Anoice, Takahiro Kido, This is Ivy League, Women, Matmos Reviewed

So it really has been to long since i visited this page and shared good music with you. Much has happened and much new music has been discovered and continues to be discovered on a daily basis, the Japanese in particular, seemingly a nation full of talented musicians, equal parts genius and beauty. An endless stream of musicians similar in style to World's End Girlfriend and dare i say better than. Each one taking the most lovely parts of classical and turning it into something of exceptional splendour.

First up Anoice, whose album Remmings is a real joy, a gorgeous mix of piano and violin, occasionally dischordant but in a subtle way rather than any barrage of decay that you may expect. The almost Tarantula AD had they not discovered 80's poodle rock of Kyoto stands out alongside the yearning violins of Liange.

Anoice - The Three-Days Blow mp3

Anoice guitarist and programmer Takahiro Kido also records under his own name, more sparse and slightly magical in its basic form. Lovely piano compositions

Takahiro Kido Myspace

Yasushi Yoshida's new one for the ever impressive and reliable noble label is a touch of genius in a very similar vein perfecting the mold he so sucessfully created on pevious album Secret Figure. Highly recommended.

Yasushi Yoshida mp3's

This is Ivy League have been catering for my pop requirements. Thir self titled debu album is a breath of fresh summer air, like Belle and Sebastian with a greater love for Simon & Garfunkel, for Modesty Blaise, for Love . like Suburban Kids With Biblical Names if they slept in silk pyjamas, really quite brilliant. Richest Kids, A Summer Chill, Love is Impossible stand out. This is Ivy League - Richest Kids mp3

Women are just brilliant, like No Age playing Shin's covers. Clinic covering the Bach Boys. I need say no more.

Women - Black Rice mp3

Matmos have been getting all perfect on us, less concepts more electronics, the opening three tracks on new album Supreme Balloon are obscenely good, suffocated in retro synths, rubbery and brain meltingly good. The rest of the album doesn't quite live up to the exceptional openings but the three are well worth tracking down.

Matmos - Rainbow Flag mp3

And some old school Matmos

Matmos - Steam and Sequins for Larry Levan Favorite on Hype Machine

Happy listening...

Sources

Girlpants

Glorious Noise
Souls on Tape

Fluxblog

Final Light - To Stop an Exploding Man

Final Light - To Stop an Exploding Man (Lost Children Net Label)
Whilst last years French Teen Idol courtesy of the Lost Children Net Label melted my mind time and again last year and indeed to this day, Departure finds its way onto most compilations i make, so they start the new year well with an excellent release from Final Light that is set to take the place of French Teen Idol, at least for a while.
Full to the brim with skipping beats and deep mumbled samples, set against simple pianos and ambient swells of orchestration, comparisons could be made to a sunday morning world weary Meanwhile Back in Communist Russia or in places World's End Girlfriend. Though with all due respect this is somewhat less visionary in scope yet very much worthy of your attention.

Final Light - To Stop an Exploding Man (Full album ZIP)
French Teen Idol - Departure MP3

Kashiwa Daisuke - Program Music I (noble) - Reviewed

Kashiwa Daisuke - Program Music I (noble)

I was stupid enough to make the mistake of mixing up Kashiwa Daisuke & Daisuke Miyatani both releasing albums this year and both with similar artwork & names to the untrained English man, so i was rather suprised to see the normally reliable Silent Ballet raving over this release and more suprised still to see it awarded number 6 in their end of year top 50 instrumental albums of 2007 as i'd been less than impressed by Daisuke Miyatani's work.

Hence why i'm sat here giving Program Music 1 the attention it deserves. Two tracks, the first Stella is stella by name and stella by nature, clocking in at almost 36 minutes its an awe inspiring trip through a fragile and beautiful outlook of the world. This again shares an affiliation with World's End Girlfriend, snow blowing in your eyes, cold and harsh yet ultimately turning the tired landscape you see day in day out into a winter wonderland of enchantment. Kashiwa has the ability much like Godspeed to write a song that clocks in well above the average length and yet never outstays its welcome. Within a loosely knit genre that often relies on repitition and indelibly written formulas never once does Stella sound like its treading familiar ground or running short of ideas.

Track 2, Write Once, Run Melos clocks in at a mere 26 minutes and again is nothing short of astounding, seemingly more electronic, this will thrill anyone who was even half as consumed as i was by this years Motoro Faam or Cloaks albums, a lovely melding of classical piano and electronic decay for a world weary, politically tired generation. This could well turn into this years favourite mistake.

Myspace

Website

Noble Label

Kashiwa Daisuke - Sample mp3

Yasushi Yoshida - Secret Figure Reviewed

Yasushi Yoshida - Secret Figure (Noble)

Much in the vein of World's End Girlfriend the work of Yasushi Yoshida is equally as stunning though perhaps not quite as ambitious. Lonely footsteps and gently picked out piano notes compliment and grace the achingly lovely violins, the ones that we're familiar with from the quieter bits of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and maybe more appropriately Max Richter.

Dance Piece is simply gorgeous, a text book demonstration in how to make the most of the bits between the notes, each one leaving you hanging on, yet not so long that you lose interest, instead you are always rewarded and then just as you reach the four minute mark it all comes together, slow like the sunrise over the distant mountains, but just as with each passing span something new is revealed, something comes that bit clearer and as such that little bit more beautiful.

Octave Leaves is all footsteps in snow & eerie pianos that remind us of the first A Silver Mt. Zion album, yet here the sound is less steeped in politics, rather focusing on extracting the best of what we have.

Website

Yasushi Yoshida - Silent Park mp3

Yasushi Yoshida - A Picture of Three Life mp3

Sources

Swan Fungus

Indie For Bunnies

World's End Girlfriend & Sparky's Magic Piano Reviewed

World's End Girlfriend - Hurtbreak Wonderland (Human Highway)

Where this time last year I was being seriously blown away by Johann Johansson’s delightful Ibm 1401 - a User’s Manual this year there is a new album in my life that touches on every beautiful note given to man, a musical vision steeped both in classical and electronic music yet never sounding (despite its brilliance) as harsh as Venetian Snares Rossz Csillag Allat Szuletett, instead in bathes itself with lush sweeps of field noises, birds singing and ever so occasionally blasts of jazz like discordance.

The echoes of piano that pass through Birthday Resistance are sublime but these are soon forgotten as Katsuhiko Maeda begins the 13 minute trip through 100 Years of Choke, a song as life affirming as the video for We Are The Massacre is brutal. This is truly something special, a gentle comedown for the fans of Mono whose interest in World's End Girlfriend must have been triggered by his recent Palmless Prayer collaboration. That was good, this is ten times better. If you need some inspiration in your life then you couldn't do much better than this.

World's End Girlfriend - 100 Years of Choke mp3
World's End Girlfriend - Ghost Of A Horse Under The Chandelier mp3

Myspace

Sparky's Magic Piano - Feel The Beat and Do It Anyway (MelodyFactory)
An album of sweet and naive pop songs, the opening four of which would've made for a fantastic EP. Yet this is not to say that the rest is throwaway, far from it. Instead simply that the openers Like Falling in L*ve, Mend, the staccato robo pop of Coffee Song & Something Somewhere are near perfect pop much in the vein of all things Amelia Fletcher, i.e. Heavenly, Talulah Gosh, Tender Trap etc, perhaps Tender Trap particularly as the sound is more electronic than you'd expect from the aforementioned.

Sparky and You Like Her are more sparse, losing the electronics and falling somewhere between Whistler and the Englishness of Black Box Recorders Sarah Nixey or The Pines Pam Berry.

Kaliedoscope is lovely in the way that Kenickie's Acetone was lovely, in the way that sometimes when you really want to say something you just can't get those exact thoughts out and so some of the notes strived for aren't quite reached but you know exactly what she means and respect it more for not being afraid to show she's not perfect.

A lovely sweet album of synth pop that worth your attention if initially only for those four great opening tracks.

www.melodyfactory.com/shop
www.myspace.com/sparkysmagicpiano

Sources

Shameless Complacency

Motoro Faam Reviewed ...(Boards of Canada, World's End Girlfriend etc)

Motoro Faam - …and Water Cycles (Preco)
Motoro Faam are three highly talented twenty five year old musicians from Japan mixing classical and contemporary music with irregular beats and sampling. This is probably the most genuinely moving thing I’ve heard since Johann Johannsson’s IBM 1401 – A Users Manual and perhaps the most original and thought provoking thing since I was first wowed with Godspeeds intelligent outlook on modern music. It’s like Lucky Dragons should they ever decide to soundtrack a ballet recital, pianos roll and electronic glitches flicker like decaying static.
The sound will satisfy those partial to the sounds of Max Richter and the like, however this is one if not two steps ahead of their game and is one of the most exciting discoveries I’ve had the pleasure to stumble across lately, timeless yet undeniably original. …and Precipitation weaves and delights with bubbles of waters and waves, sandstorms and gentle pianos beneath stormy rainfall, it’s unlikely you will find anything quite so delightful this year.

Motoro Faam – …and Surface Runoff MP3

Motoro Faam – …and Condensation MP3

Motoro Faam – … and Evaporation MP3

Website

Preco Records

Myspace

Normans Records - We have another great Motoro Faam CD on the Preco label from Japan called 'And Water Cycles'. This is pretty lush sounding stuff. Gorgeous electronics and neo classical nubbins mixed together in a sexy love pot all ready to pour into your unsuspecting ears. There's a healthy dash of Ryuichi Sakamoto in there and maybe some more. It's quite experimental and there's an awful lot going on. The sound is very dense and full, but together it makes a really beautiful listen, what with all the lovely classical-ness being chucked into the electronic mix. Mingus thinks it sounds a bit like Takagi Masakatsu....highly recommended anyway!

Boards of Canada

Long term readers will need no introduction to the fact that i absolutley adore Boards of Canada, I stumbled over these videos on youtube, the excellent video for ROYGBIV, the song that turned me on to them (thanks to an NME compilation!!) and then a rather crazy but suprisingly good Audio/Video mashup/blend of David Hasselhoff's cover of "Blue Bayou" mixed with Boards of Canada's "An Eagle In Your Mind"...nice!!

And a couple of other videos i saw that summarise some of what i'm getting more and more into at the moment...beautiful stuff

at the close of every day - Hemelsblauw

World's End Girlfriend - We Are The Massacre