song about trying to break out of something, a place or a feeling that you don’t want to be, and thinking about how to get somewhere else. “Shapeshift” is about the feeling that you’re being held in an emotional place, trying to get away from something or someone that’s not allowing you to break out. That song is an emotional tussle — you know you should be getting away, but so many natural instincts make you want to stay. The whole EP is about lyrically trying to break into new, happier ground.

How their cover of “Climax” came about:

We were asked to do this show last summer in London, a really great project called The Coveryard. A girl I went to university with gets together an orchestra and then invites an artist to come along and have their songs reworked or perform covers. So she asked us to do [Massive Attack's] “Teardrop” — which was also amazing — and then we chose to do “Climax.” At first I was a bit skeptical of doing the song, I couldn’t quite hear how it would sound. But I think it translated pretty well [and] we brought kind of a new dimension to it. We were pretty amazed to see that Diplo mentioned it on his Facebook wall and seemed to enjoy it. So that was a big comfort to us, that we hadn’t totally ruined someone’s song.

On the studio space where they recorded the EP:

Bassie, who produces all the stuff, has a studio down in the countryside in Dorset. We went down there in January and recorded it in front of this huge bay window that overlooks the English countryside, and it was just beautiful. There’s nothing for miles; just green hills. It was a great place to do it [and] encapsulated that disturbing and isolated headspace on the record.

On the meaning of their name:

There’s a song on the first EP, Life Size Ghosts called “Cry Wolf,” which we wrote before we named the band. We found the wolf imagery quite alluring. It’s a dangerous creature, but [it also] has this mysterious element. We liked the idea that [Mt. Wolf] might be somewhere that doesn’t really exist and is ethereal but also has this element of darkness and potential danger. When we actually found out that it was a real place, it made sense to us because our music sounds celestial and otherworldly but at the same time the subject matter is pretty down-to-earth and grounded in real time and a real place. Obviously it’s not anything new in terms of band names — quite a lot of wolves out there.

Akala, The Thieves Banquet

Scooping the MOBO Award for best hip-hop artist in 2006 failed to open doors to mainstream success for Akala, but the man given to referring to himself as “the black Shakespeare” has carved a niche as one of the most erudite and articulate of British rappers. His fourth album, The Thieves Banquet, (grammarians everywhere will wince at that missing apostrophe) finds him on characteristically loquacious form, remembering musical giants long gone on “Old Soul,” lauding society’s idealists and agitators on “Malcolm Said It,” and lambasting colonialism and the slave trade on “Maangamizi.” Few would argue with these bouquets and brickbats, yet the wry philosopher-poet Akala delivers them via winningly dexterous wordplay over limber, jazzy beats. Best of all is the epic, quasi-Biblical title track, wherein the devil attempts to decide whether the greatest modern evil is wrought by monarchs; cardinals; third-world despots; or bankers. Akala remains a marginal voice, but one always worth heeding.

Terence Blanchard, Magnetic

At 51, Terence Blanchard has become the gold standard for band leadership in jazz. Magnetic is just the latest example of Blanchard’s M.O.: pluck simpatico-but-distinctive young talents, provide them with a challenging, stylistically versatile forum, and, perhaps most importantly, play their tunes. Furthering the pattern of his last three small-ensemble recordings, Blanchard eschews covers, allowing compositions by younger bandmates to comprise the majority of the all-originals program. And there isn’t a dud in the bunch.

Blanchard understands the balance between individual ego and group synergy. Pianist Fabian Almazan is accorded nearly five minutes for his stunning solo track, “Comet,” and drummer Kendrick Scott kicks off his surging song, “No Borders Just Horizons,” with a highly musical two-minute drum solo. (Not coincidentally, Almazan and Scott each released an ambitious debut record shortly after joining Blanchard’s ensemble.) Yet more frequently, each member chimes in with an original thought that remains consistent with the structure and spirit of the song and the imprint of the previous soloist. It happens on “Jacob’s Ladder,” the ballad by 21-year-old bassist and band newcomer Joshua Crumbly. It happens on the rippling closer, “Time To Spare,” by saxophonist Brice Winston.

And when Blanchard adds special guests to a couple of his own tunes, things really get cooking; on “Don’t Run,” Blanchard sets up a pass-the-baton groove on the shoulders of guest Ron Carter’s stentorian walking bass line, lets guest Ravi Coltrane solo mightily on soprano, tops it with his own thrilling trumpet solo, and leaves it to Carter to clean the debris from all corners with his contrabass solo. This is sharing and daring small-group jazz — magnetic indeed.