shawty = charlieyou

As far as dumb songs from stupid YouTube videos getting stuck in your head, this is truly on some next level shit.

Found via Stuff You Will Hate!

"based on a true story"

Y'know, going through Sight & Sound's extended critics' faves of 2009 and given the amazing critical praise it had (despite little distribution), I'm surprised to see how few people lost their shit over Love Exposure. Because, um, look at it.

I need a spare four hours to experience this for myself.

motorcycles, rock n roll and no lyrics

I love this shit. So should you.

did i mention jokes?

Jokes!

nobody cares about your goddamn top ten list

1. 35 Shots of Rum (dir. Claire Denis)
2. The Hurt Locker (dir. Kathryn Bigelow)
3. Up (dir. Pete Docter)
4. Burma VJ (dir. Anders Østergaard)
5. Rachel Getting Married (dir. Jonathan Demme)
6. A Serious Man (dirs. Joel and Ethan Coen)
7. Fantastic Mr Fox (dir. Wes Anderson)
8. Bronson (dir. Nicolas Winding Refn)
9. Love Aaj Kal (dir. Imtiaz Ali)
10. Sin Nombre (dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga)

Close but no cigar: JCVD (dir. Mabrouk El Mechri); White Lightnin' (dir. Dominic Murphy); In The Loop (dir. Armando Ianucci); Duplicity (dir. Tony Gilroy); Slumdog Millionaire (dirs. Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan), Moon (dir. Duncan Jones)

...I didn't listen to many albums in '09, but I saw films.

songs i've been listening to recently, pt. 1

Wiz Khalifa - B.A.R.

If it wasn't for Nation, I would've probably slept on this dude forever. And really, half of Burn After Rolling is misguided decisions - whoever thought it would be a good idea for Khalifa to cover Beyoncé's "If I Was A Boy" in ironically out-of-tune Auto-Tune has a screw loose - while the other half has dude just going in. It never quite reaches the heights scaled by the opener (posted above) but it's nice to know some rappers are nice surprises these days - a cool example is on the chilled-out "Timeless".

Download Burn After Rolling from Wiz Khalifa's Myspace i.e. HERE.

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.

blackout!

I'm going to get to putting up Karriem Riggins' mix from last week's Benji B soon, people - I'm just very damn busy so not many posts recently. At least I'm still doing FLFD, people!

One of the things Riggins played on said mix was some unreleased Black Thought from Masterpiece Theatre - i.e. the unreleased solo album he did that got scrapped in favour of The Roots' Phrenology (if I remember correctly, I think "Rollin' With Heat" was originally supposed to be from that). I think the track's with Madlib? Anyway, I'll have it up soon. And here's a goodie that I forgot to post about last week:

Black Thought - The Professional

On other related Black Thought stuff, if you haven't yet seen that cipher with him, Eminem and Mos Def, stop being an idiot and click here already. And click on this old freestyle vid of Black and ?uestlove minus an afro. Weird.

"what the fuuuck just happened?"

Classic shit right here. Is that Lukas Haas? Sorry the quality isn't great.

Gilles Peterson's show this week revisits the N.E.R.D. x Spymob Maida Vale session from 2002 - remember when these guys seemed like the next, next until Pharrell fell into "twelve pages in women's American VOGUE"/La Vegas schintz mode and Chad went seemingly into hiding, producing intermittently for nameless RnB divas? And they have a sense of humour on this shit, too, Pharrell sings with a cold!

I've got an untitled jam that they played live around the time of the In Search Of... tour at home (I remember that, I travelled down to LDN with my dad to see them at the Brixton Academy - thanks Dad). I'll up that this weekend if I remember, it's a nice listen.

like a bulemic on a seesaw

Another late pass post - an amazingly atmospheric piece of user-created content for Nas' "Queens Get the Money". Remember The Nigger Tape and how good it was and then Untitled came out and it was real disappointing? This intro was a red herring. Insane track.

Oh, and I slept real long on Jay Electronica but paid for it by losing it when I heard "Exhibit C". INSANITY!!!

Jay Electronica - Exhibit C (Radio Rip)

smoooooth breasts

It's the weekend! Here, enjoy a goddamn classic.

This track still, still, still will kill.

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.]

"ya mother's dick"

This is guaranteed to (A) make your day better or (B) make your day grimier. There is always the possibility of (C) both at the same time.

Just-Ice rules. I wish I had his famous Gucci hat with his name on it.

"they're eating them! and I'm next!"

Somedays you just find a band that make you breathless and slightly slackjawed that you found them by pure luck! You're left just sounding like this kid after you hear one of their songs, especially the one below. If you weren't familiar with Kid, You'll Move Mountains before, well now I reaaaaaally hope you are.

Kid, You'll Move Mountains - Volts

*scurries off to their Myspace to immediately order the record, no joke*

"king of copenhagen"

I finished the entire Pusher trilogy in about a week, something I'm seriously stoked about. I rule. Let's run it down: the first one is good and the most unusual of the lot, the second feels like a retread more than anything despite a cracking first act, and the third is the nastiest and probably the best, Zlatko Buric walking high and mighty over everybody else in the film. For a trilogy of films made to stave off total bankruptcy, they are way way better than they have any right to be.

Each film starts with an iconic opening montage set to the trilogy's theme music like so, one of the few times that I've seen heavy rock actually used well in a film. (If you're not an American filmmaker, it's most likely you'll know how to do this - apart from Zach Clark, whose underrated comedy Modern Love Is Automatic has a spot-on soundtrack from Blasphemer).

But the music I'm going to let you check out is the creeeeeeeepy ending theme to Pusher 3: I'm the Angel of Death by Peter Schneidermann. And you can see the trailer for the trilogy HERE.

"i made you cool"

New MPHO track, courtesy of Popjustice, who attribute it to, er, whoever leaked it. It doesn't quite beat "Box N Locks", one of my favourite singles of this year, but it's still catchy stuff.

ooooooh yes!

It is uncomfortably hot in this computer suite (that, of course, may just be the cold talking) so I'm going to make this quick. New Between the Buried and Me songs, from the upcoming The Great Misdirect.


Between the Buried and Me - Mirrors (couldn't find an MP3, sorry dudes)

Between the Buried and Me - Obfuscation

Victory Records will be taking a break from sucking hard to release this Stateside on October 27th . Get stoked.

ps. fast forward to 6:30 in this video and if you're like me, you'll lose it.

bad house is satan's church

I found this while looking for soundclips of that moment in Antichrist - y'know, the "chaos reigns" bit, and I found this. Huh.

this is my only post of the week but...

HOLY SHIT HOW DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS?!

Shakira & Danzig - Hips Don't Lie

Flashing Lights + Flash Drives is back on Air3 very soon..

swoosh

Because I'm ridiculous and have my opinion formed fully by Nah Right [/sarcasm], I've been playing a lot of US hip-hop golden boy Drake recently. So Far Gone is my shit, I'm not going to lie, especially when it goes back and forth between the more laidback, almost drowsy material ("Houstlantavegas", "Sooner Than Later", "Successful") and the massive sounding summer smashes - namely "Best I Ever Had" with its video with, well, good looking women. (Really good looking women. True story.)

So my first reaction to the cover/reimagining of the song by Donna, Anna & Ruby was "EUGH THIS IS LIKE THE LIVE LOUNGE GODDAMMIT" before it started seeming pretty sweet, with those new lyrics and all that stuff. It sounds a bit like the song can end at any point and you'll continue singing along, which is both a testament to Drake's original and the cover version.

Donna, Anna & Ruby - Best I Ever Had

(via Cover Me)

And while we're on the topic of Drake, the made-to-be-massive posse cut "Forever" featuring Kanye West, Lil Wayne and Eminem leaked last week and Tom Breihan went in for Pitchfork. Ouch. Low reviews and general spreading of apathy aside, the song's allowed me to annoy my girlfriend with a brand new catchphrase: "I'm shuttin' shit down in the maaaaaaaalll". And for me, that's priceless.

Drake ft. Kanye West, Lil Wayne & Eminem - Forever

The FADER cover story that the photo above is taken from is worth reading if you hven't peeked yet. Click here.