1) the shh/so over Beangrowers are a Maltese three-piece indie rock band consisting of Alison Galea (vocals and guitar), Mark Sansone (bass guitar) and Ian Schranz (drums and noise). All three were born in 1977 in St. Julian's, Malta. The members of the band are also songwriters, resulting in their albums reflecting diverse influences, including indie rock, punk, and goth. Alison has also lent her voice to the academy award Wim Wenders soundtrack for the film Pina 2011, the biopic on the contemporary dance choreographer Pina Bausch. side project di alison e ian questa band the shh di cui a novembre dello scorso anno usciva questo album di debutto All Things With Love prendendo spunto dal fatto che in aprile saranno in giro per l'europa. 2)maria antonietta/ossa Letizia Cesarini, studia Storia dell'Arte Medievale ed inizia la sua attività musicale all'età di 18 anni Si fa notare come vocalist e chitarrista del duo Young Wrists, che forma con Alberto Baldolini. Nel 2009 registra per poi autoprodurre, nel luglio 2010, il suo debutto discografico solista con il nome di Marie Antoinette. Il disco, dal titolo Marie Antoinette wants to suck your young blood, riscuote importanti considerazioni e buone critiche da parte degli addetti ai lavori ed è caratterizzato da un'attitudine prettamente punk e da testi in lingua inglese, rabbiosi e graffianti. Il tema di fondo è rappresentato dal coraggio delle donne. Vi sono dediche a Giovanna d'Arco (Joan of Arc) e alla poetessa Sylvia Plath (Sylvia Plath). Nel luglio 2011 partecipa, assieme ad altri 13 artisti della scena indipendente italiana, alla scrittura del libro Cosa volete sentire. Compilation di racconti di cantautori italiani, che racchiude quattordici racconti, pubblicato poi l'autunno successivo da Minimum fax. Nel novembre 2011 gli Young Wrists si sciolgono definitivamente e Letizia intraprende un lungo tour solista. Il tour si conclude con la pubblicazione di un album in italiano. Il secondo lavoro, dal titolo Maria Antonietta viene appunto pubblicato con il nome Maria Antonietta ed esce il 6 gennaio 2012 per Picicca Dischi. L'album è registrato e prodotto da Dario Brunori (Brunori Sas). In generale l'album contiene molte influenze vocali e artistiche che rimandano a grandi cantanti italiane come Nada, Carmen Consoli e Cristina Donà, ma l'animo punk di Maria Antonietta fa pensare anche a PJ Harvey e Courtney Love. Anche questo album contiene elementi di agiografia e riferimenti all'universo sacro, soprattutto femminile (Santa Caterina). I singoli estratti sono Quanto eri bello e Saliva. Per il primo viene realizzato un video per la regia di Giacomo Triglia, mentre per il secondo hanno collaborato Leandro Emede e Nicoló Cerioni. Nel maggio 2012 vince il premio "KeepOn" nella categoria "Rivelazione Live". È inoltre considerata da molte riviste e siti web dedicati una delle rivelazioni assolute del panorama musicale indipendente italiano. Dopo un tour acustico, il 18 giugno 2013 pubblica il singolo Animali, che segna il debutto con l'etichetta discografica La Tempesta Dischi. Il singolo è accompagnato da una cover di Non ho l'età di Gigliola Cinquetti e dal videoclip di Animali[9], montato da lei stessa con le riprese di Flavia Eleonora Tullio e pubblicato in esclusiva sul portale di XL di Repubblica. Nel periodo giugno-agosto 2013 è impegnata con un nuovo tour, in cui ad accompagnarla vi sono tra gli altri i fratelli Marco e Giovanni Imparato, membri rispettivamente dei Dadamatto e dei Chewingum. L'uscita del nuovo album è prevista per i primi mesi del 2014. Nel luglio 2013 aderisce al progetto Hai paura del buio?, promosso dagli Afterhours: si tratta di un festival culturale itinerante a cui prendono parte non solo altri musicisti (tra cui Marta sui Tubi, Il Teatro degli Orrori, Daniele Silvestri e Verdena), ma anche attori di cinema e teatro (Antonio Rezza con Flavia Mastrella, Michele Riondino), scrittori (Chiara Gamberale, Paolo Giordano), disegnatori e ballerini. Il 20 gennaio 2014 annuncia la pubblicazione del suo secondo album ufficiale (terzo in assoluto), dal titolo Sassi. Il disco, pubblicato da Picicca Dischi, esce l'11 marzo seguente.Nel mese di febbraio viene pubblicato il video del brano Ossa[14] e un mese dopo quello di Giardino Comunale, per la regia di Dandaddy (già al lavoro con Baustelle, Le luci della centrale elettrica e Dente). 2010 - Marie Antoinette wants to suck your young blood (autoprodotto) - come Marie Antoinette 2012 - Maria Antonietta (Picicca Dischi) 2014 - Sassi (La Tempesta Dischi) 3)moonshine/broke joke All songs written by Sarah Dickenson Recorded at Hell Cactus Studios with Conor Robb Guitar/Vocals- Sarah Dickenson Drums/Bass- Conor Robb Moonshine isTulsa vocalist and guitarist Sarah Dickenson and drummer/bassist Conor Robb. They have what looks like a three-song self-titled EP, that’s straight-no-chaser raunch rock. There’s nothing fancy here, no instrumental gimmicks, samples — just an old-school guitar-jarring drive. And that makes the band’s chosen name all that more apropos. The music is a pretty slick slice of punk and garage, and my favorite track is “Broke Joke”, which begins with Dickenson hammering out these obstinate opening verses: “Daddy called and said I’m in trouble / I pour myself another double / And drink away what people say / Cause I don’t need em anyway .” The style would easily fit into old 80s or 90s radio rock, but the inventive guitar melody gives it a modern sense too. 4)Ou/tutti in fila Qualche giorno fa mi è arrivato un album da ascoltare, è sempre una cosa piacevole quando qualcuna cerca attenzione direttamente selezionando da chi farsi ascoltare, ed eccoci qui a passare un pezzo di questa bella band Il termine sardo Ou significa uovo e a covarlo è un ensemble equalmente diviso fra tre ragazze sarde e tre ragazzi romani. Il sestetto ha così poi imbandito un bel pranzo a suon di jazz bislacco e giocoso che vaga tra le epoche e categorie swing, avant, brass, folk e via dicendo. Ad accorgersi delle capacità di Ersilia Prosperi (tromba, ukulele, flicorno soprano), Sabrina Coda (sax alto, sax soprano), Martina Fadda (voce), Luca Venitucci (piano, fender rhodes, organo hammond), Claudio Mosconi (basso) e Cristiano De Fabritiis (batteria, vibrafono, glockenspiel) è stata la statunitense Amy Denio, musicista out-rock e sperimentale, già in passato con svariati progetti tra cui i monumentali Tone Dogs, che li ha fortemente voluti nella sua Seattle per registrare il disco e produrre, per la sua etichetta Spoot Music, questo vivace esordio. “Pisces Crisis” convince proprio per la sua verve esecutiva ed espressiva, in cui trovano spazio le importanti esperienze passate di ciascun musicista (dalla musica bandistica all'avanguardia più eterodossa, passando per pop e rock) che qui convergono perfettamente nei dodici episodi di un album fatto di tante sfumature arty, ma anche colorato e dinamico in senso pop, nella sua accezione più positiva. Piano, fiati, batteria e il resto ben si integrano tra di loro, accompagnando il gioco di voci dei vari musicisti, quando non è la squillante ugola di Martina Fadda a essere protagonista. 5)haerts/call my name siete nostalgiche delle belle ballate pop anni '80 romantiche e morbide? un po' strappalacrime un pò no? HAERTS released a new song, “Call My Name”, for streaming via soundcloud. It’s clearly a nod to an 80s synth-pop sound, and for a day I couldn’t quite put my finger on what the instrumental part of the song reminded me of. And after an online talk with a friend of mine it suddenly hit me, Chris DeBurgh’s “Lady In Red”. Whether you hear it or not doesn’t matter. It’s a pretty track reminiscent of the old pop ballads. The Brooklyn quartet, who have toured with Atlas Genius and Washed Out, have yet to release an official LP debut 6)sharon van etten/taking chances Sharon Van Etten has a new lyric video for “Taking Chances”, a single from off her upcoming release, “Are We There”, out May 27th in the U.S. and May 26th in EU/UK via Jagjaguwar and SCD 7)hideous towns/joy Hideous Towns are a cute, new band from Melbourne. Here’s how they know one another: Chris and Ryan are long time pals, nothing sexual, Ashley’s mother was a coworker of Ryan’s so she hooked us up with her little drummer boy, nothing sexual, Alana was recruited from the internet. Nothing sexual. Cool. They have a track called Joy, the black-and-white-friends-hanging-out clip to which is nestled at the top of this screen. Its a really nice debut, reminding me of Crystal Stilts, or a more melodic Sonic Youth. The female vocals are a nice change too, bringing a softness to the overall sound which doesn’t go unappreciated. 8)Wishbeard Wishbeard is a ‘psychedelic dream-pop machine’ from Seattle that, in just ten short months, went from playing friends’ basements to opening for some of your favorite acts like Austra, JD Samson and MEN. The machine – Bryn (guitar/vocals), Brighton (bass), Erin aka Res (keys/synth) and Jude (drums) – are currently in the studio recording their debut EP and winning hearts at venues all over Seattle and the greater Pacific Northwest. Bryn is a personal trainer for elderly women and a barback at a gay bar called Lobby. Brighton feeds hungry people at Food Lifeline, Res is a DJ and the IT Coordinator at The Stranger and Portland Mercury, Jude is also a DJ and an elementary school teacher. 9)chicks on speed/utopia Super-duper electro-art duo Chicks On Speed are returning with a brand new album in May. Alex Murray-Leslie and Melissa Logan have joined forces again to produce their first full-length record in four years, entitled UTOPIA. As befits a band who are always on the cutting edge, the LP comes with some intriguing extras – six interactive apps. Both are said to “investigate and challenge the boundaries of experimental pop music through sound and visuals.” We’re waiting with bated breath to see how both album and apps do this – fortunately, we only have to wait until May 5 to find out. And, because that’s still quite a way away yet, we’ll whet your appetite with the predictably quite arty video for the record’s title track. Chicks on Speed are musicians, artists and everything in between. Alex Murray-Leslie and Melissa Logan met in a jewellery making class in Munich, which led them to running a bar together in the 90s. From there they started making electronic music, performing, throwing underground parties, discussing feminism and activism and probably a billion more impressive things. This year they're releasing a new album, UTOPIA, which has six apps attached to its release and boasts collaborations with Yoko Ono and Julian Assange. We caught up with them to talk about their new album, art and becoming "prosumers." Mel Kenny: What can you tell us about the album? Alex: Utopia is a concept album in the vein of 70s concept rock albums, except we've twisted this notion of concept album to embody ideas of invention and new forms of creativity in the digital frontier, not just thematically but through the development of our musical instruments for iPads which will be releaed alongside the album on iTunes May 2nd. Our aim was to make our art become a multisensory experience in which the spectator becomes an active participant (apps that can be manipulated by the audience.) Through the process of participation, the spectator in essence becomes the artist. Turning the tables of the viewer as a consumer to a PROSUMER — producer/consumer during our live renditions of the Utopia album at concerts and in exhibition spaces, such as the current installation of SCREAM @ Design Hub Rmit University. I read somewhere that you guys view Julian Assange as more of an artist than a political activist. Care to elaborate on this? Alex: Just to clarify, I said this to Angela Richter in a conversation, she actually said she'd thought the same thing when she first met Julian, but then changed her mind after meeting Julian on several occasions. I do believe he's part artist — he has this 7th sense, something I consider great artists to have, to be able to see the world, remix it, comment on it and form an audio visual opinion of contemporary culture with the aim of furthering the development of great things. Utopia seems to stretch experimentation even farther than previous albums. There are iPads, underwater microphones, body sensor suits, cigar box synthesisers and a shoe guitar. This sounds incredibly fun. Was it also stressful, though? Alex: It was two years of research and development at ZKM, Centre for Art and ArtSpace Sydney. We were very lucky to have such great institutions behind us to develop this ambitious series of musical instruments, something we started doing in 2005. Who are some modern artists you admire for their own experimental qualities? Alex: Hannah Hoch, one of the first Dadaists who pushed the boundaries and pioneered collage as a form of experimental and political art. Lygia Clarke and her multi sensorial object inventions for relational art experiments. She's having a major retrospective at MoMA NYC this year. Sonia Delaunay, for her GESAMTKUNSTWERK STYLED APPROACH to making fashion, textiles, paintings and objects that become part of a bigger WHOLE work or art — something that's very important in the work of Chicks On Speed. We never just think about one single facet but all, in connection to the other. For example, a song becomes textile, becomes dress, becomes movement notation, becomes full blown show. Melissa: Also Carol Rama, Viv Albertine (The Slits), Ana da Silva (The Raincoats). Chicks on Speed were conceived as a multidisciplinary art group. How has your work together grown or developed since 1997? Alex: Melissa and I have maintained a vision over the last 17 years, to be artist inventors, resist all labels and be in a permanent state of invention, and most importantly to question of popular culture by being critical and humorous in our lyrics. I think we have done been true to our ongoing vision and I'm looking forward to the next decades of projects to contribute to developing and challenging everyday notions of contemporary culture. Melissa Logan: My aim is also to create art directed toward a larger world audience, drawing attention toward social issues, thus achieving a new sense of cultural freedom for our group and the participating public. 10)kate bush/wutherig heights Se non vi trovavate in giro per l'Europa tra il 2 aprile il 14 maggio 1979, è sicuro che non abbiate avuto la fortuna di vedere dal vivo Kate Bush, la cantante più ammaliante, misteriosa e anomala fuoriuscita dalla Gran Bretagna e arrivata ai primi posti delle classifiche di tutto il mondo. 35 anni da allora, dopo quel The Tour of Life, l'unico della sua carriera intrapreso quando aveva appena 20, e la sua più grande hit alle spalle, la meravigliosa Wuthering Heights, la pianista, violinista ed eclettica della voce Catherine Bush ha annunciato una serie di concerti: 15 date in tutto, all'Hammersmith Apollo di Londra. Lo stesso "mitico" luogo della musica dove hanno suonato tutti i più grandi artisti inglesi (e non solo) e dove la BBC realizzò il documentario dal vivo Kate Bush: On Tour. 56 anni il prossimo 30 luglio, la cantante ha voluto annunciare personalmente sul suo sito il Before The Dawn Tour che la riporterà sul palco, tra il 26 agosto e il 19 settembre; un particolare che ai più potrebbe sembrare ininfluente ma che dimostra quanto sia decisa a fare questo passo: una tenacia inusuale visto che si tratta di un live. La sua lontananza dal palco ha infatti motivi psicologici molto forti: la paura di salire su un aereo, la morte accidentale di un componente della sua crew, il direttore delle luci Bill Duffield che perse la vita durante il concerto di apertura del The Tour of Life ma, soprattutto, la sua indole perfezionista che le imponeva di avere il controllo di qualsiasi cosa, fino alla maniacalità. Update: Kate Bush is back! She's announced a bunch of London dates, which you can read about here. It's become the music world's ultimate Unimaginable, that Kate Bush, who last toured in 1979, should perhaps decide to return to the stage one day and do some live shows. Every year or so someone would start a tour rumour (including pretty loud Olympics whispers about Kate singing the 2012 remix of 'Running Up That Hill' at the Closing Ceremony) but, so far, nothing has crystalised into anything other than the odd televised performance, the most recent of which was a Top of the Pops outing in 1994. 11)soft metals/on a cloud Patricia Hall and Ian Hicks of the Los Angeles-based synth act Soft Metals approach their music with the loose conceptual framework of avant-garde sound artists rather than musicians. The duo, who started dating right around their band's formation, refer to Soft Metals albums as “works being commissioned” and stand apart from their boy-girl synth contemporaries like Kisses and Glass Candy, simply because their electronic compositions are several shades darker, stalking around ominously on the back of churning keyboards and drum machines, often without any discernable hook or cathartic crescendo. Their self-titled 2011 debut album had flashes of poppier aspirations amidst the busy distorted breakbeats and murky bedroom production, but those moments were almost always subverted by Hall’s ethereal, distant vocals and unnervingly detached lyrical persona. For their latest album Lenses, Hall and Hicks relocated from Portland to Echo Park, setting up a home studio after failed attempts to write and record in a professional space. Like their self-titled debut, they worked through the new material by participating in extended improvised jam sessions, shaping and editing the new batch of songs from long dirges of chugging krautrock rhythms set to the Teutonic tick of an 808 drum machine. But Lenses dives deeper into the hallucinogenic soundscapes from their previous work via subtraction; instead of pushing toward more pop inflected compositions and building off the moments of melody from their previous album, they've pared down their work, focusing on the hypnotic depths of the repetitive synthesizer movements and brittle keyboards of Kraftwerk and John Carpenter’s classic movies scores. The production allows most of the tracks’ spartan compositions to reverberate in cavernous expanses of space, while Hall’s ghostly voice waxes dreamy poetics about the doors of perception and altered states of consciousness. Hall’s heady lyrical abstractions were inspired, in part, by a moment of clarity she reached during a mushroom and ecstasy fueled dance party. “We'd be there for 10 hours dancing and then I start seeing cave paintings on the wall,” Hall told me when I interviewed her for Paper. “It made me think of how this couldn't be very different from what prehistoric people were doing. They were gathering, and dancing around a fire, listening to this primitive music and having these really incredible experiences connecting with one another.” But while Hall and Hicks’ aspiration to explore weighty philosophical ruminations through their impressionistic songwriting is an interesting goal, the results are more admirable than listenable. This is pretty evident on Lenses’ title track, which attempts to create an abstract patchwork of synth arpeggios, but never quite congeals into a coherent enough piece to merit attention. That, and Hall’s vocal work here is marred by an unflattering harmony and cringe-worthy, sophomore philosophy major's lyrics: “Breaking through my perception of you/ Breaking through my concept of life/ Breaking through what the mirror reflects/ Breaking through the way that I move.” “Tell Me” does a much better job working out the rhythmic dimensions that Hall and Hicks seem to be striving for, pulsing from a spiraling synthesizer riff and four-on-the-floor beat as Hall sings breathy lyrics that are alluring in their sensual crypticism (“Tell me/ Has this come true?”), while staying much closer to the central melody than she did to worse effect on “Lenses”. On the occasions Soft Metals inch nearer to pop songcraft, like they do with the bass-heavy R&B light show of “On a Cloud” or the arty melodrama of “No Turning Back”, the results are surprisingly effective, especially considering the ways in which the duo’s penchant for breakneck cyclical synth patterns augment their prettiest harmonies with a paranoid sense of unease. In the end, Lenses comes off like a proggy, synth pop album that wants to get treated like sound sculpture, but Soft Metals don't fully commit to either endeavor in spite of the record's handful of successes. Regardless, they've admirably carved out their own corner of the electro world; Hall and Hicks are determined to make challenging, cerebral EDM and have more on their minds than the placement of the next drop.