Exhale, Brunswick Mechanics Institutee, Melbourne, 7 to 17 May Their storming debut album An Awesome Wave surfed the charts, and their densely layered, complex electronic harmonies ruled the Aussie festival stages last summer.
The responsive group, including pianist Sam Beste and Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner (whose Hello Skinny band had played a contrasting opening set of Portico Quartet-like music), mixed grooving synth harmonies, electronic percussion and dark melodies.
You can notice subtle sonic differences among varying hues of the same color, or even point your phone at an object with multiple colors to produce a dissonant harmony of electronic notes.
The mix of a driving bassline, high harmonies and electronic tinkling is well-drilled, tight and, at times, utterly infectious.
On her solo albums, Bjork has frequently abandoned a straightforward beat, replacing it with sustained harmonies or electronic stutters and flickers (though thumping remixes have kept her songs in clubs).
Even as the hot gleam of the highway gave way to desolate roads and fenced-off military zones, Adams's characteristic musical gestures — the rich-hued harmonies and bopping rhythms that have made repertory items of "Harmonielehre," "Nixon in China," and "Short Ride in a Fast Machine" — disintegrated into broken clockwork rhythms, acid harmonies, and electronic noise.
Even as the hot gleam of the highway gave way to desolate roads and fenced-off military zones, Adams's characteristic musical gestures the rich-hued harmonies and bopping rhythms that have made repertory items of "Harmonielehre," "Nixon in China," and "Short Ride in a Fast Machine"—disintegrated into broken clockwork rhythms, acid harmonies, and electronic noise.
She'd laid down the initial vocal tracks in a spontaneous rush, standing over the mixing board with a handheld mike — "a big old nineteen-fifties thing," she said — while electronic mockups of the harmonies and beats played on Valgeir's computer.
In late 2016, the Met finally put on a performance of L'Amour de Loin by Helsinki-born composer Kaija Saariaho sixteen years after the opera, which subtly blends electronic music with medieval harmonies and North African rhythms, premiered to wide acclaim in Europe.
There is a present synthesis of electronic sound engineering and modal harmony.
