Sonic Playground - indie electronic

Dusty Kid - Nemur (Walls of Guitars) (Extended Version)

2026-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

Genre and Mood

Dusty Kid surprised everyone with Nemur (Walls of Guitars) (Extended Version). From a producer known for dark, driving techno comes a song that is closer to indie electronic pop: built on guitars, shaped with electronic patience and coloured by melancholic, reflective and heartfelt feelings. It is the moment the raver puts the headphones down and sings.

Song Summary

“Nemur” is a song of under five minutes placed at the end of a club album whose tracks run up to seventeen minutes. Guitars layer on top of each other, as the subtitle promises, into a shimmering wall of sound, while Lodde’s own vocal floats above with a fragile, almost private tone. The album credits list two guitarists, Dusty Kid himself and Francesco Lodde, and Dusty Kid on vocals. The production keeps the electronic producer’s sense of space and build, but the heart of the track is the warmth of the strings and the openness of the melody.

Musical Breakdown

The arrangement grows by stacking guitar on guitar, so the song gets bigger without ever getting louder in a club sense.

Intro

A single guitar pattern opens the track, intimate and slightly melancholy, like someone playing alone at dawn.

Verse 1

The vocal enters gently over the guitar, unhurried and close, with a hint of electronic texture beneath.

Build-up

More guitars join, each adding a new rhythm or harmony, and the sound starts to thicken into the promised wall.

Chorus

The melody opens up over the layered strings, the most emotional and uplifting part of the song, bittersweet and bright at once.

Climax

All the guitar layers ring together in a glowing, resonant swell, the wall at its tallest.

Outro

The layers fall away until the song returns to something close to its opening, a soft and fitting farewell.

Concepts in Focus

Nemur is a verse-chorus form song on an album otherwise made of club tracks. Techno tracks like the album’s opener “Here Comes the Techno” develop by adding and removing layers over a steady beat; Nemur instead alternates sung verses with a melodic chorus, the way a pop or folk song does. Listen for the moment the chorus melody opens up: that change of section, rather than a change of texture, is what moves the song forward.

This page uses the extended mix from A Raver’s Diary: The Extended Versions, the companion release Boxer issued in 2009 for DJs. The techno tracks gain whole minutes in their extended forms, “Klin” growing from under five to over seven, but Nemur only goes from 4:46 to 4:51. A song shaped around a voice and a chorus has little room for the long intros and outros a DJ needs, which is exactly why it stands apart on the album.

Artistic Context

Dusty Kid is the Sardinian producer Paolo Alberto Lodde, best known in the late 2000s for intense, melodic techno. A Raver’s Diary, his debut album, was composed and recorded between July 2007 and September 2008 at his JFL Studio in Sardinia and released on 20 April 2009 by Cologne’s Boxer Recordings, with distribution through Kompakt; he wrote, produced, arranged and mixed it himself. “Nemur (Walls of Guitars)” closes the album, a bold choice after the seventeen-minute “America”. In 2020 the album was reissued digitally on Isolade with the extended versions and a continuous mix of the whole record.

Impact and Reception

Nemur has become the gentle, human side of an artist usually heard at peak time, the track listeners return to after the techno. It is here because it shows how much heart can hide inside a dance producer. Listen to it at sunrise, preferably after a long night.

Glass Animals, Gilligan Moss - Gooey (Gilligan Moss Remix)

2026-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

Genre and Mood

Glass Animals handed Gooey to Gilligan Moss, and the Gooey (Gilligan Moss Remix) comes back as glistening indie electronic music rather than indie pop. It keeps the original’s sticky intimacy but makes it dreamy and hypnotic, with a playful streak in its percussion that keeps the haze from ever getting heavy.

Song Summary

The original is a slow, honeyed love song; this version stretches it out to more than five and a half minutes and lets its pieces float apart. DIY, which premiered the remix, described chiming percussion providing an oddly sinister backing and a song that keeps its loose shape while being stretched out to serious lengths. That chiming top end is what makes it memorable: sweet on the surface with something faintly unsettling underneath.

Musical Breakdown

Rather than a verse-chorus song, the remix behaves like a slow tide.

Intro

Bell-like tones and soft clicks flicker in the dark before the beat settles, as if the track is tuning itself.

Build-up

A warm low end and a gentle beat slide in, and the first vocal fragments start to circle.

Main Section

The groove settles into a hypnotic sway, layered percussion moving around pieces of the Gooey hook.

Bridge

Midway the drums drop back and the chimes take over, a glittering passage that feels like the remix holding its breath.

Climax

The beat returns fuller and the melody blooms into its most lush form.

Outro

Layers fall away until only the chimes and a last echo of the voice remain, dissolving rather than ending.

Concepts in Focus

A remix reworks the parts of a recording, and this one shows how far that can go while keeping a song recognisable. Gilligan Moss keeps Dave Bayley’s vocal and the melody of Glass Animals – Gooey, but replaces its slow, sensual groove with twinkling, warped electronics. DIY compared his style at the time to producers such as Pantha du Prince and Four Tet, and you can hear that delicacy in the percussion.

The remix is also a slow build-up. Instead of a single rise and drop, it adds layers patiently over several minutes, so that its fullest moment arrives late and feels earned. Listen for the point where the chimes, the beat and the voice finally sound together.

Artistic Context

Glass Animals, the Oxford band led by Dave Bayley, released Gooey on 14 February 2014 as the lead single from their debut album Zaba, made with executive producer Paul Epworth; Bayley famously recorded its final chorus in eight different voices to imitate a choir. The Gooey EP that followed in April 2014 collected remixes and other extras, and Gilligan Moss’s version was one of them. At 5:39 it runs close to a minute longer than the album cut.

Impact and Reception

The remix found an audience of its own on music blogs: Complex later reported that it reached number one on Hype Machine, and it is often credited with putting Gilligan Moss on the map. The original went on to number 12 in Triple J’s Hottest 100 of 2014, the band’s best placing until Heat Waves. It is on this playground because it shows how a great remix can find a new mood inside a familiar song. Put on headphones and let it melt.

Tubbe - In Berlin

2024-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

Genre and Mood

Tubbe, the German duo of singer Henri Jakobs and producer Klaus Scheuermann, deliver bright, driving synth-pop with “In Berlin”. The duo began in 2010 in Munich’s queer rave scene, moved to Berlin in 2013 and describe their music as electropunk and electropop; this track blends modern electronic production with 1980s synth colours. The mood is energetic and euphoric on the surface, with a sharp, ironic eye underneath.

Song Summary

“In Berlin” is about arriving in the German capital with a head full of dreams. The text that accompanies the official video tells the story: growing up in a village where you dream of the endless big city, where the lights are too bright to sleep; then arriving in Berlin and finding your dreams sold off for 50 cents in a 1-euro shop, everyone else saving the world and wearing more tattoos than you, confetti and noise everywhere, until you open a corner pub called “Bei Mutti” because home is where you find peace. The music is all driving beats and shimmering synthesizers, which makes the disillusion land with a grin.

Musical Breakdown

Intro: Setting the Scene

The track opens with a pulsing synth bass and crisp electronic drums that immediately set the song’s energetic pace.

Verse 1: Building the Narrative

The vocal enters clear and direct over a relatively sparse arrangement, letting the words take centre stage while the beat keeps the momentum.

Pre-Chorus: Tension and Release

Additional synth layers come in and the energy rises, setting up the chorus.

Chorus: Euphoric Release

The chorus opens up with bright, 1980s-flavoured synthesizers around the title, the song’s most celebratory moment, whether you take the celebration straight or not.

Bridge: Atmospheric Interlude

A short breakdown strips back the beats before the final push.

Final Chorus: Peak Energy

All the elements come together for the last chorus, the track at its fullest.

Outro: The Night Continues

The elements are gradually stripped away while the core beat carries on to the end.

Concepts in Focus

Tubbe are heirs to electroclash, the scene that fused 1980s electro and synth-pop with punk attitude and a taste for performance, and which grew in part around Munich, the city where the duo was founded. Discogs calls them a “queer electro punk duo”, and the description fits: cheap-sounding synths used with confidence, a provocative image, and lyrics that poke at their surroundings. Compare Chicks On Speed – Euro Trash Girl, a Munich electroclash act of the generation before.

The synthesizer is the song’s main instrument: Scheuermann’s electronics supply the bass, the beat and the bright chords. Synth-pop’s sound has long been the sound of nightlife, which is exactly why it suits a song that both celebrates and mocks the city’s party image.

The music video, made by the studio Modest Department and featuring Katrin Kaspar as a “flower girl”, came out on Audiolith’s channel in March 2015, the week the album was released. Its accompanying text turns the song into a little story of small-town dreams and big-city letdown, a framing that makes the irony in the chorus easier to hear.

Lyrical Themes

The song treats Berlin as a destination of longing and a place of disappointment at once: the city of brightness and reinvention that, up close, turns out to be crowded, noisy and full of people who seem to be doing better than you. The return to something small and familiar, a corner pub with a homely name, is the punchline.

Production Techniques

Klaus Scheuermann handles the electronics and production in Tubbe, with Henri Jakobs on vocals, guitar and bass. The production pairs vintage-sounding synthesizers with crisp, contemporary drum programming, so the track sounds both retro and current.

Cultural Impact

“In Berlin” comes from Keine Arbeit lieber Tanzen (“no work, rather dance”), Tubbe’s second album, released on 13 March 2015 by the Hamburg label Audiolith, with guests including Torsun of Egotronic and the jazz pianist Joachim Kühn. German Wikipedia describes it as much more socially critical than their debut Eiscafe Ravetto, while staying danceable. The duo announced a split in 2020, then revealed in 2023 that it had been staged and returned with a third album, Bankrott in Utopia.

Music Video

The official video, published by Audiolith and directed by Modest Department, follows the arc of the song’s story from village to city, with Katrin Kaspar as the flower girl. Watch it with the text above in mind and the jokes in the song become much clearer.