If you're headed to M.I.A. at the Palladium tonight, get there early: Cool Kids have cancelled, but we're dying to see what C440R's monster party-rap duo have in store when they step in tonight as a last-minute opening act. Big Digits at the Palladium: who'da thunk it? For an idea of how much awesomeness is in store, check the video above to see what happened the last time someone offered TD and Mac Swell a nice big stage.

Monsterous edition of THUNDERDOME tonight, bringing Baltimore Clurb legend Scottie B and Spank Rock's Chris Rockswell to the decks, along with resident headbangers Micl Ptvn, Mistaker, and DJ Die Young to represent the home team. Special live-video guests: Robotkid (ask him how much the new Harmonix game Rock Band is gonna rule) and Matt Boch. Beware: it's at a new venue this month, and taking a cue from Robotkid's email, we're throwing in a map below instead of mpfrees.

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DOWNLOAD: Shepherdess, "Not Gonna Be There Now" (mp3)

For reasons that aren't entirely musical, Hilken Mancini was our favorite member of Fuzzy. Chris Toppin was technically the better singer, but Hilken was the one with the squeaky voice, the messy guitar, and the skintight jumpsuits. The one, obviously, who stood out. Since Fuzzy, she's often ended up undeservedly playing second fiddle (garage-punk with the Count Me Outs, indie-folk with Buffalo Tom's Chris Colburn, DIY jane fonda in Punk Rock Aerobics). But in Shepherdess she's front-and-center, fusing her underappreciated knack for heart-destroying melodies with moody, soul-jarring bursts of magical noise. (Think Mary Timony, minus the unicorns.) This band, with the Count Me Outs rhythm section and the Operators' Emily Arkin on strings and samples, might be her best yet. And the songs, especially this one and the meaner "Green Seat," (<-- right-click, save-as) will rip your guts out.

Don't miss: the CD-release party tonight at the Plough with Cave-In's Steve Brodsky, Phoenix contributor and Pipeline host and now musical recording artist Jeff Breeze, Mission of Burma's Clint Conley, and frequent Burma lyricist Holly Anderson's duo New Randy.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL:

DOWNLOAD: Shepherdess, "Faith" (mp3)
DOWNLOAD: Hilken Mancini and Chris Colburn, "Party Town" (m4v video)

DOWNLOAD: Crystal Understanding, "Power Feelings" (mp3)

We have a general rule: hippies and sequencers don't mix. But, as blog nerds have discovered via the already-web-famous track "World with No Windows," Crystal Understanding’s Aaron and Sonya have become a weird, sweet exception. The duo is aligned with the local shit-pop cabal Compound 440r, and like most C440r groups it forsakes (sez their bio) "the usual trappings of rockitude, replacing guitars and basses with handmade claves, computerized beats, and power feelings." Power feelings! For what it’s worth, CU rhymes with VU, and depending on how much hash you smoke, you might come to theorize that their DIY electro steez shares more conceptual turf with no-wave and new age (no-age?) than with your average retard-disco knockoff. Paper Rad's Jacob Ciocci designed the cover of CU's new Hold the Gem, and CU's music offers kind of sonic rhyme to Paper Rad's design philosophy: to wit, a proto-psychedelic digitalia that finds in raw primitivism the pulsating elements of supernatural euphoria. Thanks to Campaign for Real Time/We Are Cassette synth wizard MicL Ptvn, "Power Feelings" has just enough polish to keep from spoiling the cumulative hypnotic effect of Casio presets, boy-girl vox, and shamanistic intentions.

CD Release party not to be missed: Saturday night at the Ark, accompanied by Zombies with Attitude and DJ Mark E. Moon. Info here.

VIDEO: U.V. Protection, "Animals"

Thanks again to everyone who sent along videos for Best Music Poll. We tried to get them up on the ballot page, but the ballot page wasn't having it. So we're gonna try rolling them out OTD-style. If we're lucky, clicking above will get you the awesome video for UV Protection's "Animals," which reminds us of something by Numbers, although it turns out UV Pro have never heard Numbers. No matter. This kills.

DOWNLOAD: U.V. Protection, "Chemicals" (mp3, via Phoenix Band Guide)

Regular readers of OTD know we're all over Mark E. Moon's jock. Up til now he's focused on dropping Certified Bananas-style indie-rap smashups, but in honor of his joining the MySpace megaverse -- as good an excuse to revisit his way-too-slept on Neutral Milk Hotel remix -- he's put together a two-minutes-and-change minimix that throws gimmicks out the window and just kills shit, flipping the ubiquitous Justice/Simian track "We Are Your Friends" until it flips the bird at social networking. In other news, Mark E.'s been cooking up this thing where he's become the Jam Master Jay of Big Digits, live-mixing "ciara and kelis hooks, reggeaton umbrage, and comedy record laugh tracks" right into their backing beats. They're doing this shit live tonight at the Middle East for a last-minute gig.

DOWNLOAD: Mark E. Moon, "MySpace Minimix" (mp3)

Baddassery over at the Midway Cafe in JP courtesy of the "Musk" crew. We don't really have words to describe Kocho Bi-Sexual's track "Donuts." Gratuitously dubby DIY Casiotone reggaeton jam that rhymes "dog shit" with "bong hits"? We're all over it. Best thing to come out of Detroit since "Sandwiches." 

DOWNLOAD: Kocho Bi-Sexual, "Donuts" (mp3)

DOWNLOAD: DJ Mark E. Moon, "Kidzmix" (mp3)

In case you missed him spinning at the Children’s Museum a couple of weeks ago, DJ Mark E. Moon — the nom de guerre of a prominent local cartoonist/indie-rocker/party-rocker — has uploaded an ingenious mixtape that brings the anything-goes strategies of 2ManyDJs and Hollertronix to the Kidz Bop crowd. Matching pre-tween fare like "Since You Been Gone" with mashed-up SpongeBob SquarePants cameos, remixing Cookie Monster in a baile-funk style, and unearthing priceless rarities like "Elmo’s Rap Alphabet," it’s the cool-kid hit of the fall.

Tracklist:

Do the Lollipop-Sweetness
Summer Nights-Olivia Newton John and John Travolta
C is for Bolinho-Cookie Monster
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song
Clementine-Eject
The Two Little Squirrels (Nuts To You)-Louis Jordan
LY-Tom Lehrer
Since You've Been Gone-Kelly Clarkson
Spongebob Squarepants theme song
Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah (Means I Love You)-Violent Femmes
Sesame Street theme
Smurf Rave
Meow Mix theme-Paper Rad
Oye Mi Canto-Reggaeton Ninos
Elmo's Rap Alphabet
8th Wonder-Sugarhill Gang

We try to keep abreast of MICL PTVN's adventures in this space, but the dude just keeps on keeping ahead of us. David Day caught up with him in his latest circuits column, and then sent us the following mixtape to pass along:

Potvin's sense of tunes and danceability is no clearer than this mix, "Disco mix 4 Sarah," which does the hip Manhead, Daft Punk, Pitchfork poster-girl Annie, club queen Miss Kittin, those LCD boys, and the red-hot Digitalism remix of Cure's "Fire In Cairo" in one 60-minute super-jam. Privot is the in-house DJ for the Compound 440r collective, a group of art-minded music makers in Somerville that throws parties in club and loft around town. The guy also plays in Campaign for Real Time and is part of (We Are) Cassette. What more do you want? Check him out at a new night over at the Enormous Room or at any one of the 100s of 440r jams around town. Or just drop this into your iPod and try not to jiggle your hips on the bus. We dare you.

DOWNLOAD: MicL Ptvn, "Disco Mix 4 Sarah" (mp3)

We're so turning our entire weekend over to Compound 440r. Mr. MicL Potvin just checked in to inform us of a late-breaking gig by Japanther Friday night over at MIT. Which is sort of like just casually mentioning that there's gonna be a fucking hurricane in someone's living room. Oh, the furniture damage. For those of you who attended the Steer Roast, this is the same address: 70 Amherst Street, 9 pm. Those of you who cannot make it, and some of you who can, should also tune in WMBR's "Out of the Trash Can" from 7 to 8 pm for live, on-air Japanthage.

To sweeten the bargain, pawrty-rap commandos Big Digits and the reunited -- and tour-sharpened -- We Are Cassette are also on the bill. Plus, word has trickled back to We Are Cassette that the band who took their original name, Cassette, might have broken up. Which then leaves open the possibility that We Are Cassette would go back to calling themselves Cassette. We feel like jumping the gun and just calling them Cassette ("which I never really stopped calling us anyway" -- Potvin), especially since they've taken this opportunity to drop a new song, namely their bananas synth-mope anthem "Human Beings," which can also be found on the amazing new two-disc Compound 440r sampler. It does that awesome '80s Breakfast Club thing where the synth parts are really optimistic and the lyrics are about being in love but the voice is all Bela Lugosi-is-coming-for-your-children. Like Simple Minds if they'd been possessed by Type O Negative. On second thought, don't ever tell anyone we said that.

DOWNLOAD: Japanther, "The Whales" (mp3)
DOWNLOAD: Cassette, "Human Beings" (mp3)

That dude DJ Mark E. Moon has been awful quiet lately -- too quiet, buried-in-the-lab quiet, building-birfday-mixtapes quiet. We should've known that he wasn't kidding when he told us his Dipset-ized Neutral Milk Hotel "King of Karat Flowers" remix was part of a longer suite. But after that, there was his baile-funk Belle and Sebastian remix and then . . . nothing. Hell, we haven't even heard much from his band Plunge Into Death lately.

Wait's over. Run for cover.

The official occasion of Mark E. Moon's "Last Nail in the Coffin" mixtape is the birthday of his comrade-in-ravesploitation TD of Big Digits, and the official celebration goes down tonight at outsider-rock gnome Dan Shea's "Haunted Toof, Neon Fang" night at the Reel Bar. [DETAILS.] But this tape is going to be knocking spare tires off trunks for months. We knew the kid had something back when he created the groundbreaking "Crunkin Donuts" mixtape, which introduced the world to the Compound 440r miniverse and set Allston breakdancing to UV Protection. Now he's set his scope on the world at large, and the results are . . . fuck . . . stunning. Crazy. The tracklist doesn't do it justice -- but like OMG THE MAGNETIC FIELDS DISCO SONG AND JJ FAD IN THE SAME JAM (which OTD hereby christens the "S/FJ'S REVENGE MIX"), and then Tom Waits over Clipse shotguns is, like, ten kinds of retarded genius. Like everything on this thing, the Waits track is outofcontrol brilliant, but it's an example of what elevates Moonbeams over yr usual mashup fare -- the associational leap (the fronteir-American-violence of Waits' bone machines, the urban-American-violence of Neptunes' clattering gunplay) that makes rock critics start drooling and titling posts "total genius" and gushing like idiots.

Neutral Milk Hotel: King of Carrot Flowers
Lil Kim: Whoa
Juiceboxxx: Do you wanna hear some Juiceboxxx?
Tom Waits: Hoist That Rag/ Hawnay Troof: Out of Teen
Beats International: Won't Talk About It
Chamillionaire: Ridin
Sebadoh: Brand New Love/ Yaz: Situation
Magnetic Fields: I Thought You Were My Boyfriend/ JJ Fad: Boom I Got
Your Boyfriend
Run DMC: Tricky/ Velvet Underground: What Goes On
Busta Rhymes: Touch It/Architecture in Helsinki: Do the Whirlwind (NON-MARK E. MOON JAM)
Jay Z: Dirt off Your Shoulder/B-52s: 52 Girls
Clipse: Mr. You Too
My Bloody Valentine: Sometimes

DOWNLOAD: Mark E. Moon, Last Nail in the Coffin Mix (mp3)

The latest denizens of Boston's powerbook-pop underground to join the mysterious Compound 440r collective, the Westward Trail are not without precedent in these parts. Their pre-owned synthpop tones play nicely with We Are Cassette, and in a budget crunch they could probably go halfsies on a guitar player with Mobius Band or Certainly, Sir. What makes their brand new "Steady Hands" so face-meltingly dope is the way they rock that shit arena-style: if you want to hear what Europe's "The Final Countdown" would sound like as a twitchy blank-wave anthem, click here.

You can catch the band this Friday, April 7, as part of thephoenix.com/New England Product series at Bill’s Bar, 5.5 Lansdowne St in Boston with Porsches on the Autobahn and the Texas Governor.

DOWNLOAD: The Westward Trail, "Steady Hands" (mp3)

DOWNLOAD: Big Digits, "Music is Magic" (mp3)

OTD is back. (More soon on gators, Disney, and the genius of Southwest Florida radio.) And just in time, because the fishwrap told people to come here today for the new Big Digits track, which of course you all are fiending for because they're about to wreck shop with Hot Chip and the aforementioned new dance-punk geniuses on the block, Blanks. -- plus the last minute addition of Phoenix Circuits columnist/DJ extraordinaire/electronic-music documentarian DAVID DAY -- at Great Scott, which we flew back early from FLA just to catch.

For more on this show, you should go to the Compound440r blog, where they have some mp3s that are way too illegal for us to host.

So we're in a hurry, we want you to hear this now, in lieu of bloggerspeak we give you the description Big Digits' Mac Swell sent us with the track:

Here is one our new songs: "Music Is Magic." We recorded it right before we went on tour, burned it to a cdr, and sold it as part of a 6 song 'tour only' ep. also, it was posted as a secret mp3 on the 440r blog for like a second but has long been unavailable.  so some kids may have it already, esp. on the west coast, but since i've been back, i've retooled it and re-mixed it a bit, fixing some stuff i didn't like about the original mix. whenever we record enuff songs for another full length, this song will be on it, but who knows when that'll be.

also, i feel like this song is appropriate in that, it's kinda about how music should be a shared experience. by extension, i believe and promote that music should be free and support people sharing their music with one another. Music is a beautiful thing especially when it's a shared experience. It is awesome to walk down the street, iPod in hand, rocking out to your favorite dance tracks, but if you enjoy that song so much, wouldn't some of your friends, or beyond that, a stranger with similar tastes? Yes, of course.

make music a shared experience by making mixtapes, posting+downloading songs on the web, or dancing together at a club.

sound kinda hippie?  oh well.
fuck metallica.

peace and love,

- Mac

Partly a shameless "House of Jealous Lovers" ripoff, and partly a genius extension of dance-punk's 15 minutes of fame, "Pouncer" is not your average DFA cloning experiment gone awry. Sure, all the basics are there -- the hi-hat-kissed snare beat, the gangrene-guitar stabs, the falsetto-ing dude who sounds like he's feeling up the third rail. But Blanks., Allston's newest dance-dance revolutionaries, are too knowing, and too damn handsome, to leave it at that. If the original version doesn't have Lower East Side trust fund babies smashing their disco balls into coke mirrors, the synthy remix -- by We Are Cassette and Eject maestro DJ PTVN -- ought to do the trick. Check them out next Monday, March 13 at Great Scott, with Hot Chip and Big Digits.

DOWNLOAD: Blanks., "Pouncer"
DJ PTVN, "Pouncer (Do Not Eat Mix)"

OTD is heading south for the week -- and no, we're not going where everyone else is going. We're off for some R&R and even a little M&M, because as we've said before, OTD is for the children. Don't sleep, though, because Cami and a cadre of Phoenix guest bloggers are gonna keep you up to your eyeballs in exclusives until we return. Before we step off, though, here's what we'll be listening to on de plane.

A couple years ago, we heard some dude talking about freestyle, and from the way he was describing it our brain got all scrambled, because he definitely wasn't talking about improvised rap battles, but he was talking about shit we knew. And so it was that we discovered we were experts in a genre we didn't know even existed: capital-F Freestyle, which, to paraphrase DJ Ayres in this month's Fader, is all about chanelling your inner 15-year-old Puerto Rican girl. Unless you actually dated 15 year old Puerto Rican girls in 1987, you probably don't have intractable yanking-on-heartstrings connections to the eight songs Ayres pegs as pillars of Freestyle -- Noel's "Silent Morning," Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam with Full Force's "I Wonder If ITake You Home," Stacey Q's "Two of Hearts," Taylor Dayne's "Tell It To My Heart" among them. But holy shit, we do. Not only do we own all these 12-inches, we still sweat them. We'd always wondered what to call the stuff we danced to at middle school jams, and usually threw up our hands and described it to our metal pals as bubblegum R&B, or black electropop, or something despicable like that.

There's been a resurgence of interest in this stuff over the past couple years -- Ayres mentions Ciara's "1, 2 Step" as a distant relative of Freestyle, though we also detect its synth-brass heartbeat in Chromeo; and our fave Freestyle act of all time, the Jets, of "Crush on You" fame, have become a mainstay of 2ManyDjs-type mixes. We know the Compound440r dudes represent for this shit as well. Witness C440r's Philly brothers-in-arms Crimp Yr Hair, whose freestyle party Jam It On the One is apparently causing a stir at a rock bar we used to get kicked out of called the Khyber. The Crimp dudes' "What Would Theo Do?" mix (that's Theo as in Huxtable, not Epstein, as the Cosby Show samples will make clear) also goes heavy on first-wave Freestyle, including Ready for the World's "Oh Sheila" and Shannon's "Let the Music Play" and the aforementioned "Crush On You" (best song ever, or so we've thought for whole weeks of our lives), which is what you'd expect from a couple of dudes who pledge undying allegiance to Jellybean Benitez and the Jimmy Jam/Terry Lewis empire.

DOWNLOAD: DJ Ayres, "Fader Freestyle Mix"
DOWNLOAD: Crimp Yr Hair, "What Would Theo Do?"

Oh, and weve mentioned these before, but dude: the Diplo podcast on Baltimore club music is absolutely killer (who's got the unmixed bmore remix of the Beatles "twist & shout"?!), and the new Caps + Jones mix destroys. When people give shit like this away for free, you start to wonder why anyone buys records, ever.

MP3 of the Week

LISTEN: UV Protection, "UV Protection Theme" (mp3)

Previously available on the Internet and on tiny plastic discs, the debut album by these avatars of electropop future has finally been re-released on . . . old-fashioned wax? Yup. It still hiccups like Devo scoring Doctor Who with an all-woman cast. Or like Le Tigre meeting operatic-disco queen Klaus Nomi and forgoing feminism in lieu of chemistry. Nothing, of course, approximates the hyper-theatrical UV Pro live show, which you can catch Friday as part of ThePhoenix.com/New England Product series at Bill’s Bar.

1. A belated welcome to the new-look OTD. In case we didn't mention it before, that sweet logo is by Jef Czekaj, with whom any regular reader of this blog is already familiar via his numerous musical endeavors, most of which he chooses to pursue under one pseudonymn or another. Besides all that he's an awesome cartoonist. Even Dustin Hoffman thinks so, or so we've been told. If you ever forget where he's at, just click his signature above to check out his site.

 2. Let's pretend this item is unrelated to the one above. Mark E. Moon -- the dude who wrecked the internet with last week's all-world Neutral Milk Hotel remix -- has done it again. He was a little bummed we didn't mention him in our baile-funk rundown a few days ago, but that's only because we hadn't checked the Compound 440r blog in a whole five minutes, and in the interim those dudes had lit up, like, three yards of posts. Including a couple of distinctly non-C440r leaks -- like the first single off the MSTRKRFT album, which, goes without saying, we're totally stoked on. Plus the Big Digits dudes took a videoblog ride with that dude Raji that Miliard wrote about a while back. To get back on track, though, Mark E. Moon has posted two more songs from his upcoming Last Nail in the Coffin mixtape: a reggaeton remix of Unrest and (the source of his protest to OTD) a baile-funk remix of Belle & Sebastian. Fuck's sake, why isn't this kid famous already?

LISTEN: Mark E. Moon, "Legal Man (Baile & Sebastian Remix)" (mp3)
LISTEN: Mark E. Moon, "Isabel (Reggaeton, Eventually Remix)" (mp3)

3. Deserving of its own post: Wayne "& Wax" Marshall's definitive two-page Reggaeton essay in the Phoenix this week (actually even longer online). We were super, super inspired by reading Wayne's now-famous blog post "We Use So Many Snares," which subsequently became the inspiration for a couple of MSM reviews, including a widely-read one in the Times by a former Phoenix hip-hop critic . Wayne didn't really get as much credit as he probably deserved for steering the critical discussion about reggaeton, and OTD thought it was really important to get him into ink-and-newsprint to set the record straight. In any case, we feel this is an important and definitive piece of criticism, and it's one of the things we're proudest to have published. Even better, Wayne has put together a 40-minute annotated soundtrack for the piece that's downloadable for free over at this place, tracking many of the musical moments he elaborates on in his piece. We got giddy listening to it and reading along with it: this is what music criticism should be like. Period.

LISTEN: Wayne&Wax, "Dem Bow Mix" (mp3)

3. Apparently everyone else had this already, but now we got this thing where you can see what Google searches people did to end up at OTD? And then you're supposed to post about it when you get a funny one? OK, best one so far, just the other day: someone landed here by searching for "Jordyn Bonds nipple." Dream on, duder.  

4. The Chop Chop's Catherine Cavanaugh checked in the other day -- hi, Catherine! -- to clarify that we were not crazy, they really did have an mp3 up, they just took it down to save on bandwidth. "And plus," she writes, "I'm fascinated with myspace....which is lame, I agree." Not at all. We love social networking as much as the next hopeless web addict, we just can't take myspace with us on the train. So consider yr iPod satiated: here's the track . . .

LISTEN: Chop Chop, "Mixtape" (mp3) 

"Like, when I wrote `Oh, Comely,' I felt really great about it. I wrote it till six in the morning. I was staying at my dad's house at the time, and I was walking around the kitchen, and my dad heard me, and he's like, `What are you doing, son?' And I came in there and I said, `Well, Dad, I just wrote this song, it's really pretty freaked out.' So I played it for him and he made me feel okay about it. And I think that `Two-Headed Boy, Pt. Two' is that way, and `Holland, 1945' was that way, where I would be writing them and be feeling like things were right, and then I'd get tripped up by a line and suddenly think, `Oh my God, is this too much? Is this too fucked up? Are people gonna understand what I'm trying to say?' And it's taken seeing other people get the same reaction that I'm getting out of it to realize that I'm not just crazy."

Sorry for the lack of updates: we've been busy with some work stuff. (Some mistakes in that article -- like the launch date, which isn't until February -- but yes, big tings are in the works). Hope you like our new URL. Comments are now turned on retroactively, so if you ever felt like you wanted to add your two cents to our snarky appraisal of something, go apeshit.

Luckily for us, the kids at the paper have been keeping up with stuff in our absence. Tia OTD is in print today with a report from the wild and woolly Compound 440r Holiday Party, including the debut of the druidy c440r drum-machine circle Wind Cheetah (photos here, including the vagina mentioned in the piece). Thurston Moore: check your snail mail for the demo.

While we're on subject, both the Big Digits boys dropped new mixes this month. TD passed one off to us in the antiquated CD-R format, and it's killer: imagine an entire musical universe formed in worship of Le Tigre, albeit Le Tigre before (as TD will say, brow furrowing) they learned how to work their instruments. We had no idea there were that many electro-sleaze bands left in the post-Fischerspooner-bust era. Here's hoping it makes its way online.

Meanwhile, Mac Swell -- the other half of Big Digits -- has posted up the second installment of the Compound 440r Soundystem monthly mixtape series, which is about to become a serious problem. When those dudes are not remixing the Strokes or leaking the new San Serac Bowie cover that Trevor Jackson's putting out, dudes have been sharpening their cool-edit game. In any case, December version kicks off with Holland Boys' homo-for-the-holidays blank-wave anthem "Gay Christmas" -- great lyrics, too, about falling in love on the subway in winter, emotional temperatures rising with the street numbers -- then heads due south and warms up with glowstick-waving bubbletechno, Miami booty-bass, psycho microhouse divas, and the best Christopher Wallace duet that didn't make the album: this one with . . . Hail Social? Also, as you'd expect, there's some hot-wired Big Digitry artfully inserted.

LISTEN: Compound 440 Soundsystem, "December Mix" (mp3) (tracklist)