Music that can best be described as a mix of psychedelic folk, avant-garde, indie and alternative. This anachronistic flower-child reels off subtle ballads that often smack of Latin culture. Devendra Banhart is an odd character. He looks like he’s just walked off the set of some Brothers Coen film. His background includes time as a busker between Texas and Venezuale and art courses at the prestigious San Francisco Art Institute. DB’s rise to fame started under the aegis of Michael Gira of The Swans and he now enjoys worldwide success on a renewed wave of interest for traditional and eccentric song writing of which his take on folk is just the starting point.
Watch out for him. He’ll be showcased on Magazzini Generali on December 18th.
It’s a Sunday of “total craziness” as we accompany a crowd of adoring teenage girl fans to the C’N'C Showroom to wait for their idols the band Tokio Hotel. It is all part of a competition held by UNIVERSAL who have given 500 lucky winners the chance to witness the official launch of Humanoid, the band’s new album.
Ennio Capasa, creative director of the fashion house CoSTUME NATIONAL recently played host to the German rock group Tokio Hotel at the C’N’C Space in Milan’s Via Fogazzaro.
Thanks to a competition organized with Tokio Hotel’s record company UNIVERSAL, five hundred young fans of the group had the chance to meet their idols and listen to a sneak preview of the tracks on the band’s next album entitled “Humanoid” released on 2 October 2009.
“Music is a key part of the C’N’C project – it’s been part of its DNA right from the start,” declares Ennio Capasa. “With my new internet projects through which I communicate daily with the new generations, I am in direct contact with kids and artists from all around the world.
My idea was and is to break down the final barrier to allow the fans to meet Tokio Hotel in
person in an informal and intimate space – a sort of workshop club”.
In Bb 2.0 is a musical collaboration that wonderfully incorporates video via youtube. You can play all of the vids simultaneously and in any order to create a very nice soundtrack. You can also adjust the volume on each video to mix the levels as you wish. This is absolutely brilliant stuff! It is a must that you try it out!
The way in which music videos are made is changing in this new age of Youtube, Facebook and file sharing. “Guitars are overrated” is the new single by the indie band The Robot Disaster and the video was created by students from Silpakorn University International College together with Birmingham City University. It’s a mix of urban landscapes with superimposed images and zoom-outs that capture the spirit of Birmingham City in a perfect language for the Net.
Sometimes the simplest of solutions can turn out to be the best. That’s what the Superbrothers must have thought when making Pedro Marín’s video “El Día Después” animated by quite a few pixels in 8-biy version. According to the creative from Toronto, the very first to be entirely created using Teletext.
Influenced by “drinks, drugs and gravity” Brit Band Wave Machines has a catchy electro-pop sound that smacks of psychedelia and even rock ‘n’ roll mixed with dance. The band’s debut album Wave If You’re Really There is a perfect mix of sounds for the summer – alternative easy listening and sing-along stuff.
The latest video from singer Elly Jackson, better known as La Roux is called Bulletproof and has a kind of kaleidoscopic, futurist atmosphere. The music’s retro-psychedelic electro-pop that stands out from the crowd. Those heavily into production notes will notice a RED camera was used with Zeiss optics, Maya for the 3D effects plus Toxic, Flame and After FX software for compositing. . .
This modern interpretation of the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood by the Swedish designer Tomas Nilsson is a small masterpiece. Graphics, break down and analysis owe much of their inspiration to the Röyksopp video “Remind Me” while the background song comes from the Swedish band Slagsmålsklubben. Enjoy!
Impazziamo per questa canzone, a partire dal titolo e dall’atmosfera del video.
Grande debutto per i Whispertown 2000, band dalla musicalità indie e folk in arrivo da L.A.
A poetic video with a lazy, Sunday-morning feel to it in which the idea of Sunday brunch out with your friends is hat it takes to wake you up completely. It’s sung and directed by Oren Lavie but do carry on snoozing in bed as long as you can!
The epic landscapes of East Washington state at the start of the 20th century make the video “Caskets’ by the folk singer Damien Jurado (directed by Matt Daniels) a small masterpiece of its genre. This grippingly morbid video showcases the hard times of past pioneers. Check out the back stage of the shoots, photo gallery and interview with the director.
Waves of what can only be described as an edifying, abrasive sound make The Big Pink our latest most interesting discovery on the music scene. Newly arrived from London they are right up there on our track list with their remix of “Too young to love”
Electro-lunar music that’s sinuous, minimal and essential background music for a long motorway trip or film soundtrack. Suspended atmospheres with deep, soft bass sounds underpin calm electronic arrangements that are absolute and no-frill, loyal to the melody like a real professional orchestra. Chromatics, well worth discovering.
Let me steal this moment from you now! …Let’s exchange the experience!
We Buy Your Kids is Sydney design duo Sonny Day and Biddy Maroney, who do all manner of graphic design, illustration and motion graphic.
One of their latest projects is this video for fellow Aussie Megan Washington, so delightful!
A psychedelic fable, mirror effects, inner worlds, pixelated images that dance in the void – an electro-delight for the soul in which electronics, arches, percussion and acoustic instruments form a special sound-weft. The face and the voice of all this belong to MEG and this is the new video. It’s too easy. BIG UP!!!!
Photo frames of normal daily life imbued with the spectre of more effective and spectacular digital assembly programs. Out and out pictures in motion designed on an LCD canvas with a Macintosh airbrush. Takagi Masakatsu is one of the leading names in the new generation of Japanese multimedia artists. He is an images craftsman but also a fine composer and musician. Often called the Japanese Giovanni AlleviTakagi has succeeded in bringing classical music to teenagers’ I-pods and making it cool. His concerts are live performances that combine music, orchestral instruments and voices in a blend of hyper-coloured projections that seem timeless fables. Nostalgic Japanese poetry that looks at tradition with a futurist eye.
Suspended somewhere between electro, glam-rock and punk Late of the Pier are one of the latest phenomena to owe their explosive success to MySpace and musical blogs. They have a sophisticated and mature sound that interprets synth-pop through indie-rock sounds. All this finds form in their new album Fantasy black channel. As they say with complete candour: “We were always bored so when we discovered this new music we felt like explorers.” Have a listen and you’ll see what they mean!
A Fab Five hailing from Liverpool. Their strange, on-the-edge music has been termed “psychedelic cartoon punk”. A cocktail with a rhythm and blues base, lots of slide guitar, piano backings and psychedelic touches. The Zutons have just completed their third album and in just a few months have notched up four platinum discs. Not bad at all! The latest offering is an electrical charge that runs between USA and UK with powerful guitar riffs, frantic rhythms and a dollop of blues. “You Can Do Anything”, its name.
Inspirations for C’N’C Plug Generation Contest
Not that different from Stop Motion, SLAM (Slide Animation Movies) starts with a photograph and then transforms it into video. “Only” 18000 photos were needed to make this “motion”.
An unusual mix of dance beats, percussions, shoe-gaze settings and massive M83 keyboards. Somewhere between Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party, Friendly Fires are the latest new discovery to reach us from England.
Fresh news from Austin, Texas. They’re called White Denim.
Finger-lickin’ rock’n’roll that smacks of garage with punk undertones. Simple tunes with a warm but wild groove. C’mon – let’s shake it up good!
Described as an exercise in subtraction minimal music should not be thought of as “incomplete” music but rather as finished compositions. “It’s not a genre but rather a way of relating to music” says Michael Mayer, key man behind Kompakt (one of the sector’s most talked-about labels) and the person who first came up with the term minimal-techno. “Here pieces of music are written exclusively focusing on what’s indispensable”. Cutting away the superfluous to attain the quintessence of music. Worth listening to.
How about this as a suggestion for your ears as you wait for holiday time to come round? Fancy something incredibly stylish and vaguely eccentric? Then White Williams is your man! His vital and catchy electro-pop will have you hooked right away! Enjoy the wait!
Avant-rock, post-punk, dance, techno: Smalltown Supersound is the record label for the latest “experts” and in recent years it has discovered and produced some really interesting artists.
On the map Smalltown is just a dot somewhere in Norway. The truth is that despite its limited size it’s an exceptionally lively metropolis. The music is always different, focused on the search for new sounds and effects. The people at the label strive to maintain a certain consistency vis-à-vis artists and sound designers: everything has to please the ear of head producer and founder Joakim Haugland. Some of his protégés’ to look out for? Jaga Jazzist, Lindstrom or the young “DiskJokke”. Listen and listen again!
They are imbued with the sacred spirit of rock’n’roll, a desire to rebel and a feel for adventure. Practically ignored by the major record companies and the music press in their quest for the next big thing thought up over a business meeting, The Duke Spirit have paid their dues and are now drawing a wider audience thanks to the magnetic lure of their live gigs: the grapevine and youtube clips are doing the rest.
NYLON TV get in bed with The Kills to reminisce about their magnetic beginningsm,
on-stage chemistry, and their long awaited third album, “Midnight Boom.”
Particularly renowned for their no-holds-barred stance with exploits such as drum-kits set alight on stage and a record of twelve concerts in one day (Austin Festival SXSW 2007), The Black Lips are one of the most visible garage punk influences of the moment. Their influences include ‘50s and ‘60s music, their songs are nervous and psychedelic.
A clever fusion of electronics and garage with massive use of a drum machine, distorting telephone line effects and voices. This is for you if you’re really into electronics and on the lookout for a dark, rarefied atmosphere – up for a mix of electronic fusion and hybrid rock with a blues influence. The Kills, an Anglo-American duo with three albums to their credit, are the proponents of this style and they recently presented their latest album, Midnight at Milan’s Music Drome. Read the rest of this entry »
Afro-house mixtures, pure talent, this is female soul at its most original. Kathy Diamonds, voice of the latest C’N’C CoSTUME NATIONAL show, charms her fans with a funk-laced rhythmic beat and vocal style both bewitching and laid-back.
costumenational.com