This october The Revival Tour will cross Europe and visit Amsterdam the 4th of october. Chuck Ragan, folk/punk artist and team member of The Revival Tour, supplied the soundtrack for the upcoming It’s Better In The Wind 2011 movie. Again an amazing road… [ Continue reading ]

After Hugo and Wilco point me for several times towards the new tunes of Amatorski, I finally started listening- and completely fell in love! The Belgium band formed in 2008 with a melancholic and narrative style, and some reminiscences of Portishead, Sigur Rós, and… [ Continue reading ]

I’ve put together a little playlist for the hot summer afternoons. My favorite tracks of the past months. It became a very diverse list with tracks by Bright Eyes, Dirty Gold, Buck 65, Sander Kleinenberg, RJD2 and many more. You can listen to it while enjoying fresh… [ Continue reading ]

The waiting is over, Trentemøller’s remix for the LateNightTales is here (if you pre-ordered)! “…For it’s in the dark beauty of Low’s tremulous ‘Amazing Grace’ or even the way that the Shangri-Las’ ‘(Remember) Walkin’ In The Sand’, surrounded by the similarly inclined, takes on a funereal… [ Continue reading ]

Just discovered these fresh tunes by Dirty Gold, a San Diego based young and upcoming trio formed by Grant Nassif, Lincoln and John Ballif. This movie for their debut single ‘California Sunrise’ was shot by Chadwick Gantes for the music/art platform Sezio. Inspired by… [ Continue reading ]

1. Daido Moriyama – ’71-NY 2. Old letterset  from flea market in Antwerp 3. Text010 – Burial + Fourtet + Thom Yorke 4. Flying Lotus – Cosmogramma Gold Edition 5. 90’s Mickey Mouse Soap 6. Vintage Pen Case (an… [ Continue reading ]

With 22 degrees it almost feels like summer in the Netherlands this weekend. And with Final Approach by Buck 65, featuring Marie-Pierre Arthur summer officially started! It brings in mind a party in Lisbon back in 2009 where Sander Kleinenberg did the last set. 5… [ Continue reading ]

Amazing work by up-and-coming filmaker Yoann Lemoine for Woodkid’s EP Iron. Speechless…… [ Continue reading ]

Today is the day of the new Radiohead album ‘The King of Limbs‘. They’ve just released this video for ‘Lotus Flower’. Can’t wait to hear the rest! (Video produced and directed by Garth Jennings, choreographed by Wayne McGregor with director of photography Nick Wood and editor Leila Sarraf)… [ Continue reading ]

In many cases the real beauty of a piece of music only reveals itself after playing it a few times, like Joanna Newsom’s music I wrote about previously. But sometimes there is no need for such an incubation process. The first time I heard Glasser’s debut album Ring, its sincere and to-the-point sound immediately appealed to me. [ Continue reading ]

Astor Bell, the netlabel that freely releases exclusive and original electronic music, celebrates their anniversary with the 14th album called Anniversary 1: the Astor Bell Remixes. ‘The broken beats, the down-sampled waves, the backwards bass and the organic subway samples accumulate like a snowball rolling down a… [ Continue reading ]

After the first time I heard the music of Joanna Newsom I could not have predicted I was going to write an article about her a few years later. To be honest, I did not think I would listen to her music again. It just seemed a bit too awkward at that moment. So what was it that made push the play-button again? Whatever it was, I gave her music a second chance, and a third and a fourth… It was her second studio album Ys I was listening to, after a lengthy article in Wire magazine draw my attention to her. [ Continue reading ]

I wrote about Koen Tossijn before because I was impressed and inspired by his denim label Moos Tailored Basics. When you can’t pay his lovely raw denim, or have something better than money, you can make a trade with him. The Dutch DJ Aardvarck… [ Continue reading ]

Early this year Midlake’s new album The Courage of Others was released. The first time I listened to it I heard a somewhat simpeler and darker sound than on its predecessor The Trials of Van Occupanter. But, as always, the album grows on you after a few listens, and although it became clear that in this album I would not find as much complexity in the structure of the songs, complexity can still be found in the density of the layers of sound, carefully shifting over each other, building up to a climax or peeling off like on onion, slowly exposing its core. [ Continue reading ]

I remember the excitement of going to the record store as a young boy to buy the newest album of one of my favorite bands (most probably a piece of remarkably heavy rock music, knowing my taste at that time), and the feeling of disenchantment when I came home and discovered how my favorite group decided to try something new, to go a different direction, to make music in another style than the one I loved them for. At that time I did not understand the necessity of artistic evolution. There was no need for that much change in my world.

Fifteen years later I listen to the three studio albums Efterklang released, and I am surprised about how they changed over the course of six years, yet still they communicate the same musical idea and most of all, I hear the same passion and integrity in Magic Chairs, their newest work, as I heard in their debut album Tripper. [ Continue reading ]

Last weeks Jonathan Looman (aka Lowman) made some more or less necessary changes to Anothersomething. One of them was to make the special features more special by changing the layout into something more magazine-like. And since we’re so happy with that… [ Continue reading ]

While waiting for Heligoland, the new album by Massive Attack, here’s a little warmup: Splitting the Atom, directed by Edouard Salier. Beautiful!… [ Continue reading ]

Lately I’ve been enjoying the whispery tunes from The xx and their debut album xx. I very much like this trio from London with influences of 80’s guitar tunes and American R&B, accompanied with the soft vocal duets and downtempo melancholic melodies. Check their Myspace page… [ Continue reading ]

The movie news of the year―at least on this side of the Atlantic―has almost wholly revolved around Spike Jonze's filmic adaptation of Maurice Sendak's seminal children's book, Where the Wild Things Are, an innocent-looking 48-page essential that no good mother would be caught without. The big screen version of the generation-transcending classic is quite visually spectacular and emotionally moving (I'm not going to get into criticism or review here―The New Yorker's for that), which is, not incidentally, what most Sendak fans assumed it wouldn't be. ("How can you―and why do you want to―inject live-action life into a masterpiece of the two dimensional?" many asked.) The magical transformation from innocuous paperback to grandiose $100-million-dollar-budget silver screen spectacle can be explained by noting the importance of a simple "a-ha" moment Jonze had several years ago upon splitting with his girlfriend Sophia Coppola: The Wild Things embody wild emotions (anger, fear, and loathing; happiness, exuberance, and excitement). The trouble-making director, along with one of this generation's most lauded scribes, Dave Eggers, transformed Sendak's bedtime story into an exploration of the most primordial feelings that unify us all.

Unusually, the film did not come attached with the usual Disney-style marketing package (numerous throw-away action figures, cheap pajamas, lunch boxes, video games, and so on), but rather a sort of grassroots call to (creative) arms. Where The Wild Things Are gave people the bug to simply create in reverential celebration of a seminal work of toddler fiction. Obviously, Jonze et al. had a roll in the development of these "extended value" efforts, but theirs was more of the warm, encouraging father than the demanding, out-of-touch boss. Read on for a rundown of some of my favorite objects that were created in concordance with the flick. [ Continue reading ]

In these heated, confusing times of economic recession and political angst, unavoidably and inevitably, we all find ourselves listening to music of the more soothing variety to put our world in balance and perspective. Some folks veer towards the classical end of the musical spectrum while others default to country; the cheesier of those among us turn to Kenny G. while the more refined look to Coltraine; but we Anthem staffers increasingly find ourselves on a sonic journey to Scandinavia for our aural Xanax fix.

Maybe it's the fjords; maybe it's the omega-3 fatty acid diet; or maybe it's just the placid snow-covered, oftentimes sunless landscape the Northerners dwell in. Whatever it is, we Americans find ourselves entirely in want of the X Factor that is making the musicians mentioned below (and many more) pump out such mesmerizing and enchanting tunes. Here are some of our favorite new disco/new Balearic/cosmic disco favorites (don't worry about the genre monikers―just jam). [ Continue reading ]

Danish producer and performer Mike Sheridan (Irish dad, Danish mom) could have been the adopted son of scandinavian co-producers Anders Ilar and Anders Trentemøller. Although he was only 16 in 2008 he blessed us with an amazingly strong album called I Syv Sind (In Two Minds). The dramatic… [ Continue reading ]

I was already enjoying Copenhagen Harbour Boat Trips, the new mix cd by Anders Trentemøller where he takes us on a trip along some fine danish sounds; just came across the besite of Thomas Skou, the photographer who did the images for the album. Love it… Sound and… [ Continue reading ]

Another new song by Radiohead – for free: These are my twisted words. love it!… [ Continue reading ]

Fantastic video work by graphic designer Adam Guzman and Julia Tsao for Nosaj Thing. “As the graphics become more spatial, the performer flattens, becoming a 2-D cutout version of himself.” Thank you Bas & Nalden for sharing!… [ Continue reading ]