Tag Archives: Phoenix

We bloody love Yuksek

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One thing I like about mixcloud is that I’ve set up ‘new cloudcast’ alerts to my work email, and it brightens my day when a new mix wings its way towards me. Especially when it is someone I love, and don’t hear from enough: king of the remix Yuksek. And doubly especially when the description starts with ‘we bloody love Yuksek’ and the tracklist starts with his remix of the beautiful Lisztomania by Phoenix. French, tres chic, creating melodic electro, and, let’s face it, pretty easy on the eye.

It would be wrong of me not to share the love (and he can sing too, something I didn’t know).

Woody’s Roundup: Field Day

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Let me back up! Field Day has now held its place firmly on the music-loving Londoner’s radar for 4 years. Slightly slow out of the blocks, we first got involved in 2008; a superbly messy affair. Our Field Days have been plagued by the weather that typifies Glastonbury, but also energised by the atmosphere that makes it. Perhaps 2010 is the year the drenched festival curse will be broken in Victoria Park too?

Field Day 2010 will mark our hat-trick, so it may come as no surprise that we thought we’d jump on the Field Day warm-up bandwagon and put out a little post for you all. As suspected, in writing this, one of the most exciting things about Field Day has been looking back. The promoters and programmers are like the Mystic Megs of modern music. Scrolling through the line-ups from 2007-2009, they read like the boards of a rather successful bookie:

2007 – Bat for Lashes, Florence and the Machine, Caribou, Filthy Dukes, Foals, Justice, Late of the Pier, Zombie Disco Squad.
2008 – Brodinski, Crookers, Magistrates, Simian Mobile Disco, White Lies, Wild Beasts.
2009 – Aeroplane, Big Pink, Delphic, Errors, Fake Blood, Mumford & Sons, Santigold, The Temper Trap, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs.

At the time, it was all those people you’d never stumbled across before. Or, that you only had a sort of an inkling you might like. Then, maybe like us, you just had a little wander over, just to see what the blogosphere fuss was really about and all of a sudden you were a fan!

The 2010 spectacle is already complemented by the more ‘commercial’ resurgence in Electronic music. Upward climbing artists, perhaps most notably, names like Egyptian Hip Hop, Gold Panda, Hudson Mohawke, Memory Tapes, Mount Kimbie, Pantha Du Prince, Phoenix and Tensnake stand side by side as equals with their lesser known counterparts, and long-established champions of emerging music (Andrew Weatherall, Erol Alkan, Kieran Hebden, James Holden…). The range of stages caters for every fan, from the Small Disco drinkers of the Lock Tavern to the all-night ravers of the city’s disused east-end Car Parks and Karate Clubs. This, in turn, draws a crowd of hungry young trend setters eager to get a taste of the future legends of our generation.

So, in appreciation of the event’s keen eye for the charts of new and their sure fire tip-offs for the future, we have put together 2 little Zip packages for our Friday-weekly Woody’s Roundup. Links and track lists are below, plus a couple of our favourite mixes from the vaults for good measure. We hope you like it. It should provide some stereo fodder for the prelude, the after party and the recovery should you so require…

See you tomorrow.

Stars of 07 – 09 [zip]

Florence and the Machine – Drumming Song (Boy8bit mix)
Foals - Olympic Airways (Disjokke remix)
Justice – DANCE (Alan Braxe & Fred Falke mix)
Late of the Pier – Bathroom Gurgle (Tronik Youth mix)
Zombie Disco Squad - Esperanto
Aeroplane – Whispers (Love Affair mix)
Fake Blood – Mars

2010 Sampler [zip]

Gold Panda – You (Seams remix)
Pantha Du Prince – Behind the Stars
Brodinski – Arnold Classics (Tony Senghore Staggering & Daggering Mix )
Walls – Burnt Sienna
Mount Kimbie – Field

Mixes
Tensnake RA Podcast 187
Simian Mobile Disco – Forever Fabric
Andrew Weatherall – Dummy Mix July 2010

What Kind Of Breeze Do You Blow?

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With a remix back catalogue that looks like the who’s who of 2009 (Memory Tapes, The XX, Delphic, Phoenix, Lake Heartbeat), What Kind Of Breeze Do You Blow? are preparing for big things in 2010. After the recent release of their first EP, Love of Luxury, Swedish band Montauk are up next with a What Kind Of Breeze Do You Blow? rework of their debut single dropping on their own label, Brilliantine, in the not too distant future… There’s also word of a new live show set to hit state-side this summer.

So, with all this in the pipeline, one half of What Kind Of Breeze Do You Blow? spoke to us about music, the new record label, Toronto, live shows, Hot Chip, Tronik Youth and the future… As if that wasn’t enough, at the end of the interview there’s even an exclusive free download of their first single Love of Luxury for you, from them, to check out what they are all about for yourselves!

Who are What Kind of Breeze do you Blow? and how did you get into music/production?
Well, there’s two of us. We’d both been working on little personal projects of our own for years – one of us purely electronic, and the other purely acoustic, and we realized that we’d never really been able to actually finish anything ever. So, together, we brought in what we felt was really important and compelling about music and found out that we felt exactly the same. At the time we were living in the same small New England city, but we’re transitioning to Toronto now and beginning to involve more people, so things will be changing a lot over the next several months.

What’s in the name?
It’s really wondrous! I’m not sure we ever really intended it to be the name of anything, but it was a phrase that’s really fun to say, particularly outside when you’re having a lot of fun, and it just worked it’s way into our consciousness enough for it to be the first thing in mind when we were looking to make our project official. I love it now because it’s so unmistakably ours, though I always have to take a deep breath and maybe roll my eyes a little whenever I meet anyone in person and they ask what the name of my band is. Still getting used to it.

You mentioned you had a label Brilliantine which I believe launched late 2009. Can you tell us a bit about it and what’s in store for the future of Brilliantine?
Brilliantine was formed with Faisal Jehan of Ohh! Crapp.. and Nightmagnets as a vehicle for us to make known a lot of the great music we encounter, which I guess is pretty standard as far as new labels go. As we work long distance, though, and it’s just the two of us, we really rely more on the strength of the music we love and the clarity of our identities coming through in everything we do.

Ideally, there’s no set pattern to the music that would show up on a Brilliantine release, but it will never be something we don’t absolutely love enough to put many, many hearts next to in an email or a blog post. We’ve also got loads of amazing friends who do amazing remixes, and now we’ve got a vehicle to get them to loads of people. Incidentally, it made a lot of sense to get the label started by releasing the first What Kind of Breeze Do You Blow? single, as it was sort of raring to go out of the gate and needed a home.

We’ve got the Montauk single coming up next month which is just an amazing track which in a perfect world should just take over everything this summer (we’ll see) and we’ve worked hard putting together a really compelling remix pack to go with it. Coming in the next few months we have the debut single from a lo-fi pop sleeper from Boston called Sweet Track, a pack of What Kind of Breeze Do You Blow? remixes and a second single, and a complete and utter pop smash from someone a lot of people know…

You’ve remixed some of our favourite artists of 2009 from all over the world, including 2 of the UK’s most sought-after new bands; The XX and Delphic. How does What Kind of Breeze Do You Blow? go about choosing the tracks to work their magic on? Are they just all your favourites?
They are. We just try to take what it is we love about a track and make it bigger, and experiment with ideas we’re working into the tracks we make for ourselves.

As well as remixing some hot new acts from the UK, you’ve also been remixed yourselves by London’s Tronik Youth on your own track Love of Luxury. So, we wondered, what does What Kind of Breeze Do You Blow? make of the UK music scene right now? Are you fans of the DJs and producers coming out of it?
Being from North America, we tend to think of things as either From Here or From There, so a lot of the great acts we love and work with exist in this very liberated, varied scene that crosses country borders from Sweden to the UK to Belgium – though there really is a strong core right now in the UK with Tronik Youth and The C90s and Alex Egan’s Astronomer project… I feel like all centred around a love of much of the same things.

Can you tell us a little bit about the music scene in Toronto and any exciting new talent over there?
Well, only one of us is currently there, and it’s only been a few months, so like any scene there’s a period of acclimation. What I’ve seen so far has been very encouraging, though, and there are a number of venues (Wrongbar, for example) that can put on a consistent schedule of compelling shows. I’m really excited about Parallels - I think they’re going to get very big, very fast.

What are What Kind of Breeze Do You Blow? hoping for in 2010? Anyone you’d love to work with? What can we get excited about?
Everything. We want everything. We’ve got a couple new singles in varying stages of completion, an album nearly half done that’s evolving to a really interesting, unexpected place and we’re working hard to put together a live show that we can be really happy with by this summer. Maybe some Brilliantine shows outside of North America sometime later in the year, and a series of DJ nights in Toronto is in the works as well.

We’ve got remixes on the next couple of Brilliantine releases, a very, very loud edit of the next Hot Chip single, a remix for Tronik Youth and a few surprises as well.

Finally, who is on your ‘ones to watch’ list for 2010?
Well, Montauk, honestly. Holiday is a huge track, and there’s a lot more where that came from. I’m also very, very excited for the Ted & Francis album, and it’s inexplicable how they’re flying so far below the radar still.

It seems we’re at the next stage of really good, timely acts finally crystallizing their remixes/shows/culture into albums – it happened in 2006 with bands like Justice and Digitalism and Simian Mobile Disco, and it’s happening this year with Aeroplane, and Holy Ghost! and Ted & Francis. It’s going to be an exciting year.

Thanks What Kind Of Breeze Do You Blow? for taking the time to talk to us and especially for this download of their single Love of Luxury:

Love of Luxury (Original mix)
Love of Luxury – Tronik Youth penthouse mix

If you haven’t heard it yet, you can pick up the remix package for free here too which includes all the artists mentioned:
What Kind Of Breeze Do You Blow? The Remixes