Underrated Swedish rockers First Floor Power don't seem to mind getting the Silent treatment. Lead singer Sara Wilson let her synth-pop side lead her forward on 2006's Love & Youth for the Knife's Rabid label, but her long-running main band gets back to the guitar-driven stuff (with a few synths still) on "The Jacket", the first single from their forthcoming Don't Back Down!. In this remix, Knife half Karin Dreijer Andersson takes the song back to the electronic sphere, which sounds like some kind of mythological underworld, or else maybe a planet-destroying space station. Atop a basic New Order-esque house beat and some other crackles of percussion, some synths plink rapidly, ominously, while others coo gently. The Knife's familiar (strange) vocal effects give Wilson's vocal an edge of menace: "If your jacket is getting too heavy for you/ Please, let me take it off." From there, Dreijer constructs a house of unusual sounds-- Wilson's frosty breathing, her wordless ululations-- and proceeds to haunt the shit out of it. Not all power currupts: Don't Back Down! is now streaming in its entirety on First Floor Power's MySpace page.

[from Don't Back Down!; due 05/05/08 in Sweden and 05/23/08 in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland on Crunchy Frog]

Dr. Dog's Scott McMicken was so taken with Pepi Ginsberg that he not only collaborated with the New York singer/songwriter on her third album, Red, but he also got her signed to Philly label Park the Van. It's easy to see the musical attraction. On "The Waterline" Ginsberg sounds thoroughly self-possessed both lyrically and vocally, fitting a breezy, folky arrangement to dark lyrics about trying to keep your head above water. Although it is specifically city-set, the song doesn't sound necessarily urban, but neither does it sound like the freaky folk music emanating from Philadelphia lately. There are jazzier elements pushing the song along: In the high range, a choir of Pepis sing a wordless warble-- the song's most distinctive feature. In the low range, a piano plays the left-hand part of an old boogie rhythm, filling in for a bass guitar and giving the song its ambling lope. In the middle is Pepi herself, singing about how "life is poetry you can't read twice." 

You know how the first time you heard that Andrew W.K. was going to be co-producing Lee "Scratch" Perry's next album you thought to yourself, my god, I would love to be a fly on the wall in that studio? Well, dream come true, basically. Watch as these two eccentrics, seemingly from separate musical universes, form a mutual admiration society and come together to make some auditory magic.

We also added to the archive sweet recent videos from Hot Chip, Clinic, and Parts & Labor.

Hot Chip: "One Pure Thought"

Clinic: "The Witch (Made to Measure)"

Parts & Labor: "The Gold We're Digging"

Another day, another video for Robyn's "Handle Me". This makes three for the single, count 'em, and the budgets seem to be slipping with each. Here she dances and sings in front of a mildly trippy video backdrop.

Jan St. Werner has been in the public eye in the last year or so for Von Südenfed, the collaboration he and his Mouse on Mars partner Andi Toma have with the Fall's Mark E. Smith. But St. Werner keeps busy and often has several projects going on simultaneously. Musically, the man never stays still; even when he's issuing a sequel, it still feels like the first time. Case in point is his new solo album under his Lithops guise. Though it shares the title Mound Magnet with its predecessor, (this is Part 2, subtitled Elevations Above Sea Level), the feel on the tracks I've heard is looser, sillier, comparatively melodic, and more focused on the driving 4/4. The epic "Rosa in a Light Speed Vessel" has a propulsive beat at its core and everything but the kitchen sink is swirling around it in a cyclone of sound-- stomping guitar chords, sea-sick synth moans, what might be a gradually pitch-shifted sample of a bi-plane's engine. It's a track that makes you feel like you're one step behind it for its entire duration, not quite able to figure out what's going on one moment as it has already moved on to the next.   

Hot Chip dropped by Radio 1's "Live Lounge" to chat about the ATP line-up (have fun and be safe, everybody) and they played "One Pure Thought" from the new one as well as a weird but relatively faithful cover of Wiley's rather awesome single "Wearing My Rolex". The BBC stream is super lo-fi, but what are you gonna do? (via I Am Fuel, You Are Friends, who have the mp3s).

Stream:> Hot Chip: Live on BBC Radio 1's "Live Lounge"

Some bands might wield a song title like "Parasite Fungus" as if combining two words with often negative connotations somehow makes a work avant-garde. Frauke rock "Parasite Fungus" as if it's funny (hey, it kind of is) and as if they hate you (they probably don't, but that's their URL if not their M.O.). Either way, the Brooklyn-based punk trio of Tammy Duncan, husband Andrew Duncan, and Goes Cube's David Obuchowski dig this track-- from full-length debut Dirtier Than Horses-- a shallow grave of trebly hammer-on guitar riffs and attention-deficit drumming, then cover it up with some distorted banshee wails. As the drums and cymbal crashes build up intensity, after a verse or so the guitars start to sound less "American Girl" and more "Last Nite"-- albeit quite a bit messier than both. Perhaps it's because they're decomposing: "I'm already dead," Tammy bellows, and almost as soon as the track has begun, sure enough, it goes dead. But that shouldn't stop the parasite fungus. Not yet. (There's also an unofficial video for the track, posted below the link.)

Stream:> Frauke: "Parasite Fungus"

[from Dirtier Than Horses; out now and self-released]

The four-movement title sequence from Chinatown-based composer Nico Muhly's forthcoming LP, Mothertongue, exhumes the detritus of memory. Muhly plumbed his mind for old, useless phone numbers, serial numbers, street numbers-- all the context-dependent codes we accumulate over a lifetime-- and turned them into a secret, subliminal, and ultimately unsolvable cipher. This condensed excerpt from "Mothertongue" begins with the insectile buzz of a mind digesting itself, as mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer unravels sonorous strands of digits with religious fervor. Its palette includes rose-scented Romantic-era strings and mighty modernist synthesizers, and it has the same celestial, ululating quality of Music in 12 Parts by Philip Glass (with whom Muhly has worked in various capacities). Many classical composers seem like the Wizard of Oz; the glowing godhead of the music distracts us from the man behind the curtain. But Muhly always wants to be perceived, and here, we witness the junkyard of his memory being spun into something at once utterly ordinary and utterly strange.

MP3:> Nico Muhly: "Mothertongue" (Excerpt)
[from Mothertongue; due 07/22/08 on Brassland]

Gregor Samsa awoke after a night of unsettling dreams to discover "Jeroen Van Aken", from latest album Rest, had been turned into something nearly half the length of the eight-minute-plus LP version, and its glacially paced arrangement set to this watery video. With even a leading presidential candidate from the party of Al Gore proposing tax cuts likely to encourage global warming, guess everybody knew where those glaciers were headed, right? "It seems the devil's got a grip on me," frontman Champ Bennett intones, accompanied by Nikki King's vocal that wobbles as if coming up from underwater (or "Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl"). The song's central, stately piano is shown in loving detail in the video, along with other pieces of the orchestration. But we also see a cardboard box floating in shimmering water, a bit of crumpled paper-- plastic?-- billowing in the wind, and the pipes of a radiator in some empty apartment. The devil damns the narrator of "Jeroen Van Aken" no matter what he or she does, but this video offers a concise introduction to the song's slow-building tranquility, the hellfire better left to Jerry Lee Lewis or his cousin Jimmy Swaggart. I mean, if we're talking about preachers now.

The latest episode of Pitchfork.tv's "Daytripping" series features Fleet Foxes, who took time to chat with our cameras between their multiple gigs at this year's SXSW. Pitchfork also tagged along in the Seattle psych-folk group's van, scoping out Austin, Texas' lovely scenery and thumbing noses at the Lone Star State Troopers.



The archive of videos continues to expand, and today we have the latest offering from Brooklyn's pop sensation Santogold. The rather disturbing video for "L.E.S. Artistes" finds Santo singing astride a horse, while some city dwellers spill their guts (literally) on the street. It's a little gross, but boy, what a catchy tune propped up by Switch's trademark blippy beats.



And while we're on the subject of weird, here's one from Super Furry Animals' Gruff Rhys and Boom Bip, aka Neon Neon, "I Lust You", which revolves, curiously, around a Jellyfish competiton.



Finally, we have "Shelter From the Ash", from Ben Chasny's Six Organs of Admittance, a no-frills but strikingly pretty video comprised mostly of panoramas of the desert at dusk.

Every ounce of violence spread across Bear in Heaven's debut album last year goes under the magnifying glass in this dark, disturbing clip. And when I say dark, I mean it-- there are passages that are so inky you can hardly make out anything apart from an occasional metal beam on the ceiling. Shades of Guantanamo Bay are clearly evident in the orange-jumpsuited man who is strapped to a chair by hooded captors, who then allow him to be beaten by a white-haired vamp with severe dental problems. The lyrics about a world full of enemies (and the song's patently ironic title) seem to be the jumping off point for the video's overarching paranoia.