Melodium - Cerebro Spin

A brief moment of recommendation- Magic music for winter. Melodium aka 28 year old Laurent Girard, late october released his 10th album "Cerebro Spin" on Audiodregs (Lullatone, O.Lamm etc.) A very wonderous and strange little album for people who love tricky fireplaces, melty snowmen, forests, evil toys, lemon icecream, scratching their ears, black tulips, kiwis and odd couples (not the tv show). Cerebro Spin is a record that with an almost outer planetary sound, engulf the art of dividing listeners as they dive into what could have been a silent film score about unevil nightmares and the dangers of day dreaming. Imagine a boy playing piano, inside a burning logcabin sitting on a pillar far away out on the ocean, accompagnied by serenading seagulls and robot whales.

Yes, lot of quirky distant keywords apply and salute Melodium on his 10th album birthday. Thankfully, thats just how he rolls. You can listen to a couple of songs from Cerebro Spin over here or here.

Blip festival NYC 2008

Grafitti Monsters (US). Photo by Richard Gin.

Originally i didnt feel like writing about this years Blip festival, mostly because of the fact that its just around the corner, and i cannot go. Have no time, have no money, and no chance in hell of convincing my boss that those days in New York across the planet from little ol' Denmark would be the perfect location for a company christmas get together. Ehhh.... Well, so me writing about it now, is pure therapy. I have to get it out my system someway, somehow. (And if possible i need someone to live it out for me and report back).

Blip festival is doing its 3rd annual run this december, 4 days straight, from the 4th to the 7th of december. It is undeniably the biggest bit-music event in our time, so far. Nearly 40 international musicians and visual artists occupying the sweet low-res cutting edge under the organization of Manhattan art organization THE TANK and legendary NYC artist collective 8BITPEOPLES.

To set the record straight, were talking hundreds of wonderful "geeks" and messed up indviduals performing, playing, modyfying and caressing/beating the living shit out of Nintendos, Gameboys, Amigas, Commodores (gaming consoles in general) or even homemade circuitry (and software), for the sake of creating ugly/cuddly bit tunes and art. Kinda gotta clue, but not quite sure what to think about that? Well, check this cheeky little promo from the documentary "BLIP FESTIVAL: REFORMAT THE PLANET" (Promo featuring Nullsleep. One of my favourite bit-peeps).



Got some money stashed away? Gotta rich pappy? Got the balls to rob a bank or.... Could you really just go? Then you really should. Atleast if you fancy bit-rock, nintendocore, New York and beyond.

I myself still havent come to reconcile with the fact that im not even closely enabled to go, but i will try to make the best of it. So, when Blip festival kicks off. I will to. Every day from the 4th to the 7th of december, i will gather up and post the best of the free Blip-related bit-music downloads my webhotel can muster. Hopefully we will all enjoy it.

In the meanwhile, please go and check out all the fantastic artists and activities blessing this years Blip festival. Furthermore, heres a group of audio excerpts, from festival related artists.

Hayden - New video/European tour cancelled

Good news: Canadian Hayden just released a new video for "Barely friends" from his latest album "In Field & Town", which came out earlier this year. Classical Hayden, lovely song, beautiful video. Bad news: Haydens much anticipated 2 week European tour, which was supposed to kick off 25th off November in London together with Giant Sand, is for reasons unknown, completely cancelled. I guess we will have to settle for the nice video for now then.

A Simple guide to free music

Myspace, Purevolume, Facebook applications, ilike, Last.fm, Skreemer, Songza, Hypem....yup, theres is no end to what time, fancy name, slogan or site you have to deal with in order for you to approach free legal attention worthy music downloads. At myspace one can spend days on following links amongst bands and friends, maybe finding good music yes, but interesting quality downloads? Rarely. The same goes for the rest of them.

An important thing to remember about most social network sites (whether they be music related or not), is that theyre driven by advertising and personal interests in commercial purposes (even from most bands point of view). So it is no wonder why these sites slowly evolve into hopeless digital deserts, highly infested with german emobands, crappy/unfriendly music players and dead end lofi downloads.

But, if youre keen on more, being simple (or just plain fox clever). Take the road less travelled. Think open source and embrace creative commons!. All you need, is to visit the open source audio department at archive.org, along knowing partially what you wanna look for. That, and some simple reading/searching skills. Let me show you what some concentrated 35 minutes of snoopin' around can do for you.

Seven New Songs of Mount Eerie (2004) - recorded for the July 2004 tour of Australia by Mount Eerie. They were recorded "Nowhere" in Anacortes, Washington in the months of May and June 2004. The release was in an edition of 196 CDRs and sold out on tour. Somehow people in North America found out about it and thought they really wanted it because of the low quantity. Now it is available forever for free. Besides this there are 11 other free Mount Eerie releases on archive, unique liveshows, private recordings, you name it.

FreeQuency - In Germany (and in german) Mr. Christian Grasse is doing his own podcasts, documentaing his search for neat new music, may it be indie, eletronic, punk, lofi or experimental. He regularly posts full podcasts under the name of FreeQuency. Though along that, posts individual tracks for download aswell. Tons of good stuff like Ghostape (CH), Cantaloup (DE), Resynthesize (US), Tone (DK) and heeps more cool unknown artists from all over the world.

Headphones Required - Headphones required is a weekly bilingual podcast from Montreal about independent quality music (post rock, indie rock, microsound, electro or pop). Filled to the brim with brilliant music ranging from unknown artists to stuff like Below the Sea (CA), Of Montreal (CA), Tortoise (US), The Brunettes (NZ), Akitakaya Tohyama & Kenji Ninuma, Fly Pan Am (CAN) and much more. Though the sets of podcasts are 128kbps encoded and dont include individual track downloads, it is still very much worth digging into.

By The End Of Tonight - A Houston mathrock quartet, uploaded some good quality live recordings from one of their liveshows At The Bottom Of The Hill in San Francisco (2005). Viva Computer - a Tasmanian (yes down under) indieband uploaded 3 releases, their debut album "Viva Computer" included. Austrian Liger - and his archive pressence with "The infra-ordinary" album lead me further to the Beat Is Murder netlabel, with tons of more great albums to download freely. Cassettes - An anonymous soloartist, have a homemade noisy bedroom rock album entitled "Everything Is Chemicals" made entirely with Garageband and a three-string detuned guitar, that Black Reble Motorcycle Club, Sonic Youth and Pixies fans wont necessarily dislike..... Mogwai have maybe over 50 bootlegs floatin around.... Mono have a handful aswell......

Well , what im trying to say here. Why settle for the crowded, questionable and obvious, exclusively every day, when you can get all of this (and more) wrapped neatly in a minty breath of fresh air, "legally" along with.

Happy hunting.

PS: And may i remind you that Archive.org aint a dumb place to find uncopyrighted (or copyright expired) movies, commercials and animation either. (all the way from the beginning of the 1900's.:)

Ghostly Swim

Some time ago, cartoon channel Adult Swim teamed up with Ghostly international and put up a neat little free album download named Ghotsly Swim. It holds 19 various artists, all of a more or less electronical character, ranging from such nice names as Milosh, The Reflecting Skin, School of Seven Bells, Tycho and many others.

It is still available (free ofcourse), and it would be a darn shame if you didnt get the chance to get this home with you. Heres some previews.



Go visit the Adult Swim site and get your Ghostly Swim. Click here.

The Mintpad

The Mintpad. A promising little Korean pocket monster for those who appreciate the fine arts of drawing, blogging, taking pictures (and blogging), listening music, watching videos, making post-its (and blogging them). Yup, and i havent even beging to mention the different social features like personal calendar, chat and what not.

The Mintpad is a creation by Korean Mintpass, a newcomer on the market founded and run by fugitives of Irivers innovation department, lead by concept excentric Duk-Jun Yang, a former Ceo of Korean Reigncom/Iriver. Mintpass whom with the Mintpad now have good physical proof that they have no intention of being a company not doing things right from the beginning.



To sum up the full potential of the cuddly Mintpad. Well, besides its miniature form factor - the crossbreed size of a creditcard and post-it, it has a good quality 1.3 Megapixel integrated camera (descent for blogging and fun), Wi-fi (802.11 b/g), integrated speaker and microphone, a full 2.9" touch screen (for both fingers and pens), 4gb internal memory (backed up by a microSd slot, supporting up to 8gb cards), removable battery, built in accelerometer and a 3,5 mm standard headphonejack. Codec supports and tricks for music include Mp3, Wma, Ogg, Ape and Flac (which is damn impressive) along a customizable equalizer and intelligent playlist features. Videowise it does Avi (pressumably Divx/Xvid), Wmv and Mpeg (which is equally impressive).

Features include Etch'a'sketch like gesture support for both drawing and blogging. So that when you fx take a picture, wrote some text, made a note or a drawing. Just give the Mintpad a little shake and it goes straight to your blog (or other web destination). Yes, weve seen the shake gestures before, but to be honest, it actually makes alot of sense when you have the internet involved. Check it out.

Draw/write and take pictures. Shake it and blog it!.


Writing/drawing, speedy and natural.


Another really neat and exclusive feature (if you notice on the videos) is that when you make a drawing or a note, it actually blends in a paper texture (optional) so that it looks like a real drawing/post-it instead of straight up generic graphics. That combined with the fact that the Mintpad posseses a very capable tabletminded atypically responsive touchscreen (and nice user interface), makes it all pretty pitchable to the public and worth the fact that this could go and become an actual intelligent little trendsetting device.

So all in all, if youre a whore for simple clean cut design in a tiny package, you love blogging (and lofi photgraphy), you need a home for your handdrawn post-it style critters and doodles. Last but not least, wouldnt mind carrying your music/video along with all of that. Hell, your train has almost arrived. All you gotta do is, Hold your breath for a while and let Mintpass do their thing. They wont let this one miss out on a good old European fondle.

If you wanna see more of the Mintpad, please check out these pages on the Mintpass website. Mintpad design and press photos, The concept and features and How to use. All pages are unfortunantly in Korean, but theres loads of good product shots and details to be excited about.

The David Bazan dvd

To be completely honest, even if you dont know who the hell David Bazan is. This is the indie xmas present of the year : The 13$ David Bazan - Alone At The Microphone dvd. But why is that? Well.... There are so many reasons (some describable, som not). His 4 one mand band Pedro The Lion albums, his solo work as David Bazan, his Headphones band (with members from Starflyer59 and Fleetfoxes), he played with Damien Jurado, he played the drums on the first Unwed Sailor Ep.... and well.... Yeah, well, lets not make this rocket science. Watch this and tell me why you dont wanna know more about this man and his music.

Live outside Berkeley Campus, November 7th.
More clips from the Berkeley campus gig last week can be found here.

Youtube dvd promo.


The David Bazan dvd is internationally available at undertowstore.

Sky Diary Edits and...

Sky Diary Edits is a spectacular almost a year old compilation released by Italian netlabel Zymogen - a unique and dedicated netlabel that wont reallly cost you anything to either check out or consume (mostly because they house 21 free album downloads). Zymogen generously carries noteworthy artists like American Off The Sky (Jason Corder), Irish Jimmy Behan, American Ten And Tracer, Russian Songraphie, Italian Con_Cetta and others. My favourites being Songraphie, Off The Sky and Jimmy Behan.

Here's a few Zymogen tracks for you to listen to. Theres 3 tracks from the Sky Diary Edits compialtion and 1 each from Jimmy Behan, Sonographie and Off The Sky. Beneath the player you can download the Sky Diary Edits compilation, the latest Jimmy Behan album and the new Off The Sky Ep. Just rightclick + save as. All files are 192kbps mp3 with full album art.




Sky Diary Edits - Various Artists (2007) - Download (75,3 MB)
Jimy Behan - In The Sudden Distance (2008) - Download (61,9 MB)
Off The Sky - Dwelling Spells (2008) - Download (49,5 MB)

The acoustic 31 knots?

Photo by Kasper Troels @ www.comeondieyoung.dk

A little month ago i witnessed, what i still think is one of the best shows ive attented this year. San Francisco 3 piece - 31 Knots, kicked my ass to high heavens that late saturday night. Not only is 31 knots a fantastically excentric and technically potent liveband, they also radiate a such rare theatrical, almost hyper bohemian atmosphere, that makes it impossible for the audience to predict in which direction the band tends to stretch its energies (both mentally and musical). Those energies and qualitities combined, to me, celebrate so many great things, that i cannot anything but recommend you try and pick up a 31 Knots show first chance you get.

That being said. French Le Cargo, has an amazing youtube channel, on which many unique and intimate live videos with wonderful atypical not so household names can be discovered. Amongst them, great artists like Matt Elliott (UK), Broadcast 2000 (UK), Promise And The Monster (SE)(one of my favourites), Efterklang (DK), Zombie Zombie (FR), The Concretes (SE) and even hundreds more (im serious, hundreds).

And untill today, now also 31 Knots acoustic. Didnt see that one coming. None the less, extremely entertaining stuff.

A beautiful reminder

Back in 2002, Johnathan Ford of instrumental band Unwed Sailor got together with friends in Tulsa bands Ester Drang and Lasso. In 48 hours they recorded a bunch of songs for what today, still remains a rather anonymous project - Circle Of Birds. The result was a beautiful little ep mixed by Johnathan Ford and former Unwed Sailor drummer David Bazan (also known as the artist behind Pedro The Lion). An ep which today is still widely digitally available here and there

One of the ep's tracks - Old Ironside, is today still one of the most fantastically sad and beautiful tracks i have ever layed ears on. I am still amazed years after, that no big hollywood movie dreamers never even bothered to atleast attempt steal this for the sake of their visions. But on the other hand, to me thats what makes this track so pretty. It just sits there on the Unwed Sailor website (free to download), for everyone to enjoy, contempt with the fact that people who have never heard about either of the tracks many contributors, are fine without its subtle glory.

Well.... Since i am not really poking the coals of new fires here, why dont you give the track a listen and then decide if you wanna go here and download it? (you might get more than you bargained for).