Blog

I have been listening to a lot of netlabel music recently. As you may be aware there is a lots of netlabel stuff to be found out there. A good site for downloading archives is Legaltorrents , which has large collections of netlabels like Kikapu, One, Observatory Online, Please Do Something, and other good stuff, this is where I first stumbled upon (well, we ducks don't really stumble, more a kind of limping waddle,) the world of netlabel music.
Some of my favourite artists I found out about through Legaltorrents are Twizzle, Adria, Koordinate of Wonders and Transient to mention a few. A couple of days ago I discovered her highness, which I am excited about (on the Israeli netlabel birdsong, which I have to explore further).

A brief note on the artists I mentioned above.

Twizzle
Twizzle's - Soda Fountain
download tracks here
sound like... a beautiful decaying seaside town, forests, ice cream and lemonade. They take you to a dreamy, slighly sinister world. These four tracks I have been listening to over and over and over.
Some lyrics: He's as sweet as lemonade drunk in through a straw, I'm his little barefoot girl and we are joined by law.
He likes ... children's yellow carousels, he likes the soda fountain, it's a long trip down from black elk mountain.

A quote - "We enjoy evincing the innocent but you know, underneath, there's something dark going on. I come from a film-making background and studied film in Prague. That strange dark city really inspired me"
from a small interview with them here

Adria - Palaio Falira
It seems that Adria (formed in Sweden) is no more, but the few songs found from them (download here) are beautiful. Electronic and melodic with hazy, lovely vocals.

her highness - Broken Music Box featuring HER HIGHNESS
This is the description from the netlabel page:
"cutting and pasting on her computer , her highness is like a 3 year old circus girl singing her songs to make all the kids laugh...
she makes happy pop songs with samples she recorded using a cello , harmonium , a plastic clarinet and other toys.
sometimes she even sprinkles tiny bits of midi on the top."
Dowload here
My favourites from this (so far) are marcellosback ("being brave or being silly to insist on speaking frilly.") and this feeling.
There is a second album too which is fab, you can download here.

Koordinate of Wonders - EP
Koordinate of Wonders is a two person electronic music project from Minsk, Belarus. (According to Wikipedia.)
I'm not sure how to describe this EP, I'm not down with all the genre descriptions, but here we go; electronic, icy, wintry, precise, rich beats. Very good.
Download here.

Transient
various stuff, electronica, ambient and more. Interesting. I like the over the river and through the woods in its mellowness. There's a ton of stuff out there from him, can be found here.

Ok That's all for now.

I am on a Smiths tip at present. Though I wasn't aware that I'd listened to them over 100 times this week. (And those are only the listenings that the Last.fm player attended). I had a look at the Illustated Smiths page here, with interesting pics submitted by mainly B3ta-ns I think. People like illustrating Panic (Hang the DJ). One punny image shows someone hanging a dinner jacket on a rack (Hur). It's a nice little repository.

I'm getting around to buying The Victorian English Gentlemens Club's new album after having three or songs by them. I've been quacking Amateur Man on and off all week. And Warbling "I smoke because I'm hoping for an early death and I need to cling to something", The Boy With Thorn In His Side "behind the hatred there lies a murderous desire... for love", "I was minding my business lifting some lead off the roof of the Holy Name Church. It was worthwhile living a laughable life, just to set my eyes on the blistering sight of a Vicar In A Tutu. He's not strange, he just wants to live his life this way" and other choice Smiths lines. Oh how I could go on. Perhaps in another post. These track and artist tags make that last paragraph quite awkward to read. Ah well.

My quacking is becoming almost musical these days. And my Arcade Fire fixation is waning. I can get through a whole day without listening to them now. I feel the need for some Sonic Youth. And some drum'n'bass (or drum 'n' bass or however many variations thereupon.)

I'm so taken with last.fm that after only 12 or so hours of exploration I've decided to subscribe for a month.
What's £1:50 for such amazingness? I'm still trying to find a fix for not having John Peel to tune into whenever the whim took me.