+++ I’m completely in love with “BTSTU”, a song by a British songwriter and record producer called Jai Paul (see picture). The song is a demo from 2007 and has gained a lot of attention after being played several times on the UK national radio in December. Someone even dedicated an animated video to the song a couple of weeks ago. Download it here (via aHeadwork):
+++ The Berlin based hypnotic psychedelic electronic showgaze band Kool Thing has recently released its first self-titled E.P. via Bandcamp and ITunes and I can assure you that it’s worth every single penny. Check out the site for their tour dates as well. Here’s the “The Sign”, the opener of the E.P.:
+++ Download a mixtape by SCAB and NYC based artist Michael Magnanright here +++
+++ “Fireworks” is a track of the upcoming self-titled album by Vianna based artist Wolfram and has been produced in collaboration with Hercules & Love Affair (whatever this means exactly). More about the album and the artist here. Here’s the song:
Trish Keenan, beloved singer of British electro-psychedelic-sci-fi pop band Broadcast, passed away on January 14 at the age of 42. Press reports cite the singer had been hospitalized for pneumonia for several weeks after being on tour in Australia last month.
Known for her dreamy, lush, and melancholic voice, Keenan has been compared to the likes of Vashti Bunyan and Dorothy Moskowitz of The United States of America.
Broadcast, originally based in Birmingham, England, released four albums beginning in 1995. Their last endeavor from 2009 was a collaboration with the Focus Group entitled Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age.
I have extremely fond memories of discovering their 2005 record “Tender Buttons” (albeit a few years after it was released), and spent much of the summer of 2007 biking through Berlin while listening to it on my ipod. A bad habit, yes, but an infectious album that is equal parts gritty, distorted, and elegant…seemingly perfect for Berlin by bike, and for conjuring up the ghost of Gertrude Stein whose novel, Tender Buttons, was published in 1914.
Keenan and Broadcast bassist James Cargill
A tremendous talent as heard in ‘Black Cat’ below:
Grant Worth is a New York based artist, who is not ony one of the guys responsible for DIS magazine’s soap opera “Hooper Place”, but also for two very nice (inofficial?) Chris Garneau videos and a lot of other great stuff that can be found on his website which is really worth checking out. Light Asylum are currently asking their fans on Facebook to spread the word that they need a manager as well as European booking agent.
Casey Spooner’s new video “Spanish Teenager” premiered last week on nowness.com, which I realize, in internet time, makes it SUCH OLD NEWS. However it’s directed by one of my favorite photographers, Luke Gilford, so I figured it deserved a mention anyway. It’s the first single from Spooner’s upcoming solo album Adult Contemporary, and while I find the song itself a little underwhelming, sort of like Tears for Fears light, I can fully see this one growing on me eventually. The video though is lovely and also pretty NSFW, as is the style (see also recent clips from The Flaming Lips, Klaxons and Girls.)
To get us ready for Wounded Rhymes, Swedish siren Lykke Li recently gave her new single, I Follow Rivers, the animated treatment. This probably isn’t the official video, but it’s still pretty awesome. Check it out :
The new Hercules and Love Affair album “Blue Songs” will be released in two weeks, and it’s really exciting to see how much attention it already got during the past few weeks. I met Andy Butler in December two interview him for a German gay magazin and weekly newspaper, to talk about him about the record and the team behind it. I was especially curious to see how much the many political implications of the project are actually intended. Here the full-length transkript of the intervew. Pictures by Lili Almog (F51) via The Fader.
CF: Just to get things clear here: What is Hercules And Love Affair right now? Who are the current band members?
AB: Right now it is Marc Pistel, who produced some of the record with me, Aerea Negrot, who is a Berlin-based singer from a label called bpitch control, Kim Ann Foxman, who is from the last Hercules record, and a young man named Shaun J. Wright. These are the people who contributed tons of time, energy, creativity, talent and love into this record.
So they’re not just collaborative partners.
They are. I have to except something about all this. It’s a hard lesson to learn, but you must let everyone go at some point in your life. And I recognize, Daniella (Aerea Negrot) already has a career and Shawn will become a star I think and Kim Ann as well – so only for now they’re helping me as the songwriter and producer realize my songs. And Mark already had this really lengthy amazing career doing music with bands like “Meat Beat Manifesto” and “Consolidated”. So they are collaborators but right now we are a family.
Do you feel comfortable with the fact that you are seen as the “speaker” of all of this – the guy who promotes it? I mean it’s always you who is mentioned first when someone writes an article about Hercules And Love Affair for example.
Alright kids, time to give you the first Music Ticker of 2011.
+++ Last night, D.I.Y blog Neon Waves posted the new single by Patrick Wolf. The City shows signs that Patrick Wolf is ready for happy times and new boys. We’ll see what happens when Lupercalia drops in May.
Shunda K of Yo Majesty released her first solo album The Most Wanted this week (although that’s using the term “solo” liberally, as she works with variety of different guest vocalists and producers, including Snax, Cindy Wonderful and Electrosexual). You can download several tracks for free at her SoundCloud, including the single “I’m da Best”, which I described in my proud magazine best-of-2010 mix as happy hardcore gospel hip-house, as well as the Outkast-inspired “My Light”:
In my recent interview with Shunda (read the full thing at expatriarch.com or listen to an excerpt in Expatriarch Radio #11), she confirmed that Yo Majesty is not completely defunct as previously reported, and that the group’s new incarnation will be releasing in the near future. She also gave a heads up on “Three-way Freeway”, a forthcoming track in collaboration with Peaches and the Superions, the new band from Fred Schneider of the B-52s. Group sex while driving? Can’t they keep it in their pants until they see a faded sign at the side of the road that says “15 miles to the…”?
Bibio is probably my favorite musician at the moment, and unlike some other artists on Warp records (I’m not going to name names) he seems to have no problem with actually releasing his music to the public on a regular basis. Furthermore, his prolific output has not come at the expense of quality control: In 2009 he released not one but three albums, all of them amazing. The new album Mind Bokeh sounds like an even further step away from the woozy guitar ambience of Fi (2005) and a continued exploration of the more overt beat and vocal oriented sound of 2009′s Ambivalence Avenue. The album isn’t out until March 28th in the US and April 4th in Europe & the rest of the world, but luckily Warp records have provided this sampler to enjoy in the meantime.
The winner of the 2010 Catch Fire music video award is Antony’s “Thank you for your love”, a clip based on Super 8 footage that the singer himself shot upon his arrival to New York City in the early Nineties. Congratulations! And thanks to all voters! Click here for the final results and watch the clip here.
For queers in Berlin 2011 starts with two new parties that will both take place for the first time this weekend. Camp!, which will take place at Festsaal Kreuzberg tomorrow, is a very pop culture oriented event with music by acts such as Schwefelgelb, Kissogram and Electrosexual, while GEGEN, which is organised by queer activist and theorist Warbear has a more radical and political attitude. It will take place on Saturday at M.I.K.Z. Club (Revaler Str.99, corner Modersohnbrücke). Here’s Warbear’s GEGEN manifesto he has written to explain the approach of the event. Below you also find a video teaser and a “sound manifesto”. For more details check out the party’s Facebook page.
☯ GEGEN MANIFESTO ☯
Against yourself. Around queer narratives.
“Gegen” is a complex word in German because it has two opposite meanings.
Historically speaking it means “against”, signifying all the counter cultural movements since the very beginning of youth cultures but if you apply the word to time, it means “around”. One meaning is closed, defined in terms of space. The other is open and undefined in terms of time. In the contemporary moment the idea of “enemy” – in which a thought and an action can be identifiable as “against” – is not there and is not clear anymore as power relationships changed through the development of post-modernism. And this gave space to markets to regenerate themselves through the queer-counter cultural movements by producing an oligopoly of empty events repeating themselves until their fast extinction and in the same time by crystallising the institutionalisation of big “queer meccas” which exercise more and more power on the scene. This process is verifiable in Berlin as the incubator of new world trends in the arts of entertainment.
