Brooklyn's fine Blackburn Recordings recently released the self-titled full-length by this borough's sweetest noise pop group Sweet Bulbs, and here's another brilliant track fresh from the release for your ears to make sure you don't miss this piece that is deemed to become one of this year's finest in the still rising sub-genre of honest Black Tambourine devotees. Purest pop goodness drenched in a fog of thick guitar layers and heavily reverberated textures, Sweet Bulb's music is dark yet never too far away from the bright side, just like every true shoegaze ever was.
And if you need further arguments, be sure to head over to our beloved Pelly Twins who premiered the rough but wonderful Dilated Sleep yesterday. Also, ask them if you need more tracks and further insight.
Sweet Bulbs - Fell In A CaveRead more →
Brooklyn's fine Blackburn Recordings recently released the self-titled full-length by this borough's sweetest noise pop group Sweet Bulbs, and here's another brilliant track fresh from the release for your ears to make sure you don't miss this piece that is deemed to become one of this year's finest in the still rising sub-genre of honest Black Tambourine devotees. Purest pop goodness drenched in a fog of thick guitar layers and heavily reverberated textures, Sweet Bulb's music is dark yet never too far away from the bright side, just like every true shoegaze ever was.
And if you need further arguments, be sure to head over to our beloved Pelly Twins who premiered the rough but wonderful Dilated Sleep yesterday. Also, ask them if you need more tracks and further insight.
Sweet Bulbs - Fell In A Cave
We had to wait an awfully long time for their latest LP Human Culture to finally be released, but now that it's out, new gems of our favorite Vancouver band Terror Bird keep on dropping on an almost weekly basis. After their amazing Outside single on NightSchool Records, another London boutique label is about to put out an EP with some as yet unheard Terror Bird songs: Waiting for Nothing will be released by Verulamium Records on March 7, and below you can take an exclusive first listen to the title track as well as to the second a-side song, the particularly marvelous She Kissed Me (And I Fell Ill), in fact one of the most dazzling tunes by Nikki Never and her pals that I've come across so far.
Pre-order the four track EP on brown 7 inch vinyl here. Limited to 500.
Also, Terror Bird are on an extensive tour all over Europe at the moment. Some of the dates are listed below:
02-13 Rome - DalVerme
02-21 Hamburg - Rote Flora
02-26 Berlin Mitte - Levee (w/ Former Ghosts)
03-07 Paris - L'international (w/ Ela Orleans & Holy Strays)
03-08 London - Cargo (w/ Former Ghosts)
03-10 Manchester - The Deaf Institute
03-11 Glasgow - 13th Note (w/ Golden Grrrls)
03-17 Hamburg - tba.
03-25 Berlin Kreuzberg - Madame Claude
03-26 Cologne - King Georg
For more dates, check their myspace and/or last.fm. Probably subject to change.
Terror Bird - Waiting for NothingTerror Bird - She Kissed Me (And I Fell Ill)Read more →
We had to wait an awfully long time for their latest LP Human Culture to finally be released, but now that it's out, new gems of our favorite Vancouver band Terror Bird keep on dropping on an almost weekly basis. After their amazing Outside single on NightSchool Records, another London boutique label is about to put out an EP with some as yet unheard Terror Bird songs: Waiting for Nothing will be released by Verulamium Records on March 7, and below you can take an exclusive first listen to the title track as well as to the second a-side song, the particularly marvelous She Kissed Me (And I Fell Ill), in fact one of the most dazzling tunes by Nikki Never and her pals that I've come across so far.
Pre-order the four track EP on brown 7 inch vinyl here. Limited to 500.
Also, Terror Bird are on an extensive tour all over Europe at the moment. Some of the dates are listed below:
02-13 Rome - DalVerme
02-21 Hamburg - Rote Flora
02-26 Berlin Mitte - Levee (w/ Former Ghosts)
03-07 Paris - L'international (w/ Ela Orleans & Holy Strays)
03-08 London - Cargo (w/ Former Ghosts)
03-10 Manchester - The Deaf Institute
03-11 Glasgow - 13th Note (w/ Golden Grrrls)
03-17 Hamburg - tba.
03-25 Berlin Kreuzberg - Madame Claude
03-26 Cologne - King Georg
For more dates, check their myspace and/or last.fm. Probably subject to change.
Terror Bird - Waiting for NothingTerror Bird - She Kissed Me (And I Fell Ill)
Following the glitchy electronic genius Seams' wonderful Tourist EP back in September last year, the darlings at Pictures Music finally bless us with yet another electronic release: Chairman Kato's Wildfire EP, due February 14th - better known as Valentines day, for those of you who may celebrate that tradition. However, if you expect to find some cute and bubbly indie pop love on this one, you're wrong. The production set up of the London based Chairman Kato may vary, "depending on what mood I’m in" as he says himself. He tweaks, turns and reshapes sounds on his analogue equipment until that rather interesting crunchy electronic landscape appears, of which he often rams through an old tape recorder to get that particular noisy, blown-out feel – a deep and uncensored sound you can place somewhere between abstract hip-hop and dub. Totally gonna grab a bottle and listen to this while everyone else are hanging out with their dear ones on Valentines. (forever alone)
Stream a track from the EP below, or grab the whole thing for $5 via Pictures Music here. Also, don't forget to stay tuned for their Koreless release in March, it's probably going to be just as amazing.
Read more →
Following the glitchy electronic genius Seams' wonderful Tourist EP back in September last year, the darlings at Pictures Music finally bless us with yet another electronic release: Chairman Kato's Wildfire EP, due February 14th - better known as Valentines day, for those of you who may celebrate that tradition. However, if you expect to find some cute and bubbly indie pop love on this one, you're wrong. The production set up of the London based Chairman Kato may vary, "depending on what mood I’m in" as he says himself. He tweaks, turns and reshapes sounds on his analogue equipment until that rather interesting crunchy electronic landscape appears, of which he often rams through an old tape recorder to get that particular noisy, blown-out feel – a deep and uncensored sound you can place somewhere between abstract hip-hop and dub. Totally gonna grab a bottle and listen to this while everyone else are hanging out with their dear ones on Valentines. (forever alone)
Stream a track from the EP below, or grab the whole thing for $5 via Pictures Music here. Also, don't forget to stay tuned for their Koreless release in March, it's probably going to be just as amazing.
Here's the brand new "Codeine Rebuild" of Stay Out Tonight, Lay Bac's terrific tropical floor filler from last summer, and Austin, Texas fellow Matthew Shogi aka Party Girl has turned the already quite sleazy original into an outright instrument of seduction, with all its heavy clipping, drowned vocals and slow burning, juicy bass line letting it sound like some five a.m. extravaganza you most likely don't wanna be reminded of the next day.
Lay Bac - Stay Out Tonight (Party Girl's Codeine Rebuild)Read more →
Here's the brand new "Codeine Rebuild" of Stay Out Tonight, Lay Bac's terrific tropical floor filler from last summer, and Austin, Texas fellow Matthew Shogi aka Party Girl has turned the already quite sleazy original into an outright instrument of seduction, with all its heavy clipping, drowned vocals and slow burning, juicy bass line letting it sound like some five a.m. extravaganza you most likely don't wanna be reminded of the next day.
Lay Bac - Stay Out Tonight (Party Girl's Codeine Rebuild)
Got hit up recently by some pretty weird project named Myrrh, consisting of "two gypsies with a laptop and some screws loose". The latter assertion we can confirm, the former remains rather shady or should be read metaphorically, if anything, as it turns out that Myrrh is in fact the latest side project of Arc Light's Ryan Gabel with his "buddy Landon", which after all makes an awful lot of sense - indeed we find Gabel's distinct take on screwed, lo-fi psych-pop in here, and after a few listens this whole thing becomes strangely captivating. So go join the N'ajzabi Nation and cop the whole EP for free over here, and then you should probably get some shrooms as well, we guess they might help enhancing the whole experience. Seriously.
Myrrh - N'ajzabi NationRead more →
Got hit up recently by some pretty weird project named Myrrh, consisting of "two gypsies with a laptop and some screws loose". The latter assertion we can confirm, the former remains rather shady or should be read metaphorically, if anything, as it turns out that Myrrh is in fact the latest side project of Arc Light's Ryan Gabel with his "buddy Landon", which after all makes an awful lot of sense - indeed we find Gabel's distinct take on screwed, lo-fi psych-pop in here, and after a few listens this whole thing becomes strangely captivating. So go join the N'ajzabi Nation and cop the whole EP for free over here, and then you should probably get some shrooms as well, we guess they might help enhancing the whole experience. Seriously.
Myrrh - N'ajzabi Nation
Arcseconds is the recording project of Calgary, Alberta native and current Berlin resident Mike Verdone. Jesse Locke of Montreal-based cassette label Planet of the Tapes recently sent over this marvelous outer space voyage of a track, the aptly titled Astronauts. The slow-burning, gently floating piece of drone and beautiful, slightly clipping synth patterns with heavily manipulated vocal snippets will be part of Arcseconds' upcoming split C-40 with Montreal's Sundrips. One of our favorite magicians of the visual, Hobo Cult/Moduli TV's Frank Ouelette, has produced the accompanying video, a stunning and absolutely fitting collage made up of footage from Terrence Rafferty's seminal 1989 documentation For All Mankind: Fantastic Voyage. Taken together, this splendid audiovisual experience is among the most overwhelming things happening to us lately.
Arcseconds - AstronautsRead more →
Arcseconds is the recording project of Calgary, Alberta native and current Berlin resident Mike Verdone. Jesse Locke of Montreal-based cassette label Planet of the Tapes recently sent over this marvelous outer space voyage of a track, the aptly titled Astronauts. The slow-burning, gently floating piece of drone and beautiful, slightly clipping synth patterns with heavily manipulated vocal snippets will be part of Arcseconds' upcoming split C-40 with Montreal's Sundrips. One of our favorite magicians of the visual, Hobo Cult/Moduli TV's Frank Ouelette, has produced the accompanying video, a stunning and absolutely fitting collage made up of footage from Terrence Rafferty's seminal 1989 documentation For All Mankind: Fantastic Voyage. Taken together, this splendid audiovisual experience is among the most overwhelming things happening to us lately.
Arcseconds - Astronauts
I can almost hear the crisp sound of the water flowing over my skin while swimming through a pitch black lake in the middle of the night. The trees form a perfect circle around me, pointing their elegant silhouettes up at the night sky above me like sharp, but peaceful arrows. And like soft rain that falls from the sky an early October morning, light finds it way down.
And that is just about as deep as I'm going tonight. This is Bendik, the name of a boy but the body of a girl behind it, Silje Halstensen from Bergen, Norway. Together with some helping hands, Silje crafts together foggy ambient pop from a wide, dim landscape that can make your heart skip a beat – or sometimes, if the condition is right, even stop completely. With her music being both freezing and warming at the same time, it makes me wish we lived in this calming, beautiful darkness for eternity. Bendik is silence, or as we also call it, stillhet – and the mellow sound of her accent brings out the magic of Siljes voice in a way that I think is hard to find in a language not so close to your heart. Honestly. Just listen.
Bendik - StilleBendik - Og tankeneRead more →
I can almost hear the crisp sound of the water flowing over my skin while swimming through a pitch black lake in the middle of the night. The trees form a perfect circle around me, pointing their elegant silhouettes up at the night sky above me like sharp, but peaceful arrows. And like soft rain that falls from the sky an early October morning, light finds it way down.
And that is just about as deep as I'm going tonight. This is Bendik, the name of a boy but the body of a girl behind it, Silje Halstensen from Bergen, Norway. Together with some helping hands, Silje crafts together foggy ambient pop from a wide, dim landscape that can make your heart skip a beat – or sometimes, if the condition is right, even stop completely. With her music being both freezing and warming at the same time, it makes me wish we lived in this calming, beautiful darkness for eternity. Bendik is silence, or as we also call it, stillhet – and the mellow sound of her accent brings out the magic of Siljes voice in a way that I think is hard to find in a language not so close to your heart. Honestly. Just listen.
Bendik - StilleBendik - Og tankene
Music in times of recession. Recently, Emilie Friedlander of Visitation Rites linked the economic meltdown inter alia to the "return of outmoded recording technologies like the 8-track and the cassette tape". But as she herself observed as well, I’d argue that it’s by far not only the means of production that have taken a shift since Lehman went to the gutter, it’s also the music itself. Starting by the end of 2008 with some devastatingly beautiful tunes by a certain young man from Seattle who's recording under the moniker Perfume Genius, we've come across quite a few artists as of late that all share a remarkable propensity towards music that is all about fragility and pure introspection. Re-interpreting popular topoi of Sturm und Drang (Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther comes to mind in particular) and early 19th century romanticism, albeit perhaps unconsciously, American artists like Idiot Glee or Allister Izenberg have unintentionally established a sub-genre in contemporary popular music that more than anything else should go by the already outworn designation "bedroom pop", as the lonesome, unhappy adolescent creating music between his pillows while the world outside is happening without him is exactly the image being evoked by each and every of the musicians' frail melodies.
The latest exponent of this artistic development is another young man, this hailing from Southern California, named Alex Jacob aka Therapies Son. Having chosen the moniker after a "horrible breakup" and a subsequent, still ongoing therapy, Alex' gorgeous little pop gems became quite suddenly fairly popular in the blogosphere last November, and the hype has constantly been growing, although until this very day we've only been blessed with the scant amount of merely three songs. "I never wanted to be part of any movement", Alex told me recently, and sure he ain't. In fact, there's no "movement" to be found here - the introspective nature of the music itself seems to preclude the very possibility of anything even close to that. Still, it's hard to ignore the impression of a certain rise of such artists, and in his case it slightly appears as if someone had been waiting just for him to show up.
Of course, post-pubertal heartache and sorrows being sublimated into passionate love songs isn't exactly an uncommon phenomenon in the history of popular music, and the same certainly holds true for music as a means of self-therapy. But the attention these young and lost boys are receiving at the moment is striking nonetheless, exemplified by the fact that, according to the artist, it took Transparent's Jack Shankly and Sahil Varma only two days after Alex had started a myspace to hit him up. His unquestionably incredible talent notwithstanding, I maintain that this kind of awareness wouldn't have occurred during the heyday of late capitalism, an assumption that is reinforcing the sociological implication that modernity once again has led us towards introversion.
Therapies Son's debut EP Over The Sea is out on Transparent February 15. Pre-order via Pure Groove now. Below, watch the gorgeous video for Rose Red Rose, and don't miss the latest EP gem that has found its way into the interwebs (via Transparent) today, the absolutely gorgeous and amazingly playful Yellow Mama.
Therapies Son - Yellow Mama
_____________________________________
Speaking of James Friley aka Idiot Glee, Impose has debuted the brand new track Do You Wanna Go? today, another blissful, sixties-jangling reminder of why we love that dude so much. It's gonna be the a-side of an upcoming cassingle in Impose Magazine's cassette series. Pre-order here.
Idiot Glee - Do You Wanna Go?Read more →
Music in times of recession. Recently, Emilie Friedlander of Visitation Rites linked the economic meltdown inter alia to the "return of outmoded recording technologies like the 8-track and the cassette tape". But as she herself observed as well, I’d argue that it’s by far not only the means of production that have taken a shift since Lehman went to the gutter, it’s also the music itself. Starting by the end of 2008 with some devastatingly beautiful tunes by a certain young man from Seattle who's recording under the moniker Perfume Genius, we've come across quite a few artists as of late that all share a remarkable propensity towards music that is all about fragility and pure introspection. Re-interpreting popular topoi of Sturm und Drang (Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther comes to mind in particular) and early 19th century romanticism, albeit perhaps unconsciously, American artists like Idiot Glee or Allister Izenberg have unintentionally established a sub-genre in contemporary popular music that more than anything else should go by the already outworn designation "bedroom pop", as the lonesome, unhappy adolescent creating music between his pillows while the world outside is happening without him is exactly the image being evoked by each and every of the musicians' frail melodies.
The latest exponent of this artistic development is another young man, this hailing from Southern California, named Alex Jacob aka Therapies Son. Having chosen the moniker after a "horrible breakup" and a subsequent, still ongoing therapy, Alex' gorgeous little pop gems became quite suddenly fairly popular in the blogosphere last November, and the hype has constantly been growing, although until this very day we've only been blessed with the scant amount of merely three songs. "I never wanted to be part of any movement", Alex told me recently, and sure he ain't. In fact, there's no "movement" to be found here - the introspective nature of the music itself seems to preclude the very possibility of anything even close to that. Still, it's hard to ignore the impression of a certain rise of such artists, and in his case it slightly appears as if someone had been waiting just for him to show up.
Of course, post-pubertal heartache and sorrows being sublimated into passionate love songs isn't exactly an uncommon phenomenon in the history of popular music, and the same certainly holds true for music as a means of self-therapy. But the attention these young and lost boys are receiving at the moment is striking nonetheless, exemplified by the fact that, according to the artist, it took Transparent's Jack Shankly and Sahil Varma only two days after Alex had started a myspace to hit him up. His unquestionably incredible talent notwithstanding, I maintain that this kind of awareness wouldn't have occurred during the heyday of late capitalism, an assumption that is reinforcing the sociological implication that modernity once again has led us towards introversion.
Therapies Son's debut EP Over The Sea is out on Transparent February 15. Pre-order via Pure Groove now. Below, watch the gorgeous video for Rose Red Rose, and don't miss the latest EP gem that has found its way into the interwebs (via Transparent) today, the absolutely gorgeous and amazingly playful Yellow Mama.
Therapies Son - Yellow Mama
_____________________________________
Speaking of James Friley aka Idiot Glee, Impose has debuted the brand new track Do You Wanna Go? today, another blissful, sixties-jangling reminder of why we love that dude so much. It's gonna be the a-side of an upcoming cassingle in Impose Magazine's cassette series. Pre-order here.
Idiot Glee - Do You Wanna Go?
We had to wait an awfully long time for their latest LP Human Culture to finally be released, but now that it's out, new gems of our favorite Vancouver band Terror Bird keep on dropping on an almost weekly basis. After their amazing Outside single on NightSchool Records, another London boutique label is about to put out an EP with some as yet unheard Terror Bird songs: Waiting for Nothing will be released by Verulamium Records on March 7, and below you can take an exclusive first listen to the title track as well as to the second a-side song, the particularly marvelous She Kissed Me (And I Fell Ill), in fact one of the most dazzling tunes by Nikki Never and her pals that I've come across so far.
Pre-order the four track EP on brown 7 inch vinyl here. Limited to 500.
Also, Terror Bird are on an extensive tour all over Europe at the moment. Some of the dates are listed below:
02-13 Rome - DalVerme
02-21 Hamburg - Rote Flora
02-26 Berlin Mitte - Levee (w/ Former Ghosts)
03-07 Paris - L'international (w/ Ela Orleans & Holy Strays)
03-08 London - Cargo (w/ Former Ghosts)
03-10 Manchester - The Deaf Institute
03-11 Glasgow - 13th Note (w/ Golden Grrrls)
03-17 Hamburg - tba.
03-25 Berlin Kreuzberg - Madame Claude
03-26 Cologne - King Georg
For more dates, check their myspace and/or last.fm. Probably subject to change.
Terror Bird - Waiting for Nothing
Terror Bird - She Kissed Me (And I Fell Ill)
Read more →
Following the glitchy electronic genius Seams' wonderful Tourist EP back in September last year, the darlings at 
