Blog: Playground

Christmas is still quite a few weeks away, but Sincerely Yours has already started to show their festive spirit in the form of a double serving of bizarre pop by Swedish band JJ. Those weird musical creatures are repeating what they did before the release of their third long player, "nº3". On...

She introduced herself as the fairy godmother of nude, arcane folk, frugal and strangely pure. But the new Ólöf Arnalds has widened her lyrical and musical universe with warmer and more extroverted registers on "Innundir Skinni" (One Little Indian/Houston Party, 2010), a territory in which a...

Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) and Joel Ford, a.k.a. Games, have just launched a video for "Shadows In Bloom", one of the best tracks on their remarkable "That We Can Play" (Hippos In Tanks, 2010). The song, a sort of AOR pop meets Italo with some "hipnagogic" hints, is an excuse...

Imagine you're an international recording artist and, without any notice, you get up one day to discover the media and blogosphere are all talking about a music video of yours you didn't even know existed. This is what must have happened to Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss, who yesterday via a few...

There's no doubt that the proto-R&B slow jam practiced by Teengirl Fantasy is pink, fuchsia, mauve and purple. If your synaesthesic perception tells you otherwise, watch their most recent video. Director Mark Charles Brown (helped by his own inner colour wheel) was convinced of that and used...

Fresh blood from the endless Brooklyn reserve, although in the case of Selebrities the British influence is quite obvious. Maria Usbeck, Jer Robert Paulin and Max Peterson are determined to give new use to old fabrics by fusing the post-punk of early-era The Cure and the electronic-pop of New Order ...

We were already liking this song by Woolfy, but now, thanks to it's corresponding video, we think its even better. Curious traps, those of perception. Director Collin LaFleche has focused on a dark room, a zenith-like plane hanging vertically over an unmade bed, and a girl whose skin acts as the...

In March this year, Hot Chip released "I Feel Bonnie", a rework of "I Feel Better" aimed for the dance floor, transformed into a sort of an afro-progressive, minimal funky house with the help of Will Oldham, the king of American alt-folk. Now the original version of the song, with a more...

As usual with Sincerely Yours, the new music video for Sail A Whale comes surrounded by mystery, eight lines telling us about "the truest whale, the truest rounded mandorla, the shape of sunshine and piercing thought; firm but soft, moving with certainty through the oceans", and dropping the...

"A truthful diary of creative and personal confusion, an anti-climatic chronicle of a depression and an album of impasse, in expectation of change and new revolutions.", David Broc said in his review of "Man On The Moon II: The Journey Of Mr. Rager". Now we're treated to the cinematic...

Chris d'Eon's is a story of precocious experimentation and nomadic research. Born in Halifax, New Scotland, his parents gave Chris his first synthesisers at the tender age of four. That kind of experience at such an early age can make quite a mark on you, so it's not surprising that the young...

In mid-October, Dubliners—or half Dubliners, as there's some Swedish blood running there—Kill Krinkle Club took advantage of their presence at New York's CMJ to record a music video for "Golden Eagle" that features the Manhattan street as the backdrop. The best part of this video is its...

While waiting for the arrival of his promising "The Look EP" (in stores as of 29th November via LuckyMe), the stealthy Jacques Greene has dropped "Sorted" on the Night Trackin' (a reputed series of monthly parties thrown at Montreal's Velvet club) Facebook profile. And because the track is...

Songwriter Jamie Woon is still looking for alliances on the post-dubstep scene. We'd thought he'd squeezed all the juice out of "Night Air" after the post-garage rework by the hypnotizer Ramadanman that appeared on a 12", but it seems there's a second remix—and there might be even...

• here » NightAir(BecomingRealRemix).mp3

Some of you might not remember because it happened a few years ago, when you were still too young, and others might not be able to relate the young Robyn Carlsson, then a promise on the 90's European pop R&B scene, with today's Robyn: mature, sophisticated, and electronic. The fact is that...

Only one album, a catalogue reference (K7281) and a website featuring only images and a short video that could well be an ad campaign aimed at hipsters. This is the only thing, at least for now, that the !K7 label wants us to know about their new acquisition, When Saints Go Machine. The first refere...

Scientist Launches Dubstep Into Outer Space... Remember? Summer was about to end when the Tectonic label dropped fresh details about what would be their most ambitious project to date, an album focusing on confronting the "futuristic" visions of dubstep with its Caribbean roots. On one end,...

Like Ballard's "Concrete Island" (1974) and "High Rise" (1975), or the Aphex Twin of "Come to Daddy", Becoming Real knows perfectly well that if they're not well lit and populated, the city's streets can become a nightmare. Characters emitting deranged laughter, dogs threatening to...

New dance music and a certain nostalgia for 90's music help to characterize "From the Cradle To The Rave", the debut album by Irishman Shit Robot. His fellow countryman Eoghan Kidney has based the video on these ideas and has used the technique rotoscopy to take Nancy Wang around Williamsburg,...

You like over-elaborated tags, you mean? Well, here's one for you: "Victorian Punk". This is what some people out there have decided to call the music by Agent Ribbons, an Austin-based trio influenced by blues, 60's acid folk and something halfway between chamber and cabaret pop, with a...