Category Archives: Awesome

Calypso’s Debut EP Is Here

calypso

Just recently we were treated to an impressive debut single from a newcomer out of Tasmania who goes by the name Calypso. The track was called “Numbered” and it was said to be just the first taste of her upcoming debut self-titled EP. Here’s the video in case you missed it:

The EP is a combination of old and new material. Calypso began writing some of the parts a few years back when she first began experimenting with electronic music. Over time these ideas grew and evolved as her influences changed and she discovered more about her own musical direction – she’s also been busy releasing music as one-half of SLOW. This year Calypso felt she was ready to make a decision on the final selection of songs, which she then sent through to a producer known as KOWL to help get them polished-up and ready to release.

“I suppose the main themes behind the EP would be growth and change…whether that’s within a relationship or within oneself. I think it’s a reflection on how life is constantly moving, and you have to adapt to your surroundings and learn how to survive through the changes.

The EP is also about the push & pull of love, how we can connect with other people and how we can move apart from one another as well. I hope the EP can take the listener on a bit of a journey, as they connect and relate to the words and the music through their own personal experiences” – Calypso

Calypso has indeed delivered an impressive debut collection of tracks, showcasing her strong indie-electronic/electro-pop sound as each track explores the intricacies of relationships; the happy beginnings, the excitement throughout, and sometimes the inevitable end.

Stream the EP here:

Favorite: “Field of Violets”

The EP is also available from iTunes and Spotify if that strikes your fancy.

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Newest Love: Litche – “Look Up”

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“Look Up” is the stunning debut single from an Australian newcomer who goes by the name Litche, giving us a nice little introduction to his chilled atmospheric electronica.

Litche is the solo project of Sam Litchfield, a producer out of Newcastle (Australia) who some may also know for his role as one-half of Aussie/Hawaiian duo Haliia. Over the last few months Sam has been busy working on a number of new productions that aren’t quite right for the Haliia sound & style.

The initial idea for “Look Up” came about while Sam was jamming with his Swiss friend Elias back in 2015, who he was introduced to by a mutual friend on a surf trip to Bali last year.

“After discovering we both had a mutual passion for making music, we decided we’d get together and have a go at make something. Not much came out of it at that time except a simple 4-bar loop and a few vocal samples, but then back in April this year I became inspired by an Ethnic sample pack I’d found and started working this with the beats and vocals Elias and I had recorded all those months ago, and it all seemed to work so well” – Litche

Inspired by some of his favorite instrumental artists for their use of organic soundscapes mixed with deep electronic production (like Seekae & Shlohmo), Sam continued working this rediscovered idea with a variety of foreign samples & sounds, as he strived to create a song that could transport its listener to somewhere else, a place where they can reflect on the different cultures we have around the world, and show just how music can bridge the gap between them.

Haunting vocal arrangements drift throughout a chilled atmospheric landscape of smooth tribal percussion, dark echoing synths and pulsing electronic beats.

Available for free download (but not for long — so do it now!):

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Remix: Anna Of The North – Baby (Felix Cartal Remix)

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Epic, swooning and ethereal, Oslo based act Anna of the North recently arrived with the new single, “Baby,” exclusively on Noisey. Now, Vancouver native, Felix Cartal premieres his shimmering re-work of the track, streaming on Mr. Suicide Sheep.

A relentless touring schedule and tireless work ethic have led to Cartal’s continued rise as one of dance music’s premier producers. Never content to reproduce the same sound, his artistic evolution has resulted in a unique style defined by memorable melodies, beautiful vocals, and driving bass. 2016 has seen the release of multiple remixes by Felix, all of which have topped the Hype Machine charts, including Kiiara’s “Feels” and Wafia’s “Heartburn”. The JUNO nominated artist has performed on the stages of Tomorrowland, EDC, Electric Zoo, and HARD, as well as clubs around the world.

Anna of the North’s “Baby” is the highly anticipated follow up to previous releases, “The Dreamer” and “Sway,” which were streamed over 30 million times, and caught the attention from tastemakers like Fader, NYLON, Pigeons and Planes, and rose to number three in the Hype Machine charts. “Sway” also garnered an official remix from certified hit makers, The Chainsmokers.

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Newest Love: Stone Cold Fox

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“The five-track effort is likened to a roadtrip, “a collection of journeys” in which Stone Cold Fox venture out to discover who they really are when all the layers are peeled back and they’re forced to look in the mirror.”
– Consequence of Sound

“…delivering dancey and joyful synthesizer beats, overlaid with groovey guitar leads. The band has an innate knack for finding the sweet spot of catchy music that isn’t shallow, leading you to want to teleport from your shitty apartment to an island paradise. “
– NOISEY

“…while it retains energy, [Firing Squad] opts for something far more ethereal. The track basks in a haze of guitar effects and subtle performances, proving that Stone Cold Fox can sound subdued without feeling lethargic…”
– The AV CLUB 

“Amongst the slew of synth pop revivalists, Brooklyn-based four piece Stone Cold Fox are doing things a little differently. By staring their song producing process with an indie-rock core, they craft songs that are essentially guitar led, before channeling that heart into an addictive electronic, synth-heavy format.
– Wonderland Magazine
The best kind of road trips are the ones that are spontaneous. You know where you want to go, you have a final destination in mind – you just don’t necessarily know how you’re going to get there. But that’s ok, because it’s all about the journey, right? Brooklyn-based four piece, Stone Cold Fox want to take a road trip with you- they’ll get you to where you want to go, you just gotta let them take the wheel, because in the end whatever will be, will be. And the soundtrack? Their EP, Tunnel Vision.

Tunnel Vision is a stunning contradiction- a collection of journeys made up of distorted dance synths that bleed with a rock-heavy heart. Written, recorded and produced over a period of two years, the sound of Tunnel Vision resembles a mindset that is anything but narrow minded- instead, it’s a collection of tracks that skew in every which way, that ultimately steer back to it’s original course to create a wistful, cohesive sound. “Tracks started as total rock songs, then turned into chilled electro songs, eventually finding its way somewhere comfortably in the middle,” explains guitarist and vocalist Kevin. “They find middle ground with a rock core and a dancey pulse,” he adds. So, imagine a world where John Lennon is rose from the dead and conceived a love child with The Strokes while listening to LCD Soundsystem and Beat Connection – that’s the kind of world that Tunnel Vision creates.

If you’re digging that sound — check out the EP here and now:

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Coleman Hell – “Flowerchild”

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Coleman Hell caught people’s attention last year with his breakout hit “2 Heads”, which has been streamed nearly 100 Million times across different platforms. His follow-up single, “Fireproof”, was released in late April and has already been streamed over 4 Million times. He has crafted a unique musical style, incorporating elements of folk, rock, dance, and pop and fusing electronic music with organic instrumentation.

Coleman’s new track, “Flowerchild”, continues this musical exploration. “We danced in the forest like flickering candles and ran our fingers across the trees. The fire crackled like a record in the 70s. And when the smoke clears you’ll be someone else. The person you leave behind will be sleeping like a baby, with daisies curling up your arms and roses in your eyes. Run wild you little flower child”

Along with his bandmates, La+ch and Michah, Coleman has spent much of the past year on the road, touring North America with Robert DeLong last fall before completing a US headline tour this Spring and recently selling out The Troubadour in LA following his appearances at Hangout Fest and Bottlerock Fest. He also supported Twenty One Pilots on their Spring Canadian tour and made a trip to the UK to play The Great Escape Festival. He is now appearing at a host of North American festivals over the summer, including Electric Forest, Summerfest, Pemberton, Wayhome, Osheaga, and Rifflandia.

Coleman Hell’s debut album will be released this summer via Columbia Records.

Tour Dates:    

Jun 23 Electric Forest Festival Rothbury, MI

Jun 25  Red River Ex Winnipeg, MB

Jul 01   Canada Day at Parliament Hill Ottawa, ON

Jul 08   Summerfest Milwaukee, WI

Jul 09   Calgary Stampede Calgary, AB

Jul 15   Ottawa Bluesfest Ottawa, ON

Jul 17   Pemberton Music Festival  Pemberton, BC

Jul 23   Canalside Buffalo, NY

Jul 24   WayHome Oro Medonte, ON

Jul 26   K Days TD South Stage Edmonton, AB

Jul 29   Summer in the Park Festival North Bay, ON

Jul 30   Osheaga Montreal, QC

Aug 03 Queen City Ex Regina, SK

Aug 12 Catalina Wine Mixer Avalon, CA

Aug 21 Billboard Hot 100 Festival, Wantagh, NY

Sep 2   Backwoods Festiva, Stroud, OK

Sep 16-18  Rifflandia, Victoria, BC

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Listen: Ghost Hours – “For You”

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“‘For You’ is a hazy, laid back California summer kind of song. Definitely inspired by the ocean and California sunsets.” — Ghost Hours

Ghost Hours, the moniker of Southern California’s Ron Fountenberry, is an electronic solo project aimed at creating beat driven melodies with a midnight vibe.

Fountenberry is an accomplished composer who has written music for Apple, Ford, Google – as well as projects for television and film.

Ghost Hours is his musical respite; where he can explore electronic, R+B, indie, and pop terrain freely as his imagination takes him.

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Music Box Village

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New Orleans Airlift is pleased to announce a new, ambitious endeavor to build a permanent home for their collaborative Music Box installation —The Music Box Village. Each Music Box house is a one-of-a-kind, interactive musical instrument disguised as a whimsical house, allowing visitors to explore, play, and create sound. Originally conceived by artists Delaney Martin, Taylor Shepherd, Callie Curry (SWOON) and Jay Pennington, and built in collaboration with dozens more local and international artists to date, each house is outfitted with hand-made pulleys, levers and other interventions, which are activated by guest musicians and visitors. The nonprofit organization recently acquired a 55,000 square foot forest with an adjoining metal fabrication warehouse in the Bywater, and plans to hold a grand opening of the new cultural destination in October 2016.

Since its creation in 2011, in part as a response to destruction and decay after Hurricane Katrina, Airlift’s flagship project The Music Box has drawn tens of thousands of people to experience a unique mix of ambitious sound art, memorable performances by local and world-renowned musicians, and one-of-a-kind musical architecture. Performance highlights include Thurston Moore, Wilco, Solange Knowles, Preservation Hall, Andrew W K, Mannie Fresh, Lost Bayou Ramblers, and Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes, just to name a few.

This summer, musical houses from several nomadic iterations including New Orleans City Park, and houses built in Georgia Tech, Tampa Bay and Shreveport, along with some other surprises, will be installed for the grand opening. In the 2016–2017 season, Airlift will present an exciting lineup of local and international performers as well as new collaborative musical houses, including a Mardi Gras Indian house with Big Chief Darryl Montana of the Yellow Pocahontas.

New Orleans Airlift is known for organizing large-scale collaborative art and performance works, crossing cultures and expanding upon tradition. For the first time, the organization will offer a membership program to support their organization, in addition to tax-deductible giving, partnerships, volunteering and more.

To celebrate this announcement and invite the public to get involved, the organization is running a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter to support the major build out and site improvements.

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Newest Love: Ancient Cities – “Marmalade”

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Following their well-received self-titled debut album in 2014, Ancient Cities returns to bring us Supermoon Blackout, out 7/1 and available to pre-order now. After being invited to play Newport Folk Festival in 2015 by Converse, the band began recording at Converse Rubber Tracks Studio in Boston and Sioux Sioux Studio before taking the record to frontman Stephen Warwick’s home studio to wrap up. What emerged is both raw and organic in the ways you’d expect and enjoy from and fuzzed out rock album like this.

They’ve expanded on a sound that is lively, warm, angsty, and ferocious, and the new addition of organ/synth sounds have only added to the party. Supermoon Blackout will have you swooning, dancing silly, jumping around wildly, or nodding your head and tapping your steering wheel from one song to another. The band is putting one foot in front of the other along the road of psychedelic folk rock laid before them. Each stone placed with road-tested material has landed them features in Vanity Fair, The Village Voice, as well as live video sessions with Paste Magazine and Live & Breathing. Creatively and otherwise, Ancient Cities is following this road to success- polishing their evolving tastes but not straying far from their fuzz rock n’ roll, psyched out pop roots.

Songs like “Sunburn” take you back to the swooning melodies and harmonies of 60’s rock ‘n’ roll, while “Actress” is an instant party starter.  “Midnight” gives you a sense that you’re coming back to life- or realizing that somewhere along the road you lost yourself and just noticed you’re back. “Marmalade” captures the essence of the album musically as an ode to getting lost in rock n roll textures, swooning vocals, and a fuzzed out guitar solo.

Warwick gained acclaim in 2010 with his solo album Talking Machine, receiving local notice as best song-writer and landing on Shuffle Magazine’s top 10 list for albums of that year. Ancient Cities became his new musical outlet that gave him freedoms to break out from lofi alt-folk and pick up an electric guitar with no reservations or apologies. This shift in perspective brought about some foot-stomping rock n’ roll that comes from a thoughtful desire to move you. Supermoon Blackout is the kind of music that beckons you put down your cell phone to just dance, listen, or watch.

Supermoon Blackout
Track List:
1. Marmalade
2. Phases
3. Sunburn
4. Luck
5. Time Traveler
6. Supermoon Blackout
7. All Rise
8. Actress
9. Midnight
10. Sorceress
11. Losing My Mind

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Must Watch! 360° Video from The Zolas for “Swooner”

Photo credit: Steve Bays

Photo credit: Steve Bays

“The four piece pop band from Vancouver are upbeat and undoubtedly having lighthearted fun with their music, and the song is layered in sugary harmonic vocals and melodies for you and your friends to get dark (or drunk) to.” VICE’s Noisey

“a danceable exploration into experimental indie pop” Culture Collide

Vancouver indie-pop darlings The Zolas have released a cutting-edge video for their fuzzed-out, guitar-driven pop anthem “Swooner”, which just reached #2 on the Canadian Alternative Chart this year. The interactive live video was shot on four GoPro cameras mounted in a special 360° tripod that allows the viewer to pan around the room and explore different viewpoints. Make sure to watch on Chrome or Firefox!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKCo8z-j3yc

The Zolas’ Swooner LP, released this year via Light Organ Records, dives headlong into vibrant, experimental pop, showcased by stirring modern production, highlighted by flashes of grungy hard-panned guitars, Prince-like synth flourishes, eurodance vocals and electric pianos. The band is heading out on a North American tour in June, including a stop at NXNE Festival and Pemberton Music Festival.

Tour Dates:

6/13: San Diego, CA @ The Casbah
6/14: Los Angeles, CA @ The Echo
6/15: Santa Barbara, CA @ Velvet Jones
6/16: San Francisco, CA @ Rickshaw Stop
6/18: Toronto, ON, Canada @ NXNE Festival
6/20: Portland, OR @ Doug Fir Lounge
6/21: Seattle, WA @ Sunset Tavern
6/22: Spokane, WA @ The Bartlett
7/14-17: Pemberton, BC, Canada @ Pemberton Music Festival

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“Feel It In Your Guts” – Thurston Moore & Bernie Sanders

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Joyful Noise Recordings recently brought together two inspiring individuals for a very special release: a brand new composition by Thurston Moore, created in collaboration with the Bernie Sanders campaign. Titled “Feel It In Your Guts,” the track is a twelve-string acoustic piece laced with excerpts from Bernie Sanders’ speeches, touching on topics like the worship of money, economic inequality, social justice, and the need for basic human rights for all people.

“Feel It In Your Guts” is limited to 1000 hand-numbered copies on square, white flexi-disc vinyl. All records are given away for free to those who make individual donations to Sanders’ campaign. More details here.

Throughout his political career, Sanders has been a strong supporter of the arts. “You have my promise that as President, I will be an arts President,” Sanders said in a video recorded for the Arts Action Fund. “I will continue to advocate strongly for robust funding of the arts in our cities, schools and public spaces. Art is speech. Art is what life is about.”

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ORDER HERE

Explaining how the Bernie Sanders & Thurston Moore collaboration came to fruition, Joyful Noise’s Karl Hofstetter says:

Bernie Sanders inspires us. In a political and business climate which is increasingly self-interested and money-driven, Bernie Sanders alone remains uncompromisingly focused on the issues that affect 99% of us. Which is to say, he’s talking about the things that will improve the lives of ourselves, our families, and basically everyone we have ever met. As the only presidential candidate who refuses bribes from big business, his agenda is unswervingly focused on the people over special interests. As Bernie himself has said, “The reason why we are doing well in this campaign is because we are telling the truth.”

We at the label were inspired to support the campaign, and we thought it would be best to use our curatorial talents to this end. Being a weird-o indie rock record label, we are fortunate to work with a variety of incredible musicians; including, on occasion, the great Thurston Moore. So we decided to ask him. And we were delighted that in a matter of minutes after posing the idea, Thurston excitedly agreed.

Next: the task of getting a major presidential candidate involved. Fortunately, one of our employees was already friends with the good folks of the Bernie campaign, so we reached out. Amazingly, the Bernie campaign responded, and within a week or so, we heard that Bernie himself was into the idea. The amazing folks at the Bernie campaign have worked closely with us to make this crazy collaboration a reality. 

– Karl Hofstetter

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