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.

Lick The Fake Blood From Your Fingerrrr

I've been so busy lately so I won't be posting so frequently. Apologies but there's just too much to keep up with!

So, as I mentioned in my last post, Calvin Harris's new single 'Ready For The Weekend' (which I most certainly am now) received the remix treatment -already- from two pretty damn big names in club music - Fake Blood, who's identity was shrouded in mystery last time I heard, has he revealed it yet?.. and High Contrast, who has curly hair.

Calvin Harris - Ready For The Weekend (Fake Blood Remix)
Okay so, in my opinion, this one's the better of the two. It's just so much fun! Not a hell of a lot of the original has been kept in this remix mind you; sorry to disappoint if that's what you were hoping for. Some elements of the track remain but it seems almost as if it belongs to Fake Blood with Calvin Harris co-starring to raise the hype. You know what I mean? Sort of like when someone whacks a 'Where's my money?' into a song totally unnecessarily. Anyway, if you like thumping drums and bouncing bass, this is your thing. Oh and there's a cheeky little 'hands-in-the-air' trancey piano breakdown which everyone always loves, no matter how cheesy they get :) All in all, a very uplifting track.

Calvin Harris - Ready For The Weekend (High Contrast Remix)
After all my praise of Fake Blood's rendition, you might not be expecting this to be much good. It's still pretty good. At first, it seems as if we've lost the good times vibe of the original with the intro and the weird vocal tweaks but we're reassured as soon as the piano kicks in after being teased with that drum beat surfacing out of the depths. The first half of the track, in my opinion, is fairly mediocre. However, you'll (quite obviously) notice that halfway through, the driving bassline drops again and gathers a lot of more power. I found the momentum of this was satisfying enough to take me through the rest of the song without any qualms. Enjoyable.

Bonus Track:

Discovery - Osaka Loop Line

Introducing Discovery - one half is the keyboardist of Vampire Weekend, Rostam Batmanglij, the other being the lead singer of Ra Ra Riot, Wes Miles. Together, they make synth-abundant electro pop. Osaka Loop Line is my favourite off their new LP. We start off with deep, booming (yet not aggressive) synths with a dreamier, playful layer swirling about the track. Pair this with the sing-song vocals of Wes Miles and you've got a very addictive listen. Eventually, we progress into a glitchy breakdown and a melancholy conglomeration of various sounds to finish.

Wonderful, enjoy all your summers.