Teengirl Fantasy feat. Kelele: “EFX”

Label: R & S
Style: R’ n’ B
Rating: 3.5

Teengirl Fantasy explore the trippy possibilities of the electronic dance music and the pop  you grew up listening to. That is if you’re like me and was raised by MTV during the 90’s and 00’s. You will feel at home in the hazy phantasm-RnB worlds that Nick Weiss and Logan Takahashi imagine, but you won’t be able to find your way in them. Like How To Dress Well and James Blake they invent new visions of what a pop song can be. Of course, this is nothing new. Both Prince and Michael Jackson were doing it long before any teen girl went crazy over Backstreet Boys. The Typical Pop Song turns into a maze for you to get lost in, it is deconstructed and reconstructed into something that feels both new and old at the same time. “EFX” is no exception. It’s like the Stg. Peppers version of a Mariah Carey or Destiny’s Child song. After a few listens you will own the song, and the refrain will be as powerful as any “Independent Women Part I”. You can preorder their album Tracer.

Bojan Buntic

Airhead: “Wait”

Label: R & S
Style: Ambient
Rating: 4.5/5

Airhead released a remarkable interpretation of Yeah Yeah Yeah’s most tender rock-anthem in March. He took away the epic, inexorable sweep of the stadium sized emotions, the strongest most unstoppable plea of love, and focused instead on the tenderness, turned the indie rock classic into a kind of James Blakeian electronic postrock, breezes of abstract/natural noise, heartwarming guitars, sweeps of passion, Karen O’s stammering, doubting, slowly moving expressions floating in a sky full of sunshine. Less of the experience of begging a lover to stay, in the middle of the most stormy relationship, and more a slow, insecure, loving embrace. The prolonging of a moment you never want to end, but you don’t know what words to say, you don’t know what magic trick can keep her there with you.

Bojan Buntic

Airhead recently released a new single, which is a raw carnal monster of dubstep compared to the aching beauty of “Wait”. A very versatile producer. Listen to Pyramid Lake here:

Destiny’s Child “Say My Name (Cyril Hahn Remix)”

Not only does this remix fit well with my life at the moment and my current mood (I’m working the night shift in my mind) it also makes the poignancy of loss that much stronger, the sadness of seeing the one you love loosing that loving feeling for you — intensified to the point of leaving both me and the original song in ruins. It is so strong that I feel the need to turn it off, because of the breathtaking beauty, because it makes the already aching lyrics more painful. Beyoncé has turned into a man, of sorts, and she resonates with my own voice. The first half of the track we get the cut up words repeated, we only hear “say my name” over again. When the song has fulfilled its purpose the rest of the words are fit in, and the sing-song quality, the inexorability of the phrases, hurts you badly. But it also soothes you, as you accept the loss. For this Cyril Hahn has chosen the most comforting gemlike bassline of all time, which can be heard in the before-death-release-of-endorphins “Halcyon On and On”. And, in all kinds of dying, we need a helping hand, even in the death of heartbreak.

The XX recommended it on their facebook page, and of course nobody else could have sent it to me. A week ago I was listening to their latest single, “Angels”, and the lyrics really moved me. I was about to wake up without my angel, and I knew it. And now, I guess, I have.

Bojan Buntic

Best New Track: Joy Orbison “Ellipsis”

Label: Hinge Finger
Style: House
Rating: 4.5/5

Joy Orbison is responsible for my most repeated song of 2009, the dubstep innovation “Hyph Mngo”. I was glidefloating through the cold winter with the sunlight in my face. I still lift from the ground whenever I hear it, and today I needed that. I added it to my ipod again, which was emptied first of all the crap I’ve collected over the years, and then I saw a way to move past all the troubles in my life. There is a way for me to regain my strenght, and it is to write about what I most passionately love, and that is electronic dance music, techno, rave.

Peter O’Brady — the man behind the moniker — has been embraced by both Resident Advisor and Pitchfork, my two favorite sources of new music, as a genius. Now I aswell want to applaud his brilliance. The celebrated UK DJ has been prolific. During the beginning of this year he has done remarkable collaborations with Boddika: “Mercy” and “Froth” sound utterly vile, mechanical shadows dripping with sweat and frothing at the mouth, full of raw power, moving like trains of death through the darkness of a devastated club. Like the current work of another UK hope, the young Blawan (I’m especially thinking of theLong Distance Open Water Worker EP) hey are formed from the mould and discarded bits and pieces of the darkest techno, put to life by the lightning of the innovative mind.

“Ellipsis” has less of the hot lava boiling inside its guts, though it is sizzling from heat, and more of the chill coolness of “Hyph Mngo”. You actually get relief, as if suddenly in the warmest and sweatiest of summer days a breeze gives you some temporary mercy. That fresh wind coming to save you is the sample/hook “We just used to like… do our own thing” and the beautiful piano vamp cooling your insides like soda with ice. Then that deadly hot bass comes back and gets your body pumping, the only route now is into the ocean.

Bojan Buntic

Zomby: “Fuck Mixing, Let’s Dance”

Where were u in 92′?