Severe Jam Damage

A few things I can’t get enough of right now…

1. Fever Ray - If I had a heart
Karin Elisabeth Dreijer Andersson (lead vocalist with ‘The Knife’) has a new project called Fever Ray. If you haven’t already get thyself to itunes.

If I Had A Heart from Fever Ray on Vimeo.

2. M83 - Kim & Jessie \ Skin of the Night
I’ve already mentioned that listening to ‘Kim & Jessie’ is like wrapping yourself up in a John Hughes movie - by contrast ‘Skin of the Night’ tears the comforter away and leaves you bare. No official video for ‘Skin’ so here’s a live version - all 7 glorious minutes of it.

3. Zoë Keating - One Cello x 16
Formerly second chair in Rasputina, currently featured on Amanda Palmers solo album ‘Who Killed Amanda Palmer’ - Keating takes one cello, one macbook and makes an orchestra. Here’s ‘Tetrishead’ for a sampler.

4. The Presets - If I Know You
Simply sublime video and song.

The Presets - If I Know You from Modular France on Vimeo.

I feel like it. And also Ectoplasmosis posted it during the week and I remembered just how good it is…

For those of you who are always looking for new music, and you’ve grown tired of Last FM or Pandora - A new site that might tickle your eardrums is musicovery.

Its interactive streaming webradio - the more you fave songs the more customisable the station becomes. Select your mood on a point in the grid, select your genre(s) and decade(s) and Musicovery does the rest. You can also deselect or ban songs. I’ve been listening to it for most of the afternoon on the ‘Discovery’ setting which pops up a lot of stuff I’ve not heard before. If you want to maintstream you can also select just to listen to ‘Hits’ or your music ‘universes’.

Nice and slick - no FAQ but the UI is simple enough to figure out in a matter of seconds. The free account gives you lo-fi versions of the tracks, but its still decent enough quality coming through my external speakers.

Musicovery

I signed up for Blip a while ago and I’m slowly adding tracks to my playlist.
It’s pretty much like a Twitter for songs, but I’m not sure how the legality of it works. After all Muxtape provided a similar service, but was taken down a few months ago and is now planning on relaunching as a service exclusively for bands.

I like the search functionality in Blip, which is pretty damn robust and allows you to find stuff you’ve never heard, stuff you’ve forgotten about or stuff you didn’t even know existed. Anyway, here’s my playlist so far. 25 rather mellow(ish) tracks, all just A Little Bit…

25. Milosh - Your Taste
24. The postal Service - The District Sleeps Tonight
23. Peter Murphy - Your Face
22. Slowdive - Like Up
21. Kate Bush - Army Dreamers
20. Depeche Mode - A Pain That I’m Used To (Goldfrapp Remix)
19. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis - Song For Jesse
18. Mogwai - Hunted By A Freak
17. The Delgados - Coming in from the Cold
16. French Kicks - England Just Will Not Let You Recover
15. Air France - No Way Down
14. Joy Division vs Bauhaus - Love Will Tear You Apart
13. Julian Cope - Head Hang Low
12. Sugarcubes - Birthday (Justin Robertson Remix)
11. Cut Copy - Hearts On Fire
10. Spiritualized - Run (single version)
9. Chemical Brothers with Mazzy Star - Asleep
8. Camouflage - That Smiling Face
7. Snow Patrol(feat. Martha Wainwright) - Set The Fire To The Third Bar
6. The Go! Team - the icestorm
5. Garbage - Only Happy When It Rains
4. The Presets - This Boy’s In Love (Life Like Remix)
3. Our Broken Garden - Watermark
2. Tori Amos - Not David Bowie
1. Midnight Juggernauts - Into The Galaxy (Architecture In Helsinki remix)

Blippity blip

Kate Bush said that ‘Hounds of Love’ was inspired by a movie called ‘Curse of the Demon’
(ITS IN THE TREES, IT’S COMING!!)

Here’s a youtube mashup of the original vid, the movie, a live performance and some other stuff.

Dustin is representing Ireland in the Eurovision this year. I laughed my ass off through the performance last night. RTE went back to the old way of picking a song and this is what the public voted in - given the other choices, Dustin was really the only way to go. Dana was disgusted, Louis made a crack about the fact that Dustin is RTE and it was an RTE show, and Maria (the girl who won for Serbia last year) almost fell off her chair with laughter and kept calling him a ‘duck’.
Priceless…

Warren Ellis has posted up episode number 9 of ‘The 4am’. This week its all about ‘Poptometry‘.
Give it a whirl. If you like the tracks right click to download ‘em (filesize - 20mb)

So far the third track ‘Cavalier’ is my favourite. From Warren’s post on the 4am:

Brandon Whitesell of Onlooker says: “I imagine that this song is about chemical dependence, destroyed eco-systems and biological chaos… and an army of stuffed bears wearing gas-masks and marching through the rainy streets of downtown…” And he’s not wrong. If possibly a bit mad.

Picked this up on Saturday, but I’m not going to bore you with a review of it as Jim Carroll did a much better job over on The Ticket.

I almost lived with Jim once, years ago. I was looking for a new place to live and so was he. A mutual friend put us in touch. We had a few discussions about getting a place big enough that would be able to house both of our music collections and libraries but Jim found a place soon after and I met Mrs H and moved into Smithfield.

Anyway go read it, in addition to upping the band, he has a good (or bad) take on the state of the Irish music scene that is worth reading.

Lisa Gerrard and Patrick Cassidy

I’ve been listening to this on and off over the weekend. Lisa Gerrard - the female half of Dead Can Dance and composer of the soundtracks to Gladiator (with Hans Zimmer) and ‘The Insider’ (with Pieter Bourke) – has teamed up this time with Irish composer Patrick Cassidy to bring us ‘Immortal Memory’. Similar in theme to her previous work, this has the added bonus of hearing Gerrard actually singing words. Granted those words are sung in Old Irish and Aramaic but still, they are (almost) recognisable words. Then again if you are buying a Lisa Gerrard album you aren’t really there for the lyrics rather, the Voice. Which still manages to astound and surprise. At times you could be mistaken for thinking that no human could make that sound, it must be an oboe or a cello. For instance I had to listen to the second track ‘Maranatha’ (Aramaic for ‘Come Lord’) three times before I realised that she is actually chanting deep underneath and has overlaid this with another lament – the second melody sung in her signature ‘melismatic’ style. ‘Amergin’s Invocation’ builds on ‘Maranatha’ and listening to it one can easily imagine the Milesians marching to war with the Tuatha De Danann.

This is quite a specialised album and it’s not going to be up everyone’s street. Me, I’d buy an album of Lisa Gerrard singing the phone book. Given the lack of recognisable lyrics on her previous albums I quite possibly already have. But this is good listening for those nights when it is 4 in the morning and you can’t sleep. Put it on the stereo on low, close your eyes and get lost in the heart of it.