Link: Official Website

There is something to Johan Reinhold. One look at him, he appears to be the anti-pop star. But sink into “Shoot Me Down,” and it’s one of the more sincere pop songs that could ever come out of the Swedish Pop scene, blending classic psych pop with future folk.

Reinhold’s wayfaring journey is relaxed in his complexity. It’s a smooth song to digest, filled with pop aesthetics from a man who has a story to tell. The song itself is generalized enough to make you feel like you could relate to his lyrics as he lays it all out on the open (he even posterizes the lyrics on the front of his website), yet in its delicacy, you remember it is Reinhold who is at the forefront of this emotion.

He is transparent in his delivery and lush with his musical scope. After a while you begin to catch glimpses into the potential this song has for a proper remix. It’s not an obvious choice, but the challenge is certainly there for some intelligent re-design. Those up for that challenge is Owsey, The Kill Van Kulls, and FRNKNSTYN.

Northern Ireland atmospheric DJ Owsey begins the song like a mess as if My Bloody Valentine had something to do with the song. But that’s the point. It reminds me of Meat Beat Manifesto and the remix of “Asbestos, Lead Asbestos.” The song begins in a chaotic fury, dirty, and confusing in a non-linear scope. Somewhere mid-way, the song is conformed into its traditional element by being highly structured and tight. The style for Owsey’s work is different, but the idea is the same. It starts out like a hallucination and then ends up like a lucid dream of atmospheric tranquility, hovering around like the Northern lights. It’s a great accentuation to the song, using music more than lyrics as a mood shaper.

If you have ever heard Mancester’s Kill Van Kulls, you will quickly come to the distinction that their original music is better than their remixing skills. What sounds like a moderate electronic pop reworking gives a bare resemblance to something Trent Reznor would have done circa early 2000s. They accentuate Reinhold’s chorus to stand out the most. Everything else surrounding that is just electro thump. It also is the shortest remix out of the bunch, clocking in at just over 3:30.

20-year-old Auckland, New Zealand, DJ FRNKNSTYN takes a progressive Dubstep stab to the song. With vocal processing and the now classic contemporary Dubstep break used like a chorus, the popular stance does more damage than good. It’s another example of people taking any song and converting into Dubstep expecting it to shine like gold. Like some of Skrillex’s re-workings, add this to a failed attempt at falsifying the emotion.

Some songs don’t have to re remixed. Although the potential is there, the original still serves as the best dish to devour.

Links:

• Facebook
• Website
• Twitter

“Up and down like a yoyo” is a great way to describe the latest release from Fujiya and Miyagi. “Ventriloquizzing” offers a dark and twisted play on funk with hints of drum n’ bass mixed in with a lot of analog synthpop.

On first listen they sound very much like the French band Air, but delving into their sound further,  the beats are more catchy then Air’s purely electro pop style. While clearly a moody and almost lethargic song style on the album, you can’t help but bob your head back and forth to each and every track.

Tracks of note are the rhythmic, almost hypnotic, splash title track “Ventriloquizzing”, the cat scratch bluesy sound of “Sixteen Shades of Black and Blue”, the trip hop Asian flavor of “Taiwanese Roots” and the up and down mellow tones of “Yoyo”.

If you can deal with the moodiness and synthetic noise, this album is definitely worth a listen. Take what you like about it, but it definitely grows on you like a birth mark.

Link: Christina Vantzou’s Official Site

The beautiful wraparound cover art of Vantzou’s kranky debut.  A presumably lovely woman bent at the waist, amidst dense foliage (location unknown and therefore anywhere), and the photo is taken in a way we find eerie and familiar, as though we’re remembering the time from a dream. Are we in love with the woman?  Why does she bend down to plunge her hands into the undergrowth? The type on the sleeve is so delicate: does it represent the opening credits to a film we have just begun watching?  Is the film in progress, and have we stumbled upon a critical scene? Is the sleeve imagery gently faded to suggest that the scene is beginning, fading in, or ending, fading out?

This cover art identifies the album as part of an imaginary music scene—a scene inhabited by artists like Deaf Center, Liz Harris, Rafael Anton Irisarri, Goldmund, the Miasmah label, and spectral others.  How can we identify this scene by its sound?  Its sound embodies our subconscious’s slow-motion, half-remembered honeyed relics, all contained in the strange zone of our dreams (these are the hidden lands within).

When I hear the long tones of neo-classical drone music in films, I think, “Something big is happening, something internal, a slow realization.” I’m a deeply flawed viewer: when these things happen in movies, I always miss the meaning.  “I know that was a big deal,” I think, “or they would not have used that music at that moment.  In movies, nothing is done without a reason.”  Sometimes I’ll bother to do research later; it’s so easy to find terrific writings online about films, any film you can name. “What a brilliant thing,” I think, “and I hadn’t imagined it was happening until I read this article.” Other times, the thing I saw wasn’t very brilliant at all—it was just my mind adding things to it.  No matter, all fine, all valid. It doesn’t need to have a meaning, it doesn’t have to signify anything.

Vantzou scores these vapory moments on No. 1.  For the better part of an hour something big is happening inside, or so the music says.  Inside the sleeve, Vantzou—one half of The Dead Texan with Stars of the Lid’s Adam Wiltzie, who, together, created one of the greatest ambient albums of the last decade—is photographed wearing a lovely black dress and a smile, near a brick wall.  Difficult to tell if she is rising in the air, falling to the ground, or stationed on earth.

Links:

• Official Website
• Facebook

It’s not often one can throw jazz and electronic music in the same description of a band’s style of music, but Body Language incorporates these vibes with a disco soul grove in their latest release, Social Studies. Comprising of four New Yorkers, this quartet is simply visionary when it comes to laying down eclectic sounds that include pieces from all different musical genres. Breaking the mold, Body Language is a very complex band and hard to categorize in any particular musical genre.

One constant throughout the album is that it is pure genius. Part playful, part sensual but constantly visceral, the music flows from peaks of high energetic bliss to valleys of sultry grooves. The vocals of Angelica Bess and Matt Young blend together in each track where it seems their voices are playing a game of pure unbridled love.

Though the whole album is awesome, tracks of note are the sadistically happy title track “Social Studies,” to the disco fueled “Falling Out,” and the 80’s Synthpop-inspired “Running,” which is very reminiscent of a Killers song. However, the most catchy and straight-up poppy track of the record is the final song, “Holiday.” The video is below.

The band is currently on tour. Location and dates for upcoming shows can be found on their FaceBook page or the official website.

Links:

• Official Site
• FaceBook Page
• “Let It Rain (Lotus Remix) on Soundcloud

When I listen to the Blackout EP, I feel like me and this band have a tight bond. When you give these songs a spin, you get the impression that this band has been in your life for years, although reality says they have not.

The Blackout EP is filled with big beats, earth-shaking bass and cut up samples that fit together with great ease. With something like “Let It Rain,” I get the feeling as I did when listening to DJ Nassir or Mr. Oizo. Their cut and paste makes the deep Hip Hop blended with Art of Noise-like shenanigans a gutsy move, but you will find that Keys N Krates do it so much better. The music is accessible and welcoming as the transitions move about flawlessly.

“Ring The Alarm” is Dancehall with Lucas with the Lid Off jive. When the bass drops, holy cow, what an experience! They take a concept and exploit it while blowing the sound up to its fullest potential without compromising anything. Somehow they have managed to keep everything at a certain level of insanity to their mixes without going overboard. By the time you get to the end of “Ring The Alarm,” you will want it so loud the windows shake as much as the booty.

The tiny accents, layers, and direction to the songs help keep the repetition in check. And when they throw in a modest amount of Dubstep meets Basement Jaxx (“Oh Baby”) or glitch hop with a pinch of soul (“Uncle Otis”), you will want to lose your mind.

And if you have all this junk in the trunk, you can’t walk away from an EP like this with a deep electro dub track. And that they do with “Got A Lot To Learn.”

This is a band who is very aware of their electronic surroundings.

Links:

• Tycho
• ISO50

As the air continues its decline deep into the chill of the bone, winter is on its way. There is no escaping the inevitable, but Scott Hansen has found a cure to the winter blues. Dive is a delicious effort that builds dreamscapes and intellectual utopias that lurk where the sand meets the sea; where the sunset reaches the water.

Building echoes of dissonant polyphonic sounds like waves bouncing off of the African landscape, “A Walk” is a coming of age for Hansen. He spent years listening…observing. And when he released his first album Sunrise Projector, later expanded and reissued as Past Is Prologue, his youthful spirit in the framework of the technology was a way for him to bring design and music together. With “A Walk” he’s put it all behind and focused on a hopeful feeling of prosperity that dwindles down to a hypnotic pulse and steady rhythm, the heartbeat of his future.

This is just the introduction. “Hours” is the true awakening, with waves of electronic bliss swooping and sloshing about as a simple drum beat points the song in a distinct direction, added by a catchy melody as layers of sound come in and out of the song like hues of natural light beaming through a windowpane.

The guitar-driven “Daylight” brings us back to Hansen’s youthful days. Harmonics flicker inside the capsule of a glistening instrumental “Dive” is a post-eight minute epic that takes the ideology on “Daylight” one step deeper. By now you will realize that Tycho’s songwriting is truly timeless. Through music, he visualizes any world and any dimension. His patience and attention to detail comes from his reaction as a visionary.

The album continues beyond the highlight of the title track. What we experience is reality skewed. “Ascension” gives us something familiar as sounds ripple off into alternate realities as tones melt away while “Melanine” drifts off into space like the lost soul in Solaris. For Hansen, we may never find this planet again, nor this moment, but he perfectly captured the feeling of it all and bundled it into some of the most beautiful electronic music I have heard in a long time.

It’s amazing how organic he makes it feel and how deeply entranced he is at paying extra attention to the smallest of detail. You have to concentrate really hard to grasp everything he is doing, but why would you. Sit back and take it all in. In my planet of my mind, Dive is that mirage we reach every time.

Link: High Places Blog

For High Places and their third release, this is not ordinary bedroom pillow talk we have experienced in the past. Original Colors treks through the fog and clouds to give you far away places of splendor and imagination through mystery that make the whole thing so damn intriguing.

The album moves through bass pulses and builds atmosphere like the best in indie chill. Mary Pearson’s nonchalant expression creates a similar aura as something that would be tucked away in a Getz/Gilberto album while adding melancholia dream pop that spun around the early ‘90s 4AD scene.

Strip that all down to a bare minimum and you have Original Colors. There are times when you are not sure the song is moving, and others where they will have you stop what you are doing and appreciate their forward-moving ambience be it a song like “Banksia” that builds gorgeous electro pop dance power that could turn any dance floor into a fashion statement, or the other end of the spectrum and the song “Sophia” as it glistens with a cool serenity, stretching out into the infinity of your mind.

When you get to “Twenty Seven,” the vocal looping throws you for a transition twist as there is no other song on this album that can be considered as filler. And this song is not used to build into “Altos Lugares.” The album ends like this, a mid-tempo, cool, darkwave pleasure seeker. The samples are slightly industrialized, and it builds the mood for a nice exit piece as Pearson’s vocals get thrown through vocal effects like a dream that is about to be snuffed out by reality.

Link: Official Site

Going from a duo to a multi-faceted group, this third long player from Pink Skull is immaculate. Your reaction of “wow’s” will sound like a broken record as each song tends to mesmerize and explore territory that wasn’t commonly explored before and not so much retained in today’s world of electronic indie pop.

Looking like an early Wax Trax! or Tangerine Dream album cover, this gateway into Psychic Welfare is with a purpose. Their industrialized appearance transforms into synth-wave bliss that feels like a smoothed-out Cabaret Voltaire turned early Air turned Dif Juz/Perennial Divide electronic instrumental love affair.

“Hot Bubblegum” is our first impression, but don’t tag this album just yet. It’s only the beginning to what later becomes deep electronic bliss. The song’s psych-pop is simple yet surreal. We feel the impression of something easy and familiar, yet something new and vibrant. It’s one of the ways the band tears down the foundation and rebuilds it back up, coinciding to the Ira Cohen poem scrawled on the liner notes, a poem that describes the decay of society and struggles to find civility within tragedy. With “Hot Bubblegum,” it is a song that is Television-inspired and nuanced into Pink Skull’s realm of reality.

A 14-second free jazz blast turns into “Mu,” a futurist dream of ancient electronic patterns like they got an ARP-2600 to work overtime. The layers build intensity that peppers in a quick sax solo that is the coolest I have heard in ages.

And that is what the album transitions into, beautifully washed-out electronic compositions that are elegant, exciting and powerful in pre-’80s minimal dance splendor. The songs flow like thought processes and bounces between the mysterious (the experimental hues of “Late Night Eggs” turning into the lightened “Salamander”) and the blatant (“Janine Aubergine” has early Roxy Music written all over it). And if you want to get your proto-geek dance fix on, they have a song for that, too — “Summer Reading.”

Spiraling across the galaxy of Psychic Welfare, you will be amazed at how far these songs will go to give you pleasure.

CSS
La Liberacion
V2/Cooperative Music USA/Downtown Records
Rating: 3 out of 5

Links:

• Official Site
• FaceBook Page

I remember the moment I first stuck my ears on a CSS record. Cansei De Ser Sexy was blatant, spunky and all the leanings of an anti-social bedroom dance party. Their Art Rock and Punk socio-diatribes were that to be marveled over. It’s what made so many fall in love with the group.

Two albums later and La Liberacion comes at us with a new label and a deeper viewpoint of the band trying to experiment outside of their perimeters. It also comes with the good and the bad.

“City Girl,” a song that smacks pop culture with the fists of feminism exploits electro pop while throwing in a trumpet solo that actually works. If X-Ray Spex started now, this is what they would probably sound like. The title track is also their first to be sung in Spanish and gives the youth something to be charged about.

As the album opens with “I Love You,” the song is a sedated melancholia that ends up being an anti-love song in CSS fashion. I appreciate the sarcasm, but even by then, it’s stretched out to be nullifying in effect.

La Liberacion is a step up in CSS pomp and circumstance from Donkey. Three years away may have helped contribute to that, but it’s nowhere near the immediacy and rush of Cansei De Ser Sexy, and that is where I like CSS best.

VHS or Beta
Diamonds & Death
Krian Music Group/Chromosome Records
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Links:

• VHS or Beta’s Official Site
• VHS or Beta on FaceBook
• VHS or Beta on Twitter

VHS or Beta has seen a paradigm shift several times throughout their career. They powered through techno sets as a full band, keeping a non-stop party perpetually moving. They went disco. They landed a spot on Astralwerks’ roster to release an indie and New Wave dance sensation.

But now they have burned the house and stripped it all down. The band has minimized their line-up down to the founders, Craig Pfunder and Mark Palgy. A move from Louisville to New York City and countless hours doing DJ sets around the world, this new sound reflects it. Adding to all of this, they left Astralwerks and Diamonds & Death presents a self-produced array of stripped-down and subtle House anthems with powerful energy-driven Trance. Consider this album more nostalgic than progressive.

Pfunder and Palgy has studied the sound and felt the New York grit while continuing the VHS or Beta identity. You may not immediately feel it on “Breaking Bones” intro. What they have to prove is that a new and disciplined group is back. But when they take their sound and explode it into an all-encompassing full dance sound later in this song, you will feel that nothing has changed. This is the VHS or Beta as we know it.

Throughout the album, you get songs that mold the same style and aesthetics you come to expect. Tempo does not vary much, and the same formula is deviated. It wears on the listener after a while, but it goes toward the ideology of “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.” These two are good at what they do and have been doing it for years. There is no reason why they shouldn’t continue to excel.

VHS or Beta “Breaking Bones” from Graham Hill on Vimeo.