What is the Tech Guy listening to?

Dead by April is a Swedish metal band from Gothenburg, formed in February 2007. The band consists of Jimmie Strimell, Zandro Santiago, Marcus Wesslén and Alex Svenningsson. They released their self-titled debut album in May 2009. In 2010 the two guitarists, Pontus Hjelm and Johan Olsson, left the band. Pontus rejoined the band once Johan Olsson left, first as a session player, later as official. In September 2011 the band released their second studio album “Incomparable”. In 2012 the band entered the Swedish edition of Eurovision where they went on to the finals with their new song “Mystery”.

Dead by April

What is the Tech Guy listening to?

A sonic tincture of shamanic energy, at once ecstatic and shadowy, fragile and surreal, fluid and psychedelic.

Cheri Chuang’s wordless crystalline voice graces three songs, with traces of Persian inflection. Deep basslines hint at dub, while analog modular synth skitters and chuffs the outlines of a rhythmic grid, propelled forward by pulsing north African drums. Sustaining guitars bring a searing edge. Cello and reeds echo plaintively in the distance. Rich’s sparse piano adds droplets of modal jazz to this dark tea.

What is the Tech Guy listening to?

When Nikki Sixx, James Michael and Dj Ashba get together, something special happens. The last time the supergroup aligned as Sixx:A.M., their first album, 2007 s The Heroin Diaries Soundtrack gave birth to the single, Life Is Beautiful, which became radio s most-played rock song of 2008. They joined the Crüe Fest tour and played for more than half a million rock fans with Michael at the mic, Dj on guitar and Sixx on bass. Recently, they rejoined to create This Is Gonna Hurt, their second album and the second soundtrack to a New York Times best selling book by Nikki Sixx. The 11-track companion CD hits stores May 3rd.

The idea for the album came one day when Michael stopped by Sixx’s Funny Farm photo studio. The pair was looking through some of the bassist’s recent pictures, which depicted people missing limbs, some who were incredibly overweight and prostitutes who all engage with Nikki for photographs included in the book THIS IS GONNA HURT. Michael and Ashba were struck by Sixx’s ability to capture beauty in situations where society judges it as other than. It made them think about their own assumptions and feelings and as they do, the group got together and wrote and recorded songs about the experience.
Michael says, The way Nikki had set the surroundings, you realize the photo subject has such an incredible story to tell. It was very thoughtful and very beautiful and I believe he was taking a picture of the person inside, even though the outside was not what we are used to seeing and certainly didn’t fit the average person s concept of what beautiful is. When I listen to the finished record, it s these images I see.

The title came quickly, Michael says of This Is Gonna Hurt. It just seemed so appropriate for what we were going to embark on. It was gonna hurt us to make this record and to discuss these topics. It was a painful experience but also something that ended up being pretty beautiful in the end.
Of course, this journey is one the band has embarked on before. When they made The Heroin Diaries Soundtrack, they presented the horrors of addiction with the caveat that there was always hope. Their song Life Is Beautiful, with its infectious chorus and pleading melody, struck an immediate chord with thousands of people. Almost the minute it went to radio, we were getting Facebook and Myspace messages every single day saying, This song literally saved my life. Thank you so much, Michael says. Or posts like, My husband or my wife was a drug addict, and this song helped me through his or her addiction. To this day we get messages like that.
Other sources for inspiration on the record came from outside of the photography studio as well. The laidback, feel-good rocker It Sure Feels Right hit Nikki one day as he was driving in Los Angeles, the city he s lived his entire adult life in, and realizing that no matter how hard things get things always work out and how happy he is to live there. And the album s final song, Skin, came to Michael one night when he was playing the piano apart from the band. After working on This Is Gonna Hurt for eight months straight, he was overcome by the subject matter he d been singing about and was inspired to write a piano ballad just making sense of it all.
In the end, the group defied all odds and made a second record that built on the sound and positive message of The Heroin Diaries Soundtrack not because the needed to, but because they wanted to.
I think this record ended up affecting all of us on a much deeper level than we thought it would. The album is about being honest with yourself. When you sit down and start really acknowledging who you are and how you behave towards other people and how you judge other people, it s gonna be painful. This is gonna hurt.

What is the Tech Guy listening to?

After the near symphonic exercise of engaging the void that was Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid in 2001, it was hard to believe there was anything left to do. Wrong. Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie emerged from the studio in early 2007 with the equally huge And Their Refinement of the Decline. The notion of symphonic here is, without doubt, still present, but not in any normal way. Over two very differently themed discs, and three LPs, Stars of the Lid engage long conceptual ideas from a place one can only call micro-minimalism. An obsession with drones fading in and out on all kinds of instruments is what takes precedent here, whether that be a string section, a solo cello, harp, trumpet or a children’s choir. (Yes, all of them are here, and more.) Don’t worry, all this deep fixation with drones and classical music doesn’t mess up Stars of the Lid’s sense of humor. The titles are still hilarious in places (the set opens with a piece titled “Dungtitled (In A Major)”). The sound of drones is prevalent on disc one, though the drones change and are actually held notes. Whether they are played live or simply articulated and then manipulated by electronics doesn’t matter. The feeling of being washed over, being gently pulled under water to someplace where language no longer makes sense, feelings get all folded together and an overwhelming calm takes over — especially at loud volumes — as single notes are held by the strings for as long as five minutes. The aforementioned piece is like this, as are “The Evil That Never Arrived,” and “Apreludes (In C Major),” which moves through one note for minutes at a time with an ever increasing dynamic and textural array of sounds and instruments and begins to feel like the opening theme of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yet the real bottom line in these pieces, and to a lesser but no less relevant extent, is that these cuts feel like a part of an opening whole that is also at the end of something, like quiet exits from a long-form work, with the feelings of being finished, exhausted, lulled by the lack of energy and motion. It’s impossible to say, but when engaging disc two, it feels almost as if it is a mirror image to Gavin Bryars’ magnificent “The Sinking of the Titantic” (the second version). Here, where melody dissipates and disappears or never even arrives, as in “The Daughters of Quiet Minds,” or the in-and-out of the ether feel in “That Finger on Your Temple Is the Barrel of My Raygun,” where actual oceanic and perhaps ship sounds can be heard washing through the mix; and the piece is merely three notes in scale. The sense of drama and restless experimentation are portrayed in back to back pieces (“Humectez la Mouture” and “Tippy’s Demise”) where on the former a voice in French speaks out of an indescribable series of spaces and noises, and on the latter a cello harmonically plays with the all but absent “orchestra” who have disappeared into the actual feel of the piece rather than remained in its mechanical parts. The set’s final cut, “Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface” begins with voices, muted yet telling, washed into the emerging sound, where chords express themselves, shift and change shape, color and dimension, becoming both something more and something less in the process. At over 17 minutes, more instruments are added, they emerge louder and are more “present” but remain under the guise of absence, as that thing that has already been wiped away. The single- and two-note lines that emerge from the slow, turtle-like pace of the track never move toward anything else even though they assert the theme in various dynamic ways on occasions before re-entering the shadow world of sound. Everything here is rounded. There are no edges on either disc, it’s all fuzzy and yet brilliant to hear at the same time. It’s music of such quiet and devastating power it can silence a room in five minutes without the volume knob on the stereo being manipulated.