As reported earlier this month, head of the Unknown to the Unknown label DJ Haus releases a new mixtape, Thug Houz Anthems Vol. 1 this week. 

Beginning life as a YouTube channel, Unknown To The Unknown became a powerful force for good throughout the last year, churning out 20+ releases of twisted garage and oddball bass music from the likes of DJ Narrows, DJ Q, Sinden and Sinden; we correspondingly named it one of our ten favourite labels of 2012. Their lo-res hijinks have continued into 2013: NY troublemakers Jubliee and Star Eyes released fresh material at the start of the year, the Classified label sampler dropped in February, and they recently found a home for Lake Haze’s glittering ‘Need For Speed’, to name a few.

On ‘Cold as Ice’, a favourite of ours from Thug Houz Anthems, DJ Haus looks to Baltimore with scruffed breaks and reversed breath samples before shooting the track into space with a starry arpeggio. You can download it below.

Last year, FACT TV cornered DJ Haus in an Austrian cave - head here to watch the results.

Available on: XL LP

Most people are familiar with Sigur Rós thanks to their soaring style of post-rock’s easy affinity with epic televisual events. Their tendency to emotional spoonfeeding notwithstanding, Sigur Rós’ music has always been technically superlative, from the falsetto of Jonsí (singing in a self-penned language called Hopelandic, no less) to the bowed guitar and, more recently, string and horn sections. The new album Kveikur (Candlewick) has been billed by the band as the “anti-Valtari”, a self-produced attempt to address the increased glossy accessibility of recent albums Takk… and Valtari. Track titles translate to ‘Brimstone’, ‘Storm’ and ‘Iceberg’, which if anything should indicate that though the angle may be grimmer, the band’s intent – to create heroic musical panoramas – is more or less unchanged.

As such, Kveikur can sometimes feel a little lacklustre. ‘Brennisteinn’ (‘Brimstone’) opens promisingly enough with a crescendo of mucky feedback, epic drums and guitars borrowed from black metal, but as Jonsí’s breathy falsetto towers prettily above the crunchy instrumentation, it’s hard to shake the feeling that any grit is ornamental. ‘Hrafntinna’ (‘Brimstone’) is a mountain of a track, its stately strings, vocal harmonies and brass rising up to improbable emotional apogees, and ‘Ísjaki’, lovely though it is, has a hook that’s a hair’s breadth away from soundtracking the copulations of a million butterflies. ‘Yfirborð’ (‘Surface’) is just that, all superficial sheen and little depth, bizarrely seguing from plaintive dirge to ill-advised euphoric Eurodance. If you ever wondered what the Guetta remix of Sigur Rós covering Earth would sound like, wonder no more.

Kveikur isn’t short on moments of subtle beauty – take the sweet metallic chimes and subdued closing horns of ‘Hrafntinna’, or the deep bass rumble of ‘Bláþráður’ – but all too often an ornate, monumental chorus engulfs all nuances. Guitars on the title track churn grottily, but they too then lapse into a triumphal tower of song that’s more M83 than MBV. Similarly frustrating, the (admittedly over-polished) guitar drones of ‘Kveikur’’s closing thirty seconds are far more interesting than the preceding five minutes of spiralling melody and triumphal drums, and the melancholic ‘Var’, which sees the band allowing a little space and mystery in, is the most moving and uncluttered thing on Kveikur.

Kveikur is by no means a bad record: beautifully arranged, it does a good job of avoiding the twee sugariness of Sigur Rós’ last couple of albums. That said, its elements of darkness feel incidental to the overall triumphal blueprint. If anything, they illuminate an increasingly formulaic approach that, in its attempt to express extremes of human emotion, ends up saying not very much at all.

Sixteen years ago, Gary Wilson was depressed.

He was going nowhere, working a dead-end job, “the midnight shift out of a bookstore” (and what kind of bookshop is even open at midnight?). One night in June he turned on MTV and there’s Beck. Beck’s just swept the board at the 1997 Video Music Awards, winning a bevy of silver moonman statuettes and body-popping a best rap video award into the hands of Will and Jaden Smith. “Just how many awards did you win?” asks MTV’s on-the-scene reporter, John Norris, at just about the point Wilson switched his TV set on to the post-show wrap-up. “We don’t really know our mathematics right now,” says Beck, “But we do know that six-point-four equals make-out.”

‘6.4=Make Out’ was a languorous slab of mutant freak funk taken from Wilson’s first and (at that time) only album, You Think You Really Know Me. It would have sat quite comfortably on one of Ariel Pink’s records – only it had the temerity to come out several decades too early, in 1977. Since then, Wilson’s pop career had hit a two decade slump, so you can imagine his surprise when MTV’s twice-in-a-row Best Male starts quoting his lyrics on the telly and yelling “Like the man Gary Wilson rocks the most” in the middle of ‘Where’s It’s At’.“I’m flabbergasted, you know? Jesus. Why’s he talking about me?”

Fast-forward sixteen years and Wilson’s riding high, having released a further five full-length records on cult labels like Stones Throw (Madlib, J Dilla) and Western Vinyl (Bonnie Prince Billy, Papa M), and starred in his own documentary feature film. I stumble across the man playing at Paris’s annual free Villette Sonique festival, looking like Phil Spector’s just been dragged through a bush made of cling film and gaffa tape, backed up by a quintet of hip, young Austinites dressed like extras from a Tim Burton zombie movie. Their paint-flecked car-crash-in-the-dress-up-box appearance, Wilson tells me, “goes back to my time when I was interested in the art of Robert Rauschenberg and Jackson Pollock.

The set opens with an instrumental groove that sounds like something the BBC Radiophonic Workshop might have put together for a Schools broadcast about genital herpes, and ends with the whole band leaping on top of each other and rolling around on the stage in a giant heap. “That was the old Endicott pile up there,” says Wilson, a wistful look in his eye. “My buddies, the original Blind Dates, we used to do that. We entered a dance contest once and we did that as our dance. We actually won! I don’t know how that worked out …”

Endicott is the name of the small town in Broome County, New York, where Gary Wilson was born in 1953. A generation earlier, Rod Serling had been born in the same town and several of his Twilight Zone episodes were set there. For Wilson, likewise, ‘Electric’ Endicott is the scene of a whole dream-like mythos, of golden-haired girls in blue jeans on the banks of the Susquehanna River, and gleaming chromium dishes (Endicott also happened to be the birthplace of IBM, where Wilson’s father worked).

“This whole Blind Dates thing started because of a duck,” insists one of Wilson’s former bandmates in Michael Wolk’s (2008) film You Think You Really Know Me: The Gary Wilson Story. “Yeah, my father wouldn’t let me have a dog or anything,” Wilson elaborates as we catch up in his prefab dressing room in the middle of a park in Paris. “But he let me have ducks. Every Easter they would sell ducks and chickens in the five and dime stores. They used to sell purple chickens, blue, green. They dyed ‘em, y’know? So every Easter, we would get a duck or two. They were like little dinosaurs. They’d follow me around. My friends would always come round and try to get at ‘em. Come on ducky! Yeah, I still might get a duck again, y’know?”

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For FACT TV’s latest episode of Record Shopping, we met Carl Craig during a trip to Phonica.

One of Detroit’s all-time greats, Craig has been making history since the early 1990s, both under his real name and with aliases like 69. With a new triple-disc mix CD due for Ministry of Sound’s Masterpiece series, we spoke to Carl about whether we’ll ever see DJs quite like Derrick May and Ron Hardy again, the first record shops he used to visit, the importance of tuning forks and more.

The Bay Area producer’s debut full-length has finally arrived.

Without Your Love presents a murky, nocturnal world of decaying synths and deep echoes, but for all its gothic atmosphere the songs are underpinned by a pop feeling hinted at in Chris Dexter’s own vocals.

The album follows a pair of EPs on Tri Angle and will be released on oOoOO’s own label, Nihjgt Feelings.

The album is out on 24 June but you can stream it in full now over on Pitchfork. Listen to lead single ‘Stay Here’ below:

The gothic pop princess will embark on her first headline tour of the US and Canada in August.

Charli XCX has already spent part of the year in North America supporting big-lunged Welsh pop lady Marina and the Diamonds. Her own string of headlining dates begin on 30 August and will feature support from dreamy rock group Kitten and indie pop trio Little Daylight.

After releasing her debut album True Romance in April, the Hertfordshire singer-songwriter recently dropped a ’90s-flavoured track titled ‘Interior Design’.

Here’s the full list of dates:

8/30 Vancouver, BC – Venue *
8/31 Portland, OR – Doug Fir Lounge*
9/1 Seattle, WA – Bumbershoot Festival
9/3 San Francisco, CA – Slim’s ^
9/5 Los Angeles, CA – El Rey Theatre ^
9/6 San Diego, CA – House of Blues ^
9/7 Las Vegas, NV Vinyl – Hard Rock Hotel & Casino ^
9/9 Salt Lake City, UT – In The Venue*
9/10 Denver, CO – Bluebird Theater
9/12 Minneapolis, MN – Triple Rock Social Club*
9/13 Chicago, IL – Lincoln Hall
9/14 Meadow, MI – Meadow Brook Music Festival
9/16 Toronto, ON – The Hoxton ^
9/17 Montreal, QC – Sala Rossa ^
9/18 Cambridge, MA – The Sinclair ^
9/20 Asbury Park – Wonder Bar ^
9/21 New York, NY – Gramercy Theatre ^
9/23 Columbus, OH – The A&R Music Bar*
9/24 Nashville, TN – Mercy Lounge*
9/25 Atlanta, GA – Vinyl*
9/27 Houston, TX – Fitzgerald’s
9/28 Austin, TX – The Parish*
9/29 Dallas, TX – Club Dada*
10/2 Orlando, FL – The Social

*with Kitten
^ with Kitten, Little Daylight

Kaleidoscopic sounds from Vancouver, courtesy of Heartbeat(s).

Internet-savvy beat duo LOL Boys are having a (probably indefinite) pause in operations, although it hasn’t stopped band member Jerome LOL churning out a stash of remixes, edits and originals. Fellow LOL Boy Markus Garcia, meanwhile, has decamped to Vancouver and started up a new alias, Heartbeat(s).

Debut album Home Remedies arrives courtesy of Vancouver cassette imprint 1080p, also responsible for releases from M/M and scruffy house producer Bobby Draino. The LP is a real grab-bag, designed to match the eclectic and rough’n'ready feel of the mixtapes he listened to as a teenager: limber deep house, scrambled acid and ghettobass sounds all make an appearance. Dance Mania and Traxx are pinpointed as influences, and 1080p promise “heavy Detroit feelings leaking out of 303 twists.”

Home Remedies is available now on cassette and digital. Closing number ‘(We) Knew All Along’ – a granular techno track with echoes of Terekke and Svengalisghost – is available to stream below, as is a 15-minute album sampler. [via Exclaim]

Home Remedies:
1. Hocus Pocus (ft. Angelina Lucero)
2. Long Night Ahead
3. T.T.T. (Twerk Team Tryouts)
4. Brick & Birds
5. South Shore
6. Unemployed
7. Somewhere Between
8. Diss Track
9. (We) Knew All Along

Yeezus is upon us – and you can be sure that a swarm of remixes will follow in its wake

One of the early remixes arrives, fittingly, from Brenmar - another Chicago-raised musician building his own warped brand of club music. Last heard injecting some adrenaline into Brownstone’s 1994 slow jam ‘If You Love Me’, Brenmar takes a different path on his ‘New Slaves remix: in his words, “Love the original just wanted to slow it down a bit to more my tempo and give it a little bit more icing for the club,”

As such, the stuttering edit leaves ‘Ye”s original just about intact, but dials down the tempo and adds some ornamental work and unexpected drops for effect. Our tolerance for this sort of thing will no doubt nosedive when files tagged ‘Guilt Trap’ start popping up in our inbox, but, for now, it’s a decent first attempt.

Kanye West‘s producer Mike Dean revealed yesterday that the rapper is likely to tour off the back of Yeezus. A mix of the samples used on the album is available to stream here. [via The Fader]

Last we heard from Eminem, he was engaged in a messy legal squabble with Facebook – so it’s a relative pleasure to finally have some new music to tout. 

A segment of new self-produced track, ‘Symphony In H’ premiered last night on longtime supporter DJ Tony Touch’s Toca Tuesdays mix show. In contrast to the agonised navel-gazing and soul-searching of recent releases, ‘Symphony In H’ sees the rapper spitting over the sort of playful baroque lilt that characterised The Marshall Mathers LP and The Eminem Show. 

The track will appear on Tony Touch’s Piecemaker 3: The Return Of The 50 MCs, which arrives on July 9. Eminem’s eight studio album, which has been under construction since early 2012, with Dr. Dre suggesting the rapper was “finishing up” the record back in March; Dre and No I.D. are among those expected to appear on the record. [via Hypetrak]

Tracklist:
01. Tony Touch / D Stroy – Touch And D Stroy
02. Rah Digga – Freestyle
03. A.G. & Masta Ace – Double A
04. Busta Rhymes, J. Doe, Reek da Villian & Rock Marciano – Hold That
05. M.O.P – You Know You Love This
06. Too Short, Kurupt & Xzibit – V.I.P.
07. B-Real – Hit This (Freestyle)
08. Papoose & Uncle Murda – Brooklyns The Burough
09. Sean Price & Guilty Simpson – Random
10. Black Thought – Thought Process
11. Styles P, Sheek Louch & Jadakiss – B.A.R.S.
12. Liknuts – World Premier
13. Raekwon, JD Era, Ghostface Killah & RZA – Unorthodox
14. Twista & Bun B – Bounce
15. Thirstin Howl III – One Person Thirstin
16. Willie The Kid – Power Cypha
17. Action Bronson & Kool G. Rap – A Queens Thing
18. KRS-One, Fat Joe & Sadat X – Take It To The Bronx
19. Termanology – Aw Shux
20. Joel Ortiz, Royce da 59” & Crooked I – Slaughter Session
21. Eminem – Symphony in H
22. Redman, Method Man & Erick Sermon – Lets Go
23. Prodigy – Street Corner
24. N.O.R.E., Al Joseph & Reek da Villian – Questions
25. Gob Goblin, Starvin B & Spit Gemz – Untitled