Cocoon is a two-piece French band formed in 2006 by Mark Daumail and Morgane Imbeaud. ‘I wanted it to be a male-female duet. A duo like the The White Stripes are in rock — we wanted to be the equivalent in folk music’, Daumail says. Their songs are entirely sung in English. ‘French artists singing in English isn’t something new. It goes back to groups like Les Thugs and Syd Matters’.
Bon Iver / Flume This is the best song of the last two years, hands down. The vocals, the sound, and the lyrics: ‘Sky is womb and she’s the moon’. Sheer genius!
We asked New York-based duo, Kurt Feldman and Christoph Hocheim, who collectively make up the stunningly original and creative glitchy pop group The Depreciation Guild, to tell us about eight songs spinning on their iPods lately.
End Of The Affair / Weekend ‘This was Alison Statton’s band after Young Marble Giants, but it’s a far cry from anything you might have heard on Colossal Youth. I like this track in particular because it’s really jazzy and it has a great nylon string guitar part, but it also hasn’t lost its pop charm. Alison’s voice will be adorable, eternally. This one is perfect for springtime’.
You know you’ve made it in Australia when you have a song featured in a BMW commercial. Yup, The Presets have done that, and more. In this issue of My Secret Playlist, Julian Hamilton and Kim Moyes each write about four songs (Julian’s four are first) that have helped shape — in some small way — The Presets sound, finessed so superbly on their latest album, Apocalypso.
John Cage / Mysterious Adventure for Prepared Piano At the beginning of the score, Cage wrote a table of specific ‘preparations’ that had to be employed on the piano before performing the piece. These included jamming nuts and bolts, and pieces of rubber and wood of different sizes, between the strings of the piano. Then, when you play the piece, the piano doesn’t sound like a piano at all, more like an Indonesian Gamelan or metal junk orchestra, or something. It’s really wild. I performed this piece as part of my final recital at university. I really enjoyed studying it, and I still love listening to it.
My Secret Playlist is a music discovery website and weekly email publication. We invite our favourite bands and musicians to give us the rundown on their eight favourite songs right now. These are their words on the music that inspires them.
