Pieter van der Lugt is a freelance writer based in Cape Town. He's available for work in Afrikaans or English and his specialist fields are entertainment, pop culture and literature. See about me for a full CV and contact details.

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Casino vs Japan

Casino vs Japan For thirteen years Erik Kowalski of Milwaukee in Wisconsin has been producing smooth, sophisticated IDM which has earned him comparisons to Boards of Canada, though not the same level of fame. If you do a search for his name, he might be pipped by an actor of the same name. Just as well that he decided to work as Casino vs Japan when he released his first CD in 1998.
  As a kid Erik recorded episodes of Miami Vice so he could sample Jan Hammer's soundtrack music. He taught himself to play piano, guitar and drums and started creating songs. With one album in the bag he started performing live, opened for Low and then released Go Hawaii in 2000 followed by Whole Numbers Play the Basics two years later. Next was the wonderful Hitori + Kaiso 1998-2001, a collection of unreleased tracks and a good place to start discovering what Erik has to offer. It was compiled by a record company from an archive of material Erik gave to a music friend as a present. He didn't have plans to release it, but in 2010 it was mined for another excellent collection, Night on Tape.
  Music Has The Right To Children came out in the same year as Erik's first EP. He has a lot in common with Boards of Canada, but his music doesn't really have a dark side. It's uplifting, inspirational stuff.

android lust

Android LustThe sound of her band will remind you of Nine Inch Nails and it turns out Shikhee, the woman behind the industrial outfit Android Lust, has a lot in common with Trent Reznor. This is how she describes going home after touring with her album Devour, Rise and Take Flight in 2006. “It's always a bit scary. I start to doubt myself, reacquaint myself with my studio . . . and wonder if I can still do it,” she says. “It took until late 2007 to get back to writing.”
  Shikhee was born in Bangladesh and started listening to David Bowie at nineteen when his early albums were rereleased. She liked the abstract stylings, but found the exact sound she wanted in the industrial band Skinny Puppy. “I had no idea what to do to make music like that,” she said in an MTV interview. “It was totally foreign to me. I was doing acoustic stuff… I didn't have the means to do that. I didn't know. I bought this studio keyboard, a Yamaha 500 PSR. It had MIDI capability, but I needed to buy an external sequencer to program it. That was my entry into programming electronic music.”
  When you listen to Skinny Puppy, the Canadian outfit formed in 1982 and labelled the fathers of electro-industrial, you realise how much Shikhee adds to the genre with her vocals. She has a light voice but always stays on top of her heavy electronic mixes with their grinding beats and thick distortion effects. The lyrics are vintage Goth and just like Trent she has a knack for building a powerful riff out of a few simple elements. On last year's The Animal she added live instruments, using her touring band in the studio for the first time, and also recorded New York street noise which she used to build rhythms and ambient loops. None of this softened her sound - it's still human woman against machine. And unlike a lot of the light-versus-dark stuff, her albums don't become predictable and don't lose their power.

biosphere

Geir Jenssen (Biosphere)Here's one you don't hear every day: a music style inspired by the ice age and stone age. Geir Jenssen's "Arctic sound", as it's been tagged, took shape when he studied geology and despite the petrified roots his music is at the cutting-edge of electronica.
  He was born in Norway in 1962 and bought his first synth in 1983. He joined an electronic trio but left after two albums to do his own thing. After trying a blend with acid house and new beat as the main ingredients, he took the name Biosphere and created an album which was rejected by his record company, which called it unmarketable. Luckily electronica fans picked up on it and when Patashnik came out three years later, Biosphere was a familiar name. One track was used for a Levi's TV ad, which didn't hurt either.
  Geir went seriously minimalist with the album Substrata and since then he's taken it further by making the beats a background element, allowing the melodies and sounds more breathing space. The film Insomnia (later remade by Hollywood) featured a classic Biosphere soundtrack which made it even more memorable. He also wrote music to be played with the legendary Russian silent film Man With a Movie Camera. His latest is music for the film NOKAS, about the biggest robbery in Norway's history.
  Geir is a serious mountain climber - he did the 8 210 metres to the top of Cho Oyu in the Himalayas without oxygen. His sport is an inspiration, but also gives him a chance to record natural sounds. Field Recordings from Tibet, released under his real name, is a fascinating sound diary of his biggest climb.
  Too many ambient musicians seem to load up some loops, tweak a few settings and see what happens, but it sounds like Geir really composes his pieces. They have a structure and flow you'd normally expect from modern classical giants like Steve Reich. Not that you have to get all intellectual about it - this is music as pure and refreshing as glacier water.

scorn

Mick Harris of Scorn When he left Napalm Death, drummer Mick Harris was keen to create a new style based on experimental metal and dark dub. With former Napalm singer and bassist Nic Bullen he formed Scorn whose unique sound got the tag "dark hop" and was linked later to the dubstep craze of the noughties. Bullen didn't stay long and Mick made his debut as sole member with Giral, which had more loops and ambient effects, making it (more or less) a link between old and new Scorn.
  The 2002 album Governor shifted towards regular dubstep. After that Scorn was quiet for a while with Mick producing ambient tracks as Lull, fooling around with drum 'n' bass as Quoit and working with John Zorn's experimental jazz group Painkiller.
  After a five-year break Scorn returned with Stealth. It's a highly rated album that drew in dubstep fans, but might seem a bit convential if you've fallen for the earlier, more menacing stuff. Maybe it's just another phase - though the 2008 EP Super Mantis Part 1 is more of the same.
  When he was asked what inspired him (in a 2008 interview with Tokafi), Mick said: "Living in a shit city, Birmingham, a city I hate with a passion. Going to the river and being by myself there is a major influence. Escaping from it all."
  It's interesting to hear Mick (as Scorn and Quoit) among soul mates on the 2008 compilation Forwards in Backwards Time. The double album as a whole feels a bit mechanical, like exercises rather than experiments in drum 'n' bass. If anyone can break this mould, it would be Mick. You can never know where he's going next. Meanwhile there are the earlier Scorn albums: ominous, thumping, intense music that's likely to get more plays than the other dark stuff in your MP3 folder.

BOREDOMS

Toba SojoSince the Boredoms was formed in Osaka in 1986, the line-up has changed often. Thankfully the song has remained basically the same. Noise rock it is, but more than just an attempt to break the record for blown amplifiers.
  Upmarket critics describe them with phrases such as "masters of playful trance-inducing psychedelia with spiritual underpinnings" and you could write a thesis on how their music represents the spirit of the times: it's restless, cynical, sarcastic and manic. A thesis is a lot of work, though. Rather get the albums. They're all on emusic.
  Members past and present have more than 50 recorded side projects to their name and craziest of the lot could be frontman Eye's collaboration with turntablist Otomo Yoshihide as MC Hellshit & DJ Carhouse.