Listen: Tides - Onni Boi

Tides is the kind of song that feels like it is bursting with energy from the moment it starts... A drum snap, a bubbling electronic bassline shimmies along with a sense of excitement and desire, a falsetto vocal carries a sense of independent determination. This is the new single from Onni Boi, a musician from Helsinki who likes to blend the sounds of electronic music, indie, house and R&B.

Onni Boi is the work of Onni Poika Pirkola (Poika means boy in Finnish). Music is his vehicle to cover things he finds it hard to talk about, focusing on intimate and difficult to discuss topics.

Tides is a record that has been a while in the making, covering a topic that the artist finds difficult:

“I had a verse for 'Tides' laying around for a year or two. A little loop in the head. There was something irritating but exciting about it so ended up waiting a while before recording it. I think Tides turned out cool and cheesy and also kind of personal. There’s this feeling of trouble with letting someone close (and keeping them that way). And how those are seasonal things, cycles, tides. It’s so much easier to please people than to let them in on where you head’s at.”

Tides is out now through Lyktan Records.

Listen: Flow - Moglii

Flow is the new song from Cologne-based musician Moglii, real name Simon Ebener-Holscher, and it bursts with a wild sense of movement.

The song is a tribute to the ocean, the feeling of the flow-state and the experience of the soul of a special person. Listening to it conjures a feeling of being truly in the moment, when time seems to shift and take on a different form, somehow both longer and shorter at once.

Having previously had success in collaboration with Novaa on the 2016 EP Down Under, Moglii started to release music on his own in the form of the debut EP Naboo. Having opened for the likes of Roosevelt, Elderbrook and Empire of the Sun, Ebener-Holscher is able to combine his background in songwriting and training in jazz piano with knowledge of electronic production and what it takes to stage a live performance. The result is heard here, in the polished and yet authentic and honest feel of Flow.

There is a little bit of a bedroom, future pop feel to Moglii’s music. Flow calls to mind Metronomy and James Blake amongst others - the hooks are irresistible but at the same time the vocals feel emotionally intimate. The instrumentation deliberates plays with the sound of the sea, and a sense of serenity and strength. It’s confident and yet vulnerable, in the way genuine vulnerability can be often be incredibly strong.

Describing the inspiration of Flow, Moglii says:

“I wrote “Flow” two years ago during a profoundly formative trip to Tenerife. We camped in the middle of nature and woke up every morning at the sea – it was a surreal experience, seemingly detached from time and space, made even more magical by a special encounter: I fell in love there and put that flow I experienced with this girl into a song. It's about getting to know each other, the deepening of the relationship and the natural lightness and ease that underlined it all.”

Check out Flow below:

Listen: Kick - Shee feat. Andrew Butcher

This right here is the kind of joint I feel irresistible... slipped into my inbox at a point when my backlog of blog posts is already worryingly long, Kick is the sort of song I can’t not write about.

Kick has a weird and woozy production style that feels cavernous and a vocal that somehow feels so close it’s like it’s in my head. This is music built like architecture. It's a dayglo danceline in an empty multi-storey car park, neon lights in echoing alleyways, bright candy trickling down drainpipes.

In other words, Kick, a song about infectious attraction, manages to combine brightness and grit in way that you can almost touch. It elevates the chorus to magic trick - slight of hand as seemingly everything happens at once, multiple rhythms bounce around my head and, once it is over, it is hard to know what happened... all I do know is I found myself singing this in the bathroom as I got dressed, having only ever heard it once.

Listen: Win You Over - Whethan & Bearson feat. SOAK

Win You Over sounds like someone took your emotional sensation of a having a crush, bottled it and then poured it into rare plastic vinyl records. Bubbling enthusiasm and determination grabs you by the shoulders to create a moment of forced eye contact as Whethan, Bearson & SOAK tell you, “Hey... I’m really into you, you dummy”.

There is a feeling of joyful easiness here in Win You Over... knowing you are into someone and just seeing how that plays out. The main refrain from the song asks over and over again, “If I try could I win you over?”, some 27.5 times, and you suspect it is as much a rhetorical question as one directed at anyone in particular. It’s the nagging, insistent craving of a brain that can’t quiet itself, joyous and in awe and just wanting someone so damn bad.

Win You Over is the first collaboration between Chicago producer Whethan, Norwegian musician Bearson and Irish artist SOAK. Together they have made something that truly feels like the product of one mind - a sparkling piece of disco-pop. Check it out below.

News: Glastonbury Festival announce the Emerging Talent Competition 2019 Longlist

Glastonbury Festival have announced the Longlist for this year’s Emerging Talent Competition. The Longlist is a list of 90 different musical acts who have been selected by a panel of judges from the thousands of acts that entered this year.

I’m one of a panel of 30 judges, made up of online music writers, that helped select the acts who go through to the next round. Each judge is hand selects just three artists, with the overall Longlist of 90 ultimately being further whittled down by the festival organisers to just eight finalists, who will all perform live in next month’s finals.

You can see the full list and listen to a playlist including music from most on the Longlist over on the Glastonbury Festival website.

The three artists I chose were JacobNeverhill, Kudu Blue and Jen Simmonds. I’ve included the track I judged from each band below, together with a very brief description of why they stood out for me.

JacobNeverhill

JacobNevrhill

JacobNeverhill creates emotionally vulnerable R&B with beautiful, sophisticated production that lets the songwriting really shine in a way that has led to crossover success for the likes of Miguel.

The song I judged isn’t currently available publicly but the video below is a great demonstration of what made me think JacobNeverhill’s talent deserved recognition.

Kudu Blue

Kudu Blue

Kudu Blue blend melancholic vocals with sophisticated and soulful house music to create something that feels undoubtedly modern whilst drawing on three decades of dance music… The result is a little like the xx collaborating with John Talabot, that is to say, excellent.

Jen Simmonds

Jen Simmonds

Jen Simmonds captures a blissful dreamlike state on the spectral yet grungy One In A Million… A shoegaze wall-of-sound that feels like the soundtrack to a time when you have been untethered from your day-to-day reality and instead have become lost in all the things we hold close in our inner lives.

Good luck in the next round to JacobNeverhill, Kudu Blue and Jen Simmonds!