I can hardly remember the days when only extremely rich people were able to buy TV-sets, when most of us were listening to the radio and really adoring it. Now the situation has changed, we can’t imagine our lives without various music devices and MP3 players are obligatory as well. But what is more, we want our mobile phones to be not only a means of communication, but main attention-getters, thus, we adore lovely and stylish ringtones.

Continue reading Everything You Must Know About Ringtones

And now some metal… even death metal. But don’t be afraid it has nothing to do with real life death.

Heaven Shall Burn are a contemporary death metal band from Germany. Fro those of you who don’t know, death metal is one of the extreme metal subgenres and deals with the themes of death (not surprising), suffering, torture and all the other groovy stuff invented by normal people. In the mid 90^th death metal spawned melodic death metal, more melodic variation of the cookie monster vocal madness. HSB are a new step, they take melodic death metal (in the vein of acts like At The Gates and In Flames) and mix in with modern metal and hardcore. The mix is pretty nice actually and as all the good bands from this scene they are very energetic live.

I was on their show on Wacken open air 2007 and they literally had total madness on the festival ground. Giant circle pits and walls of death (if you don’t know what it is, check out Youtube) and tons of energy.

In addition to this I can say that Heaven Shall Burn is one of the bands that really care. They are political activists, animal rights protectors and vegetarians. Mixed with good Swedish influenced music it makes them one of the best bands to start with in modern metal scene.

Whoa their new release – Conqueror, totally blew me away last week.

They play in the subgenre, or better to say genre of traditional doom metal. If you remember Black Sabbath, they were the inventors of traditional doom metal. It is slow and bit epic music focused on some occult and fantasy themes. And it really slays!

A lot of people discuss trends and mainstream and also the metal underground. This band proves that metal underground is not dead. It is not just alive and breathing it can even prove that they are much better than the standard cloned mtv bands. This release is based on the famous Conan series and is musically similar to this good old-school battle fantasy.

Not like new doom, traditional doom metal is a bit faster, not so depressive and as for me more interesting due to homage to real good bands like Black Sabbath and Pentagram. Yeah it will take you a while to get used to the sound, but when you’ll get used to it you will see that this is a great music for both work and relaxation. It really breathes with the spirit of old rock combining it with the good old gloomy vintage fantasy.

When you’ll try to figure the formula of perfect post-rock it will be difficult. It should be melancholic but not depressive, you need to have good soundscapes, a twist of ambient and a part of neo-classic also is a must be thing. The rock part that is mostly missing in modern post-rock scene will be a good bonus, actually it is very hard to make the guitar-bass-drums combo to sound gentle and still be a bit lo-fi and garage. Vocals are really not necessary, the best solution is some backing choral style stuff, I mostly prefer instrumental post rock.

A good post-rock album is like a journey. It can vary from philosophy to feelings, from frozen mountains to sunny fields, from highway to a small path in the forest… from love to hate. From deep space to deep oceans and still it must carry something tiny that only your heart can see. This is the impossible combination of perfect post-rock made possible by the Australian band Laura in their Radio Swan Is Down album.

One of THE releases in this awesome genre.

Younnat is a solo project of the keyboardist from a local lounge band Luk. If you listen to Luk you’ll definitely hear some retro space influence. That actually comes from this guy.

In his first solo album he presented a fine cocktail of analog electronics, 8 bit and different non musical sounds. Matrix printers, real life electronic sounds are also a part of his sound archive. He mixes it a bit avant way but it is still listenable and you can definitely hear some old-school styled influences in his music.

Another thing is his live shows. That’s a WOW! A toy steering wheel that is reprogrammed and used as a DJ mixer. A joystick used in retro gaming themes based on old C64 sounds. Matrix printer with live keyboards, life of a house simulated with home electronics sounds. And finally a feature song with live girl singing opera vocals and sampling with a playstation joystick. I bet in few years he will be a number one guest on different GameCons. But now the world only has his debut album Ryba, which is also a great release on modern electronics scene.