Wait a minute, a dream pop album that didn’t come out of Brooklyn? Is that actually allowed? Invisible Elephant, a one-man creation which blends instruments ranging from guiros to a toddler’s drum, wouldn’t sound out of place nestled amongst the likes of Grizzly Bear, Here We Go Magic, Beach House and Quiet Lights but may have to be disqualified from membership of that particular scene on account of hailing from Blackpool.

Geographically, Invisible Elephant may be worlds apart from Brooklyn but musically, one suspects a record collection with many similarities to the aforementioned denizens of NYC. The Lights Go Out is a blissed out wash of sound and noise. In this instance, the distinction between sound and noise is an important one to make, for while The Lights Go Out floats along for the majority of its 30 minutes, occasionally an outbreak of heavy distortion and white noise crank up the atmosphere. It’s an effective ploy. You Can Have It All, a synthy wash which eventually ends up shuffling along to a decelerated James Brown drum beat, becomes an overpowering slab of noise, enough to stop you in your tracks.

Elsewhere, the delicacy and almost crystalline nature of songs like Still Falling In The Net provide balance and add to the overall success of the album in being something to listen to rather than something which could all to easily end up as background noise, while Wind-Up Bird is either crying out to be remixed by Massive Attack or is a remix of a Massive Attack track – it’s difficult to tell which.

The Lights Go Out is available as a free download here, or as a Limited Edition hand numbered CD with bonus tracks from here.

Invisible Elephant’s MySpace is here.

Calgary. What’s with the place? Beautiful and intricate music with a dark and menacing subtext like Woodpigeons’ ornate chamber-pop murder ballads which detail disposing of bodies and Chad VanGaalen’s inventive blend of folk, rock and electronica with its tales of hearing the voices of the dead and murder victims who just refuse to die. To that list can now be added Brock Geiger. Invitation is the latest album to dip into the city’s folk-noir style.

Geiger’s velvety lamenting vocals and pretty melodies are at the very least movingly melancholic and frequently convey a slightly more sinister message. Opening track Cliffs, a swooning marriage of Geiger’s guitar and Clea Foofat’s mournful cello, contains the lyric ‘drove them to the cliffs, smashed their heads right in’. Later, Geiger yearningly sings ‘I just wanted to be your man, but I think you’ve heard I’m a murderer’.

Pieced together over a year, Invitation is a glorious achievement which in places, such as the gently meandering I’ll Go Down, stands equal to anything by the likes of Iron & Wine or Sufjan Stevens.

Invitation by Brock Geiger is available now from here.

Taught to play piano by a student of the last scholar of Tschaikowski , Nils Frahm follows up his beautiful album The Bells with this double A-side.

Unter / Uber, which will be be released by Erased Tapes on August 23^rd, serves as a microcosm of Frahn’s music. Fluttering and light, the two miniature pieces, both of which come in at under two minutes, are served perfectly by the accompanying video shot by German film maker Ralph Etter.

The single also features a remix of Unter by Rutger Zuydervelt, the man behind Machinefabriek.

Nils Frahm will be touring with Rachel Grimes and opening for Olafur Arnalds this Autumn.

For those of you who like your record collection to be a little bit special, Brian Records will be issuing a 5″ lathe cut version of the single. More information on that can be found here.

Nils Frahm – Unter (Official Music Video) from Erased Tapes on Vimeo.

Review by Glynn Bird

Arcade Fire are unusual. They are independent in the  true sense of the word; they write their own material, produce their own albums, own their publishing rights and have a self-destrutive attitude to their own profitability. They rebuff offers of lucrative sponsorship and advertising offers. By their own admission, they were skint as The Suburbs hit the shops in August 2010.

The Suburbs is a concept album, with the clue in the title. It is brighter than the bleak Neon Bible and more tuneful than the fêted debut Funeral. It takes a few listens to get the full appeal of the album, perhaps due to it being spread over sixteen tracks but once the songs have worked their magic, it will be on repeat.

The band are doing festivals and large arenas this year, but their sound isn’t stadium-friendly in the way that Coldplay’s is, it just has a grandeur and largesse that a smaller stage can’t contain. Arcade Fire know how to move their audience with musical swells, tempo changes and shifting dynamics. As well as having an enviable live reputation, their songs survive the recording process to produce memorable and moving pop songs.

While the soundscape is epic, the subject matter is deeply personal; family, kids, neighbourhood, streets, housing, growing up and youth are frequently referenced. It is unashamedly sentimental in it’s depiction of small-town North America.

The audio is deliberately unpolished, with each track having been mastered to 12″ vinyl before being played back and digitally recorded before publishing to CD. This is the length our Canadian friends go to achieve an “authentic” analogue sound. Win Butler’s voice is expressive and melodic with shades of John Lennon on Deep Blue.

Crank up the volume and lose yourself.

• Arcade Fire
• Arcade Fire live in New York

Andrew Morgan follows up the remarkable Please Kid, Remember (which scooped the Suitcase Orchestra album of the year last year) with his new album, Grey Light Of The Season. Final mixing is underway and the album should be out in early Autumn which is fitting as his last outing was described here as ‘the sound of leaves turning from green to gold.’

The tracklisting for Grey Light Of The Season is as follows.

01. Granville
02. Blood Moon
03. No One
04. St. Petersberg
05. Laurel
06. Winterlight
07. Summertime
08. Pinetum
09. University
10. Nightfall, Magdalen St.
11. Cadet
12. Statue on Summer St.
13. Over
14. Daegu Nights

A few hours ago, I’m ashamed to say, I’d never heard of Rutger Zuydervelt’s musical project Machinefabriek. I’ve spent the hours since the arrival of an email from him alerting me to the release of two new EPs, immersed in his music and rummaging around the internet, clicking on links which have revealed an impressive array of work, both musical and artistic – Zuydervelt is a graphic designer with a knack for producing original and stylistically fresh CD and record sleeves.

Already this morning, after listening to Machinefabriek’s two new EPs, I’ve been delving into the back catalogue. Last year, Zuydervelt was brought together by a film director with Peter Broderick to compose a film score and although the work with the director was, in Zuydervelt’s words, a ‘disaster’, the pair continued with their project and produced an album of staggering beauty. Described by Broderick as the music he is most proud of making, the six tracks on Blank Grey Canvas Skies combine strings, piano and drones in a manner which in places has the power to break even the hardest of hearts.

Duotoon, the first of Machinefabriek’s two latest EPs, is a single track made purely with computer generated sine waves, layered and edited using an antiquated piece of computer software. It’s a simple idea but one which, through the care in which it has been handled, results in an absorbing and far from monotonous composition, its 19 minutes encompassing shifting in volume and intensity throughout, never once sounding jarring.

The Hilary Jeffery Tape, released on a bright orange cassette, with free MP3 downloads to accompany, is a collaboration with trombonist Hilary Jeffery. Brooding and at times menacing, this is the film-noir to the cinematic beauty of Zuydervelt’s collaboration with Broderick.

Further information on Machinefabriek can be found here.

A peek at Rutger Zuydervelt’s graphic design work, in particular his album artwork, can be had here.

Review by Beau Lark

One of the best things about getting to exist in a society that allows for creative expression is to witness someone doing what they love, with undeniable talent and confidence in what they’ve chosen. If you have been lucky enough to see The Mariner’s Children, you’ve bore witness to this. Particularly if you were at the small, cramped Wilmington Arms in London on August 4. Proof? The lead singer’s speech was winded between songs. From his stomping. Imagine for a second stomping long enough and hard enough to become out of breath. You get the point.

There is so much greatness packed into this band. Fluctuating in number, this night they were a 7 piece, snuggling up together on the small stage, comfortable in one another’s space. Each member was key in creating the huge, warm, can’t-tear-your-ears-away sound that came from the stage. At the front and most immediate was Benedict Rubinstein the lead singer. The moment he started singing, you hoped he wouldn’t stop. Ever. His voice has character, personality and depth – best of all, he knows how to use it, from a cooing whisper to a pleading shout.

The rest of the band supported with beautiful vocal harmonies and well-schooled hits of banjo, violin, cello, double bass, and percussion. The Mariner’s Children sound like a big family playing music together in the way they trust each other to do their best to support the song, to honor the music – not an ego in sight. With a nod to traditional maritime music, they manage to construct extremely listenable, dynamic, fresh takes on a form of orchestral folk rock that’s been making the rounds these days.

Mark these words – Mariner’s Children will become a very popular band. Assuming they stay together and catch a break label-wise, you’ll be hearing them for a long time to come. Try and catch them now.

The Mariner’s Children can be found here.

It would be easy to dismiss the field of minimalist music as samey, a sparse soundscape where an almost imperceptible background hum is occasionally penetrated by the odd electronic effect or a field recording of a burbling stream and birdsong. These two new releases on the Home Normal label demonstrate perfectly why that would be a mistake.

By minimalist standards, Whispers, Then Silence by Elian is a positive onslaught of sound. Once you are through the opening three minutes of static, the peace is interrupted by vibraphone and things never return to the dead calm that preceded them. By turns light and serene and dark and insistently intense, the album peaks with Magnification and Minimization, eight minutes of twisted orchestration which totally negates the other commonly held misconception about this type of music; that it is a background noise, something to be heard but not really listened to. Michael Duane Ferrell, the man behind Elian, has warped the strings into something which very much demands your attention. Try carrying on with whatever you are doing when Magnification and Minimization kicks in and you’ll soon realise that minimalist compositions can overwhelm you as much as the loudest rock songs or the most swooning classical pieces.

Engaged Touches by Celer is the flipside of the minimalist coin. Put this on as background music and you probably wouldn’t hear it, you really do have to listen to this. Dreamlike and expansive, this is the kind of minimalism that by rights you should listen to in a specially designed pod. This is the music of the future that played out in 1970s science fiction films. Celer, produce music which has an infinite nature.  At times barely more than a notion, it gently swells and rolls, single notes strung out over minutes. The sweep of Engaged Touches is at times breathtakingly beautiful.

Whispers, Then Silence by Elian is released on August 20^th.

Engaged Touches by Celer is released on August 13^th.

For more information click here.

Next time your favourite band disappear into a studio for three years, scrapping entire albums and taking two months to overdub four bars of bass guitar slip a copy of Piecemeal, the debut album by Chicago’s Like Pioneers, under the studio door. It’s a study on how to get things done.

Made up of former members of Bound Stems, the Narrator and a handful of other Chicago bands, Like Pioneers have only been together 8 months but have already got their debut album Piecemeal written, in the can and ready for release.

Initially, the plan was just for a group of friends to play some music together but their sessions quickly turned into a weekend in a studio and an album was born. No messing about here.

The resulting album may be raw but it isn’t rough, doesn’t sound rushed and captures the sound of a band brimming with ideas and songs which haven’t had the life throttled out of them by fancy studio equipment and over zealous knob twiddling. There’s a feeling of getting stuff down in one take and as a result, the energy levels on this record are infectiously high.

Lead single English Garden neatly encapsulates the whole album; interwoven harmonies and guitars, catchy melodies and driving rhythms. It isn’t all helter skelter though, Some People, Exit Row and Teakettles No 1 all inject a sense of space into proceedings, the latter complete with twinkling xylophone and folky accordion. Where it all comes together best though is the closing track, Crab Candy. Setting out as a fractured piano ballad, it pivots halfway through around some big reverby piano chords before setting off on a lightly psychedelic ramble through swirling organ and treated vocals.

Piecemeal is released on August 17^th. By next Christmas Like Pioneers could already have a Best Of out at this rate.

Click here for more information.

Foon Yap makes music which breaks your heart or, when accompanied by The Roar, kicks your sorry ass. Here she tackles the Suitcase Orchestra Q&A.

If I were to play just one of your songs to someone who hasn’t heard your music, which would it be and why?

It would be La FOON NIKITA. I love that song. Have you ever noticed how agreeable disco is to walking? I live in the inner-city and walk everywhere, and the disco-influenced melodies came to me over several weeks of traipsing around downtown. It’s like my own personal anthem, and helps me be my own best cheerleader. I would play it to someone who hasn’t ever heard my music because it expresses a very public side of me and hopefully makes them feel as exuberant as I do when I hear it. The FOONYAP songs are too personal and naked to play randomly to a random person.

You are being sent to the moon. You’re allowed to take 1 album. What is it?

I wouldn’t need to take any albums. Everything I’ve ever heard, or need to hear, is stored in my brain, and I can turn it on and off at-will. Much more interesting than 1 album ever could be. And won’t the moon have crazy galaxy noises that I can listen to?

On the subject of being sent to the moon, what 3 things would definitely be in your suitcase?

1. My makeup bag (there would be more than 3 things in it…but I have to look fabulous on the moon!)

2. Coconuts, I fucking love coconuts. And apparently you can live off them for a good long while.

3. Wait, am I being sent as an experiment in social isolation, or for VA-CAY?

If the former is the case, my last object would be a notebook with unlined pages, which has one of those pen loops- I’d have a Sharpie in that pen loop that would never run out, and I would go anywhere, for long periods of time, in my head.

If I was being sent to the moon for vacation, my last item would be a bottomless bottle of Australian Shiraz-Cabernet, and I would get drunk and watch the galaxy all day? long. Do they have days on the moon? And I would prefer to be on the dark side of the moon if I may. In which case I would sneak a flashlight in my stockings.

What film would you be a character in?

Any film with lots of guns and big explosions in which I would also be able to do kung-fu stunts. Maybe Bad Boyz II. I would be the secret ass-kicking Kung-Fu Asian gangstress you overlooked.

Tell us an interesting fact.

The only rules in FOONYAP and The Roar are:

1. FUN FIRST and

2. NO GIRLS ALLOWED (I’m a vampire).

Tell us about a band or singer we might not have heard about who should be featured on Suitcase Orchestra.

Christian Hansen and The Autistics from my province of Alberta. I haven’t seen them live, but I’ve heard their newest album, and we’re playing a show with them in October, and I’m sooooo excited because it sounds like they’re into spandex as much as I am.

Recommend a book.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Micheal Pollan- you will never look at food the same way again.

Which literary character would play you in the book of your life?

A mishmash between Jo from Little Women, pre-professor love, and Sherlock Holmes, but slightly more well-adjusted.

What’s the worst record in your collection?

I don’t want to trash-talk anyone.

What question should I always ask in a Q & A? And answer it please.

I always ask people what’s on their mind lately, because I have so much on my mind.

What’s on my mind? How weird it is that some things are expected to come in ‘ones’. One wife, one religion, one mortgage…etc.
And how awesome Vietnamese food is.

Foon Yap’s delicate solo work can be heard here.

Foon Yap & The Roar store their ‘vampire sex metal disco’ here.