Seattle-based producer Jeff McIlwain's work has long inhabited the fertile border zone between electronic pop and experimental electronic music — it's a place that's home to music that has both a brain and a heart, and McIlwain's been exploring its boundaries for the best part of a decade now.

The Waiting Room is his third full-length release for Ghostly International under the moniker Lusine, and his first album since 2009's A Certain Distance. As with all McIlwain's work as Lusine, this is a record that's characterized by both diversity and coherency. Its tracks traverse a variety of sonic landscapes, from the widescreen atmospherics of appropriately-titled opening track "Panoramic" through the digital soul arrangement of Electronic's "Get the Message" and the club-friendly bounce of "First Call" to the slow-building Detroit-inflected closer "February".

But for all The Waiting Room's eclecticism, it's also notable that it plays out as a coherent whole, with McIlwain's deft production creating the sense of a single, logical journey — an album, rather than a simple collection of tracks. It also continues the excursions into vocal-led tracks that characterized A Certain Distance — exactly half of The Waiting Room's ten tracks employ vocalists, most notably the aforementioned "Get the Message," wherein guest vocalist and wife Sarah McIlwain makes Bernard Sumner's words her own: "I don't know where to begin / Living in sin," she sings calmly, "How can you talk? / Look where you've been."

As a whole, this is an album that's both cerebral and visceral, a record that's both rewarding of a serious headphone session and also warm and melodic enough to make listening as engaging in an emotional sense as it is in an intellectual one. Many artists flirt with these two extremities of electronic music; few tie them together as well as McIlwain does.

On 19th March DFW releases on both Blu-ray and dvd the highly acclaimed ecohorrorfilm The Bay by Oscar-winner Barry Levinson.

Synopsis

This 'found-footage' film is set in 2009 in the town of Chesapeake Bay in Maryland where something has infected the water there. But it's not 100% known what it is or how it is transmitted. But when people start turning up dead and others start to do strange things, fear turns to panic and the town is shut down. The Government confiscate all video footage from every source possible. The Government didn't want you to see this. This is that footage which is put together by a news reporter who was there.

(written by Michael Hallows Eve)

Alt/Electro-Rockers Deconbrio are back with a Special Edition of their highly acclaimed 2012 release, Voyeur. After a successful digital release, Voyeur is being physically re-released as a Special Edition Digipak on it's 1 year anniversary, available now from Bit Riot Records.

Complete with additional tracks, Voyeur sees a growing artist willing to push the boundaries of electronic rock. With distorted guitars, swirling synths and a lyrical content that will lead you to the darkest depths of erotic fantasy, the album tells a gripping tale of highly charged obsessions, sultry addiction and the twisted games we unwittingly play.

Deconbrio is an alternative/electro-rock band from Knoxville, TN, headed by frontman Danny Rendo. Rendo – who writes, produces and records his own music – originally started in South Florida before moving to San Francisco and now has a new lineup in Knoxville.

The band’s debut album, Obsessions of a False Idol, was released in 2008 and it wasn’t long after that they were picked up by Bit Riot Records out of Chicago, IL. They released an EP, The Vanishing, in 2009. Their latest album, Voyeur, was released in February 2012 and has received much acclaim, including being included in the best of 2012 by Coma Music Magazine and Fixt.

Wanting to not keep Deconbrio as a studio-only project, Rendo put together a live band to help bring the music to the stage. Deconbrio has shared the stage with many talented musicians, including Everything Goes Cold, Cryogen Second, Team Cybergeist and Ego Likeness.

Since the release of The Vanishing, Rendo has lent his remixing skills to a few artists, including Caustic, Celldweller, I Will Never Be The Same and Torrent Vaccine, has recorded a cover of Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” for the Coma Music compilation “Tainted Candy: A Tribute to 80’s New Wave”, and has produced a few tracks for South Florida-based hip hop artist MC Gaps.

With their fourth full-length album to be released in as many years, The Men proudly present the sweeping New Moon, the most intensely personal and immersive installment yet.

Never content to draw on the same methods twice, nor to recline under the heel of expectation, The Men quit the city in early 2012 to head for Big Indian, NY - transforming a remote Catskills locale into a full-fledged stray dog studio home. Entering with only the most skeletal sketches, the house was selected as an incubator for its technical limitations.

Familiar faces remain, the core of guitarists Nick Chiericozzi and Mark Perro, with drummer Rich Samis all returning from last year’s much-acclaimed Open Your Heart. However, inroads have since been made to previously unreachable trails, as close friend and producer Ben Greenberg (Pygmy Shrews, Hubble, Zs) officially joins the ranks as bassist on paper, and full-bore compositional partner in practice. In tandem, wayward brother Kevin Faulkner occupies his most substantial sphere to date, dreaming aloud on lap steel guitar.

New Moon is simultaneously an expansion of palette and a contraction of focus, hedged with as much leaden dirge and ecstatic abandon, as it is genuine saccharine steel-string levity and an ever-tightening, no apologies pop concision. Summarily, it is a love letter devoted in bowed humility to the grand continuum, exposing the hoax of the great divide.

The Men - New Moon

US Release Date: March 5, 2013

International Release Date: March 4 (Euro), 8 (IRE / DE), 20 (Japan)

Bonus Campfire Songs EP Release Date: March 4 (Euro) March 5 (USA)

Electric 7" Release Date: January 22, 2013

"In Between The Opposite", the fourth one of a discography qualitatively in continuing ascent as manifestation of a creative talent that knows no limits.

The electropopish atmospheres built by the Norwegian Spektralized speaks with a direct language but at the same time sophisticated and danceable: their newest chapter reveals the band further matured and and in possession of an admirable ingenious so full of strategies that know how to conquer the listeners offering them artificial sounds created by irresistible, pulsing bpm's, synths vortex and the powerful voice of Richard that sustains the orchestrations.

Into the album nothing is casual: everything is generated by passion and science, by calculation and sentiment, elements that give to "In Between The Opposite" a fascinating aura that deserves to be discovered track after track, for a release that will drag you into an excursion in a technologic universe dedicated to the newest and old electro-generations.