UK born duo Eddie Jefferys and Jason Morrison make up the bass heavy sounds that are 16bit.  Among a deep discography, the duo has worked with Bjork, remixed Noisia, and is releasing a debut album this year. Here’s the gist, these guys bring the heavy bass.  Expect loud noises, low rumbles, and lots bass wobbles [...]

So hopefully by now you get the gist that Little Red Lung are pretty damn awesome in that rehearsal studio of theirs so for the finale we decided to take a break from all that and just go to lunch with them at Nickel Diner -- because a band's gotta eat. What was meant to be a sit-down interview-y talk about music and such turned into a very pleasant afternoon get-together over sandwiches, pastries, and a very welcome reunion with an old friend. But rather than bore you with the chit chat, why not just let the pictures do the ...

One of the Venues for Dawson City Music Fest Looking for an alternative to Sasquatch, Bonnaroo, or the so-last-week (and the week before) Coachella? Maybe something a little smaller, cheaper, more obscure, or just further away? Here are a few recommendations from this year’s crop of Canadian summer music festivals. Hillside Festival Guelph, Ontario July 27-29 The Gist: [...]

There’s another import from Britain, however, that most young people are not getting. During the Grammy awards in February, Sir Paul McCartney performed a medley of Beatles hits. Twitter, that den of Internet-savvy youngsters, lit up. Hundreds of tweets from teens and young adults poured in. The general gist? “Who is this guy?” Or, more specifically, “who the hell is paul mccartney lmao he hella old.” There’s a reason for this seemingly inexplicable tragedy of knowledge: Young people don’t know who the Beatles are, because the Beatles aren’t readily available to them anymore. – Do you buy ...

One quarter of Teenage Fanclub, Gerard Love is already responsible for countless nuggets of beautiful, evocative pop music. But his new project Lightships is something a bit special. Roping in a few fellow Glasgow indie pop luminaries, Gerard Love set to about building an album which has an indefinably touching atmosphere. Out now, 'Electric Cables' is a showcase for a songwriter who is both steeped in multifarious pop traditions and unafraid to takes chance. An obvious choice for Their Library, ClashMusic tracked down Gerard Love to discuss his literary tastes and influences. - - - What is your favourite book and why? 'Siddhartha ...

They forgot the kitchen sink. This is due, of course, to the two companies joining forces. Full story at The Verge : Here’s the gist of the “strategic deal” the two companies have agreed to: Coca-Cola plans to “invite consumers into Spotify through live events, TV, digital media,” and through a new app it’s developing with Spotify. In return, Coca-Cola gets kudos from fans for sponsoring an up-and-coming tech startup that puts music, a priority for Coca-Cola’s ad department through the ages, in the forefront. Read and comment. From thedailyswarm.com.

Brother Ali - The Bite Marked Heart EP Waveriders, can you say smooth operator?  Good, I knew you could.  If you were not aware there has been a change made to our language.  Smooth operator is now spelled Brother Ali.  Not that anyone remotely familiar with Brother Ali doubted how smooth he can be on record, but with the release of The Bite Marked EP the whole country now has to concede the point.  This free seven song EP was released the day before Valentine’s Day, and it is as smooth as the surface of an undisturbed pond. Brother Ali ...

Currently touring nationally, Shane Parsons and Simon Ridley from DZ Deathrays discuss strobe lights, house parties and ‘NME’ hype with DARREN LEVIN . DZ Deathrays and Bleeding Knees Club may share little in common aesthetically – the former plays a punishing brand of party-rock not unlike early Wolf & Cub or DFA 1979, while the latter dabbles in bratty surf-garage – but their career paths have taken an uncannily similar trajectory. Both duos cut their teeth playing house parties in their native Queensland. They signed to the same label, Melbourne’s I Oh You. They jointly appeared on NME ’s “50 Best New Bands of 2011”. And they’ve released their respective debuts within a month of each other. (DZ Deathray’s Bloodstreams came out earlier this month while Nothing To Do by Bleeding Knees was released in early March.) When M+N caught up with DZ’s Simon Ridley and Shane Parsons at the South Melbourne offices of their label in February, they were about to head back overseas for showcase dates in Europe and the States. Down the hall in a separate boardroom, Bleeding Knees Club were gearing up to do the same thing. So do they get lumped in together overseas? “A little bit,” says singer-guitarist Parsons, laughing. “It must be the two-piece thing.” Ridley, the band’s guitarist-turned-drummer, has another theory. People who aren’t from Queensland, he jokes, have a problem distinguishing between their adopted hometown of Brisbane and Bleeding Knees Club’s native Gold Cast. The pair, however, originally hail from Bundaberg, only forming the band when they were sharing a house together in Brisbane. They started playing house parties under the name Denzel, but it was soon shortened to DZ, initially as a private joke. “We called it DZ because it sounded more like a hip-hop troupe,” Ridley jokes. DZ released only one EP, 2009 debut Ruined My Life , before a clash with a US dub-step producer forced yet another name change . Adding “Deathrays” to their moniker in 2011, the band released a second EP, Brutal Tapes , all the while becoming renowned for their seizure-inducing live shows. Is the strobe lighting still a big part of what you do? Simon: When we can, yeah. We don’t really do it so much for supports or anything – that’d be weird … It’s just douche-y if you’re the support and you’ve got an entire lighting rig. [ Laughs ] So the strobes are more than just a DIY box on the ground? Simon: Well, now I use a laptop and a foot controller. That’s another thing that takes fucking ages, because we set it all up and run it all ourselves. Shane: It’s a whole bunch of scenes that Simon changes by hitting the pedal. We write a set with the lights in mind. We only do it for headline sets because it takes 20-30 minutes just to set it up. You can’t do that for supports. Touring with that must be hard. Shane: It’s OK for the UK because you drive everywhere, but in Australia we fly, so you can’t really take lighting. At Laneway in Brisbane they had a lighting guy who kinda knew the gist of the band. [ Laughs ] I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone in Brisbane who didn’t know the gist of the band. Shane: It’s weird because last year we did a show and the turnout was less than expected … We haven’t actually played that much in Brisbane. We spent three months of last year overseas. We haven’t been doing hometown shows, so it’s been really good recently: we did [shows with] Crystal Castles and Fucked Up, and Laneway. And Foo Fighters, of course [in 2011]. I guess you’re sick of talking about it though. Simon: No way, that was amazing. I could talk about it all day. Was it one of those scenarios where the big international rock band was too busy Skype-ing their kids to engage with the local supports? Simon: Well, the only guys we ended up really talking to were Fucked Up and some of the Tenacious D guys. We got to meet the Foo Fighters once. They had bodyguards that you had to get clearance from. It got really weird at one stage. They have this meeting room for VIPs, and we were in there trying to steal some of their booze because we ran out of ours. When Dave [Grohl] came in, there were literally all these people grabbing at him. We thought, “This is fucking weird! We have to get out of here!” … The best bit was the food catering. We’d get in really early so we could get free lunches. You mean you don’t get food riders in Brisbane? [ Laughter ] It’s interesting that new single ‘No Sleep’ premiered on BBC Radio 1 in the UK, rather than here. Was that a product of spending so much time over there [last year]? Shane: When we were over there the second time we did a live session [for BBC] at Maida Vale Studios, so it was pretty incredible that they asked us to do that. Simon: Really bizarre. Being in there and knowing Metallica and Radiohead recorded there. [ Laughter ] Shane: It was the end of the tour as well, so we were haggard. We’d done 22 shows in a row, and we’re not used to doing that because we’re an Australian band. People like [BBC presenter] Huw Stephens have been really supportive. Did the NME write-up have any impact on the momentum in the UK? Simon: Yeah, definitely. As much as everyone hates it, if you get mentioned in there, people still abide by it for some reason. Shane: It’s got such a huge following. Now, they’re so vibrant online. They just need to put a link up … and it goes crazy. The NME thing was really nuts. We never sent any music to them … They came to a show in Brighton and did a review of it. We did a two-hour interview with a guy [from NME ] in Liverpool. We just sat down and had some beers at the end of our first UK tour. Since then they’ve kept in contact. Is ‘No Sleep’ indicative of how the record sounds? Shane: I think the reason we chose that [as a single] is because it’s a bridging step from the upbeat rock of the EP and the moments on the record that are a little different. There are some slower songs and stuff that’s more atmospheric in some ways. Simon: We do write stuff that’s different to what we play live. We just don’t play it live because it’s boring. Shane: And sometimes it’s too hard. I have a pedal that’s a sequencer so it’s all perfectly timed. Doing it live is difficult. Using laptops and click tracks – we just don’t do that. We’ll probably end up trying to do it. Where’d you record the album? Simon: We recorded it at Mount Nebo [in Queensland] where we did some of the other songs on the last EP. We got Richard [Pike] from PVT to come up and produce it. What was it like working with Richard? Simon: It was good. He pushed us. We’re pretty lazy when it comes to recording. Three takes max. [ Laughs ] Shane: Richard really pushed me vocally. I would never class myself as a good singer, so it was good to have him pushing me to hit notes properly. It was relentless. I’d spend three hours singing one verse just to get it right. It was a good learning curve. We were able to add some synths to some songs, to give it a bit more of a dynamic and add colour to what’s essentially just guitars and drums. Did he play on the record? Shane: He did a synth line on ‘Play Dead Until You’re Dead’. It’s a really swell-y sort of song all the way up until the end until it blows up. He wrote this descending keyboard part, which sounds really awesome, because it’s so unexpected. For another slow song we wrote some synths on his laptop. Were you really intent on separating what you do live from what you do in the studio? Simon: I think this is just the first time we’ve been able to go into a cool studio and do stuff that we’ve wanted to do. Also, we wanted someone that would take us outside our comfort zone; to push us in ways that we wouldn’t have normally. Shane: Just subtle things like, “You should stop everything there. Just to give air to the song.” You just bypass that song because you’re totally focused on getting through the song without stuffing up. That’s the good thing about having someone ...

[UPDATED 4/17/2012] * I’m not sure how significant it is that I’m posting this on April Fool’s Day. Guess you can be the judge o’ dat! My ongoing, but increasingly irregular, retrospective on the career of the late maestro, Wardell Quezergue , is on again, having been delayed several times in the last few months for various mainly mundane reasons, but most recently due to my dad’s unexpected health issues. He had a hospitalization that necessitated me going to Memphis for nearly a week. Fortunately, he came through that well is now on the mend; and ...

This one is pretty much explained completely in the title, and if you haven’t already started to watch I think you’re making a grave mistake. The gist: a man on surveillance tape in the back of a police car preambles for a little while on the need for brotherhood between men, and a few brief [...]

Seamus Fogarty is set to release his debut album 'God Damn You Mountain' through Fence this Spring. Hailing from the West of Ireland, word about Seamus Fogarty has been spreading for some time. His delicate performances, his surreal, gently humorous songwriting all combine to spark a cult following. Hooking up with Fence Records following a fateful performance at Homegame, the Fife based imprint are now planning to release Seamus Fogarty's debut album 'God Damn You Mountain' this Spring. At home on a roster with plenty of acoustic clad misfits - Lone Pigeon, Pictish Trail, Rozi Plain we're looking at ...

First of all, I'm writing this actually on Friday and back-dating it for Thursday, because on Thursday I was winding down my marathon 24-hours Austin South By Southwest cameo. I rolled down that way for the Idolator Pray For Pop Party, where we had Cher Lloyd , Penguin Prison and Wallpaper. perform (starting at midnight on Wednesday). You can see pics and then read my review of the showcase. Here's Penguin Prison at the Idolator shindig. Isn't he cute? Here's Cher Lloyd at the Idolator bash. Isn't she cute? I should mention that I also met ...

The kind of experience you have at a big festival such as Soundwave, depends as much on the machinations put in place months and perhaps years before the big day as much as it does on the music. Everything has to swing just right. The venue has to be suitable in terms of space and facilities; then there is transport, security, configuration of the stages and walkways, refreshments, merchandise, first aid and so on and so forth. After all this there’s the weather to consider. When is the optimum time to hold what comes down to being a gigantic ...

“I was drinking my own sweat and it tasted like mystery meat seaweed stewed” I may have mixed some of the words up, but that’s basically the gist. Putting the [...]

Colorado’s String Cheese Incident will follow last year’s first tour in four years with a three-week jaunt this summer. The run kicks off at the band’s Electric Forest festival in Rothbury on June 29 – July 1 and continues with a three-night stand at Red Rocks on July 5 – 7. Following gigs in Park City, Utah; Flagstaff, Arizona and the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, the jam-meets-electronica-meets-bluegrass act will play a pair of shows at the Greek in Berkeley and ends the tour with four shows at Horning’s Hideout in Oregon on July 19 – 22. The band ...