My first encounter with lis­ten­ing to Mary Anne Hobbs was in 2000 when she had James Lavelle (of Mo’Wax and Unkle) and Pablo (of Psy­cho­nauts) on the show to mix it up. Specif­i­cally I had read that they had played an acetate of the then-unheard “Giv­ing Up The Ghost” track that DJ Shadow had made for Michael Mann’s The Insider. Never used, it even­tu­ally appeared on the follow-up to Endtro­duc­ing, The Pri­vate Press. This was the time of post–Endtro­duc­ing Shadow obses­sion for me and many oth­ers. How was I to hear this slice of new music? (more…)

Long time read­ers of this blog will know that I’ve been a fan of the var­i­ous doings of The Glitch Mob for awhile now. From first stum­bling upon Ooah’s mixes to mixes and albums by edIT, they’ve been on my watch list for awhile. A full-length album for them seemed to be rumored years ago but it wasn’t until recently that they solid­i­fied The Glitch Mob has a per­form­ing and record­ing force to be reck­oned with. How­ever, as a group known pri­mar­ily for doing crazy “glitch remixes” of pop­u­lar songs, how were they going to trans­late this into an orig­i­nal album? The answer was to go back to basics and method­i­cally com­pose and per­form music as a band. (more…)

Saw this linked on Mar­tin Clark’s twit­ter a cou­ple days ago, grabbed it, for­got I grabbed, heard a track on Mary Anne Hobbs from last night, went crazy. Really style LA Beat style stuff. Fans of Shlohmo, Teebs, Baths, Fly­ing Lotus, etc. should be all over this! No earthly idea who Dun­ian is but well worth the down­load. 4 tracks of pure head nod­ding lush shoegaz­ery beats.

Down­load DUNIAN — Free EP (ZIP)

PS. Shlohmo’s Camp­ing EP is insanely good. If you like the above down­load, you should really buy Camp­ing.

I just hap­pened to see the cover of hotly-tipped pro­ducer Baths’ new album for Anti­con Cerulean, and was struck by a clear trend to this year’s elec­tronic music cover design. Is the inspi­ra­tion for this rush of omi­nous sphere cov­ers related to the the futur­is­tic sound­ing year and it’s tit­u­lar movie 2010 — The Year We Make Con­tact (posters for the movie fea­ture plan­ets promi­nently as well). Or is the sin­gu­lar­ity approach­ing fill­ing every­one with the hope that Bar­be­lith is finally com­ing to push us into the super­con­text? Yeah. Any­way, check out this brief col­lec­tion of glo­ri­ous sphere cov­ers: (more…)