As musical beefs go this is probably one of the more lame (and one-sided) brewhahas in recent rock history - though the Flaming Lips/Arcade Fire set-to will run it close. A few weeks back Matthew Friedberger of brother-sister duo the Fiery Furnaces took umbrage in an interview with Radiohead's tribute to Harry Patch declaring:

"F--- you! You brand yourself by brazenly and arbitrarily associating yourself with things that you know people consider cool. That is bogus. That's a put-on. That's a branding technique and Radiohead have their brand that they're popular and intelligent. So they have a song about Harry Patch... How's the song? "Is it 48 notes to the octave? What does it have to do with Harry Patch?"

Sadly for Friedberger he confused Harry Patch, recently deceased WW1 veteran with Harry Partch, a relatively obscure but celebrated American composer. Partch, who died in 1974, worked in microtonal scales and was famed four his use of 43-tone scale (not that I really understand what all that means).

It's kind of funny to note that in discussing Partch's methods Friedberger himself could be seen as making some artibitrary associations of his own. While it might seem a bit rich to discuss put-ons given that the FIery Furnaces once recorded a concept album featuring their grandmother narrating stories of their life.

Anyway, upon realising his error - or, in fact, clarifying that he was making a deliberate mistake (it all gets pretty confusing) - Friedberger decided to double down with a tongue-in-cheek/sarcastic clarifying statement:

"Of course, Matt never 'misread' any song title, as has been reported. Though he is not very proficient at it, he can actually read. Matt naturally thought it would be interesting to pretend that they wrote a song about the celebrated American composer with a similar sounding name, hence his joking in the interview about Radiohead composing a song with something like 48 notes to an octave. It was easy and amusing to imagine Radiohead's attempt to colonize that relatively arcane bit of our musical lifeworld. No doubt that would be very successful. Matt has not heard the Radiohead song about Harry Patch, as opposed to his imaginary one about Harry Partch, but if he did, he is sure he wouldn't like it. No doubt Radiohead and their fans can ignore his opinion of this matter and the band can continue with their triumphant artistic interventions."

He then concluded with an out-of-the-blue word for Beck: "Matt would have much preferred to insult Beck but he is too afraid of Scientologists."

Thankfully Radiohead didn't respond to any of this and that seemed to be that. So far so pointless. But then yesterday Beck weighed in with an actual tribute song to Harry Partch, composer, utilising the 43-tone scale and various other Partch innovations. It's streaming on Beck.com and can be downloaded on Stereogum here. Beck also helpfully posted some streams of Partch music.

As a Stereogum commenter pointed out, "If hip-hop has taught us anything, it's that comebacks are best when done via music." The epic nine minute or so long song is pretty bizarre, but pretty cool too - especially the final section.

It should probably have ended there,with some decent music, but Friedberger felt obliged to respond to the possible musical zing with two more outpourings on MySpace - see here and here. They're fairly rambling but here's a sample:

"When I made up my imaginary Radiohead song about Harry Partch (in full knowledge that there was no Radiohead song about Harry Partch, regardless of whatever Dave H. said to people before he talked to me (I love you, Dave)), and was sharply critical of it, I certainly didn't imagine my endeavors in this regard would engender such a response. How tremendously for the best it has all turned out to be."

He then wanders off on different tangents.

As I said, all a bit pointless really, but at least there are some positives to come from the silliness: a decent new Beck tune and an introduction to a composer most of us probably knew little about. Time for a lie down.

The end.

I thought the Michael Gove/Ed Balls face-off would be my favourite video of the day, but this clip blows it out of the water...




Via How It Happened

Back in the 90s it was often noted what a great record deal Beck had, allowing him to put out independent releases while still signed to a major label - it's the sort of creative freedom most bands crave, and while Beck isn't putting out independent records every day of the week, he does still seem to have plenty of freedom. It's heartening to see other artists enjoying the freedom to play and try out new ideas. One such example is the acclaimed LA producer Flying Lotus. Last week he dropped three new tracks on his Myspace.

According to Pitchfork, his label Warp declared them, "side-items to keep his mind from going numb while mixing" [his new album]. 

All three follow in a similar vein to the sort of trippy/psychedelic/scratchy instrumental hip hop with dashes of dub step and electro (indie-hip hop, as the kids might call it) that Flying Lotus built his reputation on with his 2008 album Los Angeles. 

One track, "I Feel Like Dying" is a particularly head-melting and spooky remix of the already doom-laden Lil Wayne song. While the other two, "Data Entry" and "Lullaby", are instrumentals. Of those, "Lullaby" with its lovely glockenspiel/music box coda stands out at the moment. Hear all three, and plenty more, on Flying Lotus' Myspace.

(Via GvsB)

(Photo: Getty)

Powerful US music industry magazine and chart compiler Billboard has launched a new website to stream live concerts. Viewers will be able to see concerts for free online with a choice of five different camera angles from which to watch from; so no more freakily tall men blocking your view of the bass player.

The first shows screening on the site are with Daughtry (I have no idea who this is), Alica Keys and Usher, with others on the way. Watch the magic happen at billboardlive.com.
 
Meanwhile further down the food chain, or perhaps on a different diet altogether Pitchfork have kicked off an interesting new video feature called "Tunnelvision". It's a sort of aggregator of an independent videographers chronicling the indie music scene across America. Low budget filmmakers/sites such as Ray Conception and Chocolate Bobka in New York, Acid Marshmellow in Chicago, and Videothing and Yours Truly in California are constantly out and about documenting the interesting music that is going on in their neighbourhoods. You can go directly to their sites, obviously, but the Pitchfork programmes provide a handy way of keeping up. One of their first episodes was with London based Euro-electro/Afro pop/rap explorers The Very Best.

I've been proselytising endlessly for Beck's revamped website (Beck.com) for quite a while now.  The standout feature on the site is his Record Club project, wherein he gathers together a collection of musicians in a studio for a day to cover a classic album in its entirity - they then put videos of the results on the site in weekly instalments. It's not always a resounding success but it's an interesting endeavour that has turned out some fine efforts along the way.

For the lastest round, Beck has assembled an all star-cast to into the studio: Wilco, Feist and Jamie Liddell. They spent a day covering Oar, the 1969 solo record by Moby Grape and Jefferson Airplane man Skip Spence. Here's the first song they produced from it, a lovely ambling, country-rocking "Little Hands."

To these ears the last Hot Chip record, Made in the Dark, was a bit of a disappointment; they seemed to run out of steam a bit after 2006's excellent The Warning. It will be interesting to see how they fare with their new record which is due in February. Can they regain the freshness they had in '06? The new album is called One Life Stand, which is a nice name, so that's a good start I suppose.

Today the band put out the first song from the album, which you can get as a free download if you splash out on a pre-order for the LP on their website. However, the song, "Take It In", is turning up around the web too - though some links will probably disappear soon enough.

I particularly like the deadpan lead vocal and the metallic electro riff that propel the song. Hopefully it augurs well for the rest of the record.

In the last few years there have been a wealth of David Byrne inspired US bands (largely Brooklyn based), such as, TV on the Radio, Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective, and Vampire Weekend, fusing experimentation, art-rock, a head for fine pop tunes, electronica, and the occasional African musical inflection or two. Though in the case the Vampire Weekend the influence comes more from Paul Simon than Mr Byrne. Yeasayer are another band that has followed in a similar path (with a nod to Peter Gabriel as well) and could be lobbed into this grouping, though they haven't quite recieved the same amount of acclaim or notice, despite their '07 debut album All Hour Cymbals being well received and containing at least one perfect pop song in "2080".

Now they return with their second album Odd Blood which is released on 10 February. The first single from the record is "Ambling Alp". It doesn't drastically alter their style from previous efforts, but has a somewhat more electro feel. While not scaling the heights of "2080", it's worth a listen nonetheless (and on my second listen it grew on me considerably), and it's a free download from Yeasayer's website - get it here.

Much as I'm enjoying the droney/shoegazey/eclectro-rocky ways of The Big Pink and their excellent debut album A Brief History of Love, I have mentioned in the past my slight fear of the dread hand of a Kasabian influence on the band's single "Dominos". It's a good song, but still, Kasabian, I hate those guys...

Anyway, Switch has remixed "Dominos" and there's certainly not a whiff of Kasabian in sight. It's fairly "banging", as the fella says, full of beats, blips and random siren like noises. Hear it below and download it from the Mad Decent site - there's also an instrumental version available there to.

 

 

Ever since Barack Obama stormed into the White House last year on the back of the slogans "hope" and "change" (ok, it wasn't just the slogans, there were a few other things), everyone has been rushing to bask in his warm glow and basically steal the slogans.

The Tories, annoyingly, hitched their wagon to "change" with their slogans "ready for change" and "vote for change"; although I've no idea where they stole that horrible green and two-tone blue colour combo from - it certainly wasn't Obama.

Now environmental campaigners have made a land drab for "hope" in advance of the big climate change bun fight in Copenhagen next month. Hopenhagen (see what they did there?) is an attempt at a global movement aiming to influence change (ahem) and forward thinking in solving the problems caused by climate change. They've got a fancy website - check it out here.

But if I'm honest, I'm not here for the sloganeering, the hopetitude or the environment, I'm here for the music. Hopenhagen has put together an ad campaign to support the cause and two of the clips have some interesting music attached involving the brilliant avant garde/experimental/new music organisation and group Bang on a Can.

The first ad, "Water Shortages", features "Believing", a dramaric composition by Julia Wolfe, one of the founders of BoaA, performed by the Bang on a Can All Stars. (Incidentally, the Bang on a Can All Stars are playing in London on Saturday night with Steve Reich - see you there!)
 

The second clip, "Carbon Emissions", uses snippets of a lovely plinking percussive piece called "So-Called Laws of Nature", composed by David Lang, fellow BoaC founder and recipient of a Pulitzer Prize last year for his work The Little Match Girl Passion.


 

 

Take that U2! The Irish pomp rockers aren't the only ones who can put a whole gig online. Granted this Wild Beasts gig was recorded in east London in August, not streamed live to millions from the Pasadena Rose Bowl, but you take what you can get... Back in early August the Kendall quartet brought their brand of sophisticated art-pop and "skylarking falsetto" to the plush surroundings of Hoxton Hall to showcase tracks from their acclaimed second album Two Dancers (and more from their first record).

In case you missed it at the time (or want to relive the magic), you can now watch the whole thing on their website... they're also giving away one track, "This Is Out Lot", as a free mp3 download. In the meantime here are two songs from the set...

"Hooting & Howling"



"All The King's Men"



*By live, I mean recorded live, not live in the all conquering U2/YouTube live way.

So Spike Jonze and Kanye West have made a short film together called "We Were Once a Fairytale"; it was made a while ago so it's not some instant reaction to Kanye's outbreak of douchebaggery at the MTV Awards a few weeks back. Although, the surreal short seems to occupy the same head space for Kanye that recent troubled times have. In fact, it could be argued that Mr West has been on something of long dark night of the soul since the death of his mother and splitting with his fiance in 2007; his album 808s & Heartbreak was a reaction to these, there's been a few tantrums in between, up to and including the aforementioned drunken Taylor Swfit intervention at the MTV awards in September. In the strange and admittedly somewhat tongue-in-cheek short film, directed by Jonze, Kanye plays a particularly inebriated and boorish version of himself on a heavy night out - with a weird twist in the tale.

Or you could say it's self indulgent twaddle. Depending on your disposition. It's definitely not Spike Jonze's best work (and hopefully not his best of 09). Either which way, it's worth a look, although I don't think I ever really needed to see Kanye's sex face...




It's not the first time the pair have worked together - the last time was a collaboration on a video for West's song "Flashing Lights". Again it had a twist at the end, but it was an infinitely superior (and shorter) effort. To me this "fairytale" seems like a darker, more twisted flip-side to "Who Says", the new video by John "good times" Mayer.

Let's be trite and startlingly obvious for a second: Africa is a pretty big place. Trying to get a handle on the immense volume of music that emanates from the continent is pretty difficult. Having all said music simply put under the tag African can be somewhat confusing given the breadth and diversity of the sounds. Trying to navigate your way through it all is hard; it's tough to know where even to start - the blog Awesome Tapes from Africa offers a handy entry point.

Granted the site is based in New York and uses the catch-all African umbrella I've already complained about, but that is where the reservations cease. The site serves as a brilliant primer to all manner of interesting music, providing easy access and insight into music that unenlightened and uninitiated folks such as I, would have struggled to find on our own.

The formula is simple: each posting on the site consists of a brief snippet of information on an African artist and a selection of streams of a bunch of their songs.

The latest post concerns Mah Kouyate no 1 and her band Samaya Djeli, purveyors of Mandingo griot music from Mali. The instrumentation, utilising an electric kora is great and her voice is a delight; at turns leathery and then beautifully delicate. I heartily recommend a listen to the five tracks posted on the site.

With our appetite whetted by the release of some LCD Soundsystem remixes and news filtering through that their new album will arrive in February/March of next year, it seems a good time to catch up with the band's grand master James Murphy (left).

In September Murphy told Mojo that the new record would have a grand queasy LA feel:

"We've been recording in a mansion... It sleeps 10 and there's an amazing pool and it felt pretty amazing... We decided, let's make Los Angeles an imaginary Los Angeles of the soul from 1973. Everyone had to wear white all the time, so it's like some sort of creepy fucking cult and we'd go to parties, 10 people in a mini-van all in white, and we'd have enough of an impact on how Los Angels operated. You leave a dent."

Which all sounds pretty good to me.

Meanwhile, last week on their Myspace Murphy had an entertaining rant. He began:

"the internet is funny. i avoided all of it for a long time because it seemed gross and lame. i mean, i fought with my label not to have a myspace page at all in the beginning because, well, because i'm old and weird and buy vinyl records and do things like write letters, and it all seemed too strange. so they made one anyway, and i avoided it."

He then went on to discuss the vagaries of various social networking sites, blogging, making the new album, art, and the glory of useless things in the face of creating a "functional" new website for the band - "i kind of like useless things. for instance—and this is a pretty facile and simplified metaphor here—art is useless, and nazis made lots of useful things. i like dumb meandering things that make me happy and confused, and don’t particularly like “effective marketing tools designed for maximum accurate data capture” blah blah blah. it all sounds so sad and functional."

Finally he concluded on personal and self-conscious notes: 
"anyway, marcus (shit robot), my friend and dfa artist, is coming over to have an espresso and a shot of tequila (not mixed) before he goes to santos to dj with the holy ghost guys. marcus has a kid, which i think is totally amazing. he’s a great dj and here to get his album done with me. lives in germany now, so just visiting. and here, on this weird thing, i can just say “marcus is coming over for an espresso” and it goes from simple, personal fact that i might tell nick from holy ghost in a text (in fact, just did) to a weird other-meaning thing that exists here... or everywhere. i’m not so used to this personal as media shit. but, on the other hand, what’s the difference really between this and a song about something personal?

oh, right. you can’t sing a blog."

Now amid all that talk comes a brand new song from Murphy and friends. It's a cover of Alan Vega's "Bye Bye Bayou", with a sleekly epic disco makeover. It's been released as a 12" vinyl on 7 November in aid of Record Store Day and then digitally on 24 November. Listen to it on the 22 Tracks site; it's damn addictive.

Is this a taste of how a new album will feel? Lord only knows, but as ever, Mr Murphy is right on the money.

(Via Pitchfork)

Photo: Getty Images

So Sonic Youth were on US television series Gossip Girl this week, which might seem strange, but at this stage the veteran New York art rockers can basically do what they want. If anyone cries "sell out!" or any other slur, they'll just shrug their shoulders nonchalantly, stare blankly, shred some guitars for a while, and generally be about 100 times cooler than anyone else around. It's just what they do. For further evidence see how they let criticism roll off their shoulders when it was announced that they were releasing a compilation album through Starbucks.

Anyway, to the show: it seems that two characters were getting married in this week's instalment of the wealthy Manhatanitte teen drama. Naturally Sonic Youth turned up as the wedding band at the shindig and, to throw a further curve ball into the mix, Kim Gordon officiated at the wedding too. The band then played a pretty sweet sounding acoustic version of "Star Power" (from their brilliant 1986 album EVOL), not that many of the characters seemed to notice... Here's the footage, it takes a while to get warmed up:



As Gawker said, "it was either the death of cool or the birth of awesome." Either way, the band probably don't care. To coincide with the appearance the band have released an official accoustic version of "Star Power" - get it here.

The band have some previous experience when it comes to appearances on American TV shows. They were on the "Homerpalooza" episode of The Simpsons, which was obviously infinitely cooler back in 1996 - they even recorded a version of the theme tune for the closing credits of the episode. But more in the teen drama sphere, they also showed up on Gilmore Girls a few years back; Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon along with their teen daughter Coco played a version of "What a Waste" for an episode that also featured Yo La Tengo and several other musicians.

As if it wasn't a productive year already for Charlotte Gainsbourg, what with all that Antichrist genital mutilation and Cannes Film Fest winning, she's also gone back into a recording studio to follow up her excellent 2006 album 5.55. The first song to emerge from it is "IRM", and it's available for free from her website.

While the last album, made with the help of Air, Jarvis Cocker and Neil Hannon, was very quiet and delicate, this one, co-written and produced by Beck, sounds like it might be a somewhat more eclectic affair. "IRM", which is also the name of the album, is mildly rambunctious (if it's possible to put those to terms together) and I like it a lot. Listen to it here. The track sounds somewhat like the sort of music Beck has been making recently and the album also features a number of his usual collaborators, including drummer Joey Waronker (last seen kicking out the jams with Thom Yorke and Flea) and Beck's father, David Campbell, who did the string arrangements.

The album isn't released until 25 January, but alongside the new song, they've made a brief preview video...

The idea of American blues-rock revivalists The Black Keys making a hip hop album is one that would normally make me, and any right thinking person, feel a little queasy. But that's exactly what they've done in a project going by the name Blakroc - the album will have the same name and will be released on a label with the same name created especially for this endeavour.

The whole thing was produced and overseen by hip hop big wig Damon Dash and features vocals contributions from some of the biggest names in rap including Mos Def, Ludacris, RZA, Raekwon, Q-Tip, and a posthumous effort from ODB; coming to 11 vocalists in total. There is whole eleven obsession going on with the album: 11 tracks, 11 vocalists, recorded in 11 days, released in November (the 11th month. Crazy!). I'm not entirely sure why, but there it is.

On their site blakroc.com are three preview videos explaining the making of the album and offering snapshot previews of the music contained therein.

Last week on NPR's All Songs Considered, they previewed the first track from it, "Ain't Nothing Like You (Hoochie Choo)" with Mos Def and Jim Jones providing the rapping vocals. Making me eat my words, it's actually pretty damn good - though perhaps not all that surprising that stomping blues and rap should fit so well together. Whether the whole albums works so well remains to be seen - we'll have to wait until the 11th month of the year to find out. Listen to "Ain't Nothing Like You..." right here:

No doubt buoyed by having their 2003 album Haha Sound place 121st in Pitchfork's "200 Best Albums of the 2000s" list, Birmingham electronic band have a new collaborative mini-album out.

Made with The Focus Group, it's called Broadcast & The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age and is available now digitally through iTunes and Bleep.com, It will come out on CD on 26 October. The album precedes a full length record which is due from Braodcast next year. There's more details of all on warp.net.

Here's one sample, "Witch Cults".



And here's a little audio trailer for the whole shebang.



By the sound of things, it stays true to Broadcast's mixing of electronica, delicate vocals, psych-pop and weird noises. The Focus Group meanwhile is Julian House, co-founder of the Ghost Box label, who specialise in "library music, English folklore and the eerie feel of vintage programmes for schools and colleges".

The two go rather well together and it sounds like a dash of the present day mixed with a strange, if natural, combination of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and some psychedelic experimentalists from the late 60s.

With a hat-tip to Nialler9

In an interview in 2003 the writer Jonathan Lethem remarked, "Who was it that said, 'All art aspires to the condition of music'? It's like the pure art. I just try to make the prose as musical as I can." Apparently it was the essayist Walter Pater (cheers Google).

As Lethem suggested, music is something that has taken a major role in his writing: from the hipster LA band at the centre of novel You Don't Love Me Yet (2007) - which he described as an attempt to write a book that felt like a three minute pop song - to the whole ambiance of his epic (and brilliant) The Fortress of Solitude (2003) which is suffused with early hip-hop, new wave, soul, funk, motown and much else in between. See also, his lengthy Rolling Stone interview with Bob Dylan in 2006.

Now Lethem has gone a step further and started a band called I'm Not Jim. In interviews, he is quick to stress that he will not be a singer or even play an instrument - in forthcoming gigs he will perform some spoken word tracks from the band's debut album You Are All My People. Chiefly Lethem is in the band to write songs with the band's co-founder Walter Salas-Humara (from the band The Silos). Last year they wrote eleven songs together with Salas-Humara recording rudimentary demos for them. They then passed their efforts on to the production duo The Elegant Too, who souped them up into a full record. Together they're a four-man band.

One track, "Stalking Horse" can be heard on Lethem's website, jonathanlethem.com, with several more streaming on their MySpace, while their LP can be purchased here -www.silos.portmerch.com.

Last week a new Sufjan Stevens CD landed on my desk; except that it wasn't entirely new - more an instrumental recreation of his 2001 electronic song cycle Enjoy Your Rabbit. But now some new Sufjan Stevens material has been doing the rounds. I noticed this posting on Drowned in Sound's Twitter feed and it's been showing all over the interweb in the last day or two. It's a video of Sufjan Stevens playing a new song at a gig in Ithaca last week. The song is called "There's Too Much Love"; weighing in at an epic seven minutes, it's a big, weird sonic stew, complete with delicate vocals, some jazz noise breakdowns and slabs of heavy guitar, and it sounds pretty cool. Someone made a decent quality video of the peformance and posted it on YouTube (you might notice that whoever was shooting it seems to take a shine to one of Stevens' pretty backing singers about half-way through and from then on spends quite a lengthy amount of time focusing on her). Here it is...

Spike Jonze's forthcoming film adaptation of Maurice Sendak's beloved children's book Where the Wild Things Are is one of the most highly anticipated films of the next few months.

In the run up to its release, Jonze, hipster children's book author Dallas Clayton and others who helped work on the film set up a website, We Love You So, to "help shed some light on many of the small influences that have converged to make this massive project a reality." Here they post information about various things that influenced the creation of the film and other tidbits relating to its release.

One such post comes from Clayton and who unearths a song from what he calls the "Kids Song Super Group". He explains further...

"A few years ago I was putting together a small kids album for my son and I asked a bunch of my friends to record some songs. As tends to happen I got about half way through before being taken away by more pressing projects. The other day I unearthed this track, which I thought might be nice to share with the world. It features a pre-Little Joy Binki Shapiro, Jason Boesel of Rilo Kiley and Mystic Valley Band fame, and James Valentine of Maroon 5 coming together to create a beautiful piece of children’s inspiration based on the Dr. Seuss classic Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?"

It's a lovely little song - a slow, sweet lullaby with a nice understated vocal from Shapiro and some cool surf guitar reverb following behind.

Click here to listen. 


Via GorillavsBear