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Last week, we fed you a handful of clutch remixes from the tropical-electro-madmen Lemonade, from blissed-out synth heavy shimmery aural massages, feigned electro zap wars, to dance-hall-friendly dub tropicalia.
This week, we packaged it all into one, sleek, "click da button" REMIX ALBUM DOWNLOAD. The overall effect is like a flood of endorphins has instantly hit your brain's somatosensory system and has made everything feel warmer and lighter, and smell kinda like coconuts (or if you are really lucky like that little kid David after the dentist).
Oh and for you Lemonade aficionados, the band has a live set this Sunday, Feb 15th, at Santo's Partyhouse in NYC, along with a DJ set by Holy Ghost! (DFA), courtesy of Justine D. and the slick mag Dossier Journal. (Email RSVP: RSVP@dossierjournal.com.)
Sounds Like: Ghosts On Tape, Stay High, Roche, Lazer Sword, Soft Thing
Lemonade_- Remixtape (FULL ALBUM DOWNLOAD)
Lemonade - Real Slime (Stay High Remix)
Lemonade - Unreal (Roche Remix)
Lemonade - Sunchips (Bookworms Remix)
Lemonade - Blissout (Shades Remix)
Lemonade - Big Weekend (Delorean Remix)
Lemonade - Real Slime (Lazer Sword)
Lemonade - Blissout (Soft Thing Remix)
Lemonade - Real Slime (Mashepest Remix)
Lemonade - Sunchips (Ghosts On Tape Remix)
Lemonade - Real Slime (C.L.A.W.S Remix)
Lemonade - Big Weekend (Yao Remix)
Lemonade - Sunchips
Lemonade - Blissout
Lemonade's RCRD LBL Page
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Here's a new flood of Lemonade remixes to get you through to Friday. If you are running low on energy, I'd recommend to download Brooklyn NY-based Stay High's krunked-up dub remix of "Real Slime before your boss notices. Meanwhile Roche deposits waves of acid-friendly psychedelic sounds - the type that you'd listen to while walking through a desert oasis without clothes in search for a higher power. Then Bookworms carves a more dance hall-friendly "ghettotech' beat and Shades closes out the package with scintillating, atmospheric twirls and shudders in their rendition "Blissout." It's a tropicalia electro lovefest.
Sounds Like: Heaps Decent, Happy Mondays, CAN, Alex Pasternak
Lemonade - Real Slime (Stay High Remix)
Lemonade - Unreal (Roche Remix)
Lemonade - Sunchips (Bookworms Remix)
Lemonade - Blissout (Shades Remix)
Previously:
Lemonade - Big Weekend (Delorean Remix)
Lemonade - Real Slime (Lazer Sword)
Lemonade - Blissout (Soft Thing Remix)
Lemonade - Real Slime (Mashepest Remix)
Lemonade - Sunchips (Ghosts On Tape Remix)
Lemonade - Real Slime (C.L.A.W.S Remix)
Lemonade - Big Weekend (Yao Remix)
Lemonade - Sunchips
Lemonade - Blissout
Lemonade's RCRD LBL Page
There are many musical riches to be had once you get past Boozoo Bajou's silly psychedelic name. For their third album, Grains, the German duo expanded their dubby, down-tempo sonic palette to include strains of folk/indie rock and British songstress Rumer on vocals. The breezy finger-picked melodies and hand drumming on "Same Sun" evoke notes of tropicalia as Rumer's strong satin pipes beckon for listeners to "rely on me." Tontelas push the Caribbean vibe to Jamaican ends, replete with throbbing bass and huge swathes of reverb. But it's "Messengers" that brings the house down with Cat Power-ed swoon of melancholic arrangements.
Sounds like: Cat Power, Os Mutantes
Boozoo Bajou - Same Sun
Boozoo Bajou - Same Sun (Tontelas Roots Version)
Boozoo Bajou - Messengers
Boozoo Bajou on the web
Boozoo Bajou on RCRD LBL
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It's amazing to hear what Rafael Cohen, the man behind Las Palabras, can create with nothing more than a guitar, a woodblock and a set of lips. This exclusive new track fades in to the sound of a one-sided musical conversation, with call-and-response vocals, staccato exhalations, and even some tasteful whistling. Download for the skittering melodies and cascading guitar patterns, but be sure to stick around through the credits. If "La Primera Vez" was the soundtrack to a short film, "Salmos" is a field recording of the wrap party.
Sounds Like: Caetano Veloso, El Guincho
Exclusive Download: Las Palabras - Salmos
Previously:
Download: Las Palabras - La Primera Vez
Las Palabras' RCRD LBL Page
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When I tagged along to see Rafael from El Guapo/Supersystem's solo project Las Palabras a few months ago, I was expecting something along the lines of his previous bands' output on Dischord and Touch & Go. Instead I found him with an acoustic guitar (and a toy guitar he got when he was five) singing beautifully in Spanish about car rides, relationships and life in general. I've been after him ever since to a) record an album, and b) give me a song to post here. I'm keeping my fingers crossed about the album, but the wait is over for the first single: "La Primera Vez," freshly mixed by the man himself. Download and listen as the guitar, organ and percussion chase each other in circles right up to the near-psychedelic climax, where the layered vocals drift off into space. Every time I hear it I'm scoring the next Almodóvar film in my head.
Sounds Like : Caetano Veloso, El Guincho
Download: Las Palabras - La Primera Vez
Las Palabras' RCRD LBL page
Check out this brand new jam from San Francisco-based Alex Pasternak via our friends at Turntable Lab, from Alex’s new release on the Bersa Discos label. “Pajaritón” takes elements of electro, favela funk and cumbia rock to create a tropical, eternal sunshine feel. It’s pretty amazing, and given Alex’s other projects (he’s the drummer in the experimental psych band Lemonade), it’s a great achievement in a long line of awesome music.
Sounds like: The Avalanches, Bonde do Role, Esau Mwamwaya
Download: Alex Pasternak - Pajaritón
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Eyes up, bleak beak. Here’s relief from the dread of deep-winter, a rope dangled down the pit.
Download: El Guincho – ‘Fata Morgana’
There may’ve been a few seconds doubt, but there’s not much at all, really, to be sticking ‘round for. Wait impatient ‘til they’re out of sight and break the evening news curfew; gripping the lax vine and taking leave of the damp, dark cave that’s England’s winter while Huw Edwards relates knife crime, his burring through static somewhere in the background.
Up and out, onto the roof, and there’s all the usual light and dark there, as well as the warming roar of a distant carnival.
“I just wanted Alegranza to be a space age-exotica kind of record. Like Martin Denny, Esquivel, Attilo Mineo, Arthur Lyman, Jimmie Haskell and all that. The kind of record you play and it makes you feel like travelling to all these places but never stopping at one and then finding an empty space in the middle for you to get into it.”
El Guincho is Canary Islander Pablo Díaz-Reixa, and his ‘Fata Morgana’ adequately occupies that empty, rarely-tapped upon space in your imagination, lulling you into a gentle doze of dazzled pans and vocal/mellotron samples from the days when even fatty Presley's tropical paradise couldn’t break the monochrome of TV.
“All the joy of young people in love,” proclaims some old card, arms open, before the song remembers what it was laying awake all night waiting for and leaps to it, chiming in with steel drums so brilliant they must be pure, space-age silver, an hymnal so unreal it must be exotica and an enthusiasm that makes you feel ashamed for spending your nights locked in the house, thoughtless in front of televised karaoke contests, lest the world should end somewhere in the middle of Rod Stewart; act III.
Alegranza can and shall be bought in its entirety from here.
Eyes out, stretching far across to the other side of the Atlantic like that tidal wave that’s gonna wipe out America’s East Coast pretty soon, to the fertile concrete growing Brooklyn’s avant-garde.
“My Girlfriend and I have been really into High Places since last summer,” continues Pablo. “They’re one of my present favourite bands for sure… what? I think there is maybe some similar approach in a way, yeah. Like working with major scales, giving that sensation of light. More light and less drama.”
There’s even less drama with High Places, their take on tropicalia more distant than el Guincho’s and slightly washed out, holidaying half-memories at the back of Brooklyn minds.
Download: High Places – ‘New Grace’
Nevertheless, Mary Pearson and Robert Barber should be commended on bringing palm trees to shade a ”New York [that]’s an expensive town with a lot going on.
“It's a hustle for almost anyone," continues Mary. "You can't really afford to sit around in this city. Plus, you know so many amazing things are being made all around you. I think that artistic impulse overshadows the grit and the noise. Or maybe it just sweetens it or something.”
Their noise is certainly a sweet one, gleefully realising it shares interests with el Guincho in “just trying to spread good feelings no matter which method you choose to express it.”
On ‘New Grace’, a track previously donated to a compilation for an Australian animal shelter (click), High Places choose to express it in a cheeky, slack-shouldered desert island-step playfight between insolent drum thuds and those ubiquitous steel pans.
“We do love the beach.” Yeah? Flick the lights out.
MURDER IN THE DARK!
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Invisible Conga People are the latest to be lined-up for a release through the flawless Italians Do It Better record-house, following, head-down, in the sequin-surrendering footsteps of Glass Candy and Chromatics before getting lost down a side-alley, the wrong turn leading, unalterably, to creepy ends.
And then there’s a man, speaking Turkish.
“We have a cheap MIDI-synced light setup of three clip-on light bulbs that we've programmed to pulse in time to our beats,” says Justin Simon. “Every time we play a show we ask the club to turn out all the lights so that the only light remaining is coming from us, but so far every place has refused.”
“I definitely feel like our music makes more sense in a dark room that pulses with a low light.”
Listen for immediate understanding.
Elsewhere, there have been changes in the ranks of Ecstatic Sunshine. The duo have become a trio, following the departure of guitarist Dustin Wong and the arrival of Kieran Gillen and David Zimmerman on electronics/percussion and electronics respectively.
Guitarists dropped to one, electronists tripled; you can probably see where the band see themselves in the future.
“I definitely have a feeling the guitar aspect is going to be rare in the new line-up,” says Justin the departed. “Definitely more in the positive drone electronic based direction. I'm curious what they are going to come up with.”
A new EP, entitled WAY, will be issued through Cardboard Records in April. You can be overwhelmed by a track from that at Ecstatic Sunshine’s MySpace page, here.
‘Til next week, then, when the Ivy Wire bothers gleaming again…
- Kev Kharas
[N.B. Oh, I forgot to mention an interesting tidbit of trivia linking your choice of bands. I (Rob) used to be in a band called Sachromanic Targets with half of (Eric) Invisible Conga People. And High Places' second NY show was ICP's first.
Thanks!
-Rob, High Places]
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