Sigur Ros in New Orleans

One of my all time favourite bands, Sigur Rós, is coming all the way from Iceland to do a North American tour later this year and will be playing on October 3 in New Orleans. I bought my ticket to go see them today and am excited to finally see them live! They have tons of awesome material and lots of music videos, like the awesome one below for the song Dauðalogn off their 2012 album Valtari.

Top 5 Albums of 2012

Some awesome music was released in 2012, and I've compiled a list of my five favourite records released this year - none of which you will be hearing on the radio anytime soon unfortunately. Check them out to hear the amazing stuff that true musical artists are creating by clicking on the link attached to each of my favourite tracks from each album!

Honourable Mentions:
Mono - For My Parents
Josh Varnedore - Sun Chapter
Jodis - Black Curtain
How to Dress Well - Total Loss
Cloudkicker - Fade
Lights Out Asia - Hy-Brasil

5. Almeeva - EP #2
Something a bit different that what I normally listen to, Almeeva is trancey, up-tempo music mostly created using traditional instruments, but with a minimalist idealism. The pulsing rhythm sections on this short EP of five songs really drive the music, complemented nicely by the spacey guitars. Looking forward to hearing more from Almeeva soon.

Favourite Track: Strobe

4. Hammock - Departure Songs
Almost a little disappointing by Hammock standards, it goes to show that even an average Hammock album is still so much better than almost any other music currently being released. There are 19 songs on this double album, which makes it a little too long for my tastes, but most of these songs are unbelievably good, with particular standouts being Cold Front, Tape Recorder, Dark Circles, and Ten Thousand Years Won't Save Your Life. This is Hammock's most ambitious album to date, with many songs breaking away from their traditional ambient approach, and much more utilization of percussion and rhythm guitars. It makes for a cathartic atmosphere in this album about loss, and the music video series directed by David Altobelli is a perfect companion. I'm looking forward to Hammock's next release which has been described as the complete anthithesis to this one.

Favourite Track: Cold Front


3. Helios - Moiety 
Keith Kenniff is an internationally recognised composer (whose music you have undoubtedly heard in films or advertising but never noticed), and Helios is just one of the many projects he is involved in. He generally takes a minimalist approach to writing music, but there is absolute beauty in the hypnotic and soothing compositions. The production is lush and cinematic, with post-modern piano often taking the forefront but supported by gorgeous guitar melodies and dense ambience  I must start checking out the rest of his back catalog soon, but first I have to digest Helios' latest release, a remix album featuring two of my other favourite artists - Hammock and Rhian Sheehan. I guarantee you will lose yourself in this music.

Favourite Track: Nothing It Can

2. Neurosis - Honor Found In Decay
The tenth studio album by post-metal giants Neurosis is monolithic. At its heaviest, the music represents an epic landslide, obliterating all in its path, while at its softest, the listener feels calm and at one with the cosmos. As is expected from Neurosis at this stage in their career, the musicianship and production is simply outstanding. The tribal drumming by Jason Roeder on songs such as At The Well, My Heart For Deliverance, and Casting Of The Ages is something which can be replicated by no other band, the vocal styles of Scott Kelly and Steve von Til complement each other perfectly, and the varied song structures used contribute hugely to the success of the album. Neurosis have always been a band which make you feel a part of something greater, but on Honor Found In Decay they take it to a whole new level.

Favourite Track: My Heart For Deliverance

1. Deftones - Koi No Yokan
Deftones are one of only a handful of bands I listened to ten years ago that I still listen to today. This is quite amazing considering how much my music tastes have changed since I was 15. Back then, the Deftones were my absolute band and not much has changed since then - I haven't stopped listening to this album since it was released on November 12! Koi No Yokan is a Japanese saying expressing a premonition of true love upon first meeting someone, and it aptly describes this album. The production is full and lush, and every band member is at the absolute top of his game, none more so than vocalist Chino Moreno and guitarist Stephen Carpenter. Every song on this breathtaking album is ultimately a supreme lesson in emotional groove and outstanding songwriting.

Favourite Track: Rosemary

Exciting albums coming in 2013:
Jakob - TBA
Tool - TBA
Rhian Sheehan - Stories From Elsewhere
*Shels - TBA
Palms - TBA

Bugs & Music

It's too hot in Louisiana to do much field work at the moment so I've been spending my time in the lab processing insect samples and I now have a start of a collection going on, as you can see in the pictures below. It's a real challenge trying to properly preserve and identify the insects, but ultimately very rewarding as well when you finally manage to identify a sample or when you find a cool insect you've never seen before.

On the other hand, it can be infuriatingly frustrating and such slow progress at times when trying to make correct identifications. So to keep me calm and stop me losing my mind over whether the hind trochanter is elongated or not, if the pronotal lobe is adjacent to the scutellum, whether the hind tarsi has four or five segments, or if the front tibia has two or three apical spines, I often listen to chill music. Top of the list is almost always Hammock, and they released a new song and music video a couple of days ago, called Tape Recorder. At the same time they also announced that their new album will be a double album entitled Departure Songs, to be released in October. Judging by this song along with snippets the band has posted on Facebook, this album should be impressive (and I have a suspicion they will be releasing a video for every song as well)!


Off on our lab's second east coast census trip of the summer on July 26, can't wait to hit the road again...

Good Year For Music!

So much music by some of my favourite artists has been or will be released this year but there's a few bands in particular which have either impressed me with a new album or that I'm particularly excited about:

Jakob
Probably the best New Zealand band of all time, these guys are slowly getting the international recognition they have long deserved. It's been six years since they last released their last album Solace, but they have a new album in the works which should be released late this year. Below is a teaser of snippets of demo tracks they recorded a while back, which sounds great. Having heard three of the new songs live in Auckland last June I know this album is going to be killer!


Sigur Ros
These guys are one of my all time favourite bands and have been around since 1994, releasing a number of quality albums in that time. They're well-known around their world for writing hauntingly beautiful music and the incredible singing in Icelandic, Hopelandic (an invented language), and even English of their chief vocalist, Jonsi.

They released a new album this year titled Valtari which a return to form for them and bit of a departure from their previous album Með Suð I Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust, which was their weakest effort yet. To accompany the release of Valtari they came up with the awesome concept of commissioning a music video to accompany each track from different artists all throughout the world, giving them a small budget and giving them complete creative freedom to produce whatever the music inspires from them. Three of the eight videos have been released and the one below, by Inga Birgisdottir, is my favourite so far. It's a really simple, clever, and well-executed video and the song is probably the best on the new Sigur Ros album as well, combining for an awesome visual and auditory experience.


Mono
Mono are another well-known stalwart of the post-rock genre, with a number of epic albums under their belt. They are one of the greatest exponents of the post-rock crescendo and are going to be releasing a new album on September 4. From the looks and sound of the trailer they recently posted to YouTube it's going to be epic!


Hammock
Tied with Jakob for the title of best band ever, Hammock will also be releasing a new album sometime this year, which is currently being mixed in Australia. I'm super excited about this as pretty much everything they've ever released has been 100% quality!

Lights Out Asia
A very recent release (June 5th), Hy-Brasil follows in the tradition of this band to release huge-sounding and sonically-appealing songs of electronically influenced post-rock. All of their previous albums have been awesome and have got a lot of listens from me, and this one sounds like it will be no exception after the first few listens. They also released a music video to accompany the song They Disappear Into The Palms, which you can check out (and try to make sense of) below.


I'm really loving the frequency with which bands are releasing music videos to go with their songs, and not just boring old videos of them playing. When an accompanying music video has some sort of artistic quality to it, it really can draw the listener deeper in to the music and provide a whole new listening experience.

Jakob - Controle

By far the best live band I have ever witnessed, makes it even better they're from New Zealand:

More Hammock

Yet another video featuring some work by my favourite band, Hammock. This is becoming a bit of a habit, but it's probably because they keep putting out awesome material. The video is made by David Altobelli, the same guy as who made their Breathturn video. I think it's pretty visually stunning.

Reborrowing the Past

Looks like Rhian Sheehan had a real video made by filmmaker Eliot Rausch for the song with Hammock I posted about the other day. It's great! Looks like the rest of Eliot's work is pretty cool too...

Rhian Sheehan & Hammock - Borrowing the Past

Two of my all-time favourite artists/musicians have just released a track they collaborated on. The track is called Borrowing the Past and was originally released on Rhian Sheehan's EP Seven Tales of the North Wind, a great album in itself. Rhian Sheehan is a New Zealand composer and musician, who has released a number of excellent albums ranging from chilled out electronic music to experimental ambience to accompany a book of photos of New Zealand landscapes taken by his father. He asked the band Hammock to remix the track and add their own distinctive touch to it, which they did to great effect. Hammock hail from Tennessee here in the USA and have been probably my favourite band for a couple of years now. They've released about ten EPs and albums over the last eight years (my favourite being Chasing After Shadows...Living with the Ghosts) and produce dreamy down-tempo rock soundscapes. I've posted one of their videos on my blog before, which you can watch here.

The end result of the collaboration is 6 minutes and 22 seconds of pure bliss. The track inspired me so much I made a quick video to accompany it using footage I shot of a sunset from the top of the Mason Bay sand dunes on a trip I had to Stewart Island a couple of years ago.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

As True as Troilus

I haven't heard a band this good for a long time. Their name is FareWell Poetry, and they hail from Paris. The music they play could be described as very experimental, combining many instruments with spoken word and fairly unconventional songwriting. Their debut album Hoping for the Invisible to Ignite is an outstanding collection of four songs which flow seamlessly into one another, creating an ethereal sort of mood, especially when combined with the arty visuals they employ to complement the music.

Below is a video of the first song from the album being performed live at Eglise Saint-Eustache, a beautiful church in Paris. It's a long song, but all 20 minutes of it is pure quality.

Tundra Lights - Four Nights Under the Lights

This is another great song with an excellent accompanying video. It's by a one man band, Tundra Lights, hailing from Georgia in the United States. They have many songs as good as this one and I've been listening to them quite heavily in recent weeks, but this one in particular.

Beautiful Video

I've known about the band Hammock for about one year now and they've slowly grown into one of my favourite bands. This is a masterfully constructed video for their song Breathturn which tells a really sweet story. It's well worth the six minutes of your time to watch the whole thing. I'd recommend wearing quality headphones and giving the video your full attention...enjoy!

Mammoth

This is some artwork I did for my old band Mammoth. It was originally intended to end up as a flyer for a show, but we never got around to playing it because we all left to go overseas. Members are now in Christchurch, London, Boston, and myself in Baton Rouge.

My sister also did some artwork for our EP, some of which ended up looking like this:

Inside the booklet featured two quotes which I find inspirational and served as a theme to some songs on the album:

"In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught." - Baba Dioum

"Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the Earth." - Henry David Thoreau

Jakob

On Saturday night I went to a gig at The Kings Arms in Auckland. The band I went to see was JAKOB. These guys would be close to my favourite band on this planet ever since I bought their Cale : Drew album back in 2004.

This is a band which is always simply phenomenal to watch perform live. I've now been to seven Jakob shows, and all of them have been amazing. The best thing about the band is that it doesn't matter what songs they put into their set; they have hardly any weak songs and they all sound mindblowingly good live.

The setlist on Saturday night was no exception:

Malachite
Pneumonic
Magna Carta (New Song)
Convertor (New Song)
Nice Day For An Earthquake
Jimmy Hoffa
Harmonia (New Song)
Oran Mor
Ageena
Controle

The three new songs that will probably be on their upcoming album all sounded great. The support bands (Sora Shima and Popstrangers) were also really good and set the mood well for the Jakob set.

Here's a clip from the show I recorded with my digital camera:



I cannot recommend these guys highly enough...check them out!!

The Best Country in the World

While I'm overseas studying I'm pretty sure that there are going to be moments when I feel homesick. I'm not really looking forward to it, because let's face it, New Zealand is a pretty damn good place to live. I think the single best thing is the large amount of unspoilt wilderness. From almost anywhere in the country you can drive for less then two hours and find yourself on a deserted beach with golden sand, in a patch of native bush, or halfway up a snow-covered mountain. So, I put together a video of some of my favourite places in New Zealand to help remind me of home.



The footage was shot on various trips around the South Island of New Zealand with work, university, and my friends and family, and I edited the video in Windows Movie Maker (I thought this program was crap, but the Windows 7 version actually works quite well!)

The song is by my old band, Mammoth, and is called Two Weeks.

Rhythm, melody and tone

So, anyone who knows me will know that I like music, especially when it's played LOUD.

I'd like to think that my music tastes have broadened in the last couple of years. From what was once a mainly narrow-minded heavy metal focus, I now enjoy numerous genres including post-rock, ambient, dub, electronica, indie, and various types of metal. However, my favourite type of music is one which can't be pigeonholed by a genre - New Zealand music. NZ music has a distinctive and unique feel about it, where you just know it has been crafted on the shaky isles.

I've played the drums for about eight years now, but never really put the time in to become really good at it, mainly due to my other interests. I played in three bands; Mammoth, Varraghor and Innard Splatter, playing gigs all over the country and making various recordings. The times I had with my friends in these bands were some of the best of my life so far. While I'm in the United States I plan to learn how to play the guitar so I can record some tunes of my own in the future.

Below I've decided to list some of my very favourite bands, including my favourite album by each band (click on their name to link to a myspace/bandcamp page to listen to their music).

Favourite NZ bands:
Jakob  - Solace

HDU - Fire Works

Akaname - Akaname

Little Bushman - Pendulum

Ender - Ender
















 Ulcerate - The Destroyers of All

 Salmonella Dub - Inside the Dub Plates

Favourite international bands:
Isis - Panopticon

Dredg - The Pariah, the Parrot, the Delusion

Lights out Asia - Eyes Like Brontide

Rosetta - A Determinism of Morality

Cult of Luna - Somewhere Along the Highway

Sigur Ros - ( )

Braveyoung - We are Lonely Animals