Playlist of the Year: The Hottest Tracks on Whyd from 2013
It’s that time of year again, when people frantically try to sum up the events, changes, and developments of entire year in blog posts, articles, and podcasts, and look forward to the year to come. There is no doubt that 2014 is going to be a monumental year for Whyd, and also for streaming music services in general. But now it’s time for one of our favorite things to do as music lovers, present the playlist of the year, featuring Whyd’s Tracks of the Weekend.
2013 was a good year for Woodkid, Flume, and Ryan Hemsworth, relatively new artists that have taken the world by storm with all three netting two Whyd Tracks of the Weekend each. It was also a year of bands returning to the scene, like the obvious Daft Punk but also Whyd favorites Metronomy, Arcade Fire, Arctic Monkeys, Phoenix, and Vampire Weekend. New faces that are still nascent like Man Is Not A Bird, In The Valley Below, and Chamberlain also earned their spots on this playlist, and we look forward to great things to come from all of them.
Without further ado, the best music from 2013 as determined by our global community of music lovers, PLEASE SHARE AND SHARE WIDELY:
Track of the Weekend #66: Sam Cooke - “Having A Party” (ProleteR Tribute)
The holiday season is officially upon us, and we are looking forward to one of our favorite things: lots and lots of parties. Fitting then that the Track of the Weekend this week is a spiced-up tribute to Sam Cooke’s Motown classic “Having A Party" put together by French beatmaker ProleteR. How can you not love a song that so effortlessly croons:
“Mister, Mister DJ, keep those records playing,
Because I’m having such a good time, dancing with my baby.”
Never stop jamming!
Get A Head Start on 2014
Are you one of those cool kids that knows about bands before they even exist yet? You went to Daft Punk’s flute recital in middle school? You knew Lana Del Rey when she was just Liz Grant? You hate the machine that churns out catchy pop and you feel robbed when you know that Lorde was on Universal the whole time? Yeah, us too. Luckily, thanks to London’s Music Like Dirt, you can get a peek at the music that will take the world by storm, next year.
This playlist “The UK Blog Sound of 2014" is everything that mainstream music is not, but everything that it will be. The future sounds bright.
Awesome Party Organized by Simplib, Hosted at Deezer: Featuring Some Great Music Start Ups
Last night was nothing short of an excellent occasion. The brand new platform Simplib, which is a way for people to share cool websites (like Whyd!) that they find with their friends, organized a warm and exciting event at Deezer Headquarters in the middle of Paris.
The idea was simple, showcase cool music start ups, and bring us all together to show what we do to interested people, journalists, and potential partners. Along with Whyd were our good buddies Evergig, who have seen some major success in 2013 through revolutionizing the concert going experience. We also got to meet and chat with some extremely cool dudes at 22Tracks, one of the best sources for new music around.
There were masterful cocktails, great beer, a cool show, jam sessions, innovative presentations, more stickers than you could attach to your body, and a brilliant vibe that kept running well after the event was supposed to be over.
To the organizers at Simplib, thank you so much for your hard work, organization, and for inviting us to be a part of this. To Deezer, you guys are awesome, we love your enthusiasm and it was great to be in the nest. To all of the Whyd cats who came down to chill with us, thank you!! If you can’t tell, we are still buzzing with the energy.
Looking forward to more of those types of events!
Broadcaster at Radio Campus Paris, Community Manager at JNPPVSM, Jonathan Melgar Cannot Live Without Music
IMAGE: COURTESY RADIO CAMPUS PARIS
1. Can you introduce yourself? Where are you from?
I’m Jonathan Melgar, I’m the Community Manager of JNPPVSM, a great community of music lovers on Facebook. I’m also a music broadcaster at Radio Campus Paris (93.9 FM). Everyday I dig finding the best new albums and bands. These bands just need a little push to start their careers and as far as I can, I try to give them this visibility on the radio.
I grew up in the northern suburbs of Paris, way too close to CDG airport. I now live in Paris at Menilmontant.
IMAGE: COURTESY JONATHAN’S WHYD PROFILE
2. What is Radio Campus Paris, what do you do there, and who should listen to your broadcasts?
Radio Campus Paris is an associative radio based in Paris. Its role is to give a voice to the student community in Paris. You’ll hear all kinds of radio shows on it: cinema, news, art, history, sciences, but mostly MUSIC! 200 people are working hard everyday to give the best experience possible to our audience.
It’s original, with no advertisements, fresh music, and lovely people. If you are looking for a new way to discover music, just turn on your radio to 93.9 FM in Paris.
IMAGE: COURTESY JNPPVSM
3. You just started a new adventure as the Community guy at “Je Ne Peux Pas Vivre Sans La Musique” (I can’t live without music) which could be the motto of every music lover on Whyd. What attracted you to the project and what are your goals there?
I was attracted to JNPPVSM because I’ve always had this will to share music as widely as possible. I love to ask people randomly what is the artist or song they love RIGHT NOW and I start digging in my head to find out what could be their next crush in music. Sharing is caring!
The originality of this community: they post dozens of YouTube videos everyday in order to share them with the rest of the community!
4. Time to get personal, what type of music makes you move? When did you realize that music would occupy such a large part of your life?
I think I realized that music was going to be important in my life around 20. It’s kind of late but some people will just never realize what they’re good at, ever! I had first experience in the music industry at this time and I knew I was made to dig and share music. I have to say I’m lucky, working as a music broadcaster on Radio Campus Paris and managing JNPPVSM is so cool and it’s so me! Wouah!
I just made this playlist for Whyd and its community! Hope you’ll like it.
Thanks Jonathan! Make sure you follow him on Whyd for his latest favorite tracks!
A Huge Opportunity for Man Is Not A Bird, and THEY NEED YOUR HELP
Hello everyone! Hope you had a nice weekend, we celebrated Thanksgiving in Paris, with the Whyd team and our buddies coming together to give thanks for everything that we are lucky enough to have. One thing that we are very lucky to have are great friends and co-workers, who have become big parts of our lives. One of those people, Adrien, the man who makes everything at Whyd possible, needs our help!
As you surely know, Adrien is the drummer for the post-rock group Man Is Not A Bird (MINAB), who have been buzzing lately around northern France after their tour last week in Angers, Strasbourg, and Paris. They are playing a concert on Wednesday (December 4) here in Paris at Batofar, and it is very important that you are all there.
The organizer of the concert is also organizing a concert of MINAB’s favorite group: And So I Watch You From Afar, in the spring 2014 here in Paris. He said that if we can get a big group together, Man Is Not A Bird might be able to open for And So I Watch You From Afar! It would be a dream come true, a completion of the cycle of creation and inspiration, and would be the type of story that everyone wants to see. This week, we can make that happen.
So go to this link: http://www.fnacspectacles.com/place-spectacle/manifestation/Pop-rock-Folk-DADS—-MAN-IS-NOT-A-BIRD—JEAN-JEAN-BFD04.htm and reserve your places today. If there is ONE concert that you are going to attend, please make it this one. The music is excellent, the venue perfectly suited, and the possibilities are powerful. Let’s do it!
Track of the Weekend #65: Cashmere Cat - “With Me”
At the beginning of the week, it looked like the cultural force that is Pharrell and the clever idea behind the 24-hour music video were going to rule the hot tracks with the wonderfully positive track “Happy" added by Whyd's guardian angel Mélodie Lily. But that song is destined for greater things — like serious radio play around the world for the near future and maybe even more.
Music on Whyd move so much faster, and instead it’s the oddly unpredictable “With Me" which gives Cashmere Cat their second track of the weekend, added by world explorer and graphic designer Julie Bénard, “With Me” is deep and sometimes confusing, the the impact is undeniable.
Track of the Weekend #64: Flume & Chet Faker - “Drop The Game”
What happens when two Australian electro artists who are already well-known around the world get together? Endless possibilities. “Drop The Game" harks back to call and response, a bit of a round, leveraging the sound of voice to drive the music forward, heightened by the touches of electronic scaling that trace the background like the lines between the stars in constellations. And the dude dancing in the video must have inherited the moondancing gene from MJ because he defies gravity and friction. Awesome video to watch!
Big thanks as usual to R∆D∆R! for nailing this one. If you haven’t you should head over to his brand new page on Facebook and show the man some love!
The Very First In-Page Whyd Button: Check Out Museekly
Some of you might know Thomas Vimare from the heavy beats that he drops on the Whyd community. Others might know him from the slick design he uses on his Whyd page. But you might not yet know about his project Museekly, which just launched this week, as a new way to bring forward the art and design of music, while sharing the cool favorites that he finds across the web. Take one look and you will be hooked.
But the coolest part (for us definitely) is the sharing options that he has programmed into the site. Alongside each track is the Facebook, Twitter, and now Whyd button for people to share the music from Museekly directly to their Whyd page.
It is an amazing development that we are very excited about and look forward to seeing more in the future!
Make sure you follow Museekly on Twitter, Like it on Facebook, and of course subscribe to Museekly on Whyd!
Breaking the Barrier Between Physical/Digital & Visual/Sound: The Missing Channel Interview
1. How long has The Missing Channel been around? How did it start?
The Missing Channel is a multi-shaped label that started as a experimental project in Amsterdam in 2010. It started after four years of playing gigs and creating visuals for music in various places around France and The Netherlands. We have always been interested in linking images with sound, but were quite frustrated by the conventional format of the VJing: it always consists of a screen behind a musician and is always there to somehow complete the music. But practically, it mostly acts on the same level as stage lights. How can we change that? how can both of these media really communicate? The Missing Channel was then created on this motto: always trying to approach music like we approach visuals and the other way around.
Since 2010, The Missing Channel has been creating events and connecting numerous artists together on the internet first, and then during real gigs or exhibitions. The Missing Channel is more about bringing people together rather than patronizing them like any conventional label would.
2. What is unique about The Missing Channel?
The Missing Channel is unique only by its plurality, it is fed by the different actors that all brings their own cultural and artistic background. This joyful mess, somewhere along the creative process, creates a real experimental atmosphere that brings all the actors of the label together in a single movement.
The Missing Channel is a label for a movement. Especially in a literal sense: it aims at studying music and visuals by experimenting with the moving media that carries and expresses themselves and/or a message. The Missing Channel could be described as a net-label. It was born on the digital medium, the internet, but should not remain intangible, that is why we always try to materialize all the work on a physical level: gigs, exhibitions, books, posters… But those media are not treated as merchandising and especially carriers the work of the Label, each object released carries the concept of The Missing Channel: Why can’t a poster be a song? Why can’t we store an image inside a song? Why can’t a gig be played over internet to cross the physical distances?
3. Who should listen to your music?
It is always hard to describe an audience especially when you try to think about music and visuals outside the conventional “trend tribes” that characterize external visual outlook along with a specific music genre. Let’s say we like to cross borders, so on the same level we always love when people that usually listen to one specific type of music, who belong to one specific music tribe, end up in one of your gigs listening to our music. And whether they like it or not, there is always an interesting talk that emerges from our confrontation.
But of course we do electronic music, which means that we do compose music with analog and electronic devices, but that’s all. We are inspired by lots of genres of music and we try to play with composition dogma that exists in electronic music as well as in metal, rap music, etc….
So everybody should listen to our music, everybody with an open mind who wants to expand their usual listening habits. We would not say that people who like “electro” should listen to our music (they can of course) but actually this word was invented at the end of the 80s by major labels in order to embody all the electronic genres and this decision ended up normalizing and narrowing electronic music down until what we know today as “electro music.”
4. In your opinion, how are you changing the dynamic between music and images?
You can only change something when you propose something different and do it in a generous way. What we do are proposals for a new way of seeing the relationship between images and sound. We try to experiment during events, but also when we release new songs, in the digital or physical world. For an example, for the first physical release on The Missing Channel, PaulusP’s Pagus EP, we tried to question how labels usually distribute music: we decided to store the whole EP on mediafire and make is available for free, but the physical version had to add something to that. So we gave away a pack with three visual cards and one CD, the visuals printed on the cards were actually the song directly translated into image form, using a transformation process and the CD was empty, with the URL to download the EP. The whole idea was to question the CD as a medium that carries music and create a real communication between the digital and physical version. And this communication continues with the user as he is able to burn the EP as well as other songs he would judge interesting to juxtapose.
When we talk about the relationship between music and visuals, we can not avoid the question of the representation of the artist and his music on state. Each live event is for us an opportunity to try to understand the role of the DJ as part of a musical show. This always raises some questions like: does the DJ/Musician have to stage himself, stage his own music? Does this mean that he has to exacerbate his movements? Show his instruments in some sort of attept to prove that he is indeed “making” and not only “playing” (like pressing play on a device) music? That is why every artist on the label have a kind of amateurism in common in their way of crafting music. We all try to make things and not only play them well, and just like an amateur does, when we make things, we experiment, we try, make mistakes but end up most of the time surprising ourselves.
Thanks for this very innovative look at the music world! Subscribe to The Missing Channel on Whyd for all of their latest tracks!