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

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)

Your computer, I think? Don't watch the Youtube, the Vimeo is way better.
I don't know if Grimes has anything to do with "Knife-y vocals", if anything, she sounds to me like a female Damo Suzuki, but I love that the song goes from skip-rope chant to Madonna and ends with backwards rapping. Great song!

Do I have to spell this out every 5 posts? I didn't start this thread looking for stuff that sounds JUST LIKE The Knife or even Knife-y.

I am looking for stuff that gets *compared* to The Knife, as in, shorthand for "arty, weird, slightly pretentious electronic music with non-traditional vocals that are usually female or falsetto or pitch-shifted."

Repeat to fade.

This might be why I'm not fully onboard with the Gazelle Twin stuff, because although the production is nice and fairly interesting, her voice is really quite "traditionally pretty" sounding and I just think I'm not really that interested in traditionally pretty girl voices at the moment.

I think it's quite unsettling actually, but that's probably the melodies and the treatment of the vocals rather than the voice itself.

I want to thanks this thread for introducing me to the fantastic GRIMES

cool thread! a few more picks

new ford & lopatin feat tamaryn fits here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAGIb5U5wkY

dillon. more newsomesque than electro weirdo but this tune does the trick

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq6HhsWgTpo

LOL. one of the most slept on records of the year. this is great stuff. "dare me" and "quarter life crisis" are also worth tracking down

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IiCiES0tAU

pandr eyez. came across these guys recently. they just put out an ep a month ago or so. sort of a poppier take on witch house, which i dig.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-OQZpy7pew

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJobaxZqy18

^ Ayshay - Warn-U

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

^ Julia Holter - Goddess Eyes

This is probably not directly under the remit of this thread but I love this track so much I will take any opportunity to talk about it

Lamb - "Butterfly Effect"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzkGWdw9ieM

(although there are strong shades of We Love in the arrangement, now that I think about it)

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.