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Embassy One - Independent Record Label •

Felsmann + Tiley - Embassy One - Independent Record Label

About Felsmann + Tiley
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How long can an artist with an instantly recognizable sound stay anonymous? For years, apparently. Take Felsmann + Tiley’s reinterpretation of M83’s ‘Solitude’, a track that has over 200 million streams to date. Very few of those listeners know the evolution of the German producer-duo’s drumless synthwave melding Cliff Martinez-style maximum emotional impact with Nils Frahm’s neoclassical minimal...
Guerilla Music Promotion •

Maike Depas

Young Milanese DJ-producer MAIKE DEPAS (born Michelangelo De Pasquale) has seen the future of music and it’s called metaverse: “In the future it will blow up,” he predicts. “And it’s going to revolutionise the way we experience music.” Bowled over by Skrillex and Martin Garrix at the age of 8, and DJing at small Milan clubs by the time he was 11, Maike Depas went on to study composition and piano at the prestigious Milan Conservatory before learning ‘life-changing” lessons from the best in the b...

Universal Music Publishing Group | Germany

For the past decade Italian songwriter-producer Dario Faini has been on a mission to keep us on the edge of our seats with the chameleonlike sound of his solo-project Dardust (portmanteau of Dario and Stardust). Consisting of 6 albums, 500 million streams, epic stage shows with 50-piece orchestras, sync-deals with Apple and Hyundai, and commissions with luxury brands such as Krug, Vanity Fair, and Maserati, his body of work merging neo-classical piano with contemporary electronica is a secret re...
Rhythm Passport •

Interview: Montañera – The World of Music According to María (November 2023)

The fundamental challenge every music journalist faces – by no means different from the rest of the industry – stems from oversaturation: having new releases coming out of our ears can make us forget the special powers of music and why we chose to write about them in the first place. Until one day, you come across an artist who jogs your memory. In my case, it was Montañera (born María Mónica Gutiérrez), a London-based Colombian singer-songwriter, and her new coming-of-age album A Flor de Piel....
El Garaje de Frank •

Interview: The Soft Moon — El Garaje de Frank

Haunting and hard-hitting, The Soft Moon grabs you by the throat in much the same way Nitzer Ebb, Skinny Puppy, and Front Line Assembly did during the heyday of electro-industrial hybrid. Dig a bit deeper, and you will find an extraordinary story about music as a driving force in uncovering your past. During the current European leg of The Soft Moon Tour 2022, Luis Vasquez had a conversation with El Garaje de Frank on WhatsApp right before stepping on stage for a sound check at Santeria Social C...
Rhythm Passport •

Interview: The Maghreban – Pieces of the Continent (August 2022)

The Maghreban. Even the name had enough air of mystery about it that you could be forgiven thinking this was the new alter ego of Hussein Sherbini or Maga Bo. The first 15 seconds of ‘Eddies’, the intro of the debut album 01DEAS released on R&S, only confirmed the impression. Not only did the sound have the unparalleled intensity and magnetism that you got immediately attracted to, but also its cultural authenticity more than lived up to the geographic moniker.
I was sold, so much so that the mo...
El Garaje de Frank •

Interview: Thief — El Garaje de Frank

Thief emerged from the shadows in 2016 with his evocative, unorthodox sound that summoned up delirious journeys through Carcosa and the Asphodel Meadows, experiences unnerving enough to bring even the most level-headed listener down to their knees–all of which raised the question: what is this artist’s modus operandi? El Garaje de Frank met with Los Angeles-based Dylan Neal on Zoom to talk through his new album The 16 Deaths of My Master, dark arts of sampling, Joseba Eskubi’s paintings, evoluti...
Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviews •

Pure Heart: Martina Topley-Bird Interviewed | Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviews

It’s the classic ‘rapper meets singer, rapper loses singer’ story we all know by now, thanks to the music press.
Martina Topley-Bird, a 17-year old student from Clifton College, sozzled on cheap cider with her mates after the exams, sits on the wall by the St. Andrews Cemetery, singing. Adrian Thaws, a 24-year old graduate from the school of hard knocks, happens to stroll by and hear her voice. Three days later, an empty timeslot at someone’s home studio falls into his lap, and she invites her t...
Rhythm Passport •

Album Review: Ammar 808 – Global Control / Invisible Invasion [Glitterbeat Records; September 2020]

Electronic music has always been a soft target for the purists. To use an ex-colleague (jazz guitarist, quelle surprise)’s metaphor, the fundamental difference between a handcrafted armchair and a cheap mass-produced imitation is the latter’s lack of the most universal characteristic known as ‘human element’. Or a human error – if you happen to be a diehard purist.
Tunisian producer Sofyann Ben Youssef, better known as Ammar 808, is no stranger to this aesthetic bias: “Instead of having the mach...
Rhythm Passport •

Album Review: Duma – Duma [Nyege Nyege Tapes; August 2020]

When Venom’s legendary album Black Metal came out in 1982, ‘black’ meant two things: a vague reference to Old Nick himself and a fashion statement. Not one metalhead could have foreseen that it would be in – of all places – Nairobi where the mosh pits would be heaving with headbangers thirsty for the latest acts: Lust of a Dying Breed, Mortal Soul, Vale of Amoniton, Aphasia, Void of Belonging. The list goes on and on.
A clear sign of the boom is the self-titled debut Duma by the gutsy new conver...
Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviews •

Tricky - Fall To Pieces | Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviews

“I think it… it’s gonna work now”, the lead vocalist Marta Złakowska remarks three seconds into Tricky’s latest album ‘Fall to Pieces’. The comment may be off the cuff, but as far as the man’s creative process is concerned, it is bang on. “My music is weird because I don’t know what I’m doing,” Tricky writes on his autobiography ‘Hell Is Round The Corner’. ‘Fall to Pieces’ is a reiteration of this very quality that sets Tricky apart from the rest, for better or worse – intuition.As an autodidact...
Rhythm Passport •

Album Review: El Búho – Ramas [Wonderwheel Recordings; March 2020]

The ultimate litmus test for any release is to listen to it on a robust pair of closed-back monitor headphones at home. No accentuated frequencies, no fancy cocktails and canapés driving a wedge between you and the mix as it was intended – for better or for worse. In 2020 the beauty of an unfiltered experience is best exemplified by Ramas (out on Wonderwheel Recordings), the new album by El Búho (born Robin Perkins).
Over the course of an hour and a half, loosely laid out repetitive patterns and...
Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviews •

Dave East - Karma 3 | Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviews

The real is back. With much awaited third instalment of the Karma series mixtape out, there is little doubt that Dave East (born David Lawrence Brewster Jr.) has earned his stripes as an artist who has gone from strength to strength and become the best thing that happened to the East Coast Scene since Styles P, Jadakiss, and Sheek Louch aka the LOX.
Gangsta rap and method acting have become so indistinguishable, any decent record company should hire a casting agent and start running auditions. Y...
Rhythm Passport •

Interview: Mentrix – In Search of Your Voice (June 2020)

This year there have been debut albums, and then there has been My Enemy, My Love by Mentrix (née Samar Rad). From sacred electronica à la Aisha Devi rubbing shoulders with The Master Musicians of Joujouka to music videos that were Sufi-versions of M.I.A.’s ‘Bad Girls’, everything indicated a singular creative vision. And yet a thorough search only yielded a handful of vocals featured on German dance labels. I was intrigued. How did Samar come up with that?
It turns out we live in the same area...
Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviews •

Filter Dread - Trickster | Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviews

Has the UK dance music scene become too safe? Without question, if the new album by Filter Dread (born Leo Johnson-Davies) is anything to go by.
Starting from the title 'Trickster' and the striking cover artwork that depicts a cluster of CCTV-cameras mounted on a lighting truss, the mischievous spirit of a bygone era cut short by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 that clamped down on unlicensed gigs is still fresh in his memory.
Johnson-Davies is not alone in this sentiment. Last ye...
Rhythm Passport •

Album Review: The Colours That Rise – Grey Doubt [Rhythm Section INTL; May 2020]

If ever there was one cultural movement that pushed back the frontiers of black identity, it was Afrofuturism. Inspiring generations of musicians to come up with ingenious, edifying narratives, it gave us Drexciya – an advanced underwater civilization built by the offspring of African women thrown off the slave ships – and Shabazz Palaces which chronicled the journey of an inter-galactic musical emissary Quazarz through Amurderca on the dystopian Gangster Star.
Beyond a light-hearted mockumentar...
Rhythm Passport •

Album Review: Spoek Mathambo – Tales From The Lost Cities [TEKA Records; February 2020]

‘Remember back when good rap was just a cool dance hit / Even though it wasn’t saying shit’, Paris spat on his militant debut The Devil Made Me Do It. Released only three months before Rodney King’s assault, it made an accurate prediction about the future of hip-hop. Try looking up a Top Records of All Time list and you’ll see that pre-1999 titles outnumber the rest by 10 to 1. Now, that could be just some old farts stuck on memory lane. But it could also mean the scene really is brimming with b...
Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviews •

Yves Tumor - Heaven To A Tortured Mind | Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviews

There is always more to Yves Tumor than meets the eye. On his fifth studio album ‘Heaven To A Tortured Mind’, the earlier avant-garde pandemonium takes a back seat as he gets behind the wheel with co-producer Justin Raisen – two kindred spirits on a mission to revolutionise pop music – and pick up where they left off.
In essence, it’s a psychedelic soul record for the 21st century, a florid homage to labels like Stax, Cadet and Invictus with resplendent guitar solos, pulverising drum fills, and...
Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviews •

Moaning - Uneasy Laughter | Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviews

“I've been sober for a year today,” Sean Solomon, Moaning’s frontman, wrote on Instagram last year. “I am finally finding happiness.”
Solomon’s new-found perspective on life is at the heart of ‘Uneasy Laughter’, the band’s second album on Sub Pop, which marks a stylistic shift away from the nihilistic post-punk of their debut towards introspective new wave. While their debut grappled with muddled matters of the heart without ever reaching a conclusion, here Solomon puts his moral compass to the...
Rhythm Passport •

Event Review: Oum @ Passionskirche (Berlin, Germany; Wednesday 4th March 2020)

‘Berlin, the city where everything works’, said no Berliner ever. 
Having witnessed the world-famous German technology out of action and run through the crowded Gneisenaustrasse U-Bahn exit (the one not closed due to construction), we scraped through the front doors of Passionskirche and found empty seats. Ironically enough, around here the gigs start right on the dot without exception.

As the house lights went down, the familiar Christian imagery of capital punishment in 1st century Judea was...
Rhythm Passport •

Album Review: Ko Shin Moon – Leïla Nova [Akuphone; March 2020]

We are a product of our own environment. Nowhere is this more evident than in music, as an accurate representation of the artist’s social fabric. To Axel Moon (oriental lutes, beats) and Niko Shin (keyboards) of Ko Shin Moon, this phenomenon doesn’t seem foreign.
“In Aubervilliers 90% of the population are immigrants: the café downstairs is run by Kabyle people, the grocery shop by Turks, I play saz and sitar, I listen to Raï on cassette”, Moon told in 2019. “All of that is linked to where I liv...
Rhythm Passport •

Album Review: LaliBoi – Siyangaphi [Teka Records; November 2019]

‘History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes’. At the beginning of the 20th century in South Africa, the ownership of the cultivable land was transferred from five million Africans to one million Europeans. When the native population was banished from the towns and stuck in limbo, the obvious question on their lips was: “Siyangaphi?” (Where do we go?)
A century later, Vosloorus-based multi-instrumentalist cum vocalist Siphosenkosi Nkodlwane aka LaliBoi (‘rural boy’), a great-grandson of Xh...
Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviews •

Sepultura - Quadra | Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviews

Co-founded in 1984 by brothers Max and Igor Cavalera, Sepultura soon put themselves on the map of the global metal scene with their unique Afro-Brazilian groove metal, as epitomised by the unrivalled albums ‘Chaos A.D.’ and ‘Roots’. But ever since the acrimonious departure of the Cavaleras – in 1996 and then 2006 – the burning question in the metalhead community has been not so much, “Is this the end of Sepultura as we know it?” as, “Will they succeed in carving out a new identity of their own?”...
Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviews •

Wire - Mind Hive | Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviews

‘No Love Lost’ sums up the band politics in Wire so accurately, you would be forgiven for thinking it’s their song. “It can be brutal. I felt crushed at times”, Colin Newman wrote in 2006. “We have been playing power-games for 30 years. Wire could be an even better band, if not for that.”
Better how exactly is anyone’s guess. If anything, the previous 16 studio albums have cemented their status as heroes of rock music, carrying a similar clout to other heavyweights such as Thurston Moore, Robert...
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