Tuesday 1 September 2009

A Selection Of Electronically Crafted Tunes


So, for the past few days I've been away at Reading Festival. It's made me realise that, although I loved many of the bands there, my musical taste is slowly shifting away from your typical Reading/Leeds Festival bands. I was planning on doing a post on the highlights of the festival, but I'm sure you would have heard half the content or even been there to see it yourself. In light of that, here's a few Not-So-Reading-Festival tracks that I've been all over lately:

Boys Noize - Ja!
A fairly new track from the Berlin-based techno pioneers. It's a lot smoother round the edges compared to their older material and you'll get more of an emotive feel than their previous electro distortion.

Joakim - Spiders
Joakim now performs as 'Joakim & The Disco' as his live band. Spiders is a mix of effortless synth work with some chanting vocals. I found it to be a bit of a grower - just wait for that guitar riff to come in; you'll appreciate more every time.

Instra:mental - Watching You
Watching You is Instra:mental's own IDM/Glitch flavour of Drum and Bass with those unique vocals, courtesy of d-Bridge. A particularly original track; so much so that I'm finding it hard to describe the feel even as I'm listening to it now - I guess you'll just have to listen to it yourself.

Flying Lotus - Tea Leaf Dancers
There's a load of critical acclaim surrounding Flying Lotus, but not the kind that sends musicians so commercial that they can't top the hype. Perhaps it's because he's crafted quite a niche brand of fuzzed out, wonky, hip-hop influenced electronic which I'm in love with right now. Tea Leaf Dancers mixes a slow, sleepy drum beat with ghostly, ebbing vocals and synths - beautiful and very, very cool.

This track also comes with a great video, which is what I think first caused me to check FlyLo out. Apologies for the quality, it was the only real video on YouTube:


Maybe some of the chaps above will play at Reading Festival in the future, but I think I'll check out Creamfields or Bestival next year.

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