thread in which we talk about kinda arty kinda electronic stuff which gets compared to "The Knife" type stuff

I think that's because Glasser is really the trope codifier (obv The Knife is the trope namer) than any lack of Glasser love. I for one certainly love Glasser.

cosigning that l-vis 1990/samantha lim song, really fantastic - FT did you check out creep? two of the songs i've come back to most this year.

the emika album is one of those albums i enjoy so much when i play it that i can't work out why i don't play it MORE. like, i really like it but it's not the 100% craving need that, say, glasser is.

kate wax album was aight on one listen, keep meaning to go back to it

i did check out barbara panther but i honestly don't really know what i think of it, though i suspect i need to be in a very specific mood to enjoy it

another one that i'm not sure what i think of - charli xcx

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBxC5bRbruQ

Yeah I think we discussed how the Glasser/Karin comparisons are superficial in the other thread, I just thought it was worth bringing her name again since her album is very good.

I do not get Barbara Panther at all, her voice really irritates me.

I love Barbara Panther's voice, it is just such a thing of joy to me. That slight squeak and whistle when she swoops up to "like moonlight people doooo!" But I recognise it probably is quite marmitey.

Lex, I have tried listening to a couple of Creep things but it just didn't seem to take with me. Maybe I should give it another try to see what it is that does/doesn't grab me.

I think that the Emika album is quite strong flavoured, and definitely a ~mood~ needed for it, it's not the kind of thing you can put on when you're walking to the shops, you need to be quite overcast and wearing your raincoat with knitted eyebrows and an expression deep in thought with mild misanthropy. Which is actually a mood I'm in quite a lot, so it's perfect for me. but other albums do not demand my emotional space the way that Emika one does.

I was seeing Grimes getting namechecked on the "artists you haven't seen discussed" thread

this was me. i really love her 2011 dune-themed album, geidi prime.

I just discovered the Emika this week. That album is an absolute must for fans of darker trip-hop like Mezzanine or Maxinequaye, but absolutely requires a decent subwoofer. Sounds pretty empty on my anemic car system.

This thread is custom made for Gazelle Twin, whose 2011 debut album is nicely poised between Lisa Gerrard and Fever Ray.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANaabsQo-uA

half a min in and fucking hell that gazelle twin is amazing! how did i miss it! omg

WOW, it's the witchIER house Dead Can Dance. Or maybe it's the new iamamywhoami?

(No, I like it. Really.)

Who knew that early Dead Can Dance records would be the hip musical crush to namedrop in 2011? Makes me want to dig out Within The Realm Of A Dying song and flop about in white robes singing FWONTIERS! FWOOOONNNTIIIIIEEERS! FWONTIERS!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXstxFoayxI

possibly off-topic but i like it

Caek, I think you'd really like the Jah Wobble & Julie Campbell album Psychic Life, which also sounds (in parts) like some lost On-U Sound project.

emika is awesome

Yeah that Yang Yang song is kinda off topic but TBH it's utterly Fucken AWESOME so thanks for putting it here.

The Grimes half of the Grimes/d'Eon split from earlier this year is vastly superior to either Heidi Prime or Halfaxa, and everything I have heard from the new album indicates that it will be even better. Vanessa from the Darkbloom split might be my favorite track this year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxC2XLePDWQ

also, I'm really enjoying Julia Marcell, so thanks for that recommendation.

i like that song vanessa a lot, but i still love geidi prime.

LOVE this thread. I've been way behind on music this year, but this is definitely helping me catch up.

glad people are up on Emika now - i nominated "Drop the Other" in last year's trax poll but no one except lex cared. :(

Don't think I was around last year to vote on EOY trax, but if I'd heard Emika then I certainly would have gone for her.

Not to turn yet *another* thread into a R@d10h34d thread but I have Thom Yorke to blame for this, after sifting through 2 hours of boring blahblah IDM on his 6mix (I got suckered into listening to it! The first track was Erykah Badu, I thought it was going to be good! it was all clicky blippy Modeselektor crap) the Emika track he played was pretty much the only one that made me ears prick up and go boy howdy. And then Lex was all "have you heard this REMIX!?!?" which was all I needed to convince me.

I like the look of Grimes' dirty makeup hair-flinging slumber party there. a++ wkiw But that is a stunningly beautiful video, and manages to capture a bunch of beautiful women having fun without being totally male gazey at all. Need to listen again without watching the video so I can get a better sense of the song because I'm worried it's distracting me.

They only released one album before disbanding but Zeigest are practically a The Knife tribute band. Same hometown even.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo90OHJ0GxQ

I've heard that song before. I thought it *was* The Knife.

The stuff in this thread doesn't have to ~sound like~ The Knife, I was really just trying to get an index on that the kind of stuff that gets "compared to" The Knife, often for fairly superficial or affinity reasons, rather than actual stylistic similarities.

love all the grimes stuff itt

http://www.grimesiowa.gov/

her first album was called GEIDI PRIMES?! omg!

If Zeigeist falls within the purview of this thread, iamamiwhoami certainly does. They have no physical releases, only arty youtube promos for Amz/iTunes/emusic singles. I suggest viewing them in chronological order as there's a narrative arc of sorts, bottom to top here.

her first album was called GEIDI PRIMES?! omg!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnLNZL2pvKY

yeah (might have been her second album tho). and most of the songs have dune-themes, too!

• caladan
• sardaukar levenbrech
• zoal, face dancer
• feyd rautha dark heart
• shadout mapes

no one likes Oni Ayhun? weird people itt - guess it's the sandbox.

hmm sorry I can't get with anybody who views face dancers as a valuable addition to the dune universe xp

grimes track crystal ball is really good btw

i wish there was the old chillwΔve thread around, wont to post a bunch of outer limits traxxxx

uhm, sorry for being rude but I can't stand that woman and her voice, that's why I think Oni is the same thing but better since it's so very faux masculine / evil or not. It's good stuff. Please continue.

Maybe instead of making comments about how weird we all are you could, you know, post some YouTubes or Spotify links for us to check out? I'll happily listen to anything in this general theme.

yeah stop being mean to grimes she needs positive vibes!

i don't mind her voice at all, actually. it didn't even occur to me that it's abrasive until it was mentioned here.

I love her voice! But I also love early Cranes records so I have a high tolerance for weirdoes.

ah alison shaw - was wondering who she was reminding me of

I love her voice!

haha i didn't mean you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKbh3-JWbdQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsRiaTQpqRE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_L_NN7sS_Y

second track is the knife-iest, but probably the weakest song of the three

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohnvxymZZgk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2m7FJbhwME

More Gazelle Twin needed, yes:

http://youtu.be/BOXJS6iS1fg

oh ffs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOXJS6iS1fg

Grimes is good. There is one unreleased song she's been playing live all year that will be a hit, I can't find a good recording of it but this is the one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq2SSXEY3IQ

Here's a much better sounding video http://player.vimeo.com/video/21480152

OMG @ this Gazelle Twin album.

^^^ OTM, made my afternoon

Wow that Gazelle Twin album is fantastic. Why did no one who'd heard it start a thread about it?

Listening to this record reaffirms the importance of production and arrangement to stuff like this. I can't really get with people like Zola Jesus or Austra because while the voices are nice the arrangements and synths sound so out-of-the-box. Whereas there's great sound design and interesting stuff happening right across the Gazelle Twin record, same goes for Fever Ray and Planningtorock and the likes. I'm getting bits of Vespertine and the last Trentemoller album in there as well, and Alison Goldfrapp warbling over Tricky and the bleaker sounding Orbital tracks as well.

(Same criticism applies to witch house types who use the same tinny production techniques as yr jobbing US rap producers to worse effect).

I agree with this for the most part. I get that Zola Jesus is going for some sort of goth/EBM aesthetic, but jings, it's 2011 already and I'm just not interested in cheap synth music.

I suppose I need to spend more time with Gazelle Twin on better headphones because so far, although y'all are going bonkers for it, I still haven't had that instant "WANT this in my life!" like I had with Emika and Barbara Panther, for example.

I agree, it's much more the production and the arrangements than it is "crazy lady in the attick" voice (as much as I like crazy ladies in attics) but we probably disagree on what makes a good production because I'm not bothered by Austra, I quite like what they're doing.

Zola Jesus, though, I have really tried with, and agreed, it's just silly goth affectations. There was one thing I thought I liked by her, but I think it was a collaboration with another artist in a similar vein (heh) - I don't have Spotify on this computer so I can't even look up what it was or see if it held up under re-listening.

(And Owen, I can't get any of your Grimes vids to work but that might be this rub old puter not yr links)

They did a cover of Janet's He Doesn't Know I'm Alive that is pretty good, but not on the album.

There are things I so don't understand about mine own reactions to why I'll love one artist or song, and just reject another.

Because for all the fact that CREEP leave me cold, I have to acknowledge that I utterly love and adore this song, and it's mining almost ~exactly~ the same territory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LacbQ4Lh7wk

This makes no conceptual sense to me.

(see also the whole love Austra, hate Florence thing.)

OK, I persisted beyond the single on New Look and I'm liking it a lot more. Some things bear looking a little closer at. The singer does have a much wider range than is shown by that one song. When will I ever learn not to judge an album by its singles?

I was going to say in the other thread when you talked of moving discussion here that New Look are more focused on being tuneful and less on being arty than this thread would imply. But then the sandbox died. "Teen Need" is my jam from that album as of this moment.

Now I'll have to read this thread cause I see there's Ayshay talk.

Yeah, Teen Need was definitely one of the songs I favourited off that album. But they did seem to be focusing more on being a pop band than making the interesting textures, and I can never quite seem to balance my need for those two things.

Btw I will totally cosign Ayshay's fact mix and the Nguzunguzu megamix on the Warn-U EP. I need to check her new EP under her government name (Fatima al Qadiri) tho.

I meant to listen to her FACT mix the other day, loaded it up and everything, but got caught up in something else. I will do that now instead of getting caught up in glam bam thank you ma'am comps.

oooh new stuff from her, didn't know that

one of my favourite moments in journalism this year was getting the warn-u ep into my metro singles column right next to beyoncé

OK, this stuff is absolutely awesome and hitting a lot of my happy places.

But I'm so culturally ignorant WRT the music of that part of the world that I don't have the ability to distinguish much between this, and some of the more modern ends of Baris K's sets, and the weirder bits of, like, Cafe Istanbul compilations. If they're using samples of similar source material, or if I'm just having a racist reaction of "I can't really distinguish between massively different strands of Middle Eastern traditions."

yeah i don't really claim to be au fait with exactly what's going on here. fatima al qadiri's ep under her own name is WHOA though

http://soundcloud.com/fatima-al-qadiri/sets/genre-specific-xperieince

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpgtuWQ2vUc

kate: the warn-u ep is all samples of her own voice reciting islamic chants, apparently chopped up a bit to alter their meanings.

yeah my friend sent me this a few days ago - great

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsbG4pXrhr8

For this year's charity action (Music For Life), radio station Studio Brussel has arranged this cover of Luc Van Acker's Zanna - both the version and video are quite Knifish, imho:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPOWuFLcKLM

If this album doesn't feature in the ILX100 this year, I may have to consider disowning you lot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8uht6FFReE

(When Saints Go Machine - Konkylie) - This isn't the best track on there, but then I enjoy the whole album all the way through.