Just let us go

[ffffound]





Here We Go Magic - I Just Want To See You Underwater

It's complicated, you know. We don't know what we want. Well I know what I want, happiness. Like, I want to smile more and I think she could give me that. My toes tingle when I see her sometimes and life's short. So the complications... I just want to set them alight. But we can't, she can't. It's New Year, for fuck's sake, I just want to see her, it's too much not to see her.

Balearic rhythms and guitars, melancholy and clarity, watch out for this in '09. [via Rose Quartz]

[Here We Go Magic - buy/myspace]

Happy New Year.

Lights are in your eyes

[loveology]

The Raveonettes - Come On Santa

[Wishing You A Rave Christmas]

By the time Christmas rolls around each year, the need to curl up with family and wrap myself in light, warmth and beauty, is pressing. Like the deep breath between one year and the next. Laziness, easiness and love surround me. Not many Christmas songs capture the season as as well as this.

Bosque Brown - Silent Night

A wonderfully clear rendition of one of my favourite Chrismas carols. Her angelic voice echoes through your head speaking of Christmas' timeless story. I lie on the rug with my head under the Christmas tree, scratching the cat with one hand and squinting through the branches to see the light of the angel at the top.


Have a Happy Christmas.

Gun in the sun

[style.com, the pretty much perfect Burberry Prorsum S/S 09]

And to think it was all just a dream

[source: lost! sorry]

School of Seven Bells - Connjur

[Alpinisms]

What starts off as underwater journey is quickly pulled back to the surface by a beautiful voice and warm guitars, sort of how a beautiful voice and warm hand are the only things that are acceptable to pull you from your own journeys in your sleep. The surfacing/song is insistent with spaced-out, occasionally arching, guitar and siren-like vocals. Do you like your pop dreamy? Yes, please, thank you very much.

We were captured by Victorian vampires

[source: Deerhunter myspace]

Deerhunter - Saved By Old Times (Platts Eyott Session)

This session was recorded by Bradford Cox [Deerhunter/Atlas Sound] in September of this year on Platts Eyott, an island reserve in the middle of the Thames river, London. It's a continuous stream on consciousness containing songs from this year's Microcastle and 'Spring Hall Convert' from Cryptograms and is supposed to be listened to all at once - a tribute to John Peel. It's fantastically melancholy and confessional, a great headphone listen that somehow feels heavy on your ears. This song in particular, from Microcastle, makes any room you listen in seem a dimly lit, smoke-filled haven.

Listen to the entirety of the session here, and my favourite song from Microcastle here.

***


Also:

Along with every other teenage girl in Australia, I will be going to see this today:



I'm more than a little excited.

I told you love, I'd try

[Joan Nocito]

A Classic Education - We Can Always Run To Hawaii


A group of young things sat at a cafe on the beach front, two among their number, of about ten, thought of nothing but each other. They laughed along with the others and watched each other's reactions and still refused to look the other in the eye. It had been three weeks since they had broken it off and she was still the last thing he thought of before he fell asleep. Later, the group walked along the sea front, kicking water at each other and telling stories. The two of them ended up walking next to each other, dragged behind until they couldn't hear their friends. They talked about anything and everything but themselves and the sun was in her eyes and the wind blew her hair everywhere till she couldn't see, her eyes were blurry and wet. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She made her excuses and ran to catch up with her friends. He went and stood in the water, watched her walk away and tried to recapture some of her warmth in the sun.

[buy]

I promise, I'm on it

[here; via here]

They raced very fast on their bikes until the road ran out and then they stopped, gasping for breath at a barbed wire fence at the foot of, what looked like a hill 10 minutes ago, but which now more resembled a mountain. Ignoring the 'Do not trespass' sign, they gingerly pulled the fence apart for each other and slipped through. The sun was so hot the backs of their necks were burning as they put one boot in front of the other pulling themselves further to the summit. She tripped over some rocks, he picked her up, tucked her hair behind her ear and they continued. They talked and listened to a bird that was singing in a tree at what seemed like the very top. About half way up they stopped under a tree to shed jumpers and catch their breath. They sat on a log very close, their legs were full flush against each other and her perfume, their mingled sweat and the dry grass were all they could smell.

Sleep all day, just waiting for the sun to set

[I'm sorry, I can't remember who created this amazing image]

Chad VanGaalen - Willow Tree

[Soft Airplane]

[myspace]

P.S. My extended absense was the result of end of year stuff and gettin' loose at Schoolies, sorry about that. I hope to jack up my output this summer before I start university. Lovin' the holidays, aren't you?

Terrible am I child, even if you don't mind

Fleet Foxes - A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

Listen to this amazing rendition of 'Blue Ridge Mountain' where the Fleet Foxes break into an abandoned Grand Palais and perform with such enthusiasm and care. They play in an enormous chamber-like room which makes their already echoey, perfect harmonies even more echoey, perfect and filled with mythicism and passion. 

In the quivering forest,

Where the shivering dogs rest,

Our good grandfather,

Built a wooden nest.

And the river got frozen,

And the home got snowed in,

And the yellow moon glowed bright,

In the morning light.

Terrible am I child,

Even if you don't mind.

This is my favourite song from Fleet Foxes' self-titled LP of this year.

Burn, burn, burn

Jack Kerouac [via the impossible cool]

"A tremendous thing happened when Dean met Carlo Marx. Two keen minds that they are, they took to each other at the drop of a hat. Two piercing eyes glanced into two piercing eyes - the holy con-man with the shining mind, and the sorrowful poetic con-man with the dark mind that is Carlo Marx. From that moment on I saw very little of Dean, and I was a little sorry too. Their energies met head-on, I was a lout compared, I couldn't keep up with them. The whole mad swirl that was to come began then; it would mix up all my friends and all I had left of my family in a big dust cloud over the American Night. Carlo told him of Old Bull Lee, Elmer Hassel, Jane: Lee in Texas growing weed, Hassel on Riker's Island, Jane wandering on Times Square in a benzedrine hallucination, with her baby girl in her arms and ending up in Bellevue. And Dean told Carlo of unknown people in the West like Tommy Snark, the clubfooted poolhall rotation shark and cardplayer and queer saint. He told him of Roy Johnson, Big Ed Dunkel, his boyhood buddies, his street buddies, his innumerable girls and sexparties and pornographic pictures, his heroes, his heroines, adventures. They rushed down the street together, digging everything in the early way they had, which later became so much sadder and perceptive and blank. But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn and say commonplace things, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!" What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany? Wanting dearly to learn how to write like Carlo, the first thing you know, Dean was attacking him with a great amorous soul such as only a con-man can have. "Now Carlo, let me speak - here's what I'm saying . . ." I didn't see them for about two weeks during which time they cemented their relationship to fiendish allday-allnight-talk proportions.

Then came spring, the great time for travelling, and everybody in the scattered gang was ready to take one trip or another. I was busily at work on my novel and when I came to the halfway mark, after a trip down South with my aunt to visit my brother Rocco, I got ready to travel West for the very first time."

The brilliant Jack Kerouac with one of my favourite passages from On the Road.

What you have in your hand

[via Loveology]

This week I finished the last of my high school assessment and the weather seemed to pick up on the escasties of my friends and I. It's been a lovely week of too hot, muggy weather that makes my blood sing even louder and my skin burn with the sun as well as my excitement. I feel light, free and full of optimism for the future, fully aware of my strengths and the strengths of all the wonderful people around me. Here's two songs that are, I suppose, soundtracking these days for me in a most spectacular way:

François Virot - Cascade Kisses

Indie pop at its very, very, very best. Gloriously infectious in a way that makes you thankful that you've got something this great to sing along to as you skip down the street. It's feelings in sound in all their complexity: wondering, hesitant and confusing even in happiness. Full acknowledgement that we can't ever turn your brain off for just a minute and just stop thinking. Can we enjoy this moment now or do we only know how to enjoy the prospects of the future and smiles from our pasts?

[from Yes or No which you should get if you know what's good for you, I love every song on this album]

[myspace]

The Very Best - Tengazako

Last year's summer anthem is remade into something, possibly, even more uplifting by The Very Best [go here - you can download to the entire album/mixtape for free!], I've posted about these guys before, as I said, they're a collaboration between the fantastic Malawian singer Esau Mwamwaya and Radioclit. I really cannot get enough of the clear and uplifting voice of Esau over the much loved guitar of 'Paper Planes'. Bend your knees, raise your arms and let the familiar sounds wash over you.

Deliver

Brian DeGraw from Gang Gang Dance

Avey Tare and Panda Bear from Animal Collective

Pieter Schoolwerth

I just spent a good hour and a bit looking through the fascinating, varied and beautiful work of Isabel Asha Penzilen. She takes the most wonderful photographs of artists, musicians and couples in their homes as well as contrasting landscapes, cityscapes, nature, misplaced objects and nameless people. She somehow, amazingly, manages to make her images both hazy and sharp, full of soft tones but clear with contrast - like soft, dreamy skin and dark, intent eyes.

I also loved the pictures of some of my favourite musicians in their practice spaces.

Come together

Congratulations America, it's been a long time coming. I've been quietly confident for some months now that this amazing feat would come about and that having a point of view would become more than just a useless, pointless exercise in frustration. The last eight years have been horrific but the sun is shining again. It's going to be difficult to undo all the bad that's been done, but I've never seen such an intelligent, well spoken and, most inportantly, level headed politician in all my life and I have no doubt that 'yes we can'.

It isn't the first time he's made me cry, he pulls my cynicism and apathy completely to pieces. If you haven't seen this yet, then you must:

Happy Halloween

Atlas Sound - Danse Infernale

Atlas Sound - Danse Macabre

Some special Halloween songs for whatever you have planned for tonight from the prolific Atlas Sound. I'm dressing up as a preppy vampire from Vampire Weekend. Have a spooky night.

Daily routine

[Aliki Braine]

Today, I received some encouraging news that my hard work [combined with, I'll admit, a pretty big c.b.fed attitude] might have paid off. On the same day of course I received two detentions for bunking off, etc. Oh well, one jump forward, two steps back.

I think next year I'm just going to read books, listen to music and write a bit, i.e. do a B. of Arts. I need to relax and just enjoy learning again.

The Walkmen - In the New Year

[from You & Me]

Here's a song for the new year hurtling towards us, or dragging slowly, or dawning with promise but apprehension, we're leaving everything behind with a shout, stamp and howl to the clear sky. We won.

Boneless

[Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard's 1962 Vivre Sa Vie]

The Notwist - Boneless (Panda Bear Remix)

Calling this a remix is dubious at best, it's more like a complete reimagining. The Notwist's brilliant 'Boneless' has been chopped up, added to and mixed around to become something unrecognisable, but even better. Panda Bear has made it a song in it's own right and it's my new favourite. [via I Guess I'm Floating]

P.S. How excited is everyone for Merriweather Post Pavillion?!?! 

Asleep at a party

[Nan Goldin's Guido Floating]

Memory Cassette - Listen to the Vacuum

Hazy, lazy, lo-fi and shoegazey disco. That is what this new project from Weird Tapes is. Not sure exactly who Memory Cassette is but they're making some of my favourite music at the moment, you can download a whole heap free at the Weird Tapes/Hail Social blog. Another favourite is 'Asleep At A Party'.

Thobias Fäldt

The amazing photography of Sweden's Thobias Fäldt.

Sorry for neglecting blog for so long I've been in the UK visiting relatives but I'm back now!

Hoist the flag

Vancouver ink and watercolour artist Julie Morstad's new exhibition Touch Wood and Whistle. 

Tidal wave

mp3: Grouper - Heavy Water/I'd Rather Be Sleeping

[from Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill]

The sort of etheral dream pop that seems to take up your entire world/space/consciousness for the few mintues that it's playing. Lulling, whispering, confessing and tired music, lie on you back, headphones on and listen to someone else's feelings so as not to examine your own.

[myspace]

***

Also:

Up late doing work last night and the TV was left on. SBS was playing some great 1989 anime about a 13 year old witch with a black cat (nah, not Sabrina). I've never really gotten into anime before, but this was really awesome, it was called Kiki's Delivery Service it was a dub traslation with a young Kirsten Dunst doing the voice of Kiki. It dealt with teen angst, dealing with independence and boysssssss. It was fantastic, really.

[photosource]

Also, I've been doing up the garden recently and have planted some roses and petunias. I hope to clear the rest of the garden in the holidays and start a herb garden, I got started with a little bit of coriander, I might put some pictures up later.

 [photosource: 1.618]

Recover me

[photosource: can't remember]

Deerhunter - Agoraphobia

Song I'm enjoying very much while being held inside by the weather and study. 

[from forthcoming Microcastles, available currently on iTunes]

***

Also:

Everyone should see Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, it's definitely one of the best movies I've seen this year. The imagery and montages accompanied by a fantastic score were literally jawdropping. The movie was tense, tense, tense and in the end really quite moving. It was about a sixteen year old boy who is involved in an accident at a local skate park and the story is basically about how he deals with his guilt and also try not to get caught. The film was infamously cast over myspace and I think it was a great idea, everyone is just so normal looking and it's superbly well acted. It just looks so good, cinematography was amazing. Here's the opening ten minutes for you to get the idea and Paranoid Park is available to rent at your local Video Ezy :):

Sweet dreams

[Image: rt peters]

Abe Vigoda - Hyacinth Grrls

from Skeleton

Exams, study and assignments seems to be all I do. Thank god for songs like this.

Abe Vigoda are another great band to be produced by the amazingly talented scene centred around The Smell in Los Angeles which includes No Age and Mika Miko. 

[Abe Vigoda myspace]

Ripped knees

[can't remember where i got this photo from]


White Denim - Let's Talk About It


I kind of ignored White Denim's existence for a while. But because of my recent love for angular guitars and Wire-esque post punk I was urged in their direction. This song is off of Workout Holiday which I'm trying to get my hands on to in Brisbane, but I'll just have to content myself with myspace in the meantime.

This song is called 'Let's Talk About It', but White Denim doesn't really want to talk about it. Not talk about it in the sense that they want to hold a civilised conversation. This is about bringing up an issue we've been awkwardly dancing around and they want to talk about it, tell you about it, scream, sing themselves hoarse all about it, run their guitars ragged about it and they want you to listen because they're right, alright? End of story.


***

Also:

Randy Randall from No Age has been directing a short film documenting the Altamount Apparal skate team trip to Paris and it's called the Foreigners. The soundtrack features No Age songs, the teaser is below and features one of my favourite's from No Age's Nouns - 'Ripped Knees'. It looks fantastic, can't wait to see the whole thing.

It feels perfect

[photosource: The Cherry Blossom Girl]

High Places - From Stardust to Sentience

This song, for me, is like when you wake up in the morning and you don't remember waking up, there's a moment of consciousness when you go 'oh, i'm awake', you've been staring out of the window and you don't remember opening your eyes. And what you're looking at is beautiful and you realise that you know that, but that you haven't been thinking about it, were you dreaming with your eyes open?

[High Places myspace]

Graceful, in the morning light

First Aid Kit - Tiger Mountain Peasant Song (Fleet Floxes cover)

Voices as clear as a mountain stream, backed up by years of clean honesty, a little madness, and no hint of pretension. First Aid Kit are two teenage girls from Sweden, Johanna and Klara (17 and 15, respectively) have made something wondrously special. This song was recorded in a Swedish forest, see the video here (look at them!!!). I think I like it better than the original, and Fleet Foxes have made some of my favourite music of the year. The darkness, confusion and regret that's in this song, sung with especial urgency in the lines: 'I don't know what I have done, I'm turning myself into a demon...' is especially poignant when sung by such young'ins. You wonder what could have happened to these girls, they seem as old as the forest, and make it all seem so much more than teen angst.

Close to the surface

Animal Collective - Essplode

[from Danse Manatee]

It's the dragging long days, seeing the same people every day, doing the same things, a continous, cold cycle of sameness. There's no feeling, no need to feel, just leeching boredom leaking into everything. Then it's like the sun coming out from behind cloud, passing across your face, warmth on your eyelids. Someone taking your hand and speaking right into your eyes. The reawakening, stretching your limbs, a deep breath, it's alright.

[photosource unknown]

In the world

[Fleet Foxes, photosource: Stereogum]

[Vampire Weekend, photosource: Stereogum]

[Fuck Buttons, photosource: Stereogum]

Photos from Pitchfork fest in Chicago in July which I am fully aware is quite old news now. I love looking at pictures of my favourite musicians performing, there's something so dynamic about performance photos, I just can't get enough of them. Speaking of, Brisbanians should also look out for Yeasayer (3/10, The Zoo), Ladytron and Familjen (1/10, The Tivoli) and The New Pornographers (7/10, The Zoo) who are swinging by in the next couple of months, can't wait. MGMT (I know, I know) has also just upgraded venue size for the Sydney and Melbourne shows, might be able to get some tickets this time.

I might post some more festival pictures tomorrow, I have tonnes and this is fun.

***

Also:

Air France who released one of my favourites, No Way Down EP, this year has done a version of 'Sweetness' by Taken by Trees and it's really freaking great. Find it here.

Listen to and watch this lovely live version of my favourite song off Beach House's Devotion - 'Holy Dances':