Hello Moon, Can You Hear Me? - Professor Tim O'Brien, Jim Spencer and Dave Tolan

What immediately drew me to this one is the same thing that drew me to the music of Professor Green. With Prof. Green I was ultimately disappointed but Professor Tim O'Brien is an actual professor, and a professor of Astrophysics at Manchester University at that. What's he doing releasing a 7" record? Well, in collaboration with producers Jim Spencer and Dave Tolan, who have worked with New Order among others, they've created Hello Moon, Can You Hear Me?, a driving piece of electronica all created of samples from the Jodrell Bank observatory and centre for astrophysics. The samples include sounds from Sputnik 1, swirling electrons, a black hole and a dying star among other things. In a nifty move, the B-side has the professor explaining where the different sounds are from and what they mean. 

  
The music itself is a driving dance floor banger. It's got an '80s feel and is as if synths pioneer Giorgio Moroder wrote the soundtrack to a fast-paced space adventure. It is reminiscent of the relentless soundtrack to the 1998 German film, Run Lola Run and has a dystopian future feel to it. I'd love to see how this goes down on a dance floor, it's bound to be out of this world! 
Sorry. 
Listen to the song and read a bit about it from the Prof. himself at his personal blog, here.

Professor Tim O'Brien, Jim Spencer and Dave Tolan
Hello Moon, Can You Hear Me?
O Genesis
7" Moon Picture Disc (cool) out: 22/07/2016 at Rough Trade
    

The Capsule's Pride (Bikes) - Bwana

Techno has always been more of a Tech-no thanks for me. I lived in Berlin for six months and you can't escape the stuff. The constant thud emanates from grimy corners of the city at all hours of the day. It's so sobering when you're off on a midday stroll in the sun and come across a dingy, thudding warehouse with the techno crew still raving away from last night. It's even worse being in there. I once arrived at the doors of a club as the sun came up, only to be plunged into deep darkness inside some abandoned building, the only light being the occasional flaring of someone's cigarette or the bright, early morning summer sun bursting through when anyone opened the door, the light flooding in to mock my misfortune before the big warehouse door swung shut again and plunged me back into the continuous beat of the dull techno. What made it worse was how seriously all the Berlin club crew took it. Standing in static rows facing the DJ, doing the "techno-shuffle" from one foot to the other and whistling at the slightest predictable drop or dodgy DJ effect. Techno really is one of the least fun music forms ever. Not what I want at 7am.*

So a techno producer called Bwana based in Berlin has all the hallmarks for me to pass this one by. Even the name Bwana is enough to get on my nerves. But am I glad that I checked this out. 

The Capsule's Pride (Bikes) was originally floating around on the Dark Web through Tor but is now available for free download through a pretty cool website (link below). The whole album is a tribute to the 1988 anime film, Akira. For some reason I've never seen Akira, but I had heard some of the soundtrack and know that it's a bit of something special. Bwana's album is made exclusively from samples of the soundtrack and has so much more mood and emotion in it than the usual techno thud. 

There are many of the usual techno tropes; repetition, ping-ponging beats, deep electro rhythms. But there's so much more going on than that. On the track The Colonel's Mistake, The Scientist's Regret, the beat is a sample of someone saying "Akira" chopped into three bits, A-ki-ra. There's a lot of vocal samples which gives everything more character, makes it interesting, no longer just a cold beat. What's really great is how Bwana uses the traditional Japanese musical sounds from the soundtrack and morphs them into some great techno. This is techno with some soul, something to make you move and, dare I say it, it's really fun.          

Check out the full album in this Youtube playlist  and download the album in full at the pretty cool website made for the album. 

*Despite how it sounds, Berlin is great for a party and I loved it.

Bwana
Capsule's Pride (Bikes)
LuckyMe
Vinyl LP out: 15/07/2016 at Norman Records