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-- On September 7, Critical Mass will release a tribute album dedicated to space-rock greats Hawkwind. In Search of Hawkwind features tracks from fuzz-pedal abusers like Mudhoney, Bardo Pond, Acid Mothers Temple, Kinski, Moon Duo, and White Hills trying Hawkwind songs on for size.
-- Belgian disco duo Aeroplane will release their new album We Can't Fly September 27 on Wall of Sound in the UK. We awarded Best New Music distinctions to the title track; hear it at the Playlist.
-- Knit-hatted Brit balladeer Badly Drawn Boy is about to return with his first studio album in a few years. The End will give It's What I'm Thinking: Photographing Snowflakes, the first album in a planned trilogy, an American release on October 12. In the UK, it's out October 4 on One Last Fruit.
-- The Ooh LA L.A. festival brings a whole mess of French dance music to Los Angeles September 30 - October 2 and San Francisco October 3. Sebastien Tellier, Kavinsky, Turzi, Acid Washed, Gotan Project, and others will participate.
New Orleans-bred, New York-based cult rapper Curren$y makes supremely bleary rap music that sounds great when you're stoned, partly because you can always be pretty sure he was stoned when he made it; check the BNM'ed album Pilot Talk for evidence. Rising Mississippi MC/producer Big K.R.I.T. is a Southern rap traditionalist, and his tracks come with a full-bodied organic thump that captures some of that same haze. Smoke DZA made a mixtape with this cover. So it makes sense for all three of these rappers to link up for the aptly named Smoker's Club tour, which crosses North America next month.
MP3: Matthew Dear: "Slowdance (Bear in Heaven Remix)"
We like most everything about electro-pop guru Matthew Dear's sultry and mysterious new album, Black City. We've already given it Best New Music honors and put not one but two tracks in our Playlist section, and now we'd like to turn your attention to a remix of another highlight from the record, "Slowdance".
Art rockers Bear in Heaven add some fizzy funk to the gurgling original, and you can download the remix above and listen to Dear's version below:
In the new video for Röyksopp's percolating instrumental "The Drug", three girls in airbrushed t-shirts wander around a skull-strewn apocalyptic landscape. This, naturally, turns into a surreal, hallucinatory, narrative-free horror movie, complete with assault rifles, white wolves, and kids with horribly mutilated faces. Noel Paul and Stefan Moore direct, and their cinematography game is absolutely on point. Watch the video below or at Pitchfork.tv.
Front page photo by Kirstie Shanle; photo on this page by Mitch Manzella
If you missed Arcade Fire's triumphant August 5 webcast of their show at Madison Square Garden-- or just want to relive the experience all over again-- the whole thing is officially available on-demand for the next 24 hours. (Via Merge.) Watch the 94-minute broadcast directed by Terry Gilliam below or at YouTube:
Last month, Belle and Sebastian promised a series of unique videos in support of their upcoming album, Belle and Sebastian Write About Love, and the first one is now available. (Via Matablog.) It's a beautifully produced half-hour program featuring the band playing two new songs, "I Want The World to Stop" and "I Didn't See It Coming", along with a Q&A with fans, sly skits about the dire current state of music industry, and montages of fan pics. Watch it below or at Belle and Sebastian's site:
Photo by Akmal Naim
When Pavement take their 2010 reunion to "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon" on September 23, they'll be joined by a special guest guitarist-- you! Well, not all of you. But one of you. They're accepting submissions from guitarists to play with them on the after hours TV program, according to Matador. Click here for all the rules and regulations.
Pavement fared pretty well on our Top Tracks of the 1990s list, by the way.
"Helicopter", a slow and dreamy track from Deerhunter's forthcoming Halcyon Digest, now has a video. To watch it, head over to this site and click on the passage from band-beloved writer Dennis Cooper. The clip is five minutes of frontman Bradford Cox singing directly into the camera, in tight black-and-white close-up, while other stuff flashes onscreen in double-exposure. It's sort of an incredibly indie-fied take on Sinead O'Connor's "Nothing Compares 2 U" video, except no teardrop.
Halcyon Digest arrives September 28 from 4AD.
If anyone was going to invent a Theremin that you could control with your mind, it'd have to be someone from the Elephant 6 collective, right? According to a possibly-not-joking press release, Apples in Stereo frontman Robert Schneider has done just that. Scheider has invented a device he calls the Teletron, which allows the user to play an analog synth completely through brain activity.
That hand-drawn child-on-shoulders image above is the cover art for Animal Collective member Panda Bear's next single, "You Can Count on Me" b/w "Alsatian Darn". The two-song 7" drops October 19 via Domino; it's the second in a series of singles leading up to the eventual release of Tomboy, the anticipated follow-up to 2007's Person Pitch. It's limited to 500 copies Domino is offering it for pre-order now.
Panda Bear has a few tour dates lined up in the future too; you can check those out below. Take a listen to a standout from Panda's last single, "Slow Motion", over at the Playlist.
Photo by Chris D. Rasmussen
Vampire Weekend leader Ezra Koenig has weathered through his fair share of Paul Simon comparisons. Now, he's meeting them head on. According to sources familiar with the project, the singer recorded a cover of Simon's 1972 track "Papa Hobo" along with rock legend Van Dyke Parks, and Fruit Bats' Eric Johnson for the upcoming indie comedy Ceremony with Uma Thurman. The movie was directed by Max Winkler (aka Henry Winkler's son) and premieres at this month's Toronto International Film Festival. No word on an official release for the track just yet.
MP3: Blue Water White Death: "Song for the Greater Jihad"
Blue Water White Death is the new art-pop superduo comprised of Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart and Shearwater's Jonathan Meiburg. Their self-titled album is due October 12, via Graveface. And up above, you can download one of the tracks from the album, the evocatively titled "Song for the Greater Jihad". It's a florid acoustic track with exactly one burst of horrible noise in its six minutes.
Meanwhile, Xiu Xiu, Stewart's main gig, is touring the entire known universe this year, and they've just added even more dates. Click below for their touring schedule.
Photo by George Kalivas
Rising dream-pop band Twin Sister are set to embark on their most extensive tour to date in the coming months. Most of the gigs find them opening for the Morning Benders in North America, but they have a few European dates lined up for the end of November, too. Check out the full itinerary below:
Self-proclaimed "ethnic electronic band" Das Racist are also a good-humored hip-hop act from Brooklyn who have a playful, nostalgic, old-school-Nintendo-inspired new video out for their track "Who's That? Brooown!", which you can watch at Pitchfork.tv or below. If you remember Double Dragon or Rampage or Frogger, you need to see this. If you don't remember those games, get familiar! (You can actually play the game shown in the video here.)
"Who's That? Brooown!" is off of their recent Shut Up, Dude mixtape. And the guys already have a new tape due to hit the internet September 14 called Sit Down, Man. It features a guest verse from El-P and production from Diplo, Chairlift, Boi-1Da, Keepaway, and more-- the tracklist and an in-studio trailer are after the jump:
Artist: Squarepusher
Album: Shobaleader One: d'Demonstrator
Release Date: October 9
Label: Warp