Get Her To The Greek

Now I quiet like Lana Del Amitri. Yes, I hear the argument for her being a big fake, that her lips are silly, and I'm sure it's unlikely that she'll be pursuing the "Gangsta Nancy Sinatra" look in a year or two's time when her album sales have propelled her into a need to maintain a proper pop career with corporate sponsors pumping money into franchise products and tour sales but ultimately and right now, fake or no, her Lynch-twanging melancholia and decent face make her the best pre-packaged pop thing since The Sex Pistols. Better than the similarly contrived authenticity of Michael Kiwanuka. But, I just have one question for you...

Below is a video of the Greek singer Eleni Vitali, from 1991. Now I am in no way trying to suggest this song bares any kind of resemblence to Videogames and, even if it does, baring a similiarity to an older, obscure song is no grounds a bad thing, music is after all an aural tradition, but check it out and see what you think...

Blackgoldbuffalo make dreamy music, contemporary yet strangely oceanic. One of them has recently moved to LA whilst the other cuts my hair on the occasion I get round to it. A Recent trip to Nottingham put them to work with producer Faley Fnord from Late of the Pier, but until these fruits drop, here is Magnets.

Not much I known about producer Buillion, except the brilliant single Say Arr Ee is released on the rejuvinated R&S Label. Twisting a perfect blend or eerie familiarity into something unhinged, with what sounds like a wooden sax solo; vocals that hit a blend of Dinosaur L and early 90s Factory Records; pads that point towards a long lost utopia and all maner of echoed blurches jostling just a little too far out of neatness.

Terry Gilliam is the anti-Spielberg. Both authors of often fantastical flights of fantasy portrayed through a child's perspective but where Spielberg is a reassuring uncle who puts the house back as he found it, with maybe a little extra sugar in the cupboards, with Gilliam, from Time Bandits to Tideland, you get nothing as simplistic as a guarantee of a happy end. Below you can check out his new short - an online released mini feature, The Wholly Family, which from the outset is unmistakably the work of the man who cast Robert DeNiro as a heroic plumber in a dystopian future based on the 1940s. Bought to you by Distrify, it isn't free to watch, but I think you know if this is your bag and worth the admission...

Toy, Astronautica, Third Man and Wednesday

As hard a band name to google as Girls, it would be understandable if Toy are possibly annoyed at getting constant comparisons to The Horrors, even if most of those are pretty damn complementary. Left Myself Behind is a psych pop epic, it has guitars that are played properly (as in, with very few notes and put through lots of pedals) and the final few minutes are a crescendo of Stereolab'esque modulations.

Together it gets a re-release by Heavenly on Jan 23d. Also known as the other day.

 HVN233 - TOY 'Left Myself Behind' & 'Clock Chime' by heavenlyrecordings

It is important as a modern human being to not think in terms of genre when it comes to preference. Our lives and options have changed irrevocably through technology in the last ten years and are now far too expansive to justify hiding behind the woolliness of one thing. Championing one cause is for football fans, not music lovers.

Astronautica has done something very lovely with some minimal electronics, some grain, some pulses and they're even very kindly letting you listen to a whole album of it on Bandcamp. Fuck, do you remember MySpace? Do you remember when actual people, not bands, had MySpace pages? Do you remember how each and every one of those pages looked like a teenager's bedroom?

The above is a still from Secret Cinema. It finished on sunday so now I can talk about it. The Third Man came to life in a disused office/factory in Clerkenwell (where part of Batman Begins was filmed). I curated a bunch of live musicians to play in various nooks and crannies of the fictitional post war landscape and the whole thing went swimmingly. Below is a moody little youtube of the event made by my good friend Tom Haines - who also DJs as Hyena

Today We're Starting with Bowie Eating Peas on a Train

This is Femme and you can listen to her awesome tune Bring It Back Round below. In some ways its the best R'n'B pop tune by someone who isn't strictly R'n'B pop since Dirty Projectors' Stillness Is The Move. It also has a touch of the day glo pop of  the golden yesteryear of Bow Wow Wow about it. If you want to see more, she's playing as part of the producer Herve's Cheap Thrills label party at The Nest, Dalston on February 3rd

 Bring It Back Round by FEMME

Next wednesday I shall be DJing a set of glam stompers at the Glam Rock Murder Mystery. Exactly what it says it is: a murder mystery with plenty of stomping glam rock. A combination of live music and interactive theatre, possibly a cross between Cluedo and Velvet Goldmine where the audience have to work out who killed the fading singer of a legendary hair-piece. Get down to the Amersham Arms, New Cross for furry fun. And here's the facebook page

Like Wahol's 15 minutes theory, even the most dubiously heralded performers have a nugget in their cupboard. That one moment where they shine amongst a career you wouldn't usually poke a stick at. Rock On is David Essex's Copland, his Devil Woman, his Blackadder.

Then below and right at the top of this post its great to see, on occasion, David Bowie does normal things. You can see more of these normal things here

New York based psych pop producer Expensive Looks has just released his debut album Dark Matters. Check out this short but very satyisfying mix below - where the delicate atmosphere of Aphex Twin seamlessly evolves into the crunchy The Juan Maclean and beyond. Its only 19 minutes which is about the same amount of time it takes to caramelize red onions

 Decisions (Live Negatives Mix) by Expensive Looks 

A little more Ken Russell below. This early photograph proves he not only invented Resevoir Dogs but also A Bande Apart

Old Devils, Weeknds, Barons and New Roxy Music Remix

When Ken Russell died at the tail end of last year there was a noticeable immediate sense of loss of something most people had forgeten they had even needed. After all, you need to go back decades to get to the essence of why it suddenly seems we have lost such a visionary. You need to travel back prior his last decade of home shot movies, prior his 80s shlock back to a heyday that ended with Altered States but began several decades before that with his creative highs of Women in Love and The Devils. But even before then, before his BBC work we glimpse a young devil capturing stills of austere post war Britain and its bombed out buildings, where there was actually a law forbidding dancing in Hyde Park and where Ken's lens captured the rarely glimpsed Teddy Girls (above).

Yes. Yes. Yes, this is a very good thing. I never get bored of playing the original out and now I have this superb edit to look forward to hammering - there will be heavyweight vinyl editions of this released as well...


 LOVE IS THE DRUG (TODD TERJE DISCO DUB) by BryanFerry

Last time I featured Baron I could describe their sound as being vaguely Canterburyesque, full of chamber pastorialisms, a touch of the less fiddly Crimson. I booked them to play Tago Mago last Halloween and new Bandcamp released track Comea (below) is a sign of their newer stuff: heavier, Eastern influenced yet at the same time still beautifully divorced from the ATMs and mock-celebrity Britain of 2012.

A song came on the radio the other day - it had a soulful epic sweep and beautiful strings, it sounded like Rotary Connection or Roy Ayres and as the winter sun hit dustbeams I felt momentarily warmed in that way post-psychedelic acoustic soul can do. Then I noticed my DAB was telling me it was an album track by BBC Sound of 2012 winner Michael Kiwanuka and I suddenly clenched like I had been tricked.

What in a name should alter how I feel so instantly? Why, just because a piece of music I presumed was made in 1972 suddenly turns out to be brand spanking new should I revise my opinion on what I felt?

Should music makers have a duty to reflect the times they live in, sonically as well as lyrically?

Or are we happy to have our music supplied to us by, rather than artists - craftsmakers. Craft like a table lovingly made out of old oak where every bump and pattern has been slowly chiseled and naturally carved, a tradition passed down with genuine care, an artisan preservation society chaired by Paul Weller, where Corine Bailey Rae takes minutes and Jack Johnson serves tea out of a flask during the break. Interesting to note his album has been produced by The Bees - whose best known song Chicken Payback authentically recreates an era before when your TV was colour.

So, instead, listen to The Weeknd. Abel Tesfaye makes music that sounds like its made for now, or even a time that doesn't exist yet. Futuristic R'n'B, open and exposed, like the gold champagne skin of the genre has been surgically removed and inside all that's left is insecurity, doubt and darkness. It is also damn sexy. The 21 year old canadian released three mixtapes last year, culminating in Echoes of Silence. All of them free to download here

Transgressions, Space and Snoop

New York based photographer and film maker Columbine Goldsmith's new short Hatsuyume (First Dream) has that feel of transgressive underground cinema. Having a pounding acid drenched rock score helps, always...

Below is the first photographic proof of something that could be really good. Hoping Snoop avoids jail after having carried some of his favourite gardening produce across the set of Easy Rider, we see him and headphone salesman Dr Dre back at work doing what we love them for, to which they'll be playing live together at this years Coachella.



























If your American and stupid and have kids, the hilarious US spoof newspaper Christwire published these figures of what your little angels can expect to come away with if they go to this "Festival of Disease and Sin" Adding: "Your children will most probably die." Sadly, I think its more likely they'll come away with a few new friends and a touch of disappointment over the At The Drive In reunion.

Below I was going to post the video of Over There by Johnny Headband. The beginning reminds me of that Will Oldham film Old Joy, except more happens. Then I heard a sneaky peak of their new album - which takes the music into more interesting, deeper psychedelic and organically electronic directions so instead check out Lost Claus below and some photos from the video above

Back to the transgressive. Brooklyn psych rockers Prince Rama (image above) were raised in a Hare Krishna commune and have released music on Animal Collective's Paw Tracks. What do they sound like? A 3 piece Brooklyn psych rock band raised in a Hare Krishna commune that have released music on Animal Collective's Paw Tracks. This is a good thing. Light some candles





And as if that wasn't enough, Prince Rama's 15 Minute Exercise runs for a good extra four minutes than its title proclaims and adding to the fever dream mix are some of the most crunchy analogue arpegios since Delia Gonzales and Gavin Rusholm's Days of Mars - by far the greatest thing ever released on DFA

My friends Dan Beck and Sandra Kazlauskaite have set up Unmute: an audio and visual participatory network, where fortnightly themed musical podcasts are accompanied by a visual counterpart. A way of bringing two disciplines together. The mix below, made by Dan, is a genuine journey - the theme of Space playing with the way music can create its own geographical surroundings that takes in Bardo Pond, Mount Eerie, Popul Vuh and John Hopkins to create a sometimes cavernous, sometimes unsettling, sometimes luxuriant mixscape.

Unmute Theme 3 - Spaces by Unmute on Mixcloud

Check out their website here: http://unmute.eu/Pages/spaces.html
You'll get the visual accompaniment made by Nye Williams if you do so, so there

Deep Red

Happy second week of the new year. Have some proper decent new hiphop on me... Its very hard to type and listen to A$AP at the same time without doing stupid hand gestures and spilling my coffee. Like most people either swing a bit to the politically left or to the right, or have a little bit of either autism or dyslexia, I tend to hear sound rather than take in lyrics - my love of a vocal lies more in its shape and texture than in context, as Sir Iggward Pop once said, lyrics ain't poetry, so on a purely personal level my love of hiphop is based on an advancement of sound alone, to which this sounds like what would happen if the rabbit hole in Alice In Wonderland was a giant 808 and the cheshire cat was a cocksure young man in a baseball cap

I don't really know anything about Maggie 8, except her Facebook page says she comes from Leeds. Staying in last night, tucked in bed with a copy of the new Madame Bovary translation,  Radio 6 played this haunting yet sprightly re-imagining of The Smiths' cider down the trousers on the indie dancefloor classic. In that middle of the night there was something very sublime about the way elements of the original shuffle in to play

Charming Lady - Maggie8 by maggie8

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Maggie8/111644945528972

Knotty..Knot..not from Lucy Butler on Vimeo.

I designed a program of music for visual artist Lucy Butler's display at Jasper Conran. Lucy made the above film in connection with the installation displayed in the London and Paris stores. The idea was to play around with the ethereal, electricity and nature. I just happened to be reading Tom McCarthy's C at the time, itself sort of an exploration of the metaphysics of electricity. It was fun to link this up to Eno, Arvo Part and Oval amongst others.

Sancho / I'm on your side from Stéphane C. is a photographer on Vimeo.

I love the work of French photographer Stephane C. I met him a couple of times around a decade ago, I was producing music for Sebastien Schuller in a barn-like studio in the Parisian suburb of Yerres. We dined like kings for a month on wine, pate and cheese and the studio had Bowie's old mellotron from Berlin which i'd inhale each morning for inspiration.The Vimeo above is a photo of his put to a song I made under the name Sancho from the album Mystery Year (released by Seed Records, 2007)

You can check out a load of Stephane C's work at: 

http://www.stephane-c.net

Winter Mix Tape

Chopping wooshy psychedelia and chunky laptop hiphop with a few unexpected guests. As genre distinctions blur, all we are left with is feel. NY's Clams Casino's reverberating off kilter productions have him lined up to produce hiphop big guns like A$AP Rocky yet feel as much locked in some kind of shoegaze dreamspace. Django Django's krauty, west coast explorations owe bitesize crunch to Diplo's beatwork. I couldn't resist putting in a few vintage gems along the way for a mix rough around the edges and most definitely not for purists...

TAGO MAGO WINTER MIXTAPE by bringmecoffeeortea

Clams Casino – Motivation (Lil B)

Starslinger feat. Reggie B – Dumbin’ (Diplo Remix)

Shabazz Palaces – Swerve…The Reaping Of All That Is Worthwhile

Colour Music – Tog

Friends – I’m His Girl

Leila – (Disappointed Cloud) Anyway

Django Django – Waveforms

Squeeze – Take Me I’m Yours

Odd Future – Forrest Green

Nicholas Jarr – Why Didn’t You Save Me

Baths – Heart Emoticon
Alicia Keys - Try Sleeping With A Broken Heart (Chad Valley Edit)

Shabazz Palces – Swerve (Reprise)

The Antlers – VCR

Laws – Run Away

Deerhoof – Super Duper Rescue Heads

Can – Turtles Have Small Legs

Clams Casino – The World Needs Change (Soulja Boy)


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