If you haven’t heard Los Angeles’ Evan Voytas own brand of experimental, synth-driven pop music, you have likely seen him shred in another setting. Dude’s a regular in the live bands for Brainfeeder maestros Flying Lotus and Gonjasufi. Voytas has been mostly working on his own gigs lately, though, whether it be playing out with his own backing band or crafting his impressive brand of retro earworms in the studio.

The latter becomes apparent on his latest release, the Feel Me EP, which you can get a taste of here with “You Don’t Even Know Where It’s At.” The richness of the synths and guitars are what really make this track jump out at you, but his party-prepped vocals are just as endearing. You can stream and download the track below.Feel Me drops Tuesday, Jan. 24 via Dovecote.

UK-based quartet Jonquil have recently announced their forthcoming full-length, Point of Go, set for a February 21st release with Dovecote Records (The Futureheads, Hooray For Earth). To celebrate this upcoming release, FILTER and Jonquil have partnered up for the release andpremiere of a special Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs Remix of“It’s My Part” by the band.

Fronted by Hugo Manuel of Chad Valley, Jonquil spins listeners’ attention to something fun and shiny with classic pop elements. This TEED Remix bubbles up “It’s My Part”, making Manuel’s vocals float above the intricate guitars and upbeat tempos. The balance falls into a obvious place - a new addition to some indie-pop DJs’ playlists. 

Download the remix below and check out the original version of Jonquil’s “It’s My Part” below.

The best way to finish off Hard Mix’s “I’ve Got Them” is to load right into the next three songs on his SoundCloud page, which publicly archive the 21-year-old artist’s practice on the cello, an instrument he’s been learning for about a week. “I’ve Got Them” already dances between drum machine and acoustic percussion (acoustic-seeming at least, whether or not he’s really just playing a computer keyboard), and following up with unvarnished, Garageband-recorded solo instrument practice really drives homes the organic quality that makes Hard Mix’s music so compelling. “I’ve Got Them” originally premiered in a mix Hard Mix did for SiriusXM Chill, which you can download here.

Stream: Hard Mix, “I’ve Got Them”

Fol Chen’s cover of Sufjan Stevens “I Walk” got honorable mention on NPR All Things Considered’s end of the year list for best cover songs.

LA’s Fol Chen have teamed with legendary minimalist interface designers Monome and the Echo Park art space Machine Project to create the Tetrafol, this wooden, pyramid-shaped device that plays/manipulates sound based on how it’s moved, as demonstrated in the video above. What’s just as crazy, if not even more so, is that the song below, “Back on Kent,” was composed on this buttonless space thing. And it’s really good! They only made 100 Tetrafols and they cost a hundred bucks, but if you buy one it comes pre-loaded with the stems from “Back on Kent” and some other Fol Chen songs/sounds, plus the software is open source so you can jack in and upload your own stuff and jiggle it around like it’s god’s Yak Bak.

Download: Fol Chen, “Back on Kent”

Read more: http://www.thefader.com/2011/12/07/fol-chen-invent-an-instrument/#ixzz1fsRx4G2r

Hard Mix’s new song “The Well Chant” was commissioned for The Paper Industry theater company’s “ugly opera,” Apologies (and other grey areas), which explores human emotion through quantum physics’ Schrödinger’s multiple-realitied cat and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (that we can’t ever really know what’s going on). It’s a natural fit listening to “The Well Chant” with an eye to the cosmos, the cascading loops like parts of a mysterious superstructure, the human/not-human vocal samples like hums of bored angels. Apologies runs December 1-17 at the Incubator Arts Project inside St. Mark’s Church. Tickets are available here.

Stream: Hard Mix, “The Well Chant”

Free Download: Evan Voytas’ ‘Can’t Let Anybody Know Who You Are’

Los Angeles based multi-instrumentalist Evan Voytas is gearing up to release his debut LP, Feel Me, on Dovecote on January 24th. The album’s lead single, the twinkly “Can’t Let Anybody Know Who You Are,” combines Evan’s dreamy falsetto with a synth-jazz blend. Voytas explains that the track was inspired by life in Los Angeles: “I wrote this song here in L.A. I feel like L.A. has a hazy, mystical quality to it. People appear and disappear, reappear as someone else. This song documents that phenomenon,” he says. “I like to hide out. I like to embrace mystery rather than be explicit about things. I like people who I can’t understand, who never settle on an identity.”

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/free-download-evan-voytas-cant-let-anybody-know-who-you-are-20111121#ixzz1eMrnHQId

The Tetrafol Is a Crazy, Motion-Sensitive Musical Pyramid From Fol Chen

Los Angeles musical group Fol Chen has created a strange new instrument that lets listeners re-create the band’s unique sound.

The device, called a Tetrafol, is a wooden tetrahedron that can manipulate sound. Its guts sense orientation and motion and use those movements to modify the playback of sounds. Each device comes loaded with mini-compositions created by Fol Chen, but users of the Tetrafol can also upload their own sounds to manipulate.

“We spend so much time making Fol Chen’s music on a computer, so it’s quite liberating to have an object that can manipulate sound — especially pitch and speed — through movement,” said band member Julian Wass in an e-mail to Wired.com. Wass and bandmate Samuel Bing created the Tetrafol with help from instrument maker Monome and Machine Project.

Monome, which also created one of DJ Deadmau5’s favorite gadgets, designed the Tetrafol to be battery-powered and easily connected to headphones or external speakers. Its circuitry and firmware are open source and each unit is assembled by hand. Machine Project is selling a limited run of 100 of the devices for $110 each. Grab one here.

“First and foremost, we wanted to create an object that people could use to make their own music, so it had to be something that we ourselves would find fun and useful in the studio,” Bing said. “At the same time, we wanted to make a cool-looking toy that non-musicians could play with just for the pleasure of making weird sounds.”

Want a taste of what the Tetrafol can do? Check out Fol Chen’s track “So Good,” made with sounds that come preloaded on the device, below.

Wise Blood, “Spliff” MP3

NME Track Review

Wise Blood - ‘Loud Mouths’

This makes us excited for their EP

Two-and-a-bit minutes of what sounds like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ backwards, tumbling piano motifs, an eerie Jack White-y falsetto and a waltzing drum machine give away little about Pittsburgh’s most mysterious, but they do make us excited about the forthcoming ‘These Wings’ EP, of which this is the lead track.

Premiere: Main Attrakionz “Perfect Skies (Supreme Cuts Remix)”

The Main Attrakionz song is called “Perfect Skies,” but this Supreme Cuts remix sounds extremely hazy. For a duo whose music is often described as “cloud rap,” it makes sense. With a laid back, euphoric vibe to it, this one sounds like it was tailor-made for a smoke session. You can download the track here.