“Like The Wheel” is the single that’s been released as a teaser. It has a more delicate feel than some of Matsson’s other works. There’s the typical finger work on guitar and Matssons’ rustic voice but there’s also a sense of burden and sorrow that we don’t typically hear from him.

The Tallest Man On Earth – “Like The Wheel”

01. Little River
02.0The Dreamer
03. Like the Wheel
04. Tangle in This Trampled Wheat
05. Thrown Right at Me

For now the EP is only available on iTunes but will receive a physical release on Nov. 9th

Watch Sweden’s royal couple perform a live version of Björk’s “Human Behaviour,” filmed at the Polar Music Prize ceremony in Stockholm. Björk was named a Laureate for 2010.

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Tyler Cowen draws attention to this paragraph, from Milan Kundera’s Encounter:

Scarcely 1 percent of the world’s population are childless, but at least 50 percent of the great literary characters exit the book without having reproduced. Neither Pantagruel, nor Panurge, nor Quixote have any progeny. Not Valmont, not the Marquise de Merteuil, nor the virtuous Presidente in Dangerous Liaisons. Not Tom Jones, Fielding’s most famous hero. Not Werther. All of Stendhal’s protagonists are childless, as are many of Balzac’s; and Dostoyevsky’s; and in the century just past, Marcel, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, and of course all of Musil’s major characters.

Then Cowen adds:

Contemporary writers seem more likely to give their protagonists children (Roth, Franzen, Updike, for a start, plus the rise of female authors helps this trend). And that is precisely at a time when more people are having no children at all. The decline of the heroic ideal in literature, and the decline of the journey of adventure, seem to be stronger forces in predicting fictional family size.

When readers are fathering children, writers aren’t. When readers aren’t, writers are. Interesting.

Relevance to music?

Sound artists, it seems, could benefit from the reflexive contrarianism we see across the aisle. It is long-established, if we are to accept the musician’s view, that currency has sheared away our ethical moorings, that civilization is ugly and doomed, that record companies are an uncontainable evil, and that the end of a love affair is the end of the world. To say nothing of the groupthink that plagues music composition itself (against which we have railed again and again here). Is there not one active musician anymore who is lyrically and musically freethinking, unconcerned with polls and trends and herds?

Our interview with Dave Keifer uncovered a wildly independent artist, but the attentive reader will cry foul: he pens only instrumentals, and we are searching for “lyrically and musically freethinking.” Blogger #4 suggests Death Cab For Cutie, but the competition is hot these days, and comparatively Death Cab’s music is quite stale. The Decemberists earn a mention for “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” alone. It’s easily the best yarn ever about a seafaring rastabout who is pursued by his late lover’s son, until a huge whale devoured both of their ships at once. But what have they done for us lately?

Leave bands we’ve inevitably missed in the comments section.

Here at tMiM we try not to make posts personal. We try not to tell stories about ourselves in order let the music stand on its own merit. Letting you, the listener, form your own opinion instead of using ours as your base to start from. This is one instance where not making this personal may prove difficult. My apologies in advance for the first person narrative.

Lately I’ve been listening to music with my ears only instead of my heart. I hear corny lyrics, abysmal transitions and even worse progressions. I’ve become critical instead of appreciative. New tracks and band suggestions come in via email each day, most of which are scoffed at and deleted. Once in a while we’ll find the time to go out searching for ourselves and rarely will we dig up something that’s worth mentioning. Her Name Is Calla is not only worth mentioning, it’s worth screaming from the hilltops.

With the access that bands have, even in home studios, to soundboards, effects and countless other knobs and dials, it’s becoming all too common for an over produced, overly spit shined album to hit the shelves. For a production company this screams “We have lots of money to spend” and it may please lay listeners but for serious music lovers this just isn’t cutting it anymore. I want to hear emotion, I want for the song to take me to the pain, pleasure or depression that brewed it.

My Name Is Calla write complex tracks that at times sound chaotic and at other times sound as though they were drawn out to perfection. Emotion is never hidden and there is no guessing as to what spurred the creation of the song. There are multiple minutes of almost complete silence that are taken over by climaxes that build to the rafters just to bring us crashing back down to Earth again.

“Pour More Oil”, at the moment, is the stand out track from their catalog and has taken a far lead over the rest of the pack. With up to eight members in Her Name Is Calla, a window is left wide open for them to try and fill all the empty spaces with sound. Luckily this temptation is subdued. “Pour More Oil” is fully embodied, all encompassing, atmospheric and at the same time minimalistic. You hear what you need to hear and nothing more. An extra instrument line is never thrown in to prove their brilliant talent and nothing is lost in the layers. In the end this formula creates a piercing piece of music that literally reduced me to tears.

After numerous EP’s and snippets over the years My Name Is Calla is scheduled to release their first official LP titled The Quiet Lamb via Denovali Records on October 22nd in the UK and November 8th in the US. This album has great potential to turn our entire top ten list for 2010 on it’s ear in one fell swoop.

From the label’s website above you can download their Long Grass EP as well as The Heritage LP for free. I highly recommend you do so.

Her Name Is Calla – “Pour More Oil”

Her Name Is Calla – “Thief”

by Desiree

Some people know exactly why and when they became “deaf.” For me, it’s not so easy to put a finger on the root cause. It could have been the steady stream of earaches I endured as a baby. It might just be the same bad genes that sentenced me to an expensive life of glasses and contacts by the tender age of six. Or maybe, just maybe, it was the incredibly good but incredibly ferocious Dead Confederate concert I went to last Sunday…

Fred’s the one who told me that Dead Confederate was a “must-see”. And he was right – they were great live. They delivered everything I was expecting and more. Much more. Like, in volume.

The night began quietly enough, which is actually not such a great thing when you’re attending a show. Based on the success so far of their newest release Sugar (see review here), I expected the draw on Sunday to be pretty decent. Unfortunately, the attendance was a little bit weak for my taste. Not sure why that happened, but I guess I’ll chalk it up to the time of year. Maybe Sunday nights are a little rough on Dallas during the school season.

But no matter – it just meant I had front row seats to three great shows. The evening began with two opening acts: Georgia’s southern indie rock group Futurebirds, and Ume, one of the heavier bands to come out of Austin in recent years. Both brought interesting material to the stage, and did their thing in completely different styles. Stay tuned for another post on Ume later this week; I was so impressed with that performance I have to save the details for another review.

Let’s just say that by the time Dead Confederate took the stage, I was pretty amped up and ready to rock. And boy, did they ever rock.

They nearly took the whole building down! You really should have been there.

The guys played a nice smattering of old and new songs, and maintained their reputation for moody, atmospheric music. But when they turned things up (starting with “Mob Scene”), they really tore the room apart. From that point on, it was an earthquake of sound that seemed to ripple the floor beneath our feet. The women’s bathroom lights were clattering, and I can only assume the same thing was happening in the men’s. Like I said, you really should have been there.

Highlights in the setlist included favorites like “The Rat” and “It Was A Rose,” but I still thought the new “Giving It All Away” held its own next to them. In short, Dead Confederate hit us hard with attitude and intensity. It was nearing midnight, but I don’t think anyone was ready to go home and start their work week just yet. We all preferred to stay put and suffer more hearing damage. Earplugs are for wimps. (But if The Loft had offered them, I might have taken a couple.)

Ping is Apple’s answer to the social networking craze (follow us on Facebook by the way). The idea is to follow your favorite artists, find out what they’re listening to (supposedly), what their tour dates are, and a feed that looks very similar to Twitter, although I don’t know where this feed actually comes from as some of them are well over 140 characters.

But that has nothing to do with social networking you say…

You are also able to follow your friends, find out what they’re listening to, what concerts they’ll be attending and other artists that they suggest. I hear that you are also able to connect iTunes with Facebook and import your friends list but at this moment I have found no way of actually doing that.

Privacy is also a big topic of concern when dealing with social networking and Jobs was sure to make a point of this, all the while, taking a stab at Facebook and their constant privacy issues when he said the privacy setting are “super simple”. I can’t comment on the simplicity of this since every time I try to access the privacy settings I get an error message that says “We could not complete your iTunes store request”. I guess not being able to change your settings at all does make it quite simple.

Like any new software there will certainly be bugs to work out. The idea of following what my friends are listening to on iTunes is quite appealing but the user interface still leaves a great deal to be desired. I have yet to find out how to search for artists that I would like to follow and the fact that you can only show 10 bands under the “Music I Like” heading is pretty ridiculous for a person like myself.

Hopefully as more users update their iTunes to 10 and more bands get involved this thing will flesh itself out but as for now I don’t see how this is very useful, great potential, but useless.

The Meligrove Band’s long-awaited follow-up to Planets Conspire is titled Shimmering Lights. We’ve heard it. It’s worth the wait. And the cover art, release date, and track list are all set.

Cover art? See left.

Release date? Tuesday, September 21, 2010. The album will be released on Nevado Records in Canada, and on Last Gang Records in the US.

Track list? We have you covered:


1. Ghosts At My Back

2. Heart Attack

3. Make Believe It

4. White Like Lies

5. Halflight

6. Kingfisher

7. Racing to Shimmering Lights

8. Bones Attack!!

9. This Work

10. Eagles

And here is a quick taste of what has kept Meligrove zealots on the edge of their seats for the last five years.

The real news of this post was not that technology has found a way to make Justin Bieber tolerable, but that the software is available to you, the casual passerby, right now, free of charge.

It is called Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch. Download it at Nasca Octavian Paul’s home page.

There are some advanced features you’ll want to eschew right at first, so all you really need to get started is a WAV, OGG, or MP3 file. Rookies can easily convert iTunes files to these file types. For an explanation, start with this article. We won’t publish the fruits of our labors (“no derivative works” clauses and all that), but here is some of what we’ve been tinkering with:

–“In This Shirt” by The Irrepressibles, stretched 3X.
–”A Warm Place” by Nine Inch Nails, stretched 3X
–“The Snow Leopard” by Shearwater, stretched 8X.

Heavy synthesizer, orchestral, or choral music favors better than Big Drum and Big Guitar. Repetition in real time becomes unbearable in 8X time, meaning complicated arrangements (read: anything by Cagey House) can greatly lessen the angst.

There. Primer concluded. Go, and enjoy!

“We Used To Wait” was directed by Chris Milk, who allows the user to insert their childhood address to make their neighborhood be the main focus of the video via Google Maps. The one downside is that if you don’t have Google Chrome already installed then you have to download it as the video doesn’t work with any other browsers. Trust me the download is worth it and you can just uninstall it in the end.

View your video here.

Is it real? A hoax? Or is the only hoax the accusation that this is a hoax? Who knows? This piece of music is remarkable either way. And you should give it a spin, just to be sure:

Allow Max Read over at Gawker to catch you up on the rest here. Executive summary? Sure:

You totally hate Justin Bieber, right, because you’re a rebel, or whatever? That’s just because you haven’t listened to Bieber slowed down 800 percent. Now his new single “U Smile” is a 30-minute epic. And it sounds awesome. No, really.

Courtesy of musician Nick Pittsinger, who used the free program Paulstretch, this is “U Smile” made slower. Like, a lot slower—eight times slower, to be exact.

See? Toldja.

Soft update: TMIM tinkers with the untinkerable here.