I’ve been a big fan of The Girls Can Hear Us ever since Audioporn mentioned that they sound like another of my favorite artists, Scotty Dynamo.
The Girls Can Hears Us! (conveniently shorted as TGCHU) have the sort of self-aware hilarity that I like in my electropop-rap, and the catchy beats also make for pretty good gym music.
Now, just in time for summer, TGCHU are going to drop their debut album and all of the songs sound pretty good. Even better is that the boys are fans of giving some of their tracks away for free, and hooked me up with a couple for posting here.
To stay posted on when their album comes out, hit up TGCHU.com. Bide your time until then with a couple of other TGCHU tracks I’ve posted here and here.
They might be one-note wonders with nothing more than a few well-received demo tracks to their name, but I’ve been digging Sleigh Bells. As Jane Bang has found (pictured on the shirt above from T.I.T.S clothing), they’re going to make for great remix fodder.
As I Tweeted earlier, this trailer for The Electro Wars (a documentary about electronic music) has me absolutely stoked about the state of music today. From the film’s decription:
“It seems that every other day a new remix is popping up on the blogosphere, how does this affect marketing for other independent artists? Do they welcome the remixes or oppose them? Is music overload possible? What will eventually happen when all these budding producers grab a hold of a Pro Tools tutorial and develop their own remixes week in and week out? Will the remix itself become obsolete? Will original tracks have to step up to the forefront rather than recede into the background? Themes of this nature are explored in the film.”
The trailer seems to answer most of these questions, and all the artists interviewed seem to agree that it doesn’t matter what category music is in anymore, and that it is all amazing and all in one stream, and that there is a place for everything.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how much I loved the design of the Gotta Dance Dirty website, and the guy who made it, Falco, left me a comment to say I should check out his site.
It turns out he does design work for a whole bunch of artists, and seeing his graphics for Bubblegum Sci Fi made me want to give them a listen.
Here’s a couple of their sci-fi-tastic remixes that I picked up from around the web:
Check out Falco’s website for more, and let me know if you think Bubblegum Sci Fi got their name from The Bubblegum Crisis. Either way, I totally think The Knight Sabers would be an equally bad-ass band or DJ name.
It has been a while since I last heard from NONEWYORK, and that’s why I was so excited when they sent me an email the other day with a couple of new tracks.
Born in Blood is a slower track from what I think they normally do. Its dark and full to the brim with dub and samples from Dexter.
Their refix of Rusko’s Cali Anthem is also a solid track, and the Tupac sample really cements the California feel. In fact, it even inspired me to add a California category to this blog.
The NONEWYORK boys are featured on Bay Area Bass Vol 1 and you can grab the whole thing here. They are also NONEWYORK_BASS on Twitter, and they’ve also got some mean bass on their MySpace page.
You can also find a couple of other tracks by them on 199X here and here.
The image above is from the The Descent, probably one of my favorite horror movies. Its full of blood and claustrophobic terror.
Oh man - I just finished reading Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination and it is intense. The book was written in 1956, but is decades ahead of its time and reads like an ultra-violent modern thriller. It keeps up a frantic pace for all 300 pages, and you’re never sure if you should be sympathizing with the main character and cheering him on in his quest for justice or hating him for the atrocities he commits.
If you get a chance, pick this book up. I mean, just look at the main characters in the book:
Gulliver “Gully” Foyle - the almost-unlikable protagonist. He survives months shipwrecked in deep space, has his face tattooed with tiger stripes and the word “Nomad” and spends the entire book on a murderous quest for revenge against those he feels have wronged him.
Sol Dagenham - The fast-talking head of an interstellar courier organization/private detective agency, a war-time accident left him so radioactive that he isn’t legally allowed to be in the same room as anyone for more than 30 minutes.
Olivia Presteign - Heiress to the Presteign fortune, albino and able to see only in the infrared spectrum. Gully’s hidden tattoos are visible to her, as are the warring ships in orbit around earth.
Jiz McQueen - The unfortunately-named beauty that helps Gully escape from a prison deep within the mountains of France, she seems more of a throw-away character
Robin Wednesbury - A broadcast-only telepath who promises to help Gully in his quest for revenge only so she can find out what happened to her own missing family.
Y’ang-Yeovil - Master of disguise, Asian stereotype and a big shot in the earth’s intelligence agency, he is tasked with putting a stop to Gully’s rampage.
Add to this zany cast of characters the fact that everyone in this future is able to teleport at will distances of about 15 kilometers (they call it “Jaunting”), and you’ve got one hell of a piece of science-fiction.
Try and not think too hard about it while you listen to Owl Vision’s Fields of Corpses - its a track as angry and intense as Gully Foyle. I don’t much about Die Antwoord, but I’m throwing another of their tracks up here because Ninja is at least as driven and tattooed as Gully.
In the comment section of io9 a few months ago, someone suggested that t-shirts be made depicting a quote attributed to George Orwell:
“Back in the 1900s, it was a wonderful experience for a boy to discover H.G. Wells. There you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers…and here was this wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of the sea, and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined.“
Its a wonderful quote, and I completely agree with the commenter that shirts should be made, so I’m offering my design above, paraphrased from that quote (clicking on the image will give you the layered, PSD file should you wish to use it - I can’t remember where I got the template).
I’m certainly not a graphic designer, so if you make your own version, let me know in the comments or via email. It’ll probably be better than what I’ve come up with.
Keep the sci-fi dream alive, my friends…and while you’re at it, grok these future tracks:
Its the beginning of March here in Toronto (actually, its probably the beginning of March in the whole world) and the weather is unseasonably warm. To celebrate, I ate lunch on a patio.
Is this the beginning of summer? I hope so, and to get in the mood I’ve been listening to these smart Beach Boys remixes.
Phase02 is one of those blogs that is the perfect mixture of design and music - you can tell that they’ve put some serious thought into the way they want the blog to look and how it fits with the sound they’re sharing.
They recently posted this track by RSD and I knew I just had to listen to it. I mean, the title of the track is “Naked Mario Kart.”
I love Mario Kart. I’m pretty sure that the original Mario Kart is one of the most perfect video games ever. Like chess, it is easy to learn the rules but you can spend a lifetime mastering it. When I lived in Japan, my roommate Ian and I would spend hours playing Kart. We’d enter a kind of zen-like trance, and stay up all night dodging red shells and sniping green shells.
That’s why I was slightly disappointed that the track “Naked Mario Kart’ wasn’t really about Mario Kart. I mean, one of the sounds might be sampled from it but that’s it. The good news is that it’s really got that etheral, spacey feel that I’ve been digging lately.
Someone also dropped me this Peo De Pitte rework of Telepopmusik’s Breathe, and its also worth a listen. Let them be the soundtrack to your Sunday evening.
Between this post and the earlier one with the Starfox image you’re probably thinking I’m getting nostalgic for the SNES days of yore (the Starfox battle mode being great, but nowhere near as good as classic Kart).
You’re right, but its not a new thing. I’m sure one small part of my mind is always thinking about Super Mario Kart.
I haven’t seen it, but I’m pretty sure 1980’s GALAXINA is probably the most perfect movie in the world. Produced by Playboy, it stars the 1980 Playmate of the year Dorothy Stratten as a “voluptuous android who finds herself alone for many years, developing emotions and falling in love with the ship’s pilot as he and the other crew sleep the years away” after they’ve been placed in suspended animation (Parts of this actually sound suspiciously similar to Alastair Reynolds epic book House of Suns).
The tag line on the movie poster (via) is “IN THE 31st CENTURY MAN FINALLY CREATED A MACHINE…With Feelings” and its going on my must-watch list.
Speaking of machines with feelings, you can’t go wrong with remixes of Florence + the Machine’s You’ve Got The Love. I wrote about the XX remix of that track a little while ago (damn, I love golden robots), and I was glad to hear Adam Smith’s take on it.
The Secret Galaxies remix comes courtesy of T-dot ballers Borracho, who were kind enough to post it on their Myspace page. Its a little more mellow than some of their other stuff, and I definitely like it.
You can’t go wrong with a little Ellie Goulding, and when the theme of the day seems to be galaxies and robots what better than a space-disco track about getting starry-eyed (I’m just going to assume she’s singing about looking at the stars and dreaming about space). These Monarchy cats have done some other mixes, and I dig that they called this one the Horses Head Nebular remix.
Anyways, if you’re in a galactic mood, give ‘em a listen:
Florence + The Machine - You’ve Got The Love (Adam Smith Remix)
Cavaliers of Fun - Secret Galaxies (Borracho! Remix) (via Borracho!’s MysSpace)
