Happy New Year y'all!

The PAVLOV crew wishes you an outstanding 2011. With less traffic jams, oil spills, political crises, bad music, bad films, bad food, earthquakes, cheesy hit-40 remixes, tornadoes, right wing maniacs, left wing maniacs, boring cooking programmes, hangovers, rain, bloghouse, impolite waiters, horribly produced dubstep, long queues, African dictators, flu, and much more fun!

Holly Miranda

This is Holly Miranda. Born daughter of a priest, she was raised severely religious and learned to sing in church choir on Sundays. At sixteen she dropped out of school and moved to New York. Few years later she met up with TV On The Radio’s Dave Sitek to record her first album “The Magician’s Private Library”. Live she is assisted by the talented Timmy Mislock who some of you might know from his solo project Abandoned Lighthouse.

Central narrative of her album is both sides of sleep: either staying awake or drifting away in dream. The thought that the night is always the hardest part when things get though, shimmers through songs like ‘Joints’, ‘Slow Burn Treason’ and ‘Sleep On Fire’. In ‘Waves’ and ‘No One Just is’ Miranda sings of long lost love, as she twists her hauntingly beautiful voice into the deep cavities of her soul. A very intimate and well produced album. Christmas present? Nah, keep it for yourself.

Choosing a single video-moment to go with this post has never been harder but I decided to show you the very same fragment I first saw of hers. ‘Pelican Rapids’ is an unrecorded song Holly uses as an encore for her gigs. It’s so raw and intense. Watch in HD, full screen and maximum volume to faint in absolute swoon.

Hannes

Bill Willingham - Fables

If you love a good fairytale, then better hold on to your socks for Fables! It's a comic book by Bill Willingham, who throws all the characters from fairy tales into one great story. Because all the characters are chased by their nemesis - the Adversary-, they have to seek refuge in the real world, where they find shelter in NY. It's a struggle to fit in with non-magic beings, in combination with the constant thread of the adversary.

The book gives a very nice twist at the fairy-tale creatures: making Pinochio an angry boy who just wants his balls to drop and grow up, while prince charming appears to be one big asshole. The realistic look on the creatures only heard from in stories we've been told is refreshing and the addventures they go through are beautifully written. This makes it really worth your while to pick up the book, because faibles will nail you down to your chair and leave you no less than amazed.

Emily

Brodinski - The Best of Everything pt.II

Woot Woot!

Brodinski's long awaited Best of Everything compilation finally dropped on XLR8R yesterday. Some great remixes of Brozzers favorite R&B and hiphop tracks by top notch producers as Djedjotronic, French Fries and Renaissance Man!

Grab it while it's still hot!

Free Beach House Christmas Single

Showing their grace to the kind and warm people that have supported them during this incredible year, Beach House, the dreamy indie rock duo consisting of French born Victoria Legrand and Baltimore based Alex Scally, have released a Christmas-single for free on their website. And it’s as sweet and wonderful as you imagine it to be.

Indulged by the swirling snowflakes and glooming white sceneries, the ever charming Legrand reflects on the past, present and future to decide: “Thou darkness come, so quick in time. Shortens our days, to longer nights. Snowflakes that fall across our eyes. It's all that matters, this time of year”

Grab it here.

Hannes

Icycle

Exams are right around the corner for most of you, and I know a little time-waster can be very helpful to get yourself back on the happy-track when you are trying to stuff your head full with knowledge in a too short timespan. If you find yourself tearing your hairs out as a result of frustration in combination with a cafeine overdose, a little game always proves useful tot ease the mind.

Icycle is pretty simple: a little balding guy rides his bike naked in what appears to be a new ice age. You have to bring him safely through eight levels. What makes this game so special and definitely worth playing, is its very neat design, its superb little sound-effects and the great artwork.

Play here. Enjoy!

Superamas - YOUDREAM

Imagine. A social network where people can share their dreams. Room for everybody throughout the European mainland to ventilate their wondrous adventures in the hazy shades of their dream world. That is what Superamas, a young and dynamic company, offer to their spectators in YOUDREAM.

Superamas have always been pleasantly surprising and innovating. With their new production they have yet again pushed their own limits quite a bit further. Operating from three different media (a television series, a website and a theatre show), YOUDREAM is spectacularly intimate as well as funny and amusing. On www.youdream.be it has been made possible for people all around the world to tell their dreams in front of their webcam and upload them to the YOUDREAM-database. These dreams, along with those from random spectators in the audience, are then incorporated in the absurd and highly entertaining theatre show. “Superamas make your dreams come true”. And how!

Truly, if you are rarely seen in a theatre-building or get uncomfortable even thinking about sitting still for an hour to watch people move and talk on a stage, this is the one show you really should drag yourself to. Utterly entertaining and staggeringly surprising, YOUDREAM will not let you or your dreams down.

Youdream plays at the VOORUIT GHENT on the 17th and 18th of December. Tickets and info www.vooruit.be

Hannes Dereere

FormaT - My 100 tracks of 2010

The Liège scenestars of FormaT have posted a quite impressive list of their 100 favorite tracks for 2010. Have a peek if you think you have missed something.

You can find the list here!

Blackbox Revelation - High on A Wire (Waxdolls Kills Your Television Remix)

The Ghent based electrorock/porncombo Waxdolls have made an edit of this awesome track by The Blackbox Revelation. This should get the hands in the air on your new year's eve homeparty. Waxdolls are giving the track away for free soon, but untill then we'll have to settle with a streaming version. As you can see I found a relevant picture of half-naked girls as a bonus.

 The Black Box Revelation - High On A Wire (Waxdolls Kills Your Television Remix) by WAXDOLLS

Das Racist

Maybe I'm a bit late with this, but I'm going out to see Das Racist in Ghent tonight. Their Sit Down, Man is one of the best rap-albums I have heard in years, so I'm pretty thrilled about the show. I Also found a 12inch of Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthin to Fuck With in a record store this afternoon, so I'm feeling gangsta today.

Anyway, here's some Das Racist youtube proxy if you don't feel like going out.



Flx

Barbarella

If there is one film I always recommend to everybody, then it's barbarella. One of my favorite movies of all time. Barbarella is played by Jane Fonda, and her love and husband Roger Vadimis is the director. The movie is based on a comic book by Jean-Claude Forest, that was published in V-magazine.

It is an "erotic sience-fiction" wrapped in lots of fur. you won't see any 'real action', but it's constantly talked about. The mission of Barbarella is of course: love, and she brings the love in very very tiny outfits (and a lot of them too!).The special effects are intentionally not very realistic, andthe dialogues are not very complex, but it all makes the atmosphere more alive!

And also, movies that have devices like an Orgasmetron, you just got to love them!

Emily

Jonas Bendiksen- Satellites

Some of us already know his name. Maybe you know him as one of the youngest Magnum members, or maybe you saw his photograph for The Bony King of Nowhere's debut album Alas My Love. Bendiksen is Norwegian and was born in 1977. He made a couple magnificent documentaries, travelling around the globe. I want to share his first book Satellites. It contains a bunch of emotional, fascinating and beautifully composed pictures that he took during a trip of seven years across the former Soviet Union. A must see!

You can check more of Bendiksens work on www.jonasbendiksen.com.

Fien