This city's lament

Fantasy Remixes: #2 (take 2) - Eurythmics (This City Never Sleeps, from Sweet Dreams)

Or then again, something with more sheen than Burial would be a less brutal juxtaposition - Tycho's lush, spacious electronica has the right measuredness & melancholy for the job...

Hear old & new-ish giveaways Dictaphone's Lament & Cascade (latter a re-up: previously here).

Get your hands on the ravishing The Disconnect from last year's The Daydream/The Disconnect EP.

& feast on the man's design work as ISO50.

To Rococo Rot: Telema

Klangwart: Stadtlandfluss

Pole position

#1 in an occasional series: Fantasy Remixes...

The re-release of Pole's staggering 1, 2 & 3 on ~scape makes me want to hear his huge talent in other contexts. A dose of all that smear & buzz & textured dubby weight would do wonders for LTJ Bukem's gorgeous but perhaps too perfect Horizons (from Logical Progressions, Level 1) - imagine its glossy brilliance reframed by the spacey crackle of Pole's Fragen (from 1), say.

Everything That Happens (stream)

Digital dowry (doubled re-up)

NB: post from un-Hyped pre-history updated (& re-upped) with new tracks, blather & self-deprecation...

There are lots of things to love about Cepia - his moody, naive melodies, an always fascinating & intensely textured base of clicks, echoes & beats, the way the one is laid over the other, the cunning, almost drum'n'bass or dubstep-y sense of pace (the idea that a melody can work itself out over a much faster rhythm track & that the tension between the two is what pulls the piece along)...

Opening Parade & Hoarse, giveaways from last year's Natura Morta on Ghostly, say all this more articulately. & in notably fewer words.

So do the clanging, reverbed Ithaca, from this year's Ghostly Swim giveaway extravaganza (re-up: see here), & the vampy, intensely textured remix of Lusine's Flat, from Podgelism.

For a rarer, more ethereal version, try the lovely Countrytime from the Dowry EP (buy it here & enjoy the pretentiousness of an eMusic review that uses the phrase - apparently without embarrassment - "did the budding experimentalist's muse fully exit her shell"!).

Ramp on Idol Tryouts Vol. 2 is a drone-drenched, almost Tim Hecker-esque, take on this side of Cepia. & that's a good thing (or here).

But best of all, to these ears, is sqr exp - a wonderfully warped, lurching, chattering piece on the rare-ish SMM Vol. 2.

Twine - Endormie

Dream of life (trailer) Patti Smith

Ghostly drone

Talking of drone & Ghostly (rare combination, but we were...), here's the vast Toward Water from this year's Ocean Fire by Christopher Willits & the fairly legendary Ryuichi Sakamoto.

& here's three parts (Fountain, Floating [clip], Touch Me & I End Up Singing) of Willits' seven-section post-Frippertronics Breathe on SMM Vol. 2.

& here's the too brilliantly titled to miss out on Your Face Looks Like a 15th Century Turkish Carpet (from this single).

Best of all, here's the serial collaborator on inspired glitch-march with 12k don Taylor Deupree: Grounding (from Mujo).

NB: all tracks artist's giveaway - lots more here.

Cole crops

There's a kind of diligent carelessness - immense attention to detail, & a willingness to mess with the results - about Brassica's slightly loopy Microvictories (on Tartaruga). Stodgily, though, the tightest tracks appeal most to these ears: the plinky, endearing Thank You, Mr Francis & what mapsadaisical rightly characterised as the Books-ish opener (& its closing reprise) - Conveyor Belt (On The Way In/Out).

Out not uploaded as half of the album has been blogged or given away already: buy it here.

Or at least join Max's library to get your hands on the thing for some intense object fetishism ("The CDs are full glass-mastered CDs, housed in a signature Tartaruga recycled cardstock gatefold sleeve, silk-screen printed, hand stamped, and sewn together. Each sleeve is then individually numbered.

The album also features exclusive artwork from ten different visual artists, all enclosed on ten separate full colour postcard-style inserts.")

"Transform the jangling discords"

Exclusive: an inspired reimagining of one of the better tracks on In Rainbows - Australia's Prince Charming (plus a sample cast that includes Martin Luther King, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon &, less obviously, Whittaker Chambers) wrings yearning, menace & uplift out of Videotape with his poignant Videotrip (Tragedy of History).

Hear a sanctioned Nude remix here & others here (NB: LMYE's 'nothing unsanctioned under 1 year' policy waived for Videotrip in view of IR's original distribution...).

Radiohead home.

"This groove is out of fashion"

Listen to Strange Overtones - the first, given-away taste of the new Byrne & Eno opus, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today ("our first collaboration in about 30 years").

Of course, it's rich & subtle in many rewarding ways. & it's served to you only after marinading in a bucketload of irony & cleverness.

But to these ears it's also quite disappointingly conservative - more Byrne than Eno, you could say, though that's unfair as the song is quite sharp: it's the music, surprisingly, that for once seems behind the curve ("these beats are 20 years old" is fine as a metaphor, but also is disarmingly accurate)...

Compare with the inspired (& also song-based) Another Day on Earth: more than ever, it seems like Eno's masterpiece of this decade.

ETHWHT is released on August 18.

More legitimate plunder (re-up)

A slightly warmer electronica, etc selection than yesterday's, again plundered from the surprisingly tasty music section of download.com...

NB: some tracks waved past LMYE 'nothing under a year old' stance due to legit giveaway status.

NB2: the slightly dodgy Schnauss included for its genius ending...

>Boards of Canada: Skyliner (from Trans Canada Highway, Warp)
>Digitonal: Snowflake Vectors (from The Centre Cannot Hold, Seed)
>Thomas Fehlmann: Lindt (from Lowflow, Plug Research)
>Matmos: Rainbow Flag (from Supreme Balloon, Matador)
>Ulrich Schnauss: On My Own (from A Strangely Isolated Place, City Centre Offices)
>Telefon Tel Aviv: When It Happens It Moves All By Itself (from Map Of What Is Effortless, Hefty)



DownThemAll.

Legitimate plunder (re-up)

Often dark, fairly minimal & occasionally quite recent electronica, etc - all plundered from the surprisingly tasty (if largely unnavigable) music section of download.com...

NB: some tracks waved past LMYE 'nothing under a year old' stance due to legit giveaway status.

>Ellen Allien: Bim (from Sool, BPitch Control)
>Autechre: Altibzz (from Quaristice, Warp)
>Jan Jelinek: Universal Band Silhouette (from Kosmischer Pitch, ~scape)
>Mouse on Mars: Chartnok (from Varcharz, Sonig)
>Radiohead: Nude [Holy Fuck Remix] (from Radiohead/ Remix/ Nude)
>Nobukazu Takemura: Cogwheel (from Sign, Thrill Jockey)



More to follow...

DownThemAll.

Ambient drama (re-up)

Self-evidently, drama isn't often a big feature of the ambient end of the electronica spectrum. This burbling, rolling remix of MIT's German teen yellathon Rauch by Luke Abbott (blog) of Border Community shows that it can be, though...

Get the self-proclaimed "minimal electro-punk bleep fest" original & both the Abbott version & a far more upbeat, Kompakt-style mix by Coma here.

Buy new MIT album Coda here. & Abbott's Tuesday EP at Border Community or here. & Coma's debut 12" here.

"An infidel for commitment" (re-up #2)

Having racked up a baffling series of Hype Machine failures on our recent posts, plummeting LMYE's always modest audience into new realms of miniscularity, here goes a Hail Mary...

& when you're hailing Mary, you want the blessed Four Tet on your side. Given his taste for smutty song titles (in his Audion guise, anyway), & indeed his sub-Leonard Cohen lugubrious vocals, you may not also want Matthew Dear.

But you're getting him anyway, because our recent airing of MD's Lusine remix segues pretty inevitably into this version of his Deserter (from Asa Breed Black Edition). & it's too lovely - naive piano & bleeps, raw hi-hat, strangely uplifting choral/sequencer (?) backing, multi-tracked LC vocal for max luge - not to share...

Sorry about the four to the floor bit at the end, though - can't say it adds too much, but it's brief.

Video:

Layered & orchestrated (re-up)

Two beautifully layered & orchestrated pieces of poptronica: Closer Musik's yearning, rattling Departures (from After Love, Kompakt) & Lusine's bubbling, backwards Flat for You, remixed by Matthew Dear [perhaps a bit generous with the vocal, but inspired anyway...] (on Podgelism, Ghostly International).



DownThemAll.