Dan Bodan
The Guardian:
Dan Bodan sings electronic love songs. No, croons them, like a clean-cut pop idol from the 50s given a dark, modern makeover. And we use the term "love songs" in the broadest sense, to denote tunes that move at a torpid pace and could conceivably be slow-danced to, even if you're unlikely to find titles such as Under a Cancer Sky, an extra track on Bodan's new single, being "spun" at school discos or wherever it is young people do their smooching to music these days.
He's a bit of a mystery, is Bodan. He lives in Berlin but comes from Canada, but we've also seen mentions of him as "one half of the duo Synthdromes" from Sheffield, and he has also links with Maidstone, where he has been known to play DJ sets on the area's "growing alternative electronic scene". He's done "informal performances" in galleries and collaborations with visual artists and released an album called Nudity & Atrocity that has been described as a "gothic romance", but the music he's making now, especially the Aaron/DP single due out in a few weeks, would appear to mark his official coming out as a recording artist. He's even got the patronage of a Hot Chip to coincide with the release – Alexis Taylor has recorded a version of Under a Cancer Sky.
Bodan – who is looked after by the same people behind the excellent Dave ID – cites as influences Soft Cell, James Blake, Antony and the Johnsons, Arthur Russell, Björk, even Prince and Bruce Springsteen, and it is said that he "channels the greatest hits from the 70s, 80s, and 90s", all of which is a bit far-fetched and the result of excessively wishful thinking, especially the Prince and Bruce parts and the bit about channelling hits. These are sketchy, sombre, after-hours avant-ballads, not exactly chart material, although you can see them appealing to older music fans than, say, Blake's demographic – if anything, Bodan is like an indier, more abstract Bryan Ferry, wallowing in blue moods and the anguish of romance, with the vague whiff of the transgressive and decadent. Aaron, one of the tracks on his single (the other being DP), suggests he might be gay, and we've seen one comparison between him and Frank Ocean, but that, too, is wishful thinking. His music doesn't quite have that luxuriance or sense of scale and ambition, but there's definitely an intriguing album of smoky, saxy torch songs bearing an askew view of life and love in this young Berlin (via South Yorkshire and Kent) boy.
