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Formed just a year ago, this quintet has enjoyed a quick rise up the ranks of the Brooklyn buzz-bin — an almost meteoric ascendance that belies the band’s tender sound. Xylos’ fractured dream-pop gently brings to mind Yeasayer (who guests on a couple tracks) and the Flaming Lips. In fact, on opener “In the Bedroom” founding member Eric Zeiler’s voice evokes the wistful croon of Wayne Coyne while he bittersweetly sings about failed romance over tropical synths and twirling guitars. Meanwhile, the swooning harmonies on “This House We Built” virtually demand a coed campfire sing-along under the stars — that is, if the textured rhythms, boy-girl vocals, and ethereal strings throughout this debut EP didn’t sound so magical in stereo.
     Xylos will take a break from recording their first full-length album (due by early 2010) to headline New York’s Mercury Lounge on July 28. The Bedrooms EP is currently being offered as a free download at Xylosmusic.net .

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Xylos – This House We Built

Images by Joyce van den Berg

Today, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, much of the former border between the East and West is still a no man’s land. A painful reminder of times past, the barren strip of land lies untouched, as though someone witnessed something horrible there and swore to never speak of it again.
     Inspired to change this, landscape artist Joyce van den Berg set up the exhibition New Light on No Man’s Land, currently on display at the German Center for Architecture (DAZ) in Berlin. The exhibition shows precisely where the restricted area used to be and how it has changed, and proposes to transform the “landscape of trauma” into a dynamic and organic recreation area.
     Van den Berg wants to construct two bicycling tracks and reseed the ground so that new plants can grow where there is now little else but sand and gravel. The sandy terrain used to be regularly flattened in order to make it easier for the border guards to spot the fresh footprints of East Berliners fleeing to the West.

DH Records / Mercer Street Records

Quiffs, pompadours, and ducktails. Skintight skirts. Super-high heels. Ill-fitting broad-shouldered jackets. It’s either a ’50s theme party or a Kitty, Daisy & Lewis gig. The three Durham siblings, all under 20 years of age, may not be sure who Nirvana is, but ask them about any of their three favorite Louises — Louis Jordan, Louis Freeman, or Louis Armstrong — and they can school you.
     Kitty, Daisy & Lewis tend to favor music from half a century ago. Their impressive multi-instrumental abilities (at their July 7th show at the Echo in Los Angeles, we saw guitars, drums, harmonicas, pianos, ukuleles, banjos, trombones, and accordions, not to mention a double bass, scattered about onstage) are dedicated to recreating sounds from a pre-digital time. These same instruments, plus a few more, will be found in their North London home where Lewis Durham has set up a recording studio. It is here that they completed their self-titled debut (out August 11). A combination of select covers spanning from the ’20s to the ’50s, Kitty, Daisy & Lewis’ track-list also features five original songs penned by one or all three of the siblings.
     Entirely analogue — as is expected — Kitty, Daisy & Lewis has the crackle of vinyl embedded in it.

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Kitty, Daisy & Lewis – Going Up The Country

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Photography by Jim Newberry for Thrill Jockey

Here on Chicago’s west side, the streets are closed for Puerto Rican pride weekend. A swirl of festivities that could just as easily be celebrating a return to form for the pioneering avant-garde instrumentalists whose Beacons of Ancestorship, the follow-up to 2004’s tepidly received It’s All Around You, is just days away from hitting record stores.
     Tortoise has never been a full-time band, yet with all five members involved in countless side-projects – drummer Dan Bitney’s Isotope 217, for example – their many hiatuses have ensured an endurance that most indie bands from the ‘90s failed to cultivate. “High Class Slim Came Floating In”, the opening track on Beacons of Ancestorship, finds Tortoise embracing more playful and fuzzed-out sounds that Bitney admits might have been reserved for other projects in the past. “There’s always been a line with my ideas and stuff that I didn’t think was appropriate for Tortoise,” he says. “When I started 217 it was kind of a way to do what Tortoise was doing but more stripped down. It could be more funky or have hip-hop elements. So now I think that line of what was appropriate is gone.”

Photography by Iwan Baan

The most common response to the question “What’s your dream home?” is probably something like “A place in the woods, surrounded by nature.” That’s because many of us equate living deep in the forest or high in the mountains with serenity and, if the house is modernist (or better yet, a modernist take on a log cabin!), a sort of rustic sophistication. Think of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater; hell, even that vampire family’s house in Twilight. But many of us spend as much or more time at work than we do at home. And many of us work in some of the world’s most demoralizing, low-ceilinged buildings in the busiest and smelliest areas of major cities. So, short of becoming a lumberjack, how should today’s cooped-up white-collar employee dream of escaping his or her miserable workspace? By getting a master’s degree in architecture and applying for a job at Selgascano, a Spanish design firm whose new studio is in the middle of the woods outside Madrid.

Ghostly International

With three albums’ worth of music in just five years, 22-year-old Randolph Chabot has been producing his home-recorded electro-pop at an astonishing clip. This week, after much anticipation, the prolific prodigy from Detroit has released his proper full-length debut, Moondagger — a swirling set of twelve songs whose titular implement reportedly refers to a space-age myth about seeking “ultimate power.” Sci-fi fantasies aside, Moondagger indeed seems to herald a powerful voice of tomorrow, a voice that likewise befits today’s age of ADD. On “Toxic Crusaders”, Chabot’s swooning vocals over jaunty guitars evoke the wide-eyed wistfulness of Vampire Weekend mixed with the hyperactive futurism of New Order. Meanwhile, “Parallelogram” (stream below) launches the M83 model of lush, spacey synths out of this stratosphere with a frenzied rush of propulsive rhythms.

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Deastro – Parallelogram

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First was the Tesla – an electric dream car taking you from zero to sixty in four seconds with a range of 220 miles per charge, bringing environmental responsibility and high-performance sports cars together in perfect harmony. Of course, its one drawback is its price tag, affordable only to the super rich.
     Enter the Zero, straight out of the land of Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Maserati. Named for its lack of greenhouse emissions, the name might also be a hint at its accessible cost. The newcomer isn’t able to go as fast or as far as its competition but the Zero brings something much-needed to the world of electric cars: affordability. Its €18-20.000 price tag makes it a realistic option for the average driver, beating the much-anticipated Chevy Volt to the punch by a solid year. And the cute compact design makes it the Mini-Cooper of electric cars. Let’s hope consumers will find it as irresistible as we do.
     Hitting markets early next year, the 113-inch two-seater will be a perfect for cramped city streets. Constructed primarily out of cast aluminum, it weighs merely 1,200 pounds, one quarter of which is the latest generation of Lithium batteries. It charges simply by connecting to a normal socket. The chassis is one hundred percent recyclable aluminum. With a range of eighty-eight miles on a single charge, it is well within the average daily usage of most drivers, and can accelerate from zero to fifty-five km per hour in less than five seconds.
     The Zero will have its world premiere at the International Motor Show in Bologna, Italy, in December.