As if his plan to write an album about each state of America wasn’t grandiose enough, Sufjan Stevens has elected to zoom in on the map and compose a symphony about a single road.

B.Q.E. is Stevens’ attempt to represent the Brooklyn-Queensway Expressway in music. Having never traversed said highway I wouldn’t be in a position to accurately assess whether or not he has been successful in his aim and I doubt very much that drivers who travel along its 11.7 miles every day would nod knowingly and say “Yup, he’s definitely nailed it.” But, what he has achieved is a vast sweeping symphony which stands as a success musically as much as any of his other output.

There’s one brief wobble in Introductory Fanfare For The Hooper Heroes, which sounds like it belongs on a Disney soundtrack, but that aside, the whole piece is beautifully orchestrated and pieced together, swooning and fluttering through 40 or so minutes.

As an entity, Stevens’ B.Q.E. has been around for a couple of years since it premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2007 but has now been issued as part of a multi-media boxed set which also includes a DVD, an essay, a comic book and a View-Master reel.

As paeans to stretches of tarmac go, it’s infinitely more listenable than Route 66 – you can insert your own ‘it’s streets ahead’ joke.

More info here.

Cian Ó Cíobháin has been broadcasting the eclectic spread found on this compilation CD for over ten years now on his An Taobh Tuathail show on RTE in Ireland. It may be one of the best kept secrets in music.

Cíobháin has put together a genre hopping collection to shame the broadcast output of most stations and DJs in this, the third such sampler for his show.

The common denominator is mellowness and this is definitely best listened to very late in the evening.

The mood is set with the opener, Loner Deluxe’s wintry instrumental Frozen Grass, complete with wind howling at the door and icy sounding glockenspiel. Other highlighlights include Rollers/Sparklers minimalist The Evening Station, the warped 60’s sci-fi theme sounding  Loch Raven by Animal Collective and the bleak soundscape of False Memory Syndrome by The Caretaker.

All in all, as soothing a collection of music as you are likely to find, An Taobh Tuathail Vol III will be released in February 2010.

For more information about the show, click here.

You Were Into Them First is a series aiming  to give new bands the limelight we feel they deserve. The first of the series focuses on Edinburgh’s Eagleowl.

Named because an eagleowl can kill a woodpigeon (Eagleowl’s Malcolm Benzie used to work in a record shop with Woodpigeon’s Mark Hamilton apparently, though the rivalry in band names is friendly), Eagleowl describe themselves as a lo-fi post-folk ensemble. If you aren’t sure what that means, this may be easier: Eagleowl are the Spacemen 3 of folk. Simple looping guitar riffs played over a woozy drone of fuzzy strings, breathy, sometimes murmured, vocals, all done to hypnotic effect. On the band’s website, they claim to believe in doing things right, rather than doing things fast – this appears to apply to both the quality of their output and the pace of their songs.

Like Spacemen 3, some of the music is gently mesmerising while other songs like This Is Not Your Lucky Day have a pulsing air of menace about them. Their new single, Sleep the Winter, falls into the former category – it’s a whispered lullaby moving at a glacial pace, which draws you slowly into its titular hibernation.

Sleep The Winter follows their debut EP, For The Thoughts You Never Had, which, to give you an idea of the attention to detail that’s going on here, was released as a limited edition CD with screen printed hand folded card sleeve. That’s now sold out in its physical form, but can still be downloaded from the usual sources. It features Motherfucker which is so positively poppy, by Eagleowl standards, that it even has a drum beat. The titles of the other tracks on the E.P. – Sleeptide, Blanket and Blackout – hint at a desire to be smothered and unconscious which is mirrored in the somnambulant nature of the music.

December the 11^th sees them play at the Bowery in Edinburgh to mark the release of Sleep The Winter, followed by  an appearance at the Sick Kids Sunday charity all dayer, at the GRV in Edinburgh on Suday 31^st January alongside an impressive line-up which includes James Yorkston & Adrian Crowley’s tribute to Daniel Johnston.

Sleep The Winter is released by Kilter on December 11^th. Check that out here.

Eagleowl’s Myspace is here.

He’s Howard Robot and he’s My Robot Friend. He’s released his third album, the electro-folk-pop mash-up that is Soft Core and he has provided the A to our Q.

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

Robot High School because it has a secret agenda. I can’t tell you what the secret agenda is though because then it wouldn’t be a secret anymore, and that’s no fun.

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

Astral Weeks by Van Morrison. It is my favourite album of all time. I never get tired of it. Plus its title is celestially themed and that is a bonus for the whole moon trip.

What was the last album you bought?

Memory Tapes “Seek Magic”. It is my album of the year so far.

Tell us an interesting fact.

We are all robots.

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

Sleeping States’ “There the Open Spaces” is a few years old but magically interesting. Talk Talk’s “Spirit of Eden” is even older, but beautiful and strangely underappreciated.

What film would you be a character in?

Tron2

Recommend a book.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. It is a love it or leave it proposition though. If you aren’t enthralled after the first 100-200 pages, just walk away.

What’s the worst record in your collection?

It is an album called “Picking Up Girls Is Easy,” sort of a how-to record. It is delightfully terrible.

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

Not this one. Really. It hurts my brain and sends it into a recursive loop. I have to shut down and reboot every time you ask it.

Soft Core by My Robot Friend is available now, check it out here.

Beach House release their new single Norway, the first from their forthcoming Teen Dream album and it is available as a free download here.

The album is scheduled for early 2010 and Beach House will be supporting Grizzly Bear on a handful of British dates listed below.

8th March    The Sage   Gateshead

9th March   The Queen’s Hall    Edinburgh

11th March   The Corn Exchange   Brighton

12th March  Warwick Arts Centre   Coventry

13th March    The Roundhouse  London

Tickets are on sale now.

The very nature of being a polymath genius means you have to keep busy doing several things at once and Andrew Bird has been doing just that. Currently touring his Noble Beast album, he has also found time to write a soundtrack for the forthcoming film Norman, set up a touring art installation and covered Jim Henson’s It’s Not Easy Being Green for an album celebrating 40 years of Sesame Street. All of which should see fruition in 2010.

Who wouldn’t want a robot friend? Who wouldn’t want to be a robot for that matter?

I would, and so would Howard Robot which is why he calls his solo music project My Robot Friend and why he performs (and lives?) in the cool home made electronic suit pictured here.

I had read somewhere that My Robot Friend’s third album, the recently released Soft Core sounded like The Pet Shop Boys. Breathe easily, it doesn’t. Not in the slightest. It is a bit difficult to pin point exactly what it does sound like though, being such a varied collage of songs.

It kicks off as you might expect an album made by someone called Howard Robot to. Robot High School bleeps and buzzes around a heavy synth sound and an effects laden vocal. Misfits Fight Song is a lighter more poppy version of the opener but then we’re off down some unusual avenues. The album features several collaborations. Dean Wareham contributes the skittering By Your Side and the outstanding Astronaut which has his trademark somnambulant wooziness and sounds not unlike Spacemen 3 at their most mellow. The Short Game, a collaboration with Zombie Nation, sounds like a lost New Order classic and Waiting appears twice – first as an 80’s electro dance track with Alison Moyet on vocals then reprised as a bluegrass folk song with Jay Kauffman on finger picking duties.

Sandwiched between all that are two songs, Boyfriend and the wryly observed Failure, which could easily be Jonathan Richman and Daniel Johnston songs, albeit performed as a duet with Metal Mickey in the case of Boyfriend.

This is a curious and ridiculously catchy mix of playfulness and sensitivity, classic pop and modern electronica. Hopefully by next Christmas, we’ll all be able to have our own My Robot Friend Suit to dance along in.

Visit My Robot Friend here.

You can’t beat a good murder ballad and even though the ‘hands around the throat’ in Christy & Emily’s Golden Rings are only dreamt, I’m reeled in by the darkness of the lyrics.

Superstition is far from a straightforward album. It covers some of the same ground musically as the previously featured Luxury Pond and Snowblink but with lyrics hinting at an impending sense of doom. ‘All that we built on the fault line will fall’ is the repeated refrain of Queen’s Head, while the album opens with the sky falling in on Chicken Little and there’s the aforementioned Golden Rings with the ‘face of evil’ and those ‘hands around the throat’ – and we’re only up to track 3.

This is a richly layered collection of songs which pretty much spans the entire modern folk horizon. Reverb heavy guitars bring a feel of Grizzly Bear and Beach House to songs like Lover’s Talk and Superstition while 105 & Rising throbs menacingly over an acid-fried slice of late sixties psych-folk. Chicken Little and Nightingale add balance through their simple beauty.

Robert Lloyd (yes, that Robert Lloyd) is releasing the album on his Big Print label. His claim that Christy & Emily are “the greatest band in the world” is pushing it, but they are definitely worthy of investigation.

…and you can investigate them here.

New Found Land have released their new single Leave It All Behind, one of the stand-out tracks from their debut album, We All Die and are currently midway through a tour of Europe and the U.S. with British dates hopefully to be added soon.

To read a review of the album click here.

To visit the band’s website click here.

Tour dates are as follows:
11 NOV: Popsoaré – Jönköping, Sweden
28 DEC: Intersoup – Berlin, Germany
29 DEC: Glocksee – Hannover, Germany
20 JAN: TBA – New York USA