Hello! We’ll have a typically epic New Arrivals post for you within the hour but, while you wait, why not enjoy this new remix of Cut Copy’s “Blink and You’ll Miss a Revolution” by Toro y Moi?

Blink And You’ll Miss a Revolution (Toro Y Moi Remix) by cutcopymusic

“If you’re in a studio making an album you can easily say, “Fuck everyone, I’m making this music for me” … but if you are going to start standing up and inviting people to come and see you … You have to at least something that’s worth being there for.”

So says acclaimed electronic musician Amon Tobin, in his excellent and illuminating eMusic interview with Joe Muggs. The problem, for musicians whose primary instrument in the computer, is an old one; in the same interview, Tobin lamented the too-common sight of performers “hunched over their laptops” in front of a paying live audience. Tobin’s excellent new record, ISAM, is an even more challenging live proposition; it’s a clattering, chaotic patchwork of avant-garde experimental music — not exactly the sort of thing to that gets bodies moving in unison.

The mindblowing above video shows Tobin’s ingenious solution to the problem. For the live shows surrounding ISAM, he has stepped away from the traditional DJ set completely, and has commissioned a living, art-piece set design, one that will provide a large-scale live audio/visual experience to select cities around the world. The flashes of the set in the video are tantalizing: Q*Bert-like structures throbbing with an unearthly organic-green glow; images of pixels rippling across them like so much digital snow. It looks literally unbelievable, a synapse-fusing mind-meld of sound and sight that most visualizations of music fall well short of.

Download ISAM here, and check out our full interview with Tobin here.

April was a phenomenal month for new releases here, and of course when the influx is so great many fantastic albums end up falling through the cracks.  Here are a few of the most criminally overlooked albums of April, please to be sharing your lists as well!

Yikes! – London Elektricity -  This album was not tagged properly until this week, so I didn’t even notice it come in at first.  One of Hospital Records  brightest returns with an album of moody, transcendent drum n bass I would emphatically recommend to fans of any electronic genre.  From the smokey lounge jungle of  “Elektricity Will Keep Me Warm” to the  euphoria of “The Plan That Cannot Fail”; and accompanied more often than not by vocalist Elsa Esmeralda, this album is a constant joy.  I was curious to see what he would do after his fantastic collaboration with Underworld on last years “Scribble“, and he certainly did not disappoint.

Son Lux – We Are Rising – Sophomore full length by avant-indie-tronic Anticon artist (say that 10 times fast).  This one doesn’t seem to be as sparse as his brilliant debut “At War With Walls And Mazes“, and the songwriting seems a tad more conventional but the arrangements are as inventive as ever.  He deftly blends horn sections, choral arrangements, synths and his own pained warble into complexly syncopated pseudo pop songs.

The New Regime – Speak Through The White Noise – The New Regime is just one dude, Ilan Rubin.  Coulda fooled me!  This record sounds massive, like a less falsetto Muse or earlier Radiohead.  Razor precise production and stadium sized hooks served up with more competence and conviction than one would expect of a single 22 year old.  This album is majestic, and it deserves a lot more attention than it has received.  Oh, and he was the drummer on the final Nine Inch Nails tour, which is always extra points in my book.

I’ve got to be the only person in the known universe who’s not completely put-off by the term “chillwave.” You guys know we used to have a genre called “cuddlecore,” right? Like, let’s reserve some of that ire for shit that actually matters. Genre tags are idiotic but necessary, so let’s all figure out ways to cope. I say this as a preamble to posting this “Seance” mix of Matthew Dear‘s “Slowdance” by [ahem] chillwave/ghost&b artist How to Dress Well. I’ve always gravitated toward both the ghostly and the Ghostly, so this is fully working for me: graveyard synths, eerie falsetto crooning, strange spectral ambiance. This is the kind of music to keep you up at night, in a cold sweat, clutching the covers. It’s more HTDW than Dear, to be honest — the Dear original just provides the foundation for Nathaniel Bartholomew Dresser (How to Dress Well’s real name) to do his thing on top of. Check it out.

One of the great upsides is not only getting the chance to listen to an avalanche of new bands, but also to listen to bands they love. Case in point: Bobby Boomerange — aka Dan Whitford from eMusic chart-wreckers Cut Copy paid a visit to the noted Melbourne radio show Noise In My Head to play some of his favorite songs for DJ Michael Kucyk. If you assume, because it’s Cut Copy, you know what you’re getting, you’re wrong. For example, he opens with a song by Hot Water Music. Possibly huge down under? Mysteries upon mysteries. Hear the rest of Bobby’s selections by following the link below.

Download Cut Copy’s Mixtape

Way back when I remember raving on here about Teengirl Fantasy, this young dreamy DJ duo who had a single that Alex and I really loved. And by God we still stand behind that. But the praise that I gave to Teengirl I really should have reserved for Memory Cassette, a far superior group in a similar style out of New Jersey. They’ve gotten a bit of Pitchfork love of late and are starting to bubble as a result, but the music still bests the hype. Their Call & Response EP is absolute magic. It’s cinematic and wistful and just a bit druggy, too. If you liked Air’s Virgin Suicides score, you will love this. (That got your attention!)

All four songs on Call & Response are spectacular, but opener “Surfin” is particularly so. It’s effortless, ’80s disco dream-pop that just glides and charms. “Body in the Water” is a bit more opaque — more mood piece than pop song — and completely immersive. “Asleep at the Party” might be the best of all. The female vocals are a bit more assertive than usual, and the swooping keyboard strings almost burst with their intensity. And finally, “Last One Awake” is maybe the weakest here, but it’s still fantastic. Just a bit more twinkling than I typically go for. Anyway, download this!

Ida No and Cameron Mesirow are two of our finest divas, Ida the haunted voice behind Glass Candy, Cameron performing as Glasser, a hypnotizing project out of Los Angeles that we’ve been championing since last fall. On Saturday night both played in Brooklyn — Glass Candy in a bowling alley, Glasser in a DIY space — and I caught them back to back.

I hadn’t seen Glass Candy since their punk Love Love Love days. And yeah their sound changed drastically from that raw cacophony to Beatbox‘s disco, but all the underlying stuff is the same: Glass Candy are about attitude, a detached hedonism.

On stage it’s just Ida No — leopard spandex clinging her legs, perfect bangs falling just right — and keyboardist/collaborator Johnny Jewel — shirt unbuttoned like retro Eurotrash. Ida prances and shakes, a confident dancer with a lean body. Johnny milks the backing tracks with dramatic dances and exaggerated playing. Together they project competence and confidence.

Ida No’s voice is not the best on-stage, and only the really good songs — like “Candy Castle” — truly shine. There were highlights, but overall it was a bit dull.

It was my second time seeing Glasser, the first at this past SXSW where she blew me away. At Saturday’s Glasslands performance she was backed by Tanlines, a duo who have done incredible remixes of her tracks and some other people’s, too. Most of the music was backing track (some occasional guitar accompaniment and some percussive melodies), and so Cameron Mesirow, prowling across the small stage, was the entire show.

Mesirow has a flexible voice not all that unlike Bjork’s, though she uses hers in different ways. It’s an excellent voice, and it comes through live much more so than on record. She’s a good performer, too. She’s constantly dancing and moving, her steps deliberate and lunging. Most of the time she sings with her face to the ground.

She is no shrinking violet, and she’s confident of her ability. Her songs twinkle and shudder, but there’s real heft. The arrangements are very spare and the rhythms are often vaguely Caribbean. Her voice dangles above.

“Apply,” which was on our eMusic Selects compilation earlier this year, was a standout, but I was disappointed that with Tanlines on-hand they didn’t perform their remix of the track, which is maybe her best moment so far. “Glad,” a very delicate, pillowy song of hers, didn’t translate live, but it’s still a longtime favorite.

The crowd for Glasser was small, but her potential is still there. Signed to True Panther Sounds (the label that will be releasing the Girls album), hopefully a debut album will come soon.

Doesn’t look much like a deep house maverick, does it? Something about Walter Jones, the guy, and the hauntingly perfect single he’s just released, I’ll Keep On Loving You, doesn’t seem to add up.

The ho-hum, could-be-your-postman name. The hometown (New Orleans — not exactly a dance music mecca). The fact Jones has been making music for around 20 years and has (according to Discogs) a total of six singles, including this one.

And, of course, all of this is before you find out that the breathy, spaced-out vocals on both tracks of Loving You don’t come from a trilling, hired diva, but from Jones himself. Bathed in reverb, on maximum falsetto, but Jones nonetheless. I replayed each track several times when I read about the vocals and it remains somewhat astonishing each time. He burrows under self deprecation when talking about the process — he “added lots of reverb to disguise my horrible singing voice” and it “ended up [being] a really bad impression of Curtis Mayfield’s falsetto” — but the results are undeniable.

“Living Without Your Love,” the b-side, is what initially won me over. The stuttering vocal, the pillowy synths, the almost-funky programming. It’s really the vocal melody that cinches it, though — an immediate earworm that I’ve been singing in my head (and out loud in the hallways around eMusic HQ when I don’t catch myself) on a loop for the past few weeks.

Loving You has been repeatedly described as “lo-fi,” but it’s all relative of course. Some of the tinniness of the drums and the ocean-deep reverb might sound dollar-store to a Resident Advisor regular used to an (on average) more polished and precise production aesthetic, but this isn’t Wavves-gone-disco or anything. “Living” especially feels diffuse and totally airy and, ultimately, just fucking beautiful.

Even if you’re a dance music dabbler, it’s absolutely worth investigating Walter Jones’ surprisingly homespun and lush take on nu-disco.

Every now and then a record shows up on the site with little warning, and gets lost in the onslaught of bigger titles with more cache or cred. Do not let Reichmann’s Wunderbar be that record — especially if you have a soft spot for the B-Side of David Bowie’s Low or moodier Kraftwerk or any of Brian Eno’s ambient/electronic works.

Sonically, this record is a marvel. It came out in 1978, so you can imagine what it might sound like: weird, wispy electronics, very “cold” and “Germanic,” Reichmann occasionally augmenting his icicle-like synths with hummed vocal melodies. There’s a genuinely creepy vibe to this record: the synthesizers sound like lost, lonely ghosts, and the whole thing seems set in some weird, dead futureworld, one where everything is made of metal, it’s always nighttime, and the roads are full of flat, gleaming cars that whizz by quietly, purposefully. Imagine the cities that dotted the movie TRON and you’re getting close.

Like all great lost records, this one has a backstory: Reichmann was a member of Spirits of Sound Group with Neu!‘s Michael Rother and Kraftwerk’s Wolfgang Flühr (which explains a bit why his album recalls the work of both). Wunderbar was set to be his official solo entre into the burgeoning electronic music scene, but his career was cut short when he was tragically stabbed to death two weeks before the album’s release.

I can’t recommend this record enough. It’s not really an “electronic” record — it’s more new wave. It’s melodic — minor-key melodic — and has a strange, unsettling quality that’s hard to shake. Take a spin through the samples and see what you think.

You can read a bit more about it here. Highly recommended!

I don’t know how long it’s been since I have posted something, but as I have noticed a distinct lack of electronic music chatter here lately I figured it was high time.  Here are a few records that have been killing me lately.

Telemetrik: My Lightyear – This very well may have become my all time favorite drum n bass record of all time.  It’s melodic, technical and absolutely filthy.  It makes me miss the Seattle drum n bass scene sooo much.  Be sure to grab the sampler too, they are actually the first two tracks of the album and for some weird reason got delivered separately.

Speaking of drum n bass, pick up the Spor remix on this single by The Qemists.  It’s a freakin sick track and actually directly responsible for leading me to the Telemetrik record.

Trifonic: Emergence - If you dig Hybrid or BT you need this record in your collection.   The vocal tracks are somewhat unnecessary (but not as irritating as some of BT’s later poppy stuff), but I forgive them because the rest is so stunning.  Oh, and the video for Parks on Fire?  It will absolutely melt your brain.  Watch it in full screen.

Another quick related aside, BT’s new single just dropped a few days ago.  I dig it.  You probably only need the first track though, I felt most of the remixes were pretty forgettable.

Freeland:  Cope™ – This one might actually be closer to a rock record, and therefore more palatable to some of the casuals.  It feels a bit done before, but there is still something about Freeland’s stomp box electro production that manages to keep my attention.  I can’t gush about this one as much as my other selections, but it’s a solid record and worth a mention.