We hope that you’re enjoying our new Featured Artist Ha Ha Tonka. There’s lot more great (and exclusive) stuff to come, including a fantastic competition lined up for next week. In the meantime, however, we asked the Tonka gents to select their five favorite moments from the sprawling BAMM.tv archives. Here are their choices:
The Flashbulb – ‘Virtuous Cassette’
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Hope you’re enjoying our exclusive season of stuff from Austin’s very own melody-merchants Wild Child, who have presently been crowned our Featured Artist. We’ve already interviewed them and revealed their personal playlist … now we ask them to pick their personal highlights from the massive musical vault here at BAMM.tv. Which great artists did they choose? Check out the list below …
1. Birds and Batteries – ‘Trouble Makes Three’
We asked our Featured Artist The Flashbulb to pick his favorite moments from the sprawling BAMM.tv music archive …
“I think I’ve actually gone through every BAMM video for this process. It made for a splendid Sunday morning. I kind of feel like an A&R guy, but my coffee isn’t expensive enough.
“After watching Who Cares – Show Me Some Change (below), I was reminded of how deceiving looks can be. I expected the sound of “Mouse Rat”, for those of you familiar with Parks And Recreation. The actual sound was an unexpected blend of 70’s Harlem, some open mic’d drums, and a filthy loop that sounds like the groan a baby didgeridoo would make while bashing out police car windows. The point is, this is unique, and it is great. The other point is, I need to grow my hair out and stop wearing tracksuits before I make another video.
Meet electronic mastermind Benn Jordan. He’s a man of many different names, collecting pseudonyms the way a hyperactive 90s kid collected Pokemon. You may also have heard him referred to as (deeeeeep breath now) Acidwolf, CHR15TPUNCH3R, DJ ASCII, Dr. Lefty, Dysrythmia, FlexE, Human Action Network, Lucid32, rapemachine, rnd16, 66x or Q-Bit.
For the purposes of our Featured Artist celebration, however, we fixing our beady eye on Benn’s most well-known alterego: The Flashbulb.
Benn is particularly direct when it comes to the origins of Flashbulb. “In the mid-70’s,” he recounts, “Lee Jordan and Denise Richardson met while vacationing in Virginia. Many sexual instances later Denise noticed she was more nauseated than usual. 9 months later the band was formed, but did not record music for another 14 years.” In other words: it’s just him. Flashbulb is a one-man operation, and Benn is the brains and talent behind it.
Charity begins at home, the old phrase goes – and if the history of Canadian melody-merchants Hollerado is anything to go by, it seems that musical genius begins in that area too. Born and raised in Manotick, Ontario (infact, three of the band members grew up on the same street together), the four Hollerado boys – Menno Versteeg, Nixon Boyd, Dean Baxter and Jake Boyd – officially came together in April 2007. Relocating to Montreal, they’ve since been gathering a well-deserved reputation as everyone’s favorite Bright Young Things.
We’ve already explained just how great our Featured Artist Whiskerman is – so let’s give them the chance to recommend some greatness too. The band have been granted super-privileged access to the BAMM.tv vault (i.e. they bought us a couple of beers and we ‘accidentally’ let slip the combination lock), and they’ve chosen five of their personal highlights. Let’s take a look at the rundown …
Adam Haworth Stephens – Second Mind
Anyone familiar with reviewer shorthand will know the meaning of the term ‘wallpaper music’. It’s often used to describe the output of MOR giants like Coldplay or Maroon 5 – it’s background stuff, ambient dinner party noise, inoffensive and barely noticeable chatter which uses music more as a pleasant crutch than a blazing center of attention.
Sooooo … if you were a frenzied hip-hop electro-pop mastermind who drops beats like John McClane drops bad guys, you probably wouldn’t want to associate yourself with the word. You’d call yourself ‘Explosion Beast’ or ‘Annihilator’ or ‘Dance Yourself Sick’. That would be the predictable thing to do. The thing is: Ricky Reed – the producer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist behind Wallpaper., our brand new Featured Artist – is anything but predictable.
Interested yet? Want to read on as we get all Home Depot on your ass and really start examining Wallpaper.? Or are you just a big old Doo-Doo Face?
(Note: Doo-Doo Face is the title of his first album. It’s just a joke. We’re not really calling you a Doo-Doo Face. Unless you’re a sadomasochist and are into that kind of thing. This is the internet, after all).
Anyway. Let’s continue (after the jump …)
If you haven’t already checked out our write-up on phenomenal Featured Artist Typhoon, you can do so right here. And if you have read that and are hankering for some more Typhoon action, we’ve asked this superbly stormy ensemble to pick their five favorite moments from the sprawling BAMM.tv music archive. Here we go …
Monsieur Perine – La Tienda de Sombreros
(more great music after the jump …)
Let’s get indulgent for a second and take a look at the Venn Diagram crossover territory between rock music and weather. While there’s no shortage of feelgood summertime jams in the cultural archives, things arguably only get really interesting when we look at the tunes that focus on the stormier side of things.
Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ reflected massive social upheaval. Springsteen’s ‘Thunder Road’ encapsulates the feeling of youthful unrest and yearning better than anything pre-Smiths. Creedance Clearwater Revival’s ‘Bad Moon Rising’ is just brimming over with foreboding sky-predictions, while ‘Riders On The Storm’ (as well as having the honor of being the last song The Doors recorded together) contains as much brooding menace as a wall of rolling clouds on the horizon.
Still – these are all mere song titles. To go the whole hog and name your band after some extreme weather madness … well, then, you’d better make sure that the band in question is something very, very special indeed.
Thankfully, Typhoon – a veritable army of musicians who fuse indie rock instrumentals and vocals with violins, percussion, hand claps, xylophone, horns and a choir of other instruments – are great enough to merit such a bombastic name. Combining the bombast and drive of Arcade Fire with the communal energy of The Polyphonic Spree, anyone who has been watching this exciting act since their inception will know that the forecast has always been good.
And if you’re brand new to Typhoon? Join us right now as we delve into their meteorological history …