Kirsty Almeida – If You Can’t Make Me Happy

Here’s a photo of Kirsty Almeida on stage that I got at Godiva.

Kina Grannis – Valentine (Official Music Video)

Awwwwh, how sweet is that video!
Anyway here are some of her amazing covers

Kina Grannis – First Train Home (Imogen Heap Cover)

I love how in the bridge Kina, taps her guitar for purcussion. Play those do waveforms Kina, she’s even got the vocal layers spot on and says the obvious, that Ellipse is just awesome! Plus she has done a cover of the song that really broke Feist (who I adore), mainstream proper.

Kina Grannis – 1,2,3,4 (Feist Cover)

I’ve just got back from the Godiva Festival in Coventry, so expect more on that soon!

Over the years my tastes have varied a lot and back in the day as I was coming out of my teen years, I became entranced with the sound of Ibiza 99 (having never been there). I’ve always had a thing for deep house / ambient / stripped back and downtempo tracks which feature lush female vocals.

Jean Jacques Smoothie – Two People

Jean Jacques Smoothie’s hit Two People then, joins my collection alongside the greats of the time, such as Fragma (also feat. women’s sport) Roger Sanchez, The Avalanches, Milky, even Robert Miles and Chicane. Although this version of the track doesn’t do it justice really, you need the full length version. The vocals are sampled from a soul classic, Minnie Riperton’s – Inside My Love, which is a lot slower, the samples seem to have been sped up for this tune. The genre reminds me of the adventures of leaving college and starting University and still influences my tastes today.

He is of course on twitter @jjsmoothie. But this is such a tune and perfect for the summer weather we are currently seeing! And yes I do have a thing for both Tennis and Kirsten Dunst. Forget the Football World Cup, ladies tennis is where it’s at!

The indie four peice, rocked out to a local crowd at the Hare and Hounds in Birmingham recently and so I thought, well why not get a few photos while I was there supporting our anthemic locals! As luck would have it I teamed up with friendly reviewer Matt Elton, who has posted a bostin review of the gig on his excellent music review blog, Rocket Falls. The gig was awesome but Matt will tell it like I can’t, in his Rogue States review :)

You can follow Rogue States on Twitter @roguestates and check out their website.

A change of pace for Music Monday today. Something awesome happened last night while I was walking home, I found these abandoned mixtapes! It gave me an idea :)

Strewn from a carrier bag in a bus stop were ten’s of tapes that seemed to be abandoned, although it might have been cheeky of me, I sifted through the selection, reading the labels and chose some of the best sounding ones. As I type this post, I’ve linked up my walkman to my PC and am listening on a 1993 tape to Tom Petty – Learning to Fly! Which in my previous mixtape post is the song you can hear on the Eilizabethtown trailer. How serendipitous is this? These tapes have come to a good home as I have desk lamps made out of cassettes!

The thing is as well I sit at a computer for hours and when I can listen as a lot of people do, to music. Hours upon hours of music have been listened to as I work, I find it inspires and relaxes me and makes me more productive! I can imagine getting through these tapes quite easily when I work from home at this desk.

Seeing these tapes littering the bus stop though, gave me an idea.

What if in art galleries up and down the land (with PRS of course) there was a chair, some headphones, a walkman in a quiet spot and a selection of mixtapes that had been given to the gallery by visitors?

Epic Mixtape installations
What if in art galleries up and down the land (with PRS of course) there was a chair, some headphones, a walkman and a selection of mixtapes that had been given to the gallery by visitors. Wouldn’t that make the most awesome-est art installation? Knowing that on your lunch break or whatever you could drop in for half an hour and come away with a brand new fave song? You could also leave your comments in a guestbook and post your own physical mixtape for other people to listen to. As long as these tapes remained in the gallery and didn’t leave I don’t see why there would be a PRS issue, if it was all done properly.

Mixtapes on 6Music!
Lauren Laverne on her radio show is doing something called “Memory Tapes” where listeners send in their playlists which are then discussed and 5 tracks are then selected to be played! Here’s theMemory Tape for 4th June 2010. I can’t help but think, are mixtapes coming back in a rage against the iTunes machine stylee? Anyway here’s a classic from this tape I found in the street!

Tom Petty – Something in the Air

That would get me into an art gallery hands down!
Share the music.

Hailing from Belgium, this group mix rythmic acoustic guitars and soft female vocals to produce an altogether atmospheric and enchanting listening expereince. This is both delicate and hard hitting, the track, “Reunite” doesn’t really fade into the background, it kinda grabs your head and makes it rock backwards and forwards.

Isbells – Reunite

How hauntingly beautiful is this?! Deffo on my list of bands to see at Summer Sundae this year!

The track, “Reunite” doesn’t really fade into the background, it kinda grabs your head and makes it rock backwards and forwards!

I love the way they chose a local area landmark for the album title, it’s a train and metro station well known to travellers in the city and always a fave destination for the Birmingham Flickr Meet. The whole album seems to have that feel good athemic quality that the previous offering didn’t really have throughout.

The Twang – Barney Rubble

I really don’t know why I’ve only just picked this up after seeing them rock the Coventry Godiva Festival 2009, I guess I’m just so bogged down at the moment, but it’s deffo lighting up my train travel at the moment. Barney Rubble is amazing and has that “Fairground by Simply Red” feel to it, but I’m also loving Took The Fun and Back Where We Started.

Which usually means new projects! When I saw that he was touring material for a new acoustic EP, and that he was re-visiting The Glee in Birmingham, I just had to go! My third Natty gig then was stripped back and very intimate, he introduced new songs and told us what the deal was with the EP, hence the blog post about this great idea!

Natty – Bedroom Eyes

Pledge Music
Through pledgemusic.com he’s selling the EP as it is being created, which is just about as far away from a traditional business model as you can get, but he’s also raising funds for chairty at the same time. How amazing is that! In this case The Sarcoma Research Fund. It’s like pre-ordering even though the product isn’t yet finished, in essense the fans become investors in the production and recording of the EP as well as doing something for a charity that means something to the artist!

In essense the fans become investors in the production and recording of the EP as well as doing something for a charity that means something to the artist! A very different way of moving through the music industry!

The “Things I’ve Done Ep” of which we got to hear songs from, live, then sounds really good. It’s a slight departure from Man Like I, there’s a different vibe as Natty puts it but there is still the Reggae aspect heavily at work in the songs. The new song “Street Lights” raises an interesting question for us social media types; If Internet connections were ripped up, would we still be able to meet up and chat, would we want to go out into the streets at night if all the street lights were turned off? Are we really connected or are we just crossing paths only on a digital basis? I thought about that a lot as I returned home by train, quite often we could and do get by offline, but are we too invested in our bubbles? Lyrically he is a genius, the gig itself was very intimate and towards the end everyone was feeling the love and myself, well I just danced like nobody was watching.

Click the following badge to get through to his pledge site and listen to a snippet of Street Lights

Late Night Alumni
I’m really impressed with this soma FM and last.fm recommend and really am a sucker for cute music. A downtempo, house, electronic group from America, who have that perfect formula of catchy melodic sounds, loops, blips, atmospheric vibes all topped off with lush husky almost european female vocalist. Perfect for a warm up to a night out, a wind down from a hectic day, it’s great road trip music and awesome for watching birds, bees and butterflies fly next to your train. This is nice music!

It’s intelligent dance music, is what it is and comes with a fit bird with a lush voice! Perfect for those summer holidays and BBQ’s that are in the calendar!

Late Night Alumni – Of Birds, Bees, Butterflies, Etc (Title Track)

Late Night Alumini Official Site

I’m not gonna beat around the bush here, it’s the female vocalist that has my attention! Becky Jean Williams is perhaps the element of this music that grabs you first and of course it’s all back by blissful sounds, that aren’t too harsh, but don’t fade into the background either. An album was released September 2009, Of Birds, Bees, Butterflies, etc; featuring these two tracks. Anyone remember Milky – Just the Way You Are? Well I thought that was a once in a lifetime cheesy-song-that-lee-goes-crazy-for moment, but LNA have recaptured that space somewhere between catchy pop, cheap cheesy wiggles from ASDA and serious scene music and made it their own.

Late Night Alumni – You Can Be The One, Live

I must also mention I’ve fallen in love with an online radio station from SomaFM called Lush, which plays nothing but this sort of music, from LNA to Frou Frou, yes it’s all about electronic bliss, with superb females.

Reports are floating about that it could be rebranded. I’m going to explain why I think this is a sustainable position for the future growth of BBC Digital Radio, although I don’t like it, I like it better than loosing 6Music altogether.

For me BBC 6 Music, mimicks almost exactly what BBC Local Radio had to go through to become accepted by the corporation. Local Radio from the BBC was an experiement, in providing in the public interest services, and that wasn’t wanted either, dismissed as trouble makers with their pesky radio cars! Which is what 6Music became, the rebel in the pack. Local radio had to fight to become accepted.

Try closing local radio now? You can’t, and this is exactly why BBC Radio 2 Extra, means 6Music will always be around in some form, it’s being moved away from the edge of the platform!

Move away from the edge of the platform
Without Radio 7, Radio 6 was now at the end of the numeric branding, and close to falling onto the rails below. The BBC have for many years been blasted for having too much reach, and the cuts seemed aimed on crippling this reach, with 6 near the edge of the platform, it was exposed, the nature of the cuts meant it had to go, to reduce down from 7 stations to 5. However let’s promote 6Music and place it ABOVE Radio 3, afterall DAB radio stations are alphabetically sorted on an auto tune, suddenly 6Music goes right in there as this weeks highest new entry! Absolute, doesn’t make sense until you look at where it is “on the dial”.

A little Extra from the Infax
It was one of the first things that crept into my mind as a way of saving 6Music, when I looked at BBC Radio 7 becoming “Radio 4 Extra”, I did read into the rebranding hidden agenda very well. If 6 is Radio 2’s sister station, why not bind them closer together? Although it’s worth pointing out here my unease with “1Xtra” and “4Extra”, for consistant branding it’s either one or the other.

The brands “5 Extra” and “1Xtra” have been around for a while, so maybe 1Extra needs to loose some coolness, it is after all utter rubbish being broadcast. The length of all this concerns me, it’s a mouthful already “BBC Radio Five Live Extra”?

For the non comformists, we can call 6Music “2x”, and strapline it with “twice as much real music as Absolute” (oh snap! YES please use this strap), or “Real music to the power of two”, either way, there are interesting word plays to be had there.

Mind the Gap!
Anyone notice a gap in the branding, where is Radio 3 Extra? One reason why DAB needs to be wiped out as soon as possible, is technology has moved on, we are talking about digital radio, which should beable to broadcast in Surround Sound, but it’s currently worse than FM. There is a gap analysis here to be had, and DAB+ could create the space needed to offer 5 channel audio, not just for classical music, think of the sports events covered on 5 Live that rudely interupt your football commentry?

Radio 3 Extra, could broadcast the same station output but in Surround Sound, that is if DAB had the bandwitdh to facilitate that, which it doesn’t, so why not push forward with DAB+ and CREATE reasons for moving to digital, rather than slashing stations?

What I’m trying to say is the Extra brand makes sense, going forward for the future of digital radio and offering new services once we all have money again, although it’s not a nice thing to be happening to 6, we still have Opal Fruits right? They didn’t die out when they got renamed Starbursts, there are now many forms of Starbursts, even sour ones, which I highly recommend.

Broadcasting 2Xtra for 12 hours only
Again I’m not proud to have suggested this either, because it could be happening and it’s so wrong, as most of your listeners would listen in the morning and throughout the day and then different listeners at night! It stinks of bandwidth issues with DAB, in the same way that BBC3 and 4 share space with Ceebies and CBBC.

However does the iPlayer make live broadcasts history? NO! Not in the case of radio, absolutly not.

There are cheaper ways of keeping 6Music/2x on 24 hours, which could include broadcasting only documentaries on a night time and having the live shows in the morning, afternoon and early evening, a 7am to 7pm type live schedule.

In Conclusion
Although Radio 2 Extra, could save 6 Music, and the Extra brand makes sense in trying to get DAB adoption up, which is good news for everyone because digital stations are failing due to lack of listeners; I do have to echo the statements of many, many people.

Leave 6Music the f**k alone!