Blondes released one of my favourite tracks of 2011 with ‘Lover’, a big slice of euphoric dance music which harks back to the sprawling lengths of old. Similarly dark and long, ‘Wine’ is taken from the duo’s last release of the year in November on RVNG, the completion of a trilogy of singles which went ‘Lover / Hater’, ‘Business / Pleasure’ and ‘Wine / Water’. The video is pretty insane.
There’s a Teengirl Fantasy remix of the track too:
Darren from Last Days of 1984 put me onto this compilation seeing as I’ve shared a love of Shangaan cassette tapes recently (a few are available in Elastic Witch).
The nine-track compilation Music from Saharan Cellphones on the SahelSounds label, as the title suggests, is music that comes from cellphone memory cards. Cheap mobile phones are popular in West Africa so it makes sense to use in-built memory cards to share your music collection via Bluetooth or similar with others when there’s no internet access, Wi-Fi or 3G available (no not even an Edge network! Madness.)
The songs chosen for the compilation were some of the highlights — music that is immensely popular on the unofficial mp3/cellphone network from Abidjan to Bamako to Algiers, but have limited or no commercial release. They’re also songs that tend towards this new world of self production — Fruity Loops, home studios, synthesizers, and Auto-Tune.
Compiled by Portland’s Christopher Kirkley in Kidal, Mali in 2009 and 2010, some of these songs were previously released on cassette tapes by Kirkley. He would swap songs from Townes Van Zandt, John Vanderslice and Elliott Smith for these nuggets.
It’s a path that occurs way too often in pop. A promising young artist gets noticed for their idiosyncratic take on pop and then proceeds to be stripped of each interesting trait until nothing but a sanitised blandness remains. Back in 2009, Anita Blay aka CocknBullKid impressed with a series of singles (‘I’m Not Sorry’, ‘Boys And Girls’, ‘There’s A Mother In Our Bed’). Then last year’s debut album Adulthood was released and followed the above law. It was… a bit crap.
So another album leaked last week called Adolescence that features those early songs that held so much promise.
Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt have all of the cute…
Frank Loesser’s 1947 song was covered by Nancy Wilson and Ella Fitzgerald.
Original post via Hello Giggles.
A list of recommended events taking place over the next seven days in Dublin and especially New Year’s Eve . All times are 7.30pm /8pm unless stated. Feel free to recommend gigs not listed in the comments.
Hit play and hear a song from each album in my top 30 of 2011.
30. The Caretaker – An Empty Bliss Beyond This World (whole album stream)
29. Cut Copy – Zonoscope
28. Modeselektor – Monkeytown
27. Ghostpoet – Peanut Butter Blues & Melancholy Jam
26. Rustie – Glass Swords
25. Planningtorock – W
24. Feist – Metals
23. Drake – Take Care
22. The Horrors – Skying
21. Jay Z & Kanye West – Watch The Throne
Nialler9′s top 20 albums of 2011…→
Here we are. The end of the sixth year of the Nialler9 poll. Thank you all once again for voting. We had about 100 or so votes that made up the results in songs, new artists, EPs and now, the big one – albums. Our ultimate winner has topped the poll before that doesn’t negate the indisputable fact that there’s plenty of superb Irish music contained within this list…
The top 25 Irish songs as chosen by you featured eight of my own personal choices in its midst, so we all seem to be in general agreement right? Not bloody likely. Thanks for voting. Tomorrow, I’ll reveal the top 25 Irish albums while Irish EPs and new artists is here.
I’ve had my say, now we’re kicking off your say in the first results of the readers’ poll with your top Irish EPs and new artists of 2011.Both those lists follow along with links and embeds to where you can hear why they got the votes they did.
I spent all of Monday afternoon listening to the first two mixtapes from The Weeknd, House of Balloons and Thursday. There’s enough quality material there that I really didn’t anticipate the final part of the trilogy would come before the end of the year but Echoes Of Silence is here and downloadable. 2011 has sure been a prolific year for Abel Tesfaye.
First impressions: it opens with a cover of Michael Jackson’s ‘Dirty Diana’, features lots of big crashing drums, Abel Tesfaye’s golden voice saying lots of “ooooohs”, production from Clams Casino on ‘The Fall’ and won’t frighten you if you dig the other two mixtapes. Get it here.
