Miss Kittin, Sebastien Tellier, Clark LP reviews

Electronic music round up - Music Extra - in today's Metro.

MUSIC EXTRA

Electronica

Whether it’s the mainstream in 2008 (Hot Chip, Hercules & Love Affair) or the underground in 2007 (Michael Mayer’s Supermayer LP, Cobblestone Jazz’s 23 Seconds, or Matthew Dear’s Asa Breed LP - Dear’s currently supporting Hot Chip’s UK tour), electronic music is enjoying its most influential, fertile and accessible periods in recent history.

First lady of electro Miss Kittin’s third LP Batbox (Nobody’s Business) is poised between the vocal and electronic: abstract lyrics and dry innuendo accentuate mystery as grinding synths and taut guitars divert your attention away from Caroline Herve’s coded messages. Miss Kittin playfully holds a mirror up to the world we inhabit and that ultimately made her: Play Me A Tape demands a tangible romantic gesture in the era of texts, emails, and MP3 playlists. Miss Kittin can come across as aloof and cold but the opposite is true: her increasingly catchy electro is plugged into – and a commentary on – the here and now.

Electronic music can suffer from trying too hard to be cool but Sebastien Tellier cocks a snoot at such posturing, with a gloriously kitsch and shamelessly sexy album, Sexuality (Lucky Numbers). Tellier’s best-known for the emotionally epic and wistful single La Ritournelle (2005), though Sexuality’s sauciness adds lust and post-coital euphoria to his palate. Sexuality’s built from the same blueprints as trance and prog house, its layering and arrangement is assiduous, and although it’s produced by one half of Daft Punk, Sexuality’s mini-symphonies are far closer to Air’s Moon Safari as seen through the blurry gauze of 1980s soft porn.

Clark’s sophomore LP Turning Dragon (Warp) is full-on banging, churning, clunking dancefloor electronica. Turning Dragon might be tough and relentless but it’s anything other than mindless, instead it’s a wonder that Clark fashions order and rhythm from sonic chaos. Turning Point’s not all high-octane, there’s an ebb and flow (a rave must have lows in order to scale the heights) and the dense dissonance is offset by melodies (for example church organ). Eerie menace gives way to shrill frequencies that sound like a post-apocalyptic attack of the killer bees. Turning Point’s extraordinary doom electronica - somebody give Clark a horror film to score.

Prosumer is resident at Berlin’s leading club Berghain which is set in a disused power station and doesn’t get going until Sunday morning and runs into Monday afternoons. Prosumer & Murat Tepeli’s debut LP Serenity (Kompakt) couldn’t be further from the pummelling machine music that soundtracks Berghain: it’s a mixture of contemporary electropop encompassing melancholic disco (Turn Around) and analogue ballads (I Go Mad), and instrumental grown up house and techno. Serenity stitches pop into a collage woven from Detroit techno, Chicago acid house, New York disco and new wave, and of course, Berlin’s avant-garde experimentalism, and can quite comfortably cosy up to Hot Chip on your CD rack or hard drive.