Byrning Down The House

Somehow I ended up on the email list for Positiva records, something I am not entirely happy about, as you can imagine. So I was reading my latest batch of Paul Van Dyk news, when I caught sight of the words 'feat. David Byrne'. This caused an obvious cartoon style double take, and then an equally obvious pursuit of said track. A collaboration between the coolest man ever and the trance meister himself? It's gotta be heard right?

Paul Van Dyk - Fall With Me (feat. David Byrne)

So when you have a partnership between my favourite person in the world, and one of my least favourites, in terms of quality, I suppose you expect to get something in the middle. Which is where I would put this. Van Dyk raises his game and comes up with something, well, okay, and for Byrne, well, it's no Life During Wartime. But an average David Byrne song, sung by David Byrne, is better than 98% of music in the world, and God I love his voice, he really could sing anything and I'd be interested. Like trance, for example.

He also has a new collaboration with Baby Elephant, who are Prince Paul (a man who likes a collaboration also as much as Byrne himself) and Bernie Worrell, the legendary Funkadelic and Talking Heads percussionist. This track completes the Stop Making Sense reunion by also featuring vocals by Nona Hendryx, one of the vocalists on that tour. It has a real George Clinton feel about it, especially the intro, and as always, Byrnes vocals are great:

Baby Elephant - How Does The Brain Wave? (feat David Byrne)

Get it while it's hot!

Here's the new Hot Chip song:

Hot Chip - Shake A Fist

It's predictably great, and features a nice Todd Rundgren sample halfway through (those Chip boys really know their way around James heaven, don't they?):

Todd Rundgren - Intro

Feliz Aniversário Jamesinbrasil

Did you realise that this blog is now one year old? And more to the point, can you believe it survived this long? So to all of my regular readers (a big hello to both of you), thanks for stopping by, downloading and commenting, it's all very much appreciated.

My regular readers (a big hello to both of you) will remember my over-excitable, slightly evangelical review of the Daft Punk gig that I went to in Sao Paulo last October. Well we have got tickets to the same festival again this year, and the line up couldn't be any more perfect. First up are Spank Rock, my favourite hip hop crew right now. Then it's Hot Chip, whose last album I still listen to like a new release, i.e. all the bleeding time. Then it's Bjork, who is, as I said before, a genius, and I haven't seen since 1995. Then there are three more acts (Juliette & The Licks, Arctic Monkeys, and The Killers) who I don't care about. This means we can go home early, which is great because, as my dad would say, I'm getting a bit of the old boy about me. A full match report will follow in due course.

This also gives me an opportunity to post two new Hot Chip remixes of Kraftwerk (a marriage made in James heaven):

Kraftwerk - Aerodynamik (Hot Chip's Intelligent Design Mix)

Kraftwerk - La Forme (Hot Chip's King Of The Mountains Mix)