Bloody Knives is an industrial/shoegaze band from Austin, Texas consisting of Preston Maddox (bass, voice, keyboards, samples, programming), Jake McCown (Drums, noise, programming, art), Kim Calderon (sound manipulator) and Christo Buffam (guitars/keys/noise). The band combines the sounds of heavy punk and industrial with blurry ambient electronics, shoegaze atmospherics, and 8-bit glitches and melodies.

Ghost to Falco is essentially the brain child of Portland, OR resident, Eric Crespo. Beginning in late 2001 as a solo project incorporating swirls of electric guitar loops, antique analog synthesizer sounds, and field recordings, he first used the moniker as a way to book shows that might score him a floor to sleep on while moving cross-country from North Carolina.

With outrageously immodest beginnings, The Tom Fun Orchestra sauntered into the Canadian music scene the way an Italian funeral saunters through a mountain village. That is, with many loud instruments, casks of wine and complete irreverence for everything happening around them. A year into the band's life, they travelled the country with eighteen of their friends in a school bus. And so it began.

BLKHRTS are a force of nature. Their live show is like a hurricane slamming into a shoreline at a thousand miles an hour or an avalanche triggered by barbaric yawp. King Foe, one third of the Velociraptor-voiced Denver rap trio, describes them as the “breath that you take the moment after the bungee cord is extended to its fullest extent jumping into the Grand Canyon.” Yorrissey, the group’s producer, summarizes them as “M.O.P.” meets Morrissey.” There is a light that will always get punched out.

Where are the phenomenons? In a time where the industry is flooded with cookie-cutter images, most Hip-Hop lovers either rely on classics to get them through their day-to-day groove or wait anxiously for new music from artists that continuously present fresh ideas. Omen, an introspective, Hyde Park, Chicago artist, accurately chose his stage name and strives for nothing short of authenticity. Omen\'s striking solo feature on J. Cole\'s mixtape Friday Night Lights was enough to prove that he\'s a progressive sign of things to come for the Hip Hop community.

BLUE SKY RIDERS (Kenny Loggins, Georgia Middleman, Gary Burr)

"How do you write about a musician who has spent more than 30 years defying musical conventions? You could trot out all the cliched rock-critic terms: seminal, hyperbole, incendiary, eponymous, masterful, achingly poignant, priceless, alt-country, old-school, outlaw. Some of those might even fit if you shoehorned them into context.

2012 was a big year for The Sideshow Tragedy: in addition to continuing their tireless, never-ending tour of The United States, the band also completed their first European tour and released a new record, Persona. Recorded and produced by Austin TX funk outfit T Bird and the Breaks, the LP is the Austin, TX duo’s rawest, bluesiest, dirtiest offering to date.

White Poppy is the experimental pop project of Canadian musician and artist Crystal Dorval. Dorval self produces and records all the music for White Poppy at her makeshift home studio in Vancouver BC.

Not Not Fun records released the debut cassette “I Had A Dream” in 2012, and will be releasing a full length LP in the spring of 2013.

Dorval also creates psychedelic art and video. Both of these visual elements are incorporated into White Poppy.

“…a sound that simultaneously stimulates and satisfies…” – My Old Kentucky Blog

Boy+Kite released their debut album Go Fly the summer of 2011, although the band started in 2009 when the two main members Beth & Darvin met in a hot tub. Since the release of Go Fly they have been flying high, opening up for acts such as Ume, The Quiet Company and The Toadies. The band also hit the Top 10 Charts on KUT 90.5 in Austin, TX and stayed in the top 10 for 12 weeks!