Red Snapper are a great electronica band with some really rich melodies. Often drawing direct influences from jazz, integrating the double bass and saxophone. I’ve loved this band for a long time and recently found my old copy of Making Bones from 1999 and I can’t suggest it enough to any fans of fusion music.

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Retro singing icon Kamahl teamed up with Australian electronica outfit Valleyforge and video producer Surfaces Rendered for this epic track from the new album, Artificial Heart, off the Clan Analogue label.

Curxes (pronounced ‘curses’) are one of the most exciting new bands you’ll hear all year. Roberta Fidora and Macaulay Hopwood make music that will suck you in, invade your brain, and make you lose sense of time. Their music is somewhere between Depeche Mode and Crystal Castles.

With buzzing, loud sentiments of big beats and velvet-like compositions, Mr. Moustache, a 20 year-old disco and house producer from the Czech Republic, presents the core medium of electronic music with his debut EP, Female. As obscure as his name is, the Louis La Roche-inspired producer brings a memorable first impression on tracks like Big Tasty and Female, which incorporate Warp-like synths overdubbed with cut-and-paste vocals reminiscent of Crystal Castles.

Further, the seventh studio album from the Chemical Brothers, marks the return to the classic, elegant hooks that set the earlier Chemical Brothers’ albums apart. Further brims with epic tracks that transport you to those great days which turned into epic nights. For me, that’s long, unplanned London summer days. This is an album for close listening and reckless dancing.

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Toronto-based Solvent’s latest full-length album, Subject to Shift, is out soon on Ghostly International and is another glitchy, robotic masterpiece of pop surrealism, ‘a mix of dystopian, acid-tinged futurism and bittersweet romantic ache’, bowing gently to the beautiful template he set earlier with his radio-friendly hummer, My Radio. Check out the Mitgang Audio Remix of that track below.

A year after the release of Osborne’s self-titled album on Spectral Sound, the music still sounds fresh. No wonder then that it spawned a suite of awesome remixes. We have two copies of Osborne: The Ghostly Remixes to giveaway. Just leave a message with the name of the city you live in.

Osborne: The Ghostly Remixes opens with Bullion’s rerub of the appropriately titled, Afrika. The UK producer replaces the track’s mesh of African-percussion samples with a cocky electro-soul strut and an earworm of a bassline — the results still reek of a psychedelic revolution, but its locale is decidedly American. Bogdan Raczynski’s remix of Ruling is a real curveball, as the Rephlex acolyte turns the original’s warm Chicago trappings into a cascade of cubist dots and lines, lowering the track’s iconic vocal sample to a disturbing basso profundo. Werk Discs’ Lukid transforms There from a dreamy New Order nod into a buzzing, anxious slice of instrumental hip-hop.

Culled from Mux Mool’s EPs, mixtapes, and beat vaults, the Viking Funeral EP collects five choice Mux cuts into one concentrated blast of music, an introduction to Brian Lindgren’s dazzling take on homespun electro hip-hop and a preamble to his upcoming full-length release, Skulltaste.

Our friends over at Ghostly, who consistently dig up the glitchiest, choicest electronica, have just released a brilliant new music discovery iPhone app which is available for download through their website. This thing is smoking hot, packed with new music and beautifully designed. You can also create Playlists through it and share tracks with your friends. We’ve created a Playlist of some of our favorite Ghostly music, which you can check out above.

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Helsinki electronic producer Vladislav Delay has recorded for three of Europe’s most challenging labels: Chain Reaction, Mille Plateaux, and Max.Ernst. He grew up trained in jazz and still counts Philly Joe Jones — the drummer for the first Miles Davis Quintet — as one of his prime influences. His album Tummaa is out on The Leaf Label and features contributions from Craig Armstrong and Lucio Capece. We checked in with him to get a rundown on the sounds that inspired his latest recording: ‘Juan MacLean’s One Day is a strong and brave dance-pop. Not usually my cup of tea, but this track is quite interesting. I’ve also been listening to The Cool Kids’ Basement Party [audio below], a nice club groove, showing something new in the Hip Hop vein, which is always welcome’. Read the rest of Vladislav Delay’s Secret Playlist

We featured their Secret Playlist recently, and now they have a kicking new album out. With members scattered across the globe, though with roots firmly planted in Sydney, electro mavericks Pivot create lush, onimous, and beautifully porous music that seeps through your soul, steals your heart, and renders you immobile. For a good ten minutes at least, as their latest album, O Soundtrack My Heart [which we have five copies of to give away], proves We interviewed, Richard Pike, guitarist and producer from the group, and asked him whether the making of the making of O Soundtrack was a stressful or chilled experience? ‘
It was stressful at the start as the old band was falling apart. When that business got out of the way, it was a pretty easy affair. We were all focused and ready to make something great’.

How does the geographic location of the members affect the sound or the ability of the band to function as a band?
‘Well, we’ve been together for most of this year, mostly out of suitcases touring Europe, and we’re functioning quite well. We’ve played more gigs in the last six months than we ever have before. By the end of the year it will be somewhere between 80 and 100 shows. The old band played about 12 when we released our first record.

‘When we recorded, we did initial sessions in a studio then spent the rest of the time sending files back and forth between London and Sydney. Then we all came together again when it came time to release it and tour. We had to re-learn a lot of the songs and decide how to play them live’.

Given that you guys are now signed with Warp, have you been a long time fan of the Warp roster and who are your favourite acts off it?
‘Yes of course. Name one and I’ll probably like it. Autechre and Boards of Canada will always be classic. Out of the new acts I love Grizzly Bear and Born Ruffians’.

The new Fujiya & Miyagi album, the aptly titled Lightbulbs, is a typically crackling collection of songs, ‘a pulsing antidote to the ordinary’. Formed in 2000, the electronic duo of David Best (guitars and vocals) and Steve Lewis (synths, beats, programming), have since added bass player Matt Hainsby to the mix (in 2004), and now have an album in their catalogue which is ‘littered with fragmented images, anecdotes from the sublime to the ridiculous, blurry stories that you feel you shouldn’t have overheard’. The guys have given us the inside word on each track from the album, starting with the opener, Knickerbocker: ‘A vibration of words that sound good, touching on lost innocence, child star Lena Zavaroni, the very first tragedy of X Factor-style excess, and the joy of multi-storeyed ice cream sundaes at Woolacombe Bay. Knickerbocker mixes my sister’s and my memories of watching Lena Zavaroni on TV, whilst eating ice cream as children’.

Uh
‘It stops, it starts, it stutters with vocal embellishments making a rhythmic home for some funky bass, with everyday time-saving, no beating around the bush, one-liners as shorthand for a romance gone wrong’.

Pickpocket
‘Based on the flickering black and white Bresson movie, the perfect stolen metaphor for ideas purloined, with intricate tinkling percussive momentum, a hooky idea with a conscience’.

Goosebumps
‘Steel City synths add swathes of texture as we escort a goosebumped couple through a park full of Stella Artois and stale beefburger-addled lowlifes proving that love blossoms between many thorns’.

Rook To Queen’s Pawn Six
‘Loose funk, with a playful guitar rattle, rolling it’s ‘R’s through the story of chess eccentric Bobby Fischer who’s caught in a cold war Bond-esque challenge with computers and a bug in his teeth’.

Sore Thumb
‘A strutting funk celebration of heroic Viv Stanshall whose Men Opening Umbrellas Ahead has him sounding like Beefheart especially on the psychedelic rumba of the justifiably namechecked Strange Tongues’

Dishwasher
‘A cry for non-veg normality, where the most mundane claustrophobic conversations, the creation of chill out compilations and painting the walls magnolia sound like a recipe for disaster’.

Pterodactyls
‘Any song about synchronised swimmers has to have a pin prick sharp syncopation, a rhythmic anchor behind a series of oh ah uh ahs and a juddering melody line. Just like this’.

Pussyfooting
‘More tales of difficult harmony. Every broken hearted relationship failure involves splitting the contents of the record, book and video collection, but what about the cat’.

Light Bulbs
‘An everyday story of odd couples and role reversals punctuated with a synth that sounds like a funereal northern brass band heralding the need to get back into a similar rut. ASAP’.

Hundreds And Thousands
‘To summarise Light Bulbs, a four minute synth-powered wrap-up instrumental where the credits roll and the cast take their plaudits. Let’s return to track one and its theme of ice cream simplicity’.

Between its title and content, the Phoenix-based trio Mr. Meeble’s sensual and soulful pop meets dark electronica record will prick your ears, then spin them around and burn the damn things to the ground. It’s sparkling stuff, reminiscent of fellow French band Air, with moments of smooth, breathy vocals floating over spacey synths, chilled-out Rhodes and orchestral strings.

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OK, so this is the world’s first electronica music video made entirely from cardboard. The creation of London animator, Tony Comley, the track is for Push Door to Exit by Alexander’s Annexe, which is out through Warp records. Very cool.

It was late afternoon in Sydney on a rare sunny summer’s day when I pressed play on Cut Copy’s latest album, In Ghost Colours, and immediately felt like I was in the midst of an awesome chilled out holiday. Hooked from track one, with the pop perfection of Feel the Love, I spent the next hour nodding my head to the trans-electro tapestry of emotional highs and lows, all encompassed by a smooth steady beat that drives each song with a sense of reckless love. Fans of Cut Copy stand united: we have a winner.

We featured White Williams on Lost At E Minor recently, so we thought it was time to pin him down for a chat. Metaphorically speaking of course. As a kid you were scorned by your piano teacher for toying around with your own sounds and refusing to be ‘taught’. Have you always been wary of treading other people’s paths? ‘I think I have a natural tendency to be disobedient from having listening problems. But I think that informs a lot of what I do. If someone tells me to do something, I’ll respond to it unconsciously. It’s usually only partially right or wrong. I like to make things sound wrong. At certain times I find myself going into my songs to find things that I tried to play perfectly and finding a way to ruin them. When my sounds are contained in the computer, I have the opportunity to partially erase and write over what I have done. I like when sounds are not always so deliberate. It’s certainly hard to translate the experience of the studio process into a performance. That is a new challenge’. How much of a boost to your career was it being named one of Rolling Stone magazine’s Breaking Artists? ‘I can’t really gauge a thing like that. I think when people associate you with something like Rolling Stone, then they make assumptions. I know for people in my family and people I grew up with it made it easier to take what I was doing more seriously. It’s silly that people need an experience like that to gather opinions. Most of my friends have supported me from the beginning’. Your MySpace page puts you as a Happy Hardcore/Club artist. I get a bit of Beck and New Order, and a splash of lo-fi electronica, from your music. Why the discrepancy? ‘They’re only words. You and I could create a genre of music. It’s almost as arbitrary as a band name. Here are some of my faves: Dem Palms, Jesus Slaves, Filthy Dynamo, Hell Jail, USA Bluffs, EsCaLaDiES’. There’s a real tongue-in-cheek style emphasis across the album’s artwork, and in the credits. What exactly are you mocking? ‘Blogs, Fashionistas, Heteros, God, Graffiti, MySpace, Plaque, Rachael Ray’.

I checked out the annual Transmediale festival last night. It’s the premier cultural art and music festival in Berlin and runs for six days all over the city. This year they had Murcof, Pierre Henry, Mouse on Mars, and Vitalic playing, just to name a few. Danish supergroup Efterklang played last night to a packed house. They are currently touring their latest album, Parades, and hearing it performed live was something of a surprise. Their record is quite sedate compared to their live show. On stage, there are eight of them making a beautiful racket, hinting at times of what a cross between Arcade Fire and Tortoise would sound like. A truly uplifting live experience.

Listen to the Efterklang track, Cutting Ice To Snow.

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Listening to Mum’s fourth album — Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy — for the first time, I was awash with sentimentalism. Amidst carnival trumpets and burlesque beats, there’s a sense of this being a bohemian rhapsody. Perhaps it’s the mix of cello and brass with experimental electronica. Or maybe it’s just the soft vocals that cascade over playful, imaginative sounds. Whatever it is, it’s totally brilliant. [see also Sigur Ros' Heima]

Listen to Mum’s track, The Amateur Show.