Tuesday 24 May 2011

THE GIRL AND THE ROBOT - Silence/Borderline (EP 2011)

  The answer to the question of why this law is to be set above all the others has already been given by THE GIRL & THE ROBOT and their extraordinary debut "The Beauty of Decay". 
  The warmth of human emotions, merged with cool, calculating electronics was one of the biggest discoveries of 2010 – and yet was only the beginning. With summer approaching, the fascinating Plastique and her machine man Deadbeat once again rise to the limelight to continue the most unusual relationship in music history.
  Their brand new EP "Silence/Borderline" once more takes us on dazzling journeys through mysterious circuit universes that again and again get melted by Plastique's alluring voice. 
 The most important interface in the virtual cosmos of the new EP are the two new tracks "Silence" and "Borderline", both impressively proving how deep the unequal duo dug into their floating electro worlds and how much they actually learned from each other. 

 
 The results of this are both gripping and artful examples of nocturnal electronic music, breaking up the cold sequences in "Silence" with warm, tantalizing synthesizer drops while "Borderline" with its Swedish lyrics is driven through the depths of human emotion by a dark and hypnotizing beat next to Plastique's bitter, yet passionate vocals.     





For more Informations visit their official site

The Girl and The Robot
My space


 

Saturday 21 May 2011

Micron 63 - Micron Sixty Three (EP & DEMOS)

  It grabs you, thrashes you, rotates you and throws you to the floor. And that's only the opening.
  Micron Sixty Three provide an electrifying, head pounding slice of 80's dance music with a darker filling of vocals that leave you as confused and disorientated as the flashing neon lights blaring in your face. Intensifying every emotion you are almost able to smell the enthusiasm as the first track 'Death is Colder Than Love' conjures up images of quirky underground clubs with the lingering smell of cigarette smoke wafting through the air as the walls thud in unison with the beat.

 Micron 63 make a brooding electroey/guitary racket which marries memories of the past with visions of the future to create something undefinable by the present.

"Alternating between Sonic Youth/New Order inspired dance music and minimalist soundscapes, an imminent threat of violence simmers just below the surface with Micron Sixty Three."

  After the listening this video for the song Death is colder than Love I believe that you'll very quickly be the first  in the row for downloading the whole album and be surprised how great they sound.

 This is a collection of Demos and Live versions. You will Enjoy a lot!





Sunday 15 May 2011

Son Lux - Weapon VII


   Son Lux (b. Ryan Lott), is a USA composer / musician / remixer. 
  Son Lux is 32-year-old producer-composer, a man classically trained, but rewired by his own design.
A frequent collaborator and consummate “man behind the curtain,” with Son Lux, the New York-based auteur takes center stage. Somewhere between the concert hall and the dingy hip-hop club, you’ll find his haunting liquid soundscapes, born of beatwise means, rich in their orchestral warmth, always hinting at some divine unreachable height.

    In 2009, Lott released his critically lauded debut, At War with Walls and Mazes, and followed it with a series of performances that broke the album down into a mercurial mass to be reassembled at will — sometimes by Lott alone (on computer and/or piano), sometimes with help. Similarly,
Son Lux continued to evolve as Lott’s extracurriculars pushed him into new realms.

  He’s worked extensively with acclaimed choreographers, including Stephen Petronio, scoring his large-scale
dance works for Ballet de Lorraine and National Dance Company Wales. He also orchestrated
the brass and woodwinds for These New Puritans’ NME-touted Hidden LP, arranged the score to
a to-be-released French film, and produced a beat for left-field rapper Beans’ 2011 Anticon.

  His second album, We Are Rising, was made in February of 2011. 

  "Weapons VII" is a cut from Son Lux's Weapons EP, an amorphous structure wherein a given track can sound different every time you hear it.

  The four-and-a-half-minute production features a beautiful but sometimes unnerving mix of artfully stylized images, including half-naked models and Lott himself completely covered in a white powder.


  "In a sense, these songs are not songs, but meditations," Lott says. "I created as many as five different versions of each song (on At War With Walls and Mazes) before settling on 'the one.' But really, there is not just one. I'm free from the confines of structure, and the 'song' is, in its purest form, only simple melody, and the possibilities for presenting that melody are infinite."
   The "Weapons VII" video was produced by Son Lux and directed by Landis Smithers.

 Give yourselves into a rare powerful "meditation & Enjoy in his intensive masterpiece!

Polly Scattergood

  Polly Scattergood is a British singer-songwriter from Colchester, Essex, England, UK. She has been described as ethereal, dark, intense and quirky, while her musical style has been described as "early 21st century electro-dance-pop of London proper". Scattergood's debut album, self-titled, was released in spring 2009 in the United Kingdom and United States. It received mixed, but generally positive, reviews.

   Her name Scattergood is her family name. It means "here today, gone tomorrow" or "spendthrift waster".
  
  Scattergood describes herself as a storyteller. "I write about emotions and moments, not all are biographical." 

  Scattergood's debut single entitled "Glory Hallelujah" was released in 2005. Her September 2007 single "Nitrogen Pink" is about the fragility of life and how quickly things come and go. It was written about "a friend of a friend who was really sick from cancer, this young guy who was only 30 and had a great, happy life but was slowly deteriorating". 

 The single "I Hate the Way" which was written on a toy keyboard was released on 22 September 2008 on both limited edition 10 inch vinyl and iTunes. The song has been described as documenting her emotional instability and penchant of going to bed with unsuitable men.

On November 10, 2008 Scattergood was a guest on the Rob Da Bank show where three of her songs were played ("I Hate The Way", "Untitled 27" & "Nitrogen Pink"). Da Bank called her "The Kate Bush of the 21st century". Later that month, on the 28th, she played an acoustic set on the Janice Long show ("I Hate The Way", "Please Don't Touch" & "I've Got A Heart"). When asked about her discovery of music, she replied, "I found a guitar when I was about 12, in the coat cupboard, it had maybe 3 strings on it ... I just taught myself".
   On March 7, 2009 Scattergood gave a live studio session on the BBC Radio 2 Dermot O'Leary show. Her cover version of "Puff, the Magic Dragon" proved to be popular with listeners, introducing many for the first time to the artist.

  Polly Scattergood was released 9 March 2009 in the United Kingdom.and on 19 May in the United States.

  "Other Too Endless" was released as a single from the album on 23 February 2009. It was named "record of the week" on the Steve Lamacq show. The download version features a remix by Vince Clarke who is a member of Erasure, ex Assembly (where he shared the spoils with ex Undertones frontman Feargal Sharkey), ex Yazoo and ex Depeche Mode. iTunes made it 'Single of the Week' on 30 March 2009. "Please Don't Touch" was her second single, released on 4 May 2009. She then re-released "Nitrogen Pink" and released "Bunny Club" as singles.

 

  The lengthy “I Hate The Way” opens the album compellingly, beginning with Scattergood’s whispered, confiding vocals, passing through a strident guitar motif and building to an off-kilter spoken-word coda. “Maybe if I skip my dinner / Make myself pretty and thinner / Maybe then he’ll love me / And stop looking at the other girls”, Scattergood wonders, desperately. 



  Here's her live video for this song, it shows her talented voice, it's amazing to listen to, beautifully...




   The record concludes with Breathe In Breathe Out, a serene piano ballad accented with bird twitters. It is a weary resignation after all the preceding catharsis as Scattergood's voice delicately falters with the lyric "Learn to breathe in/Learn to breathe out/I can't let you go...yet."

   There is something truly magical about Scattergood's debut; it breaks your heart with the delicacy of a heart surgeon. She accomplishes a record akin to a diary of an eighteenth-century woman accused of hysterics and committed to Bedlam. And when you're finished listening, you emerge feeling purified by insanity. For Scattergood, the people she loves are the ones who are here today, gone tomorrow, leaving her naked and impoverished; her only crime is being a spendthrift with her love.






Saturday 7 May 2011

Chew Lips - Unicorn


   Chew Lips are an East London based dance-pop trio consist of singer Tigs, and multi-instrumentalists Will Sanderson and James Watkins.

    The group was formed in early 2008 and wrote ten songs at their first rehearsal, and played their first show that spring at a friend’s house. After a few more gigs, the group found a champion in BBC DJ Steve Lamacq, who asked Chew Lips  to perform a session on his show and invited them to play the BBC Introducing Stage at the Electric Proms Festival that fall. After a MySpace exchange with the founder of the French label Kitsune, the band released their debut single, "Solo," on the imprint early in 2009; the song showcased Chew Lips'  distinctive mix of brassy female vocals and Casiotone beats and melodies. The single "Salt Air," which featured a video directed by Man vs. Magnet, followed that summer. Their debut album, Unicorn, appeared in January 2010, as did the Play Together EP.



   CHEW LiPS have gone on to create an astonishing, visceral debut that thrills from start to finish, each song different from the last but with the hallmarks of the trio stamped over everything, the tracks intrinsically connected and detached at the same time, grand and intimate at once. Opener ‘Eight’ creeps into life slowly, its glacial soundscapes giving way to a robotic surge of glitches and bleeps, ‘Play Together’ sees shrill synths pirouetting round Tigs’ deviant vocals, whilst ‘Slick’ is space-age soul, building to its climactic outro in a haze of cascading, kaleidoscopic harmonies as Tigs showcases her vocal allure – the CHEW LiPS frontwoman is mesmerising of voice, her prurient laments imbued with a playful menace that could break hearts and the law at the same time. 


   “’Play Together’ sums us up as a band,” says James. “It’s got an amazing bassline and some really cool keyboard sounds, whilst ‘Slick’ could signal a change into a new direction for us – the thing I really like about it is that the music could be Beyonce or something. It was one that me and Tigs were always excited about. It came on the most out of all the songs we recorded in the studio.” 


   “I love ‘Karen’,” adds Tigs. “I love that little break in it.”Indeed, anyone whose accustomed to its original live version should grip themselves for the moment it morphs from straight-arrowed art-rock into its swirling, mesmeric breakdown, whilst the likes of ‘Too Much Talking’ and ‘Piano Song’ reveal tenets of raw emotion within CHEW LiPS that underline the heart pumping within their mechanical beats’n’synths.


  “I like that about our record,” opines Tigs, “the suggestion that we could go in any direction afterwards and it wouldn’t be completely surprising. Like ‘Piano Song’ – where the fuck does that come from?” As it transpires, the plaintive lullaby that closes ‘Unicorn’ comes from when James sat down at a piano left in David Kosten’s studio that Stevie Wonder used to play. “It’s not a song, there’s no structure to it, it’s just… nice,” smiles Tigs. 



CHEW LiPS are looking to release their second album late this year.
Her's their demo song "Eagle"  for the new CHEW LiPS track





Thursday 5 May 2011

The Knife

  The Knife are a Swedish band made up of siblings Karin Dreijer Andersson, who also performs solo as Fever Ray, and Olof Dreijer.
   As a group the Knife seem to operate in an interesting space. I would venture to say their more electro-pop style of music has situated them within particular audiences.
The band announced that, in collaboration with Mt.Sims and Planningtorock, they would be writing an opera for the Danish performance group Hotel Pro Forma. The opera, titled Tomorrow, In A Year, is based on Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
‘Colouring of Pigeons’ is an 11 minute frequently-discordant opus featuring operatic squalls, much percussion and Karin’s unique voice along with Kristina Wahlin Momme and Lærke Bo Winther.

   For the project, Karin and Olof researched Darwin literature and opera in general;seeing as they had no idea about it beforehand. Olof even attended a field recording workshop in the Amazon to record sounds.


The Knife announced that they were recording a new album to be released in 2012.

   While meanings are subjective and the work of the Knife is particularly cryptic, the content of their music addresses issues of gender and social inequalities.

 

  On stage they often wear neon Blue Man Group-esque jump suits and surround themselves with gothic video projections. In their press photos they have donned bird beak masks, known to be worn by medieval doctors.Their most recent album, and masterpiece, Silent Shout is a fantastic voyage into the heart of darkness that reveals it’s magnificence slowly over time. 

Check out this live clip of the band and enjoy!!