Some songs are just born singles, perfect little gems that set up house without asking and don’t leave when asked, no matter how kindly you insist. Norway’s Casiokids’s recent release “Finn Bikkjen” is exactly one of those songs: a prefect mixture of melody, beat, and, my own personal audio aphrodisiac, a fat analog synth lead. The ice cream on top is a reverbed, vocal line with a soft melody and sung in a language I can’t understand, which for some reason only makes me love it more. The song undulates from spacier bridges to the uptempo synth-laden chorus that never fails to have induce some sort of contented nodding along. Quite simply, electropop at its finest.

Casiokids – Finn Bikkjen

This, in combination with their last single “Fot I Hose”, another bouncy, synthy tune leads me to feel nothing but anticipation for whatever they choose to record next. Beyond their odd inclusion in the Fifa 2010 soundtrack, I guarantee more exposure for them this year as they’re supporting Hot Chip on tour this February:

12 – Glasgow – O2 Academy
13 – Edinburgh – Picture House
15 – Nottingham – Rock City
16 – Leeds – O2 Academy
19 – Manchester – Academy
20 – Birmingham – O2 Academy
21 – Southampton – Joiners
22 – 
Bournemouth – O2 Academy
23 – Bristol – O2 Academy
24 – Norwich – O2 Academy
25 – London – Camden Barfly (Headline Show)
26 – London – Brixton Academy

In the US, you can’t purchase their singles through iTunes, but you can grab the Moshi Moshi label compilation. It features “Fot I Hose” and the b-side “Verdens Største Land” along with tracks by Au Revoir Simone, Samuel & the Dragon, and The Very Best. To download the compilation through iTunes click the cover to the right.

The 7″ singles for both “Finn Bikkjen” and “Verdens Største Land” are available direct from Moshi Moshi Records.

Today, for some reason, Grizzly Bear was on my mind. While driving around some back roads, I was listening to my favorites off Veckatimest, mulling over the evolution in songwriting from Yellow House to today. The album is certainly one of my favorites from last year and “Two Weeks” still stands as both a killer single and video.

Sitting in my inbox almost summoned by my daylong binge I found this newly minted live Grizzly Bear track. Recorded for Austrailia’s Triple J Radio, the band covers “Boy From School”, one of the finer tracks off Hot Chip’s 2006 album The Warning. The song is given the standard, but wonderful Grizzly Bear-ification: the tempo is slowed, everything is doused in a healthy amount of reverb and the vocal harmonies snake around each other like bacon wrapped around a steak. (In general, this blog is short on vegan friendly metaphors) It’s a lovely interpretation of an already good song, and even if it’s just some under the radar promotion for Hot Chip’s upcoming One Life Stand, I’m ok with that.

Grizzly Bear – Boy From School (Hot Chip Cover)

Please check out Triple J’s website to hear more of the interesting stuff they have to offer.

Now when I say “winter outdoor group participation experimental Christmas art music”…what comes to mind?

Nothing, you say?

Well, to the cross section of you who haven’t thrown up a little (I admit, I get queasy at the “group participation” part), you should all be alerted to and excited by the concept that is Unsilent Night. The brainchild of Phil Kline, a longstanding NY artist who works most frequently with music. Since 1992, he’s lead his own kind of interesting Christmas celebration. Unsilent Night centers around one of Kline’s musical compositions: a drone based swirl of chimes and other vaguely Christmas related tones played through a variety participant brought audio sources. It’s kind of a chorus line that both Fennez and The Flaming Lips (remember Zaireeka?) would enjoy, as folks snag their copy of the composition from the website and the living sound sculpture begins as the group walks together playing the piece from home brought boom boxes, iPhones, and hopefully some of those lovely bike audio rigs I’ve seen at Critical Mass. Given that the composition is an abstract one coming from multiple moving sources, the work evolves as the crowd passes through the given city, forming something fluid and unique each time. Ultimately, a unique, weirdo holiday tradition I can get behind.

This year has some new cities, including Chicago and if you attend NYC’s 18th annual Unsilent Night this Saturday, you’ll get to be lead from Washington Square Park to Thompkins Square Park by Kline himself. Last year’s reported attendance for the New York event was around 1500, so that’s probably the best bet for the most epic scale of holiday drone.

Unsilent Night is happening in 25 cities this year: Albuquerque, Asheville, Baltimore, Berlin, Boulder, Cambridge (Ontario), Charleston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, East Lansing, Fredericton (New Brunswick), London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Milledgeville, Missoula, New Haven, New York City, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Vancouver.

Many of the events are happening this weekend. Check out Unsilent Night to find out when and were it’s going on in each city.

The Warp debut by Glaswegian Ross Birchard is certainly one of the most interesting albums that 2009 has dropped in our collective laps. Butter is a beautifully chaotic swirl of influences: L.A. glitch-hop, smears of Warp’s spacier back catalog, and at its weirdest there’s charmed allusions to 1970’s prog/experimental masters The Mahavishnu Orchestra. It’s a wonderfully experimental affair, something far more worthy of the Warp branding than the label’s current top seller Veckatimest.

Trying to pick a song to feature here was a bit of a challenge. On the whole, Butter is a long and twisted affair, a bit exhausting to listen to from front to back. It’s strangely uneven too, with some songs congealing more than others, though that is often the byproduct anything so experimental. Still, it’s still one of the best this year has brought forth.

When I first took a pass at the album, the track that kicked my ass the hardest was ZOo00OOm, because…well, I’m a sucker for a killer synth lead. Amidst the hard stomping ghost of an electrified Dilla beat and the fluttering Casio bleep accompaniment is a hard synth that creeps out an almost cheesy sci-fi sounding melody. It’s one of the more linear and charmed tracks on the album; equal parts head-nodding wonky goodness as well something to put on at high volumes to scare the piss out of your cat.

Hudson Mohawke – ZOo00OOm

Seriously though, I’ll throw $20 bucks on the table for whoever can get Outkast back in the studio and have Hudson Mohawke produce the album. Fuck, that would be epic.

Also epic – the Butter album cover:

Butter was released by Warp Records on October 27th 2009

There’s a lot contained below the surface of Eskimo Snow and what’s underneath is not entirely an uplifting affair. The album, which was released in late September on Anticon Records, is almost completely devoid of the hip-hop sheen that glossed both Elephant Eyelash and Alopecia and what is left settles with much more heft and weight. Much of the humorous subtext is gone as well, though the wordplay left behind is no less clever. The album gives off the air of a defeated narrator, be it Yoni himself or the character he’s woven into the band’s three albums, someone who has laid down his arms in light of the arriving war. The first two albums settled a mixture of reaction to the world around him with wry commentary, Elephant Eyelash brimming with a bit more uptempo sadness followed by Alopecia’s growing frustration. Put in context, the core of Eskimo Snow, in both lyrics and music is something more introspective

I had the pleasure of interviewing Yoni back in early 2006 just before one of their opening shows for The Silver Jews at Chicago’s Double Door. The read I got off him then was a sincere one, as he was a genuinely kind and grounded guy who spoke with as much sincerity off the stage as he did in his lyrics. Between then and now, one has to assume that as you progress as a person of interest in the public eye, there is a divergence between the self you present in your art and the self you live. Over the course of the last two albums, it’s safe to guess that more of a ‘narrative interpretation of Yoni’ has crept into the lyrics. The process of exposing yourself through your art, especially to the extreme that he does can create two representations of one’s self. Even with those ideas are taken into account, Alopecia and Eskimo Snow were born of the same recording sessions, so to say that there’s an evolution over time could be a less than true guess.

Character analysis aside, when you take away the hip-hop sway and gloss humor, what’s left at the core is a dense affair. The same themes of morality, self image, and mortality run through the core of this record. The songs stand strong individually despite the brief length of some, like the hypnotic album opener These Hands. This pairs a rising coo of discordant backup vocals with Yoni’s comparison of his own life’s progress to his father’s. The deep reverb on his voice paired with the lonely piano chords makes for something that creeps under the skin and at under two minutes is gone before you really recognize what is going on.

Why? – These Hands

Another highlight rests with Into The Shadows Of My Embrace, which leans on a swirl of keyboards and xylophone as it marches toward an almost melodramatic musical and lyrical peak where he sings about the extreme of his confessional nature. The kind of straight pop style that he uses in songs like this and Alopecia’s Simeon’s Dilemma and Brook & Waxing were a shift in style that I had to really wrap my head around, but the way they’re executed it grows on you.

Why? – Into the Shadows of My Embrace

With the tour supporting this album, there was a pretty interesting shift in the band’s setup. My last show in Portland was them with the charmingly enigmatic Phil Elverum, this time doing what could best be described as epic Anacortes sludge metal. Why?’s live setup for this tour featured Andrew Broder and Mark Erickson of Fog, so that the full band that participated in the Eskimo Snow and Alopecia recording sessions was present. Earlier tours, they’d shift up the arrangement and subtract elements to perform the songs live, but the full roster of folks on stage allowed for a pretty fair recreation of the album’s sound, down to the barely there backup vocals on Against Me which I always chalked up to reverb. Usually, Yoni would have a setup of a snare drum and a keyboard hooked up to a few effects pedals, but now he was able to function more as a lead man, free to move around the stage untethered. Overall, the show was the most solid and confidant I’ve seen them yet, a reflection on the changes musically and lyrically on the album.

Ultimately, Eskimo Snow chopped up snippets of someone’s life, very much not my own, but the emotion behind it all rings true with me. The feeling of frustration and exhaustion, that I feel a lot of people are suffering through as the world lets loose what could only be described as a massive economic sigh. The emotional pull of the album is more important than the specifics of musical influences or which track hides the cleverest lyric, as Eskimo Snow yields a rewarding listen weather you take the stories as truth or fragments of Mr. Wolf’s own mythos.

Eskimo Snow was released by Anticon Records on September 22nd 2009