97

WIXIW
Liars (2012)

Download it here

96 - BLACK HAIR CITY

I am proud to announce the launch of BLACK HAIR CITY !
A collective of artists founded by Giulia Essyad, Francisco Soares, Lauren Kagny & myself
Featuring art of all kinds, including music from Motile and my own Alien Princess project

Please join us & support!
http://www.facebook.com/BLACKHAIRCITY

Website coming soon!

95

"Lots," Dan Deacon
From his new album America out this August

94

"Tearz for Animals," CocoRosie

93

Biophilia Remix Series: Part 2
Bjork, Death Grips (2012)

Download it here

92

Animal Collective announced today a 7" featuring two new songs, "Honeycomb" and "Gotham," out June 26
Stream both songs below




Download them here

91

CocoRosie's new single "We Are On Fire" is streaming today, ahead of its physical release next month!

90

By liking their Facebook page, you can hear the first single "No. 1 Against the Rush" from Liars' new album WIXIW

Pitchfork has also posted a short interview with Angus Andrew, where he talks about the new direction the band has taken this go around... very exciting

89

Great new track from Jai Paul, "Jasmine"

88

Sigur Rós will release a new album,  Valtari, on May 28
Listen to "Ekki Múkk

" below

Sigur Rós - Ekki múkk from Sigur Rós on Vimeo.

87

Another great cut from Light Asylum's debut album (out May 1!) titled "IPC"

86

Bloom
Beach House (2012)

DISCLAIMER Clearly the MP3s were cut unevenly, a product of the actual ripping process that got us this leak. "The Hours," for example, ends prematurely. Bloom is released May 15, look forward to it's physical copies. I offer this rip as something to tide the wait.

Download it here

85

Our first taste of new music from Beach House The song is called "Myth" from their forthcoming album Bloom

84

Check out a new collaboration from Burial and Four Tet, "Nova"

83 - Best of 2011, Albums

So 2 months into 2012, maybe it's time to share with you my favorite albums of 2011

1. Biophilia, Bjork
2. Replica, Oneohtrix Point Never
3. Street Halo EP, Burial
4. Kaputt, Destroyer
5. Bon Iver, Bon Iver, Bon Iver
6. Let England Shake, PJ Harvey
7. Far Side Virtual, James Ferraro
8. Director's Cut / 50 Words for Snow, Kate Bush
9. The King of Limbs, Radiohead
10. Eye Contact, Gang Gang Dance
11. Hubble Drums, Hubble
12. Alien Observer, Grouper

W, Planning to Rock
Regifted Light, Baby Dee
We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves
Channel Pressure, Ford & Lopatin
Demolished Thoughts, Thurston Moore
On the Water, Future Islands
Ravedeath, 1972, Tim Hecker
Chopped & Screwed, Micachu & the Shapes
Hour Logic, Laurel Halo


I have written some excerpts on certain albums and tracks, and will update this post as I see fit
To start, I'd like to share with you a piece about Grouper's "Alien Observer," written by my friend Francisco (aka Motile), and some thoughts on Hubble's LP Hubble Drums

"Alien Observer," Alien Observer, Grouper
by Motile

The audience of “Sleep”, Liz Harrisʼ new transdisciplinary piece, is asked to lie down in
large pillows upon entering the performance space. An outer circle made out of
projection screens will provide faded, distorted and colorless images. Dozens of
walkmans form the inner circle, hours of field recordings conjuring up all the spatial
memories hidden in Grouperʼs catalogue. The goal is to induce a suspension, a
prolonged stay in the edge of falling asleep.

The experience doesnʼt introduce a whole new aspect to Grouperʼs output as much as it
makes it less solitary. That the same relief can be obtained in a room full of strangers
might confirm the music as dealing with a universal theme among its listeners –
countless definitions have been uttered by the press in the past few years to describe it,
from ʻlongingʼ to ʻnostalgiaʼ, or the ʻdrugged-out hazeʼ cliché. 

Alien Observer, the first single from this yearʼs double LP A|A, could easily be thrown
into one of these categories, insinuating an unchallenging continuity from the Dragging a
Dead Deer Up a Hill LP (2008). Which, quite frankly, would be the predictable attitude
coming out of the lo-fi skepticism (which can be as ridiculous as the overexcitement over
the genre). Yet the aesthetic parameters that tie her discography together demand this
progression. The circularity between all the elements in “Sleep” coincides with the
movements of her music, sprouting always from the break between the conscious and
the subconscious, new fragments of that void added with each new release.
The specific fragments that concern Alien Observer are a lyrical shift and the
effectiveness of the melody. Past lyrics dealt mostly with a private, intimate space where
childhoodʼs lost dreams come to haunt present situations, both frightening and
melancholic. That closed space refers now to the terrestrial landscape, and itʼs
inescapability becomes the main concern. The hopeless subject is unable to exit the
sphere of itʼs own limits, left with undying memories that she cannot recreate.
Once again, a boundary is imposed between memory and reality, both undeniable and
often undesirable. Itʼs precisely the inability to assume a concrete line of action that
justifies Grouperʼs lo-fi aesthetics – in exploring indecision, the music loses the outlines,
it hovers, suggests through the reverb layers, whispers melodies of a new found
familiarity.

Distrust in the photographic image has led to distrust on perception in general. The
barriers imposed by specific modes of perception wonʼt ever allow a true knowledge, as
it will always be incomplete, subtracted. The amount of fascinating visual artists
distorting images and structures to express the impossibility of a clear and noise-free
message should be taken into consideration when pushing Grouperʼs music to the 
amalgam of inconsequential and trendy bedroom music of the past few years. Her use of
reverb and delay remains one of the most coherent projects revealing this impossibility.
As it sets ground, nothing but the vocal harmonies remain, suspended in the last second
before reality captivates it all back into consciousness. The melodic traces becoming the
hymn for a possible breach, one last resource for the ever-so-hoped fresh starts, no
longer shaped by the insistence of memories. You play it again and itʼs now a memory
itself, a circle, a perfect ever fading object.

Hubble Drums, Hubble

Traveling through space, we encounter a spiral galaxy. M81, similar to our own Milky Way, is one of the brightest galaxies that can be seen from Earth. Its spiral arms wind all the way down into the nucleus and are made up of young, bluish, hot stars formed in the past few million years, while the central bulge contains older, redder stars. Zooming directly into this red center, we wind up in the midst of the glowing gas ejected by a dying Sun-like star called a planetary nebula. We continue to explore other planetary nebula forms with amazing and confounding shapes. They dance for us, and morph into one another, entrancing and beautiful, inviting reflection on our place in the Universe, tenuous as it is. At the musical, physical, and emotional climax, we confront a light echo, the expanding illumination of a dusty cloud around a star, pulsating along with the music, echoing the grand celestial end, but also foreshadowing an inevitable and shattering re-birth.  -Ben Greenberg on his video collaboration with NASA, "Hubble's Hubble"

Been Greenberg's way with guitar is an incredible thing- asymmetrical riffs tightly coiled around each other, bouncing around your brain in sharp, jagged waves- it sounds impossible at times, and there really isn't anything else quite like it. This great talent brought New Slaves, his most recent (and best) album with the incomparable Zs, a nuclear shell of dizzying dissonance and rhythm: his melodic lines, if you can even call them so, are so inconceivable upon first listen that it's hard to keep a straight train of thought. Your mind, your sentences run on. The sounds of cosmic explosions.

With his Hubble project, though, it's as if he's been able to shrink down to the subatomic plane, trace the paths of quarks darting around, and artfully transcribe them to sound. While New Slaves sounds decidedly macro, Hubble Drums sounds unquestionably micro. Each song is structured around a number of repeating cells- riffs as tightly compacted as they can possibly be, many of them barely one second long- that travel great distances by stretching, evenly and unevenly, across space. Each of these small cell-sets of notes are then cycled into larger clusters that also continuously replicate themselves, often with beautiful, delicate variation.

Earlier this year, as part of a grant collaboration with NASA, "Hubble's Hubble" was commissioned to soundtrack continuous images from the actual Hubble Telescope. The complexity of these compositions sets a wonderful tone for stargazing deep into the heart of a distant galaxy, and this audio/visual pairing is one of my favorites this year. For Greenberg, however, this certainly isn't just documentary music: "I’m looking for a cathartic relationship with energetic release in performance. Just getting it out, making myself sweat as much as I can." The somersaults of "Hubble's Hubble," the nervous tension opening "Glass Napkin," and that exhilarating first stomp of a far-off drum midway through "Nude Ghost" are moments as physically arresting as they are mentally. I recently saw Hubble perform a fantastic set in Boston, where the audience sat in a circle at the center of four large speakers positioned in each corner of the room, allowing even the tiniest strike of a string to spin orbits at blistering speeds around your head. It was the perfect setting for Hubble's music- each piece brought crisply into the physical world, given the ability to travel the space on their own. Even without the quadrophonic live setup, Hubble Drums's elegant exploration of physical space (and outer space!) grabbed a great deal of my attention this year- please give it a listen!

 

82

Nice to see Ms. Badu collaborating quite a bit as of late
This time she's featured on Damon Albarn/Flea/Tony Allen's debut album as Rocket Juice and the Moon

Pitchfork has a stream up now

81

Visions
Grimes (2012)

01. Infinite ♡ Without Fulfillment
02. Genesis
03. Oblivion
04. Eight
05. Circumambient
06. Vowels = Space and Time
07. Visiting Statue
08. Be A Body
09. Colour of Moonlight (Antiochus) [feat. Doldrums]
10. Symphonia IX (My Wait Is U)
11. Nightmusic [feat. Majical Cloudz]
12. Skin
13. Know The Way (Outro)

Download it here

80

Download a recording of Bjork's February 12 Biophilia concert at the New York Hall of Science for free over at NYC Taper

01 [intro]
02 Thunderbolt
03 Moon
04 Crystalline
05 Hollow
06 Dark Matter
07 Mouth’s Cradle
08 You’ve Been Flirting Again
09 Isobel
10 Virus
11 Generous Palmstroke
12 Sacrifice
13 Pagan Poetry
14 Mutual Core
15 Cosmogony
16 Solstice
17 [encore break]
18 Nattura
19 Declare Independence

79

The always-fierce Erykah Badu played Letterman with Mark Ronson last night, check out their performance of “A La Modeliste" below

78

Light Asylum have finally announced their debut LP, titled Light Asylum
I've been lucky enough to see the band perform a couple of times, and trust me, this is something you should be excited for

The first single from the album, "Shallow Tears," is streaming now, along with b-side "Genesis"
Check them out below, with the tracklist of the album

Light Asylum is out May 1

01 “Hour Fortress”
02 “Pope Will Roll”
03 “IPC”
04 “Heart of Dust”
05 “Sins of the Flesh”
06 “Angel Tongue”
07 “Shallow Tears”
08 “At Will”
09 “End of Days”
10 “A Certain Person”






If you haven't heard of the band, do check out their stupendous In Tension EP

77 - Street Halo EP / Kindred EP, Burial

Friends,

I would like to say something about this release, in particular the Kindred EP (as Street Halo was released last year)

I went to listen- outside, smoking in complete darkness- and I started dancing, honestly moved beyond words
I'm really speechless about it, I don't know how to really phrase what I want to say about this record. I do hope any who read this enjoy it as much as I have (and will, from now on)

Kindred is among the most staggering pieces of music to have ever been made; I am so grateful to have been around on Earth at the time to witness this achievement of Burial's
I am proud to preserve it digitally here on the internet, for the rest of our computer age

"My tunes are a bit rubbish and messy but it's all I know."1

Burial's discography is still small, having only released two albums. His second, Untrue (the masterpiece to which this quote refers), arrived five years ago
He's been working for a while

"One day I want to make a tune people can have a dance to" 2

And here we are in 2012, listening to what came next. Here is the evolution of a hallowed and now-historic trademark sound, his first rebirth- and fuck, put simply, these "tunes" are fucking unreal. Unreal. There are infinite numbers of twists, shocks, moments of unparalleled beauty and awe. They very well may move you to tears. It's got the best dance beats ever produced, and a bass presence like nothing before it (not even Untrue!)

Burial is the most singular electronic artist of all time. I'm 20 years old and I've watched the world's first great producer-artist come into being, and on February 10, 2012, I got to listen to one of my favorite albums ever made for the first time

Really really happy about it
Michael



Street Halo EP / Kindred EP
Burial (2012)

Street Halo EP

1. Street Halo
2. NYC
3. Stolen Dog

Kindred EP

1. Kindred
2. Loner
3. Ashtray Wasp

Download it here (!!!!)

LISTEN PROPERLY, BASS-HEAVY SURROUND HEADPHONES, LOUD SPEAKERS ONLY, THIS IS BURIAL, DO NOT DISGRACE HIM WITH YOUR SHIT EARBUDS AND LAPTOP SPEAKERS
& if you download, you better fucking buy it when it's released in your country!



1, 2 Burial, speaking with Mark Fisher, published in 2007 by The Wire, which is a must read if you haven't already

76

75

Put Your Back N 2 It
Perfume Genius (2012)

Download it here

74

Always (156kbps rip)
Xiu Xiu (2012) 

I'm sure, like me, you can't wait for this one
Will post a full-quality rip when I can find one, but until then...
Download it here

73

Great new video for "Hood" from Perfume Genius's new album, Put Your Back N 2 It
 

72

Xiu Xiu are releasing a new album, Always, on February 27th!
The first single, "Hi," is streaming right now. I've also got the track list and a video of the band performing "Black Drum Machine" in 2010 below

01. Hi
02. Joey's Song
03. Beauty Towne
04. Honey-Suckle
05. I Luv Abortion
06. The Oldness
07. Chimney's Afire (Mickensian Suicide)
08. Gul Mudin
09. Born to Suffer
10. Factory Girl
11. Smear the Queen
12. Black Drum Machine


Hi by Xiu Xiu

71

2 0 1 0

01. Grey Oceans, CocoRosie
02. Have One On Me, Joanna Newsom
03. In Evening Air, Future Islands
04. New Slaves, Zs
05. Swanlights, Antony & the Johnsons
06. Heartland, Owen Pallett
07. Returnal, Oneohtrix Point Never
08. A Book of Songs for Anne Marie (2010), Baby Dee
09. Crystal Castles (2010), Crystal Castles
10. Body Talk, Robyn
11. Tomorrow, In a Year, The Knife
12. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye West
13. Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty, Big Boi
14. Teen Dream, Beach House
15. New Amerykah Pt. 2: Return of the Ankh, Erykah Badu
16. Dear God, I Hate Myself, Xiu Xiu
17. Love Remains, How to Dress Well
18. Learning, Perfume Genius
19. The Suburbs, Arcade Fire
20. The Age of Adz, Sufjan Stevens
21. Sister Kinderhook, Rasputina
22. Treats, Sleigh Bells
23. Forgiveness Rock Record, Broken Social Scene
24. Before Today, Ariel Pink's haunted Graffiti
25. Halcyon Digest, Deerhunter
26. Marnie Stern, Marnie Stern
27. Down There, Avey Tare
28. Genderful, Little Annie & Paul Wallfisch
29. Shadow Temple, Prince Rama
30. My World 2.0, Justin Bieber
31. last days of summer, White Denim
32. Everything In Between, No Age
33. Black Noise, Pantha du Prince
34. Homeland, Laurie Anderson
35. Swim, Caribou

70

Hear a wonderful cover of New Order's "Leave Me Alone" by Destroyer
Stream it over at Stereogum