OasisMansion

Carnaval Lisboa...lets get dressed up!!!

Australia Day 2008

Our Australia day BBQ was lots of fun...Roger from Canberra did the honors and lit a flaming fire for us all. Yorn, the young Belgian born Industrial Design student, jumped right into the festivities, kept the flame alive and showed us all that BBQing can be a very stylish "NOW" affair if performed correctly. The secret according to Yorn is to be "patient" and to "feel the love".

Nice work fellas.

Australia Day---HooRAY!

a day we should forget...how best to achieve this than by getting really drunk at a BBQ party...hmmmm?!!

On the Robbery of Discrete and Mobile Locomotives and Their Relation to the Kingdom of Animals

New York. Cat Power
Jukebox, Cat Power's second album of covers, is due out January 22nd in the States, and opens up with a loose, soulful rendition, €”hardly recognizable, of "New York"€. The performance suits her voice perfectly and each line adds dimension to the song's protagonist, a Chan Marshall anti-hero trying her hardest to be optimistic but unable to shake her consciousness of the fact that she was beaten before she even began.

Lump Sum. Bon Iver
It has been a while since I heard a guy with a guitar doing the guy-with-a-guitar-and-a-heart-slapped-on-his-sleeve thing and been able to, without reservation, enjoy it. A lot of people have already said effusive things about Bon Iver, but I will go ahead and add my voice to the chorus. For Emma, Forever Ago is an arresting record, subtle and immediate, balanced on the warm expressiveness of Justin Vernon's voice. It is the document of a very personal experience that transcends the subjective nature of that experience and expresses something very nearly universal.

Foam Hands. Destroyer
Dan Bejar is the kind of singer that tends to polarize listeners. Some cannot get enough of his idiosyncratic delivery, the way he plays with his phrasing, dragging out syllables and squeezing long strands of words in spaces that seem much too small. Others simply find him irritating. I definitely count myself among the former. "Foam Hands"€ is the first taste of his forthcoming album, Trouble in Dreams. I find myself focusing on the line "I'€™m not the kind to tell you what is true and what is totally out of control," and wondering at the thinness of the line that separates those too things all too often. And Bejar certainly knows this, as some of his best songs tread that line to magnificent effect.

Quarantined. Atlas Sound
Atlas Sound is a band fronted by Bradford Cox of Deerhunter. Their first album, Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, will be released in February. Their sound is less abrasive then Deerhunter's, though the continued interest in sounds and soundscapes is obvious. I love how the bassline changes the whole feeling of this track, introducing a touch of playfulness into the spaced-out ambiance that characterizes the rest of the song's elements.

Final de Archipelago. El Guincho
El Guincho is Pablo Dí­az-Reixa, a resident of Barcelona who is also a member of the group Coconot. This particular track is a psychedelic mélange that brings to mind Panda Bear in the way it fuses the childlike to the subtly disturbing.

#5 (Go Bang!). Dinosaur L
Blind (ft. Antony Hegarty). Hercules & Love Affair
Hold On. Holy Ghost!
Cable Dazed. Invisible Conga People

These four songs are reflective of my current interest in disco. The first is a classic track by Dinosaur L (Arthur Russell and Nicky Siano), one that James Murphy said he was thinking about while writing "€œAll My Friends". The next two are both DFA releases, though the Hercules 12"€ won't be released until February. And the last, by Invisible Conga People, is from the Italians Do it Better label, home to Chromatics and Glass Candy among others, and has a spectral, haunted quality reminiscent of The Knife's Silent Shout.

Mango. Sascha Funke
This is a strange track. Hazy clouds of guitar feedback, moments of paranoia pushed against passages of new wave glory, all wrapped around a thumping beat. There are moments where I find myself thinking about The Cure, specifically about Pornography and Faith. And then that funky guitar line comes in and...well, I am a little surprised that it all works so well, that it coalesces into a slinky yet elegant minimal track worthy of compulsive listening.

Xmas Day Dinner Party

This Xmas day,the 25th of December, we are having a Dinner Party for all at Oasis. There will be Roast Turkey and lots of yummy food and dessert. Lets not forget plenty to drink also. SO JOIN US!

FESTIVE SEASON begins with staff party

This Wednesday the Oasis staff dressed up and gathered to celebrate the beginning of the Festive Season with a massive dinner and drink fest. We all brought traditional food, drink and sweets from our countries of origin. It was amazingly fun and delicious. Here is a photo of us all...what a good looking bunch we are!

The Universe is Expanding

This music is meant to keep depression at arm€™'s length during the holiday season. Among other things, any number of people (who would not otherwise) will probably sleep with you if they hear you listen to these tracks in conjunction.

D.A.R.L.I.N.G.. Beach House
On February 26th the Baltimore based duo Beach House will release their sophomore album, Devotion, on Carpark Records. Like their self-titled debut (which I listened to compulsively to keep myself warm last winter) it is woozy and seductive, full of half-lit scenes that beckon you, conspiratorially, into their willowy beauty. Darling itself, the hackneyed-unto-oblivion word, even seems to regain some semblance of compelling affection when Victoria Legrand renders it letter by letter.

Busy Doing Nothing (Optimo (Espacio) Remix). Love is All
The past month or so has seen the release of two fantastic remixes by Optimo (Espacio) (JD Twitch and JG Wilkes) €”Colder'€™s "To the Music"€ and "Busy Doing Nothing"€, Love is All's incomparable anthem to sedentary days of non-stop movie watching and repeat record listening. Optimo is also a night put on at The Sub Club in Glasgow by the aforementioned duo, who book bands and handle the DJ duties themselves. Check out their website here: Optimo. They have some great mixes up that serve as introductions to some of their favorite genres and bands, such as...

Optimo. Liquid Liquid
This would be the prime example, the song from which they took their name. There was just an insane amount of musical invention going on in New York in the late seventies and eighties, something that compilations like Soul Jazz's New York Noise compilations have tried to document. "Optimo"€ sounds especially contemporary at the moment, a form of primal, funk-laden dance rock.

Cardboard Lamb. Crash Course in Science
I dream of cardboard lambs these days. They're new, they'€™re hot, they are sexually suggestive. Maybe you can dream of cardboard lambs too.

3E. Mars
Mars is one of the seminal no-wave bands and was included on the celebrated No New York album put together by Brian Eno. I have verged on stepping into the somewhat vaguely defined genre a couple of times...but never quite did so. Anyway, "3E"€ does it for me and it does it for Thurston Moore so maybe it will do it for you.

Little Lost. Jens Lekman
This is a cover of one of my favorite Arthur Russell songs, given a gentle reading by Lekman in which he shows that the th sound is one of the most troublesome for those who learn English as second, third or seventh language. It is a spare rendition, vocals, idiosyncratic percussion and bass—€”just enough to frame and properly focus Russell's tender lyrics.

Baltimore. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks
The first taste of the forthcoming 2008 LP, Real Emotional Trash, "€œBaltimore" contains some quintessential Malkmusian vocal-tangents, soaring harmonies and a lot of churning and fractured guitar. It'€™s a long one that gets where it's going in segments that somehow coalesce into a surprisingly unified whole before it slides into two plus minutes of measured cacophony.

ܜber Wiesen. Thomas/Mayer
Tobias Thomas and Michael Mayer teamed up for this track from Kompakt Total 8, which is basically piano house with a bouncy, elastic beat that is pretty difficult to resist. It manages to be pensive and joyful, a lot of fun with a soul to back it up.

Peacebone (Pantha Du Prince Remix). Animal Collective
This was the first thing I heard involving Pantha Du Prince of Hamburg's Dial label. Since, I have checked out "Saturn Strobe"€ (which is definitely worth repeated listens) and learned that the bells are a pretty standard part of the Dial sound. The "Peacebone"€ mix starts of with about four minutes of heavy bass, decorously minimal, before pushing forward into the glistening beauty of those chromatically chirping bells.

Fall from a Height (The Field Way). The Honeydrips
As if the original of this track wasn’t good enough, or gorgeous enough; as if I wasn'€™t satisfied by the tasteful samples from Annie Hall and Rebel Without a Cause. This is my favorite remix by The Field and one of the best things that he has done, period, full stop, period. It is the perfect exit note to a year that saw the release of the much, and rightfully, lauded From Here We Go Sublime. This is what I want to hear on New Year's Eve.

New Oasis T-shirt has arrived - GET 1!

boatronic plays at Incognito

thanks be to the turkey