Monday 20 April 2009

Bat For Lashes

Natasha Khan AKA Bat For Lashes is a female singer. I first heard of her when I found out she was supporting Radiohead in Manchester, at the time I just had her first album and only listened to it a few times, but just recently since her new album has been released I've been listening to them both a lot. Her voice is most compelling, having a sweet,soft voice accompanied by tribal drums,Medieval instruments ,drum machines and synthesizers, great combination with help from her great band!

Below is a great quality live recording someone from Youtube sent me . It was a live performance from April 2009 in Birmingham. Although I'm not fond of encores especially 3! If she needed a break she didn't need to say goodnight!

Me being borderline OCD ,I have tagged and renamed all the files before compressing it. So it should be ready to go straight on your MP3 player.



P.S Thanks to Chaotikmind for the songs and setlist!

Bat For Lashes - Live at Town Hall, Birmingham (123mb)

Link

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Saturday 18 April 2009

Voice Draw

Next time you have a spare minute or two check out this website, everything on the website is made and designed by one guy called Ze Frank.

The link below is one of my favourite, It uses your inbuilt (or external) mic to create pictures,little pieces of art. Just scream,hum,shout,quack,whisper (my favourite) and this causes the virtual ink to move around and flow its own direction.

The majority of his little creations are based around sound or visual elements,he also has some pretty funny videos,songs,stories and projects going such as "Impress your date".





Link

Friday 17 April 2009

American Football

American Football are surprisingly from America, specifically from Illinois. If you've heard of any of these bands/artists I'm sure you'll like this band:
Owls
Cap'n Jazz
Joan of Arc
The Geese
Braid
Make Believe

All of the bands above included one or two specific people of the Chicago Indie rock scene. Brothers, Tim and Mike Kinsella.
American Football only has Mike Kinsella on vocals and two other members of The Geese. This band split up in 2000 and Mike went his own way under the name of Owen and is still going strong.I may upload one of his albums soon.

Anyway the band...For a 3 man band their music is incredibly complex. Incorporating odd time signatures and tempos with a new (at that time) style of playing guitar that was never seen or heard in the indie rock scene.With a drummer who manages to keep all the instruments intact ,complimenting and giving enough space while the bassist add his sparse melodic bass lines.Both Tim and Mike Kinsella have been playing in bands since the late 80's/early 90's with Cap'n jazz and in that time they have learnt a lot which you can really hear as you go through their albums.



American Football - American Football (38mb)

Link

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sgt.

Yup, more Japanese music.This one is a good'un

sgt. are a 4 piece band from Tokyo that formed in 1999. You could call them post-rock but I think their sound is much more different than the usual "quiet to loud" bands out there. They mix different styles including, Jazz,Ambient,Folk, Classical.More often that not people who knows this band knows that these guys can improvise. They often go into lengthy (10-30min) improvisational spaces where the band and crowd can feed off each other and slowly travel through different moods/tempo/loudness.They're so good that they also released a live album with singer Damo Suzuki which I bought off the man himself (he's a good salesman - how could barter with a guy you've just seen and heard sing/wail/scream over a mic?!)

If this album was better produced this would probably be in my top 15 (maybe 10) favourite albums. Track 2 is my favourite song off this album listen to it full blast and I guarantee goosebumps at 10:20.


sgt. - Perception of Casualty (54mb)

Link

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Clara Hill

Clara Hill is a German born Jazz singer. Her smooth vocals mixed with electronic and acoustic instruments such as drums/acoustic and electric guitar/programmed drums/drum machines/synths and many more. This album can be as easy listening as you want,you can either listen to in the background or put some headphones on and chill out.
She uses her own vocals as backing vocals and she does it effectively,creating interesting harmonies.

Listeners of Beady Belle,Jazzanova, Wahoo and Thief would really like it.


Clara Hill - All I Can Provide (92mb)

Link

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