If you go down to the woods today..you'll hear some kreepy techno

I got a lovely Christmas present from my girlfriend. She booked us a mini-trip to Belgium where we are going to see Wolfgang Voigt play a rare performance of his Gas project this weekend. Last year, I raved and dribbled a lot about the Nah und Fern boxset. Getting to see this stuff live has me very excited indeed. I don't know how exactly he is going to work it, but apparently it will involve sizable, tripped-out projections of murky forests and a huge sound system. I can well imagine some of the low end sounds in the Gas records dropping into the 'brown' zone, so I'll pack some Immodium just in case. I'll report back to the compost heap with a full review on Sunday.

In the meantime, I'd like to draw your attention to some ultra-blissful music from technopop merchant Popnoname. How blissful? How about as blissful as when you were ten years old and turned the outside tap onto your bare toes on a sweltering July afternoon? Or as blissful as that first time you shot a speedball into your cock backstage at a Grateful Dead gig?


I don't know what the fuck this is, but I kind of want to climb into it and have a nap.

The album 'Surrounded by Weather' even has a blissed out cover. On it, a mysterious geometric glass structure hangs impossibly over a blurred seaside scene. It's a pretty if perplexing vista, and one that suits the music to a tee, which sometimes gleams and wibbles in that futuristic Royksopp way and at other times glides and pops in the slipstream between shoegaze and electronica. The place where Ulrich Schnauss and Axel Willner like to fly. Try these tracks out for size and see if you aren't transported to a dreamy Balaeric place where there is no recession, global warming or PhD research to worry about.

MP3: Popnoname-ID Card
MP3: Popnoname-The Movement