New Music
New Music / Yonlu’s hidden recordings
April 28, 2009 | New Music | 
by Ari Stein |
One of the most intriguing stories I’ve come across this year is about a young artist called Yonlu, born Vinicius Gageiro Marques in the town of Porto Alegre, in Brazil. His story is short but fascinating. As it goes, this sixteen year old songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and virtual artist locked himself in his bathroom, signed on to one of the various suicide forums he belonged to on the Internet, and took his own life, remaining online until the very end. After his death, his father went through his computer and found numerous musical creations, including the songs that make up his debut album through Luaka Bop. It’s an amazing listen and very ahead of its time.
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New Music / Black Pus
April 27, 2009 | New Music | by Gerry Mak |
With his solo project, Black Pus, Lightning Bolt drummer Brian Chippendale continues to pound out muscular, unrelenting, ear-shredding thrash noise. Using pedal-triggered feedback and electronics, harsher vocals, and occasionally a saxophone, the by now iconic Chippendale does not disappoint fans of his earlier work, as the packed crowd at Tarantula Hill in Baltimore proved the other night — even after an hour-long set and an ambulance showing up, people were grinning ear-to-ear, sweaty and panting from crazed dancing.
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New Music / YMCK
April 24, 2009 | New Music | by Gerry Mak 
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On dark, gloomy days, I usually listen to dark, gloomy music like Skepticism or Evoken. Sad music cheers me up when I’m sad, and doom metal cheers me up when it’s rainy and gross outside. The other day, it was wet and overcast all day, but I decided to mix things up by putting on Japanese chiptune pop band YMCK. The cat I live with immediately started purring and rubbing himself against the computer speakers. I guess all the sugary-sweet beeps, boops, and harmonies made him fall in love with my laptop. It made me smile, but I think if I listened to anything that happy on a sunny day my pancreas might explode.
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New Music / Brown Wing Overdrive
April 23, 2009 | New Music | by Gerry Mak |
Last week, I saw Brown Wing Overdrive open for Black Pus (the solo project of Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale). The band — which formed in DC and relocated to NYC — uses electronics, found objects, banjos, duck calls, jaw harps, and whatever else they can get their hands on to make jerky, syncopated, yelpy noise. At times, referencing shamanistic traditions, at others drawing from kabuki, the band doesn’t quite sound like anyone else on their label, Tzadik. I wish more experimental bands would play around with vocals the way these guys do.
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New Music / The bands Plants & Animals are listening to
April 23, 2009 | New Music | by Zolton |
We asked Matthew ‘Woody’ Woodley, drummer and vocalist with Montreal group, Plants & Animals, which bands he thinks are doing interesting things right now and he gave us the following list: ‘Grizzly Bear, Malajube, Yeasayer, Metro League and the guys in the Patrick Watson band’. To read about Woody’s favorite songs right now, check out his recent Secret Playlist.
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New Music / Mistress Stephanie & Her Melodic Cat
April 20, 2009 | New Music | by Casper Johansson |
Mistress Stephanie & Her Melodic Cat is the naughty brainchild of Stephanie Stephens and Adam Sultan, two musicians and actors and from Austin, Texas. Initially a cabaret act influenced by Weimar Republic Berlin, Mistress Stephanie & Her Melodic Cat soon expanded into what one critic calls ‘Sado-vaudevillian punk’. Their diverse sound combines everything from classical music to classic rock, performed with outrageous style and irreverent humor that touches on half a century’s worth of history. Their debut CD, Take That!, ranges along the German countryside from Marlene Deitrich to Kraftwerk, then crosses the border into Eurotrash dance, punk rock theater, and even Texas swing.
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New Music / Crazy Dreams Band
April 17, 2009 | New Music | by Gerry Mak |
Lexie Mountain of the Lexie Mountain Boys has another band that actually consists of boys. Crazy Dreams Band features Mountain belting out deep, howling, bluesy vocals over dissonant synths, guitar, bass, and drums that often devolve into improvised, exorcistic noise. The band lays down grooves and lets them linger as they begin to shatter, explode, and cycle into an apocalyptic cacophony, providing a perfectly horrific backdrop to Mountain’s gospel-inspired spirit-channeling.
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New Music / Pocahaunted
April 16, 2009 | New Music | by Gerry Mak |
Pocahaunted are the pinnacle of the whole tribal, Native American-inspired, abstract, psychedelic thing that’s going on right now. The prolific duo once referred to themselves as “the Olsen twins of blissed-out drone” and have released tape after tape of ambient, hallucinatory weirdness that seems aimed at hastening the return of Quetzaquatl. Despite their tongue-in-cheek band name, Bethany Consentino and Amanda Brown compose brooding, challenging music that draws inspiration from darker, more ancient sources than Western pop and folk.
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New Music / Extra Golden
April 15, 2009 | New Music | by Gerry Mak |
I got to check out Extra Golden the other night at the Floristree in the H & H Building in downtown Baltimore. Despite a bill of heady, contemplative, experimental music that preceded the DC-based band, the crowd was chomping at the bit to see them when they finally hit the stage well past 1am. It’s still cold and rainy here in Charm City, but these guys made it feel like summer with their sunny blend of Kenyan benga music and guitar-driven psych rock.
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New Music / Lexie Mountain Boys
April 14, 2009 | New Music | by Zolton |
Lexie Mountain Boys are another interesting act I got to check out at the Transmodern Festival. The five women who make up the group never sound the same twice, making a cappella, improvised, stomp-and-holler chants inspired by everything from Inuit throat-singing, Sacred Harp singing, to backwoods preachers speaking in tongues. For their performance this weekend, they dressed all in white and stood in front of a screen on which they projected a video of scary, clown-like faces with their eyes and mouths green-screened out.
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New Music / Eat Skull
April 13, 2009 | New Music | by Gerry Mak |
Once upon a time, sloppy, out-of-tune, marginally talented basement bands with limited resources had little hope of making a dent in the music scene, local or otherwise. These days, those kinds of bands are among the most interesting and talked about, as Portland’s Eat Skull prove. The four piece plays drunken, chaotic, blown-out songs that sound like karaoke versions of pop and psych classics blasted through Marshall stacks.
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New Music / Child Bride
April 10, 2009 | New Music | by Gerry Mak |
One-woman noise act Child Bride makes droning, ambient, sample-laden, tribal noise that sounds like a pagan cyber-witch mourning the death of her shaman.
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New Music / Soft Circle
April 9, 2009 | New Music | by Gerry Mak |
One of the best bands I got to check out this weekend at Transmodern Festival was Soft Circle, the solo project of one-time Lightning Bolt and Black Dice member Hisham Bharoocha. Using looping effects, a drum kit, a guitar, and a rhythm composer to generate every component of his songs live, Bharoocha pounds out joyous, gorgeously epic, percussive songs that seem like some weird nexus of post-metal and late-era Genesis with occasional African beats. The rest of the bill had been more heady, contemplative, experimental acts, but the NYC-based one-man band had the whole room pushing aside the chairs that had been provided to dance.
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New Music / Angus Stone’s Smoking Gun solo album
April 8, 2009 | New Music | by Zolton |
On Smoking Gun, Angus Stone’s wistful, soulful voice sits triumphantly above a rootsy bed of instrumentation. From here, it rarely loosens, instead finding a comfortable middle-ground amongst this debut solo album’s surprisingly upbeat and bluesy tone. Recording under the name, Lady of the Sunshine, the other half of brother and sister duo, Angus and Julia Stone, steps away from their highly organic folk ballads and veers instead into a edgier fusion of acoustic roots, blues and funk, the typically sweet serenades tossed, stirred and spun, then spat out the other end, lyrically pricklier, but still infused with their trademark earthy arrangements. While it lacks a killer blow, Smoking Gun is a real grower, sounding just that little bit sweeter with every new listen. [photo via BBC]
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New Music / Jana Hunter
April 7, 2009 | New Music | by Gerry Mak |
Although Baltimore shoe-gaze crooner Jana Hunter appears on a split with perennial freak-folker Devendra Banhart, her music has none of the juvenile hippieisms on which Natalie Portman’s one-time beau has built his career. Hunter’s sound is more contemplative and at times remote, even her major-key pop-folk tracks dripping with melancholy. This is not to say her music is depressive, and the darkness she expresses is tinged with something sinister and knowing. Live, the diminutive guitarist/singer is the epitome of no-frills, with bassist Geoff Graham providing backing vocals and drummer Abe Sanders playing steady and sparse beats on his pared-down kit.
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Check out Mike Stimpson’s Lego reinterpretations of classic photographs. Stimpson’s version of Malcolm Browne’s iconic 1963 photograph of the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc is particularly twisted. Read more
Project Squadt’s latest skull-masked collectible figure is already sold out, but it’s worth taking a look at their site to be ready when they unveil the next one. I’m not much of a toy-freak, but these are still pretty nifty.
Yes, Cuteoverload has been doing it for years, but can there really be too many sites devoted to cute animals? Fuck Yeah Puppies may not be original, but they have puppies. Lots and lots of puppies.
It’s only fitting a band of Canadian rootsters like this would tap a mythical figure of folklore for their namesake. Indeed, Ottawa’s The John Henrys understand the power of the familiar. Read more
The strategy based architectural firm Popular Architecture has created a scheme that takes on the spread of cities. Based on the estimation that London will need to provide housing for 100,000 new people each year up until 2016, this building houses 100,000 in one hit. Read more
Oh man, this is good. If Jamie Lidell was born in any earlier era, he would have soul brother number one plastered all over his birth certificate.
Ok, so I’m speaking from first-hand perspective here because as I type on this warm morning, with the faintest slither of sun creeping its way through the privacy blinds in my living room, I’m wearing the very same t shirt that the dude in this photo is wearing. Yup, the same damn one. Perhaps I’m not looking quite as groomed as he is, but hey, it’s a start. Australian fashion label Das Monk is my new favourite t shirt label and this t shirt is more comfortable to wear that a thousand pairs of Ozone socks. Das Monk? Yes it is.
WE'RE RESPECTING
WE'RE POSTING / SOME OF THE BEST
German painter Armin Rohr’s works look like stills from Stan Brakhage films, all acid-washed, scratched out, and ethereal like a sudden flood of memories. Read more
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
I live the upbeat, feel good tempo of the new single — A Hundred Hearts — from Philly group, The Swimmers. Off their latest album, People Are Soft, this song is a strangely fitting anthem for the blustery day outside.
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Diane Koss’ recycled bottle monsters
Check out Diane Koss’ amazing handmade stuffed monsters if you’re looking for a last-minute gift. Her mostly cycloptic creatures are fashioned from felt made from one hundred percent recycled plastic bottles. Read more
Scanners’ new single Salvation
I love this track by London based rock group, Scanners, which is off their latest album, Submarine. Having toured with acts such as The Horrors, The Wedding Present, The Charlatans, Electric Six, and Juliette & The Licks, Scanners could well blow up in 2010. Figuratively speaking, not literally. No, that wouldn’t be fun.
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Warning at Work is a silkscreen mini-print from Sussex based illustrator Andy Smith which comes in a limited edition of just 50. Dimensions are 20cm x 15cm. We have them available through the Lost At E Minor store. Read more
We’ve just updated the Lost At E Minor iPhone app in the iTunes store with some new features. It’s a daily snapshot of the latest content from the site. You can download it now. Win? Well, it’s free. So you win, we win. Snap!
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