Hercules & Love Affair have followed up 2022's dark, gothy and decidedly un-dancey In Amber with a return to the club. Andy Butler, who is H&LA, made the Someone Else Is Calling EP with Quinn Whalley of DECIUS and Paranoid London and Icelandic vocalist Elin Ey aka Hips & Lips. Whalley is an inspired collaborator, and the EP throbs with deep house bass, dashes of techno / acid house, and tons of attitude.
Marcus Elliot Brown, AKA one-man project Nourished By Time, has a classic R&B singing voice in the style of Freddie Jackson or Luther Vandross: warm, earnest and with every word enunciated as if to express his keenness of feeling. But his music is quite different: a slippery layer cake of samples, multitudinous keys and lo-fi pop production, with Brown singing of a world where the ebb and flow isn't ebbing right, be it in love or civic life.
On the afternoon of August 3, a few hundred people gathered at the Nursery, the intimate outdoor extension of Brooklyn's stylish Public Records, to hear DJ Sprinkles. I think it's fair to say most of us knew what to expect: Sprinkles, an alias of queer producer and cultural critic Terre Thaemlitz, blends deep thoughts and deep house into languorous, embodied critiques of everything from Madonna's use of Vogue culture to British trade union organizing to laws restricting public dancing in Japan, where Sprinkles lives.