Electronic

Festival Alert: Outlook Festival 2012

Since its humble beginnings just four years ago, the Outlook Festival has quickly become famous worldwide as Europe’s leading Bass music & Soundsystem culture festival. Held in an abandoned fortress off the coast of Croatia, Outlook has consistently been at the forefront of bass driven music and each year brings the biggest and most vibrant names in Electronic music. Alongside this, the festival has also become known for exposing the freshest and most unique talents from the world of Dub, Dubstep, Dancehall, Drum & Bass, Hip-Hop, Grime, Garage, Electronica and Bass Music. 2011 brought them the ‘Best Overseas Festival Award’ as voted for by the UK Festival Awards, and 2012 looks to be even better.

Competition: Win Nicolas Jaar – Space Is Only Noise Vinyl LP

2011 was quite a year for Nicolas Jaar and just two months into 2012 he’s set to take to the stage of Camden’s Roundhouse to showcase his new label Clown & Sunset. Having just been voted the no. 1 live act in the Resident Advisor polls, and seeing Nico at his last London date (where he played one of three sold out nights at Fabric), take it from us, this is one opportunity not to miss out on.

Tracks You Might’ve Missed: Lips – Everything To Me

A talented keyboard player with a soft spot for Casio sounds, Stephanie Brown a.k.a Lips isn’t your run-of-the-mill singer-songwriter. The mingling of dulcet tones with idiosyncratic beats places her comfortably alongside Little Dragon and Zero 7, in a realm of Electronic-Pop that seems to be dominated by female artists. Lips performed extensively in her native New Zealand before moving to New York and releasing contagious anthem, Everything to me, in 2010. The track personifies that fervidly desperate plea to vanish from the daily grind, under the surreptitious guise of a lucid pop song. It draws an almost inverted semblance with Bill Withers’ Lovely Day, replacing the celebration of Bill’s sunny morning verve with an anesthetised lament of Monday morning melancholy that has the ability to, in the same way as Lovely Day or Zero 7’s Home, lull you into a coma of comfort.

New Artist: Guy Furious

With the recent release of Jacques Greene’s new track with Koreless, we thought we’d bring you a new producer who likes to dabble in RnB samples. Despite still being a Music Tech student at Birmingham City, Guy Furious has already achieved a fair bit. It’s his exploration into Future-Garage on EP Pillow Talk that caught our attention the most.