Monday, February 22nd, 2010
There’s something about the joyful psychedelia of Animal Collective that gets us all wide-eyed and giddy (and maybe a little dry-mouthed, but that’s a minor side effect). So you can only imagine how excited we are to let the band guide us through a totally immersive sensory experience at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
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Thursday, January 21st, 2010
Issue 20 of The Block features a photo shoot by ioulex of costumes designed by Christian Joy, or CJ (as she’d rather be called). The interview accompanying the shoot covers a lot of ground, from CJ’s past in fashion retail to her ascent to indie fashion It Girl while costuming the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O. We talked so much, in fact, that we couldn’t include everything in the magazine.
These are the outtakes.
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Thursday, January 21st, 2010
Meet CFCF, AKA Mike Silver. By now you may have heard his lush disco-textured debut album Continent; if not, you’re missing out on a lot of time you could be spending lying on your duvet thinking about twinkling stars, raindrops sliding down panes of glass, and people running slow-mo through sun-dappled meadows. (It’s dreamy stuff.) But before CFCF was making his spacey, atmospheric electronic music, the 21-year-old Montrealer was remixing other people (including Sally Shapiro, The Presets, HEALTH, The Teenagers, and Hearts Revolution). That’s why, for our Fame Issue, The Block asked CFCF to create a custom mix tape. Check it out, and just try to keep a grip on reality.
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Thursday, January 14th, 2010
You don’t need thousands of dollars and big-name directors to make a hot music video when you’ve got a hundred bucks and a Macbook – if you’re M.I.A., anyway. Check out this dreamy made-at-home video for her brand new track “There’s Space For Ol Dat I See (Space Odyssey),” which M.I.A. dropped via her Twitter account. Her new album is out sometime in Summer 2010, and we can’t wait.
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Tuesday, December 29th, 2009
It was pretty good year for music in The Block. We chatted with Passion Pit and La Roux (and got stood up by Florence and The Machine), but loved every minute we spent backstage and on the dancefloor. From the lush melancholia of Fever Ray, to Calvin Harris’s booty-shaking collaboration with Dizzee Rascal, check out our favourite songs of 2009 on 8tracks.com.
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Friday, December 11th, 2009
Moray McLaren – “We Got Time”
Directed by David Wilson
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Saturday, November 28th, 2009
Don’t be fooled by Dragonette’s online merchandise shop. Sure, they may be selling knock-off Dragonette-inscribed LV and Dior scarves for only $10 American, but the band does have some taste. Since their debut album, Galore, Dragonette has been really “getting around;” lead singer Martina Sorbara has since collaborated with Martin Solveig for “Boys and Girls,” which was filmed inside Jean Paul Gaultier’s Paris studio.
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Monday, November 9th, 2009
Until we heard Tomorrow, In A Year, an opera about Darwin staged by Hotel Pro Forma, we were pretty sure that the phantom of the opera had evaporated into a cloud of White Shoulders (or whatever perfume your grandma wears to the opera).
(more…)
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Sunday, October 18th, 2009
LUIS VUITTON/TIM HAMILTON
THE TINY MASTERS OF TODAY SHOW OFF FOR THE BLOCK’S FALL LOOK BOOK
Words Lucy Madison Images Ryan Pfluger
Ivan, age 15, and Ada, age 13, may have started their band as a joke, but the Brooklyn-based brother-sister duo Tiny Masters of Today has never had to ask to be taken seriously: the band’s first gig (at an open-mic night for kids in Brooklyn) was covered in the pages of Newsweek, their first single, “Stickin’ it to the Man” was praised as “genius” by David Bowie, and their first album (which came out in 2007 – you do the math for how old they were then) earned them fans like Karen O and Nick Zinner. And that was just the beginning.
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Thursday, October 1st, 2009
You Say Party! We Say Die! are infamously known for “playing anything, anywhere, anytime.” With lead vocalist Becky Ninkovic being thrown out of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Herberge hostel after a performance in Berlin, to bassist Stephen O’Shea’s ban in the U.S, the Canadian quintet were able to find plenty of bad-kid inspiration for the aptly-named third album XXXX.
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