Shigeru Umebayashi - Yumeji’s Theme (from In the Mood for Love’s Soundtrack)
梅林茂 (born February 19, 1951 in Kitakyushu, Fukuoka) is a famous japanese composer. He began his career as the leader of the Japanese new wave rock band EX. Subsequently, he began composing music for films and television series. He has composed music for more than 40 Japanese and chinese films. His minuet, Yumeji’s Theme, originally composed for the 1991 Seijun Suzuki film Yumeji, was used by acclaimed director Kar Wai Wong in his 2000 film, In the Mood for Love, and Umebayashi was subsequently commissioned by Wong to write the score for the film’s 2004 sequel, 2046. He also composed the musical scores for two wuxia films by Zhang Yimou, the Oscar-nominated 2004 film, House of Flying Daggers and the 2006 film, The Curse of the Golden Flower.
Sébastien Tellier - La Ritournelle
Sébastien Tellier (born 1975, Paris) is a French singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. He is currently signed to Record Makers, a French independent record label. He sings in English, French and Italian.Tellier’s first album, L’incroyable Vérité (The Incredible Truth), was released in 2001. Tellier went on tour with Air in support of the album. L’incroyable Vérité is a pop album featuring styles from lo-fi electronica to bizarre cabaret tunes. Tellier followed L’incroyable Vérité with his second studio album Politics (2005). A particularly popular song from Politics was “La Ritournelle”, a string-led tune, which featured Nigerian drummer, Tony Allen of Fela Kuti fame. His third studio album Sexuality was produced by Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo of Daft Punk. Tellier used a single term as title and theme of the album. Tellier’s label Record Makers collaborated with retailer American Apparel for an exclusive three month pre-release of the album, whilst American Apparel sold limited edition versions of the Sexuality CD, LP and “Divine” 7” and 12” single through their North American stores and website. His latest album, My God is Blue, came out on April 23rd.
Classic.
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.
Wolf Parade - You Are A Runner And I Am My Father’s Son
Wolf Parade is an indie rock band from Victoria, British Columbia, based in Montreal, QC, and currently on indefinite hiatus. Wolf Parade was formed when Spencer Krug (also Sunset Rubdown, Frog Eyes, Moonface and Swan Lake) was offered a gig supporting Arcade Fire. He called Dan Boeckner (formerly of notable B.C. band Atlas Strategic, now also part of Handsome Furs) and they wrote songs with a drum machine before calling Arlen Thompson to play drums. Hadji Bakara joined in 2004. Dante DeCaro (formerly of Hot Hot Heat and currently of Johnny and the Moon) joined in Summer 2005 as second guitarist and percussionist. Though expected to perform again, the band announced their indefinite hiatus on November 27, 2010.
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.
Kronos Quartet - Mishima/Closing (from Kronos Quartet Performs Philip Glass)
Kronos Quartet is a string quartet founded by violinist David Harrington in 1973. Since 1978, the quartet has been based in San Francisco, California. The longest-running combination of performers (1978–1999) had Harrington and John Sherba on violin, Hank Dutt onv iola and Joan Jeanrenaud on cello. Jennifer Culp replaced Jeanrenaud on cello in 1999. Jeffrey Zeigler replaced Culp on cello in 2005. Kronos specializes in new music and has a long history of commissioning new works. In fact, over 600 works have been created for the Kronos Quartet. They have worked with many minimalist composers including Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley and Kevin Volans.
Sébastien Tellier - Russian Attractions (from My God is Blue)
Sébastien Tellier (born 1975, Paris) is a French singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. He is currently signed to Record Makers, a French independent record label. He sings in English, French and Italian.Tellier’s first album, L’incroyable Vérité (The Incredible Truth), was released in 2001. Tellier went on tour with Air in support of the album. L’incroyable Vérité is a pop album featuring styles from lo-fi electronica to bizarre cabaret tunes. Tellier followed L’incroyable Vérité with his second studio album Politics (2005). A particularly popular song from Politics was “La Ritournelle”, a string-led tune, which featured Nigerian drummer, Tony Allen of Fela Kuti fame. His third studio album Sexuality was produced by Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo of Daft Punk. Tellier used a single term as title and theme of the album. Tellier’s label Record Makers collaborated with retailer American Apparel for an exclusive three month pre-release of the album, whilst American Apparel sold limited edition versions of the Sexuality CD, LP and “Divine” 7” and 12” single through their North American stores and website. His latest album, My God is Blue, came out on April 23rd.
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…
College - Teenage Color
David Grellier is a French electronica musician and founder of the musical projects College (2005) and Valerie (2007). College, in Grellier’s words, was an attempt “to synthesize into my music the emotions of my childhood” and was greatly influenced by American 1980s pop-culture, “80’s soaps and an aesthetic which I particularly like: color, images, silvery films and the sun – images of Los Angeles and all of the other cities that […] continue to fascinate me.” In an interview to magazine Tsugi, David Grellier said he was influenced by “nostalgic music”, by the band Daft Punk, and artists like Alan Braxe, Fred Falke, Lifelike, Jacques Lu Cont (Stuart Price), Nicolas Makelberge, DJ Falcon, John Carpenter and others.
BBC's In Our Time: Voltaire's Candide
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Voltaire’s novel Candide. First published in 1759, the novel follows the adventures of a young man, Candide, and his mentor, the philosopher Pangloss. Candide was written in the aftermath of a major earthquake in Lisbon and the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War, events which caused such human suffering that they shook many people’s faith in a benevolent God. Voltaire’s masterpiece piles ridicule on Optimism, the fashionable philosophical belief that such disasters are part of God’s plan for humanity - that ‘all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds’. Often uproariously funny, the novel is a biting satire whose other targets include bad literature, extremist religion and the vanity of kings and politicians. It captivated contemporary readers and has proved one of French literature’s most enduring classics. With: David Wootton, Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York; Nicholas Cronk, Professor of French Literature and Director of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford and Caroline Warman, Lecturer in French and Fellow of Jesus College at the University of Oxford.
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
Radiolab: Talking to Machines
This hour of Radiolab, Jad and Robert meet humans and robots who are trying to connect, and blur the line. We begin with a love story—from a man who unwittingly fell in love with a chatbot on an online dating site. Then, we encounter a robot therapist whose inventor became so unnerved by its success that he pulled the plug. And we talk to the man who coded Cleverbot, a software program that learns from every new line of conversation it receives…and that’s chatting with more than 3 million humans each month. Then, five intrepid kids help us test a hypothesis about a toy designed to push our buttons, and play on our human empathy. And we meet a robot built to be so sentient that its creators hope it will one day have a consciousness, and a life, all its own.
Clever Bots: In 2006, Robert Epstein decided to turn to his computer for some help finding a date. He was single at the time, and it seemed like everyone was getting into online dating. So he started searching through photos and sending messages, reaching out to women who caught his interest. And then he found a match—an attractive brunette from Russia named Svetlana. They struck up a correspondence that hummed along for 2 months…until a little bell went off in Robert’s head, and he realized not only that Svetlana wasn’t the woman of his dreams…she wasn’t a woman at all. Brian Christian, author of The Most Human Human, explains that even the clunkiest computer chat program opens a little window on human introspection and intelligence. And Sherry Turkle of MIT helps tell the story of ELIZA, a program designed in the 1960s to mimic responses as though it were a therapist. At first, ELIZA’s creator Joseph Weizenbaum thought the idea of a computer therapist was funny. But when his students and secretary started talking to it for hours, what had seemed to him to be an amusing idea suddenly felt like an appalling reality. Brian rejoins us to puzzle out the heart of the matter—can machines think? And how could we know for sure if they did? It turns out that in 1950, right as computers were beginning to come into being, their creators were struggling with this very question. Brian tells us about Alan Turing, the man who invented a test to answer this very big question, and about The Loebner Prize—a kind of yearly Turing test that Brian experienced firsthand in 2009. And Rollo Carpenter introduces us to Cleverbot, a program he coded to learn by talking to humans.
Furbidden Knowledge: In 1999, Freedom Baird was in grad school, and Furbies—those furry little robot toys that talk to you and tell you to play with them—were all the rage. So Freedom, who was thinking about becoming a mom someday, decided to get a little practice by adopting two gerbils and one Furby. And that led to a chance discovery…and an idea for an experiment that Freedom believed could serve as a kind of emotional Turing test, a way to ask whether machines are more alive than dolls. In order to test Freedom’s idea, we gathered up a Barbie, a hamster named Gerbie, and a Furby. Then, we invited five brave kids into the studio: Taro Higashi Zimmerman, Luisa Tripoli-Krasnow, Sadie Kathryn McGearey, Olivia Tate McGearey, Lila Cipolla, and Turin Cipolla. We ran our results by Caleb Chung, the man who created Furby. And according to Caleb, the reason Furby gets under our skin is simple…but Jad and Robert aren’t ready to buy his explanation. Sherry Turkle returns to help us think about what’s going on.
Everyone Has a Solar: Can a machine have a life of its own? Last year, Jon Ronson got an assignment from GQ to interview robots. He soon found himself in Vermont, sitting across from what’s purported to be the world’s most sentient robot: Bina48. Bina48 is modeled after an entirely human woman named Bina Rothblatt, whose partner Martine Rothblatt commissioned a robot capable of capturing the real Bina’s essesence and bringing it to life. If Bina48 succeeds, Jon explains that it will mark the third time one of Martine’s ideas has changed the world. David Hanson, Bina48’s creator, argues that robots like Bina48 will be so lifelike within his lifetime that we’ll be unable to distinguish them from real humans. In the meantime, Jon experiences one profound moment with Bina48 that hints at what the future may have in store.
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.
DVAS - Inner Sanctum
DVAS (Dietzche V. & the Abominable Snowman) is a Canadian electronic dance music group formed in 2003 in Toronto. DVAS signed to Upper Class Recordings, the Toronto-based label responsible for notable artists The Russian Futurists, Cadence Weapon, Girlsareshort (MSTRKRFT Al-P’s original project) and The Cansecos in 2009. DVAS’ French touch takes us on a dangerous and sexy journey of disco, funk, electro, soul, and pop with its bounce‐heavy set of emotional and summer‐y electro house anthems that will drench sound systems at the dawn of 2010. Since their migration to Toronto and Montreal they have greased clubs and dance‐floors throughout Canada with their high‐octane live shows, culminating with their anticipated showcase performance at Pop Montreal 2009.
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. 
