We came across this on photographer and PLANET contributor James Chiang’s blog for his Ideation & Presentation course at the Academy of Art. And as great fans of both Björk and Arvo Pärt, we just had to share with you this clip from the BBC program Modern Minimalists, in which the Icelandic chanteuse interviews the Estonian classical composer.
     A pioneering force within the mystical school of minimalism, the septuagenarian Pärt experienced a slight renaissance in the past decade with last year’s premiere of Symphony No. 4, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, as well as with the inclusion of his work on the soundtracks to Fahrenheit 9/11 and There Will Be Blood. But his influence (and particularly his stark yet beautiful style, known as tintinnabulation) can also be felt on records by more mainstream, modern artists like Max Richter, Radiohead, and, indeed, Björk.
     Set to the lush and lamenting strings of Pärt’s 1977 composition, “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten”, Björk begins the interview by declaring that his oeuvre “in a very sensitive way has got the whole battle of this century inside him.” Speaking in her signature sprite-like patter and sporting intergalactic chignons, the singer-turned-temporary-journalist also suggests a somewhat strange dialectic shaping Pärt’s aesthetic — that of “Pinocchio and the little cricket,” in which a postlapsarian human capable of so much pain confronts and consorts with another being bursting with compassion and the will to comfort.
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Mad Decent /Asylum records

Typically a mixtape is just enough to whet your appetite for the official release, serving the essential purpose of leaking songs and then becoming a throwaway once the real deal comes out. Not so in the hands of Diplo. In fact, in recent years his mixtapes in advance of debuts for artists such as M.I.A. and Santigold have become as lasting as their studio efforts, return-to listens long after their release, and even companion pieces to those great albums. After a reggae/dancehall sabbatical with Major Lazer in 2009, the venerable DJ returns once again to his first and true love, hip hop, with Free Gucci: Best of the Cold War Mixtapes. Gucci Mane is arguably the hottest voice in hip hop right now, MySpace’s top rap artist of ‘09, with supposedly another two albums on the way this year despite being incarcerated for violating probation. He’s best described as a “playful gangster” with a lazy vocal delivery, cheeky streetwise lyrics that are simultaneously crack-up and G’d up, and hooks that make it no wonder people keep coming back. The genius here is Diplo’s matchmaking between recent electronic music breakouts as remixers (Flying Lotus, Zomby, Memory Tapes) with vocals they’d never think to use; it simultaneously introduces hipster music geeks to the newest crunk and hip hop heads to up and coming electro beatmakers. Oh yeah, and like the best mixtapes, it’s free. Grab it at Mad Decent.

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Smalltown Supersound

Since the Bergen-reared, Berlin-based Annie Lilia Berge Strand released her breakout album, Anniemal, in 2004 the pop music landscape has changed dramatically, particularly with respect to genre-straddling female artists with one foot firmly entrenched in indie waters and the other dipped in pop territory. Her second full-length album, Don’t Stop — long-delayed and substantially reworked after creative differences with Island Records — arrived in late 2009, a post-Ladyhawke, post-Little Boots, post-Lykke Li moment. But Don’t Stop differentiates Annie from this pack of indie-electro darlings for whom she opened the doors. The album is a mixed bag in the best possible sense. Its songs run the gamut, from the dance confection “My Love is Better” to the moody, melodic, French-pop-inflected “Marie Cherie”. And Annie has chosen a diverse set of collaborators, including Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand and producers Xenomania, who have worked with Kylie Minogue, Saint Etienne and the Pet Shop Boys, reflecting her repudiation of a sound that is one note.
     PLANET caught up with Annie as she readied herself for a year of touring to support Don’t Stop as well as continuing her regular DJ gigs at home and abroad.

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XL Recordings

Having received an endless stream of hype for their self-titled debut, this quartet will finally release their much anticipated sophomore set next week, and we couldn’t wait to share our impressions. If the debut was chiefly defined by Ezra Koenig’s lilting voice and soukous-style of guitar, the power of this second record very much resides in the hands (and dials) of Rostam Batmanglij’s arsenal of instruments and skilled studio work. In fact, Contra’s ten tracks ostensibly diverge on two paths: One (anchored by songs such as “Cousins” and “Holiday”) continues the jubilant pop that turned the debut into a surprise hit; the other boasts a more baroque strain of synths and samples — first demonstrated in October’s release of “Horchata” as well as on the reggae-tinged “Diplomat’s Son”, which appropriates vocals from M.I.A.’s “Hussel”. These distinct paths collide and culminate in standouts “Run” and “Giving Up the Gun”, in which carefree harmonies crash into digitized blips and beats. As Koenig sings on “Giving Up the Gun”: “Your sword’s grown old and rusty/Underneath the rising sun”, it almost seems the band is consciously trying to overcome the sophomore slump of sameness that doomed so many upstarts before. For that matter, even “Cousins” subverts the formula of earlier hit “A-Punk” by adding an aggressiveness we didn’t realize the band possessed. Thus, on this second album Vampire Weekend achieves the rare feat of honoring what earned them initial acclaim, while still evolving their style with an ambition that promises even more excitement in releases to come.

Watch “Cousins” after the jump. Buy this at Other Music or iTunes.
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Domino Records

Having already released twenty or so records the past decade, the four prolific members of Animal Collective have put out a new EP just as January’s Merriweather Post Pavilion seems to be topping every critic’s year-end list. The Brooklyn-by-way-of-Baltimore band’s five new tracks maintain Animal Collective’s unique flair for progressive music that precariously straddles the line between innovative and inaccessible. Eschewing the latter entirely, however, “What Would I Want? Sky” (which samples the Grateful Dead’s “Unbroken Chain”) mixes carefree harmonies over trippy, carnivalesque noises and eerie atmospherics that, decades from now, could still stand comfortably among the Beach Boys’ and Radiohead’s dreamy classics.

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Buy this at Other Music or iTunes.

Glassnote Records

With the new year approaching, we at PLANET wanted to share our favorite music from the past twelve months. And while there were many worthy contenders, the unanimous pick among the editors as the year’s best record is Phoenix’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. After three albums that seemed to revolve chiefly around a set of artfully crafted, boundary-pushing pop singles, the French four-piece has finally released work that — from first song to last — taps into a potential that has been itching to burst out in full for years. As we wrote in May:
     Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix marks possibly the quartet’s most complete record to date. Its ten tracks may not vastly depart from the band’s now dependable sound, but [Thomas] Mars’ swooning croon and the band’s soft-rock polish mixed with some modest doses of spiky guitar-work (invoking the Strokes) and disco synths (partly guided by album co-producer and “fifth member” Philippe Zdar of Cassius-fame) reach their zenith on “1901”, “Fences”, and “Lisztomania”, among other such standouts. “The more we do music the more we want to do something that no other bands can do,” Mars modestly proclaims. (Check out the full interview with the band here as well as a stream of “Lisztomania” below.)

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And after the jump, we present the rest of our top fifteen albums of 2009 (with streaming audio).
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Vin Du Select Qualitite

This week we sat down with Alexis Taylor and Al Doyle of Hot Chip to talk about their new record, One Life Stand, which hits stores in February. While our full feature is still forthcoming, we wanted to recognize a project the band says they’ve been especially loving recently: Mark McGuire. Best known for his work with the Cleveland band Emeralds, McGuire recently released an ambient acoustic record for Vin Du Select Qualitite, which calls to mind Tangerine Dream and Brian Eno. “I would normally really hate solo guitar with a loop pedal,” says Doyle, “but there is something about the way he does it that is really amazing. I’ve been listening to his music a lot this year.”

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Photography by Jon Bergman

“This is the last song that I write while still in love with you,” Charlie Fink sings on “Blue Skies”, one of many tracks that narrates the end of love from his band’s The First Days of Spring, a concept album of sorts for the brokenhearted. Named after Noah Baumbach’s 2005 film The Squid and the Whale, this London quartet mixed Fink’s downtrodden voice, which recalls Will Oldham, with delicate plucks and pianos throughout their headlining set, exuding a rustic aura of Americana that belies their British background. Much like the band’s cinematic namesake transformed from a quiet melodrama to a modest epic, the album’s title track (streamed below) morphs spare guitars into a climactic swell of violins and distortion.

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Photography by Jason Frank Rothenberg

Fresh from headlining a show at the Guggenheim last week, this experimental outfit from Brooklyn (by way of Baltimore) has just released the first single from their highly anticipated second record, Odd Blood, due out February 2010 on Secretly Canadian. “Ambling Alp” kicks off with strange sounds reminiscent of gurgling water that soon give way to the kind of tribal-electro rhythms that have fast become the trio’s hallmark. That said, with moments that recall the snarling gospel of TV on the Radio and the dreamy delirium of Animal Collective, this new track boasts a more accessible, uplifting shift from the sometimes esoteric athmospherics coloring their 2007 debut All Hour Cymbals. Suffice it to say, we can’t wait to hear the rest.

Download the track at www.yeasayer.net. Also available on the site is a digital bundle featuring remixes by Memory Tapes and DJ /rupture, as well as instrumentals.

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Buy this at Other Music or iTunes.

Photography by Owen Richards

The buzz bandwagon hit NYC last week along with the 2009 CMJ Music Marathon — and this precocious London quartet did not disappoint. With the exception of guilefully covering Womack & Womack’s ’80s R&B hit “Teardrops”, the xx’s setlist stuck chiefly to their self-titled debut. The reverb-heavy interplay of guitars and harmonies between Romy Madley Croft’s smoldering siren’s call and Oliver Sim’s disaffected croon wonderfully recalled Interpol and Pixies at both bands’ most intimate moments. And while Sim’s bass proved too much to handle at times for the usually solid-sounding Mercury Lounge, the live drums added a greater gravitas to the basic digitized beats pervading the record’s gothic lullabies. All things considered, it was a stellar performance by these dark stars in waiting.

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Buy this at Other Music or iTunes.