Amanda Warner puts it simply, “Pop music is a platform to say something. You don’t have to only talk about parties.” Feed Me Diamonds is the result of Warner and producer Peter Wade’s tireless efforts to translate raw emotions into music that grooves without excess glitter. The pair first teamed up in 2008 after discovering a mutual love of gear, sci-fi, and cults. Warner studied classical piano and bass as a kid in North Dakota and got her start in a Minneapolis noise band before moving to California and immersing herself in rave culture. When she relocated east to design the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ touring synth rig, she met Wade, a young studio vet who’d seen it all as an in-house producer and engineer for Sony Music under Tommy Mottola. MNDR’s rise from the underground has been an impressive journey thus far. Just three months after MNDR’s first EP release, E.P.E., (Wondersound 2010), the team had a global smash on their hands: Mark Ronson & the Business Intl.’s “Bang Bang Bang,” featuring Q-Tip and MNDR. The track sold more than 3.5 million copies and helped introduce the world to Warner and Wade’s smart, hooky songwriting. MNDR was profiled as an Artist to Watch in SPIN, Billboard, Q, and NME magazines, performed the song on Letterman, Kimmel, Carson Daly, and Jools Holland’s TV shows, and took the stage at Pukkelpop and V Fest — all as an unsigned artist. MNDR has headlined shows in the US and the UK, opened for Miike Snow, Massive Attack, Chromeo, Yacht, The Shins and most recently The Ting Tings, among many others. Shazam named MNDR a breakthrough act and the project earned an MTV O Awards nomination. When the time came to make decisions about MNDR’s debut album, Wade and Warner made the choice to keep the album sounding dark and industrial, not spit-shine pop. Title track “Feed Me Diamonds,” was inspired by performance artist Marina Abromovic’s story about how her revolutionary father was supposedly murdered by ingesting ground-up gems. Glitchy “Sparrow Voices” is about the pitfalls of global economics and “Faster Horses” draws its inspiration from Henry Ford’s famous quote, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” While there are several songs on Feed Me Diamonds about “challenging money, wealth, power and the class system,” the disc is dominated by songs with even more personal starting points, like mesmerizing “Draw the Curtains,” which explores “when sexy is dark or when you want to be dark,” Warner explains. MNDR unleashes her instantly swoon worthy pop to you this Summer.
 
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There is one guiding belief for the members of AVAN LAVA: Be present. Burnished by years spent on stages around the world and refined on sweat-slicked dancefloors, AVAN LAVA is a movement without the self-aggrandizing rhetoric, a distillation of what is important, a celebration of everything that has ever happened to you, and everything that ever will. That this presence is set to AVAN LAVA’s rave-up-wrapped pop only enforces the connection between the mind’s machinations and the body’s revolutions.
 
“Being engaged, always being present – it’s about maintaining a certain kind of energy. It’s all inclusive – there’s room for everybody,” describes multi-instrumentalist Ian Pai of the intraband state AVAN LAVA constantly aspires to. In many ways, AVAN LAVA is bigger than their parts and their sum – central to the band is the communing with their fans. “Our whole thing is the audience. It doesn’t happen without them.”
 
It was this realization that first drew the core members of AVAN LAVA – Pai, producer-musician Le Chev and lead singer TC Hennes – into each other’s paths. The three had spent years orbiting each other in the New York music scene, with Le Chev even auditioning for Pai, who was with performative electroclashers Fischerspooner at the time. (“It’s still the only audition I’ve ever done,” says Le Chev.) When he eventually joined that outfit, Pai and he discovered their shared adoration of Daft Punk was only the beginning, and the two began collaborating on an undetermined project. While Pai and Le Chev found the music came easily, Pai was haunted by the voice he imagined singing over their tracks. “It’s a certain kind of tone that cuts through everything, because of where it sits in the frequency range,” Pai says of what he kept envisioning. Around that time, Pai saw Hennes perform in The Last Goodbye, a musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet set to the music of Jeff Buckley. “As soon as I heard him sing, I knew that was it,” recalls Pai.
 
Continue reading at avanlava.com…
 
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The Mast will be releasing their full-length album Pleasure Island on January 28th, 2014 on Channel A Records, a lush and inviting collection of songs that soaks the mind in a bath of endorphins while propelling the body to dance.  While their style skewed more towards organic, acoustic-based dance music on their first album, Pleasure Island is more modern and seductive, borrowing influences from artists like Massive Attack, Bonobo, Purity Ring, and Mount Kimbie.  Warm, sultry vocals and infectious melodies along with driving beats that bring to mind early IDM, post-dubstep, and experimental beat music all merge into finely crafted songs.
 
Vocalist Haleh Gafori and beatsmith/percussionist Matt Kilmer created the blueprints for Pleasure Island on planes and between gigs and recordings sessions for various projects in their hometown of Brooklyn and overseas.  Over the past year, while composing music and recording for Louis CK‘s show Louie on FX and working with artists as diverse as Reggie Watts and new music cello pioneer Maya Beiser, Matt always had his laptop in tow and was consistently sending tracks to Haleh. Between directing or editing music videos, Haleh would write lyrics, record melodies, tweak arrangements, and send the tracks back to Matt.  Through this volleying of ideas, Pleasure Island was born.
 
The opening track “Luxor” highlights Matt’s infatuation with early UK drum ‘n bass released on the Metalheadz imprint, detectable in the skittering beats under Haleh’s  winding vocal lines and velvety chants.  The euphoric and mysterious “Raining Down” follows, with a victorious middle section that first introduces the tribal element that recurs through the album. On “So Right,” a minimalist verse featuring a bell-like synth slowly builds, eventually bursting into a chorus that could easily be at home in a Deadmau5 or Hardwell set.  “Cliff” follows with a wide-open booming 808 beat that drops into a crushing double-time chorus as Haleh’s vocals soar.
 
The dance floor banger “Breathless We Go” follows, leading us into the mysterious cave of “Voices” which like many of the songs on the album features found sounds, in this case the swoosh of windsurfing as well as percussion samples Matt collected during his years of traveling.  Continuing in this vein, the impressive beast of a song “Nuclear Dragon” features an African balafon deftly played by Matt and “Lean Into It” opens with a sample of Pygmy water drumming from the Congo.
 
In their dazzling live shows, where they have performed alongside Blonde Redhead, Reggie Watts, Teebs, Susanne Sundfør & more, Matt and Haleh incorporate live electronics, percussion, and vocal improvisation, preserving the spontaneity they cultivated as instrumentalists. Speaking on their live show, Haleh said “We know we’ve succeeded when our audience is sweating by the end of the show.  When we see them jumping and moving, we know they’ve had a good time.”
 
The duo has created two videos so far for the album, both of which have met much acclaim. “UpUpUp” which features the pop and lock dancer Pandora Marie in butoh-esque body paint and beat-synced projections screened at Bumbershoot and has gotten over a quarter million views.  The second one, “So Right” which features a clever baby DJ who escapes from his crib and throws a rave, premiered in Interview Magazine and was chosen as Tubefilter’s must-see video alongside Arcade Fire’s “Afterlife.”  They are currently in Brooklyn working on the next video for Pleasure Island.
 
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milán is the music of Maria Neckam, who has made a name for herself on the international stage as a uniquely original and versatile singer/songwriter coming out of the New York downtown scene and has been praised by the press, from The New York Times to NPR’s a blog supreme and Le Monde in France, as “trailblazer” and “natural wonder”. She has also lent her voice to countless other artists’ projects, such as 4-time Grammy winner Erykah Badu, composer Ted Hearne and the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, HipHop producer Mesta Bish, and Indie Rock artist David Bronson.
 
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