Armando Martinez is one the first electronic music producers to explore overtly political themes. Until now, the form’s most memorable articulations of this topic have tended towards the abstract and have included UR’s call to the oppressed to revolt, Drexciya’s hope that the experience of their forefathers provided inspiration for change and the more general concern expressed in electro records that the machines are taking over.
The lost album, Afro-Cuban Electronics, will arrive on the Detroit label in June.
As anyone who was brave enough to listen to last year’s Eat My Fuck album will surely attest, Jamal Moss’ I.B.M. project is not for those who like streamlined electronic music. Short for Insane Black Man, that 2014 album saw the Chicago artist push the raw, jarring take on house music he releases under the Hieroglyphic Being guise into a place where distorted chaos rules. Collecting tracks from the Moss archive spread over a ten-year period, From The Land Of Rape & Honey is for the most part very much in keeping with the disturbed thought process that guided Eat My Fuck.
A decades worth of Insane Black Man recordings by Jamal Moss will be compiled on the forthcoming From The Land Of Rape & Honey (The Suppressed Tapes ) 1995-2005.
For those living outside of Detroit, Erika may be a relatively new name. But in the Motor City, Erika Sherman is a long-recognised figure of a hardcore underground electronic music community. Her debut solo album, Hexagon Cloud, released last year was preceded by a remix 12” featuring reworks by Orphx, and Detroit locals Marcellus Pittman and Brendan M. Gillen doing his BMG thing. Gillen, who oversees the long running Interdimensional Transmissions label also produces with Erika in Ectomorph, an electro group he formed in 1995 with Gerald Donald of Drexciya in an attempt to make Detroit music for Detroit, ‘not for export’. When Donald left Ectomorph, Sherman was handed a 606 and asked to join, which she did with Brian ‘DJ Godfather’ Jeffries and Carlos Souffront, a Detroit DJ rumored to have one of the most extensive acid record collections going around.