Tutorials about how to play some Ladytron songs

The user ReAgent601 did some tutorials about how to play some Ladytron songs.

604





Light & Magic





Witching Hour





Velocifero

Mira and Helen featured on TEC's The Beauty of the Synthesizer list

Both Mira Aroyo and Helen Marnie featured on The Electricity Club's "The Beauty of the Synthesizer" list (the most beautiful women in synthpop).

That list includes names like Au Revoir Simone, Sarah Blackwood (Dubstar, Client), Anastasia Dimou (Feathers), Alison Goldfrapp (Goldfrapp), Claire Boucher (Grimes), Patricia Hall (Soft Metals), Imogen Heap, Victoria Hesketh (Little Boots), Marianthi Melitsi and Sophie Sophie Sarigiannidou (Marsheaux), Lauren Mayberry (Chvrches), Anais Neon (Vile Electrodes), Sarah Nixey (Black Box Recorder), Polly Scattergood, Emilie Simon, and others.

Also Marianthi and Sophie from Marsheaux were compared with Mira and Helen: "Marianthi Melitsi is the Helen Marnie of the pair with her sweet vocals and porcelain looks. Meanwhile, Sophie Sarigiannidou is more akin to Mira Aroyo with a more smouldering demeanour which is deadpan in comparison".

Mira Aroyo

While Ladytron are very much a quartet musically, imagewise it has been the band's female pair who have been the focal point.

When Mira Aroyo first appeared on the scene, her icy East European demeanour suited the band's dark terrorist chic meets the catwalk. With look akin to the notorious Baader-Meinhof gang, she was Mira armed with a Korg MS-20 as her weapon of choice.

As well as DJing, she has branched out into other projects, the most notable being when she made her stark deadpan presence felt on the appropriately dystopian "Watching a Building on Fire" with John Foxx & The Maths in 2011.

Helen Marnie

If Mira Aroyo is the Anni-Frid Lyngstad of Ladytron, then Helen Marnie is Agnetha Fältskog.

The sweeter, more pop inclined of the pair, Helen certainly appeared at home with a more glamorous image when Ladytron relaxed their uniformed stance after their third album Witching Hour.

It was probably Helen who persuaded Mira Aroyo to sport swimwear on their 2003 DJ mix compilation Softcore Jukebox.

She is obviously comfortable with that look as she has continued with the swimwear and gone for some glossy imagery in support of her pristine first solo album Crystal World.


Other superb pictures with Mira & Helen:

"Destroy Everything You Touch" videoclip snapshots

On the design site Behance, Adam Bartley (credited with Art Direction and Directing) uploaded a nice collection of snapshots from the gorgeous "Destroy Everything You Touch" videoclip. Click on pictures for a higher resolution:

Bonus: two storyboards of "Destroy Everything You Touch" videoclip:

"She Stepped Out of the Car" cover

A Ladytron fan, Adren, covered one of the band's exclusive tracks for The Sims 3 soundtrack. It sounds very nice.

Tamoios, a new side project of Daniel Hunt

Tamoios is a new band from São Paulo, Brasil that consists of Daniel Hunt, singer Luisa Maita, and Fernando Rischbieter. The first single is titled "Alto lá".

Jim DeRogatis interview (2006)

While the democratization and rapid distribution of music via the Internet has been a boon to many independent bands, there's no denying that it's compromised the ability of groups to grow organically over time, crafting a sound that improves from album to album.

"It's actually pretty rare for a band these days to develop over three albums, because people just expect that it will be here and then it's gone", says Ladytron keyboardist and vocalist Daniel Hunt. "The appetite for indie rock at the moment is so voracious that things are just getting soaked up faster than they can be produced. A band like the Arctic Monkeys comes out straight away and has such a big success on the Internet, they're barely even given the chance to make their first album, let alone a third!".

Taking its name from Roxy Music and drawing inspiration from the strangely non-mechanical sounds of early synth-pop artists such as Kraftwerk, Gary Numan and Devo as well as vintage '60s pop, Ladytron was formed in Liverpool in 1999 by Hunt and fellow club DJ Reuben Wu, who recruited Bulgarian vocalist-keyboardist Mira Aroyo and vocalist-keyboardist Helen Marnie.

The group has yet to broach the mainstream, and its music is a treasured secret for a dedicated underground following. In addition to numerous singles and EPs, Ladytron has given us three full albums of exquisitely crafted, unforgettably melodic electronic pop: 604 (2001), Light & Magic (2002) and Witching Hour (2005).

"We had been on tour for a long time with Light & Magic, and we had the opportunity to continue touring it -- Marilyn Manson asked us to support him on tour; things like that. We had made some progress, but we were quite naive, especially about the USA, because we did one tour here [in 2003] and a trip around Coachella and thought, 'That's enough. We've done it now; we've sold out the Henry Fonda [Theater] in L.A.' We skipped all of the crappy little shows that people normally have to do".

"We wanted to get off tour and start the next record, because we thought that was more important. But in retrospect, the record was delayed so much that we could have toured for longer with the last one. We just wanted to get back into the studio and demonstrate what we could do; we already found with the previous albums that we liked them, but we knew we could make something closer to what we heard in our heads".

Witching Hour is indeed the group's strongest offering yet, with songs such as "International Dateline" standing as perfectly realized pop gems. The disc has an overall darker vibe that makes the gorgeous vocals and indelible melodies seem even more mysterious and seductive.

"I think it's more emotional", Hunt says. "I don't know if you've seen a little film of when we went to China -- just some footage that a friend took -- but she started the video with 'The Last One Standing' and ended with us playing 'USA vs. White Noise' live in Shanghai. She said that she took it in the opposite direction of how she perceived the album: as stark, pretty and solid, and then becoming more emotional.

"I was watching TV the other day and there was a documentary about illegal immigrants trying to get from West Africa to the UK I thought, 'God, this is really, really sad', and then I realized they had 'All the Way...' as the music underneath it!".

As for "International Dateline", Hunt says the tune came together in the group's new home studio, which eschews computers in favor of older, more distinctive analog synthesizers and instruments.

"I had this really bad little Casio keyboard that I actually bought for five pounds off a Chinese guy in a cafe. It had this really nice distorted sound, and you could only play two notes at once because it wasn't polyphonic. It was a bit like [the punk-era electronic duo] Suicide. The song just came about with the chord sequence from the keyboards; there were variances with the vocals, then the guitar part went on it, and that turned it into what it is now. The lyrics just came pretty instantaneously".

This underscores a common misperception about the band: despite its futuristic image and fondness for fanciful sci-fi instrumentation, Ladytron maintains the spontaneous spirit of all great rock bands, and unlike many electronic groups, its focus is always on songs rather than sounds.

"I think with this record, a lot of people who have had the opinion of us as automatons before might have revived it", Hunt says. "Sometimes people can only go on what they've heard, their perceptions of it and things they read. And I feel similarly: if someone described a band to me that was all about style over content, I would just be going, 'I am going to murder them!' But that's not us at all".

21 April 2006

Source

Marnie - "The Hunter Remixed" available to buy as digital download

You can buy Marnie' single "The Hunter Remixed" as digital download from Amazon. There are also song previews.

The 12" vinyl version was issued on Record Store Day (19 April 2014) as limited edition (500 copies).

Track listing:
1. The Hunter (album version)
2. The Hunter (Roman Nose remix)
3. The Hunter (Stephen Morris remix)
4. Sugarland (Mark Reeder remix)

Ladytron - La Route Du Rock Festival, 2001

Format: MP3, 192 kbps VBR
Note: I made the cover. You can watch the concert here.

Track listing:
01. Zmeyka
02. He Took Her to a Movie
03. Paco!
04. Discotraxx
05. Holiday 601
06. Another Breakfast With You
07. Commodore Rock
08. This Is Our Sound
09. Playgirl
10. Skools Out...
11. Mu-Tron
12. The Way That I Found You

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