french-argentinian-japanese-love-music-jazz

Oh my days.

I've been listening to Mama!Milk's Fragrance of Notes quite a bit - that and George Russell's (R.I.P.) Jazz in the Space Age, both make for good "shit-I-have-to-do-work-for-uni" type of music. But they both stand up on their own - anyway, you should play the video above, which is Mama!Milk playing their gorgeous "The Moon" live at a temple in Kyoto. It's as lovely as it sounds.

If you love the show, please feel free to buy this on vinyl for me.

oh yes

I didn't know about Ultimate Thrush until ten minutes ago, and now they're a band I HAVE TO SEE LIVE LIKE MY LIFE DEPENDS ON IT. Luckily they're playing the Glasgow School of Art on Friday with FLFD faves Holy Mountain and some band called Mr Peppermint with no easily located Myspace page.

Download their self-titled album HERE and whet your appetite at their Myspace.

It’s taken me a while to type this up – it was going to be up on Monday but the computer I was working on crashed and I didn’t save this, which kickstarted a very stressful evening. But I figured it would be worth checking out, so better late than never eh? I now present to you FIVE QUESTIONS WITH… FUCK BUTTONS

1. So why Fuck Buttons as a band name?

ANDY (jokingly): We really like the word “fuck” and it had an incredible resonance at the time, we just enjoyed embellishing it with the word “buttons”. The word “buttons” with “fuck”, it kind of turned into… it excelled the word, in a way.

FLFD: Did you have any other contenders?

BENJAMIN: Piss Witches. (everyone laughs)

FLFD: Alright, now we’re rolling!

2. Listening to the new material tonight, it sounds like ideas piling on top of another, creating this really dense feeling – it’s akin to reading a book with various subplots running alongside one another. Is there an intention to put together music that feels especially layered?

ANDY: I think we were really conscious in embellishing our sounds from the last record. With Street Horrrsing, there was definitely a prominent singularity to the components of the music but this time round we were extremely conscious of not repeating those steps but also in learning from them. You’re right though, we’ve definitely moved towards becoming a more multi-faceted prospect this time round.

FLFD: The new songs are a lot heavier - I heard elements of rave and industrial music that weren’t prominent before.

ANDY: I guess these are words attached to specific aesthetics but it’s not something we can turn ourselves with or at least have an intention with. I can see why you hear elements of dance and metal in the new songs, but it’s certainly not a conscious decision to contain these sounds.

3. How does a song begin in your writing process? Does it start with an idea or a certain riff or…

BENJAMIN: We never have any set agenda when we sit in a room to start writing music together, like wanting to use particular chords or wanting a song to evoke a certain emotion. We literally just sit in a room with as much equipment as we can get our hands on and try to extract sounds from them. Once we hit upon a sound we like, we jam it out and then work on structuring something around it. We never come in with ideas and that leaves us constantly surprised with what we come up with. That keeps us happy.

FLFD: My friends’ old band used to write really technical songs that I imagined took up to a month to finish writing. How long did it take to write “Ribs Out”, for instance?

ANDY: “Ribs Out” actually took two hours. Our perspective and sensibilities are really important when it comes to writing – I mean, it can take a few days to experiment with sounds until we hit on something but the actual structuring of those sounds don’t take too long at all.

BENJAMIN: Some tracks will take two hours to write, some tracks will take two months.



4. With the wide array of different equipment you use, would you consider yourselves an analogue or digital band?

BENJAMIN: All of the signal processors we use in the first instance are analogue, but there is some digital manipulation in there. A lot of the stuff we use are things picked up from car boot sales and things like that, but it’s a mixture – we don’t have a set idea as to what we’d use to create a song. Whatever goes, really.

5. How do the lyrics play into the music? Unless there’s some secret Dan Brown code hidden in the artwork to Street Horrrsing that I’m missing out on, I know nobody that knows the lyrics…

BENJAMIN: There’s no lyrics. For the most part, it’s improvised.

FLFD: Really? Can you tell me just one line that you usually use?

ANDY: “Be awesome to each other”.

BENJAMIN (sceptically): Yeah.

ANDY: The reason behind improvising the vocals is because they don’t function as a narrative tool.

BENJAMIN: They’re like another layer of sound. (pause) There are some lyrics we use, but we’re not going to tell you. I’d probably have to kill you. (him and Andy laugh)

Fuck Buttons - Surf Solar (Album Version)

[Thanks to Andy and Benjamin for rocking Stereo last week/deafening my girlfriend/doing an immortal drop that I can never use for my show ("You're listening to Flashing Lights and Flash Drives: eat a dick, motherfucker") and being sound. Their new album is called Tarot Sport, it's out on ATP Recordings and it just leaked. Be a nice person and take it home with you on October 12th instead of downloading it.]

ahhh, no sandler

One of my favourite ever songs covered in an even better way. Can't believe I had never heard this before last week... big up Gilles Peterson and Mayer Hawthorne (the podcast where Hawthorne played the track can be found HERE)

Curtis Mayfield - We've Only Just Begun (Live)

lay with me on the ground

Passion Pit make me wish that I had saved up for a festival this year, if only for that sun-drunk sense of total euphoria you get from being part of a giant body, consisting of hundreds of people, bellowing out the words to songs you love. It's better than just a live experience in a club or indoors. Festivals really do make for the best musical moments.

Anyhoo, Passion Pit came onto my radar pretty late but "Moth's Wings", off their album Manners, is pretty much one of the best damn things I've heard all year. Above is a clip from their recent Myspace Transmissions set - you can find the rest HERE - and even though singer Michael Angelakos' voice sounds kinda shot from constant gigging, it sounds great away from the multi-tracked vocals and really loud drums. It's the best Coldplay song that Coldplay never wrote, and I just know I'll be disappointed when Coldplay don't play this next month. If you get what I mean.

DA PIT are playing the Garage in Glasgow on the 23rd of October after hitting Lowlands, Reading, Leeds, Pukkelpop and Rock en Seine. If you're going to any of these, check 'em out and get back to me on what they're like live.

stoked

A reminder for all y'all: Calvinball and Apologies, I Have None are playing Glasgow on Friday and Perth on Saturday as the poster above states. In short, DON'T MISS!

Calvinball - You Always Get What You Want

Apologies, I Have None - 100 Club

STOKED.

ps. I haven't checked out Onsind (stands for: One Night Stand in South Dakota) yet, soon will.