Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury are such bona fide, fully fledged nerds, they made a vintage-synth record in the style of classic Wendy Carlos based on the city from Judge Dredd comic books. The full title of the project is Drokk: Music Inspired By Mega-City One. This sounds disastrous, like making a MOVIE based on the Judge Dredd comic books, but it's a lot closer to Blade Runner than it is to Demolition Man. You may know Geoff Barrow as a key member of Portishead, and the atmosphere he helped hone in that band is front and [...]
//mixtrade march - p.m. These mixes just keep getting better and better! I swear that I am going to do this every year until the day I die (or maybe just until the concept of mixtapes is obsolete). Getting this rare glimpse into the head of a guy like P.M. is a treat and I honestly can't say that I am not at all surprised by what I found. It's like fishbowling a crazy car from the future with your big brother who keeps trying to make you laugh. Right after I wrote that last sentence, [...]
You probably remember Mr. Oizo for his 1999 classic video for Flat Beat, featuring the yellow muppet Flat Eric. He never really managed to eclipse that song or video, so over ten years later, he brings the puppet back to promote his new EP, Stade 3 . The EP is good (and right now it's free, so you can't really complain about that), but the promo video is hilarious. It's probably the best muppet-playing-chess video I've seen all year. Even if you don't really want the EP, I recommend checking out Oizo's website, it's done up like [...]
//cover art by coL Yes the Lilys records have the biggest, most unabashed crush of MBV ever and yes their sound has run the gamut from mod revival to shoegaze and just about everything else in between. However the sound they ended up with on 20002s Selected EP is purely ecstatic and has been described as "watercolors amplified". Case in point - today I was having one of those days where I was incapable about being excited about anything and all the colors had faded from the scenery leaving a grayness that [...]
// boldy james - consignment Boldy James - Consignment Boldy James - White Dresses
//dj rashad & dj spinn - space juke I fucked up by never posting this gem a while back when I had the chance. Every time I see it m mind is blown all over again. Better late then never.. DJ Rashad & DJ Spinn - Space Juke Bonus: Michael Myers Footwork (video)
Juke all day and all goddamn night. Well maybe not strictly Juke, but there are no rules anymore so call it like you want it. M|O|D crew compilation tapes have been kicking for a minute with LiL TExAS , Young Satan, C.Z., and Rewrote all keeping dirty trap alive and well in Boston. Blow your speakers to this shit and get sweaty with a broad who drops it quick and hard. LiL TExAS - Off The Chain LiL TExAS - Miss Do Right [...]
The new Brian McKnight is straight to the bedroom. No flirting..
I have no idea what to write about this band, I don't know anything about them and the fact that they took their name from a Van Morrison song makes it very difficult to search for information. The music is a bizarre mix of drone, noise, folk and metal, and it all sounds like it should be played in the background of a Spaghetti Western stand-off. It's dreary and depressing, sometimes heavy enough to rival Earth, sometimes folky enough to rival Neutral Milk Hotel, but always with an upbeat tone that keeps it feeling fun. If you have a younger [...]
//click to see larger in a new window We are pleased to announce the launch of a mobile version of the blog for use on your phone! Hopefully this will make it easier to check out music while you take the train home, wait around the ER, or are lurk outside some chicks house ala Say Anything . You don't need to change anything on your end, as we have set up a redirect to go to the mobile version automatically if you are accessing the site from your device. We just [...]
Holy shit, how is Summer not here yet? As maybe you can tell by now, all I like posting about are jams that you can blast at 3am while riding your bike through the warm misty night. I try to be patient and hold these songs until they are more appropriate, but patience is not one of my virtues. Since I have no willpower, your job is remembering to go back and play these songs when it's time. Deal? Okay then. David Speck has been hiding out in San Francisco making his synth-heavy classics [...]
The new thing in the UK is a sort of mix between Chicago Juke, Baltimore Club, and post-dubstep half-time beats. Think short vocal snippets repeated ad nauseam over insanely fast and syncopated 808 beats. It's actually surprisingly fresh, especially considering how derivative it is. Addison Groove had something of a hit a couple years back with Footcrab , a bizarrely funky tune that really showed his Juke and B-more club influence. To further reinforce this, he features Philly / Baltimore heavy hitter Spank Rock on two songs. Not every song on the album is [...]
The new Beach House album is wonderful. Everything that made you fall for them in the first place is intact and they even dropped some of the pop allure that made some people tune out the last album (check out the staccato guitar on 'Wishes'). The internet is pretty locked down for the upcoming release of Bloom so I don't expect these links to be live for very long. But between the officially leaked single 'Myth', and the songs below I think it's safe to say that you should go buy it when it drops on [...]
Tonight at Dreamers and Make Believers in San Francisco. Hotel Party zine release with Pink Films and Cruel Summer playing music around 9ish. Get there early since it's so small in there. There will be zines for sale at a special price and I will be there looking riddled with anxiety. I know you think that a show at a hair salon is just some photos on a wall, but I assure you it's not. There are close to 150 images in this show and after I finished the install last night I realized [...]
Jay Howell has been going on about Cruel Summer since they started playing, and I figured it made sense that he should say something about the best band of the 902s that actually exists right now. San Francisco is full of jangly guitars, but only Cruel Summer combines it with shoe gaze to sound like your favorite band when you were fifteen. Turns out Jay was a total dick about it and wouldn't give me anything, so I pasted our chat below and made the post about that instead. How you like them apples? [...]
I just climbed onto my roof in a torrential downpour after two gallons (that's not an exaggeration, that's how big the two buckets were) of water poured into my bedroom, and proceeded to "clear the snorkle" so to speak by jamming the back end of a broom down the gutter drain pipe, pounding on the drain pipe with the other end of the broom like a fuckin' cave-man, and finally dismantling the bottom quarter of said drain pipe with a screwdriver (like a more recent-man) while a dough-boy's worth of water sprayed into my face and chest. When the last [...]
After a long 4 year wait, the Berlin-based duo Modeselektor returns with their 3rd LP, this time on their own label, Monkeytown . The album is bizarre and really runs the gamut of styles, but you can hear the constant undertones of angular German electronic production. Heavy electro tunes like Evil Twin showcase the duo's production skill with the high energy lead synth playing in odd time against the rhythm. This is instant classic techno, but it's a little too weird to go mainstream. This is highlighted by their choices of guest vocalists; in addition to the [...]
Man fuck a Sunday. This is starting to become the worst day of the week. Like the day that everything starts caving in on you, feel me? I dunno, maybe I should clean up a bit. My mind is starting to feel like a junkie again and I may be fucking up. Dang, that just felt like a LiveJournal entry from 2006 (shout out to Jane). Anyways, good thing Jim-E Stack came through and remixed the fuck out of ASAP's Purple Swag. Killed the original and made me want to lean at 45 degrees all damn day. Even screwed the [...]
Shakes Gown, who we mentioned a while back , have released a new album entitled Nikko's Cafe and are playing tonight at The Knockout. It's always fun to watch such an indie-rock-centric city like San Francisco get freaked out when these guys start playing and realize that it won't be as easy to digest they though it would be. Sort of like when you get 10 pages into Tolstoy and you're like "fuck, I actually have to try here". Anyways, keep an eye out for the new songs to start popping up and go to this show [...]
Bad Weather California has apparently evolved from a solo acoustic guitar project, but my first introduction to them was the current incarnation, a sunny beach party dance soundtrack. Their new record is produced by Akron Family's Seth Olinsky, and is released on AF's own label, Family Tree. The album sounds great, but the live show is so genuinely positive that it's creepy in a David Lynch sort of way. They had friends in the audience encourage the crowd to dance by yelling, mere inches from someone's face, "HEY YOU GONNA SPREAD THE LOVE LET'S GO C'MON DANCE!" In other words, [...]
Unpiano
MP3: Daft Punk – “Horizons” (RAM Japanese Bonus Track)
Listen to Daft Punk’s “Horizon”, the Japanese bonus track for Random Access Memories
