You know those afternoons spent clicking though the suggestion videos on YouTube? It’s not always a waste of time. It’s how I came across Chelsea Wolfe, an American-singer songwriter from Sacramento. Using pedals and other effects to create her intense, elemental sound, she has already caught the attention of critics at The Guardian, LA Times, Pitchfork, I-D and Nylon Magazine. She also performed at this years SXSW festival in Austin. Now signed to Sargent House Records, Wolfe and her eponymous band are about to release their first album, A Collection of Acoustic Songs, for the label Unknown Rooms.

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Originally from Flower Mound, Texas, but now based in Oklahoma City, Horse Thief has been wowing audiences south of America’s Manson-Nixon line with rock that’s as much psycho as psychedelic. They’ve been described as the ‘next Kings of Leon’ – another Oklahoma band – but after electrifying perfomances at 35 Conferette and this year’s SXSW festival, they’ve earned a cadre of their own fanatical fans across the country. Horse Thief’s songs are edgy and emotionally compelling. ‘It’s about losing yourself in the sound and creating an experience that sticks with you long after the show is over’, says frontman Cameron Neal. Australian audiences will be able to judge for themselves with the imminent release of Horse Thief’s debut album, Grow Deep, Grow Wild.

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If you’ve always wanted to visit Toronto, but never really had a reason to go, now’s the time to head north by northeast, in more ways than one. The so-called little brother to SXSW, NXNE is a full week’s worth of nonstop live indie bands, film programs, and much less attitude than many other music-fueled juggernauts. Happening from June 11-17, NXNE also overlaps with LuminaTO, another Toronto-based arts festival that focuses on the latest creativity coming from the biggest city in Canada.

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You may know Jeff Berner as the enigmatic guitarist from Psychic TV, recently gracing the stages at SXSW and the Adelaide Festival. But did you also know he’s a Producer/Engineer at GaluminumFoil Studios in Bushwick, Brooklyn? Berner has recently worked on the latest records by Naam, Heliotropes, Dead Stars, La Otracina, and Psychic TV. You’re next!

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I love the cinematic vistas that Australian band The Black Ryder evoke, as well as the ravishing beauty of Aimee Nash and her sultry vocals. They are currently working on their second album, and judging by their recent performances at the SXSW festival, they are on to something magnificent. [Read a Secret Playlist by The Black Ryder]

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I saw this documentary short at this year’s SXSW festival in Austin and was captivated by the simple storyline, so elegantly and beautifully related. The premise is simple: ‘the butchiest prisoners in Scotland cutting the hair of fellow inmates inside some of the toughest jails in the country? Your chance to experience first hand the lead up to the annual prison hairdressing competition in Scotland’s prisons’.

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Secret Walls made its way to Austin and the recent SXSW festival. Mirgun Akyavas of Austinspace caught the street graphics competition as they exploded during the three days and two nights of live art battles with Jon Burgerman, Bridge Stehli, Kev Bee, Dan Leo, Lamour Supreme, Joshua Sutterby (aka Alfa), Fel3000ft, and Smug.

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Citadel, a movie filmed in Scotland by director Ciarán Foy, makes its world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival this weekend. The awesome poster for it makes use of ‘the revolutionary new Aurasma app‘. How does it work? Simple: ‘just hold your Android up to the poster and it will reveal exclusive clips from the film’. Score.

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Roll on Bass Culture at SXSW. It’s all about celebrating the influence of reggae on British music as Natty, Little Roy, Rasites, Lady Leshurr, BBC 1Xtra’s Robbo Ranx and more hit the road. The first stop is the world famous and strong contender for my favourite gathering of all time: the SXSW festival in Austin.

I get to host the gig, and with my production partner Jnr.Tubby, will showcase our new ElectroBashy sound as Orange Hill Productions for the first time outside the UK. This showcase is not to be missed, so if you’re going to be at SXSW this year, head out to The Driskell Hotel’s Victorian Room on Friday March 16 at 8pm. A panel discussion all about Bass Culture will be held the following day.

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Having blown away the recent SXSW Music Festival in Austin, two weeks ago, London-based electro-pop trio Chew Lips now have a new album to drive. Unicorn was produced by Dave Kosten (Bat for Lashes) and features impeccably-executed guitar pop that veers from grinding electro-grooves to fevered howls of beat-heavy R&B, all reflected in the first single, the popjestic, Karen.

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Don’t be fooled: The Middle East actually hail from Queensland, Australia, where their mini-album, The Recordings Of The Middle East, was originally self released 2008 before the always hip record label Spunk re-issued it with new packaging and a new tracklisting in 2009. Next up for the band are their first shows ever on American soil at this year’s SXSW Music Festival in Austin in March.
[audio:http://get.mysw.ag/private/the_middle_east/blood.mp3]

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Earlier this month, a screening of Garbage Dreams (the directorial debut of Egyptian American documentary filmmaker Mai Iskander) made its way into the SXSW film festival. The documentary, filmed over three years, follows the lives of three young men who live in a suburb of Cairo called Mokattam, which is known for its residents living among tall piles of garbage. Mokattam is home of the Zabballeen, a Christian minority group of around 60,000 who have served the city of Cairo as garbage collectors for 150 years. And although Cairo’s government has finally begun paying these collectors a nominal fee for their service, it has not always been this way. Mokattam’s young garbage collectors are known for being the most efficient in the world, reusing and recycling between 80 and 90 percent of what they collect, but their way of life is rapidly diminishing — the government has been trying since the late 1980s to replace them with modern European waste collection.

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Welcome to the first issue of Lost At E Minor’s new email publication — My Secret Playlist — a weekly peak inside the MP3 collections of some of our favourite musicians, bands, and producers, giving us a rundown on their eight favourite songs or albums right now. For the first issue, we have a wickedly talented and creative producer and DJ. It’s, wait for it, just a little longer, nearly there. Ok, it’s Moby, from some otherworldly universe

John Lee Hooker / I Hated The Day I Was Born
‘If I could sing, I’d love to sing like John Lee Hooker. Him or David Bowie. I don’t have a beautiful singing voice, so I really appreciate the deep and gravelly voice that Hooker possesses. I really like everything about John Lee Hooker’s music. I’m a big fan of old blues anyway, especially music from the pre-war era. It was so much simpler back in the day. You plugged in and you played. Studios are like instruments now. This song is one of my all-time favorites. “I love depressing music”: that was a quote in my high school yearbook’.

Pantera / Great Southern Trendkill
‘Not a week goes by when I don’t listen to a Pantera album. I grew up playing in punk rock crossover bands and I love the complete lack of subtlety about Pantera’s music; the precision of it. Pantera staked this territory early on and just got nastier as they went along. War Nerve has to have the nastiest lyrics ever written. If the Devil wrote lyrics, it would be War Nerve’.

Donna Summer / I Feel Love
‘This is the best electronic club song ever recorded. It breaks my heart to know that I’ll never write anything as good as I Feel Love. I always play it when I DJ, though not the remixes; the original version. I never play remixes. I saw Donna Summer perform once and I went backstage afterwards to say hello, terribly drunk and stumbling about. She was polite and friendly, but she must have been horrified at the sight of this scruffy drunk accosting her after her show. I found out later that she was a tea drinking Christian’.

The Gun Club / Miami
‘I listen to this album constantly. It’s one of those records that I play in my iTunes when riding the subways or walking around Manhattan. One of my great regrets in life is that I didn’t see The Gun Club play back in the day. During the early 1980s, I used to hang out at a bar in Connecticut called Pogos where I’d see so many amazing bands, but I missed these guys. Their first two albums are the best records ever made, in my opinion’.

TV On The Radio / Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes
‘Over the past eight years there has been so much good music coming out of New York. And these guys are the best of them. Their approach to music is so original and unique. Staring at the Sun in particular is really, really distinctive. In terms of New York music, I can’t hear much difference between Manhattan and Brooklyn bands because there are no Manhattan bands! Very few musicians can afford to live in the city these days’.

Suicide / The Second Album
‘This is one of the best and most inspiring albums ever made. It comes with a bizarre passion and emotion, which is interesting as it’s just a duo with a drum machine and organ. I’m a huge Suicide fan and this album is deserving of all the love and attention it gets. I remember buying it as a teenager, working a series of odd job to earn enough money to spend on records. I even worked in a vinyl store once, though it didn’t stock the sort of music I was into and actually morphed into a drug den during my time there’.

Kudu / Death of the Party
‘I first saw Kudu play at a bar in New York, a tiny dance club that always has good music. The singer in this group actually sings on the first song (Ooh Yeah) on my new album. When I stumbled in on this particular night, I was floored! Kudu create mutant dance music, similar to Liquid Liquid. It’s very atmospheric. They would like to have a larger audience, but A&R people don’t know what to do with them’.

X / Los Angeles
‘I’ve always loved X. Their first three albums are amazing. I got to introduce them at the recent SXSW festival, which was one of the greatest moments of my life. I met Lou Reed there too, which was fun. The X show was so good! It brought tears to my eyes. I never got to see them play back in my youth, so this felt like karma was repaying me some, and more. For what, I’m not sure. But it was an unforgettable experience’.

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The Midi Music Festival is sorta like the SXSW of Beijing, where bands from all over the country gather each year to rock out. Beijing-based photojournalist Doug Kanter did a series of portraits of concert-goers at Midi last year that is pretty fun.

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N.E.R.D have been in the studio recording the follow-up to 2004’s Fly or Die. Pharrell says the new album is called Seeing Sounds and is set to be released June 10. They released a new song titled Everyone Nose on their Billionaire Boys Club blog on January 22 that was confirmed at SXSW to be the first single from the album. From April to June, the band will tour with Kanye West as an opening act along with Rihanna and Lupe Fiasco as part of the Glow in the Dark Tour. They have been confirmed to play the 2008 Isle of Wight festival on June 13, 2008, as special guests to the Kaiser Chiefs. They have also been confirmed to play on the Projekt Revolutions UK show at Milton Keynes Bowl supporting the two headliners, Linkin Park and Jay-Z.

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So I just got back from SXSW, and what a blast! SXSW is one of the most hectic, insane three day parties your kidneys could ever endure. It’s so messed up that even the most messed people up think it’s messed up! It’s one of those festivals that comes at you from all angles — parties day and night, free drinks and food everywhere you look, and constant impromptu parties at one minutes notice. Some of my highlights include witnessing Justice alongside 200 people in a crammed room drunk off my head at the infamous Playboy party, chatting up a playboy bunny, and ending up in a hot tub with buzz band MGMT at 7am at their hotel — all in one night! Then there was the adventure of heading to a farmyard party in ‘Hicksville’, on the outskirts of Austin; watching Spank Rock perform on a ten storey building rooftop at 2am at the Nylon party; bumping into ZZ Top by accident; getting caught up in the revelry of a show by some unknown band that moved itself from the stage inside the venue Emo’s out onto the street; sneaking into a wine tasting party which served up some of the most orgasmic food on offer whilst watching an intimate set by Erika Wennerstrom — the next Emmylou Harris; witnessing one of the most intense politically charged hip hop shows by unknown Mississippi rising star David Banner at the Fader/Levis Fort; and watching Pharell Williams of N.E.R.D rip it up with a ten man band. Phew!

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We featured red hot Brooklyn band Yeasayer on Lost At E Minor a few months back, so we thought it was time we checked in with keyboardist-sampler, Chris Keating. There’s a flurry of bands emerging from Brooklyn who are crafting some of the finest music around at the moment. What is it about the area that fuels this creativity? ‘Brooklyn is just a giant neighborhood where many different creative people have come and decided for some reason or another to try and make a home. New York’s proximity to many other major cities and cultural centres as well as its abundance of musical venues and opportunities seems to draw a lot of interesting people and plenty of herbs as well’. It’s claimed in reviews and biogs that you shot to prominence largely because of a live performance at SXSW festival. Did this make you nervous about how your record would be received coming out of a stereo? ‘I don’t really know that this is true. There weren’t very many people at either of our SXSW shows and we toured twice after that without very many people coming to our shows. Our record is what got us any attention in the first place’. Songs like 2080 sound like a party until your ears tune into the near-apocalyptic lyrics. What’s the deal here, are you anticipating the end with big drums and duelling guitars? ‘With so many politicians preaching end-timer ideologies the only option we have is to dance frantically on the titanic’. A number of this year’s most promising bands, including you, borrow from — or even base their music on — indigenous sounds from far flung countries. Why is this becoming such a fad? ‘We just draw on any sounds that inspire us at the time. I feel like we draw more inspiration from David Bowie or A Tribe Called Quest than indigenous sounds but we are happy to pilfer any sonic textures that are exciting to us at any given moment’. Is the ‘Middle Eastern-psych-snap-gospel’ genre you’ve coined a way of avoiding being pigeon-holed into a mainstream category? ‘That’s just something we wrote for MySpace. I wouldn’t mind someone coming up with something better. Maybe Disco-Rock?’

Listen to the Yeasayer song, Wait for the summer.

[audio:http://lablogo.free.fr/julien/yeasayer-waitforthesummer.mp3]

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Melbourne duo Children Collide are a restless shake of indie pop, all skewered melodies over tapering, restless basslines. We recently exchanged emails with singer and guitarist Johnny. How do you feel the Australian music scene is going at the moment? It tends to go through troughs and peaks. Which is it in now? ‘Hard one to answer really. There are a lot of amazing bands around at the moment. However, it is a weird time with a very tentative music industry not always willing to take chances; and most interesting music is seen to be a risk. By that I mean that anything decent is going to be slightly original and hence slightly untried and unpredictable in it’s appeal. So I’d say it’s in a creative peak but a slump as far as industry faith and support is concerned’.

Is life on the road: a) fun b) tiring c) dirty d) noisy e) all of the above? ‘Well, all of the above and more. Fun cos you’re playing music and partying every night. Tiring cos you don’t sleep much when you share a room with two snorers. Dirty cos you never get to wash your clothes. Noisy… see (b) tiring and add bars, nightclubs and drunk people’.

Tell us briefly about the most memorable live show that Children Collide have played. ‘For the audience, probably the ones we can’t remember. For me personally, it’s a toss up between The Great Escape festival in Sydney a couple of weeks back, mainly due to the amazing energy of the audience and a warehouse party we played last year. I’d love to do more warehouse parties. The Flying Nun showcase at SXSW was also pretty memorable’.

How many children does it take to change an amp valve? ‘Ummmm…..Carlton Draught?’

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The John Lennon educational tour bus ‘is a non-profit, mobile recording studio outfitted with traditional musical instruments’, along with a swag of recording gear assembled in front and rear studios. Along with stopping by at festivals and events such as the recent SXSW, the tour bus has provided countless free services to schools and organisations and ‘encourages students to play music, write songs, engineer recording sessions and produce music video projects using the latest audio, video, and live sound equipment’. Kids these days – they’ve got it all, huh?

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French dub group, Zenzile, were one the stars of the recent South By South West music festival held in Austin, Texas — their irrascible hybrid of beats and upbeat, funky basslines a pleasant relief from the plethora of indie-guitar bands that seem to dominate the radio airwaves these days. The SXSW website describes them as a musically adventurous band suggesting that they ‘perpetually renovate their music by refining and always looking for new sounds. They explore the dub universe without rest, offering the freedom of original dub, revealing its real nature of its origine. But Zenzile is still a rock band … child of Clash and Ruts, of course, but maybe also little brother of Sonic Youth and Fugazy’. And having heard their debut album – Modus Vivendi – that’s probably a fair description. Thanks to the good folk at Shock Records we have ten CDs to give away to random emailers with their address and their favourite French treat in the body of the message. Croissants are out of the equation. Too damn flakey

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