Jam of the Day | Shlohmo - Ghosts

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Given the ubiquity of laptops amongst teenagers today and the availability of cheap, high quality music creation software, the mean age of professional electronic producers is dropping at a staggering rate.

The  Mountain Oasis Electronic Music Summit is next week, and looking at the line-up makes even I, at the dignified age of 20, feel old. The youngest act slated to perform for the festival is seventeen-year-old Marcel Plummer of XXYYXX, but at 22 Henry Laufer (aka Shlohmo) isn't far behind. Hailing from good 'ole LA, Laufer spins deceptively intricate webs of melodic IDM. Relying primarily on elegant, stripped down beats and found sound samples, Shlohmo's tunes resides somewhere between ambient minimalism and trance music, with an atmosphere unlike anything else out there today.

Check out "Ghosts" below, and be ready for some wicked coverage of Mountain Oasis next week.

Jam of the Day | Boards of Canada - Reach for the Dead

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Scottish brothers Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin have been recording music under the moniker Boards of Canada for over twenty years. In that time they've released three landmark albums on Warp Records, numerous EP's and a few hard-to-find private releases, which all together comprise one of the strongest back catalogs in electronic music.

The hype for the band's upcoming album, Tomorrow's Harvest, began on Record Store Day 2013, when a fan purchased a mysterious 12-inch at a New York record store. The plain brown packaging bore no identifying artwork aside from "Boards of Canada ------ / ------ / ------/ XXXXXX / ------ / ------" in small black letters, and the audio on the vinyl only consisted of static, a little music, and a voice reciting a few numbers.

The numbers turned out to be part of an elaborate set of codes, which had been hidden amongst various radio broadcasts, television ads, music videos, website source codes, etc.,  and when entered together into the new Boards of Canada website, allowed access to a video that confirms the album's release.

"Reach for the Dead" is the first track to be released from Tomorrow's Harvest, and it is unmistakably BoC; a haunting IDM drone track that culminates in a slow-building, cinematic crescendo.

Let it take you somewhere far away, to a place where things don't seem so important.