
Bon Iver
When this scruffy fellow opens his gob, something high and mighty emanates. His music is great for long drives, in cold places and long nights in warm places. We speak of Bon Iver, who we interviewed recently. No frills, just acoustics and gentle melodies. Your music is beautiful. Yet there’s a dark undercurrent to it, in the minor key chord changes in particular. Is there really such thing as a good happy song? ‘I think there is joy in a sad song: the alleviation. The pain being instantaneously discovered, and pushed out. It gives a sense of welling up. I think the firing in the brain for emotions, all happen in pathways nearby, or the same tracks or something, because they seem so eerily similar’. ‘Good Winter’: does this speak for your appreciation of the colder climes? Or is it a passing reference to one winter in particular? ‘It’s more about the sacred quality of winter for me, in general. Every season, every first snow. Every center of winter’. I like the double tracked vocals on the album — very John Lennony. Is it hard to get that falsetto up there without it? ‘The double vocals were a way to mask ego, I think, on the record and the vocals. I could be expressive without being so obtuse’. If you were to play us a cover song right now, on your acoustic, what would it be and could we sing backing vocals? ‘Umbrella, by Rhiana or Bleeding Love, by Leonna Lewis. You pick. I would love to have a choir behind me’.
Tagged: folk music, pop music
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Findlay Brown’s Love You Will Find You
A former bare-knuckle boxer from Yorkshire, England (for real), Findlay Brown was heralded by many as the UK’s answer to Jose Gonzales when his debut album, Separated By The Sea, was released on Peacefrog Records in 2007. Love Will Find You moves beyond his earlier folk sound to a more ambitious — and soulful — place. Produced by Bernard Butler (Suede), the album features songs that are lush and intimate, influenced as much by Phil Spector and Ennio Morricone as by Roy Orbison or The Beatles. The album came together while Brown was stuck on his sister’s couch nursing a broken leg, having been run over by a cab driver: ‘I’d already started going back and listening to a lot of records I’d grown up on, like Elvis Presley, soul music, doo wop, Phil Spector, The Righteous Brothers and the like. I had an idea about making a modern record influenced by the songwriting of the late 50s and early 60s. I just started writing, trying to work out what made a universally great song, like Stand By Me. These new songs are the first part of that process’. You can download his new single, Holding Back The Night, for free in our Music Download section.
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Also by JULIA HENNOCK

The tightly-wound compact fluorescent light bulbs we’ve welcomed into our homes have a little sister. Plumen is low-energy, yet she’s trendy, twisted and a designer’s dream. Not yet in production, you can see Plumen hanging alone in MOMA.

Fancy a fern in the face? The Sky Planter will fulfill your greenest fantasies. It is designed to conserve water, save floor space and puzzle visitors. An internal reservoir system to feeds water directly to the roots, so no water evaporates or drips. And somehow the soil is ‘locked in’. Woo!

A brick of any other kind would look as sweet, believes artist Jan Vormann. She began filling crumbling walls with multi-coloured Lego bricks in Bocchignano, a little village close to Rome, and was then invited to continue her rainbow reparations in Tel Aviv and Yaffo. Beautiful appropriation or ugly sacrilege?
YOU'RE SAYING (3)
Ajo Mike said | 26 June, 2008
Forever Emma, Forever Ago is the best album of the year. Possibly the best album of the decade.
Mike said | 6 December, 2008
Great article on Bon Iver here:
http://volumeone.org/magazine/articles/280/JUSTIN_VERNON_br_Anywhere_from_Here.html
HAVE YOUR SAY
Wow, here’s some work that just made my Friday all the sweeter. Finnish artist Ville Savimaa creates the most clean, beautiful, and bizarre images, filled with chunky, abstract characters and creatures, as if viewed through an old fashioned grainy, black and white lens. It feels a lot like the trippiest noir film you never saw. Even when colour occasionally comes into the mix, Savimaa manages to gracefully maintain that sculptural sensibility, leaving the viewer feeling as suspended as the characters themselves. Read more
Given the amount of talent he has, it’s a mystery why German producer Pantha Du Prince not received more attention than he has. His minimal tech soundscapes are surprisingly melodic and moody, as reflected on his epic track, Asha, as good a starting point to the music of this German electro whiz as any.
Miwa Yanagi’s Fairytale series consists of very creepy photographic interpretations of classic Western fairytales. Read more
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, or ‘Le Corbusier’ is considered by many to be the most influential architect of the twentieth century. His designs are responsible for urban structures around the world, from the grid-city of Chandigarh in India to London’s Barbican Centre, which is currently hosting an exhibition of his work. But to peg him as an architect overlooks an awe-inspiring body of work that also takes in art, literature and even a new system of measurement. With this display, the first serious UK solo exhibition of his work for twenty years, we can finally appreciate the scale of his contributions.
I spent the formative first six years of my life in Wellington, New Zealand, a beautiful windswept city framed by a magnificent harbour in one direction and a stunning collection of green, rolling hills in the other. It was here, on a return visit many years later and deep amongst the clipped accents and ruddy faces of the weather-beaten locals, that I stumbled upon the vast catalogue of the then Dunedin based record label Flying Nun. And what a roster of acts they housed — The Chills, The Bats, The Clean, Tall Dwarfs, The Verlaines, and my favourite guitar-pop band, Straitjacket Fits. Read more
It’s all about juxtaposition for the fashion duo Anzevino & Florence. With William Anzevino hailing from the East Coast and Richard Florence from West, they find inspiration in opposing forces. Who else could find commonality between Warhol and Thoreau? Read more
Fans of Australian buzzsaw rock trio, The Vines, might like to check out our sister site, My Secret Playlist, where drummer Hamish Rosser has written about eight songs he’s digging right now. There’s some interesting choices in there including The Strokes, James Brown, and, gulp, Joan Jett.
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Our celebrity-saturated culture makes many of us irrationally hateful of the faces we see on our TV screens and magazine pages. Good thing there’s Celebrity PunchOut to let off some of that steam.

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Almanac Market in Philadelphia is slightly pricey, but you definitely get what you pay for. Offering fantastic bread, cheeses, produce, and cured meats such as sopressata and pepperoni, it was a great pit stop when my band played in town, and definitely more economical and tasty than hitting a greasy spoon for road snacks.

Good thing Kris Kuksi channelled the trauma of growing up with an alcoholic stepfather, his disdain for ‘the typical American life and pop culture’, and his fascination with the macabre into obsessive, baroque assemblages, paintings, and drawings. Read more

With the recession still biting, it may be time to whip out the glue and the cardboard and make your next pair of cool kicks. Don’t know how they’d manage in the rain though? Read more
Wolfmother. Rock n roll. Mystical lyrics. Heavy riffs. They have a new album out, Cosmic Egg, and we have five copies to giveaway, along with their debut album. To enter, tell us your favorite Wolfmother song and the city you live in. Yo! Two fingered salute. Read more
Your enemies can always be counted upon to be just that. Unfortunately, your friends sometimes cannot.
Created by graphic-tee fashion label, the-affair, and printed on beautifully soft American Apparel in a limited edition of 200. Purchase now. Read more
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Francis said | 18 June, 2008
this guy’s album is AWESOME, nothing more, nothing less…