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Play It As It Lays has moved. We're now at www.playitasitlays.net.

Ssion - holding God up for ransom just to get you all dancing.

Ssion (pronounced "shun", as in "session" without the "se") are great looking. Like they've been hired for the wedding of John Waters and Larry Levan. Or to run the door at a gay club in Interzone. The frontman looks like a Moroccan street punk werewolf, while their leading lady looks like she runs an S&M cubicle in an open plan accountant's office.

The music is predictably ludicrous, and some tracks like "Bullshit" and "Street Jizz" are just bad American electroclash, that go for provocative but end up numbing. But when they let a bit of sunshine in, they transform.

"Heaven" is like being bombarded with Pick'n'Mix fired from a giant cock-shaped cannon. It's camp, silly, and you won't like it if you don't have a sweet tooth, but it'll probably make you smile and flail around like a dancing 5-year-old.

Ssion - Heaven

My love for Glass Candy is extremely strong, and while their remix of "Clown" has their usual irresistable icy sass, I think the original has the edge. I'm a sucker for a Chic-like one note rhythm guitar and middle-8's full of demented laughter.

Ssion - Clown

Reissue joys continue!

Hot on the heels of Dennis Wilson, another essential record is being reissued in style. The Microphones' The Glow Pt. 2 is coming back around with 20 (!) extra tracks, spread across 2 CDs and 3 LPs, and released by its original home, the mighty K Records.

The Glow Pt. 2 doesn't sound like anything else. It was written and recorded in Olympia, in the Pacific Northwest of America, a place of thick pine forests and icy inlets, and this landscape is shot through the record. Rather than acousmatically sample natural sounds, the songwriters attune themselves to a natural rhythmic order, with the moon-pull of tides and regularity of solar orbit alongside the chaos of flightpaths and animal free will.

Tracks move from one to another with the sudden strangeness of waking in an unfamiliar bed. Blizzards of raging static ebb away to allow bursts of delicate acoustic sunlight through; naive campfire singsongs sit alongside faceless soundscapes. The listener is wrapped in the cosiness of home and left out in the fearsome open, the latter of these evoked with an amazing noise that sounds throughout the record, like a gong being sounded from across a misty valley.


At one point Phil Elverum (above) sings of "the awful feeling of electric heat". This is an album that is full of the crisp chill of winter wind and the genuine warmth of wood aflame. The electricity used to produce it seems to have been threaded out of the air rather than taken from a socket. It's back out on April 8th. Rather than try and represent every facet of this stunning record, here's the opening three tracks. I defy you not to crave the rest.

The Microphones - I Want Wind To Blow
The Microphones - The Glow, Pt. 2
The Microphones - The Moon

This is a blog post.

Matching Mole have re-entered my radar in the last few months after the release of Robert Wyatt's Comicopera in the dog end of last year. Matching Mole was formed by Wyatt in 1971, two years before he fell from a balcony and was paralysed from the waist down. Matching Mole had four members, one of them David Sinclair from psychedelic proggers Caravan. The name 'Matching Mole' is a play on Machine Molle, which is French for Soft Machine, whom Wyatt had just departed company with. They only lasted two years and two albums, along with a handful of releases in the last decade or so.

"Signed Curtain" is from the bands self-titled debut, released a year after forming. It was composed almost entirely by Wyatt, as is most of the album, and features his voice audibly weaker than it sounds now - on the brink of something; clutching at clumps of grass to stop himself slipping over the edge.

The lyrics are relflective, literally: "this is the first verse/this is the first verse/this is the first, the first first first" They feature only statements like this, tracking the song through its stages; bridge, chorus, verse. But Wyatt becomes more unsure of where he's up to as the song continues, losing the conviction he started with, in a way that feels daft and tragic all at once.

Accompanied by simple piano and no percussion "Signed Curtain" is remarkably moving, with all emotional content directly generated by Wyatt's vocals. The gradual sense of loss dissolves the silliness the song began with, ending the song on the lyrics - "or perhaps its the bridge/or just another key change?/never mind,it doesnt hurt/it only means that I/lost faith in this song/it wont help me, retune."

Matching Mole - Signed Curtain

Wyatt's most recent album Compicopera is available everywhere, and is really very good. It featured on lots of End Of Year Lists and comes highly recommended by me.

"I'm dancing like a retard..."

So, Ebony Bones is our tip for the coming months. "We Know All About You" has already been spotted backing a BBC radio advert and is hot on the blogs. Miss Bones describes herself as 'like Harry Potter, with a vagina' and has been hailed as 'the punk Beyonce'. She digs all kinds of grills and big squashy novelty shaped jewellery too. The remix below of "I'm Your Fututre XWife" is produced by Miss Bones herself, and sounds like carnival time; dancing and singing and shouting; a hive of spangly energy. Which means it reminds me of Dama Estrela's "Tipicou" - a track always worth digging up again.

This remix of "I'm Your Future Xwife" churns up the neon flailing of the original into gloriously choppy baile-funk. The sharp bite of Miss Bones' badass vocals crash through the parp of fake brass and baile shouts; looped half-beats, hand claps and playground calls, spitting "I'm so frustrated now/I'm dancing like a retard/I'm only here because I'm trying to get you hard."

Ebony Bones - I'm Your Future XWife Remix

This is just bad; pounding, grinding fast paced beats. For those who aren't there yet:

Ebony Bones - We Know All About U

The remix reminds me very much of this track, which is featured on Diplo's Mad Decent Radio Vol.1. "Tipicou" is, in my book, a classic. It rattles by, illuminated with skeleton beats and cheap flourescent backing tracks that light up the stage and fill it with the bustle of too many dancing bodies before Dama Estrela hits the mic, a hot sweat of high energy vocals; a sharp squall chanting I don't know what.

Dama Estrela - Tipicou

Go listen to Miss Bones' here. She's touring too...

African mental wanderings.

Pinglewood is one of only two or three blogs I check everyday, and it's quality is such that I unquestioningly download everything they post. Here's a recent tip from them that I'm absolutely loving from South African psychelic rockers BLK JKS (above). "Lakeside" alternates a slowly loping beat with a deftly skanking one, while a lovely little high-life riff motors on through it all.

BLK JKS - Lakeside (Buy)

Its vocal harmonies and hazy riddims reminded me of this track from soulful Brooklyn alt-rock hepcats Yeasayer, whose album I bought a couple of weeks back and is the halfway point between the overdriven funk of Station To Station-era Bowie and Animal Collective's communal space-hippie schtick that I've always longed for:

Yeasayer - 2080 (Buy)

And it also made me think of the West African high-life vibes rolling through these recent cute-as-buttons white indie-pop triumphs:

Vampire Weekend - Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa (self-titled album out 28/1/08 on XL)
Suburban Kids With Biblical Names - Funeral Face (Buy their fantastic record for £5 here!)

And talking of Westerners influenced by Africa, Salif Keita's 1987 album Soro has been getting a lot of play from me recently. It's an album that proves that Paul Simon et al were not just doing some indulging in cultural tourism with their 80's forays into African music, but were part of a musical dialogue Africa was making with the West. Check out the 10 minute, three-movement title track in which Casio-gamelan plunking meets call-and-response brass and a shitload of bongos, like some coked-out Duran Duran concept album that never was. Or the moody groove of "Sina", which could soundtrack Miami Vice: The Ghana Years. Keita has one of the all time great voices, and he's touring with Tony Allen and Awadi next month - details here.

Salif Keita - Soro (Afriki)
Salif Keita - Sina (Soumbouya) (Buy)

I, I live among the creatures of the night...

This track is Sunday nights in retail; the echoing of the trashy 80's drum machines bouncing off the high corrugated steel roof; rain hitting the grey litter-strewn concrete car-park, now abandoned by fat shoppers leaving only their half-eaten burgers, Argos bags and copies of the Sun.

The video does it justice, Laura Branigan is trapped in a city where the streets are made not of gold but of binbags. But don't knock it - they've got some awesome nightlife, all the clubs have a tinfoil decor and the dress code is strictly pastel leotards (mask preferred). Fake kissing only; heavy petting permitted.

Shit. Had too much to drink again. Check this guy I woke up with!?!

Laura Branigan - Self Control

(As featured on Balearic Mike's awesome new balearic Cosmic Alphonsus Vol.7 mix) (also available at Piccadilly Records)

David Byrne - The Knee Plays

You’ll recognise “knee plays” as those little scenes in Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama where a couple of characters will act out some rather random little comic sketch in front of the curtain, while the bigger scenes are prepared behind them. The Knee Plays is the David Byrne-penned soundtrack to a series of these that were to run between scenes of a theatrical epic called the CIVIL warS, which was to be premiered at the Olympic Arts Festival alongside the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. The Knee Plays has just been lavishly reissued on Nonesuch Records.

In the end, they were the only part of the CIVIL warS to ever be performed, as the funding for the 10-hour play, in which each act had its own set and cast shipped from another country, and which was to feature David Bowie acting alongside kabuki theatre stars, with Philip Glass scoring, was pulled. Shame, it sounds like a hit.

The music for The Knee Plays had to be loud enough to drown out the sounds of the CIVIL warS that would be getting ready behind them. Byrne tried traditional kabuki percussion to match the Japanese dramatic forms on stage (recordings of which are included as bonus tracks on this disc) before taking an inspired 90-degree turn by using a brass band. From this already idiosyncratic musical base, he wrote some spoken word pieces to be read out over the top. “They were certainly unrelated to the stage action”, says Byrne in the liner notes. "But I realized that things that happen simultaneously are often presumed by the heart and mind to be related in some way…When you look up at clouds in the city, and the sound you hear is hip-hop and traffic noises, well, that’s the score for the cloud image”.

Byrne, right, with director Robert Wilson and collaborator Adelle Lutz. Note Byrne's snazzy homemade cardboard slippers.

The story happening onstage is a mimed Japanese folktale about sailing to a strange land, but his words describe all sorts of scenarios. In “The Sound Of Business”, a road movie narrative becomes an antsy meditation on the nature of modern movement and commerce, before dissolving into an oblique list of fictional song titles playing on the car radio, a list almost with its own narrative. “I’d remembered JG Ballard saying once that lists, ads, codes, and instructions manuals are the invisible literature of today”, Byrne says.

David Byrne - The Sound Of Business (zshare link)

I also love “(The Gift Of Sound) Where The Sun Never Goes Down”, a naïve yet oddly wise tale of sounds in a cinema being unable to escape until they are set free by someone opening the doors, "to become forever part of the landscape".

David Byrne - (The Gift Of Sound) Where The Sun Never Goes Down (zshare link)

He cites Dada and Surrealism as being an influence, and I think he gets the original concept of the Surreal absolutely right. Rather than “surreal” being almost outside of reality, as it has come to mean, it is meant to be more akin to our term “hyper-real”, a heightened form of reality where anything can and does happen. Take "Social Studies", where a bird landing on a boat is soundtracked by a think-piece about social assimilation being created by people eating the same food.

David Byrne - Social Studies (zshare link)

The music itself is immaculately performed, and covers a lot of ground. In some pieces, jazzy timbres and rhythms are tempered by a dignified theatricality, recalling the starlit sheen of Gershwin. Elsewhere, Byrne’s interests in commodification are rendered with a kind of glorious Muzak, lift-music lullabies that are not snide or condemnatory but that make an uplifting Surrealistic case for the universality of sound. Optimistic fanfares and music hall oompah also feature, while “Winter” is a beautifully minimal landscape of held chords that sounded amazing as Jen and I drove down a deserted motorway outside Burnley with the rain lashing down.

Big love to my housemate Dave for buying me this for Christmas. Buy it yourself at Rough Trade here.

#1 Most Unlikely Jolene Reworking

Peter Visti's 12 minute reworking of "Jolene" has been on repeat through my speakers and in my headphones for three solid months. Parton's country classic, in all its melancholy top-heavy original has been ground down, torn away and spread into a thick, grey grind of dark materials.

This is a gloriously brutal rehash; the looped guitar that rolls heavy and solitary through the echoes of strings that are only a whisper of the wind pulled through abandoned houses slowly builds into a mesmeric balearic slow dance. It incorporates a minimal, unassuming beat, a slow pulse heralding the eventual influx of programming that sifts slowly through to male vocals that bounce off sheer desolation. The beat hypnotises, infiltrating and occupying the psyche until the harsh snap back to reality twelve minutes later

Visti hails from Denmark and is signed to Eskimo, which is also home to the likes of Lindstrom & Prins Thomas, LSB and Aeroplane. He does not appear to have a website, and only has half a dozen or so releases under his belt. His myspace is a simple personal account, where he mostly waxes lyrical about the joys of parenthood. However, his records are stocked by the likes of Phonica and Piccadilly Records (links on sidebar).

Peter Visti - Dolly

Happy Christmas!

"as the temperature fell, fog froze on the trees and made white bare trees in which the fog appeared ghostly beautiful, as if you could walk into these trees and receive immortal powers of a sort we all want at Christmas: the power to gather our friends and loved ones close around us and prevent suffering and evil and death from touching them"

- Garrison Keillor, Leaving Home

Lord Executor - Christmas Is A Joyful Day

Women Of The Year 2007.

2007 has had some richly varied highlights, but for me the overarching constant was the level of quality from, without wanting to sound too Brit Awards about it, solo female artists. While some artists have outright disappointed (Alicia Keys, Kate Nash, Uffie) and others have yet to show their full potential (Candie Payne, Amanda Blank), these 30 women have made music that my iPod thumb keeps returning to. (I've linked to the myspace pages of a few of the less well known artists - give them all a once-over, you won't be disappointed).

30. Yelle – Irrepressible French cheese-pop chanting, but also soft naïve afternoon grooves.
29. Joanna Newsom – “Colleen” is the only new stuff released this year, but it mines a groove as deep as any funk queen.
28. Eve – “Tambourine” is a risky, brilliant track, and her fluoro-Versace look is awesome.
27. Duffy – Radio 2 incarnate, but some voices just cannot be denied. The Bernard Butler co-writing/producing avoids the cheese-layering production that sadly befell talented singers like James Morrison.
26. Rye Rye – Impenetrable Bmore b-girl stances from a girl who knows how good she is.
25. Alena Diane – Sandstone folk torch songs a world away from pell-mell modernity.
24. Robyn – “With Every Heartbeat” looked like it might not get picked up by the mainstream, and then suddenly it was Number 1. Anything less would have been criminal.
23. Amerie – She’s plainly got the funk up inside her, and you can still hear her hunger.
22. Hanne Hukkelberg – 2nd essential album in two years. A truly unique talent.
21. Tiffany Evans – American Idol reject comes good on the overlooked Timbaland jam of the year below.
mp3: Tiffany Evans - Girl Gone Wild

20. Bjork – Volta may not be my personal favourite of her records, but she is still operating outside her comfort zone as ever.
19. Gwen Stefani – “The Sweet Escape” unforgettably uplifting pop, and the “Now That You Got It” remix was equally insidious sunshine.
18. Stacy Epps – Warm but coughing soulful hip-hop. Check out her verse over one of the best beats of the year below.
mp3: Shape Of Broad Minds - They Don't Know (feat. Stacy Epps)
17. Sharon Jones – Hell hath no fury...
16. Santogold – Effortlessly straddles Switchy squelch-garage and 80’s powerpop.
15. Adele – Going to own 2008. Takes the bruised soul of Amy Winehouse and nurses it back to health; takes the quirks of Regina Spektor and makes them guileless.
14. Julianna Barwick – Hypnotic sylvan loops. Ragas for hissing summer lawns.
mp3: Julianna Barwick - Dancing With Friends
13. Janelle Monaé – Great guest spots on Outkast’s Idlewild, even better on this space-pop classic. A big tip for next year.
mp3: Janelle Monaé - Violet Stars Happy Hunting!
12. Kid Sister – Another one who could go stratospheric. Like Rye Rye she has that ridiculous flow that doesn't show off but just calmly announces its own brilliance.
11. Leona Lewis - Holy shit:

10. Bat For Lashes – Eventually made it this year despite some rather half-hearted promotion from her record company.
9. Tracy Thorn – Her album had the kind of production that tips its cap at the 80’s without pastiche. Metro Area, Ewan Pearson et al go to town with that timeless voice.
mp3: Tracy Thorn - It's All True (Escort extended remix)
8. Feist – Breezy afternoon picnic-radio music.
7. Amy Winehouse – A modern icon. Roll on the Grammys.
6. Roisin Murphy - Classic house and pop sung by unglazed porcelain. Kylie is jealous.
5. Alice Smith – Will her album For The Lovers, Dreamers And Me ever get a UK release? Subtly modern, blatantly sensual.
mp3: Alice Smith - Dream
4. Rihanna – Her album has some high points, but come on, she's here for “Umbrella”. Instantly memorable and still endlessly involving.
3. Kathy Diamond – Her Miss Diamond To You will go down as one of the all-time great lost records. Insane shimmering disco production from Maurice Fulton.
mp3: Kathy Diamond - All Woman
2. M.I.A. – Absolutely attuned to phonetics as all great rappers should be, and a fantastic producer.

1. Ciara – Her album is underrated, she can dance better than any other R'n'B starlet, but she's at the top for “Promise”, perhaps my most listened-to track this year, and the greatest R’n’B slow jam ever recorded. Amazing precise delivery, transcendent production, a furlined future-caramel masterpiece.
mp3: Ciara - Promise

Fuck Buttons

In the space of a couple of months, I've watched Fuck Buttons go from a duo with a support slot in a dingy upstairs room at the edge of Manchester's curry mile, without a proper website or any releases to speak of, to being blogged every three days, signing to ATP Recordings, releasing a dinky little 7" picture disc at Rough Trade and finally, last week - giving up their day jobs. They also premiered the video to "Bright Tomorrow" on Pitchfork a week or two ago.

In Manchester, they used a table in the centre of the standing space to construct an inspiring set up of wires, satin lined suitcases, pocket-sized casios and a fisher-price tape recorder. They sound gloriously noisy, colourful and excited. From the confusion of wires, samplers, keyboards and laptop erupt fireworks; bright infusions of cyclic melody disrupt the brash, gloopy haze of feedback and white noise. Vocals are channelled through the Fisher-price contraption, wedged in the jaws of Benjamin John Power as his screams are distorted into wide grimacing squawks.

I believe they are a band to see live, after nearly standing too close to the table in Manchester, frozen to the spot from fear and excitement, I can't imagine it being batter in any other medium. In headphones - crank it up and have somewhere to be - altered states induced at night. they have signed up for ATPvsPitchfork and will no doubt crop up around the country again soon. check their myspace for dates.

"Bright Tomorrow" works the frequencies, sonic heartbeats charged, synths stuck in a glitch, harmonious keyboard melodies that slide amongst the wreckage of electronic abuse and twisted wires strewn about, fuelling the vocal screech, the metallic strain to hit the build; the hard, fast peak of aural bliss.

Fuck Buttons - Bright Tomorrow

Note: only two Fuck Buttons tracks have been officially released, so its feels a little cheeky to post their entire back catalogue in one fell swoop. Buy the 7", or better still: support them live.