Altair Nouveau

Altair Nouveau is among the spaciest of DFA's recent signings, a producer clearly as in love with the soundtracks of John Carpenter as he is with Italo covers of classic rock tunes. Italo is key here, I think, because the music of Nouveau, AKA Brandon Mitchell, doesn't seem to be attuned to dance floors necessarily. (Although they are certainly danceable.) Instead, these are discrete songs with beginnings, middles and ends. (http://www.residentadvisor.net)

Cosmos
Dark Energy

The Isolation

Swedish band The Isolation sounds a bit like Ride, My Bloody Valentine and early BRMC and makes dreamlike melodies that has potential to both make you dance and singalong to. Great stuff!

Dancing Away
Cyclone

Pluramon

Pluramon is a project of Cologne artist Marcus Schmickler. Producing for over 8 years, Schmickler explores sound and sound-production environments. Devoting his projects to working with the connotation of existing genres and unwrapping them to bare essentials, the Pluramon project was specifically intentioned to be a non-conceptual creative output.

Drowning in You
The Monstrous Surplus

Delay Trees

With a mellow performance, one might fear that the music from Finland based Delay Trees becomes boring and unexciting. But on the contrary, these songs are well constructed and very easily one gets involved with the music. The instrumentation, the lyrics and even the artwork seem to be part of a greater theme, even part of an old film as the melodies evoke so many different scenes. Indeed, it is very cinematic music that slowly builds up to a dramatic moment, with constant references to movement, time and sequence. (http://www.glue.fi)

Desert Island Song
Resurrection Of Sonic Blue

The Vandelles

The Vandelles take us on a fuzzy, feedback-fueled trip down memory lane with their ghostly vocals and itchy riffs. A sound reminiscent of the epic early 90's alternative rock scene with a earnest hint of John Doe from X, and a dash of old, noisy Sonic Youth - The Vandelles create a unique and nostalgically fresh sound that plucks at our music-lovin' heartstrings in more ways than one. (L'etoile Magazine)

Chain Walking
Blue LA Strip

It Hugs Back

Matthew, Paul, Dimitri & Jack began making thier soft-centered dream pop back in early 2006. Switching between joyous pop-punk delight and delicate melancholia in a heartbeat, It Hugs Back melt layers of fuzzy vocals and guitars into their reassuring blend of endearing shoegaze and heart-on-sleeves vulnerability.

Back Down
Rehearsal

The Strange Boys

The Strange Boys began as a duo (Hammer and the younger Sambol) in 2003. The other two joined in 2005 and the band has been on tour non-stop ever since. Since 2003 the Boys have recorded a wealth of material which was passed around at shows and to friends, but never officially released. In 2007, Dusty Medical Records put out the Nothing EP, and in 2008, In The Red released the ìWoe Is You and Meî single. Now, finally, the band's proper debut album is seeing the light of day. It's easy to imagine The Strange Boys' And Girls Club, a sixteen-track beast, blasting out of any stereo system between The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators and Wire's Pink Flag.

Heard You Wanna Beat Me Up
A Man You've Never Known

Burning Hearts

Burning Hearts is the new project from Finnish musicians Jessika Rapo from Le Futur Pompiste and Henry Ojala of Cats on Fire. Full of subtle detail and a uniformly warm sound, this is a dream of idealized pop: beautifully understated vocals, melodies as reassuring as a lover's embrace, and a tone of intimacy that could only come from collaboration that is fully simpatico.

I Lost My Colour Vision
We Walked Among the Trees

Screen Vinyl Image

"Following a handful of individual self-produced CDs, here's the debut of the long player by Screen Vinyl Image, a duo in Washington DC that's "Interceptors" is steeped in two of the trends that characterize most of the modern indie scene. On the one hand, the increasingly inflated rediscovery of synthetic 80's years, the other a taste for bold and creative sound contamination.

A particularly gloomy and paranoid theme seems to characterize the writing of the band, which escapes the risk of falling into the trite and glossy manner of vintage sounds. The sound gives it a healthy disk halo of dirt and disorder, while the band stands out in creating a sound both unbridled and voracious that cannibalize Moroder and M83, Curve, the Sisters Of Mercy, the first school of EBM, and anything yet."

Cathode Ray
Roaming Spirit Freedom

2008...

1. Women - Black Rice
2. M83 - Kim & Jessie
3. Parker Lewis - Cezanne
4. CatPeople - All These Tears
5. Noah and the Whale - Give A Little Love
6. Crystal Castles - Knights
7. Black Mountain - Angels
8. Chicken El Diablo - Juggernaut Jugend
9. The Morning Benders - Waiting for a War
10. Spectrum - The lonesome death of johnny ace

CatPeople

CatPeople work vocal melodies like nobody else in Spain.
Their music navegates the turbulent waters of post-punk, where
the crude energy and aggressiveness of punk unite with the poetic
sensibility of new waveâ€--s darker ambience, creating soundscapes
of extreme beauty.

CatPeople - All These Tears

Benoit Pioulard

Thomas Meluch (born August 4, 1984) is an American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, writer, and photographer, best known by his pseudonym Benoît Pioulard. Meluch began documenting field recordings and his own lo-fi compositions on dictaphones, discarded stereos and four-track machines in the mid 1990s, later focusing on highly limited CD-R and cassette releases of his experimental, folk-influenced songs for friends and family.

Together & Down
Alan & Dawn

Suicide

Suicide is an American rock music group intermittently active since 1971 and composed of Alan Vega (vocals) and Martin Rev (synthesizers and drum machines). Much like Silver Apples, they are an early synthesizer/vocal musical duo.

Never widely popular amongst the general public, Suicide were nonetheless influential: critic Wilson Neate writes that Suicide "would prove as influential as The Clash. Listening to their self-titled 1977 debut from the vantage point of late 2002, it's all so obvious: the synthpop, techno, and industrial dance sounds of the '80s and '90s, and now the new New Wave of electroclash, all gesture back to that foundational album.

Ghost Rider
Dream Baby Dream

Noah and The Whale

Noah and the Whale are a folk rock band from Twickenham, London, England formed in 2006. The band consists of Charlie Fink (vocals, guitar), Doug Fink (drums), Tom Hobden (fiddle), and Matt Urby (bass), and after a handful of singles, have released their first album, Peaceful The World Lays Me Down in August 2008. Laura Marling and Emmy The Great were members of the band before going solo, although they both continue to perform with the band occasionally with Marling recently splitting her time between her solo work and Noah and the Whale. They have been compared to The Magic Numbers, The Little Ones, The Postal Service, and Belle & Sebastian, and the band cite both punk rock and folk as influences.

Shape Of My Heart
Give A Little Love

Wire

Inspired by the burgeoning U.K. punk scene, Wire are often cited as one of the more important rock groups of the 1970s and 1980s. Critic Stewart Mason writes, "Over their brilliant first three albums, Wire expanded the sonic boundaries of not just punk, but rock music in general."

Wire are arguably a definitive art punk or post-punk ensemble, mostly due to their richly detailed and atmospheric sound, often obscure lyrical themes and, to a lesser extent, their Situationist political stance. The group exhibited a steady development from an early raucous style (1977's Pink Flag) to a more complex, structured sound involving increased use of guitar effects and synthesizers (1978's Chairs Missing and 1979's 154).

The band gained a reputation for experimenting with song arrangements throughout their career. Following their reformation in 1986, The Ex-Lion Tamers (a Wire cover band, named after a song title from Pink Flag) were their opening act. The cover band played Wire's older material, while Wire themselves played only new material on that tour.

Reuters
The 15th
I Am The Fly

Blood on the Wall

Blood on the Wall is a lo-fi, Brooklyn-based indie rock band, influenced by bands like The Jesus and Mary Chain, Pavement, Pixies, and Sonic Youth. Initially slow moving, the band at first existed as a place for the three of them to get together and play music. In 2000, they played a total of just three shows. By 2001, they decided they should record their songs just to have them on tape. They spent one night in the Hall of Fame practice space on Orchard Street in Manhattan recording on an eight-track that only had five channels operating with Nicolas Vernhes (who has produced David Grubbs, Silver Jews, Animal Collective, Black Dice, and The Fiery Furnaces) and Dan Brown. Two songs came to the surface and were self-released as a 7” on the Big Deal / Rejoice label.

Stoner Jam
Keep Your Eyes

Black Mountain

Vancouver quintet Black Mountain, a band of psychedelic hard rockers who have already garnered buzz on the strength of their 2005 eponymous debut. They sound like a high-voltage mix of Black Sabbath riffs, Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett-era psychedelic sensiblity and the Flaming Lips' eccentricity. On their sophomore album In the Future, the band embraces their lava lamp-worshipping side, balancing stoner-rock opuses with ambient harmonies.

Stormy High
Angels

The Morning Benders

Do you think the Shins' latest effort was too depressing? Do you wish Dr. Dog albums arrived with a glossier production? Never fear! There's hope, and it comes in the form of Berkeley, CA's the Morning Benders.

Waiting For A War
Damnit Anna
Crying (roy orbison cover)

Crystal Castles

Crystal Castles is a Toronto-based band, consisting of multi-instrumentalist Ethan Kath (of Jakarta and formerly Kill Cheerleader) and vocalist Alice Glass (of Fetus Fatale). Crystal Castles' music is easily recognized by their heavy use of samples and distorted female vocals. Crystal Castles claims to use a modified keyboard that uses an Atari 5200 sound chip as an oscillator. Their musical style has been described as having "ferocious, asphyxiating sheets of warped two-dimensional Gameboy glitches and bruising drum bombast pierce skull with sheer shrill force, burrowing deep into the brain like a fever".Indie music review website, Pitchfork, gave a positive review of Crystal Castles' remix of "Leni" by GoodBooks, and described the style as "pitch-shifted vocal snippets that ricochet like pinballs around Crystal Castles' patented 8-bit synths".

Knights
Magic Spells

The Black Lips

The Black Lips are what you could call true visionaries of a skeptical age. Even from their very first 7" EP, you could tell they were doing their own thing on their own terms, and of course it didn't sit well, even with the dawning of the 21st century and all it promised. Wildly cross-eyed broken stars destined to waver in their importance in the cosmos, they know no boundaries and they take no pretense.

O Katrina!
Veni Vidi Vici

El Perro Del Mar live at White Session at France Inter FM

Dog
Party
Coming Down The Hill

Parker Lewis

Parker Lewis is a swedish singer/songwriter that makes really good lo-fi pop tunes, the song "shelly" is the standout track.

Shelly
Dirty Dancing

Björn Olsson

As founding member of retro-psych hipsters Soundtrack Of Our Lives, and prior to that Swedish legendaries Union Carbide Productyions, Björn Olsson has established a cozy little niche for himself in the Swede rock world. Yet, after Soundtrack’s excellent 1997 full-length Welcome to the Infant Freebase, Olsson split from the touring faction of the band, deciding instead to focus on solo material.

Tjörn
Smögen
Juli

Alan Hawkshaw

Alan Hawkshaw is a composer and performer, particularly of themes for movies and television programmes.
In the 1960s, he was a member of rock and roll group Emile Ford and the Checkmates. He also formed the Mohawks band and Rumplestiltskin with some session musicians.

The Mohawks were a band formed from session musicians and fronted by the undisputed king of Library music composers, Alan Hawkshaw. Possibly The Mohawks were never actually a 'touring' band, but rather it was just a clever idea of some guy at KPM music in the 60's who decided to release an LP of incredibly groovy and funky library music tracks and package it under the name "The Champ".

Rocky Moutain Runabout
Beat Me Till I'm Blue
Tap Footer

1999

1999 was started by Johan Hinders, Kitte and Palle in 2003 after the split of the legendery Audionom. They found guitarist Jonas Bergman drinking peoples-beer outside their rehersal space and also brought in Audionom's old projectionist Martin Malm to make visuals/films for the stage. Palle who played drums quit so they called Jonas old film collaborator friend Askar to program drums. Kitte quit to focus on his other band Strip Muisc and instead Joel from the queer Oi! punk band Pharmacy started playing bass.

Beauty Is The Winner
Butterflies
Nekropolis

Blancmange

Taking their name from a type of cooked pudding, the electronic duo Blancmange interlaced the arty, exotic dance rhythms of Talking Heads with the quirky melodrama of early-'80s British synth pop.

Waves
Sad Day

The Plan

The Plan is the brainchild of Swedish singer Theodor Jensen, otherwise known to Swedish pop audiences as the guitarist of cult band Broder Daniel. To date they have released three albums to moderate success in their native Sweden.

Embrace Me Beauty
Young & Armed

Bright Eyes

Bright Eyes is the musical vehicle of Conor Oberst, a young singer/songwriter from Nebraska who first attracted the attention of the indie music world in 1994 -- when he was just 14 years old -- as the singer and guitarist for Commander Venus.

First Day of My Life
No Lies Just Love

La Düsseldorf

La Düsseldorf was a German band, consisting of onetime Kraftwerk drummer and Neu! multi-instrumentalist Klaus Dinger and occasional Neu! collaborators Thomas Dinger and Hans Lampe. La Düsseldorf was formed after Neu! disbanded following the release of their Neu! '75 record. They released a string of successful albums (with sales totaling over a million) during the late '70s and early '80s and were considered highly influential by the likes of Brian Eno and David Bowie, with Bowie going so far as calling La Düsseldorf "the soundtrack of the eighties".

Time

Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth is the avatar of noisy, underground guitar rock. After making the transition from uncompromising avant-rockers in the early '80s to indie guitar-pop trailblazers by decade's end, the group became the alternative-music world's brightest beacon.

Sunday
Androgynous Mind
Bull In The Heather
Superstar

Yeah Yeah Noh

Yeah Yeah Noh were a post-punk group formed in Leicester, England in 1984. They released two albums and five singles while still together, and have had two compilation albums issued since they split in 1986.

The Superimposed Man
Temple Of Convenience
Prick Up Your Ears

Stereolab

Stereolab are an alternative music band formed in 1990 in London, England. Stereolab's music combines a droning rock sound with lounge instrumentals, and overlays it with singsong female vocals and pop melodies. Their records are heavily influenced by the motorik technique of 1970s krautrock groups such as Neu! and Faust. Tim Gane has supported the comparison: "Neu! did minimalism and drones, but in a very pop way.

Lo Boob Oscillator
French Disko
Superstar

M83

M83 is an electronic music group consisting of Anthony Gonzalez (and formerly Nicolas Fromageau), and was formed in Antibes, France in 2001. The musical style owes something to the shoegazing genre in its extensive use of reverb effects and lyrics spoken softly over loud instrumentals, though M83's songs employ considerably less guitar than most shoegazing bands such as My Bloody Valentine.

Kim & Jessie

Bye Bye Bicycle

Bye bye bicycle is, soul-beat gimmicks were hooked on top P!O!P! product, which simply reinforced their danceable version contained a insanely sparkling vocal with untempered emotion, guitar riffs twisted into blink of virtuosity.

Westside
Footsteps

Mixtapes & Cellmates

Mixtapes and Cellmates make stunning pop with guitardriven soundscapes. Electronic sounds and shoegaze guitarwalls meet and create something that actually feels real.

Distance, blinding lights
C: you D: The road home

Simian Mobile Disco

Simian Mobile Disco is James and Jas, a pair of electro-rock true believers who broke off from the body of indie band Simian back in 2003.

Sleep Deprivation
Clock

Happiness

Happiness is a new band from stockholm that you should keep your eyes on, this is really good stuff.

The CIA
Look at that rabbit go!

Japancakes

Japancakes formed in Athens, Georgia in 1996, and since then have garnered national and international attention for their unique and woozy brand of spaced-out instrumental music. The band has never been one to shy away from plumbing the depths nor scaling the upper ethers of melody and beauty. The creation of their singular soundscapes encompasses widely varied approaches: whether they employ a singing-sword pedal steel, a throaty cello, a sparkling wash of precision-aligned synthesizers, or even a well and wisely-placed moment of silence.

Only Shallow
Loomer

Dope Aviators

Initially intened as a studio project, Dope Aviators started in 2004 in Prague where Kasko and Sandozz teamed up againg after several years of silence /previous work included High Tatra acts El Woody Hoo and Cascoforum Rev./ The idea of a band begun after they found out that omnipresent mate Em is a fabulous singer with sensitive taste for a good tune.

UFO As A Gift
How Is This Sound

Roky Erickson

Roky Erickson is an American singer, songwriter, harmonica player and guitarist from Texas. He was a founding member of the 13th Floor Elevators and pioneer of the psychedelic rock genre.

Erickson is one of rock and roll's most famous cult figures, Unfortunately, Roky's struggles with drug abuse and mental illness took a serious toll. His 1969 arrest in Texas for possession of a single marijuana cigarette led to his being committed for three years to Rusk State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where he was reportedly subjected to Thorazine, electroshock therapy, and other experimental treatments. Most agree he was never the same after his release. Roky has had prolific periods of creativity in the intervening years, but unscrupulous managers and record label executives often took advantage of his condition, leaving Roky to live in poverty while others profit from his music.

I Have Always Been Here Before
It's A Cold Night For Alligators
Night Of The Vampire