Griff says; bringen Sie mir meinen Glockenspiel!

I was browsing through the CLLCT website when I noticed that 'A Pile Of Lo-fi!' (featured here previously on Streetlamp) have recently released the latest volume, number 6 since you ask, of their free, lo-fi, indie-music taster series. As always it's well worth a listen and contains a number of previous Streetlamp recommendations such as shalloboi, Wisdom Tooth and Tinyfolk. I also noticed that this volume contains an excellent song, Blue Highways, by the criminally under-rated Cabinet of Natural Curiosities. For those of you who dont know, the group’s principal members are Jasmine Dreame Wagner and Alex Wilson (pictured) who retreated to Wagner’s childhood home in the woods to record chilling lo-fi lullabies and country dream songs. As well as this track for A Pile of Lo-fi, a new album, reportedly to be titled Buttermilk Channel, is also apparently in the offing. We look forward to that and as soon as we know more we'll post it on here. In the meantime, I also noticed that Cabinet of Natural Curiosities have made a sweet, home-made video for their absolutely outstanding song Owllullaby from the Searchlight Needles album. This song has been a firm favourite of mine for a while now and so I need little or no excuse to post the video (below).



I hope you loved that as much as I do. A free MP3 of the song can be downloaded from the band's last.fm page and their official website (where you can also order the band's CDs).

Watching that video with it's cute, baby-blue glockenspiel instantly reminded me of a few other videos by Streetlamp favourites. You see, I own that self same brand and colour of glock and, therefore, I can't help but notice when it pops up on screen. For no other reason than that, I'd like to share some of these videos with you tonight. First of all there's Scotland's own Camera Obscura with their acoustic cover of 'Some Guys Have All The Luck', hastily filmed, and nicely intimate for that, in a camper van at the Connect festival in Inveraray in 2008.



Did you spot the glock? Here it is again, in another charming, low-budget video, this time by Spanish indie-pop darlings Mittens (previously featured here on Streetlamp). On this occasion it is part of a perfectly-performed, synchronised glock display, which is sure to amaze and delight.



Finally, I'm going to feature a video which we've shown before on Streetlamp but which I'm posting again as Ray and I both love it. This time it's Guillermo of Mittens in his other guise of Wild Honey (featured here previously on Streetlamp). This is the fantastic Isabella. Now play that glock!




Griff
xx

Griff Says; "Wild Honey. Me Gusta!"

Given the ideals and philosophy of this blog, now seems like a good time to tell you about the latest project from 'Wild Honey’.

This month they have released a new song; ‘Prevent the Road from Being Buried by the Sand’ (listen to it on their website) and have also been playing live as part of the presentation of La Doropaedia´s new issue.

La Doropaedia is a thematic fanzine that features articles, songs and pictures around a single topic. This new issue is about the concept of the Commons. For this issue, 'Wild Honey’ have provided ‘Prevent the Road from Being Buried by the Sand’ ,a song based on this idea, that was written, recorded and mixed in less than a week.

'Wild Honey’ is essentially the project of twee-pop/indie-folk music genius Guillermo Farré (pictured below) and his group of friends and is based in Madrid, Spain.

Guillermo says of ‘Prevent the Road from Being Buried by the Sand’:

“I had to study what Commons really was, a legal and philosophical concept hard to include in a song. What I liked about it was that it has roots in the idea of collective works and in the concept of shared goods and services, which I think is present in many Woody Guthrie songs (and in many other protest songs from that era, of course). I tried to give the song a twist putting it into a different context, writing about the end of the feudalism and the moment when people in villages started to manage their own lands.

In the end, I tried to mix a Woody Guthrie song with a Joe Meek style production, keeping the acoustic guitar but filling everything with noises and tremoloed guitars.”



Here at ‘The Streetlamp’ HQ the idea of a song that mixes Woody Guthrie with Joe Meek makes us quite weak at the knees. We hope you’ll be similarly smitten. For a taster of the ‘Wild Honey’ sound check out the video below (featuring Guillermo, Anita Steinberg and Cristina Gomez).The featured song ‘Isabella’ is track 8 from Wild Honey’s debut album; ‘Epic Handshakes And A Bear Hug’ (released 29 October 2009) which can be downloaded free from their ‘bandcamp’ site.

Thanks to lainformacion.com for the video.



If you enjoyed that and, like me, can’t get enough of sunny folk pop featuring; glockenspiel, ukulele, and whistling then have a listen to two more songs from the same album.

If you want to make friends, then Wild Honey are also on Facebook and Myspace.