eashfa
Head is alive. Hence the sound of music.Archive for indie
Rough rocks - Moon Blazers
A featurette - because I get ADD too.
Here are Moon Blazers from California. And of course, Saturday morning is for cartoons. A teacher becomes a valid preacher after you get your BA (but like Murs spurs, We all got a place, and we all got a purpose, Now I’m not taking y’all to sunday service). Lyrically challenging your milk-and-cereal habits, these guys have a purpose. I assume it isn’t only to get signed, but also to convey what they’ve been through to young adults. Might be a step up for you to give them a listen.
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 »
RJD2 goes all Neoplatonist
On the music liberation front, RJD2 is swinging those freedom-fightin’ bazookas like no other. He’s inviting you, and you and you to premix audio from his upcoming release, The Third Hand (March 6th). The bits of sound you get are stripped of production, to help fans return to the innocence and wonder of an uncluttered mind ready to be creative on its own terms.
when you do these remix things, you also are working with the original song in the back of your head. cause youve already heard the song. the only way around this would be if the song hadnt been released yet…..
so this was the thought process i was going through, and realized….well, my records not out yet, and ive got a few songs that are already 90% broken down to hits/stabs. it seemed like a good opportunity to see what happens when you give people access to the sounds that made up a song, BEFORE they every heard the song. so, here it is. there’s another 6 or 7 weeks before the record is released. go nuts. make whatever you want with it.
Here’s the IMEEM community. I already have aaaah! couple of favourite premixes.
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
Aaron Schroeder - So you wanna be a bard?
The only reason I haven’t listened to all of Aaron Schroeder’s LP, Southern Heart in Western Skin, is because I knew it would take too long for it to arrive here in Romania, and then all my original epiphanies while hearing this kid out would have faded, as well as his status on my to-blog list (quite a bulging one at that).
Aaron Schroeder’s debut LP is not what I usually go for. It’s got all the makings of something I would steer clear of really. Folk, Americana (is there a scarier word in my musical vocabulary?). But a true talent mixes up influences into something unrecognizable. Read the rest of this entry »
Jamie to the T
UPDATE: if you’re looking for the Sheila lyrics, skedaddle on over here
I’m not one that generally listens to a full LP these days - like I can’t concentrate on films or books.
I’m on an ADD wave
Luckily Jamie T has EPs out. That sound like inebriated swee peas. Notoriously hard to come by, almost as soon as they were released they vanished into thin 7-inch air. It’s precisely this detail that made me gallop the internets like mad until a nice last.fm jamie fan clued me in. This made my day
Jamie T was a fortuitous discovery that makes me want to do things. I cannot keep still when I listen to this dude. Too much flow baby! A one-man Arctic Monkeys is what he’s been described as - I’m going to disagree, you know me. There’s just so much more to Jamie T. Playing with samples has been a tweak exploited mainly by leftfield electronica, from the coherent to the unintelligible, but I’ve never heard them dipped into indie rock- which by the way is not quite what he calls himself. He’s a player of bass guitar, and an adept of reggae, punk and rap.
Jamie T collages his visual art into sounds, in ways I’ve never heard before. Granted, alcohol-induced inspired moments will happen. But these songs aren’t flukes. Some artists take a long time to find their sound, Jamie just slides into his aural state with utter ease. This might be an acute, long process for the bloke - point being, it never feels like it.
devotchka
DeVotchKa are slowly curing my current beirut obsession. Last week, I went to their site to do some info-seeking - something I don't usually care for - found basically nothing, but still let it rest as a tab on my browser because of the two songs I found absolutely irresistible. Their music is the kind that doesn't get stale, that doesn't alienate people who aren't used to it, and most importantly it isn't tiring although it has an intellectual streak… Like I might have suggested, I go for music that haunts me and don't regularly wait for growers to grow their wings. It's like embezzling your own sense of style so why?! I act on instinct.
Devotchka means young girl in Russian, a reference which instantly gives you an idea of what the band might sound like, albeit incomplete. When there are so many instruments that come together, it might sound like a circus foyer act (I'm not sure a circus has a foyer by the way): violin, sousaphone, trumpet, banjo, bass mandolin (and it goes on); their live show actually features circus acts from time to time - acrobatics, girls hanging from ceilings etc. "Eastern bloc indie rock band" is what they call their style, and I can only dream of one day seeing them in the flesh and bouzouki.
Devotchka - El Zopilote Mojado (Curse Your Little Heart EP)
Devotchka - Curse Your Little Heart (Curse Your Little Heart EP)
Devotchka - How It Ends
Ramona Córdova: twee-gypsy
Not that that's how he'd describe himself.
Ramona is Ramón Córdova's (pronounced Cordoba) stage name and a mighty serene stage he pontificates (it's actually his grandmother's name). An eleven track musical amusement - that's his description of The Boy Who Floated Freely. The boy named Giver 
finds himself on a deserted island that at least has a gypsy bar. They welcome the stranded being, and here's his reply:
Ramona Córdova - Giver's Reply mp3 (recommended, totally)
