I feel like so many of my Sunday Night Chill playlists have one thing in common: they make me want to get in bed and drink hot chocolate (or sit by a fire and drink red wine - pick your poison). But not this playlist. It's been gloriously sunny and warm in San Francisco over the past few days, and this weekend I was lucky enough to escape to wine country. I spent the weekend drinking crisp white wine with the sun on my shoulders. It was blissful. So crank up this playlist, sit on your [...]

This is the season for layers. Layers of clothes, layers of quilts on your bed. It's cold outside, but the sun is starting to warm up the earth. I thought I'd dedicate this Sunday Night Chill to that feeling, and somehow managed to find five songs that capture what it means to be both cold and warm at the same time. Enjoy the layered instrumentals and synths as you wrap yourself up in tonight's blanket of electronica. Image credit: Wineglass Bay by Cat1788 [...]
![[MEGA Playlist] 60+ Instrumental Tracks You Need to Listen to](http://cdn.elbo.ws/posts/4741497_lg.jpg)
Everyone loves lyrics. Whether they're light-hearted and playful, soul-gripping and gut-wrenching, or abstract and avant garde, we all love to sing along, relate certain verses to our personal lives, or just be taken away by another person's story. On the other hand, hearing a great instrumental track is an entirely different experience. Without having words to identify with, your brain is free to let the music create an image in your mind. The interpretation is more so up to you than if you had someone defining it with their own words. Having this blank canvas allows your mind [...]

I don't know much about the indie/folk band Message to Bears . With very little information available on the internet about the background and existence of this band, I have been left scratching my head for days as to what I can possibly tell you all about it... With some research I discovered that Message to Bears is the project of instrumentalist Jerome Alexander . Composed mainly of songs that combine both classical and folk influences, Message to Bears is said to achieve "beautiful soundscapes...by [...]

I decided to keep more tracks than usual in this mixtape. It weighs in at a beefy 317MB. Friday Mixtape 151 is quite a wild ride. The mix contains some pretty intense language... Have a good weekend everyone. As always support the artists and buy music . (iTunes) Play Friday Mixtape 151: Download Friday Mixtape 151 Tracklist: Petition - Tennis Towers (Slow Hands Cover) - Bon Iver [...]
Reaching the halfway mark of the year is an exciting time for a music fan, especially for a year that has so much potential with forthcoming records. Let's be honest, 2012 hasn't quite shaped up to be the best of years, especially after a far more incredible 2011. In the end though, I will always take the bad with the good, and this year has had plenty of interesting records to look back on. As a music fan, I absolutely love to see lists of top albums because it's a very accessible and convenient way of discovering new bands and [...]
Programmation de la sélection « coup de coeur » du groupe ELL : Bon Iver - Perth Sufjan Stevens - Vesuvius Efterklang - Alike Peter Broderick - Colin Sigur Ros - Flugufrelsarinn Idaho - Some dogs can fly Little Dragon - Twice Noah And The Whale - My Door Is Always Open [...]

True fans of music spend countless hours searching for that next great song, album or artist, whether it be online or in a local record shop. The beautiful thing about music in today’s age is that technology has created an infinite supply of great music that is available to us at the click of a mouse. How perfect is that? We can discover a brand new artist on the opposite side of the globe in seconds without a radio or a music television channel. It only makes sense that a website so dedicated to this gorgeous universe of music would [...]

True fans of music spend countless hours searching for that next great song, album or artist, whether it be online or in a local record shop. The beautiful thing about music in today’s age is that technology has created an infinite supply of great music that is available to us at the click of a [...]

Artist : Message To Bears Title : Folding Leaves Label : Dead Pilot Records Release Date : January 16th BUY IT Written by Tom Johnson I've really struggled to write this review. Which is in no way meant as a negative comment against either the artist or their work, but is perhaps reflective of the overall [...]

A new video directed by John Owen for the new Message To Bears track 'Mountains', taken from his upcoming second album Folding Leaves . Happy New Year. Folding Leaves is released January 18th on Dead Pilot Records. -James Godwin, January 2nd, 2011 Copyright © 2011. Informal Flick-Thru . All rights reserved. Filed under: Music , Video Tagged: [...]

Them fellers over at BLBX have cooked up another one and this time it's member Jermainesoul 's 're-design' of a rather ace Message To Bears track. I'm not sure what a re-design is, but it sounds very pretty. Message to Bears - At A Glance (Jermainesoul Re-Design) by JermaineSoul You can hear the original here too: Message to Bears - At a [...]
Message To Bears - Mountains

Our friends over at Message to Bears have sent word about their attempt to raise money for their new album - Folding Leaves - via IndieGoGo , and so we thought we'd pass it along to you. The band is hoping to raise about $4,000 for their new album (on Dead Pilot Records) , and seems to be about halfway there. We've written before about Message to Bears, and would be very happy to see the band come through with another record. So, if you're curious, check out that IndieGoGo page [...]

When one contemplates the sound of a water droplet amongst the calm dew of a picturesque morning, Message To Bears is that sound. When the sun rises over a humble slow loris stretching nimbly beneath a branch in Southeast Asia, Message To Bears reverberates below the tree-tops. As much as I adore the good stuff, bedroom producers constructing careful but blatant electronica with their Reasons and their Logics is becoming a little too familiar. Here we have Message To Bears, aka Jerome Alexander, fabricating natural soundscapes with acoustic instrumentation. Awash with emotive [...]

I've written about the excellent music of Message to Bears before , and now I've got some good news for those of you who missed out on their debut LP: Departures . Dan from Message to Bears has just written to let me know that the original is being re-released on vinyl from Dead Pilot Records . It's a limited pressing of an excellent record, and I definitely encourage you to check it out! You can hear some of Message to Bears' music by visiting Bandcamp , or heading on over to MySpace . Or, [...]

Today it dawned on me that we are nearly halfway through our allotted time to pick three artists from the 160 we have been entrusted to judge for the Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition. I'll admit, at times I have grimaced, but not as often as I expected to; the competition standard is much higher than I imagined it would be. There are certain artists that we have written about in the past that I wish were on our list, but the random nature at least means that the judging is going to be totally fair. When I first [...]

Words: Gareth O’Malley It’s always something of an experience listening to a song that sounds so fragile it seems it could fall apart at any moment. Soundscapes like this don’t come along all that often, so deserve to be treasured when they do. The new song from Message to Bears (aka Oxford’s Jerome Alexander ) falls into this esteemed category. ‘Mountains’ is a beautiful song, though there’s some tension lurking beneath the surface, almost imperceptible at first, but becoming more easily sensed as the as the track progresses. A simple, plucked guitar [...]

Sometimes, we need a break. As someone who is nearing the end / seventeenth fresh start of his Ph.D. thesis, this statement applies to me most of the time. In moments like this, I like to turn to bands like The Album Leaf , Sigur Rós , and similar masters of ambiance. But every now and again, I need something new to help me take the edge off. Enter: Message to Bears . Message to Bears is actually Jerome Alexander, a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter from the U.K. Those instruments, myspace tells us, are "acoustic guitars, [...]

There's a distinct difference between 'best albums of the year' and 'favorite albums of the year.' Who am I to say what is the 'best' album? What makes an album better than the other? You've probably already figured out that I'm trying to say that music taste is subjective. The past 12 months have probably been one of the better years in music in a while. There were albums that defined genres (Merriweather Post Pavilion), albums that reinvented the bands sound (The Hazards of Love), albums that majorly disappointed (Mama, I'm Swollen), and albums that became a sign of what's [...]