The New LoFi

Dim the lights, spark the candles and grab that bottle of Shea butter lotion, this week on the fuzz we’re all about making love. Music has always been about love, but in special cases, vocals and sounds who love each other very much get together and make sweet tender music. These tunes could sooth even the most savage of beasts in to a storm of hormones and reproductive bliss, a full-bodied eargasm that’ll send shivers shooting up the spinal column. Warning, these songs may be safe for work, but once they start playing, YOU might become NSFW.

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Oliver Tank – Up All Night

Oliver Tank’s most noticeable credit seems to come from a lackluster mash up of Snoop Dog songs, which is unfortunate, because people have missed the actual music that this Sydney-based introvert has made. “Up all Night” is our foreplay track to get you in the mood, so don’t take off your belt just yet.

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Lovage – Stroker Ace

Jennifer Charles coos and twirls her tongue around this voluptuous track from 2001′s Lovage. Dan the Automator is the genius producer behind some of the best music of the 00′s, with credits ranging from the Gorillaz, Deltron 3030 and of course way back to 96 with Doctor Octagon. The ever talented Mike Patton of Faith no More fame provides the backing vocals for “Stroker Ace”, and it’s no surprise that an album called “Music to make love to your old lady by” finds it’s way on to the fuzz today. Charles’ clever kitty wordplay gives me a good naughty chuckle, and there are few voices in the business that sound more like pure sex than hers.

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Giraffage – Undress U

Giraffage drops a new track in to the blogosphere at least once a month and the result is a collective down-tempo orgasm from the internet. My favorite piece by the young mixmaster is a baby-making delight, “Undress U” practically oozes with sex, and it’s bound to put your partner in the mood for genital to genital magic.

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Rhye – Open

The feature presentation, it’s Rhye with Open. Perhaps the most blogged about song this year (i’ve counted at least 88 blogs and countless remix ‘attempts’), “Open” is bound to get your blood to the boiling point. Milosh’s breathy vocals are more than sufficient to send you to a sensual climax as the words just float out of his throat. The real highlight is the ambiguity; there’s no explicit language, no obvious sexual references, and no specific gendered material. Mike Milosh even manages to sound somewhere between a husky female and a slender tight-lipped crooner. It’s all very neutral, yet full blown sexy.

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Beacon – Drive

On the theme of ambiguity, Brooklyn’s ‘Beacon’, fresh off their first full length album, hit us with a track that’s hard to describe. The beat screams electro neon-nightdrive with mid 80′s influence, yet the vocals tip the scales in a completely different direction. It’s hard to tell if this song about lovemake or heartbreak, but we’ll leave it up to your interpretation. All I know for sure is that the smooth sounds send me swooning for my sweetie, and the passion is purposeful and palpable in this palette-whetting piece.

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That brings us to our inevitable climax on this week’s episode of the Fuzz. Mail us in nine months time and we’ll help you with baby names.

I’m really digging this album from Joe Flory aka Amateur Best. It’s happy, it’s sad, it’s been compared to some of Hot Chip’s more understated tracks with a vocal style similar to David Bowie. Overall it’s a cool, downtempo album that exudes warmth on a dreary, rainy NY day.

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With festival season upon us, we’re going one step further than posting the festival line up. Wouldn’t it be great if you could give the whole line up a listen to help you decide who to see? We think so. To kick it off, we’ve create a 362 track Lollapalooza Preview that includes the entire 2013 line up from A-Z. To keep things fare, we included each the 3 “top tracks” based on Spotify popularity. For those of you without Spotify, we added a few tracks from Soundcloud below.

For more, check out the official Lollapalooza 2013 site

Have a festival you want us to preview? Drop us an email and we’ll put it together.

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Hello.

In no particular order and for no particular reason, here are 117 songs for April.

Thank you for your attention.

Regards,

D-Hall + The Management Team

The New LoFi Podcast is a monthly hour long mix of all the music posted over the past four weeks. It’s an easy way to get you up to speed with the latest music.

This month the music trend has leaned towards a more chill vibe with tracks from The Tallest Man on Earth, The War On Drugs, Empress Of, and Owl Eyes setting the tone. There are a couple of great remixes as well including Kulkid’s rework of “Young And Beautiful,” Lana Del Rey’s new single off the Great Gatsby Soundtrack.

We’ll kick the mix off with a single from the artist that we believe is going to make waves in the music world with his latest album entitled Muchacho. The single is called “Song For Zula” and it’s by Alabama native Matthew Houck (AKA Phosphorescent).

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TNLF 2013 April Podcast (right click to download)

• Phosphorescent – Song For Zula
• Empress Of – Don’t Tell Me
• The War On Drugs – Come To The City
• The Tallest Man on Earth – To Just Grow Away
• Owl Eyes – Nightswim
• Unknown Mortal Orchestra – So Good At Being In Trouble
• Black Marble – A Great Design
• Lana Del Rey – Young and Beautiful (Kulkid Remix)
• The xx – Reconsider (Monkeyneck remix)
• mr. carmack – Brazilian Blowjob
• Hilo – Greenhouse
• Melody’s Echo Chamber – You Won’t Be Missing That Part Of Me
• PEACE – California Daze
• Kurt Vile – Wakin On A Pretty Day
• Soley – I’ll Drown
• Small Houses – Oh, Hiding Out

The mystery has been solved. The upcoming new album entitled “Tomorrow’s Harvest” from Boards of Canada will be released on June 10th in the UK and June 11th in the US on Warp Records. That sounds like an easy piece of information to report, but it took some of the most hardcore detective work I have ever invested in the research of an album to discover.

If you haven’t been following the storyline, BOC have been dropping subtle clues that they were going to release a new album after being silent for almost seven years following their Trans Canada Highway EP.

It all started last year when a Warp representative admitted that Boards of Canada was in fact working on a new album but left it open ended saying that “there is nothing in the cards at the moment in terms of a scheduled release.” Then on April 20th during Record Store Day this year there were a couple of mystery 12″ EP’s issued that had a short clip of music and a faintly sounding computer voice reading out a series of numbers. One EP turned up at Other Music in New York, another was found in London at Rough Trade East. All of the EP’s had …Read the rest of the BOC mystery

John Andersen is hilo (pronounced hee-lo). I swear. He told me himself.  Composing electronic music is what hilo is all about. I have a feeling that if  Mozart was alive today, he’d put the harpsichord on the shelf and fire up his Macbook Air and start making music like this. Personally, I feel like when I’m listening, hilo becomes the soundtrack to the daily adventures I seem to get myself into. At times minimal, at others, very lush, it’s rather perfect. Have a listen to these selections from the Into the Stream EP, and see if they don’t just sweep you up and put you into a world of your own making. Enjoy.

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Hilo – Greenhouse

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Hilo – Liberation

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Hilo – Surrounded

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Hilo – JoyStick

I was left with a difficult decision driving this morning; to listen to the radio or wallow in silence. As an avid musical enthusiast, the choice seemed obvious. I fiddled with the knob until I found X92.9, which is widely regarded by today’s youth as the only relevant radio station in Calgary. The first few minutes were commercials.. followed by more commercials.. followed by pseudo-social commentary and silly news stories.. and more commercials. In the hour of driving I managed to hear three songs, clocking in at under twelve minutes. Yes, the radio was only twenty percent music.

It’s a constant struggle battling with the over-generalized hipster stereotypes and trying to remain genuine. As if adhering to these stereotypes somehow disenfranchises your integrity and deprives your opinion of worth. That being said, the radio sucks. Flat-out. For me, today, it had nothing to do with the actual music being played. It was the fact that they weren’t actually playing any music. Considering radio listenership has been on steady decline since the iPod age, it’s somewhat surprising that I managed to hear twice as many commercials for a local diamond retailer within an hour than actual songs.

The ultimate point here is that I am not a hipster, I don’t hate the radio for the terrible music, I hate the radio for the lack of music. I hate the corporation. Oh god.. am I a hippie? Maybe my little cousin was right all along..

On a completely unrelated note, today we’re going to spin a few tracks with female frontmen(frontpeople?). Our theme for the weekend: Water!

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Owl Eyes – Nightswim

Aussie Brooke Addamo is equal parts babe and genius, and her debut album “Nightswim” just landed on iTunes last week. The title track hits with shades of Kavinsky, but Addamo’s vocals hover above the beat. This is my kind of lo-fi.

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Sóley – I’ll Drown

Can’t say I know a whole lot about Sóley, other than the fact that she’s from Hafnarfjörður, which I assume is a town in Iceland pronounced properly with a mouthfull of marbles. I discovered this tune mid-wander on a YouTube hyperlink adventure, and it’s one of those hidden gems. I imagine listlessly stumbling through an ancient abandoned conservatory, perhaps half-dream or half-dead, sun beaming through the broken stained-glass ceiling.

We swim across the Atlantic for our last band, Woman’s Hour out of the UK. Their single “To the End” came out April 8th with Parlour Records and it bleeds passion. You can buy the whole EP for £1.49, which is some kind of silly English currency that involves a pound of flesh or something.

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Appropriately, that last song “to the end” brings us.. well..

Enjoy your weekend! And who am I kidding, of course i’m a hipster I write a music blog..

;)