Micachu & the Shapes - Jewellery: Album Review

If there can be a musical space where grime, punk and freak-folk meet, then it’s in Jewellery, the debut album from Micachu & the Shapes. This is a band very much of its time, with little care for genre boundaries or backward referencing. Jewellery is a roughshod collection of 12 songs that sound like they’ve been bound together with sticky tape and cheap glue. Led by 21-year-old Harry Partch fan Mica Levi, the group also contains keyboard player Raisa Khan and drummer (and leader of his own nine-piece drum ‘n’ bass band) Marc Pell. Completing this rag-tag collective is a producer: the microhouse musician of many aliases, Matthew Herbert.

Read full article here.

How Twitter is Shaping the Music Industry

The answer to a simple question that lies at the top of every Twitter page ("What are you doing?") is radically altering the way we process information about bands, musicians, and the music industry. The relationship between music and the internet has been guilt edged ever since MP3 files started zipping back and forth across the planet. Illegal downloading and services such as iTunes have led to a hasty shuttering of record stores, and the perennial question of how to make money from recorded music continues to confound.

Read full article here.