Beirut is an American indie-rock and world music band which was originally the solo musical project of Zach Condon (born Zachary Francis Condon in Santa Fe, New Mexico) and later expanded into a band. The band's first performances were in New York, in May 2006, to support the release of their debut album, Gulag Orkestar.

Condon recorded before Beirut was established: when he was fifteen and under the name of Realpeople, he made an electronic record, fashioned after his love for The Magnetic Fields. Condon was a straight-A student until he dropped out at the age of 17 to travel Europe with his cousin in a drunken haze, cavorting and partying with the locals wherever he ended up. It was during one of these evenings that he was first exposed to Balkan music (notably including the Boban Markovi? Orkestar and Goran Bregovi?), blasting from the upstairs apartment. Condon ended up with the Serbian artists all night, going through albums country by country, note for note.

The first album under the Beirut moniker, Gulag Orkestar (2006), was the direct result of what he learned that night. While it may sound like an entire Balkan orchestra playing modern songs as mournful ballads and upbeat marches, the album was performed and recorded almost entirely by Condon alone. He did so on Pro Tools while skipping school in Albuquerque and at Sea Side Studios in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Jeremy Barnes added percussion and some violin overlays.

After recording, Condon formed a full band which at times varies in the number of members, from six to ten. Live he is accompanied by Perrin Cloutier (cello/accordion), Jason Poranski (guitar/mandolin/ukulele), Nick Petree (drums), Kristin Ferebee (violin), Paul Collins (organ/keys/tambourine/ukulele), Jon Natchez (baritone sax/mandolin/glockenspiel), and Kelly Pratt (trumpet/euphonium).

In November 2006 Condon was "briefly hospitalized for extreme exhaustion", the band's website said, and as a consequence the band cancelled the rest of the tour. They resumed performing in March 2007 and released their second album, The Flying Club Cup the same year on October 9th. Parts of the album were performed and recorded by Condon in his bedroom again, but others were recorded with the live band, which resulted in a more organic, live sound. While writing, Condon said he was inspired by French music, like Jacques Brel (whose song Le Moribond he covered on his Elephant Gun EP), and he moved to Paris for a while. During the extensive tour in support of The Flying Club Cup, Condon and the band more or less fell apart from exhaustion once again and disappeared from the radar in April 2008.

Condon took a long break and returned in 2009 with a double EP, March of the Zapotec & Realpeople: Holland. The first was partly recorded in Mexico with the Mexican Band Jimenez and had a more South-American flavour to it than Condon's previous efforts. The second EP 'Holland' was credited to Condon's old name Realpeople and consisted of five electrotracks, once more in the vein of The Magnetic Fields.

The band's album "The Rip Tide" was released in 2011.

Albums
* Gulag Orkestar (May 9, 2006)
* The Flying Club Cup (October 9, 2007)
* The Rip Tide (August 2, 2011)

EPs
* Lon Gisland EP (January 30, 2007)
* Pompeii (February 28, 2007)
* Elephant Gun (June 25, 2007)
* March of the Zapotec & Realpeople: Holland (2009)

Official website: www.beirutband.com

User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL.

Atlas Sound is the name of a musical solo project of Bradford Cox, the lead singer of Deerhunter. Cox was born in Athens, Georgia in 1982. In early 2008 he released his first album entitled Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See but Cannot Feel on indie-labels Kranky and 4AD. His second album, Logos, was released in fall 2009 to critical acclaim. In explaining his reasoning for a solo project, Cox has stated, "It's just that I have ideas that I can't make work with a five-piece rock band...there's kind of this palette of sounds that I use that I don't necessarily get to use with Deerhunter". Cox has noted his heroes to be Cindy Wilson from B-52's and Laura Carter from Athens punk band the Bar-B-Q Killers.

Cox met his collaborator and best friend, Lockett Pundt, in high school. He started recording on a cassette karaoke machine in 1994 when he was in sixth grade. He has used the name "Atlas Sound" since then, as it was the name of the company that manufactured the tape machine. Cox has also recorded as part of other bands, such as the short lived "Wet Dreams", an all-girl garage/noise band in which he played drums. He also recorded several tracks on the Black Lips second album We Did Not Know the Forest Spirit Made the Flowers Grow, playing drums on the song Notown Blues from that album.

http://deerhuntertheband.blogspot.com/

User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL.

My Brightest Diamond is a chamber pop band led by singer-songwriter Shara Worden, which was formed in New York City, NY, USA (2006).

Worden is the granddaughter of an Epiphone-playing traveling evangelist; her father was a National Accordion Champion and her mother a classical organist. Having a family of wanderers who migrated across the U.S. every few years, the landscape and the musical influences were constantly changing: Spanish tangos, Sunday morning gospel, classical and jazz were the accompaniment to her home life. Her first song was recorded when she was three years old, and by the age of eight she was studying piano and performing in community musical productions.

As a teenager in Michigan, Shara honed her musical prowess singing along to Whitney Houston music videos and Mariah Carey albums. When pop music wasn't enough, she enrolled in the music program at the University of North Texas, immersing herself in the songs of Henry Purcell and Claude Debussy. After college, she moved to New York City and fell in love with its cold winters and busy streets. She continued to study opera on the Upper West Side during the day, but at night she frequented downtown clubs such as Tonic, Knitting Factory, and The Living Room, catching performances by Antony and the Johnsons, Nina Nastasia, and Rebecca Moore. She began to spend less time sight-reading Mozart and more time de-tuning her Gibson electric guitar to play her own newly-written songs. Coaxed out of recital halls and onto the small stages of bars and clubs, Shara assembled a coterie of musicians to accompany her with bass and drums, music boxes, wine glasses, and wind chimes. She released two full albums in 2001 (AwRY and Quiet B Sides) as well as a remix album with her band entitled AwRY.

In performance she showed unusual versatility, channeling the vocal theatrics of Kate Bush, the soulful seductiveness of Nina Simone and the gothic pop of Portishead. Her infatuation with theater and costumes inspired her to wear superhero capes, ball gowns, or Tudor corsets on stage, depending on her mood. Her deeply personal songs transcended the histrionics of opera; Shara was at last singing about what was closest to her heart. She began to see her own music as the most precious gift she could give to the world - as reflected in her namesake, "My Brightest Diamond".

Of course, opera never really left her, and Shara's performance blurred the lines between rock show and recital, setting baroque love songs alongside French carols and Prince covers. Her vocal lines reached for Puccini, but her guitar was pure PJ Harvey. The center of gravity here was the workmanship of a woman whose imagination had no limits. To sharpen her skills, Shara studied composition with Australian composer Padma Newsome (of Clogs) and began to incorporate a string quartet in her live show. The influences of Nat King Cole and Henry Mancini rounded out the edges. A few years later, she met Sufjan Stevens at The Medicine Show, a variety show hosted by New York City's incendiary poet, Sage, at Arlene's Grocery. This, in turn, led to a yearlong sabbatical from her work, doing splits and round-offs (not to mention the human pyramid) as one of the notorious Illinoisemakers. Shara was quickly promoted as cheerleading captain.

All of this led to an impressive resume, but My Brightest Diamond still had no album to show for it. So in 2004, she began work on two records: one featuring songs accompanied by a string quartet titled "A Thousand Shark's Teeth", and a more standard rock album featuring a full band (featuring Earl Harvin on drums, Chris Bruce on bass, and, on one song, her father Keith on accordion) titled "Bring Me the Workhorse", released to critical acclaim in August 2006 on Asthmatic Kitty Records.

Her songs distil stories to their most distressing points of contact: a phone call, an injured horse, a dragonfly caught in a spider's web. She doesn't share all the information - just the stuff that matters. The effect is a sensational compression of time, in which an entire event is summarized in a single note. This, of course, is the essence of opera. But My Brightest Diamond is much more than that. There is also the humor one might find in an old TV episode of Wonder Woman or Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Shara's songs reconcile all the complex emotions found in each of us: she can grieve as comfortably as she can laugh, sometimes in the same breath.


User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL.

yMusic is an expandable group of performers, formed in 2008, actively engaged - and equally comfortable - in the overlapping orchestral & pop music worlds. As well as being conservatory-trained, members are multi-instrumentalists, improvisers, composers, arrangers, conductors & singers. Six core musicians perform as a dynamic chamber ensemble, writing / commissioning works to feature their revolving instrumentation & musical perspectives. They also serve as a ready-made collaborative unit, for artists interested in expanding their sonic palette, on recordings & in performance.

Its members have toured & recorded with well-known artists, across genre, such as: Jay-Z, Björk, New York Philharmonic, Antony and the Johnsons, ????, The National, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Rufus Wainwright, Grizzly Bear, Yo-Yo Ma, Meredith Monk, David Byrne & Shara Worden (of My Brightest Diamond). Official site: http://yMusicEnsemble.com.

User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL.

Caveman was born in New York in January of 2010, when a group of friends decided it was time to put aside their boyhood ways and start being men. The sound they crafted in that large, dark room is equal parts chamber pop, dreamscape, and horror film score. At a Caveman show you will hear four-part harmonies, spaced-out guitars, synths, and, yes, much drumming. This has been a gallant year for the band, as since their first birthday they have shared the stage with bands such as Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes, White Rabbits, Here We Go Magic, Cursive, Amazing Baby, and Blue Oyster Cult. They recently went into the Loveboat studio with Nick Stumpf (French Kicks) to commit their songs to record.


Caveman is:
Matthew Iwanusa
Jimmy Carbonetti
Stefan Marolachakis
Sam Hopkins
Jeff Berrall

User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL.

Oneohtrix Point Never is an alias and solo project of Brooklyn-based synth drone artist Daniel Lopatin formed in 2007. He also is a member of Games aka Ford & Lopatin.

Previously he has been involved in acts Astronaut, Infinity Window, Skyramps, Dania Shapes and others.

http://www.pointnever.com

User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL.

Ahmed Janka Nabay is a Sierra-Leonean musician who has been a major figure in Bubu Music, a traditionally Muslim music which is played by up to 20 musicians blowing into bamboo pipes of different sizes.

Janka Nabay recorded his album in Forensic Studios in Freetown during the Sierra Leonean Civil War. Since moving to Philadelphia in the mid-1990s, Janka Nabay has continued to play bubu music, including a performance at the CMJ College Music Marathon in New York in 2009.

Janka Nabay is of Mandigo and Timini descent, two of the ethnic groups within Sierra Leone .

User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL.

As a co-founding member of Shinkoyo records, Matt Mehlan retains the label's core ideals of collaboration, experimentation, and unpredictability with his Skeletons project. Beginning in Oberlin, Ohio as a solo act with help from an eclectic cast of collaborators (classically-trained trombonists, punk rock drummers, a junkyard boy's choir), Skeletons has now settled comfortably into its adult body, having established the full-time band The Girl-Faced Boys (Seve, Johnny, Jason, and Carson) and forming an alliance with Ghostly. In addition to appearances at the 2004 CMJ and 2005 SxSW festivals, the group has lent live support to TV On The Radio, The Unicorns, VHS Or Beta, Animal Collective, Holger Czukay (of Can), Jackie O' Motherfucker, and Twig Harper. A major US tour is planned for summer following the release of the LP Git.

"Apparently, more interesting artists have lived in Oberlin, Ohio than the tiny city has streets. Life and the Afterbirth is the best of the Oberlin-based Shinkoyo label's first three intriguing releases.

Skeletons is one man, Matt Mehlan, an Oberlin Conservatory student who has a lazy voice, an ear for arranging and a knack for penning dark, subversive lyrics. First, about that lazy, breathy voice: if impersonating the Sea and Cake's Sam Prekop is a good way to get dates, well, let's just say that Mehlan is having a very nice senior year. Like Prekop, Mehlan strains to hit unreachable high notes, but never so much that he sounds anything but laissez-faire. He also shares Prekop's tendency to let the instrumental parts of his songs guide his vocals, rather than the other way around. Like the Sea and Cake's songs, Skeletons' pieces usually seem to stroll in no particular direction, with instruments often loosely following a drum groove; Life and the Afterbirth isn't for listeners who hate when music isn't crisp and compact.

And there, finally, is where the Prekop/Sea and Cake similarities end, and where Skeletons really starts to get interesting. Life and the Afterbirth is far more lush than any Prekop project I'm aware of. Mehlan employs My Bloody Valentine-style distortion, noise, fusion-inspired Fender Rhodes doodlings, IDM-like textures and washes of ambient sound, all with such skill that it's amazing that they were all done by the same person. He's also ready with more traditional instruments, including some fine (uncredited) string and horn parts. The self-titled final track even ends with a handclap-accompanied campfire singalong.

Is it a singalong about love, or brotherhood, or campfires? No way: "Get up to the sky, get down in the ground/Get back in your mother's stomach." Mehlan's lyrics contain plenty of perverse ruminations that make the bizarre observations that surround them seem even stranger: "My friend, he drowned in his own vomit/It was Bulls versus Celtics/This is the part of the story where your first pet dies/It was Jordan versus Bird/Pass out the boxing gloves/Take all your clothes off/Let's fight about who wants to die more." Lyrics like these make the apparent placidity of much of the music on the album seem curious and subversive.

Life and the Afterbirth would benefit from more direct pop hooks, and Skeletons could surely include some without interrupting Mehlan's low-key style. That aside, Life works on many different levels: Mehlan's odd and vivid lyrics give the album a feeling of mystery that unifies its already-appealing parts. Skeletons and Shinkoyo are an artist and label to watch.

User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL.