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• Fragment: Mikkel Metal

  January 24th 12, 7:17

  Here’s the latest interview in the Fragment series. We chatted to electronic deity, Mikkel Metal, About his latest releases and his relationship with contemporary music technology. Enjoy.

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• AIAIAI @ The NAMM Show

  January 20th 12, 10:16

  If you’re at NAMM tonight, you should most definitely come by for this party that we’re co-hosting with our buds from Teenage Engineering and Stüssy. The Teenage boys will be showing their latest innovations and we’re unveiling the TMA-1 Studio.

  Click here for more info!

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• Capital – Our New Headphones for Urbanites

  January 6th 12, 11:02

  

  it took a little while, but after a good deal of preparation, deliberation and strategizing, we’re finally ready to lift the curtain on our brand new headphones! If you live in the city and like music on the move, please allow us to introduce you to your new best friend: his name is Capital, he’s a flexible yet rugged sort of character – and he comes in striking, new colours

  Check out Capital here

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• Merry Xmas from AIAIAI

  December 23rd 11, 8:26

  young man Andy, master of all things video, Skyrim and Skrillex has made this lovely little Christmas greeting. A wonderful piece of seasonal art house. Happy holidays from all of AIAIAI!

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• Working Late at AIAIAI HQ

  November 22nd 11, 13:41

  It get’s pretty scary at our office late at night…

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• Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany Documentary

  April 29th 11, 7:49

  Hello there, happy Friday, etc! If you’re faced with an eventless weekend and have no idea what to do with all that free time, you should be able to spare an hour or so for this opaque gem of a music documentary.  Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany is a BBC Four production and, more importantly, an in-depth look into how epic bands like Can, Kraftwerk, Faust, and Neu! came into existence. It has it all, basically: there’s Holger Czukay explaining how David Niven who, after witnessing one of Can’s live shows and being asked what he thought about the music, had said: ‘Oh, I thought it was great! But I didn’t know it was music…’; you have the charming acid heads from Faust who reluctantly reveal that one of the reasons behind their fall-out with Virgin Records was that Richard Branson’s English mint chicken grossed them out. And then there’s Iggy Pop declaring his love for Neu! while wearing a tiny vest that occasionally reveals the perpetually shirtless, punk rock giant’s ageing nipples. No stone is left unturned.

  If you’re a nerd (you’ve probably already seen this and there’s really no no need to bring this up – but anyways) there are great, long sequences where the old masters twiddle the knobs on oscillators and talk affectionately about their analogue gear.  Needless to say, the soundtrack is no less than badass, which is why I guess I should stop writing now, so you can go ahead and watch the damn thing. Have a good one.

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• AIAIAI & Libertine Libertine: Pantherman USB Key

  March 18th 11, 6:56

  

  Like neat-looking, 2GB capacity USBs? Down with the subtle stylings of up-and-coming fashion brand Libertine Libertine? Dig spooked, trip-hop-y, Boards of Canada-esque beats? We were sort of hoping that your answers to these questions would be a resounding ‘YES!’, and if that’s the case we have a real treat in store for you. You see, we’ve collaborated with the lovely peeps at Libertine Libertine and the outcome is this wooden USB, which not only looks pretty neat but also contains the new debut album of Pantherman (AKA Bjarke Niemann, the frontman of Danish electro-rockers Spleen United) that really is a bit special. The album ‘Ghosts + Colour TV’ contains groovily named tracks like ‘LSD-KID&&&666’ and ‘The Church of MJ Fox’ and the whole album chugs along at a pleasantly eerie, sufficiently trippy hip hop pace that’ll make you dream hazy dreams of electric sheep and nostalgic for lo-tech times that never were.

  Bjarke is playing his first gig as Pantherman in Hamburg on Friday, which in all likelihood won’t be his last. Go get the new AIAIAI & Libertine Libertine USB key and see what all the fuss is about!

  www.aiaiai.dk

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• Kenton Slash Demon

  March 15th 11, 9:16

  

  Say hello to Kenton Slash Demon, two ridiculously talented, handsome Danish devils with an unwavering knack for creating deliciously dense, thoroughly inventive and straight-up banging house music. Working within a genre that’s been known to throw up its fair share of uninspired regurgitation, the Copenhagen-based duo steer well clear of cliché-filled territory by making the 4/4 formula mysterious and exciting again.

  Their latest single ‘Daemon’, which features vocals from John Philpot of psychedelia-loving Brooklynites Bear in Heaven, is out now on Tartelet records and it’s Kenton Slash Demon at the top of their uncompromisingly sophisticated game. You might say it’s a track that begins by politely inviting you in and making light conversation. But once you’ve exchanged the formal pleasantries, it starts slapping you around and calling you dirty names. Then there’s a breakdown and the track is interrogating you to your breaking point – it’s out to humiliate you. Yet you can’t help succumbing to the relentless abuse. And liking it.

  Anyways, it just so happens that Zander, AIAIAI’s very own in-house, Art Directing wiz-kid, has been in charge of their artwork, and he’s done a sterling job of it if we do say so ourselves. Oh yes, The KSD project involves the cream of the crop. And we’d be quite surprised if the boys are not soon bigger than Jesus – or maybe even Tiësto.

  http://www.kentonslashdemon.com/

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• Hungover Owls

  March 10th 11, 7:01

  

  Maybe these owls have been partying down with the MaSheen, because they’re real tired and they don’t want any hassle. They just want what we all want when we’ve had a little ‘too much fun’ (Charlie Murphy), and that’s directions to the bathroom…where they may look up into the mirror and realise that their post-drunken, dim-witted expression is only made worse by the fact that some joker drew a big, triumphant Alexander WANG on their forehead. Yes indeed, the feathered fuck-ups of Hungover Owls are a stark reminder of how quickly the giddy anticipation of Friday turns in to the existential Mount Everest climb of Sunday.

  Check them out at:

  http://hungoverowls.tumblr.com/

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• Animated Architecture

  February 23rd 11, 4:35

  

  Once in a while it can be quite rewarding to feel dwarfed. By history, a life-hanging event, or maybe just the familiar spectacle of the sky on a starry night. It keeps your ego in check and makes all those self-absorbed, insignificant doubts and fears go away, so you can focus on more constructive things.

  The architectural photography of New York-based artist Christoph Morlinghaus is the kind of majestically epic art that makes your petty problems disappear in an instant. His vast compositions that feature buildings, which will in all likelihood be here when you and I are gone, are a brutal yet reassuring reminder of the pointlessness of getting yourself all worked up over nothing. It puts you in your place. Moreover, in the hands of Morlinghaus, architecture is not sterile and monolithic but spins a narrative, which is somehow spirited and mysterious – perhaps even organically seductive. I mean, look at it. Don’t you just want to take your clothes off and run around his photos while pumping your fist and hollering like a randy viking? I know I do. In fact, that’s what I’m doing, right now, while typing this.

  www.morlinghaus.com

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• Put your Hands up for Detroit (again)

  February 17th 11, 7:07

  Isn’t it high time we had a 90s trance revival? Remember when ravers would dance around in a hippy-daze on an irony-free dance floor, waving glow sticks around as if the fate of the party depended on it? Don’t get me wrong, getting surprise back rubs from ageing, spaced-out yoga-instructors was never my bag and there are plenty of things about contemporary trance culture, which are questionable to say the least. But back in the day there was always a sense of collective purpose, community, and care-free togetherness, which is sorely lacking in most present-day partying. Blame electroclash. It ousted sincerity as mayor of the floor and installed cynicism instead.

  But maybe times are changing. This latest joint from the enigmatic Omar S, who happens to be one of our favourite Detroit producers, is called ‘Here’s your Trance, Now Dance’ and it’s a delightfully trance-y beast with classic motor city beat propulsion, organic percussion and utopian trance synthesizers. By no means has it come completely out of the trance closet, but it does make you think of making stupid dance moves on a beach in Goa while wearing a tie-dye t-shirt and feeling at one with humanity. Happy days.

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• Slowdive in Space

  February 11th 11, 7:17

  

  The weekend is rapidly approaching and that usually means a fair share of merrymaking antics for most of us here at AIAIAI headquarters. However, some of us are getting…well, I guess there’s no point in pussyfooting around it: we’re getting old. Or maybe we’re just getting weird. Because what we really long for is to float around weightlessly somewhere around the four Galileian moons of Jupiter, while listening to ethereal early 90s shoegaze. And it turns out we’re in luck. Some genius human being on Youtube took a bunch of footage from the Hubble Space Telescope and matched it with the mountain of aural melancholy from ‘93 that is Slowdive’s ‘Souvlaki Space Station’. This may bore the living daylights out of the weekend-hungry party kids among you. But you’re all soulless, disrespectful, uppity young upstarts, who’ll get half a nelson if you don’t pipe down, so there. As for the rest of you: enjoy the slowness.

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• Com Truise: What Thugz listen to in Space

  February 3rd 11, 5:15

  

  Our buds over at esteemed Ann Arbor-based record label Ghostly International deserve another pad on their affable backs. This time it’s because their already impressive roster has gained the addition of Com Truise, a talented, young synth freak whose name evokes images of a C3P0’d version of a certain, famed Scientologist, and makes thick, anthemic synthesizer music, which has so far been described as: ‘Window-fogging synth-wave’, and: ‘What thugs listen to in space’ (Thanks, Lex Records). The sound is both deeply haunting and funky, albeit in a low-slung, weathered, slow-motion sort of way, and the epic, star-gazing banger ‘Farlight’ has made us tap the hell out of the repeat button for the past week.

  Over the course of the last decade in music, it’s gotten progressively clearer that the analogue synthesizer is so much more than a retro-wave-y, nostalgic hipster instrument. Synths such as the Juno 60 are slowly beginning to gain wider acceptance as musical vehicles on par with, say, the traditional drum-kit or the electric guitar, and a new generation of artists like Oneohtrix Point Never, Stellar Om Source and, yes, our boy Com Truise seem more concerned with exploring the depth, and emotional range of the instrument, than with any kind of gimmicky, short-lived conceptualism. The analogue synthesizer has proven to be a vast netherworld of damp, unexplored, very contemporary, emotional territory, which, in effect, renders the inevitable, easy ‘80s synth-pop’ comparisons obsolete.

  You might say that a synth riff doesn’t equate The Human League any more than a tambourine necessitates a Hare Krishna jam. And when you listen to this gifted New Jersey-dwelling artist slapping his synth upside the head to make it sing, the virtually inexhaustible potential of synthesized music begins to dawn on you a little bit.

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• The Soft Moon will make You Dance into The Fire

  February 1st 11, 10:04

  

  It’s not often we come across music that’s as accomplished, imaginative and arresting as The Soft Moon’s self -titled debut album. Very rarely do we have an ‘Oh my days!’ reaction resulting in bits of our lunch (ham on toast, as it happens) hitting the computer screen because the package is so pretty it makes you forget what you were doing and start paying actual, undivided attention to what’s going on in the individual songs.

  The Soft Moon’s muse are the austere, minimalist, visceral expressions that came out of goth and post-punk – and the San Franciscans would probably make sweet, physical love to them if they could. But that doesn’t mean what you think it means. This isn’t another Joy Division tribute band or a latecomer to the early noughties, DFA-headed punk-funk revival. No, TSM’s reverently intimate familiarity with the post-punk canon is elevated into a sound, which becomes surprisingly heady, fresh and curiously uplifting after repeated listening; the whispered, sometimes piercing vocals, bleak riffs and dark subject matter sit agreeably next to the varmer Krautrock/Motorik-sounding drum propulsion and organic basslines that, on the whole, offer an aesthetic, which adds a welcome new, uncompromising complexity to the current goth revivalism of Zola Jesus et al. There’s an interesting juxtapositioning of cold tonality with varmer shades of sound and it makes you admire the amount of thought behind the overall concept.

  Were we lazy, low-brow, vulgar music journalists (which we are, on occasion) we would not hesitate in saying that The Soft Moon is the bastard/love child of Joy Division and Neu!, which became the long lost sibling of Parisian act Colder and the black-clad, big-haired imps that are The Horrors – and that’s without even mentioning The XX. So if you’re looking for a new, post-apocalyptic soundtrack to dance into the fire to, look no further.

  http://www.myspace.com/thesoftmoon

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• Classic Cocadisco: electro-disco knees-up in London

  January 20th 11, 10:51

  Some of us are going to London this weekend, which has sent us trawling though the endless list of weekend party options that the hepcat metropolis has to offer. It took a little while, but we finally struck gold when we came across the flyer for Cocadisco at East London club the Alibi, which is going down this Saturday, the 22nd. Underground dance music titan, DMX Krew, is on the bill along with Luke Eargoggle, Gothenburg’s dark prince of purist electro, and the Cocadisco DJs usually have more than a few off-kilter gems up their sleeve, meaning you would quite clearly miss out (and be a bit of a tool) if you didn’t go. See you under the mirror ball.

  

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