The Ropes - Lack Of Technology Made Me A Killer

  The Ropes are a duo. The band has received praise from NME and CMJ for their lyric driven new wave / indie rock style.

  The group consists of vocalist/bassist Sharon Shy and multi-instrumentalist Toppy (who is known for playing the drums with the guitar hanging around his neck). They have toured extensively throughout the US, opening for acts such as The Bravery, Innerpartysystem, The Used, Spoon, and others and have also played several UK dates. Music critic Allan Raible chose their album “What They Do For Fun” as #15 on the ABC News 50 Best Albums of 2008.

   The Ropes have released a string of EPs, singles, and a full length, all produced by Toppy and Nic Hard (The Bravery).

http://theropesmusic.com/

 

Piano Magic - Ovations

 Piano Magic is a musical collective formed in the summer of 1996 by Glen Johnson, Dominic Chennell, and Dick Rance in London, England. 

  Their sound has been described as ambient pop, post-rock, indietronica, coldwave, dark wave and ghostrock.

   While the most recent releases have seen them operating with a traditional band format, they originally started their career with the intention to base their recordings around their small nucleus and whoever else would like to contribute. 

   Glen Johnson is the only remaining band member from the original trio.

  Ovations is their 10th album and features guest appearances by Brendan Perry and Peter Ulrich of Dead Can Dance. 

  Perry sings on The Nightmare Goes On and You Never Loved This City, whilst Ulrich adds percussion and hammered dulcimer to March Of The Atheists, A Fond Farewell and La Cobardía de los Toreros. This album finds Piano Magic at their most confident, melodic and unabashed, merging early 80’s coldwave electronics with Eastern European acoustic instrumentation. 

  The opening prowl of “The Nightmare Goes On” is a key indicator of the overall trajectory of Ovations. With commanding guest lead vocals from Dead Can Dance’s Brendan Perry, intoning Johnson’s funereal prose over washes of synths, exotic strings and almost African rhythms, the long-player feels like a much more successful attempt to capture the true ‘80s 4AD spirit that the ensemble strained a little hard to reach on 2002’s collaborator-heavy Writers Without Homes.  With Johnson back to the singing fore, the thicker rhythmic mélange hits with even greater force on the ensuing Moroccan-vibed “March Of The Atheists” and the skittering electro-beats-driven “On Edge”. 
   The more minimalist, Details Not Recorded-like, “A Fond Farewell” brings a serene momentary breathing space before “The Blue Hour” and “Recovery Position” crash in with towering waves of Robin Guthrie guitars put through Modern English amplifiers.

  
  Before proceedings slide too close to unadulterated ‘80s noire retrophilia, the wordless “La Cobardía De Los Toreros” chimes in with an Eastern European baroque eloquence that might not sound out of place on Beirut’s Gulag Orkestar. Following this refreshing interlude, a second Perry-sung track, the elegantly-orchestrated “You Never Loved This City”, glides in with unapologetically lovelorn Tindersticks-style grace and gravitas.  The somewhat automatic New Order-referencing of “The Faint Horizon” consequently feels a little anaemic in its wake. 
  However, the closing “Exit” more than makes up for it, with squelchy Kraftwerk electronics and a Vini Reilly guitar figure enveloping an elegiac duet between Johnson and regular golden-toned Piano Magic chanteuse, Angèle David Guillou.

  Like its predecessor, the impressive Ovations provides no linear entry-point into the labyrinthine world of Piano Magic. Yet, it undoubtedly finds Glen Johnson and co. regaining a stronger sense of collective purpose; reinforcing the belief that the group still has plenty of reasons and room to exist alongside its members extra-curricular roaming, for a little while longer at least. 

Longtime fans will love it unreservedly.

  A fantastic album, Highly recommended!

Tracks:
1. The Nightmare Goes On
2. March of the Atheists
3. On Edge
4. A Fond Farewell
5. The Blue Hour
6. Recovery Position
7. La Cobardia De Los Toreros
8. You Never Loved This City
9. The Faint Horizon
10. Exit

 Pianon Magic - Ovations 2009

Piano Magic official site 

Crystal Castles – Suffocation

   Crystal Castles have released the video for "Suffocation" off their 2010 self-titled album, in collaboration with Vs Magazine. 

   They're calling it a "fashion video," and it features Alice Glass pouting and moping around an abandoned mansion wearing all kinds of fancy wardrobe.

  They are known for their melancholic lo-fi sound and their explosive live shows. 
  Expect third album from Crystal Castles this summer, until then take a look a new video!

Suffocation

They followed that up with a remix of “Suffocation” by HEALTH

 Crystal_Castles_-_Suffocation_HEALTH_Remix.mp3

The Beauty of Gemina - Iscariot Blues

  The Beauty of Gemina is a music group of the Swiss Michael Sele, which was founded in 2006.

  He's leading this project - accompanied by the musicians David Vetsch (bass) and Mac Vincens (drums) - onto the next level. 

  The band mixes elements from synth rock , dark rock  and electronic music.

  In the ten hymn-like and diversely arranged tracks the band leader seduces the listener with his dark timbre, lures hypnotically, constantly driving by powerful vocals and an unmistakable guitar play. He skilfully shuttles between melancholic intimacy and stadium sound, processing rock, wave, goth and blues influences.

   On the one hand Michael Sele reveals his habitual darkness; on the other hand he appears growingly political, proclaiming a new revolution and thus predicting an according cultural and social change of paradigms.

  The Beauty Of Gemina conceive themselves as a modern rock band orbiting close to the spirit of the age. Nonetheless, their sound knowingly eludes a clear musical categorisation.

  A distinctive voice as primary component, psychedelic guitar sounds, driving electronic devices, acoustic elements and profound lyrics peak to an arc of suspense, belt the mighty, epic-dark songs and reflect Michael Sele's atmospheric and at the same time daunting imagery output. 

  The Beauty Of Gemina with their new album Iscariot Blues are staging an opus of timeless-dark elegance, guiding their unique style to perfection. 


 My Space

 

Tracklist: 

01. Voices Of Winter
02. Haddon Hall
03. Badlands
04. Golden Age
05. Stairs
06. Prophecy
07. Dark Revolution
08. June 2
09. Seven-Day Wonder
10. Last Night Home

 

Video from the 2011 tour

 

At The End Of The Sea(2010)

Tracklist:

01. Dark Rain

02. Obscura

03. Rumours

04. Kings Men Come

05. Sacrificed To The Gods

06. End Of All

07. Counting Tears

08. In Silence

09. A Fortune Tellers Dream

10. Black Cat Nights

11. Narcotica

12. Endless Sleep

 

A Stranger To Tears

01. Galilee Song
02. This Time
03. Psycho Flood
04. Shadow Dancer
05. Colours Of Mind
06. The Lonesome Death Of A Goth DJ
07. Heart Of A Gun
08. In Your Eyes
09. Into Black
10. One Day
11. Last Kiss
12. Narcissus
13. Simple Death
14. Tell Me Why
15. Wishful Promise
16. Essai Noir 

Diary Of A Lost

Tracklist:
01. Suicide Landscape
02. One Step To Heaven
03. Hunters
04. Kingdom Of Cancer
05. Victims Of Love
06. Forgiveness
07. Nevertime
08. Trapped
09. Monster In Me
10. Fight Song
11. Isle Of Desire
12. Lovehate
13. La Reve De L'infidele

Contre Jour - One Night At The Station

  

  Contre Jour is a french band which started playing in 2009. The band includes Roxy (vocals), Christof (bass guitar), Greguy Leodocard (keyboards) and Manu (Guitar).

  Their first album called « One night at the station », which is a self-product project and was released in January 2010, combining many influences from the 80′s and the 90′s, offers a punchy sound between Post-punk and New wave.

 Their influences include Joy Division, The Chameleons, Siouxsie & the Banshees and The Cure. 

 Official site
 My space 

 Tracklisting :
01. Hourglass
02. À contre Jour
03. The chosen One
04. Grey House
05. Vladilen
06. Lies
07. One Night at the Station
08. Tension
09. This Feeling
10. Decay
11. A Recklessness
12. The Travelling 

 mediafire

  This self-produced debut album of 12 songs can produce for itself a darkly romantic world in your head and offers the dawning of the dark seasons suitable for lonely dark hours or parties.

Flying Turns - As Good As

   French Cold New wave band Flying Turns from Paris, with beautiful deep dark voice and energetic post punk guitar riffs made such a great videos that make me excited to find a real high-quality band that reminds a lot to Joy Division, the first album of Depeche Mode, Bauhaus, Devo and so on..

   One of the band members is Gesaffelstein, a french producer of techno/electro music.

  Their first single was called as good as, listen to this promising and talented trio. Enjoy!!

Directed by Francesco Colombo 

Video by Marie Athénaïs - marieathenais.com

myspace/flyingturns

soundcloud/flying-turns 

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

Eagle (Demo) by Chew Lips

    Chew Lips Official

Download 

Björk - Biophilia

  Björk Guðmundsdótti  known as Björk is an Icelandic singer and songwriter, occasional actress, music composer and music producer, whose solo work includes seven solo albums and two original film soundtracks.

  Her eclectic musical style has achieved popular acknowledgement and popularity within many musical genres such as, rock, jazz, electronic,dance music,classical and folk. Her voice has been acclaimed for its distinctive qualities.

  Björk's lyrical themes range from personal matters to scientific, natural or social topics.

This summer Björk, introduces Biophilia, an extraordinary immersive project and her most ambitious work to date. The multi-media endeavour encompasses her music, installations and live shows, and celebrating the use of modern technology by utilising the internet. The project aims to explore ideas like how sound works, the infinite expanse of the universe, from planetary systems to atomic structures.

   The world premiere of Björk's Biophilia live show will be held at Manchester International Festival for a three-week residency - across six intimate shows in the Campfield Market Hall for audiences of 1800, as her first UK dates in over three years. For these six special shows, Björk will be performing new tracks from the forthcoming Biophilia studio album as well as with a small group of unique musical collaborators.

   The show will feature a range of specially conceived and crafted instruments, among them a bespoke digitally-controlled pipe organ; a 30 foot pendulum that harnesses the earth’s gravitational pull to create musical patterns - creating a unique bridge between the ancient and the modern; a bespoke gamelan-celeste hybrid; and a one-off extraordinary pin barrel harp.

  In a special collaboration with MIF, the Biophilia live show will travel to major cities around the world following the Manchester premiere. MIF will also be working with young people in Manchester to explore the musicological, scientific and technological ideas behind the project. In a series of educational workshops schoolchildren will be given the unique opportunity to experience the world of Biophilia first hand, and to immerse themselves in the endlessly rich and inspiring place where cutting edge technology, music and nature meet. 

 Biophilia is anticipated later this year, release on september 27th 2011.

    Until then we're gonna enjoy in some of her greatest success ever made in a music world...
EnJoy In Crystalline! 

 Download

Fischerspooner - Entertainment

   Fischerspooner is an art pop performance project created and helmed by Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner that makes music, dance, fashion, film and photography. 

   Their work fuses fine art and pop culture, as in their renowned outsider pop shows bursting with stage effects presented in both art galleries and traditional concert halls.  

   Their full-length albums of music include 1, a punked-up digital party record trussed with conceptual lyrics; and Odyssey, a rich emotional fantasia with a deep, expansive sound. Fischerspooner’s third album Entertainment, a sophisticated pop epic bubbling with hooks, released in May, 2009.

   Fischer and Spooner met at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they collaborated on performance art pieces.   With the help of an ever-expanding network of dancers, singers, designers, and artists, the performances grew into large-scale arena-style pop spectacles staged in galleries and nightclubs. 

 
   Fischerspooner produces a quirky, robotic, and strangely subdued kind of dance music. Their albums can be seen as soundtracks to their stageshows, as opposed to recordings which are performed live.

              For more information, visit the official website:                 

                  http://www.fischerspooner.com/

Fischerspooner - Never Win by EMI_Music

Fischerspooner - Just Let Go by EMI_Music

Download 

Cold Cave - Cherish The Light Years (2011)

   Cold Cave are an experimental electronic pop group from Philadelphia and New York City who make melodic synthscapes with jackhammer beats. They acknowledge the dark roots of synthesizer music as well as its potential for making the brightest pop with their hard songs celebrating the contradictory beauty of the human condition.

   Cold Cave strive for balance, between the ugly and the beautiful, between rupture and rapture. The songs on Cold Cave's debut album Love Comes Close have an immediacy that belies thought-provoking titles like "The Laurels of Erotomania" and "The Trees Grew Emotions And Died". In this way they mark that transitional moment when synthesizer music went from a subversive device for sound collagists to a serious commercial force. They are cerebral and savage, yet sweet and seductive.

   Cold Cave uniquely refine a style that many consider to be still lost in the surplus of ‘80s glamour. Their debut full-length, Love Comes Close, seems to configure the most enduring aspects of ‘80s electro-pop and integrate them into the world of contemporary production where noise, IDM, and ambience are all accepted music genres. 

 The new album  arrives April 5 in the U.S. and April 4 in the UK!

Here's the newest video from the band, Enjoy, Great song!

    http://www.myspace.com/coldcave

    http://coldcave.net/

Download 

Nipplepeople - Sutra

  
      Nipplepeople are mysterious electro-pop duo from Zagreb, Croatia. 

     They are acting under the mask and do not talk a lot about themselves, they prefer that their music does it for them.

     I like this single Sutra, great song and extravagant video.
    It is a pleasant experience to enjoy their live show, especially is interesting their bizarre costumes and masks, but underneth of them is hiding incredible voice and talent.
                            
                        Enjoy!!!
                              

 

http://www.myspace.com/nipplepeople 

Detektivbyrån

   Detektivbyrån ("The Detective Agency") was a Swedish electronica and folk music trio from Gothenburg. The group consisted of Anders "Flanders" Molin (accordion, music box), Martin "MacGyver" Molin (glockenspiel, traktofon, toy piano, Theremin) and Jon Nils Emanuel Ekström drums, sound box, small bells.
  Their first Demo EP was released in 2005, their debut release Hemvagen EP was released on the Swedish label Danarkia. After that they released two singles, Lyckans Undulat and Split 7”, and two full length albums, E18 Album and Wermland, which was released on the 3rd of September 2008.

  They remind me on my childhood and some days when we all were without any worries.
  I remember my toy piano and when I hear these sensitive sounds, it can make my eyes shed tears.
 
                       Enjoy!

Download Hemvägen EP

Ladytron - Velocifero

     Ladytron are band originally formed in Liverpool,  UK. They blends electronic pop music and New Wave, using an array of vintage analogue equipment to achieve their distinctive sound. Albums so far have focused on a balance between pop structures and digitally edited analogue electronic sound, along with some more experimental leanings including psychedelic elements.

   Ladytron released the new single, "Ace Of Hz," and it is available everywhere today. 
   They also have four studio albums:
         -  604 (2001)
         -  Light & Magic (2002)
         -  Witching Hour (2005)
         -  Velocifero (2008)

        Enjoy in videos! They have much to offer!

Ladytron - Sugar by Ladytron

 

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