Week 1: Trip Hop Mix

     Here's my first playlist for you guys. Hope you enjoy it!

Read A Book Or Something... Geesh... from themanwithVANS on 8tracks Radio.

"Mountain" by Gold Panda

     Producer Gold Panda releases a new 7" single "Mountain" b/w "Financial District" digitally today via his own Notown in the UK and tomorrow via Ghostly in the U.S. and Europe. I love the way "Mountain" turns into hip hop beats towards the second half of the song. Take listen to the song below.

"My Tears Are Becoming A Sea" by M83

     By now many of you have heard M83's song "Midnight City", be it from the Victoria's Secret fashion show or even perhaps, your local radio stations. Anthony Gonzalez (of M83) realeased his sixth LP this year entitled "Hurry Up, We're Dreaming" which Gonzalez had promised would be "very, very epic". Very, very epic indeed and while there are many truly amazing songs on the album, such as the previoulsy mentioned "Midnight City" along with other tracks such as "Bloody Valentine" and "Outro", one of the tracks stands out in my mind the most.

     The most portentously titled song on M83's gorgeously monolithic sixth album is "My Tears Are Becoming a Sea." Wisps of organ drift by, billowing gently around Anthony Gonzalez's guileless vocals -- until massive keyboard stabs and crashing percussion blast in and transform the reverie into thrilling apocalyptic rapture. This has to be my favorite song on the album, take a listen. 

M83 - My Tears Are Becoming a Sea from Franck Deron on Vimeo.

"Quitters Raga" by Gold Panda

      The last time rising UK producer Gold Panda made an appearance around these parts, it was for "You", his then-single and now-opening track to his forthcoming full-length debut, Lucky Shiner. The track was built on a particularly neat trick; that is, taking a singular, minuscule element-- that looped-and-chopped titular vocal tic-- and repeating it until the song's other elements all seemed to revolve around it. So we know he's got a talent for capturing that "Big Moment". The subsequent tastes from Lucky Shiner, meanwhile, have revealed his more meticulous, textural side.

      "Snow & Taxis" takes an endlessly repeated loop or two and lets them slowly dissolve into a ghostly, bell-laden thumper, while new single "Same Dream China" takes the route of finding bliss through disorientation a step further. The opening irregular pattern of malleted melody (which vaguely recalls Steve Reich's "Nagoya Marimbas") lasts a relative while-- just enough to vibrate inside your headspace one last time before a smacking beat breaks it up. This stuff is pretty dreamy, too-- but the title doesn't get it all right, since Panda's far from a one-trick pony.

"Blood on the Motorway" by DJ Shadow

     "Blood on the Motorway," a comparatively slow, meditative reaction. Spoken word ruminations about death fall over simple piano chords, chimes and bad 80s synths, the relative corniness of which I could tolerate were it not for the hair-metal balladeering that comes with it. At one point, the vocalist repeats the phrase "let the laughter..." three times before he manages to get to what he wants us to allow the laughter to do. Personally, the melodramatic delivery of such underwhelming lines as, "Your eyes will not close/ Your tongue barely speaks/ But I can still feel you," over an electro-synth arpeggio isn't exactly my cup of tea. Still, I appreciate Shadow's attempt to take a different approach, even if I don't care for the execution. Besides, the song does eventually resolve itself with a hot instrumental charge headed by a tight-as-can-be breakbeat, so I suppose nothing's lost... er, except any unhealthily harbored expectations of perfection. Listen for yourself below.

"Fineshrine" by Purity Ring

Purity Ring is a Montreal/Halifax based duo comprised of Corin Roddick and Meagan James. Purity Ring make lullabies for the club, drawing equally from airy 90's r&b, lush dream pop, and the powerful, bone-rattling, immediacy of modern hip-hop. Meagan's remarkable voice is at once ecstatic and ethereal, soaring joyfully through Corin's carefully chopped beats, trembling synths, and skewed vocal samples. Trust me, this won't be the last time you see this duo on my blog.  Purity Ring are hardly strangers where grotesque imagery is concerned. Over the duo's earliest warped and downcast beats, the pair's singer Megan James toyed with mentions of bleeding hearts, fractured skulls, and heaps of bones. The more recent "Belispeak", too, quietly sung of holes drilled through the eye, oscillating somewhere dense and at times inaudible. But "Fineshrine" takes these bits of the band's dark lyrical character and puts them at the core of the track. "Get a little closer, let fold/ Cut open my sternum, and pull," James beckons on the chorus, with clear, synthetic glee.

Over a hiccuping beat, and with visceral care, she details a situation in which the object of her affection gets literally under her skin, rubbing against her ribs and lungs, to "make a fine shrine" inside her body. The vocals here are only minimally twisted, instead relying on James' own exuberant and poetic phrasing to remain unsettling, with allusions to sliced, bleeding skin for the sake of her sacred acquisition. The idea of a shrine itself tends to reference relationships with unreciprocated intensity, something depressed within a romantic context. "Fineshrine" evokes those sentiments powerfully, making it Purity Ring's finest track yet.

"Feel It All Around" by Washed Out

Both Ernest Greene's real name and artistic moniker sound like tired-out Pynchonian punchlines, especially given the guy's tendency so far for making sly robo-pop. The few (self-) released contributions from this South Carolinian have a homespun synthesizer arrangements and multi-tracked, faraway vocals that sound something like, say, the theme music to an instructional video from 1987. "Feel It All Around" serves as the natural progression from "You'll See It", the ravey little slab of diffident lo-fi pop reviewed by Pitchfork earlier this year, by bringing the curtain down on the little party suggested by "You'll See It".

In fact, Greene seems to operate in a nexus of clubby little referents. Brief stabs of dub drums cheat into the mix. The synthesizers that drive the arrangement sound cheap and liquored-up, but are impeccably paced like a pour of great molasses. Somewhere, echoes of 10cc's breathy "I'm Not In Love" enter the picture, as does YMO's churning bass exploration "Naughty Boys". Greene seems dedicated to mapping a musical history that never actually existed but seems meticulously seen: a historical fiction re-imagining a lifetime of easy listening. Although Greene makes primarily keyboard-based music, his vision is stuck somewhere in an imagined euphoria set after the art rock of the late 70s, with a dotted line drawn directly through the swath of synth pop and all the way to the psychedelic, guitar driven Brit-pop of the Stone Roses.

But leave the slippery musicology behind. "Feel It All Around" is a deliciously unbalanced track, starting into the groove right off the bat and unexpectedly fading out at the end. The unusual compositional style is tailor-made to entice you to spin it again, and Greene's little gem does little to convince you otherwise.

Listen to "Feel It All Around" by Washed Out here: