I’ve been sitting on these tracks for a minute. It’s been three months since the last installment of Music is What Feelings Sound Like, having deprived you of vibes for long enough, let’s get straight to the music.

Benjamin Francis Leftwich – Pictures (KJ Remix)
Marie Madeleine – No Love La Muerte (feat. Pauline Ohanna)
Bonobo – The Keeper (Banks Remix)
The Weeknd – The Party The After Party (Sango Remix)
ESG – UFO
Superman Lovers ft. Herr Styler & Cristine – C’est Bon (Punks Jump Up Remix)
Schoolboy Q – Blessed (Obey City Edit)
Bondax – Just Us
Dems – House (Evil Nine Remix)
Lianne La Havas – Forget (Shlohmo Remix)
Rokhsan – 1000 Years
Blawan – What You Do With What You Have (Original Mix)

Since we started in October of last year, we’ve been constantly surprised by the overwhelmingly positive reaction we’ve received from our readers. Your general outpouring of appreciation has been most unexpected. On behalf of everyone on the WGOF team, I want to sincerely thank you, the readers, for visiting our site, expressing your excitement about the music we spread here, and sharing some of your most treasured tracks with us.

 
Today, We’ll Go On Forever has thousands of visitors from around the world in places as far away as India, the U.K., France, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Italy,…. the list goes on and on. In all of you we see the promise of the internet as a place not just for interconnection, but also genuine communities. As a result, the blog model we’re currently adhering to feels a bit constraining, underwhelming, and unambitious. We believe that the future of music sharing will transcend the longstanding music blog trend, and we want to be a driving force behind this impending shift. While we will still be posting, photographing events, and taking video, our efforts will be oriented towards the creation of a new music discovery platform with content aggregation and sharing features as key priorities. We hope this new tool will offer more of the music you love as well as new ways to share your thoughts, experiences, and media content in unprecedented ways.

Thank you for your continual support and readership, and most importantly for your love of the music.

mwb

LISTEN. TO. THIS.

For those of you who don’t know who Downlink is, hopefully a glance at the giant “R” above is a good enough clue.  Downlink, or Sean Casavant, is one of Rottun Recording’s (label of Excision) original three musketeers, making Datsik, Excision and Downlink among the first to produce the modern dubstep we know today.   Casavant exploded onto the scene with songs like “Factory” and “Ignition” (linked below), and has continued to produce similar hard-hitting songs while managing to remain untainted by the inexplicable appeal of talent-less and worthless brostep.

I got an amazing opportunity to interview Downlink for a term paper I wrote about dubstep, and thought it’d be interesting to share some of what goes on behind the purported ex-lumberjack’s (Downlink’s career previous to music production, as told to me by NumberNin6) creative process, background, and just miscellaneous tid-bits.   Some questions were, of course, more academically relevant, but I hope you enjoy the rare chance to see a side of music beyond the partying, drugs, sweating, etc.!

Some tunes while you read:

How did you come up with your DJ name? What does it mean (if anything)?

I was just trying to come up with a spacey name while working on a track. I was working on a slower computer and was bouncing stuff down a lot so I was constantly going back to my nintendo while waiting for the computer to bounce stuff. I was playing the Legend Of Zelda: A Link to the Past. The main character in the series is named Link. I went back to my computer and started looking up a glossary of outer space terms on the internet. When I read Downlink it jumped right out at me. I read the meaning of the word and was sold.
 

Greetings earthlings.  2012 kicked off with a whirlwind of events for me but I’ve finally come down from the clouds and back to reality.  For many, Valentine’s Day is the ultimate reality check.  It’s a date (or not) in which all people have to face their relationship status head on, whether they like it or not.  A day when guys either sack up and serenade, or tuck tail and run.  A time when girls eat an absurd amount of chocolate, either out of heart shaped boxes or cartons of ice cream.

On the single side of the fence?  Don’t despair.  We still have music.  And where there’s music, there’s dancing.  And where there’s dancing, there’s nothing but positive energy in the air.  Whether you’ve already found that special person to cuddle with, or if you’re just looking for some cuddy, having a little background music is never a bad thing.

So here are some of my all time favorite ballads.  I hope you enjoy.

Above & Beyond – Thing Called Love (Andrew Bayer Club Mix)
 
Kyau & Albert – I Love You (Cosmic Gate Remix)
 
Sharam – I Love The Way
 
Tiesto – Here On Earth feat. Cary Brothers
 
Daft Punk – Make Love

Picasso captured a spirit that had long existed in African sculpture when he fragmented the human body into expressive planes. Since Cubism, the distorted human figure has developed a close association with modernism, and although there are periodic returns to representational art, these carry with them a certain self consciousness. When painters seek to represent complex emotional depth, the distorted or abstracted form is usually the vehicle.

Contemporary representational artists such as John Currin and Eric Fischl(above) cultivate an extreme shallowness in their work: they focus their energy on the most superficial layers of reality. Currin has developed a remarkable Venetian technique that he uses to direct attention to the surface texture of his paintings. Analogous precedents, such as Titian and Velasquez, also focused on surfaces, but their canvases suggest an inner life beyond the paint.  Behind a Fischl painting one senses a great void, an emptiness emphasized by the unnatural arrangement of figures and by the vacuum of space that isolates them.

On the other side of the spectrum are artists who distort or abstract the figure but intend to show complex inner states. Laylah Ali‘s paintings often carry an emotional charge similar in intensity to Goya’s The Third of May, that feeling of inevitability in the face of suffering. Her figures, though, are cartoons painted on flat backgrounds. Their bodies are pared down to the emotive fundamentals necessary to spark empathy: eyes and mouths are drawn with the most care. Her ‘Greenheads’ are carefully arranged, and despite their simplified appearance, they evoke specific sociological positions.

Daniel Richter is a figurative painter closer to the Expressionist tradition: his distortions are painterly and evocative. With Richter, it’s like looking beneath the veil of Maya. His world is as black and infinite as deep space. The figures in his work are like polychromatic ghosts moving along deterministic paths. He reaches towards  the human soul in his paintings and comes back with nightmarish ectoplasm.

So, are there trends between these artists? Isolation of minds, maybe. A sense of determinism, of semi-sentient beings acting out unalterable scenes.  A sense of emptiness. Most notably, an inversion between realism of execution and emotional depth.

One other thing that might shake us of our winter blues is that 12th Planet is coming to the city in 2 weeks…buy your tickets now.  By far one of the best live djs.