Holiday for Strings is a 5 piece band featuring John from Peter, Bjorn and John, and Pony from Thieves Like Us. The fabulously named Swedish-group is back with an awesome new single and video.

The song Unwilling/Not Able is the breeze in your hair when you’re driving along a forested coast in your convertible. It’s the cooling, artificial mist sprayed over that secret patio of a Manhattan bar on a boiling August night. And you can smoke weed out there too! The video was directed by Sweden’s new wonder kid, Daniel Eskils, who took time off from shooting music videos for Caribou, Boys Noize and commercials for Hermes, to go road tripping, at airports.

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Though he may now be known mainly for his instrumental scores for shows like Family Guy and The Cleveland Show, Walter Murphy had his first bout with fame back in the 70s.

Released at the peak of the disco era, A Fifth of Beethoven combines the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C Minor with a disco beat that made this song one of the genre’s most popular dance classics. But don’t be fooled: The Big Apple Band is Murphy himself. Despite the fact that Murphy played most of the instruments featured on the track, the record company felt the illusion of a band would be more marketable.

We’re not shy about our love of all things 80s, and Goldfrapp’s Rocket clip has taken us right back to a cloudy pastel world of big hair, synth optimism and glittering disco. We might just stay here for a while. Who’s in?

Most of us know eating a balanced diet helps maintain a healthy heart, and that there’s nothing better than a romantic ballad to nourish blossoming love. But did you know blasting Beethoven might also help to keep your cardiovascular system in tune? New research suggests that music can directly trigger physiological changes that modulate blood pressure, heart rate, and respiration. I’m definitely breathless after listening to Cyndi Lauper’s I Drove All Night, but that might be from dancing my rigorous jazz ballet routine, not necessarily from the emotion it engenders.

Researchers have found that the continuous, and somewhat predictable changes in the cardiovascular and respiratory systems, mirror musical tempo. They suggest that understanding the mechanisms of how certain types of music affect our physiology could lead to potential new therapies for stroke and other conditions – many already attest to the healing powers of Jimmy Page’s guitar solos, or the Raconteur’s legendary riffs.

According to an article in Scientific American, “Scientists found that musical selections with crescendos, especially those with a series of them (think: Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody), led to proportional constriction of blood vessels and increases in blood pressure, heart rate and respiration. These measures decreased during decrescendos and silent periods. The team also found that “rich” music phrases around 10 seconds long, like those rhythms from famous arias by Verdi, caused heart rate and other parts of the cardiovascular system to synchronize with the music. Both groups experienced this entrainment, although musicians showed a stronger response.”

Of course, this paper provides further evidence that it’s always a BAD idea to listen to overly lugubrious songs about love lost after a break-up – there’s finally proof that the physical pain you felt when you’re heart was breaking wasn’t entirely made up.

Luckily, I have the perfect recipe to keep my heart pumping to the right beat – My Secret Playlist. Discover what tracks get your favorite musician’s heart started. Donna Summers loves Ferggie’s Big Girls Don’t Cry – for those of you who thought musicians only listen to their own genre, get ready to eat your heart out (while still maintaining good cardiovascular rhythms, of course).

On our sister site, My Secret Playlist, we invite our favorite musicians, DJs and producers to write about eight songs that are inspiring them right now. You can hear some of the tunes that the artists select and discover a whole heap of cool music along the way. Some of the musicians to compile a Secret Playlist so far include The Dandy Warhols, The B52s, Donna Summer (disco, baby), Girl Talk, Cold War Kids, Moby, The Presets and The Vines.

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Lindstrom, the man who single-handedly coined the term ‘minimal space-disco’ (well, perhaps nudged in the right direction by Orbital et al), recently released a new, rather ambitious, album, Where You Go I Go Too. Weaving between ambient trance and breakbeat-flecked disco, the producer responsible for the mesmerizing reworking of that tune we all secretly love, Roxy Music’s Avalon, has produced a worthy follow-up to his 2006 album, ‘It’s A Feedility Affair’. This time, however, there’s only three tracks, ranging between 10 and 29 minutes in length, and the Eno/Ferry influence is thankfully clear to all.

We checked in with Andy Meecham, one half of Staffordshire duo Chicken Lips, about his latest side project, The Emperor Machine and why he prefers using vintage equipment wherever he can: ‘I like the feel and touch of vintage equipment — if that doesn’t sound weird. I like the hands-on approach and get a lot of inspiration from buying new, old vintage equipment. I have nothing against computer software — it is getting to the stage now where you can’t tell the difference — but for me, it’s just not the way I prefer to work’.

After Bizarre Inc and Chicken Lips, was The Emperor Machine your attempt at a more underground sound?
‘Chicken Lips have produced more of an underground sound with Big 200 and Zeefungk but Emperor Machine started as my outlet, a side hobby, ‘a dirty love child’ that I really didn’t expect anyone to be nuts enough to release. Fortunately, squirrel loving James Dyer of DC saw the light’.

There are hordes of bands and producers channelling the dub disco sound at the moment. How do you feel about the popularity of that sound now?
‘I think it’s great! It’s not really what I’m doing now, but when a sound gets too popular, usually time is ripe for another wave. As long as I’m riding the new wave, I don’t mind’.

What’s not to love? Moby told us this recently about the Donna Summer disco classic, 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’. With that in mind, we asked the Queen of Disco to write us a Secret Playlist of her eight favourite songs right now. Which she did. Suprises? Well, how many people would have picked Barbara Streisland and Sting in the same set list. Check out what she had to say.

How many bands can you name who’ve formed over drunken conversations at parties? Add another to the list. Vito De Luca and Stephen Fasano of Belgian duo Aeroplane met around six years ago at a party, and decided to work together after discovering a shared appreciation for 60s and 70s psychedelic pop, Fleetwood Mac, Brian Wilson and 80s synth pop pioneers Brian Eno and Giorgio Moroder. ‘At the beginning Vito made me listen to the demos which he made and I found it very interesting!’, Fasano says. ‘I wanted to do disco-rock-electro music with my influences, and after several working years, we both found our own sound’.

At home in Brussels, the spaced out Ital-disco of Aeroplane is a little displaced, the nightclub scene dominated by minimal-tech and commercial house parties, and ‘not very exciting’ Fasano confides. For a time, Fasano ran a club night called Discolor in an attempt to introduce the sounds he and Luca love to his peers, but the night didn’t prove profitable.

Luckily for the pair though, the Artistic Director of Eskimo Records — Dirk De Ruyck — heard some of their demos and fell in love with them. Of their initial correspondence, Fasano recalls an incessant Ruyck. ‘He called me every day during a week to say to us, ‘Guys, it’s incredible, magic!’

With two 12″ releases out already, Aeroplane are currently writing and producing their debut full length album for Eskimo. Describing the recording process, Fasano says he and Luca ‘start to compose our melodies at the piano. After that, we make a beat and put some guitars and synths on it. Vito is the musician, he plays guitar, bass and pianos, and I try to search for sounds, effects, chords and arrangements. At the end, we do the mix together’.

They also throw guest vocalists into the mix, most recently working with UK singer Kathy Diamond after she emailed them through MySpace (who says social networking wasn’t a constructive use of time?)

Aeroplane may be using Diamond on upcoming releases, but they also mightn’t. Fasano seems to want to keep that close to his chest, gently brushing away the question by saying ‘that will be a surprise!’

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Oh man, close your eyes if you will and transport yourself to a place far, far away; where disco is in, polyester is up, and everyone bows long and deep to the gravitational pull of the almighty afro. Sister Self-Doubt by The Shakes takes me there. It takes me front and centre, feeling that slippery, incidenary groove as it crunches my spine and works its way to my feet. Hmmm, the feet. It’s always in the feet. And now I’m dancing and twisting, onwards and upwards, like a manic spinning top thinking nothing of today and even less of tomorrow.

Listen to The Shakes track, Sister Self Doubt.