chillout

Portishead are a band from Bristol, United Kingdom, named after a small coastal town twelve miles west of said musical hotbed, in North Somerset. They were initially known for their use of jazz samples and some hip-hop beats along with various synth sounds and the hauntingly beautiful vocals of singer Beth Gibbons. Their current sound drops the samples in favour of a harder, more abrasive edge, but retains Gibbons' vocals.

Ulrich Schnauss was born in the northern German town of Kiel in 1977. During his formative years, he came to love a wide spectrum of music, ranging from My Bloody Valentine to Tangerine Dream, from Chapterhouse to early bleep and breakbeat tracks. There was not much opportunity to see his musical heroes in Kiel, so he moved to Berlin in 1996. By that time, Ulrich was already a prolific musician in such genres as ambient and drum and bass, with a variety of pseudonyms (most notably View to the Future and Ethereal 77).

Hunz is a three-piece electronic pop band, spearheaded by Brisbane-based electronic musician and producer, Hans Van Vliet. With a background in music programming and motion design, Hans pulls his notes out of a binary soup of ones and zeroes, hand-crafting synth patches and beats from scratch. The result is a mix of pulsating, glitchy electronics and ethereal vocals that hint at the sinister, but succumb to the pleasure of pop hooks instead.

Washed Out is Ernest Greene, a young guy from Perry, Georgia, USA who makes bedroom synthpop that sounds blurred and woozily evocative, like someone smeared Vaseline all over an early OMD demo tape, then stayed up all night trying to recreate what they heard. There’s a sense of longing and distance in Greene’s somber, filtered vocals, but it’s what he does compositionally that makes Washed Out stand out. Backed by gently pulsing, Balearic-tinged disco, Greene’s voice takes on a new dimension.