There's nothing better than having a beautiful song to make a great single. After seven years of break, Tommy (who moved from Sweden to Thailand years ago), Paulinda and Carl reunited to write new songs. "City lights" (available for free at the band's website) was the first and it showed that synthpop still have something to tell thanks to catchy melodies and cool synth sounds. IT'S A GAME is the new digital Daybehavior single and contains the main track plus two remixes. The original tune is a fresh danceable synthpop song with fat bass lines in evidence and the seducing vocals of Paulinda. The song talks about lovers' games ("it's a game and I want to play / I wanna go all te way/ ...we can go slow and faster / and we can love like there's no tomorrow day") and the Greek duo Marsheaux did a great remix by keeping the original vocal lines and writing new bass lines (those ones sounds really great) with catchy lead synth inserts here and there. Australian band Parallox (that have their debut album "Metropolis" available on Conzoom) opted for a retro sounding 4/4 danceable mid tempo with dreamy atmospheres. The remixers did their best to give to the original song a "new life" and they proved once more that when you have a hit on your hands it's almost impossible to fail. Keep your eyes opened for the forthcoming album!

Stoneman is no anonymous band at all and that goes not only for their home country Switzerland. Those who are no newbies to the metal scene know that Switzerland has more to offer than overwhelming views, peculiar dialects and Samael. 'Human Hater' is a third album of this prime league Dark Metal act and is marked by '¦ hmmm'¦ hatred. Mikki Chixx (not an evil twin of Nikki Sixx), Iron Chris (must be a bodybuilder nickname), Mr Fly (for a white guy) and Rico H play traight forward and in your face Metal. The good thing about this album is that it offers certain diversity. More than most metal bands normally come up with. I guess this comes with musical experience and artistic growth. Stoneman has already toured with acknowledged acts such as Deathstars, Impaled Nazarene, Xandria and Wednesday13.
'Trail of Destruction' demonstrates how a metal band can tastefully incorporate keyboards into their song without sounding like a popish version of Dimmu Borgir. 'Built of Anger' is a really angry song with lotta screaming and not one of my fave compositions on the CD. Something like Alice Cooper gone Black Metal on cocaine. ,Sugar Mama' has got some Mötley Crew to it, only darker. I mean it in a positive sense. 'No Sweet November' is a very untypical composition for Stoneman. It sounds as if it had been written by Jyrki from The 69 Eyes. That dark rock romance with clear deep male vocals and it features Wednesday 13. No soft rock really but sounds very unmetally pleasant and suitable for mainstream radio.
All in all a very solid metal album with a number of interesting musical developments and ideas.

Influenced by the latest Prodigy, Narsti, from UK, landed on Basserk on the fourth volume of the Some Tunes CD compilation series and now they are ready to deliver their first EP titled STEREONAZI. Two out of four tracks are new ones as "Not as strong as the machines" was already on the fore mentioned compilation and the closing track is a remix of the main track (which now sounds like a dance tune for nuclear bombing). On this EP Narsti followed the rule "if you have to do it hard, do it harder" and brought hard beats, syncopated distortions and many layers of rhythm plus balanced doses of synth arpeggios. Their formula isn't new but work well and Nasti know where to hit!

Included into the fourth volume of the Some Tunes series compilation, Rawfare's "Floor luv" has now been released as remix EP where you can find an extended mix of the original tune (which sounds like a mix of house and dance with pistol pop distortions) plus four remixes: Keatch (they focused the remix on techno distortions with digital synth leads in evidence), Volatile (they de-structured the original tune using original vocal samples and focusing their sound on hard techno influences), Distrakt (acid, techno and 8bit distortions are the core of this remix) and Shock And Awe (they opted for a cinematic slow dub grime approach). If you are in need for 30 minutes of dance sounds, check this one...

The first two releases of the series [old school], dedicated to the musical studies of some milestones of contemporary experimentation and composition, have been tributed to John Cage and James Tenney and have been considerably acclaimed by the growing public feeding their curiosity about the basic principles of avant-garde music and this third one, tributed to Alvin Lucier, known for being one of the founder of Sonic Arts Union in 1966 as well as for introducing new paradigms to the so-called concrete music througout out-of-ordinary scores and somewhat bizarre and "scientific" explorations of the acoustic properties of objects, organisms (one of his most interesting "score", Music For Solo Performer, was obtained by the recording of the constantly changing brain activity of the performer, whose alpha waves were amplified throughout a machine able to record the electrical activity of his brain, while another famous "composition", Clocker, was entirely obtained from the recording by a galvanic skin sensor!) and envinronment (maybe Lucier's most relevant and inspiring experiment related to envinronment is I Am Sitting In A Room, an intriguing experiment based on the cycled recording of performer's voice for a plenty of times in different environments whose noises were gradually amplified since the point they becomes the main voice of the performance, an experiment whose principles had some influences on the birth of experimental videomaking as well...).

Even if from one side some classical puritans still mutter when they've been asked to voice their opinion about these composers and from the other some pop addicts' stomachs can't take this kind of musical food lacking of the consumeristic "value" (or dis-value) of accessibility to the general public, Zeitkratzer is going to bring the listeners in the wonderful world of Mr Lucier, after the zeutkrazters met this creative sound physician in Dijon, France, and decided to perform some pieces of his rich and intriguing repertory at The Philarmonie in Luxembourg, the ideal place for such a performance, including two compositions, the opening Fideliotrio - a somewhat confusing piece for viola, cello and piano, where a single piano tone is played in two different dynamics while the parts for viola and cello plays a sort of glissando going in opposite directions, so that the resulting antagonistic tension induces some confusion in the listener, whose ears presumably are going to lose directions of sound, disquiting in the intertwining of mutual interferences....very funny! - and Violynn - the piece I enjoyed more based on a similar game of Fideliotrio, whereas the violin player perform between two speakers by which he could listen his own recording without perceiving his own intonation, but only the recorded-on-tape one, so that he experiences a sort of diembodiment! Really interesting experiment! -, Opera With Objects - a sort of exercise Alvin Lucier uses for didactic purposes in which his students at Wesleyan College, where Alvin teaches electronic music (even if he refuses such a definition for his sound researches...), tap on different objects that they find, exploring the timbre resonance of those objects, where the interpreter seems to be totally depersonalised in order to act as a sort of entranced medium for the playset arranged by objects during a kind of exploration of their intimate properties...-, Silver Streetcar For The Orchestra - featuring interesting experiments on amplified triangles! - and Music For Piano With Magnetic Strings - a piece where the piano plays by itself after it's "prepared" with EBows, small electromagnets previously used for electric guitars, placed on its strings so that what results is a somewhat-hypnotic series of stranded sound layers varying in density and texture as well, showing another feature of this outstanding composer, whose scores look more like to user's guidelines! -.

After enjoying these perfomances by Zeitkrazter's musicians, I'm sure you will not consider them just as a scientifc study on sound phenomenology, but as music as well!