Trump this Horror Show - New Release by Birds of Hell

Norwich-based Birds of Hell's lyrics are an expulsion of desperate anger, in a world where click-bait is juxtaposed with horror stories and 'stupid questions asked to the internet'.

"Played live, Let's Have The Windows Open digresses into semi-improvised lyrics and over the last few months Donald Trump has been the focus of these ad-libs."

Santiago Mostyn Directs Thurston Moore

"Don't let the dark get you lost.
Your freedom has come,
Fire and frost."

Directed by Santiago Mostyn, built on his own memories of first coming to San Francisco after growing up in Zimbabwe getting happily lost in the park with his mother...

Looping On....Mieux - Video for New Release 'Rush'

Ahead of their forthcoming album Are You Happy, ? - Mieux are happy looping away in this latest vid. The credits reveal a lot of it is the brainchild of one person. Props to him.  Of course the answer is that a lot of us aren't happy because we don't know how to make others happy, the first foundation stone of being happy at all.

So the next Q is: does making this album make Viennese band Mieux happy?  The answer lies in what effect is has on you.
Check out their older stuff. You may've heard Fishing before if you're an intelligent listener.

Formidable. Papoutai by Stromae.

One of our favourites tracks from this week's Free Lab Radio mix is a remix which features Belgian singer-songwriter Stromae. 
Papaoutai is a forceful track sung from the perspective of a child whose father was never home. The refrain "Ou ton Papa? Tell me where you father is?" is what people constantly asked the singer at school and as a child in Belgium, as Stromae's father died in the Rwandan Genocide where of course Belgium was the last colonial power.
We've found a translation of the lyrics below. "Everyone's knows how to make babies but they don't all know how to be fathers." The choreography is amazing, especially at 2' when the kid learns to adopt the dance and when the kids lead.

Although there are elements of Eurotrash in Stromae's musical production (well, Belgium), the minimalism and the elements of African influence, which are also echoed in the videos and costumes, more than make up for it. For elements of thism see his latest track Ta Fete (slang for 'your day') and for his satirical play on Belgian identity and attitude to sex, check out Moules Frites.

Are we sure he has a sense of hunour? Of course, look at his entrance to the NRJ Music Awards. His strongest work? Tous les mêmes without a doubt. It's moving into another realm of treatment of subject matter and drawing on traditions in music and performance that will eventually make his work classic. Oh yes, the English translation.

MIA Latest Video - 3d Gun Prints, Drones and 1984

World's Smallest Drone, So Far The Bugbot Nano

And the video was banned, MIA's label wouldn't upload it. But before we get too excited, MIA is just doing what she does best, hunting out what's cool and edgy in subcultures so that she can play off that. Parrots, neon, dogs, monkeys, MIA and the Party Squad make a tropical zoo out of estate life. The video  here - aside from the musical reference below; Shampoo Trouble - an Orwellian Dystopia in which we are monitored from the sky and online, and kids printing guns are either prepping for war or to burn out in schemes of their own doing.

 Much like the Shampoo rebels below thrown
out of the O Bar last century (the bar's still standing by the way) these kids are spirited, the best bit is the girls in burqas with the faces of other women printed on them, many of the kids are twins (a reference to the increased use of fertility drugs or cloning). What's weird is not the retro nature of the video, so many producers are into retro right now (check Casiokids) or the retro beat (TIME magazine mistakenly call it dubstep-inspired, but really it's a mash up of styles and works well that way) it's the way the kids behave, there are no adults present (aside from Mamma-MIA) plus the fact that she uses auto-tune and no one minds. These kids don't rate each other on their guns, the DIY guns look like toys, and they hang out in prison regulation sweatpants under the UFO-like drones. Nevermind that drones now can be as small as a bug.

"This sounds like science fiction, but to some it's not so far fetched..."
This isn't what we expected to hearing about MIA right now. For example, how's she managing that   $16.6 million lawsuit from the NFL for flipping the bird at the Superbowl?

About Time - Gary Newman Back in the Spotlight with Superb Retro Video

Logan Owlbeemoth's video for this song by Numan features effects by artist/musician Omebi Velouria. Superbly, this video comes with an explanation of how it was made, the nod to the Numan's roots in the analogue age: it was made with a Tachyons + video glitch synth effected live via a HI-8 camera and a CRT television "to create triply, blurry, VHS-style images of Gary Numan as he sings the song." No computer-based post-production was used at all. Fab!
Numan's recent-ish album - his 17th studio album -, Splinter (Songs From A Broken Mind) released worldwide in October 2013. It was his first album to reach UK Top 20, since the early 1980s. Numan announced that there will be a special one-off live show in London in his birthplace of Hammersmith, November 2014 at the Hammersmith Apollo. Where has been all this time? In USA with his family, he married a member of his fan club from Sidcup and they named their seocnd daughter Persia. Sounds right! If you're only a teenager now or not from UK you might not have heard of him, he was really just a shy kid with a lot of spots who became known for wearing a lot of white makeup (only administered to cover said spots apparently) and for the excellent song and what was to become his trademark almost robotic performance below - ARE FRIENDS ELECTRIC?

Casiokids Come Back

We like this too much. Possibly ten of the 40 thousand Youtube views might have been traces of us. OK maybe not, but the tight compression and the rhythm with it's mixed in African drums is just amazing. It's liberating too to have absolutely no idea what the lyrics mean, the light flow of the synths over the near-tribal drums narrates a story of its own unencumbered by "Yeah, yeah, yeah baby" or whatever it is in Norwegian. The video is typically narrative for the a-ha-endorsed Casiokids too; this is a contemporary kind of altar boy, in the super-chichi-retro temple of adoration of everything vintage. Liberated by electromagnetic TV voodoo the kid disco dances his way to the self-awareness that comes with adulthood. With nothing released since 2011 the band seemed to have underground but they were touring, appearing in pubs in the North of England and now back in Scandinavia. More recent work by the group is even more lo-fi casio, playfully delivered. What news? Watch this space!

#Grammys - Most Titanic 80s Synth Jam Ever on Video

Herbie Hancock - Yamaha KX1, Thomas Dolby & Stevie Wonder - Kurzweil 50, Howard Jones - Yamaha KX5.

After seeing some kind of Buffy musical, and the private parts of a 'lady' paraded on the awards this year, we're forced to think back to performances that have contributed to making music the innovative vehicle of expression of human excellence that it can be. Herbie Hancock, Thomas Dolby, Howard Jones and Stevie Wonder all show off together at the Grammy awards 1885, a moment that went down in history for the synthesizer. They play a kind of intense medley of all their own hits and jump from their own onto one another's keyboards (Wonder) atop a three-tiered riser, surrounded by at least fifteen keyboards. The collaboration was made possible with the posting of tapes between performers in preparation for the event.

Thanks to Rolling Stone Magazine for highlighting the event. A small dent in the mountain of hyper sexuality, clothes and exploitation that characterises music as 'entertainment' today.

The Music Video and Art

Labor45 - Electronic Toys

We're loving German experimental artists Labor45, who collaborate here with Spenza to create this u:ber video to Take Me To Your Leader. As nostalgically 80s and so German as it is, flashing influences of the visual aesthetic of Kraftwerk and sounding like something you couldn't quite put in a box. Following is their video and a little about them but first here are some thoughts their video has raised:

With new media art moving in a wider, yet more confluent direction and with viewing platforms diversifying all the time, the rise of MTV in the late 80s and capitalists like Lady Gaga who claim to create "art" in their music and videos has done little to influence the genre. Instead the area in which video art and the music video have blurred is one which was touched by enduring acts such as Kraftwerk and in the art world, and by the work of Nam June Paik of Fluxus in the art world who was part of a movement challenging conventions of art and music in public space. Didn't John Cage say that one way to write music was to study Duchamp? While the music video generally tends to allude to or add to the narrative, it can also transpose a music video from the realm of 'music' to 'art', and vice versa while contributing to a growing pool of work that celebrates and aesthetic driven by current trends in technology (going right back to Channel 4's The Chart Show, 1986 where videos were linked by their then state of the art computer graphics).

As the conventions of viewing video art change, moving out of the gallery online to anywhere one can fix a screen (recent 'public art' projects for London regeneration saw our own video streamed on loop in a run down estate in North London), the language of video art also changes. Yet is has never quite broken away from convention or explored the possible enough. Only new developments in technology and the occasionally brilliant directive (see Michel Gondry's video for Bjork's Declare Independence - which we post on here some years ago, who also plan to screen their new 40 minute 3D film in museums rather than any other kind of venue) push the medium of music video into the realm of art. Still, it is a blurred line that is as yet unexplored in any conclusive manner.

Labor45 are Barbara Herold, Katrin Petroschkat, both living in Munich . Their work is often about music, the reception and production of as well as where new date formats and digital advancements are heading:
"LABOR 45 is about artistic research on today's technical features and aims to find new possibilities for usage and expression from within the medium."

Spenza on the other hand are interested in sound, with limited but early work in visuals seemingly led by algorhythmic pulsing and basic visual programme coding, going back to 2010:
 

Dry Clean Only

Garrett Gibbons made a kid-friendly radio edit version of Thrift Shop. We like it for several reasons. 1) we can play it on radio 2) it proves the song doesn't need the extras. Regardless of which version the track and video merit a mention because while recycling stands on its own as a motive to thrift shop, to be able to create your own style is entirely a talent in itself. Anyone can buy a look, only a few can build it or create a new one. And at no other time (that we can think of) has a track been better placed as a pop-rap release, because the ones listening to this will fall into one of two camps. For too long now music's been out of the hands of the one camp, and in the ears of the other. The industry, despite the democratisation of mp3s and bedroom studios, is flooded with privileged kids whose parents have driven them, parking outside for auditions, shopping for their wardrobes... Not since the 80s has a music genre belonged to a class. Take it back!

‘Jammed’ the Story of a Bold, Heroic, Viewmaster Robot

A gorgeous lament to the demise of the audio cassette...

Everyone's Talking Laura Mvula...

...everyone's talking Green Gardens, Mvula's latest video.
If you love Tuneyards, you'll enjoy this. Mvula, from Birmingham (yes), has caught the ear of the public after a Brits’ Critic’s Choice nomination and has released this video ahead of her new album Sing to the Moon on which Green Gardens will feature, come March 4th on Sony's RCA Victor. Mvula is a graduate of the Birmingham Conservatoire with a degree in composition. There are distinctly unique points running through both her music and her videos, have a look.

Humane Animal Torture for "Natural Thing"

Genius, everyone loves watching this kind of video. But after the initial fun, what remains? The indelible truth that - put in a confined space with no details - all the animals chased the light in a uniformly concentrated manner. When the light goes out at the end, what does the behavioural pattern tell us?

Nobody Beats The Drum - Natural Thing from johan rijpma on Vimeo.

Grow Your Ears

LABoral art centre, Gijón, Spain present a visualisation in sound. Crunch, crunch, lush, lush.

Carmensita

Thank god. Here is Banhart and his girlfriend, Portman, prancing around in what I'd class as presently much-needed colourfulness.

When a Music Video Makes You Crack Up

Well the song is OK, but the sentiment, the style of the video and the fake cat paw are friggin' hilarious. Great direction by Saman Keshavarz, incidentally an Iranian. (This is really a coincidence I know I bang on about Iranian music a mazzzively disproportionate amount.) So when a music video was ever this funny, was there one? Let us know if you can think of one. Until then, this remains top funny music vid of all time.

For Today - 'I'm Gonna Throw Up!'

Something of the Noseybonk About This

From a very creepy kids programme:



To a very poppy track and as usual, engaging video from FF - remember Noseybonk?

Embody - the art of dance

SebastiAn's album Total features the brilliantly entitled single Embody for which this is the released video. The video is directed by Ed Banger artist extraordinaire So-Me who creates a fitting and slightly magical story out of the whole ambiance of the track.