SXSW 2012

On the fringes of the southwesternmost corner of culture and smart in these United States, Cuckoo Chaos is the Richard Nixon of disco dancing. Cuckoo Chaos is the Henry Ford of Dada. Cuckoo Chaos is the John The Baptist of cunnilingus. The Pontius Pilot of lamb skin condoms. Cuckoo Chaos is a nice, firm ass in the palm of your hands. Cuckoo Chaos is a tarred and feathered Hugh Hefner screaming at something... you know what I mean. Cuckoo Chaos is not milk. Cuckoo Chaos is the rusty trombone you've always wanted. Cuckoo Chaos is the Rasputin of children's birthday parties and the Richard Simmons of carpet bombing. Cuckoo Chaos is the Nobel Peace Prize of bukkake. Cuckoo Chaos is the Huey Newton of cribbage and the Britney Spears of British teeth. Cuckoo Chaos has the Lindbergh baby. Cuckoo Chaos is the Abbie Hoffman of the Tea Party Movement. Cuckoo Chaos wants you to want. Cuckoo Chaos is sleazy. Cuckoo Chaos wants Obama to come out of the closet. Cuckoo Chaos capitalizes. We're chewin' the fat. Cuckoo Chaos wishes you'd stop bragging about your nightmares. Cuckoo Chaos knows you're fucked up, but loves you. Your mom likes Cuckoo Chaos. Cuckoo Chaos is awaiting your scrutiny. Cuckoo Chaos is the John McEnroe of meditation. Cuckoo Chaos is Andy Warhol... if he could shut his mouth. Cuckoo Chaos tastes like your sister's lips (even though you're afraid to admit it.) Cuckoo Chaos is the semen on the mountain top. Cuckoo Chaos is the West Coast of wet dreams. Chew on that, sucka.

Computer Magic is the solo project of 21-year-old blogger/DJ Danielle Johnson (she goes by Danz). She moved from Rock Hill in upstate New York (population: 1,056) to New York City in 2008 to attend Hunter College. Danz started doing Computer Magic the summer of 2010, in her downtime between school, DJing, and graphic designing. She makes bedroom electronic pop music that feels equally whimsical, claustrophobic, and ethereal.

America, we’d like to introduce you to an amazing new band called Serenades. Based in Stockholm, Sweden, Serenades are the dynamic duo of Adam Olenius (Shout Out Louds) and Markus Krunegard, two of Sweden’s most highly-regarded songwriters. Serenades’ debut album will be available next year thanks to Cherrytree Records. In the meantime, however, you can get a very special taste of what’s to come via the band’s first EP, titled Come Home. Released through all digital service providers and indie retail on November 15th, Come Home is the perfect introduction to a band whose name you’ll be hearing throughout 2012.

New York was wearing on Kyle Wilson, lead singer & songwriter for the Brooklyn-based quintet Milagres. So he took off, away from the city and his band and his issues… all the way to the coldest, most remote part of British Columbia where he could get some space and breathe. As so often happens in life, he got a little more space than he bargained for – during a rock climbing trip he fell and ended up spending months bedridden with a back injury. Before he left New York, Wilson had thought he might leave the band behind entirely. But during the long days of his recovery he found himself writing songs again, and he realized he wanted to go back.

Naeem Juwan AKA Spank Rock comes from the wall-sweating, pipe-bursting, hip-grinding basements of the Baltimore Bass movement. After spending some time at Drexel University in Philly he linked up with the Diplo-powered Hollertronix crew and began crafting the type of live performances that have become underground legend.

Guards was formed in New York City when Richie James Follin returned from a European tour to a recording studio with nothing in it but a broken electric 12 string guitar and an omnichord. He wrote and recorded a few songs for his little sister to sing on ,but ended up singing on the songs himself. He enlisted the help of his friends (Caroline Polachek of Chairlift, James Richardson of MGMT, Loren Shane Humphrey of Willowz) and family (Madeline Follin of Cults) to guest on some songs.

Lee was born and raised in the small town of Wilson, North Carolina,one of 4 children. He spent his adolescence years singing in church and listening to R&B Artists such as James Brown, The Temptations, Eddie Floyd, Otis Redding and the classic sound of 60's Memphis. He joined a few racial balance groups in the South and began playing college circuits that included East Carolina University, Duke University and Georgia Tech. By the late sixties, Lee began his singing career, working with bands which would lay the foundation for funk music including Kool and the Gang, Sammy Gordon and the Hip-Huggers, and Little Royal.

Renowned throughout the global Funk community, Lee Fields has poured his grunts and screams over a legacy of funk and soul hits from the early seventies, including such 45 rpm classics as She’s a Lovemaker, The Bullis Coming, and The Funky Screw, not to mention his well sought after Let’s Talk It Over LP. This LP draws four digit bids from collectors worldwide. His recordings with the hard funk purists at TRUTH & SOUL, Desco, and Daptone Records in recent years has solidified his place as the King of contemporary funk music as well.

When Truth & Soul started as a record label in 2004, the first mission of label owners Jeff Silverman and Leon Michels, was to record a sweet soul record that would be modeled after the near perfect formula that bands like The Moments, The Delfonics, and The Stylistics had created. Music that was both tough as nails and sweet as honey. Music with laced with lush strings and smooth vocal harmonies layered over hard-hitting rhythms. Michels and Silverman called in a few trusty associates, which included singer Lee Fields, and recorded the single “Do You Love Me” b/w “Honey Dove”. What happened in the studio was pure magic and thus, The Expressions were born.

ABX (pronounced like three consecutive letters) and STV SLV (pronounced “steve sleeve”) are collectively known as The Hood Internet. For the past three years, the duo have been chewing up the indie, pop, rap and R&B landscapes and spitting out pure fire. Like laptop-armed alchemists, they draw from their expansive interest in the many faces of modern music and re-imagine songs for mass public consumption through thehoodinternet.com.

The heartbeat that sparks the third song on 1, 2, 3’s debut LP isn’t just a flutter effect meant to set a melancholic mood. It literally symbolizes the start of a new life. Or in the case of Nicolas Snyder and Joshua Sickels, a crucial state of rebirth—the next logical step after the “classic rock ’n’ roll casualty story” of the duo’s last band, the Takeover UK.
While that project took more of a straight-laced approach to pop music, 1, 2, 3’s songs are as stubborn as their name. In other words, good luck reducing New Heaven down to a tidy set of buzz words.
Or as Synder puts it, “That’s the general idea with this band—that it doesn’t belong to any specific genre, and that there aren’t any preconceived notions about the name or who we are.”
Take the aforementioned “Heat Lightnin’,” for instance. Once you make it past Snyder’s fragile vocals, a disembodied whistler, and several unidentified flying objects, one thing emerges—a liquified bass line that seems to be…talking. And then there are the many striking, speaker-panning elements that reward repeat listens elsewhere: the shimmering synths of “Lonesome Boring Summer,” the swooning strings of “Wave Pool,” the sucker punch percussion of “Work,” the lethargic blues licks of “Just Like Heaven (is gone),” the restless riffs of “20,000 Blades,” and, well, we’d go on but that’d take away half the fun of digging through 1, 2, 3’s sonic detritus.
If there’s one unifying factor throughout the Pittsburgh band’s first full-length, it’s the lingering sense that Snyder—the band’s primary songwriter—watches a lot of movies. How else to explain why New Heaven unfolds like the rabbit hole-riddled narrative of an art house film?
“I spend more time watching movies than just about anything but sleep,” admits Snyder. “Stuff like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, any Sergio Leone film, even Who Framed Roger Rabbit?—it’s all had a major impact on me.”
As for how Sickels fits into this equation, the drummer has known Snyder since middle school, back when they bonded over skateboarding and punk rock. So when he heard the early stages of 1, 2, 3, he didn’t have to think twice about rejoining his longtime friend and bandmate.
“I’ve spent the last 10 years telling everyone how great NIck is at songwriting,” says Sickels, “So I was gonna follow him into 1, 2, 3 no matter what.”
Now it’s your turn.

Good music emancipates the listener. Boring jobs, troubled relationships, rush hour traffic… such mundane prisons are no match for the liberating power of a fantastic pop song. Think of Stuck On Nothing as one giant stack of “Get Out Of Jail Free” cards.

http://www.twitter.com/tanlines

In 2009, Cleveland’s Dylan Baldi began writing and recording lo-fi power-pop songs in his parents’ basement, dubbing the project Cloud Nothings. His music quickly started making the Internet rounds, and fans and critics alike took note of his pithy songcraft, infectiously catchy melodies, and youthful enthusiasm. Baldi soon released a string of 7”s, a split cassette, and an EP before putting out Turning On—a compilation spanning about a year’s worth of work—on Carpark in 2010. January 2011 saw the release Cloud Nothings’ self-titled debut LP, which, put next to Turning On, found Baldi cleaning up his lo-fi aesthetic, pairing his tales of affinitive confusion with a more pristine aural clarity. In the interval since the release of Cloud Nothings, Baldi has toured widely and put a great deal of focus on his live show, a detail that heavily shapes the music of his follow-up album, Attack on Memory.

The lovechild of a studio experiment that was never meant to make it out into the wild, Los Angeles’ American Royalty constructs an unlikely yet glowingly functional blend of dark garage rock and poignant electronica. This creative soundscape is topped off by the two vocal leads of Marc Gilfry and Billy Scher, whose pipes both seem to fall somewhere in the realm of where eerie and soul meet back on the other side; altogether resulting in one of the most innovative sounds to haunt independent music today.
The psychedelic blues-rock three piece has already begun making their mark on the road over the past year, turning heads in the touring circuit with their unorthodox stage set up, a penchant for sprinkling in reworked bits of both the classic and obscure, and an explosively energetic and entrancingly unique live performance.
The group has won over supporters in both the rock and electronic genres; playing on both coasts with friends and advocates Drop the Lime, Superhumanoids and Hanni El Khatib... warming up the crowd for everyone from Metronomy and Digitalism to Kisses, and sharing festival bills with the likes of The Flaming Lips, Snoop Dogg and Thievery Corporation
Matchstick, the group’s newest offering, was written in the summer of 2011 in Venice Beach where Scher and Gilfry were couch surfing, waiting for their tour to start.
“We came to the studio with these demos that were inherently very electronic, because we wrote them in our friends’ living rooms,” said Scher, “We were lucky enough to record at Infrasonic Sound with lots of great vintage equipment that helped us sonically flesh out the demos by adding a complementary analogue instrumentation.”
The EP showcases the trio experimenting with the balance between both genres. “We had this idea for the EP to try to highlight the interplay between analogue and synthetic,” said Gilfry, “At times in the final recordings it's hard to tell what is man and what is machine – there are electronic drums using samples of our live drum kit, synths running through grungy amps sounding like guitar. We're excited because we feel like this is a step in a new direction for us, which is obviously exciting for any artist.”

Ki:Theory (a.k.a. Joel Burleson) is a recording artist and producer who specializes in genres of electronic and indie/alternative rock. He and his band have toured nationwide US, Canada, Japan and Korea including dates supporting Passion Pit and Baths and a performance at the Bonnaroo Music Festival. He’s DJed for famed fashion designer Betsey Johnson during New York Fashion Week. He’s done remixes for Daft Punk/Tron: Legacy, Kings of Leon, Queens of the Stone Age, Ladytron, Sasha, UNKLE and Brazilian Girls among others.

“I definitely wanted to make a pop album where every song was good, catchy and people can dance to it,” says Chris Glover aka Penguin Prison, who’s goal is to have people dancing all over the world, much like his funk-forefathers Jackson and Prince did when he was growing up in NYC during the 1980's. “(the album) was hard work to make, but I tried to have fun. If I didn’t jump around the room while I was recording a song, it didn’t make the cut. Fun is the key.”

Let's be clear: the dance music revolution taking place isn't led by European 'superstar DJs' and Las Vegas-style VIP 'clubs'. The real sea change is happening at street level, spearheaded by next generation homegrown stars such as Manhattan native, Drop The Lime, aka Luca Venezia. 'Enter The Night' is his debut artist album.

Depending on whom you ask, Matthew Dear is a DJ, a dance-music producer, an experimental pop artist, a bandleader. He co-founded both Ghostly International and its dancefloor offshoot, Spectral Sound. He’s had remixes commissioned by The XX, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Spoon, Hot Chip, The Postal Service, and Chemical Brothers; he’s made mixes for the Fabric mix series and Get Physical’s Body Language. He maintains four aliases (Audion, False, Jabberjaw, and Matthew Dear), each with its own style and distinct visual identity. He straddles multiple musical worlds and belongs to none—and he’s just hitting his stride.

2 DJ/Producers from Chicago. Toured with Kid Sister, Chromeo, A-trak, Cool Kids, and others. Fool's Gold Records. Green Label Sound.