Tunes for Lazy Mornings

One of the benefits of housesitting for a music writer is you can fossick through their CDs and albums, discovering new gems that may have passed you in the slipstream. Two albums that rose to the surface this morning, in perfect lazy Saturday fashion are from Loney, Dear and Nobody & The Mystic Chords of Memory. Both charming, breezy, free wheeling pop records for today's rainy weather or, fingers crossed, next weekend's sunshine.

Since it is a lazy Saturday (and i'm still in my PJs at midday) i'm going to leave the descriptive passages to Last FM...



Multi-instrumentalist and home-recording phenom Emil Svanängen lives in Sweden and he makes records and plays shows under the somewhat inscrutable name of Loney, dear. In either his tiny Stockholm studio apartment or the basement of his parents' house, and with a dedication bordering upon manic, Emil discreetly builds Loney, dear songs using a modest home studio set-up. In this way he has recorded and then released himself on CD-R four albums in the last two or three years. He has managed to sell several thousand of these, pretty much on his own. (Last-Fm)

I'm loving his record Loney Noir which you can hear tracks from on myspace or official site.



Nobody & Mystic Chords of Memory is a collaborative effort between Nobody (Elvin Estella) and Mystic Chords of Memory (Chris Gunst and Jen Cohen). Building off of successful guest appearances on each other's past releases, the trio began collaborating on the project in the spring of 2004. After a year-plus of road trips and mail-order production efforts, the result is a perfectly crafted blend of psychedelic hip-hop and sunshine folk-rock. Nobody proves himself a producer/arranger in the classical sense, using his sample-based tool set to create the foundations for the album. (Last FM)

Listen to more from the album Tree Coloured See on Hype Machine.