Read & Listen

The Tough Alliance - Prison Break EP
[Sincerely Yours, 2009]

Eric Berglund and Henning Fürs have been silent for a long while, and here comes a little, but intense release, Prison Break EP. Six remixes - all of them highly addictive, in the Tough Alliance manner, with enhanced danceability. One of the tracks is a mashup of an old TTA “First Class Riot” with a newer (but not really new) “A Touch of Jules & Jim” by jj. The rest are a number of disruptive remixes of “Neo Violence” (who would have thought?) - by Laidback Luke, Shazam and Woolfy, “First Class Riot” remixed by El Guincho and “A New Chance” by Juan Maclean.

As a result, at some times, you get a dose of high-quality techno and/or house, and the next minute inject yourself with the purest TTA cocaine. All together is perfect for a party - to get your frozen blood flowing again in the middle of winter.

Read & Listen:
The Tough Alliance Myspace
Prison Break on Sincerely Yours
“A New Chance (The Juan Maclean Remix)” mp3

Today’s song of the day is the second single from the forthcoming Delphic album, Acolyte. The album is already hyped about to the extent of nearly getting in the 2010 tops. New New Order and comment like this… Anyway, the drive and the speed of the track are astonishing!

The video for the song was shot in Chernobyl.

Let’s do something real!

This Momentary by delphic

2009 in songs: those listened to more than others or loved deeper.

1. The Radio Dept. - David
2. The Crêpes – What Else?
3. Animal Collective - My Girls
4. Pallers - Humdrum
5. Metric - Sick Muse
6. Franz Ferdinand - No You Girls
7. The XX - Crystallised
8. Camera Obscura - French Navy
9. Burial & Four Tet - Moth
10. JJ - My Hopes and Dreams

Honorable mention:

Masha Qrella - Speak Low
Royksopp - The Girl and the Robot
Four Tet - Love Cry
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – 103
Sally Shapiro - Love In July

The top 10 albums of 2009 (subjectively) look like this:

1. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
2. Metric - Fantasies
3. Telefon Tel Aviv - Immolate Yourself
4. Royksopp - Junior
5. Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
6. Burial & Four Tet - Moth/Wolf Cub (not really an album, but exceptional)
7. Beak> - Beak>
8. The XX - The XX
9. Franz Ferdinand - Tonight
10. Andromeda Mega Express Orchestra - Take Off!

The year has almost ended, and I realize that I won’t have the time to write about everything, or even half of what I listened to and graded A. Still, I want to mention a momentarily passion, a gloomy experimenter from Reykjavik with almost otherworldly sound - Ben Frost. Even his Myspace page is “the ghost of Ben Frost.” His album “By The Throat” has a track with a name very pleasant to a Ukrainian ear, The Carpathians. It can be downloaded here.

Ben Frost Myspace

Animal Collective - Fall Be Kind (EP)
[Domino, 2009]

The year started with Animal Collective, with Animal Collective it ends - very successfully at both. Merriweather Post Pavilion irrevocably placed them into the mainstream and brought about a round of applause on the critics’ part. And the current EP only gives a foothold for this.

With most sincerity: I adore Animal Collective. I’ve said numerous times how they influence me personally and help me deal with the chaos around. But I also love them for the fact that they’ve been doing the music they like for such a long time, despite it being too “niche” and somewhat out of place - and now they created a space in this seemingly overcrowded place, and made the so-called mass market embrace them. Five new tracks are not the brightest ones in the now rich band discography. If you imagine that this is the first thing you hear by Animal Collective, maybe you won’t readily grasp them - it’d be better to start off with something like Strawberry Jam or Feels. But for the prepared ear, this music melts in your ears and in-between them, like honey. “Bleeding,” by the way, is a very flow-y song, built primarily on vocals and dragging you into the dreamy ambient. “What Would I Want? Sky” has a sample from good old Grateful Dead’s “Unbroken Chain,” although a rare fan of both bands, divided by generations, can recognize it.

A beautiful bacchanalia: tingling, flowing, rushing and sometimes roaring, but most of all reminding you of elvish flirting in a magic wood. Frisky dancing to the flute (on “Graze”), noise of a close, you’d think, highway (”On A Highway”) - while walking the frailest of paths, and, finally, a true magic and mystery on the closing “I Think I Can,” with shamanic mantras, when the trees and the bushes have thickened around you. All this is quite far from anything you’d expect a modern music scene would bring, but at the same time, it’s nothing but Animal Collective.

Read & Listen:
Official website
Animal Collective Myspace
Animal Collective accidentally leak the EP (via Hotcakes)
Pitchfork news
Preview of Fall Be Kind

Hauschka - Small Pieces [3'']
[Secret Furry Hole Recordings, 2009]

Volker Berterlmann (a.k.a. Hauschka), a pianist and composer from Dusseldorf, is the most talented composers of today. His every work, be that LP or EP, makes my universe a bit more balanced and good. This 5-track, 3” will refine your life for fifteen minutes of its length. Released on a small Italian label Secret Furry Hole Recordings, the mini-masterpiece Small Pieces is a practically non-prepared piano sketches. The number of copies is limited to 300. Very much like photos or postcards sent from a journey - without any general sightseeing wonders, but instead with a deep insight into small episodes of local life.

This music is perfect for “catching a moment” and seeing beauty in everyday experiences. Piano music often comes as sentimental (like Yann Tiersen, for example). Hauschka leaves melodramatic aside - his piano works are subtle, magical, romantic, but without sentiment. Crystal clear and open, like photographs, without impressionist fleur. The main theme of this EP is sadness, as the name of the first track, “Sehnsucht”, “longing.”

Read & Listen:
Hauschka website
Secret Furry Hole Recordings

Hauschka - Sehnsucht mp3

Memory Tapes - Seek Magic
[Sincerely Yours, 2009]

Memory Tapes is an ailas of New Jersey DJ Dayve Hawk. Actually, one of his many aliases - Memory Cassette, The Banker from Deal Or No Deal, Weird Tapes. His twitter cutely starts with “found a skull”. He demonstrates, and sometimes gives away his new things on his blog We’re Tapes. That, and of course, the music, makes him my latest adoration.

Seek Magic is a very moving and nostalgic album, the first LP after a series of EPs. Dancing, as if from the past, dropping out of time context. At times it reminds of the latest fashion Empire of the Sun. A bit geeky, very sunny and at the same time mild. Lo-fi flowing sounds of the opening Swimming Field are deceptive - through insects chirping come the first dance rhythms on Bicycle. Here, the slowliness and waking-up mood are gone, and the real cheerfulness begins. By the way, Seek Magic can be compared to a bicycle - a lightweight construction moving forward disregarding all the gas-eating monsters and traffic on the road. Guitars are sometimes like New Order’s, danceability is like a simplified James Murphy. Dayve Hawk has his own, piece-by-piece compiled music universe. It’s like a carefully picked interior for a home. At times DIY, at times customized - each element is in its own place, thought-out and immersed into context. This makes Seek Magic really cozy. If Stop Talking is one of the centerpieces, then Pink Stones or Plain Material are framing it. Designer’s lo-fi at its best.

Read & Listen:
Memory Tapes on Myspace
Twitter
Blog
Guest List for Pitchfork

Fuck Buttons - Tarot Sport
[ATP, 2009]

Fuck Buttons are definite followers of the new noisy stream in music started most prominently by Animal Collective. (At the same time, they’re pretty close to Mogwai.) Noisy, wild, the rhythm is the king. It’s drawing you inside, it’s pressing heavily on you, aggressively and animalistically. The sophomore album of these Londoners is more convincing than their debut. There’s this feeling of stretched rubber all through the album. Wilder Surf Solar, metallic Rough Steez, epic Olympians. Rough Steez clanks with steel like a pretty big factory, The Lisbon Maru jingles with coins in a gypsy-like manner, then building up with the military drumroll the pathos before Olympians - the warrior theme there goes all the way. Fantom Limb creates a total spin of spare parts, engines and metal things.

The head almost blasts with this music, but at the same time it brings you to the verge of some kind. The music of chaos lets you get along with the disorder of the world more easily. Andrew Hung and Benjamin Power are some kind of masters from “The Flower of Stone” (Russian fairy tale), making beauty of inorganic matter.

Surf Solar

Read & Listen:
Fuck Buttons official website
Fuck Buttons on Myspace
Olympians mp3

Massive Attack - Splitting The Atom EP
[Virgin, 2009]

Massive Attack are back after six years of silence with not yet an album, but an EP that’s worth several albums. Splitting The Atom resembles a hard, serious book - you don’t get the essence all at once, but after the sevenths read. (I might be overrating here, but not from the first time, at least.) At first, you feel something abstract like “there’s something about it.” Sounds a bit like what they did before, but not quite. Then, when you grow closer, you find new levels, depth and detail. It’s probably best described as sex - with the first contact the general feel is created, and then, as the story unfolds, you pay more and more attention to detail and get into the process. Erotic relations are not incidental. Massive Attack has been, and remains, for me one of the sexiest artists ever. Not as much a “soundtrack for lovemaking” as the inner energy of music.

On Splitting The Atom, we celebrate the return of Daddy G (he was absent on 100th Window), and reappearance of old friends, Horace Andy and Tricky’s ex-girlfriend Martina Topley-Bird. Other contributors are Guy Garvey and Tunde Adebimpe (of TV On The Radio). The pace and darkness of the title track reminds a bit of Nick Cave (here we have Horace Andy and Daddy G). Smooth suavity continues with Tunde Adebimpe on Pray For Rain. Psyche featuring Martina is a dragging tenderness with hidden notes of mild hysteria. Beautiful melancholy is characteristic of all four tracks. Bulletproof Love with submerged rhythms and Guy Garvey’s vocals closes these 23 minutes.

To summarize, Massive Attack make a step to the new level. Previously they have caused quite a resonance in the head, and now their music is more like quiet steps. It wins you over one sound at a time, smoothly and softly. Not a stormy affair of youth, but a mature relationship, for a closed circle of initiated.

Read & Listen:
Massive Attack website
Splitting The Atom on YouTube