Drew from Baby Birds Don’t Drink Milk just passed along this video for the track “Fort Porkchop”, the opener to their newly released The Puppycat 3” CD EP on German label Edition 59. Hurry and scoop this up quick because, as the label name suggests, there are only 59 copies (all individually numbered) in existence.
Flipping some awe-inspiring nature landscapes on their head by mirroring each setting, the video is quite a conversation starter. For one, every scene looks like a Rorschach inkblot test, so there are certainly some Freudian-tinged sexual interpretations of the reflected mountains, valleys, and streams (or is that just me, and if so, does that mean I love my mother?). As for the track, it’s 5+ minutes of instrumental bliss which, when coupled with the video, makes for an ethereal experience. Well don’t take my word for it, check it out below:
Wow! This was a great week for music related videos. Some were so amazing, I couldn’t just wait around until the weekly round-up so I went ahead and posted a couple of my favorites already earlier this week. Not only that, but there were so many good vids that I decided to make this a sort-of mega-recap. So without further ado:
Seems like Göteborg, Sweden is continuing it’s quest for world dominance this past week. First came the amazing video for jj’s “Let Go”, then an equally impressive DIY-style video from Love Is All’s “Kungen” premiered on Stereogum a day later. Before long, we will all be eating pickled herring…
Although the latest LP from San Fran folk band Vetiver was a bit of a disappointment for me, this acoustic rendition of “Farther On”, captured by French zine WOW Magazine, reminds me why I originally liked this group so much:
The next video is another amazing acoustic performance, this time by the Danish ensemble Efterklang. Put together by the wonderful Austrian site They Shoot Music, this recording of “Me Me Me The Brick House” shows this seven-member incarnation of the group at it’s most stripped down. A really great listen! (Also check out The Shoot Music’s video for “Alike” here).
Keeping it in Denmark, The Raveonettes put out my favorite music video of this week with this awesome animation accompanying the track “Heart of Stone” (Note, if the video get taken down, you can watch it here — DAMN VEVO AND THEIR NO EMBED!):
Another crazy video snippet from the mysterious iamamiwhoami surfaced this past week, and I think it’s the best one yet. Who do I think it is? I don’t really care — as long as the music on the LP is just as amazing as these viral vids, they can stay an unknown!
Not really a video per say, but this recording of Beach House performing a new track entitled “The Arrangement” on Sirius XM Radio was too good to pass up:
My apologies to whoever originally posted about this video of Wounded Lion’s track “Friendly?” (I didn’t write down the source). Anyways, behold the amazingness of this MS Powerpoint generated music video:
Finally, it was only a matter of time before the sparse arrangements of The xx got covered by their equally minimalistic Göteborg counterpart El Perro del Mar (see, I wasn’t lying about the Göteborg takeover!). Well Sarah Assbring and company brought their own twist to the beautiful “Shelter” this past week in Brooklyn:
Man this has been a great week for music related videos! Here’s a live recording of a new track entitled “Give Up the Ghost” that Mr. Yorke played last night at the Cambridge Corn Exchange for a show benefiting the Green Party:
EDIT: Looks like Pitchfork was surfing youtube at the same time, as they’ve just posted two other videos from last night’s show which you can check out here.
Most of the time, the things that the reddit community find on the web are ho-hum, but sometimes they can be absolutely extraordinary! Case in point, this video, appropriately posted in the math subreddit, shows a cool logarithmic spiral visualization of one of the most famous pieces by 19th century Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, the beautiful “Hungarian Rhapsody #2″. I’ll let the video’s creater explain his motivation behind the project:
In a piano, notes repeat every 12 semitones (or keys, both black and white), and each whole interval doubles the frequency of these notes. Together, these notes form what we call a pitch class.
It occurred me that the shape of a spiral has all the correct properties to represent this relation between notes. So I wondered, how would piano music look like if it was represented as a spiral of keys?
In this representation, the notes with lower frequencies are in the center of the spiral, starting with A0 (as in the piano). Each radial block of keys represents a single pitch class, so octaves (when two adjacent notes of the same pitch class are played togeter) look like a pair of keys being pressed radially
For the musically and mathematically disinclined, it’s a cool plot that shows interesting patterns based on the similarities between the structure of a piano and a logarithmic spiral! Enough talk, check out the cool result:
My anticipation for this jj video was palpable, as earlier this week their Swedish label Sincerely Yours rerouted their site to a short not-safe-for-epileptics “video” (click through) showcasing crossed Euro signs, some Renaissance art, and, of course, flashing lights. Even by Sincerely Yours’ standards, this was a bizarre move — making you guess that something big was on the horizon.
And boy did this video deliver! It’s like a Swedish indie-pop version of Snoop Dogg & Pharrell Williams’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot”, full of Black Labradors, marijuana, and the occasional bling. Somehow, this is exactly what I’d imagine a video featuring Joakim and Elin would be…
Ready for another round-up of some of my favorite music-related finds of the past week? Well, here goes:
Starting off is a grainy video that I included more because of the music and the musicians than the image quality. On a summer European tour date in Göteborg, Sweden, Massachusetts chanteuse Marissa Nadler teamed up with local Sarah Assbring (better known as El Perro del Mar) for a beautiful rendition of the Don Gibson classic “Oh Lonesome Me”:
One of my favorite concerts in recent memory was the Best Coast show I caught about a week and half ago. Well the videographers at the San Fran based site Truly Yours brilliantly captured Bethany Constantino and Bobb Bruno’s performance of “Crazy”, along with some back story showing how cool Bruno is (which I can confirm):
The next video is from one of my most anticipated SXSW bands, The Good The Bad. This midly NSFW vid for their simply titled “026″ captures the sex, drugs, and rock & roll this Danish band is known for:
Although the next one is just an audio rip of Gnonnas Pedro et ses Dadjes excellent track “Dadje Von O Von Non” (and a poor one at that, with the final 90-or-so seconds completely silent), ever since Chocolate Bobka featured it on his Sunday morning radio show, I’ve dusted off my copy of Legends of Benin and have been playing it a lot this week:
The guys over at IGIF labeled this video as of their favorites they’ve seen in a while. I tend to agree with them. Here is Fang Island’s “Daisy”:
This final video is meant to get you pumped for the upcoming SXSW festival in Austin (only one more month!) Sit back, relax, and soak in the genius of Daniel Johnston as he performs “True Love Will Find You in the End”:
Sorry to post this so late, but I had a pretty busy weekend of concert going. However, better late than never, so let’s kick off another week of some of my favorite video finds of the past week:
The first one is an incredible music video from Sierra-Leonean Janka Nabay. He has an upcoming 12” on one of my favorite labels True Panther entitled Babu King. Here’s the video for the excellent and highly publicized track “Eh Congo”:
At this point, I’m starving for any sort of new National material. Although I’m usually current with any latest developments (even filming a new song myself in Copenhagen), somehow I missed this live footage for another unreleased track called “Blood Buzz Ohio” that was filmed back in August:
The next two videos are so amazing that you can’t believe they are fan produced. The first is “When I’m With You” from a track off of Best Coast’s impossible to get Black Iris 7” while the second is a take on Memoryhouse’s “Lately”:
“Our Love Was Saved By Spaceman” is the first single off of The Pipettes forthcoming album. Probably due to all the recent lineup changes, their sound has taken a turn from 50s to 70s inspired. Take a listen for yourself:
Finally, the full video of Casiokids’s brand spanking new track has finally surfaced. I talked a little about the teaser for “En Vill Hest” earlier this week, and the full cut seems to be just as weird as the 15 second snippet:
No amount of videos you’ve seen or tracks you’ve heard can really prepare you for a Mountain Man show. In this day and age where you can achieve near digital perfection in the studio, I’m still convinced that no recording will ever do them justice and that in order to truly experience what these three girls from Vermont are all about, you have to see them sing in person. Even the phrase “breathtakingly beautiful” seems to fall incredibly short when trying to describe their sound. Last night, I had a chance to witness them play a twelve song set at the acoustically perfect Reed College Chapel, and it was probably the most spiritual experience I’ve had in quite a while.
After braving through a sample-crazy electro soloist, a singer / songwriter acoustic performance, and a full band arrangement — an interesting collection of Reed College musicians — the time finally arrived for Molly, Amelia, and Alex to take the stage. Holding only a single acoustic guitar (makes it easy to pack their green sedan and drive cross country on a whim), their mostly a cappella set was about as simple of a performance instrument-wise I’ve ever seen. In fact, the group noted how this was the first time ever they’ve performed with a microphone on stage; quite a feat for it being 2010, not 1910.
And their timelessness is one of the best qualities of their music. If it wasn’t for the Appalachian-infused vocals of the group that automatically makes you think of past greats like Cousin Emmy (popular from the 20s-50s), you wouldn’t be able to pinpoint even the century this music belongs to. I mean, small groups of singers huddled together forming beautiful harmonies is one of the oldest arrangements in the books and can probably be traced back to the dawn of humankind.
Although the gravity of their music is intense, during breaks they would counter their emotionally draining performance with lighthearted banter. The most fun conversation they had was when Molly divulged an arrangement she had with her then boyfriend that, if given the opportunity, they would be OK with each other kissing Connor Oberst. Not surprisingly, this spun into a lengthy talk about their first concerts they attended with Amelia proudly declaring it was 98 degrees, even mimicking their choreographed dance moves to the t. Maybe I just have this thing about elevating musicians to higher tiers of humanity, but it’s always refreshing to see down-to-earth personalities from performers.
As anyone who has seen them live can attest to, you really need near silence to fully appreciate their music. Although I berate the arms-crossed crowd of Portland concert goers almost every live show I go to, at the very least I can say it made for good practice for this performance. With the crowd frozen on the front pews and seated attentively on the ground in front of the stage, it was so still that I felt guilty when my stomach started growling — making it impossible to even consider taking photos of the show with my loud ass shutter sound.
Opening with the track “Honeybee” with their hands clasped to each other, it was amazing to see the three only needing to hit the first note a couple of times as warm-up before going into a jaw-dropping rendition of the track, something reminiscent of the sound check I saw Neko Case do almost a year. Since the only recording I have of theirs is composed of six songs, naturally there were some surprises (at least for me) as well as some covers thrown into the mix. Regardless of how unfamiliar some of the newer songs might have been, you wouldn’t have known the difference as every track was spot-on. It didn’t matter if it was the recently-premiered “Babylon” or the Jana Hunter cover song they closed with (which Amelia told me was “the first song we learned as a band”), everything was about as picture perfect as you could get. Here is a rough setlist from the evening:
I haven’t seen the “How I’m Doing Hey Hey” track anywhere online, so I went ahead and uploaded a “video” of their performance of it tonight (more like audio because the lighting was bad and my camera sucks majorly):
It was cool because the Portland crowd pitched in some improvised snapping that went along with the music and the girls looked like they were having a great time performing it on stage.
Well that’s it for last night’s performance. All I can say is that if you get a chance to see them live, do yourself a favor and go. Trust me, you won’t be disappointed.
At the show, I got a copy of their limited edition self-titled CD-R (with one-of-a-kind handmade sleeve) that I’ll be giving away. I’m pretty sure this is a tour-only release, as it contains eight tracks as opposed to the six songs on their past release (“Loon Song” and “Buffalo” are the two additions). Anyways, if you won’t get an opportunity to catch them live or if you can’t wait for their almost-ready Underwater Peoples’s 10” to drop, go ahead and retweet this (or if you don’t have twitter, drop a comment) and I’ll pick a winner at random in the coming days (US residents only)!
In comparison to their northern neighbors, Denmark doesn’t have as much of a reputation for being a musical hotspot. However, there are severalDanishbands trying to change their country’s image and one of the latest and greatest is the surf rock group The Good The Bad.
I was fortunate enough to catch this band perform during the first warm-up day of the 2008 Roskilde Festival, where I just happened upon their set midway through and was astonished by the amount of energy they possessed. Going the strictly instrumental route (from the band: “We don’t need a vocalist anyway. The music speaks for itself. We use the music so we don’t have to say ‘I Love You’”), the group is a complete 180 from the cerebral acts like Explosions in the Sky or Eluvium — opting to rock out rather than create delicate soundscapes.
Playing mostly low-key venues in Copenhagen and around Europe, there is no doubt in my mind that they will shine at the dingy bar/club scene that’s 6th St. in Austin. Not only that, but with a sound that’s tailor made for the next Tarrantino film, they are sure to please the festival goers with their high intensity surf & flamenco tracks. With a spectacle to match the music, this group is a must see for SXSW ‘10. Check out this live video from one of their shows in Copenhagen:
When it comes to exclusives, Nathaniel and Connor over at I Guess I’m Floating have had their fair share of successes in the past (even premieringthreevideos I took while in Europe). However, nothing they have done thusfar compares to the two new tracks they’ve posted from Savannah, Georgia’s Sunglasses. Although they have only two songs to their name (it’s true — check their myspace), I can’t get either one of them out of my head.
The first unveiled, appropriately titled “Whiplash”, is a genuine summertime jam that will no doubt be put on several “getting through the winter” mixtapes. With the most insane head-bobbing beat I’ve heard in the post-Busta Rhymes era, you’d have to use restraints in order to not move around. Hell, even those stereotypical indie kids with their arms crossed at Hercules & Love Affair shows are sure to break out of their douchebag stationary position and dance with the person next to them.
Although not possessing as much flair as “Whiplash” (but to be honest, few songs do), “Referee” is still a freaking great song. With vocals sounding like you and your buddies are singing karaoke into a mic connected to Garage Band, there is something communal about their music — like it’s meant to be sung by everyone, not just the singers. This sing-along aspect to Sunglasses is what’s special about them; it’s like you get that feeling that you could be a part of their band.
Check out their amazing video they did featuring the dance moves of one “Double Dick Rick” for “Whiplash” as well as an mp3 of “Referee”:
@gorillavsbear I wish! Ironically, I have family from TX coming up to Portland during SXSW. Next year though. Drink my share of beer for me. 22 hrs ago
