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

Password: welcometothequietpage

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

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

Password: welcometothequietpage

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

password: welcometothequietpage

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

Password: welcometothequietpage

The Boredoms

What can I say?

I'll just throw a few (often contrasting) words at you:
Loud.Quiet.Mad.Silly.Serious.Instrumental.Crazy Vocals.psychedelic.Noise.


The Boredoms - Pop Tatari (151mb)

Link

Password : welcometothequietpage

Aoki Takamasa + Tujiko Noriko

This is a collaboration of two Japanese musicians.

Here's a sentence or two about these two people:

Aoki Takamasa - Electronica artists.Blends tiny minimalistic glitchy sounds mixed with large soundscapes, great to listen with headphones,almost like a journey through sound. As organic sounding as you can get; combining the outside natural space with the inner electronic time space.

Tujiko Noriko - Her voice is as creatively intense as the music she's complimenting. Sounding like an innocent child . She mainly sings in Japanese so I usually don't have a clue what shes singing about but the way she stretches her words,emphasizing on syllables and of course Aoki treating her voice would just send shivers.


The album blends these two great contributors in an amalgamation of sound.





Aoki Takamasa + Tujiko Noriko - 28 (66mb)

Link

Password: welcometothequietpage

Goonies Never Say Die

This band is from my hometown of Blackpool.
I've seen them a few times and their live shows are pretty damn good.
They've just finished recording their new album which is released now for free through their myspace/website.

4 members: 1 drummer,1 bassist and 2 guitarists...

Each song has a slow but honest build-up of sound from quiet to loud.I'm not going to put a label on them,you can probably figure out something when you download the album.

The only bad thing about this band is that they don't play anywhere else other than the North West.



Goonies Never Say Die - In a Forest Without Trees (68mb)

LINK

Mark Hollis

Mark Hollis was a member of the new romantic band "Talk Talk".Him and Tim Friese-Greene took Talk Talk's synthy sound and took it to a completely different level, creating such albums as Spirit Of Eden and Laughing Stock. He wrote this self released album then shortly after left the music business.



Mark Hollis - Mark Hollis (110mb)

LINK

password: welcometothequietpage

L'Homme Puma

I've been listening to this band recently.
A 3-man band from France.They use samples,electronics and screamy shouty lyrics along with their instrument of choice - guitar,drums and bass.

Check out these noisy Parisians!


L'Homme Puma - L'Homme Puma (61mb)

Link

Password: welcometothequietpage

Mono

Yesterday (21/03/09) I went to see Mono play at Hare and Hounds in Birmingham,UK.

After a wait in the pub,we got moved outside,after a wait outside we got moved up the stairs,after a wait on the stairs....yes we got moved in the actual venue. The long and cold wait felt like nothing when Mono appeared on stage...
I say this about pretty much every gig I go to,but it was brilliant! Although the drums and bass weren't as loud as they should be, together the whole sound coated your ears in swirling melodies. Great performance and quite a nice crowd,I don't know why but I had a MASSIVE urge to take as many pictures as possible. I'm as amateur as you can get when it comes to picture taking, I just use a normal digital camera,but some have turned out pretty well.

I recommend you turn off all your lights,close your curtains, press play and maybe play a slide show of the pictures I included.




Heres a GIF image I'm pretty proud of!

clicky click


Below is a link for their new album and some live pics taken by yours truly:

Mono - Hymn to the Immortal Wind (145mb)

Link

password : welcometothequietpage

Intro - The first of many.

Hallo

I'll be using this blogspot to share a lot of things that I like for which hopefully you guys will also like,this will be one of my past time activities so if you like/dislike any of my posts please post a comment so I know its worthwhile

I don't know if I'm going to be posting on rare occurrences or if I'm going to be addicted to this.We'll see! probably the latter. This is my first blog and first of any of these things I've done.

Ill be using this blogspot to post mini-reviews,suggestions, and links to music (Hosted on rapidshare - .rar files)

If you have any questions/comments/suggestions/recommendations send me a comment.