An unexpected but welcome drop from Zach Condon's Beirut has hit stores today, in form of 73 single 'East Harlem / Goshem', via Pompeii Records . A live recording and short introduction to the song confirms that Condon wrote this when he was 17, dispelling the so-called confirmation which has seen so many fan excited for potential new Beirut material this year. There's still room for speculation however, the project making no murmurs of unrest, having not released material since 20092s stunning March Of The Zapotec / Holland EP. Whether this further incites rumours of a third [...]
![[Resonance FM #15] Zammuto, Milagres, The War On Drugs, The History Of Apple Pie, Seapony, Porcelain Raft](http://cdn.elbo.ws/posts/3492076_lg.jpg)
[ DOWNLOAD MP3 OF SHOW / LISTEN LIVE ON RESONANCE ] Its been a pretty busy week in music compared to the normal rate of happenings - typical, in the sense that right now is the one time of year I need to be totally absorbed in Philosophical study in preparation for exams. In music, The Books' Nick Zammuto has unleashed a 73 song-strong Soundcloud page, in effect a gold-mine of spin-off material from The Books . Track 'YAY' seems to be the 'single', in so far as is [...]
Smooth, jazz influenced RnB is not something which I make a particular habit of going to see; in fact, I can comfortably say that I have never had the privilege or opportunity of going to a gig quite like that of last night. Jamie Woon , now 28, graduated from the BRIT School the year behind Amy Winehouse , and due to a combination of his subsequent support slots with the jazz singer, his placement at fourth on the BBC Sound of 2011 poll, and his absolutely rammed festival set for this Summer, I felt his [...]
What started out as the solo project of Nima Kazerouni has now developed into a fully fledged ethereal pop trio, by name of So Many Wizards , and by virtue of a notable knack for writing dreamy, 3 minute indie pop songs. Inspired by those comfortable pockets of calm within the hectic Los Angeles urbanity, the group (then a duo), engineered an EP with The Morning Benders ' Chris Chu at San Francisco's Different Fur Studios, an endeavour which produced the airy "Nico", a matter of weeks before film-maker and bassist Warren Woodward joined the line-up. [...]
Justin Vernon's iconic " Bon Iver " project, famed for its aura of tranquil obscurity and desolation as much as its immeasurable emotional scope, was taken in to such an extent by the music listening public not least for its story-line, that of a man recoiling from a break-up and retreating in to the woods to write a lonely and conceptual folk album, but also for its stark 4-track recording style, the ambience of which having been accessed by means of solitude and detachment (in the Wisconsin wilderness) and realised in to music through a universally-acclaimed debut LP, "For Emma, Forever [...]
Brighton's Cave Painting placed a second gem of an indie pop song in my inbox this afternoon - this one by the name of 'So Calm'. Little is known about them to date other than their eery teaser trailer over at their site , promise of an EP in the Autumn, and two free tracks up for download at their band camp page . Their confirmed shows to date consist of one passed at The Social, a second ever at Proud Camden on June 8th, and a third, supporting Kyla La Grange at The [...]
Blood Orange , the latest musical moniker of prolific musician and producer Dev Hynes, is set to have its debut album 'Coastal Grooves' released via Domino Records this August 8th, with accompanying free single, the tropical RnB track 'Sutphin Boulevard' to drop a week earlier on August 1st. Having lived in New York City for the past three years, Hynes has concentrated most of his time on working with other artists: Basement Jaxx, Florence & The Machine, Theophilus London, Solange Knowles, Cassie and Diana Vickers included. Blood Orange was created somewhere along the way, and draws [...]
![[Resonance FM #14] Beams, Other Lives, Petrels, Timber Timbre, Blood Orange](http://cdn.elbo.ws/posts/3475734_lg.jpg)
This week's This Music Wins show features the twisted IDM and post-dubstep-tinged electronica of British producer Beams , the Autumnal folk rock of Stillwater, Oklahoma band Other Lives , whose second album will drop this year via Play It Again Sam Records , the spiritual drone music of Petrels , lazy americana of Arts & Crafts' own Timber Timbre , and finally one of the many aliases of Dev Hynes, with his new reinvention, Blood Orange - which sees the formerly acoustic musician experimenting with soul and RnB in the public sphere. [...]
Radioseven 's 'An Escape' is a spacey instrumental submission from my inbox, a free 8 track record which evokes almost instantly a hazy, whitened and wintry imagery, glacially cold in its nostalgic urgency and dance-beat drive. The record reminds of perhaps a synth-based Slowdive , startled into activity with a splash of cold water, or indeed a vocal-less set of Memoryhouse B-sides. At times, 'An Escape' sounds wonderfully organic and rich, other times it is conceptual and evasive, but consistently the record toys with Norwegian style dance music and somewhat cinematic dubs to create an album reminiscent [...]
Cults ' long-awaited debut album 'Cults' is now streaming over at NPR , one week ahead of its official release date on May 31st, and for the first time since Cults recent and joyous emergence, via self-released 'Go Outside' 73 en-route from 2010, the Brooklyn-duo display something of an ominous depth to their 60s inspired garage pop concoctions. "You Know What I Mean" is dreamy in amongst bouts of anger, and "Oh My God" is wintry as it is unfailingly and relentlessly grand. The whole record is remarkably full for a duo, gripping and instrumentally dense and exciting, hasty [...]
A pleasant surprise from Matt Cothran's Coma Cinema project came this Monday, with the early release of his Abandoned Lands EP via band camp . Aside from Coma Cinema's own contributions, which present some of his strangest and most brooding compositions yet, he also enlisted the help of two friends for the record, Warren Hildebrand of Foxes in Fiction having sequenced, and Lance Smith of Pandit bequeathing his mastering expertise. According to Cothran's Abandoned Lands post over at Summertime In Hell, the whole affair was somewhat spontaneous in the record's quick recording, unedited mistakes and hypnotic, 'stream [...]
That ever-thinning line between genuine field-leading experimentalism and fringe dance music just got thinner; at the end of April, British producer turned Prague inhabitant Beams released 'Patches', a spiritless electronic void of empty, industrially-tinged sound informatics which dropped at name your price, via band camp. There's elements of a lot of his British contemporaries evident within the work, the hardened overdub sounds of Mount Kimbie , the Eastern strings which often accompany the breakdowns of Gold Panda , and the kind of chaotic, atonal and jazz influenced samples with which Tunng 's electronic folk music distinguishes itself, [...]
On Sunday I made my way down to the Netaudio event at the Roundhouse , a yearly event, conference, broadcast and live music convention for which my commissioned piece, a This Music Wins special outlining my thoughts on the stylistic future of experimental music on the internet, went out at 4.30pm via Roundhouse Radio and Resonance 104.4 FM London . You can listen again to the piece below, grab a zip file of all the compositions, or download them individually via tracklisting. Though trains prevented me from catching the headlining ' Nurse With Wound [...]
The stakes were always going to be high for Brooklyn three-piece The Antlers in the aftermath of 20092s iconic 'Hospice'; rarely had such a heartfelt and deeply conceptual fuzz-folk album drawn such widespread fascination, many fans wondering still to this day why Silberman, Lerner and Cicci took it upon themselves to alter such a clear winning formula. The simple answer, as detailed by Lerner in his interview with Consequence Of Sound , is that according to Silberman "it just sounded forced to do it again", and perhaps there's some truth in this statement. Certainly some extension of [...]
Yuck are set to drop "Shook Down" / "Milkshake" from their grunge-inspired and frenzied debut album "Yuck" on June 27th. "Shook Me Down" is a cut and paste, but "Milkshake" is a brand new song, and one a little more courageous. Its ever so slightly slowed down, and every so subtly more distorted, culminating confidently and idiosyncratically in those euphoric and crushing overdrive sections for which Yuck are known and loved. Download the song in its full studio glory below. Yuck - Milkshake ( MP3 ) (B-side to "Shook Down")
The Gaymers Camden Crawl Festival 2011 celebrated its tenth birthday this year; 2011 curated one of its strongest line-ups yet, and this coupled up with the sunshine, bank holiday weekend and abundance of great pubs and great music, made for an intensely enjoyable and worthwhile couple of days. Media highlights included the 12-man hip-hop collective Odd Future (OFWGKTA) stage invasion over at the Red Bull Outdoor Live Arena , a blissful return from the self-professed 'new band', Razorlight at the HMV Forum , and controversial sets from Giggs, who [...]
A flowingly-dressed and defiant Lykke Li silences co-star Stellan Skarsgård in this duly cinematic music video for new single 'Sadness Is A Blessing', wrought by the star-studded production team of director Tarik Saleh and film-maker Carl Nilsson . Accompanying the song comes a slow-building, mildly oriental club remix from Brit producer Gold Panda , and confirmation that Lykke Li's next single will be 'Sadness Is A Blessing', surfacing May 16th via LL / Atlantic Records . Lykke Li's Wounded Rhymes and Gold Panda's Lucky Shiner are out now. [...]
For Mount Kimbie , the London post-dubstep duo evidently already leaps and bounds ahead of what is very much still an emerging market in the UK, to have returned from a long stretch in America (where that same market is virtually non-existent), is as much as tribute to their ideas and flawless execution as it is to the USA's increasing propensity for affection towards the recent spate of boundary-pushing, neo-soul electronica-whizzes' to begin networking out of London and into Brooklyn. Perhaps it started with The XX , or perhaps that attribution is a little simplistic - [...]
Oklahoma's ' Other Lives ' are a five man folk ensemble set to release their second album "Tamer Animals" this August 29th via Play It Again Sam Records . 'For 122 is the refreshingly beautiful lead single from that release, and is streaming below via Stayloose on Soundcloud. The music draws as much from the rich choral folk harmonies of Fleet Foxes as it does from the relaxed organic pop music of New York City's emerging favourites Milagres in its grand, orchestral arrangement - the subtleties of which having been expertly [...]
As part of Thomas Truax 's impressive bid to write, release and record a new track every month for a year throughout 2011, April's offering has proven his most challenging yet. The elusive multi-instrumentalist and secretively prolific steam-punk musician has dealt with the death of his 84 year old Father at the close of the month of March, but was defiant over the effect this had on his latest offering. According to the Truax's blog "on a certain level maybe April Showers portrays something of this transition between death/loss and embracing life while you still have the gift of [...]
This Music Wins
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