Psychic Chasms by Neon Indian

Neon Indian, for the sake of categorization, fit nicely into the tsunami of glo-fi pop chillwaving its way onto shores near you. The sound is stripped and washed-out. The '80s vibe is pervasive. There's something airy and loose and druggy about Psychic Chasms, the group's debut album. It's electronic, but also completely organic.

Spotlight On Music: Civalias

Hailing from Southern California, Civalias is the project brainchild of 23 year-old Adam Stidham. Conjuring influences such as Aqualung, Coldplay, and Radiohead, the infectiously melodic sounds of Civalias are both engaging and visually enticing. The young songwriter who began his journey in music by playing guitar in his teens soon found that music became a form of therapy. “I found an undeniable peace and calmness in making music. It was me at my most genuine.” It is this vulnerability and honesty that makes Civalias special, attracting a contingent of fans who are seeking not only a uniquely refreshing sound, but the emotional substance to back it up.

read more HERE

The Warm Heart Of Africa by The Very Best

Though Radioclit seems to draw production ideas from the already existent ether--largely the African-Western pop alliances of the ’80s--that does nothing to take away from this fascinating and happy moment captured on record. We're given a deeper record than some may've anticipated -- sonically, for sure--but more so The Very Best's debut stands up higher as document of seamless (and shameless) cultural convergence.

Passing Behind Your Eyes by Pretty Lights

Pretty Lights is the musical vision of the ultra-versatile Colorado based producer Derek Vincent Smith, accompanied in the live setting by drummer, Cory Eberhard. Together these two achieve a raw energy rarely reached in the realm of electronic music.

At a time when music lovers from almost all subcultures and genres are finding common ground in the basic form of bangin' beats, Pretty Lights is giving the people what they want; electro organic cutting-edge party rocking beats that fill venues with energy and emotion and send dance floors into frenzies.

What makes Pretty Lights truly different though, is that these beats have serious soul. Derek's latest album, Filling Up The City Skies is a two-disc, 26 track journey through past, present, and future. He juxtaposes collages of beautiful vintage samples against backdrops of futuristic synthesis and dirty broken beats, creating a sound that can snap your neck while simultaneously shedding your tears. The album has been downloaded over 70,000 times from the Pretty Lights website in the short 4 months since its release, proving that the Pretty Lights sound is not only getting around, it's spreading like a virus.

Free Download of his latest album available HERE

Hearing Damage by Thom Yorke

There’s a brand spanking new song from Thom Yorke of the almighty Radiohead making its way through the hallowed internets. It’s called Hearing Damage and it’s just lovely. It’s on the soundtrack for the upcoming film New Moon aka the next chapter of the Twilight series. For those of us who liked our vampires a little more scary and less glossy, I understand and empathise.

Less experimental than his work on the underrated The Eraser record and a lot more accessible, Yorke goes easy on us and gives us some dark electronic pop that should render the rest of the soundtrack pointless. It’s not quite the head-bopper that Idioteque was but it’s close and one could say that this is more of a mind-bender. I had to play it a couple of times to allow myself to become immersed in the beauty of this track.

Machine Dreams by Little Dragon

Jazzy instincts and surreal lyrics perfectly offset the music's mosaic minimalism. Overall, Machine Dreams is bristling with invention and teeming with variety, a fantasy world you won't wish to quickly wake from. Machine Dreams is an exercise in scoping out the frontiers of avant-garde electronic pop not seen since the early ‘80s.

What Will We Be by Devendra Banhart

What once made Banhart such a strange bird--roaming from jazz to folk to indie pop, often within a single song, as on the impossibly catchy 'Chin Chin & Muck Muck'--now seems almost mainstream. Butler’s done well to harness the fuller ideas first explored on "Smokey" but, in doing so, has sacrified raw Devendra for something just a bit too busy.

Through The Devil Softly by Hope Sandoval

This is a record to be drunk from deeply, preferably in solitude, along with a bottle of whatever makes you purr as warmly as Sandoval and her Inventions can--and evidently still do--at their best. Her husky drawl of a voice remains as precious and fragile as a chandelier, and it well suits these insidiously melodic, intimate songs.

New Jukebox Added

We have compiled over 40 of our most favorite electronica songs that have refused to leave our jukebox over the past year.

Listen to the collection in its entirety HERE

The BQE by Sufjan Stevens

it’s an instrumental tribute to New York’s (kind of) infamous Brooklyn Queen’s Expressway. Asthmatic Kitty’s press release described the piece as being “inspired by the programmatic symphonies of the Impressionists, but it aspires to the pageantry of Copland and the melodrama of a John Williams movie score.” Musically, it owes some obvious homage to Phillip Glass, of whom Sufjan has never been cagey about his admiration for. And there’s not a little Brian Eno sprinkled throughout either, but those are only vague inspirations. Really, The BQE is its own thing. It jumps tones and moods with abandon. There are strings. There are wind instruments. There are brass instruments. There are choirs. There’s the electro blitzkrieg that’s been prevalent on his offerings for the I’m Not There soundtrack and Dark Was the Night compilation. There’s every instrument you’ve ever heard of. There’s a few you haven’t. In short, there’s simply no reservation or modesty employed whatsoever. The BQE is a marvelous experience, one of the year’s finest albums, and one more heretofore unexplored side from one of this generation’s most gifted and imaginative artists.

The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is an incidental 12.7 miles of urban roadway built over the course of several decades (1939-1964), spear-headed by the master architect Robert Moses to accommodate for the increase of commercial and commuter traffic in New York City's outer boroughs. The roadway was a painstaking piecemeal project, poorly planned, badly built, and relentlessly encumbered by the obvious obstacles of the era: red tape, neighborhood protests, World War II, and a congested borough whose sequestering layout proved ill-fitting for the automobile. The resulting expressway-a pockmarked, serpentine, congested BQE-has become one of Brooklyn's most notable icons of urban blight. And, for Sufjan Stevens, an object of unmitigated inspiration.

Texas Rose, The Thaw and The Beasts by The Castanets

Texas Rose is moody and layered, and Raposa is adept at creating a world that is deep, enveloping, and enticing. Texas Rose is moody and layered, and Raposa is adept at creating a world that is deep, enveloping, and enticing. There’s a certain kind of magic going on here and it needs to be accounted for.

listen to more great music HERE

Embryonic by The Flaming Lips

This is accessible music pushed to the very edge of accessibility, far away from the safety of the band's song-oriented efforts "At War with the Mystics" and "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots." What The Flaming Lips have accomplished with Embryonic is impossible to ignore: an ambitious double album in an age where the single is making a comeback, a collection of music that makes a 25-year-old band sound vital and new.