M83 - Moonchild (from Before The Dawn Heals Us)
M83 is the electronic music project of the French artist Anthony Gonzalez. He and former member Nicolas Fromageau founded the group in 2001 in Antibes, France. M83’s style owes a lot to the shoegaze genre, in that there is much emphasis on tonality, extensive use of reverb effects and often softly-spoken lyrics at times submerged in instrumentation. M83 was named after the spiral galaxy “Messier 83”. M83 has released the following albums: M83 in 2001, Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts in 2003, Before The Dawn Heals Us in 2005, Digital Shades Vol. 1 in 2007, Saturdays = Youth in 2008 and Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming in 2011. The double album “Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming” was released on 17th October 2011, through Naïve, produced by Justin Meldal-Johnson (Beck, NIN, The Mars Volta, Goldfrapp) and including contributions from Zola Jesus, Brad Laner (from 90’s band Medicine) on guitar, and ‘Saturdays = Youth’ vocalist Morgan Kibby. The album was preceded by the track Midnight City” released in July.
Boards of Canada - In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country
Boards of Canada (commonly abbreviated BoC) are a Scottish electronic music duo consisting of brothers Mike Sandison (born June 1, 1970) and Marcus Eoin (born July 21, 1971). Boards of Canada’s music is reminiscent of the warm, analogue sounds of 1970s media and contains themes of childhood, nostalgia and the natural world. Mike and Marcus have mentioned the documentary films of the National Film Board of Canada, from which the group’s name is derived, as a source of inspiration. Their earliest recording that is commercially available now is 1995’s Twoism, which was re-released in 2002 by Warp. Initially another limited release, it was sent to Skam Records, who were impressed enough to sign the brothers and release another EP. This was followed in 1998 by their breakthrough album, Music Has The Right To Children. A masterpiece of ambient IDM, it brought them widespread acclaim from music critics and instantly made them stars of electronic music (although Boards of Canada very rarely give interviews or perform live). After a couple more EPs, their second full-length was released in 2002. Geogaddiwas again widely praised, although it was not considered to be quite as good as Music Has The Right To Children. Third album The Campfire Headphase (2005) saw a slightly different style, with more conventional structures and the inclusion of real instruments. It received mostly positive reviews, but some reviewers were disappointed with the new sound. Nevertheless, Boards of Canada are still very well regarded by fans of experimental electronic music, and their fourth album is highly anticipated.
M83 - In The Cold I’m Standing (from Before The Dawn Heals Us)
M83 is the electronic music project of the French artist Anthony Gonzalez. He and former member Nicolas Fromageau founded the group in 2001 in Antibes, France. M83’s style owes a lot to the shoegaze genre, in that there is much emphasis on tonality, extensive use of reverb effects and often softly-spoken lyrics at times submerged in instrumentation. M83 was named after the spiral galaxy “Messier 83”. M83 has released the following albums: M83 in 2001, Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts in 2003, Before The Dawn Heals Us in 2005, Digital Shades Vol. 1 in 2007, Saturdays = Youth in 2008 and Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming in 2011. The double album “Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming” was released on 17th October 2011, through Naïve, produced by Justin Meldal-Johnson (Beck, NIN, The Mars Volta, Goldfrapp) and including contributions from Zola Jesus, Brad Laner (from 90’s band Medicine) on guitar, and ‘Saturdays = Youth’ vocalist Morgan Kibby. The album was preceded by the track Midnight City” released in July.
Aphex Twin - Matchsticks (from Selected Ambient Works Volume II)
Aphex Twin, born Richard David James, August 18, 1971, in Limerick, Ireland to Welsh parents Lorna and Derek James, is an electronic music artist. He grew up in Cornwall, United Kingdom and started producing music around the age of 12. Richard has been hailed as “the most inventive and influential figure in contemporary electronic music”, with his works ranging from ambient pieces to acid techno. Quoted in Mixmag Richard said ” I just love electronics and music and putting the two together just came naturally. I did electronics in college. Electronic music is just so lush basically I love messing with acid, jungle, and playing it out to my mates in a night club. Get out there and dance. Let’s have it! If anyone’s coming to my shows I just want everybody to just dance and have a laugh basically.” In 1991 Aphex formed the Rephlex record label with his friend Grant Wilson-Claridge. Signed artists include Mike Paradinas (aka µ-Ziq) and Squarepusher. He’s also known as: AFX, Blue Calx, Bradley Strider, Caustic Window, The Dice Man, GAK, Polygon Window, Power-Pill, Q-Chastic, Soit-P.P., Rich in Mike & Rich, Martin Tressider in Universal Indicator…
Múm - The Land Between Solar Systems (from Finally We Are No One)
It’s an enchanted world that Múm inhabit. Conceived in a remote Icelandic lighthouse, Finally We Are No One is an electronica album that conjures up hazy, half-remembered memories of childhood, both magical and eerie. The obvious comparisons are with Boards of Canada and Múm’s compatriot, Björk. But as with their superb 2000 debut, Yesterday Was Dramatic, Today Is OK, Múm make a music that’s far too original to be easily compartmentalized. So analog keyboards hum alongside muted digital glitches, and “proper” instruments—accordions, cellos, melodicas—flutter in and out of the mix. The overall effect is of a modern kind of folk music. It’s gentle, almost-fey stuff, but the quartet (including twin sisters who appeared on the cover of Belle & Sebastian’s Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant) never slips into anything like polite ambience. Instead, the 11 pieces are like extracts from a particularly vivid dream journal, especially when the Valtýsdóttir sisters sing in their peculiar gurgling, infantilized way in the epically unfurling lullaby, “The Land Between Solar Systems.” This is an album that leaves you longing for shady childhood experiences you never knew you’d even had. —John Mulvey
Boards of Canada - Everything You Do Is A Balloon (from Boc Maxima)
Boards of Canada (commonly abbreviated BoC) are a Scottish electronic music duo consisting of brothers Mike Sandison (born June 1, 1970) and Marcus Eoin (born July 21, 1971). Boards of Canada’s music is reminiscent of the warm, analogue sounds of 1970s media and contains themes of childhood, nostalgia and the natural world. Mike and Marcus have mentioned the documentary films of the National Film Board of Canada, from which the group’s name is derived, as a source of inspiration. Their earliest recording that is commercially available now is 1995’s Twoism, which was re-released in 2002 by Warp. Initially another limited release, it was sent to Skam Records, who were impressed enough to sign the brothers and release another EP. This was followed in 1998 by their breakthrough album, Music Has The Right To Children. A masterpiece of ambient IDM, it brought them widespread acclaim from music critics and instantly made them stars of electronic music (although Boards of Canada very rarely give interviews or perform live). After a couple more EPs, their second full-length was released in 2002. Geogaddi was again widely praised, although it was not considered to be quite as good as Music Has The Right To Children. Third album The Campfire Headphase (2005) saw a slightly different style, with more conventional structures and the inclusion of real instruments. It received mostly positive reviews, but some reviewers were disappointed with the new sound. Nevertheless, Boards of Canada are still very well regarded by fans of experimental electronic music, and their fourth album is highly anticipated.
Pantha Du Prince - Saturn Strobe
Hendrik Weber, better known as Pantha du Prince is a German electronic music producer and DJ affiliated with Hamburg’s Dial music label. His music is often characterized by a hypnotic, intricate combination of melodic chimes and dark, heavy techno beats, but does not confine itself to a single sound or strain of minimal techno. He made his debut as Pantha du Prince with a four-track 12” release, Nowhere (2002), followed a couple years later by a full-length CD/double LP, Diamond Daze (2004). The album garnered considerable acclaim, with some critics gleefully pointing out Weber’s affinity for late-’80s British shoegaze bands such as Slowdive, Moose, Ride, and My Bloody Valentine. His affinity for Detroit techno (à la Carl Craig) and minimal techno (Chain Reaction) was evident as well. Weber released his second Pantha du Prince full-length, This Bliss (2007), which again garnered considerable acclaim. In 2010, he switched labels to Rough Trade Records before releasing his third album Black Noise.
Brian Eno on Creating Music and Art As Imaginary Landscapes (1989)
In Imaginary Landscapes, documentarians Duncan Ward and Gabriella Cardazzo paint an impressionistic video portrait of Brian Eno: record producer, visual artist, collaborator with the likes of U2 and David Bowie, ambient music-inventing musician, self-proclaimed “synthesist,” early member of Roxy Music, and co-creator of the Oblique Strategies. Even if you’ve never handled an actual deck of Oblique Strategies cards — and few have — you’ve surely heard one or two of the Strategies themselves in the air: “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.” “The most important thing is the most easily forgotten.” “Do something boring.” The idea is to draw a card and follow its edict whenever you hit a creative block. This should, in theory, get you around the block, no matter what you’re trying to create. Eno first published the Oblique Strategies with painter Peter Schmidt in 1975, and here in Imaginary Landscapes, fourteen years later, you can hear him still excited about the cards’ basic premise: if you follow arbitrary rules and theoretical positions, they’ll lead you to creative decisions you never would have otherwise made.
This short documentary combines interviews of Eno with footage of him crafting sounds in his studio, simulating the echoes of a cave, say, then turning that cave into a liquid. It weaves these segments together with a trip through American cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, then back to the Woodbridge, Suffolk of Eno’s youth, then on to Venice, one of the world’s places that draws him irresistibly with its wateriness. Place itself emerges as one of Eno’s driving concepts, not simply as a source of inspiration (though it seems to work that way for his video Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan), but as a form. When Eno talks about making albums, or images, or installations, he talks about them as places for audiences to exist. In any physical place, you’re presented with a certain set of choices. You can’t always tell the deliberately designed elements from the “natural” ones, and having a rich experience demands that you actively use your own awareness. This, so Eno explains, guides how he builds “places” — imaginary landscapes, if you will — for listeners, gallerygoers, recording artists, or himself, trying to open up “the spaces between categories” and “make use of the watcher’s brain as part of the process.” Look into his more recent projects, like his iPhone apps or his collaborations with bands like Coldplay or his touring exhibition 77 Million Paintings, and you’ll find him building them still.
Max Richter - Last Days (from Memoryhouse)
Max Richter is a German-born British composer. Memoryhouse, his first solo album, is a journey though the 20th century which unfolds like the soundtrack to an imaginary film. Combining the BBC Philharmonic under conductor Rumon Gamba—no strangers to recording classic film scores—with atmospheric electronics, the result is a melancholy evocation of love, loss and survival, often with the focus on Eastern Europe. Minimalism with a deeply emotional core, overlaid with fragments of poetic voices, the melodic sensibility lies between Philip Glass’s minimalism, Wojciech Kilar’s The Portrait of a Lady and the film scores of Zbigniew Preisner. Both the piano writing and the intense lament “Sarajevo” echo Preisner’s work on Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours Trilogy. Other, more electronic pieces such as “Untitled (Figures)” parallel Richter’s work with the Future Sound of London and his collaborations with Roni Size. Richter, who was co-founder of Piano Circus, has delivered the sort of intelligent, imaginative, accessible new music one might expect to find on Radio Three’s Late Junction, so much so that this is one of the first releases on the Late Junction label. In the composer’s words, Memoryhouse tells “a story about where we have been, and asks the question: ‘Where we are going?’” The answer is couched in thoroughly modern insecurity, at the heart of a passionately conceived, impeccably performed odyssey of spectral beauty.
Tim Hecker - Chimeras (from Harmony in Ultraviolet)
Tim Hecker is a Montreal-based musician and sound artist, born in Vancouver. His works have been described as “structured ambient”, “tectonic color plates” and “cathedral electronic music”, however for the most part, have focused on exploring the intersections of noise, dissonance and melody, fostering an approach to songcraft which is both physical and emotive. The New York Times has described his work as “foreboding, abstract pieces in which static and sub-bass rumbles open up around slow moving notes and chords, like fissures in the earth waiting to swallow them whole”. His Radio Amor was considered to be a key recording in 2003 by Wire magazine. His work has also included commissions for contemporary dance, sound-art installations, and various writings. Tim has presented his work extensively including performances at Sonar (Barcelona), MUTEK (Montreal), Impakt Festival (Utrecht), Victoriaville in (Quebec), IDEAL (Nantes), Vancouver New Music Festival (Vancouver), and Transmediale (Berlin). His live performances have included collaborations with artists such as Oren Ambarchi and Fly Pan Am, and has supported bands including Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Isis, Jesu, Nadja, Troum and Fennesz.
Biosphere - Silene (from Substrata)
Biosphere is the main recording name of Geir Jenssen (born 1962 in Tromsø, Norway), a musician who has released a notable catalog of ambient electronic music. He is well known for his “ambient house” then “arctic ambient” styles, and his use of music loops and peculiar samples from sci-fi sources. His track “Novelty Waves” was used for the 1995 Levi’s ad campaign. His 1997 album Substrata is generally seen as one of the all-time classic ambient albums. Before launching Biosphere, Jenssen was a member of the Norwegian dream pop band Bel Canto. Bel Canto released records on the Belgium-based label Crammed Discs. The voice of the sample used in Kobresia belongs to Karl Nikolajev, a Russian “biocommunicator” (telepath), that is sitting in a room, trying to “see” which object is lying on a table two floors up. It is from Radio-Moscow.
Max Richter - November (from Memoryhouse)
Max Richter is a German-born British composer. Memoryhouse, his first solo album, is a journey though the 20th century which unfolds like the soundtrack to an imaginary film. Combining the BBC Philharmonic under conductor Rumon Gamba—no strangers to recording classic film scores—with atmospheric electronics, the result is a melancholy evocation of love, loss and survival, often with the focus on Eastern Europe. Minimalism with a deeply emotional core, overlaid with fragments of poetic voices, the melodic sensibility lies between Philip Glass’s minimalism, Wojciech Kilar’s The Portrait of a Lady and the film scores of Zbigniew Preisner. Both the piano writing and the intense lament “Sarajevo” echo Preisner’s work on Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours Trilogy. Other, more electronic pieces such as “Untitled (Figures)” parallel Richter’s work with the Future Sound of London and his collaborations with Roni Size. Richter, who was co-founder of Piano Circus, has delivered the sort of intelligent, imaginative, accessible new music one might expect to find on Radio Three’s Late Junction, so much so that this is one of the first releases on the Late Junction label. In the composer’s words, Memoryhouse tells “a story about where we have been, and asks the question: ‘Where we are going?’” The answer is couched in thoroughly modern insecurity, at the heart of a passionately conceived, impeccably performed odyssey of spectral beauty.
(via sunrec)
Tycho x Heathered Pearls Mix: Dazed
Scott and I put together a mix for Dazed Magazine last week, we wanted to make it a free download for you all. Below is the tracklist and link to the Tycho interview, enjoy.
Caribou – Sinuses
Com Truise – Karova
Broker/Dealer – On A Claire Day
Cloudland Canyon – Krautwerk
Tame Impala – Why Won’t You Make Up Your Mind?
Bibio – Saint Christopher
Black Moth Super Rainbow – From The See
Odd Nosdam – Up In Flames
Bonobo – Recurring
J Dilla – One
18 Carat Affair – Phil Spector Daydream
Broadcast & The Focus Group – One Million Years Ago
Ulrich Schnauss – Stars
Beck – Hotwax
From the Mouth of the Sun - Like Shadows In An Empty Cathedral (from Woven Tide)
From the Mouth of the Sun is the new collaboration between Dag Rosenqvist (aka Jasper TX), and composer Aaron Martin. The duo brings together a beautiful blend of minimalist classical themes and subtle yet suffused atmospheric drone. Fans of soundtracks by Peter Broderick or Johann Johannson… or the quieter music of Godspeed You Black Emperor! will find much to like here. Woven Tide is their debut album. Out of the charred embers of dusk Woven Tide emerges with an incandescent glow. Each glimmer cast by the sustained notes of ebony keys, the taut strings of the cello, and the rampant buzz of guitar lights our way, gives us hope, brings us into the dawn of a new day. As From The Mouth of the Sun, the duo act as our torchbearers, scrawling messages along the walls of an elongated cave, toiling through the decayed remnants of fetid matter to create eight illuminating pieces.
Hello. I'm Kevin. I'm French and I currently live in Montreal where I study Business and Environmental Science at Concordia University. You'll find here some of the things that I read and find interesting. 
