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In the case of No Pain in Pop, they are music tastemakers first, record label second, cherry picking music talent through their monthly parties and MP3 blog, as well as spawning releases from the likes of Telepathe, Gentle Friendly and Crystal Castles. Come April 6th they unleash their eclectic compilation, with all artists somehow linked to NPIP and here they give Dazed Digital a playlist that is similarly eclectic along with a very detailed tracklisting.

Old Blood – I Win
Luggin’ valve amps from Las Vegas, Old Blood set themselves down on your greedy lobes a couple minutes before heading inside to fry your brains, dragging all of Nevada’s empty air and silence with them. The more you turn up, the more of those quiet molecules’ll turn, fuming and grand strut, like Jael and Caleb shuffled up to Link Wray a long time ago and asked him to turn the shrapnel pulled from piggie’s guts into liquor. A few minutes later Fred’s on his knees handing eight-year-olds a 40oz of Hurricane Malt and blowing fag smoke in the faces of the American young - yes, such obscured lead lines stretch back behind Old Blood like sorry, raw tendrils; further than the history of hardcore as drums just keep on, and in the hot noise voices bark, humans crying out.

Arch M – Cat Grave
Across the dorm the prolapsed star is rousing Arch M from however many minutes of sleep was had in between the hot hours. Lobes are still plugged to the loop of grandfather’s music box, the data now battered and worn common as old tape and like they said it wouldn’t by the rise in temp. Through soft hiss melody persists, valiant still as Italian bill-boards rotted and scattered across the plains of the small-hours, bawling and baleful, pen-pal appalling. Corey came from the West coast US four years back to this sinking city, before Bradford Cox’s soul seemed so street-corner.

Night Control – Good Looks
People don’t seem to write ’songs’ any more. Most of today’s avant-rock motley seem keener to replicate the ‘tracks’ of dance music, tapping into the repetitious and blood-bound power of loops so that finite structure disappears, leaving four minutes of sound you’re sure have been playing forever somewhere and will go on playing long after your ears leave them behind. Night Control, the work of Rosemead, California’s Christopher Curtis Smith, feels like a collision between the song-built narratives of old modernity and the current blossoming of pop into aural omnipresence, one bristling up against the other like crematory fires to balsa wood. Smith’s pop - recalling fragments of sound lost on long train rides by The Beatles, Tom Petty, Jonathan Richman, Dylan, Velvets - isn’t buried beneath a slop of noise. Rather the noise goes skidding into the soft pop like an express train bursting through a blue whale’s heart, red membrane scattered this way and that, spectacular confusion reigning in the slow motion millennia before anyone feels a thing.

After the Rain - Little Dragon (Floating Points Remix)
What’s struck me most about Floating Points is the moment’s peace all his tunes seem to enjoy before they step into life, the way that they start out with clear sonic motives before succumbing to the intricate detail and minutiae that clutters days, emotional phosphorence that only makes itself known after-the-event, dust glowing as the lights go down. Such complications, when combined with the jazz soothe of beat lopers like Sun Ra, Metro Area and the pluvial Flying Lotus, seem to mark new evolutionary wanders in electric blues; 22-year-old Londoner Sam Shepard with empathy enough to know all you need is to mirror and soak your noise and confusion in the music rather than have anyone radically alter the mood. The video’s a fit, the sharp angles of its pylons connected by sudden light that fizzes and pops like a dance of panicked neurones, solution found at 02:03.




Mayfair Set – Already Warm
…or ‘Beauty and the Beast’. The Mayfair Set, our latest saints, are a potent, poignant combination of Dee Dee Dum Dum Girls and Whoever Blank Dogs Is; marrying
the propeller gut dread of the latter with the former’s dawn-sun reach to give first glimpse of something that will grow in the minds of our young, and their young in turn, into something undeniably, eye-stingingly great. Loyal to tragic extents, ‘Already Warm’ flows against the blood’s tide like the swelter of an evening grown distant, but hovering close and ever-ready, for a chance to be reborn in photographs that fade away from their centre, the threat loitering even now as time vignettes the masterworks of your memory. More lost ghosts, then - who was it that fronted Black Tambourine with Pam Berry? Curtis? Or Maus? Dee Dee carries the dog-eared image of him in her wallet like a fatigued sentry, poor girl; poor girl.

The Samps - Magnetic Thys
The Samps are hard to pin. First, there’s the name - Th£ Samps? The Samps? Th Samps? Yeah, three whole choices. It’s certainly a quandary. Whatever - the similarly equivocal ‘Magnetic Thys’, flown suburban birds, glides in a kind of taxed mundane, a dance pushed the way of small-town, big-bar cohesion by the bump ‘n grind intimacy of others but dosed with enough madden to set it flailing exempt, a wastrel booty bumping the drinks of statue bores, catching far riddim.

A Grave With No Name – And We Parted Ways At Mt Jade
Somewhere underneath the wilting distortion that coats A Grave With No Name's idle march are the same sickbed ballads Daniel Johnson croaks (or Wesley Willis if you’d prefer). Acid in his heart, yellow round the eyes, Alex Shield’s self-loathing mongrel vocals leer out from their modest lo-fi haunts and whisper anthemia from behind a phlegm-loaded hanky. Sick.

Sunni-Geini – Sunni-Geini Main Theme
Sunni-Geini’s contribution to our Telepathe split single (‘Chrome’s On It’ - out last July) was just as bound to the gilded precipice of the moment as the other A-side, alien voices serenading this dub-weighty meditation on rhythm’n'glitch.

Nite Jewel – Chimera
In search of totems and musical Troma, Nite Jewel glides sublime, for now at least, on b-movie synths and bass creeps, cruising city unerred and damp with the falling. Serene and rudderless: Ramona, friend of Ariel’s, conscript for Simonetti, blending with the hoods and their prowl glower, the gutter-strewn and the giddynaughts, ‘Chimera’s a liquefied monument, cherubs and gargoyles pimples fleeing the same marble skin.

Banjo or Freakout – Archangel (Burial cover)
Much has been made of the architecture of Burial’s dubstep. Squeals of psychogeographic glee heralded bass that’d groan swollen with the rhythm of London’s subterranean rail traffic and drums like so many clattering cries jarring through estate stairwells. Untrue wasn’t the sound of humans - rather it seemed to grow from the brickwork and filthy concrete. Here, Alessio Natalizia takes the ghost of a city and shows it the mirror, provoking existential howls that home-made recorders – like Egon Spengler’s ghoul-traps, I guess – struggle to contain, ultimately overflowing in a purple cloud of drone and far-off star wails, spectres fleeing gape-jawed into the night

No Pain In Pop compilation launch party on 3rd April at Whitechapel Warehouse, featuring Banjo Or Freakout, Trailer Trash Tracys, A Grave With No Name + NPIP DJs.