All kinds of gems in our June round-up of new music! We still can’t get enough of Gang Gang Dance‘s Eye Contact which is guaranteed to be required space station listening in the New Age. Also, new stuff from old favorites like Thurston Moore, the Bush Tetras and Richard Youngs, as well as fresh doughnuts from The Deeep, Whirl, Alan Watts, U.S. Girls and so much more! Come over and play some records…iTunes, Podcast.com, and Podcast Alley. Or, check us out on Soundcloud! CONTINUE READING
Gang Gang Dance‘s newest LP, Eye Contact, out now on the 4AD label, is guaranteed to make many Best Of lists in 2011, and it stands as their highest accomplishment yet, in a ten year career of ascending highs! Since their earliest days with The Social Registry label, and on albums like Revival of the Shitist and God’s Money, the band has walked the fine line between form and chaos while weaving exotic tapestries of Silk Route beats and synth upon which Lizzie Bougatsos can project her extraordinary vocal channelings. Eye Contact was produced and engineered by Chris Coady (Beach House, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio) who brings a wide-eyed clarity to GGD’s strange inter-dimensional wanderings, and the effect is like finally opening your eyes on Pandora after light years of travel to the distant Alpha Centauri. “Glass Jar”, the eleven minute opener to Eye Contact, is far out of this world and total future age listening! According to the band the song is about reincarnation, and was written for bandmate and close friend Nathan Maddox, who died in 2002 after being struck by lightning while watching a storm on a Manhattan rooftop. Transmigrate!
MP3: Gang Gang Dance “Glass Jar” (4AD)
BUY CD: AMAZON BUY MP3: 
BUY VINYL: INSOUND
Thurston Moore continues to push his musical interests in new directions, and on his most recent and third solo album, Demolished Thoughts, the elder statesmen of American post-punk goes acoustic and choral. Moore has assembled an outstanding band with a long pedigree in experimental music for this album with Samara Lubelski on violin, Mary Lattimore on harp, Joey Waronker on drums, and Beck producing these lush minor-key ballads. While appreciating Moore’s past solo efforts his first, Psychic Hearts, felt like a very personal collection of songs that hadn’t quite made it onto Sonic Youth albums, Trees Outside the Academy had Moore playing with Samara Lubelski and pushing to break from his plugged-in approach into something acoustic, Demolished Thoughts finds Moore fully unplugged and rocking these choral ballads to great affect. Check out how the band wraps up the song “Circulation” using what has become Sonic Youth’s trademark sonic deconstruction to finish a song, but this time transposing it into a swirl of violin, harp, acoustic guitar and percussion until it seems to break free into the morning light…
MP3: Thurston Moore “Circulation” (Matador)
BUY CD: AMAZON BUY MP3: BUY VINYL: INSOUND
Toronto’s The Deeep recently added the track “Meadow Dust (Long Gone Pitch Shifts)”, as well as “Meadow Dust (Another Hit From the Skullbong Re-Pack)”, to their Soundcloud page, and they are required 4:20 listening! Last year the duo put out the LP Life Light on Not Not Fun Records, and on it Isla Craig’s night-air vocals soared around Wolfgang Nessel’s sequencer and beat work for six tracks of narcotic dub. While both takes on “Meadow Dust” are euphoria inducing “Long Gone Pitch Shifts” bounces around on a cough syrupy high while “Another Hit from The Skullbong Re-Pack” aims you straight thru your third eye for some serious inner gazing.
MP3: The Deeep “Meadow Dust (Long Gone Pitch Shifts)”
MP3: The Deeep “Meadow Dust (Another Hit from The Skullbong Re-Pack)”
Gorgeous shoegazing abounds on Whirl‘s new Distressor EP. While this six piece from San Francisco borrows it’s sound from My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive etc., the sound still comes on so fresh and pure, like on this track “Leave” where Byanca Munoz and Loren Rivera’s gauzy and beautiful vocals break through like a cold blast of alpine air. So, fucking nice! Distressor was previously only available as a super-limited, hand-out at the bands shows. Now you can cope this deliciousness on high quality 12″ vinyl from independent UK label The Sounds of Sweet Nothing!
MP3: Whirl “Leave”
BUY DOWNLOAD: AMAZON BUY MP3:
ROIR is reissuing, on 7″ colored vinyl, two seminal tracks from classic New York, No Wave outfit Bush Tetras. While the band was a staple on the Manhattan club scene in the early eighties, this female led quartet never achieved mainstream success. Lead guitarist Pat Place had been one of the founding members of The Contortions, and together with Cynthia Sley, who provided vocals, the two created a stark and paranoid vision of consumer culture inside the belly of the beast. Too many creeps!
MP3: Bush Tetras “Too Many Records”(ROIR)
BUY CD: AMAZON BUY VINYL: INSOUND
Samiyam continues to cook up the platinum goodness on the Sam Baker’s Album, putting candy sprinkles on the deep funk he finds in his “crate of $1bin soul records”. Samiyam is the instrumental hip hop producer Sam Baker who hails from Anne Arbor, MI, and who collaborates with experimental producer Flying Lotus in the band FLYamSAM. Known for his video game inspired 8-bit glitch hop beats, Baker keeps the cartoon to the minimal mining head-scratching beats that always seem to move the feet forward, even while wandering on a track like “Where Am I”.
MP3: Samiyam “Where Am I”(Brainfeeder)
BUY CD: AMAZON BUY MP3:
This coming August U.S. Girls will release a new split 12″ with Toronto’s Slim Twig, the stage and screen persona of alt-artist Max Turnbull. On Siltbreeze releases like Introducing and Go Grey, U.S. Girls mastermind Meghan Remy has travelled an experimental road between far-out noise ambience and low-fi bedroom pop. On this newest track, “If These Walls Could Talk”, Remy has teamed up with Turnbull on production, which clears the air a bit, but still manages to turn the psych up to 11, creating a propulsive and rocking anthem around a dizzying chorus of her tranced-out vocal loops.
MP3: U.S. Girls “If These Walls Could Talk”(Palmist)
BUY VINYL: INSOUND
Mountains are the duo Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkamp, and they have an outstanding new release, Air Museum, out on Thrill Jockey. If you haven’t heard the band yet, where ya’ been? Their 2009 release for Thrill Jockey, Choral, sold through three LP pressings, and was one of the labels best selling albums. Since 2005 the band has blurred the line between acoustic, folk-instrumentation, and electronics, sonically bending analog and digital in most intriguing ways. Their newest record was mostly recorded in December 2010 and January 2011 at Telescope Recording in NY, and on it the band expands upon its technique eschewing home recording and the computer processed acoustics the duo had normally used. Instead, the band processed instruments like acoustic and electric guitar, cello, piano, bass, etc using analog techniques with pedals and modular synths. The result sounds electronic, but Anderegg and Holtkamp’s ability to get out of the way of things allows these flowing slabs of sculpted sounds to develop in the most organic ways. Mountains “Thousand Square” is like an ear in on deep glacial flows of data beneath the ever shifting facade of the dream spectacle!
MP3: Mountains “Thousand Square”(Thrill Jockey)
BUY CD: AMAZON BUY MP3: BUY VINYL: INSOUND
The ever-prolific British musician Richard Youngs will have a new solo album, Amplifying Host, out July 19th on Jagjaguwar. For nearly twenty- five years the multi-instrumental artist has defied expectation and classification, moving between forms, styles, and labels on a gigantic series of solo and collaborative projects. Youngs has collaborated with sonic luminaries like Jandek, Makoto Kawabata (Acid Mothers Temple), Matthew Bower (Skullflower, Sunroof!), Andrew Paine, and Simon Wickham-Smith, as well as playing with A Band. Moving between styles like folk, prog-rock, a capella and electronic with a sort of single-minded devotion to the process of creation, Youngs has always brought constant experimentation and the exploration of improvisational techniques to his music. If the track “Tesselations” off the yet to be released Amplifyning Host is any indication, Mr. Youngs is headed for beatification, creating work that shines with an almost religious beauty.
MP3: Richard Youngs “Tesselations”(Jagjaguwar)
ARTIST LINK: BUY VINYL: INSOUND
More great music to look forward to…Sun Araw‘s fifth LP, Ancient Romans, will be available on Sun Ark Records through Drag City, August 23rd. It will be released on CD as well as a 2xLP on white vinyl in a gatefold jacket with an accompanying art book! Sun Araw is the work of Cameron Stallones who began his career as a founding member of the experimental psychedelic rock collective Magic Lantern, but has gone onto making Sun Araw his principal work releasing 4 LPs, 3 EPs, and 5 cassettes since 2007. Exploring mind dripping and face melting realms of dub and psych using processed guitar and vocals on a track like “Crete”, Sun Araw opens a door to chthonic realms and chucks all kinds of psychedelic garbage into the hole to see just who might answer…
MP3: Sun Araw “Crete”(Sun Ark)
As confounding as their name, Tonstartssbandht‘s new 12″ LP on Artbus, Now I Am Become, delivers huge platefuls of WTF. Tonstartssbandht are Andy and Edwin White, two brothers from Orlando Florida whose experimental aesthetic have challenged and tantalized ears on a slew of releases for labels like Psychic Handshake, Black Cheeks, and Artbus. Moving between form and free-form, pop and noise, Tonstartssbandht love to take hairpin turns into left field mid-song, and this track “Orange Miss You”, off Now I Am Become, is no exception passing through narcotic realms before being delivered squarely in the middle of an Animal Collective song spinning at 44rpm.
MP3: Tonstartssbandht “Now I Am Become”(Artbus)
BUY CD: AMAZON BUY MP3:
Alan Watts debut Thank You, Spectral Void will soon appear as a limited addition cassette on House of Aragon, and you can currently stream the album from their Soundcloud page! Pulsating industrial drones of guitar and drum machine make glass filled beds of darkwave for the bands distant alien croonings. You can get high on this shit!
MP3: Alan Watts “Jukebox Dad”(House of Aragon)
