FREE DOWNLOAD: School of Seven Bells, "Connjur" Rhythm and harmony! They’re the first things you hear on “Iamundernodisguise,� the opening track on School of Seven Bells’ debut, Alpinisms: a rolling drumbeat marshals a hint of rhumba in the bassline, while sisters Alejandra and Cla...

by Piotr Orlov It was inevitable that Four Tet would find the dance-floor. Since he began recording in the mid-'90s, you could hear the man born Kieran Hebden admiring the beat, at home with rhythms as different as Dilla's, Pole's and Badly Drawn Boy's. He's hinted at grooves inside the post-rock ma...

by Piotr Orlov God bless Architecture in Helsinki! The Aussie indie-pop collective is completely unafraid to go into sonic k-holes most of its peers actively avoid. And, boy, did they stumble into one with this El Guincho remix of "Like It or Not," a track from AIH's '07 album Places Like ...

We all know by now that remixing classic songs -- like remaking classic films -- is the folly of the foolhardy. (Fatboy Slim's take on "Sympathy for the Devil" or Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes -- choose your pop-culture poison?) But every once in a while, a mash-up combo comes along that...

By local Texas lore, a “button� is a baby rattlesnake, more ornery and poisonous than the elderly reptiles. The music of F*ck Buttons, a noisy duo from Bristol, U.K., bears the same nature. On Thursday night, that nature was one long 40-minute coil of sound, an abrasive mixture of digital and an...

When actor Jason Hervey is not busy playing the role of Scott Baio's best friend on VH1's celeb reality show Scott Baio Is 46 and Pregnant, he's playing it in real life. And when he's not doing that, he's tooling around Los Angeles listening to an eclectic mix of the Southern rock, West Coast rap an...

Behold, a requiem for the music producer! In 2008, when pretty much any Tom, Dick or Harriet with a Pro Tools set-up and some decent microphones could finagle a “produced by� credit into the meta-data file of a digital release, let’s take a moment to pay homage to a pair of gentlemen who worke...

  Judging by the melodies, the beats and the lyrical smirks, Hot Chip is a band tailor-made for our times. That it happens to be kind of popular – ‘05’s The Warning was named Album of the Year by the NME, the new Made in the Dark debuted at #4 on the U.K. chart and a respectable #109 on t...

Some years ago, a wise person pontificated that electronic music was the only real world music, because it could be made everywhere by anyone and could be understood just as universally. Many beats, many passports, one dance floor – discuss! And while the hippie dream of such shared-knowledge thes...

You could be forgiven if you thought that reggae fell out of the limelight in ’07. Yet while there were no headlines to feed the masses -- no Sean Paul or Matisyahu, no “Ghetto Story� or “Welcome to Jamrock,� certainly no single riddim ruling the nation and no backward-/forward-looking tre...