Flow State

It’s Friday so we’re listening to something more upbeat. Today we’re listening to Larry Heard aka Mr. Fingers, an American electronic musician from Chicago. We last recommended his music in 2022. Born in 1960, his formative musical influences came from local radio in the late ‘60s and ‘70s – “blues, rock, jazz, soul, gospel,” he told RBMA. He played guitar and drums in high school, and in the ‘80s drums led him to drum machines (Roland TR-707) and then-novel synthesizers (Roland Jupiter-6).

Today we’re listening to Nicolas Godin, a French multi-instrumentalist and composer from Versailles. He’s one half of the duo Air with Jean-Benoît Dunckel. Godin played guitar and keys in rock bands in high school, then briefly studied architecture before forming Air with Dunckel in 1995. The duo put out several incredible records which there’s never a bad time to revisit. Godin began releasing solo music in the 2010s, with a score for the TV series Au service de la France.

Today we’re listening to Hanakiv, an Estonian composer and pianist from Tallinn. She has many musicians on her mother’s side, and she started playing piano and handbells around age eight.1 She studied electroacoustic composition and eventually settled in London, where she remains based. When covid hit, she resumed daily piano practice which eventually led to her debut LP, Goodbyes, in 2023. The album is primarily prepared piano, which she layers to create ambient neoclassical pieces.

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -10:00 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Today’s mix is all trip-hop, mostly from the ‘90s. Trip-hop is a subgenre of electronic music that uses the beat template of hip-hop – drum loops and samples – with elements of jazz, lounge, ambient, and dub. There are some usual suspects in this tracklist like Massive Attack, Portishead, and Nightmares on Wax.

Today we’re listening to Damian Dalla Torre, an Italian multi-instrumentalist and composer from South Tyrol. His dad was a DJ who played Italo pop around the house, Torre’s first influence, but his musical direction was set when he got into jazz.1 He studied jazz at the Vienna Conservatory and later moved to Leipzig, where he’s still based.2 Since 2022 he’s released three LPs of ambient jazz arrangements, reminiscent of Nala Sinephro or Sven Wunder.

It’s Friday so we’re listening to something more upbeat. Today we’re listening to Smezkh, a Ukrainian electronic musician from Kremenchuk. “My relationship with music started when a friend from school gave me a cassette with The Prodigy album on it,” he told A Closer Listen; “it was back in the 90s and it split my life into before and after.”1 He started listening to electronic music on local radio and eventually got a computer and started making his own music.

Today we’re listening to John Williams, an American composer from Queens, New York, where he was born in 1931. His father, Johnny Williams, played drums for CBS Radio and Raymond Scott’s quintet.

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -59:50 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. On today’s episode of Across the Horizon, host Bob Holmes of SUSS sits down with Animal Collective members Geologist (Brian Weitz) and Avey Tare (David Portner) to discuss their new instrumental electronic/acoustic duo Croz Boyce.

Today we have a guest mix from Noémi Büchi, a Swiss-French composer and pianist from Zürich whom we recently featured. She recorded a mix of instrumental favorites from around the world – over a dozen countries across 23 tracks. Artists include Oneohtrix Point Never, Thomas Bangalter (new record), Nico Jaar, Laurel Halo, Father Dionysios Tabakis (π. Διονύσιος Ταμπάκης), Klara Lewis, Grand River, Daniel Lanois, and more. This mix is available to everyone. We hope you enjoy.

Today we’re listening to Marconi Union, an English electronic group from Manchester. Richard Talbot and Jamie Crossley met in a record shop and formed the group in 2003, later adding Duncan Meadows as a third member; Talbot later stepped away. Their music started out as electroacoustic, with Talbot composing synth pieces and Crossley layering guitars over them.