eashfa
Head is alive. Hence the sound of music.Archive for electronic
Quiet Village - Silent Movie
Recently I feel hit by a wave of good sounds. Last year was mostly mediocre for me, but 2008 is laying it down! Right so this should be a review or rather a preview, the Quiet Village album hits stores May 12th.
You better get ready, put your party hats on, feast on this, then re-evaluate the electronic genre. I can’t use too many words, or I’ll drown the goodness.
Quiet Village Pacific Rhythm mp3
Silent movie - microsite listen to tracks, retail links and stuff
Warp Goods (times 2)
On the eashfa shopping list: Jamie Lidell is beckoning us to his one-man funk storm, which basically means a new album, JIM, a video, and promo image from said video of him dining with a horse-lady.
if you can’t wait for the album or single then grab a new unreleased track for free by signing up to Jamie’s mailing list.
reads the newsletter. Now, Jamie videos are sure easy to come by, not so in the case of Leila Arab. I tell you I did not want to see this. Not even a video per se. 
Leila just got herself signed to Warp Records, she tames the IDM/trip hop vibes like no other, and with no official LP outing in a decade, all those pent up creative juices must be waiting to burst out. You can burst on me, Leila. A 10-inch is out April 21→, followed by the album, Blood, Looms and Blooms in June. The album includes a Martina Topley-Bird collaboration, oh how you do tease. To think this is from 10 years ago:
Cyanide for my sweetheart
Cyanide Valentine have got an album out that is not emo as their name suggests, and as they themselves suggest to de-suggest. So no emo I suppose. Though they do have a fallback plan in that.It’s a good album, it’s free so it can’t hurt to download and check out. The vocals do seem amiss at times, and set me contrary, but on Sugar Coma they silently smithereen you away. All in all, a mish-mash of guitar pop and electronica. And, no, not emo I dare say. I smell a trail of potential.download The Three Sides of the Cyanide Valentine (zip)couple i like:
Sugar Coma
The Reprise
Canon(ball) blue
Canon Blue sounds like the party’s been going on in the kitchen with folks playing spin-the-bottle between shots of tequila and maybe milk, and all silently wishing they could run in the fields/forest/Iceland (ok I want to run around in Iceland). Rum Diary can only agree with the circumstances. Then it moves on to the bowels of the house, with a living room you’re seeing at lightning speed and a basement that sends your pace from horizontal to vertical. Yeah, you can jump now to Battle Hymn.
There’s definitely something atmospheric that’ll prevent you from just plugging in directly. But don’t you just wish that once in a while your music player can surprise you? (I know you said yes damn it). That said/Still you should cop this. Which is why downloading from blogs is so much more fun than from music stores.
Now. It’s morning. Around 5 am. Writing a story about the kitchen with alcohol stinging the air you remember — White tea with mango bits anyone? Or maybe just some Pilguin Pop.
Pusherman Tago-Mago
Remixing is raised to art status when you give new life to music, any type of music. To see potential in a boring cut, to push the envelope all the way to different galaxies, to let your mind wander where the originary intention left off, all this presumes passion and marquees lighting up over your head as opposed to a mere lightbulb.
A writer, most of the cases, is a passionate reader and afterwards a remixer of words. Tago-Mago does that with music. I may not like each and every track but that would be a strange and new feeling anyway. Rarely have I heard a reinvention of music I was, or thought I was, familiar with, in such unexpected ways. His major influence is Can, and the mixes are inspired by a variety of hip hop and electronica artists.
tago-mago - touch upon touch (marvin gaye and cocteau twins) mp3
tago-mago and the aliquot part - love and war (space lightning mix) mp3
In Romanian after the jump Read the rest of this entry »
Pod 01: “First One Out The Door”
Hello everybody,
Why you’re just in time for my first ever podcast which might not happen a second time (maybe a third,we’ll see).
Boy do you ever want to!… subscribe to the eashfacast (it has a page of its own, there was no other way)
Playlist
Aoki Takamasa + Tujiko Noriko - 26th Floor
Bacanal Intruder - Jazzy Rendered
The Third Wave - Wave’s Lament
Georgia Anne Muldrow - Speakervision
Y Pants - Favourite Sweater
Danny Breaks - Astral Vibes zoostrumental
Zahara - Con Las Ganas
Pretty good for a Sunday - except the Favourite Sweater, that’s Saturday night’s praise bit.
UPDATE
I’ve tweaked the feedburner feed for eashfa, so it now should include mp3s I post delivered directly to your RSS reader. Eashfa feed w/mp3s, soon enough
Bacaknuckle Sandwich
Well of course it children’s music!
Way back when I first told you to get your Bacanal, I might have omitted to say, it’s a compilation and there are other artists featured, and Eglantine Records (I mean Eglantine’s a nice name, but because of this link in my mind, I keep forgetting
record comp.. anyway, I don’t think I ever did a proper organised review of an album in my head or in my life.
Oh, look! I didn’t forget to say those things when I first mentioned the Bacanal one.
And he was featured in my 2006 album list with his EP.
Luis stole one of his own artfully-packaged LPs to send over to me, and now that some of my exams are out of the way, I decided to leap in a lapse of time and listen to the album. Lulo is maybe short for lullaby. Or lull into. The whole album is a 10-piece puzzle - easy eh? Well you might or might not join the jigsaw, hell if you’re so hyperactive you can’t rest for five minutes without checking your PDA (or HipsterPDA) - well throw that all out the window for a bit, like the English used to piss out the window in the 18th century for want of proper plumbing, or plumbing at all, yes, piss your hyper out the window and listen.
Because Lulo is for marshmallow people that cover the city in cohorts on Sundays, maybe wishing they were still in bed.
There are mechanics to the album, inner mechanics, like blood flow, but its blood is acoustic guitar mixed with samples of robot-toy-things chirping away? It’s a little postmodern mythical creature, an endearing pet, with no bumps in its synth structure or its human artifice (the spacey guitar), plotting to paint all the walls in petit blue and petit pink.
To me, it meshes together in a new, unique way, with wholehearted electronics that grasp the kid in us like no premeditated Disney all-weekend marathon will, ever again. (Although I always cry at the Fox and The Hound, I have to occasionally ask meself, what the fuck I am crying for?)
Your headphones will be cheering for Lulo’s creator.
Here are those couple songs you get for reading the post (or even if you didn’t, and if you don’t, I mind - some of you ight learn some proper spelling by reading more - not off the web always perhaps).
Ali Love
I was tempted to spice up the title with some exclamation marks, three seems to be the norm in this case. Sobriety caught up with me, even though this guy deserves at least one for each of his personalities.
Musically, multiple personalities are good news for Ali Love. The 25-year old Londoner is currently playing hop-scotch with the genres thing, and giving me a headache, if I were the type of person who got headaches. Because I can’t describe this music without getting all sub-genrey, which I can’t stand. Which takes nothing from its quality.
There’s this electronic streak on a glam-pop background travelling one song, then minor keys and a sparse, electricity-filled acoustic earscape on the next. Naturally, he writes, plays and produces all his songs.
We’ll accept nothing else since the bar’s been raised on what I might call faux-indie (the music people like to tag as indie on last.fm just because it’s not exactly mainstream pop-rock; not good enough people). Anyway, this is indie, since Ali’s records are released on his own label, I Love Records.
May I present you with the mighty catchy Rock N Roll Control.
But don’t think you’ve got Ali Love tagged just by that. You might want to listen to this too, where he gets all nostalgic the postmodern-folk way:
To listen to more, go to Ali’s MySpace page.
*I used a new file host here, mooloader. If you have any problems let me know
Triosk - the cereal of the future
Triosk are three guys from Australia with a taste for sounds derivative of jazz, but with a more compound style attached. Don’t get me wrong, this music might seem layered to the point of all absurdity at times, but it simply takes the beauty of jazz - improvization (they do improvise during their live sets) and an array of electronic artillery to craft waves of floaty+crackly music. Like a bowl of milk and cereal.
Triosk have been around since 2001 and sound like they know what they’re doing but they’re still fooling around: like on 20,000 Dollar Handshake there’s a fidgety piano in the background that has no logical reason for being there in light of the totally different beat from the rhythm section..
Also, in jazz as you might know, you basically play the piano backwards compared to classical music - you have to re-hash what you think you know about making the piano talk. Triosk have that backwards approach down, and I can’t figure what exactly sets the ambiance in my favourite track - Lost Broadcast, they have so many things going at once. That specific track suffers (pretty well I might add) from the ‘is it a bird is it a plane” syndrome. Chaos that isn’t random, that might strike you as oh-so Prefuse 73.
Intensives Leben certainly had that effect on me, but no one song determines the big picture of what Triosk sound like. You have to check them out for yourselves. Oh and another thing I love - no vocals, a sign of a superior breed of noise.
It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day: anyone feeling Shadow?
First of all, props to Jeej, he’ll be doing a *comprehensive* review (if i know him well) so watch out!
DJ Shadow has by all accounts (mine too) pulled a (very twisted) Madonna on us and he’s presenting us with the likes of this:
DJ Shadow - Keep ‘Em Close (featuring Nump) mp3
First time I listened, I practically forced myself into an aural straight-jacket, to listen to the whole of The Outsider and not skip any possible goodness. Maybe almost no track is what I expected, but I’ll still search for the details. The spirit of the tracks that Shadow concocts so well.
My feelings about this album started to change the second time I listened, by the third I felt like a banana had been squashed on my brain. Of course by then I was skipping the unadulterated hyphy mess. It might be a movement, it might have an agenda, it might speak to Josh but it doesn’t to me. Now, I don’t believe he totally wanted to alienate his older fans because half the album cavorts with his former spacey self. See, that’s the problem with hyphy. I like music that gives me space to move a thought, not make me feel like I’ve reached an epileptic state of zggrz and crnnnks and messy keyboards. What’s to feel from all those?
Re-inventing yourself isn’t always good. An axiom as demonstrated hitherto by Josh Davis aka DJ Shadow.
I assume there’s something very private on this LP. Some of the lyrics and the spoken-word ritual (that Shadow preserves intact) say just that. There’s social inadequecies that Shadow cares about - how the Katrina victims were treated. There’s also more than meets the ear. This isn’t a bad album as ideology, but the bottom line is I’m not left with a strong feeling about it, and my gut tells me there’s something wrong. It’s not lack of cohesion, no- because cohesion is more than just a flow between the last and first seconds of two consecutive tracks.
The heavier drum-guitar combo on Artifact sound like it’s been sampled off Metallica’s St. Anger. Midway through the song, the drums prevail.. but then the flow gets disrupted once more. This track encapsulates what the whole album is. Pretty much a dichotomy. A crossroad that keeps multiplying upon itself, and you’re left with a question mark hanging above your head like the sword of fucking Damocles. Josh Davis is no fool, he’s doing this on purpose. But why?! Why do you get Erase You afterwards - it’s not a masterpiece but it does take you to another level compared to the rest.
DJ Shadow - Erase You featuring Chris Martin James mp3
All in all, this is just first impressions.. I still have my respect intact for Shadow. I think.
Original image by hinchcliff
Shake your love on this: J Davey baby
The possibilites were not endless two days ago. Today they stop at 4, which is good for me right now. Four’s a good number in the music world for up-and-comping artists. Less than four cuts is too little showcasing, more is too much for a free ride.
I was surprised to hear good music from unreliable intentions the other day. And I was prepared to hunt it down. However Filip came to the rescue, ripping and rolling along the way. Look, J Davey mp3s:
J Davey - Dirty Love mp3
(erm, you don’t have to ask me why they’re 96kbits/sec, do you..)
J Davey are Jack Davey (that’s the chick) and Brook D’Leau, they make music to do your head in as you try to label it. Influences are so wide as to include new wave and rock, jazz fusion and hip hop. Jack’s voice is an emphatic underscore roar - while it has been compared to the likes of Erykah Badu, I find Jack to grip less tightly to the strength of her voice and thus not superimpose herself over the music itself. I love Erykah, but she’s more traditional in her approach to soul so the comparison is probably not valid anyway.
There is no J Davey song that isn’t danceable. While indie rock has let me down this summer, too few choices for sunshine-chasing mornings there, J Davey is escapism for the night.
Five years in the making, they’re about to break loose.
Link Complication
Fallen in love this week with perpetrators of the J Davey kind. Can’t find the album here in Bucharest, don’t have a credit card to PayPal myself through ebay, but wherever it is I’ll hunt it down. Meanwhile soul-electro-clashsters do have a myspace (a tab is permanently open in my browser - the J Davey tab as it’s going down for posterity) and a site all of their own where you can stream music. Unfortunately no downloads. If you don’t have time for this you should quit your job. Pretty mesmerizing stuff here, but I suppose it’s more chick-oriented.
Next up is that young gun that requires a deluge of clever epithets to properly state what he’s about in case you haven’t heard of him yet. Jamie T, this modern-age Socrates-slash-Petronius but with a bass guitar to prod at, I say, Jamie T is material for BBC Collective’s feature this issue. You can stream live footage of Jamie, and watch an interview. The album’s getting done, but after all the tracks are done there’s nasty marketing issues to think of; however I trust Virgin Music know when to milk the cow.
I’m very glad I received some good shit in the mail, finally, so here it is: a remix by Jim Noir for Sebastien Tellier’s La Ritournelle. It strikes me as a dance track with feeling. I can already picture the masses after an anthem, wondering what moves to pull on this one. A bit of drum and bass, a bit of strings and you’ve scored the sun rising while you’re sipping on that last cocktail or a strong cuppa green tea (Coffee is so last season). As for Tellier, his first recording ever, Fantino, can be found on the soundtrack to Lost In Translation by Sofia Coppola. As you do.
Sebastien Tellier - La ritournelle (Jim Noir Mix) mp3
Here’s the dude’s myspace.
I’m still in my Poland retrospective phase, here are some pics from the Open’er Festival in Gdynia.
Ginger pieces for my Little Red Riding Hoods
I’m out until the 12th or the 13th, depending when or if I choose to come back from Open’er. But before I go, here’s some of my favourite music to smoke, eat, shower, walk, imagine driving, drink a nice bevvie to, this darkening side of 2006.
Love Is All - Make Out Fall Out Make Up mp3
Nouvelle Vague - Ever Fallen In Love mp3
Larrikin Love - Downing St. Kindling mp3 (6 Music - BBC Session)
The Kooks - She Moves In Her Own Way mp3
Conrad Newholmes - Noonday night mp3
Beirut - Rhineland (Heartland) mp3
The Radio Dept. - Why Won’t You Talk About It mp3 (via Labrador)
Sunset Rubdown - A Day In The Graveyard mp3
Herbert - Something Isn’t Right mp3
and a remix - Wolfmother - Woman (MSTRKRFT remix) m4a
Sigur Ros you’ll just have to buy. Or take a look here.
Right, now go and check out some of my fave blogs on the Further music page. Although some of them might be on hiatus too, they’re all worth a try, especially bigstereo. My main inspiration, although it might not look it.
Oh and wolf! Don’t let’s be snarky.
C-Mon and Kypski
Who are these crazy mothafuckers? If you like your DJ Shadow Private Press-era, C-Mon&Kypski are all that and bonus funk factor.
A couple of mixtapes are up on their site for download.
Here’s their blog. Carhartt’s their sponsor, so they are indeed cool.
Until I get their CD, could someone point me out an educational-purposes mp3, hey? 
Oh but I guess you’ve heard this before
The Romanian musical landscape moves around the principle of concentric circles. The robustly-diametered outward circles are the masses listening to a strange breed of pop culture and gypsy music that I will not post. Then there's the mediocre brand of pop, substandard and all. The more you get to the center of the circles, to that one throbbing disc of lava that I like to pop my toe in, you either burn your skin or start dancing (after the convulsive twitching). Yes, bingo, adapting is the word. Again, I hope you haven't gone away. If you're still here…
Exhibit A. proto pop
Here we have a circa 1980s pop tune from a communist-era teeny bopper flick, "Liceenii"(The Graduates). Not as scary as it sounds, the film is a classic and so is this kitschy-catchy electro-pop-for-your-nan song. I still dig it.
Exhibit B. The Take-A-Stab at Indie Rock
Moving on to latter days in rebeldom, here's a band called OCS [formerly Omul cu Sobolani (The Man With The Rats), inspired by Steinbeck's Of Men and Mice]. This song expresses the struggles of having two emptied beers before you and the wish to exchange them with a new foamy pint.
OCS - 2oua beri goale (two empty bottles) mp3
You can buy OCSTV (concept album, la-di-dah) here.
Exhibit C. The Underlying Electro protest
Sometimes I find myself surprised by what my fellow-countrymen conjure up. There's an astute affinity and a growing understand of electronic music here in Romania. I know, shocking. The thing is, this goes beyond that. This, in my book, is genius. This is music for partying, sleeping, being disheveled, being a butterfly, looking at the sky. You have to download this next song. Just trust me. If you hate it, say so. (But you won't). Have you ever discovered music you just wish everyone would love? This is my pet-hype for today. Shukar Collective. Shukar is the gypsies' (Tamango, Napoleon and Clasic sing on this record) clan.
Shukar Collective - Malademna mp3 ESSENTIAL
Here's the iTunes link for the LP Urban Gypsy.
Exhibits D & E (for lack of time)
Folksy: A fable with vivid voice makeovers. Ada Milea - Greierele si Furnica (The Cricket and The Ant) mp3
Electronic: And finally. Music for art's sake with no hidden agenda. Șuie Paparude - Pentru inimi mp3
Du must lernen. Every day in every way.
