Feature: "Slow Music Berlin" (Slow Travel Berlin)

"One thing that always helps us unwind at Slow Travel Berlin is music." So here's a collection of Berlin associated music that suits the Slow Life. Settle in, now...

Feature: "Slow Music Berlin" (Slow Travel Berlin)

Live Review: "Not The Archandroid We're Looking For: Janelle Monae Live" (The Quietus)

After "the kind of coverage normally reserved for drug-addled models with absent minds when it comes to underwear", it was my turn to check out Janelle Monae, and I even got to take pictures of her doing shadow puppets, while The Quietus editors got to indulge their Star Wars fixation in the headline. Yep: it's all right here.

Live Review: "Not The Archandroid We're Looking For: Janelle Monae Live" (The Quietus)

Feature: "Dialogue Berlin" (Slow Travel Berlin)

Living abroad is all very well, but sometimes you seek the comforts of your homeland, and Sharmaine Lovegrove's Dialogue Books aims to provide English language books to people in Germany, while simultaneously helping to cultivate a literary scene in Berlin. I talked to her for Slow Travel Berlin.


here

Feature: "Dialogue Berlin" (Slow Travel Berlin)

Feature: "Let's Dance. No, Thank You" (Electronic Beats)

I'm not much of a dancer. "When someone invites me to go clubbing, I shudder and break out in cold sweats. This might seem odd, but until you’ve been questioned about epilepsy whilst freaking out to Prince, or have reached for a non-existent hand when attempting an archaic prance, you cannot understand my fear." Electronic Beats asked me to elaborate. Click the pic to find out more.

Feature: "Let's Dance. No, Thank You" (Electronic Beats)

Album Review: Codes In The Clouds - As The Spirit Wanes (Uncut)

3/5
Dramatic instrumentals from Dartford

Though novelty’s in short supply on this quintet’s second album, intensity and commitment are not. Mining the same seam of cinematic post-rock as Mogwai and Explosions In The Sky, they specialise in delicate guitar-focussed passages that bloom and explode with a primitive, dramatic beauty. Recorded in only five days, much of it displays a welcome sense of urgency as well as a lack of pomp, with ‘Look Back, Look Up’ as close as the genre gets to pop. Perhaps due to its mastering by labelmate and pianist Nils Frahm, there’s also a gratifying eye for detail in their arrangements.

Album Review: Codes In The Clouds - As The Spirit Wanes (Uncut)

Album Review: Beat Milk Jugs - 10 Years Of Hangovers (Uncut)

3/5
Preposterously named electronic indie from Latvia

Originally from Daugavpils but now based in the UK, Beat Milk Jugs have travelled equally far into the past for musical inspiration. ‘Dvina’ opens with a ghostly Russian voice, but it’s soon lost amidst fierce ‘Firestarter’ programmed drums, while ‘Not My Day’ finds common ground between New Order and Ride, lazy Bernard Sumner-esque vocals drawled over an increasingly tense bed of shiny guitars. ‘7th Street’ offers raw guitars and a bizarre vocal sample concerning sausages, and elsewhere hints of Underworld, Nine Inch Nails and, oddly, Fourtet can be found within this unsophisticated but often pleasingly ferocious malevolence.

Album Review: Beat Milk Jugs - 10 Years Of Hangovers (Uncut)