København Store - Action, Please!

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There is a thread running through the continent, from the north of

Europe to the north of Italy.

A long, long thread, made of chilly melodies, bedroom post-rock

and lo-fi electronica. A thread spun by København Store, one of

Italian indie’s best-kept secrets.

Born as a duo at the beginning of 2003, after a journey in

Scandinavian territory (which explains the bizarre moniker), in time

the band evolved to a fuller line-up.

After the first two electronica-tinged demos, København Store

re-discovered guitar sound and moved towards a mutated,

subtly nuanced form of post rock. Like Mùm in a lockdown with

cLOUDDEAD and Godspeed You!Black Emperor.

“Action, Please!”, their first full-length album, was released in

February 2008 by Italian label 42 Records. It was produced by

Giacomo Fiorenza (who also worked with Yuppie Flu, Giardini di

Mirò, Austin Lace and Fuck, among others), and features vocals

by Jonathan Clancy (of Settlefish, A Classic Education and His

Clancyness), Alessandro Raina (of Giardini di Mirò and Casador),

Fabio Campetti (of Ed Wood) and Simone Magnaschi, formerly the

singer in Italian punk legends Stinking Polecats, and now a fulltime

member of København Store.

Its peculiar genesis makes “Action, Please!” come across as the

“You Forgot it in People” of the Italian Broken Indie Social Scene.

The album immediately became a hot item on the national music

press, obtaining enthusiastic reviews on the most widely-read

magazines and webzines. Some of the songs included in the album

also gained airplay on major radio networks.

The live experience, however, is where København Store actually

made the grade. Their shows (over 60 dates in the main live venues

all over Italy, in little over a year) are the stuff rock’n’roll is made

of: the often ethereal, jingling melodies of the album come alive in

a barrage of sound that never fails to amaze the audience. They

have shared the stage with bands such as Mono, Giardini di Mirò,

Apse, Solvent, Populus, Disco Drive and Envelopes. It is perhaps no

coincidence that the band managed to sell over 1,000 copies of

the album, without distribution, entirely at concerts and by wordof.

mouth.

The video for their first single (shot and directed by Stefano Poletti,

who also worked with several bands on the Italian mainstream

circuit) was picked up for airplay by several music channels,

among which MTV and MTV Brand:New.

March 2009 saw the Italian release of a new version of “Action,

Please!”, finally distributed in record stores by Halidon. The album

was previously available on iTunes and other digital stores, or

through mail order. In the wake of the record’s re-release, the

band is about to go back on tour. In the meantime, they are already

working on their second album, set to be released at the beginning

of 2010.

They are expected to spend the rest of 2009 touring Europe.

Faggot Rock - Collective Grizzly Bears in Rainbows

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Faggot Rock is an avantgarde sleaze metal jazz fusion indie rock band hailing from all over the world. The brainchild of a mysterious European with a passionate hatred for the Swedish, Faggot Rock’s band name is at once a political statement and a call to end bigotry. Hateful words aren’t as hateful when they just become words again. Plus, Sean Penn won an Oscar for playing a gay dude.

Eureka Brown - ¡Digitalia!

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eureka brown is a file sharing enthusiast from urbana illinois who makes sunny, lo-fi, psychedelic dream-pop. he began to make ripples in late 07 after releasing the first 5 songs from his debut album future vision of the digital universe on myspace. after recieving praise via a myspace comment from one of his favorite bands and influences the bees he sent them a hand made promo copy of the record along with a letter thanking them for listening and professing his passion for all of their records. a few weeks later, just as he was wrapping up a series of shows with his new drummer to promote the album, the very same day the first track (i told you so) from the new album went up, he discovered that he had become one of their top friends! over the summer of 08 he steadily released tracks from the new record immediately upon their completion until one day in august of 08 when he recieved a message from the bbc requesting permission to include his newest song, full speed ahead (only a day or two old at the time), on their 6 music radio show fresh on the net with tom robbinson. furthermore only a small percentage of the artists, about 25%, of those who were included on the live stream made it to the podcast which is now in the bbc's permanent archives, and full speed ahead was the 2nd track on the playlist! it has since been played also on daniel peñacoba's ibiza radio show la captura del sonido/the capture of sound.

this is just very exciting because it shows how in this day and age you can bypass the usual trenches of the musica industry and have something come straight from your basement to the rest of the world without waiting a second. the very moment something is completed it can become available directly from the artist and it's free to evolve into whatever it sees fit. and indeed it has. if you watched them closely along the way you know that their songs were released in a series of versions building up to the ones that we see now, and in fact the final version of full speed ahead that you see here is a slight refinement from the 2nd or 3rd version that was included on the bbc podcast. but it doesn't stop there. these guys will do anything they can think of to destroy the boundries of a conventional record release. and so with this one there is not just one album cover but two variations, each of which are an animated sequence which plays out in the item artwork viewer on the bottom left corner of your itunes library as you click through the ten tracks of the album. also included in the zip folder download is a video only .mov bonus track.

the mp3's were released live at the mike n' molly's show in champaign with coltrane motion late last night. here's what the virtual liner notes have to say about the record:

¡digitalia! is a musical style and a miniature art movement that supports it's belief in file sharing by giving away it's musical content freely. the animation and visual art are inspired by the music, which is a highly computerized form of digital recording that's made with all real instruments. the sound is characterized by it's heavy use of percussion, analog synthesizers, dub effects, vocal harmonies, acoustic guitar, surf guitar & funk bass.

this album was also given this name because it's songs exemplify the culmination of the style. ¡digitalia! is the 2nd installment in a planned trilogy of mini-albums that imagine a future where man is faced with the possibility to embrace technologies that completely integrate man and machine.