"I did want to rip off Yo La Tengo a little bit. I also wanted to rip off The Feelies a little bit," admits singer/guitarist Martin Frawley of Australian band Twerps. But the quirky quartet infuse those influences with their own cheeky charm, resulting in a unique style they jokingly refer to as "j…
Good music may be one of the few things Iceland and Austin, Texas, have in common. Kaleo is a perfect example of that bond. The Austin-based Icelandic four-piece dance around their influences while delivering songs with such diverse sound you wonder if their songs all come from the same band. But u…
"Are you digging our laid-back vibe?" Band of Horses band leader Ben Bridwell asked the audience during their recent concert at Seattle's Moore Theatre. Following their recently released live recording, Acoustic at the Ryman, Bridwell and co. chose to perform very loose, rootsy interpretations from…
This month, UK electronic act Factory Floor finally release a proper full-length record. This is the London band that started almost eight years ago, bouncing around styles to dial into the pure genius that they’ve come up with now. They released mini album Talking On Cliffs in 2009 and dropped the…
Oakland's Beats Antique debuted in 2007 with their unique blend of the world fusion and electronic genres, performance art and live instruments. Muti-instrumentalist David Satori seamlessly brings a variety of world influences into the mix, from Middle Eastern styles to afro-beat. The group's dance…
Seattle native Joey Butler (a.k.a. Kid Smpl) has been constantly evolving his atmospheric and immersive style of abstract electronic music over the past five years, shifting away from a more tranquil and atmospheric sound for a more visceral and physical aesthetic. Now based in San Francisco, Kid S…
Seattle's silver-haired soul singer and her backing band, Grace Love & The True Loves stopped by KEXP to perform a few tracks off of their eponymous debut album, and the nine of them filled our live room to beautiful capacity. Their performance was pure vintage - her rich baritone echoing the i…
"Sweep" - that's the command that Parquet Courts give us over and over again on their new single "Dust". In the context of the tune, it's about the dust that accumulates, sitting on everything that doesn't move, marking the time we've spent without motion, watching the wheels go round. The irony of…
Of the sessions we've presented so far in our weekly series of Polish bands KEXP recorded while at the OFF Festival in Katowice, the music so far has been either experimental (Kristen and Olo Walicki Kaszebe II) or re-interpretations of traditional sounds (Hańba and Sutari), but as terrific as thos…
Donning a red jump suit, Olivia Merilahti, vocalist of The Dø, looked as if she took the spacey ambiance of the KEXP studio to heart and, based on the sonic transformation The Dø's sound undertook in the creation of their third album, it was a fitting sentiment. Leaving acoustic instruments behind,…
Can you believe it's been over a year since our last David Sylvian post? My, how time flies. Back in 2012, we looked at his 1986 album, Gone to Earth, so it seems only fitting to move forward in time by another year and see how KCMU reacted to its followup, 1987's Secrets of the Beehive, his last s…
Perhaps no other artist has brought Eastern music to the West like sitar master Ravi Shankar. His tutelage of George Harrison in the mid-60's kicked off a lifetime of cultural exchange. While rock bands like The Beatles were incorporating Eastern sounds in their music, Shankar himself was composing…
Eddie Bermuda is the alias of Eddie Sumlin, a DJ and producer originally from the Pacific Northwest, with strong roots in the Tacoma area, who currently calls Los Angeles his home base. Known for his smooth DJ sets that explore house, disco, soul, hip-hop, jazz, R&B, and anything fresh in-betwe…
Pickathon is a music festival from another time. Coming down from Seattle, you find yourself coming across the breathtaking Columbia Gorge, taking exit 17 off of I-205 straight onto Woodstock Drive, and maybe that’s no mistake. The closer you get to Happy Valley, the further back in time you seem t…
Our girl Grimes always does the unexpected, and that's just part of the reason why we love her. Today, she has released not one, not two, but SEVEN new videos for tracks from her latest LP, Art Angels. The clips were created by Grimes, her brother, Mac Boucher, and her best friend, HANA, during a …
Guillermo Scott Herren's early releases under his Prefuse 73 alias at the turn of the century proved to be groundbreaking, his fusion of intricate electronic production with high-quality instrumental hip-hop beats yielding a refreshingly innovative and highly influential sound. The current NYC-base…
Welsh singer and producer Kelly Lee Owens has been making waves as a captivating solo artist in the underground music community over the past few years, blending immersive techno, ethereal dream-pop, and hypnotic krautrock to create her own singular style. She's released a string of hotly-tipped EP…
Los Angeles' Adrian Younge is a self-taught musician and highly sought-after analogue soul/funk/R&B/hip-hop producer. Bursting onto the music scene with his soundtrack to the 2009 blaxploitation parody/homage flick Black Dynamite, Younge has emerged as a distinctive artist and recording enginee…
