erika

Yes, it’s the end of the week. Time to chill out. Time to let our friend Erika from Detroit help us to drift like a cosmic butterfly into some nice solar drift, held aloft by the delicate siren song of that new Moog semi-modular thing we’re all kinda eyeing lustfully. Oops, sorry, lost my train of thought there. Indeed, the folks at Moog have been putting out a steady stream of Mother-32 videos, and here’s the chill-est of them so far. Description: * Patch performed live * No overdubs * In this short improvisation, Detroit-based electronic artist, Erika, composes a …

CDM here in the Moog Factory, downtown Asheville, North Carolina. I don’t care whether you’re a Boiler Room fan or hater – this one is special. Erika is here from Detroit with her circular sequencer and loads of gear. The wild and wooly Survive are new to me but they’re doing lovely stuff and have a synth museum worth of keyboard racks – fantastic. And in town from New York, hailing from Oberlin, Ohio, are Teengirl Fantasy. It’s already a great lineup, but novel for a second reason – Moog will keep assembling stuff in the factory as they play. …

Monday is a perfect time to try to shift moods with music, to change the mix. So here’s a melange of Monday mixes … mmmmmmm. (Good God, I’m glad we have music to start the week, as words are generally failing me.) Here’s a bit of what we’re cueing up here – from deep, perk-you-up sounds from Anika and Moderna to richly-diverse experimental sounds via reliq and Erika.

From being a long-time mainstay of the Detroit scene to, at last, debuting a proper solo LP with Hexagon Cloud, the one word that can sum up Erika for me is, simply, “inspiring.” And if Hexagon Cloud’s perfectly-calibrated analog sounds and imaginative musical frequencies indulge our futuristic sonic fantasies, here we get the chance to talk to Erika a bit about what lies beyond musical parameters, too. That ranges from Detroit (past the fetishization of ruined buildings, please) to the liberation of early-90s BBSing to the appeal of outer space. You can listen to Erika’s work and revisit some reflections …

What if you would strip away the latest fashions, the murky layers of effects and gimmicks, and just get out to the otherworldly pleasure of listening to machines transport you into outer-space grooves? The solo debut of Detroit-based artist Erika, Hexagon, could give you just that liberating feeling. It’s arrestingly minimal in its materials, not only because it’s been sequenced entirely on hardware with a single vintage sequencer, but because the tracks themselves are so beautifully economical and direct. And that makes them no less imaginative. Retro without succumbing to nostalgia, always with an alien-chic groove, Hexagon feels like an …