+++ Hercules And Love Affair‘s new album “Blue Songs” will be released in a couple of days. The band’s label Moshi Moshi has already made the full album available to stream on Soundcloud. More about the record in the interview with Andy Butler I published a couple of days ago +++

+++ 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):

Jai Paul – BTSTU

+++ 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 Magnan right 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:

Today Hercules and Love Affair‘s label Moshi Moshi Records has made their song „My House“ available as a free download in exchange for an email adress. The song has been published as a stream on the website of the NME (see below as well) on Monday and is definately one of the highlights of the new record “Blue Song”, which will be released on January. And of which I have a digital press copy now.
With the album H&LA move away from disco (although not leaving it behind) and find new influences in acid and other early techno + house tunes, as it can already be heard in the Butler/Foxman collaborations „Creature“ and „What You Need“. But there is also a slower part of the record, a kind of „experimental soft music“, as Butler called it in an interview with Pitchfork from April. Aside from Foxman Butler has also found a couple of new vocalists such as Aerea Negrot, a Berlin-based singer singer, producer and performer from Venezuela, who has already joined the band on their 2009 live tour (check out her last single “All I Want To To” released on bpitch control and watch this portrait by her label for more information), Shaun J Wright, a H&LA fan Butler has turned into a collaborater after seing him in the audience at a live show and Kele Okereke, who is the singer of “Step Up”, a song they have already performed together live in July as you can see in this Youtube video. One last information: “Blue Song” was co-produced by Austrian producer Patrick Pulsinger (at least back in April when Butler did the interview).
Keep posted for an interview with Andrew Butler I will post later this month. And here’s “My House” for all of you who haven’t heard it yet:

This is awesome.

You can stream “Creature” as well as the Foxman/Butler collaboration “What You Need” and remixes of the two tracks in last week’s Music Ticker.