Posts in Music

I would never deny a song that has this intro from this Freddie Hubbard song, so if anyone starts a song out like this then I am all yours until the end.
D. Lissvik is one half of Studio which have produced one of my favorite albums of 2008 so this must be good. I’ll post that list closer to January for everyone.
One of the sleeper records this year is the Twine album, if you haven’t seen the cover then you need to it’s right here and that’s also where you can find this song Endormie for free to download.
Grouper is band that i’m still checking out but this song stuck out for me among the rest. I read about them earlier today in an interview with Telefon Tel Aviv, so it must be good hah.

Freddie Hubbard – Little Sunflower

D. Lissvik – B2

Twine – Endormie

Grouper – Heavy Water/I’d Rather Be Sleeping

Tom Croose is one half of the Brooklyn DJ duo Worst Friends and has done a mix on ISO50 before, it did so well that he put another one together for us for the holidays.

TRACKLIST

Tom Croose – Mr Mackey Intro
OMD – Time Zones
Badly Drawn Boy – Once Around The Block (Andy Votel remix)
Shalabi Effect – Sister Sleep
The Little Ones – Morning Tide (Studio mix)
Mount Eerie – I Hold Nothing
Flying Lotus – Robo Tussin feat. Lil Wayne
Onra – The Anthem
Beck – Hot Wax (Tom Croose edit)
Pilooski – Love Is Wet
Low Motion Disco – The Low Murderer Is Out At Night
Taj Majal – Queen Bee

DOWNLOAD THE MIX HERE FOR FREE

Tom Croose : Stoney Baloney Mix

Hamburg’s Tensnake maybe best known for his remixes for musicians like Junior Boys or Sally Shapiro but I just picked up this tropical slow burner from Beatport last week and it has helped me with cold walks to the subway. All the synth noodling and night drive long chords that keep the song flowing makes this track a recent favorite. It all reminds me of a 80s jam that I can’t put my finger on that I use to listen, let me know something pops in your head because its buggin’ me.
Vancouver’s Cobblestone Jazz helps me with my attempt to get some people here into deep house once again, there is a lot more than just the Wal-mart electronic select fav Mark Farina’s Mushroom Jazz series.
Nathan Fake at one time had me really excited, I thought he’d be the one to really stretch his sound and nail down where melodic techno and prettier synth rock would go hand and hand. I’ve really haven’t been impressed since his debut album “Drowning In A Sea Of Love” which features this beautiful Superposition song.
I was thinking what’s the best way to start off December? Vince Guaraldi Trio that’s how.

Tensnake – Congolal

Cobblestone Jazz – 5th Element

Nathan Fake – Superposition

Vince Guaraldi Trio – Skating

I got a chance to check out the M83 / School of Seven Bells show last night at the Fillmore (sorry for the bad pic, all I had was my iPhone). School of Seven Bells is a recent signing to Ghostly so it was nice to finally see them after hearing so much via the label and Jakub’s posts. M83 put on a great show as well, I saw them a couple years back at Bimbo’s 365 with Ulrich Schnauss and it was somewhat tame so I wasn’t sure what to expect this time. It was still your average shoegazy affair but there was definitely a different level of energy to the whole thing. A nice touch to the was their synth rig. I spotted a Doepfar Modular and a DSI Prophet 8. I could have sword I saw a Jupiter (6 or 8, not sure) in there, but given that all their other analogs were modern I’m betting it was something else. The only thing I was disappointed by was the lack of visuals, although the lighting did a pretty good job of making up for it. Anybody else catch the show?

And here are the videos for Teen Angst and Don’t Save Us From The Flames, both of which fit very well stylistically with the Graveyard Girl video.

I hope everyone enjoyed a nice short time off, I definitely did by digging thru some older songs and found a few favorites that we’re hiding. It’s a tiny bit crazy that this blog has pretty much a list of all my favorite songs and posting 4 a day sometimes will really make you dig deep thru old mp3s and burn old cds onto the computer that weren’t on before. Scott is definitely working on a player for the blog and pretty much that will make me close my iTunes and Pandora and i’ll just sit on iso50 all day.
These 4 tracks today are all on the gentle tip but all different styles. The first song I remember buying it at a record store in Royal Oak, MI called Neptune Records, the clerks would suggest some of the best music and i’d end up going broke a few times. I found a great description of the song below on Boomkat out of the UK – “‘A Spire’ hits a more gradually rhythmic pace, a hypnotic banjo strum loops into infinity over which a developing cresta of vibraphone notes, guitar stabs and tonewaves congregate. By the midpoint all that’s left is a lonesome acoustic guitar and piano replaying a sublime melody before slowly all the other instrumentation rejoins taking the track to a deep blue finish”.
This Studio song is a favorite, this record is never left out of anything I do, everything from loading my iPod, DJ sets, mixes for friends, whatever you name off this is on it. It’s like Surf music served up for an eager disco crowd, each part brought in gives you more of what you’d be asking for if they were right in front of you and making it for you.
If you follow any Detroit Techno scene then you know Maurizio, its like stripped down hypnotic techno from a distance, I always picture a thick python slowly wrapping around its prey and squeezing tighter with every lap up the body that it makes.
We’ve all seen Crocodile Dundee and if you make music I feel everyone once in their life has tried to fit in a digeridoo in a song they’re working on, don’t lie and say you haven’t because you have because you wanted to make this exact song but i’m going to share this with you that it can’t be done because Peter Best killed it and it can’t be topped.

Tape – A Spire

Studio – Life’s A Beach!

Maurizio – M-4.5 (Untitled A)

Peter Best – Theme from Crocodile Dundee

Jeff Toll turned me on to a new group tonight: the Austin, TX based psych-rock outfit Experimental Aircraft. Loving the intensity of this particular track, “Upper East Side” from their “Third Transmission” album. On a side note, the album cover was auto-generated in MS Paint as part of a machine intelligence experiment. First a machine is fed basic parameters and then it generates various shapes, at each step randomly determining whether or not to anti-alias the shapes. It then adds a lens flare.

Experimental Aircraft – Upper East Side

It’s been over 4 years since Khonnor has released a proper release and today we have an exclusive EP announced here first on the ISO50 blog. Khonnor has always had a strong imagination for genre hopping and quality noisy melodies and this EP has it all and leaves you wanting more but instead you just end up playing songs over and over and get hooked, thats what happened to me. Also, note that PhilistineDSGN made the cover above, if I know the designer i’ll do my best to link to their portfolio.
I first heard this Marz track on a accordion sampler cd that I found in the Ghostly office. Some of the best clapping you’ll ever hear sampled here. Reminds me of Efterklang or Mum but a lot more uplifting.
Animal Collective have a new album coming out in January and I guess Grizzly Bear leaked this song on a blog and its such a treat, they are back to the unique tribal indie sound which I adore, the last minute and a half might be the highlight of the month in what i’ve heard.
Onra is a pretty sample heavy electronic hip hop producer that my friend John turned me onto. I started to go thru the musicians whole catalog and there is gem after gem of interesting sounds.

Khonnor – Pea Mag Gourmet

Marz – 1,2,3,4 bars

Blind Man’s Colour – Brother Sport (Animal Collective Cover)

Onra – The Comet

Not to be bias but i’ve listened to plenty of Radiohead “Reckoner” remixes in the last few weeks and this Mux Mool one is the by far the best. You can put it up next to anyone’s even the Flying Lotus and Diplo ones, here it is for free, let me know what you think and if you’re a YTMND fan then you should listen to it this way.
The last few days i’ve had Label owner/musician Peter Kersten(aka Sten or Lawrence) stay at my place and we’ve shared a lot of videos and music back and forth until the early mornings. He has a couple of beautiful releases out this month on Dial and Spectral Sound, this Divided song is out tomorrow, it is by far one of my favorites, if you like any of the softer melodic 4/4 songs i’ve posted then this is a must have.
Kompakt’s Mikkel Metal has his own genre I believe, he puts out these dark shuffle songs that just keep me entranced until the last note and its accompanied by some really nice hints of vocals.
I don’t know much about this Paul Lansky track besides reading somewhere that Radiohead sampled him and this track isn’t for everyone but if you can get in the mindset and take on 9 mins of this then by all mean do it, I think its rewarding in a way and enjoyable.
Last but not least Peter showed me this Werner Herzog footage from “The Great Ecstasy Of The Sculptor Steiner” its the opening scene, I will be hunting this video down, the camera shots and color are breathtaking.

Radiohead – Reckoner (Mux Mool remix)

Lawrence – Divided

Mikkel Metal – Kaluga

Paul Lansky – Idle Chatter

“The Great Ecstasy Of The Sculptor Steiner” – Werner Herzog

There’s a little something for everyone here today. Rough Trade Records picked up a lovely group from Los Angeles called Little Joy which I heard about from a girl that I met while selling merch at the M83/School Of Seven Bells show.
As for some deep house this Rene Breitbarth track is tip! let it simmer for a bit and golden up, by far my favorite track to play out right now.
If you have been diggin’ the latest Gas box set or The Sight Below then Yagya is a definite good addition to your collection, it keeps you on course and will take you into winter all warm and cozy.
I guess Thom Yorke remixed himself and it didn’t come out that bad, i’ve been playing on repeat while I work and it made me revisit The Eraser LP which was good because so many people trashed that LP and I thought if it was anyone but Thom Yorke making that LP it would put that person on top of the indie world.

Little Joy – The Next Time Around

Rene Breitbarth – Sphere

Yagya – Snowflake 9

Thom Yorke – Harrowdown Hill (Logic Jump rmx)

Little Joy – The Next Time Around (LIVE)

There’s plenty of music that really hits that sweet spot when it comes to analog synthesizers playing melodies. I wonder why it gives so many people such nostalgia though? We all weren’t watching the same children’s show were we? When our parents showed us old photos there wasn’t a button that made the photo play Geogaddi like some musical greeting card. I think I have narrowed it down to the show Nova, TV commercials, and the speaker quality of shopping markets playing 80s muzak. You all know Christ (The 3rd member of Boards of Canada that left after the Twoism album) and of course Boards of Canada (the Fonec track posted is from the album Closes Vol.1 EP) but I have found 2 young musicians that really caught my ear Minnesota’s Boreal Network and UK’s JC Harnell both are notable talents and carry on the torch properly of that sound in my opinion.

Boreal Network – Steel Whirl

Christ. – Cordate

JC Harnell – Lost

Boards of Canada – Fonec