Thurston Moore - Illuminine

Thurston Joseph Moore (born July 25, 1958) is an American musician best known as a singer, songwriter and guitarist of Sonic Youth. He has also participated in many solo and group collaborations outside of Sonic Youth, as well as running the Ecstatic Peace! record label. Moore was ranked 34th in Rolling Stone's 2004 edition of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time."
Demolished Thoughts is an acoustic rock album produced by Beck Hansen and recorded in 2010 in Massachusetts and Los Angeles. The title derives from The Faith's "It’s Time".

info: http://en.wikipedia.org/

Francesca Lago - The Unicorn

Francesca started playing the piano as a child and the guitar at the age of 14. The first performance took place shortly after. She released her first record with the garage punk band The Wrongside, her first solo album was published by Edel in 1997 and had the legendary Marc Ribot on guitars. After the tour supporting the album she retired for some years and she came back in 2009 with ‘The Unicorn’ published by the Swiss label On the Camper Records. Her song Black Thoughts has been ranked semi-finalist at the 2009 UK Songwriting Contest. To support The Unicorn release, she started playing with great cello player Zeno Gabaglio, they played together many shows in Switzerland (at the Montreux Jazz festival and Locarno International Film festival among others), Austria, Germany, England and Italy.

info: http://www.myspace.com/francescalago

The Pattern Theory - Names For Places

The Pattern Theory's first foray into the financially insecure wasteland known as 'high-fidelity-smooth-rock', began in 2007 in Leeds, West Yorkshire. They self-released a well received EP (EP1) and culminated the year performing with the legendary Damo Suzuki.
The end of 2008 saw them relocate to Berlin. Based there, they gigged and toured extensively throughout Germany, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands, Czech Republic and the UK - playing with bands as wide ranging as Epic45, Russian Circles, Plants and Animals, The Drift, Icy Demons, Library Tapes and The Declining Winter.
Their self-produced debut album was recorded in a disused office space in East Berlin. As the songs developed, they expanded the original instrumentation of guitars and drums with various synthesizers, vibraphone and xylophone. The self-titled album was released on 13/05/2011 on Valeot Records.

Lukas Creswell-Rost Synthesizer, Vibraphone
Carl Schilde Synthesizer, Vibraphone
James Yates Drums, Synthesizer, Xylophone

info: http://www.thepatterntheory.com/

Massive Attack - Paradise Circus

Massive Attack are a DJ and trip hop duo from Bristol, England consisting of Robert "3D" Del Naja and Grant "Daddy G" Marshall. Working with co-producers, as well as various session musicians and guest vocalists, they make records and tour live. The duo are considered to be progenitors of the trip hop genre. Their debut album, Blue Lines was released in 1991, with the single "Unfinished Sympathy" reaching the charts and later being voted the 10th greatest song of all time in a poll by The Guardian.

    History  (contents in Wikipedia)
    1988-1989: Any Love beginnings
    1990-1992: Blue Lines and Unfinished Sympathy's impact
    1993-1996: Protection and their music label imprint, Melankolic
    1997-2001: Mezzanine, Teardrop, the Vowles split and Marshall's absence
    2002-2006: Del Naja's 100th Window, Marshall's return and Collected
    2007-2010: "Weather Underground" / Heligoland era
    2010-present: A future of EPs

Massive Attack's style is often thought of as being experimental.The duo have talked of how they have a different creative approach to each album and "avoid the obvious." Some of their most noted songs have been without choruses and have featured dramatically atmospheric dynamics, conveyed through either epic distorted guitar crescendos, lavish orchestral arrangements (such as swelling, sustained strings or flourishes of grand piano) or prominent, looped/shifting basslines, underpinned by high and exacting production values, involving sometimes copious digital editing and mixing. The pace of their music has often been slower than prevalent British dance music at the time. These and other psychedelic, soundtrack-like and DJist sonic techniques, formed a much-emulated style journalists began to dub "trip hop" from the mid-nineties onwards, though in an interview in 2006, G said, "'We used to hate that terminology [trip-hop] so bad,' laughs. 'You know, as far we were concerned, Massive Attack music was unique, so to put it in a box was to pigeonhole it and to say, "Right, we know where you guys are coming from."'"

info: http://en.wikipedia.org/

Cat's Eyes - I'm Not Stupid

Cat's Eyes are an alternative pop duo formed in early 2011 by vocalist Faris Badwan (known for his work with English Indie rock band The Horrors) and Italian-Canadian soprano, composer and multi-instrumentalist Rachel Zeffira.
The band were formed after Badwan introduced Zeffira to the 1960s girl group music. Zeffira became intrigued by the likes of The Ronnettes and acts produced by Joe Meek and Phil Spector and soon began work on a demo version of a track (which eventually became "The Lull") in a similar style, which on completion she emailed to Badwan.
Using Zeffira's classical music contacts the band were able to perform a short performance using a church organ and choir at the Vatican, in front of several important cardinals Following much positive press on the performance they offered free downloads of two songs via their website. One a cover/remix of Grinderman's "When My Baby Comes" and the other an original composition - "Not a Friend".
On 28th February 2011 the duo released an E.P. entitled Broken Glass on the Polydor label it was recorded at Peter Gabriel's RealWorld Studios with producer Steve Osborne. The Broken Glass E.P. featured three original compositions and a cover of a previously unreleased demo song by The Horrors - "Sunshine Girls". It met with positive press and was followed by a the release of Cat's Eyes, a full length album, in April 2011.

info: http://en.wikipedia.org/

Florence and the Machine - Between Two Lungs

The bluesy South London crooner Florence Mary Leontine Welch writes songs that occupy the same confessional territory of gossip-loving, genre-bending contemporaries like Amy Winehouse, Kate Nash, Adele, and Lily Allen, blending murder, mayhem, sweetness, and light into an intoxicating brew that earned the young artist considerable buzz in 2007. Managed by the Camden-based DJ duo the Queens of Noize, Florence + the Machine -- usually featuring Welch accompanied by a single guitar player and occasional drummer -- released their debut single, "Kiss with a Fist," on the Moshi Moshi label in June 2008, followed by the critically acclaimed full-length Lungs in summer 2009.

info: http://www.allmusic.com/

Mercury Rev - Endlessly

Not so much a band as a long, strange trip, the chaotic avant pop pranksters Mercury Rev formed in Buffalo, NY, in the late '80s. Originally comprised of vocalist David Baker, vocalist/silver pickup guitarist Jonathan Donahue, guitar shaper/single-exhaust clarinetist Grasshopper (born Sean Mackowiak), rooster-tail bass flutist Suzanne Thorpe, bass explorer Dave Fridmann, and mojo stick drummer Jimy Chambers, the sextet -- always rife with personality conflicts -- interacted with one another infrequently, and their first recordings evolved simply as a means of creating soundtracks for the members' experimental student films as well as for Howard Nelson's Lite-Brite and Marco Fogg's Sugardaddy Sea.

info: http://www.allmusic.com/

MERCURY REV - Tonite it Shows

Not so much a band as a long, strange trip, the chaotic avant pop pranksters Mercury Rev formed in Buffalo, NY, in the late '80s. Originally comprised of vocalist David Baker, vocalist/silver pickup guitarist Jonathan Donahue, guitar shaper/single-exhaust clarinetist Grasshopper (born Sean Mackowiak), rooster-tail bass flutist Suzanne Thorpe, bass explorer Dave Fridmann, and mojo stick drummer Jimy Chambers, the sextet -- always rife with personality conflicts -- interacted with one another infrequently, and their first recordings evolved simply as a means of creating soundtracks for the members' experimental student films as well as for Howard Nelson's Lite-Brite and Marco Fogg's Sugardaddy Sea.

info: http://www.allmusic.com/

Thao and Mirah -Teeth

Thao Nguyen and Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn were friends and like-minded singer/songwriters, so it only made sense for them to collaborate. The pair first played a set at San Francisco, California's 2010 Noise Pop Festival, and later that year performed a full-fledged tour with their band, the Most of All, which featured members from each of their individual backing bands. They recorded their collaboration at John Vanderslice's Tiny Telephone studio with tUnE-yArDs' Merrill Garbus as their producer, and the results were Thao & Mirah, which arrived in early 2011.

info: http://www.allmusic.com/

Thao & Mirah - Little Cup

Thao Nguyen and Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn were friends and like-minded singer/songwriters, so it only made sense for them to collaborate. The pair first played a set at San Francisco, California's 2010 Noise Pop Festival, and later that year performed a full-fledged tour with their band, the Most of All, which featured members from each of their individual backing bands. They recorded their collaboration at John Vanderslice's Tiny Telephone studio with tUnE-yArDs' Merrill Garbus as their producer, and the results were Thao & Mirah, which arrived in early 2011.

info: http://www.allmusic.com/

Wild Beasts - Lion's Share

England's Wild Beasts were founded as a duo in 2002 by Hayden Thorpe (guitar, vocals) and Ben Little (guitar). Originally called Fauve, the group was joined by drummer Chris Talbot in 2004 and changed its name to Wild Beasts.
Lion's Share is the first track of the last album 'Smother' released in May 10, 2011.

info: http://www.allmusic.com/