Diplo/ Sleigh Bells

Known internationally as a curator amongst the world's most cutting edge DJs, producers, and musical movements Wesley Pentz (better known as DIPLO) has experienced a variety of successes. The last few years have been spent running through the club circuit and having chart-topping hits with refreshing irreverence. Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1978, Pentz spent most his childhood in Florida working in his fathers bait shop and being turned onto music through then new mediums like MTV. Drifting North through the state came Miami Bass and from the West came the sounds of Southern hip-hop artists. The musical influence and variety coalesced, and at 18, Pentz moved to Philadelphia for college at Temple University to study Film & Music. While a student he took a job in the South Philadephia community as a social worker and created the influential Hollertronix club night, which was the beginning of his fledgling career as DIPLO.

In 2004 Pentz released his debut album as Diplo called, Florida. It received praise and accolades in the underground community. The music embodied on this album led to an introduction via an A&R man at XL Records to M.I.A. In 2004 he partnered with M.I.A. for the mixtape Piracy Funds Terrorism. Pentz's cultural impact had started to snowball. Together they worked on her first album Arular and much of her second Kala, including the 2008 mega-hit "Paper Planes," which reached No. 3 in the US Charts and earned him a Grammy nomination for Record of the Year. His production credits have evolved since to include Santigold, Lil' Jon and Missy Elliot, while remixing works by Beck, Radiohead, Britney Spears and countless others. In 2009 Pentz teamed with frequent collaborator Dave Taylor (aka Switch) to release the futuristic dancehall album Guns Don't Kill People… Lazers Do under the guise of Major Lazer, a Jamaican militant at war with an evil army of zombies, mummies and vampires.

Meanwhile, his record label Mad Decent has helped to introduce Brazilian baile funk, Angolan Kuduro and other marginalized music to clubs around the world, developing as a trendsetting force with which to be reckoned. With the same mission in mind, some of the varied acts Pentz has signed or produced include Rye Rye, Bonde do Role, Crookers, Blaqstarr, Boy 8-Bit, Buraka Som Systema, and Rusko, allowing Mad Decent to act as a launching pad or home base for many others while spreading its influence across the globe. Through the label, Pentz has founded a charity called Heaps Decent as a social relief program to help children in Australia as well as with additional efforts internationally. In early 2009 Pentz debuted his film Favela on Blast, a five-years-in-the-making documentary exploring the Brazilian slum favelas of Rio de Janeiro and the thriving baile funk music scene that exists within. He is currently developing a TV show.

Through a widespread assortment of releases and artists' works – from cumbia to dubstep to punk and beyond – Diplo has shown dynamic range with interests that span far beyond any singular culture or musical realm, standing as a working model for the truly 21st Century artist.

Based in Brooklyn, NY, Sleigh Bells is the musical collaboration of Derek E. Miller (songwriter, guitarist, producer) and Alexis Krauss (vocals). The two met and formed in 2008, when Miller was waiting tables on Alexis and her mother at a neighborhood Brazilian restaurant. When Miller mentioned that he was looking for a female vocalist for a new musical project, Krauss's mother immediately volunteered her daughter.

Sleigh Bells' unique sound is likely the result of Miller and Krauss's contrasting musical backgrounds; Miller was formerly the guitarist for the post-hardcore band Poison the Well and Krauss was a member of the teen pop group RubyBlue as a teenager. After steadily gaining popularity throughout 2009, Sleigh Bells signed to M.I.A.'s label N.E.E.T. in Spring 2010.

In 2010, Sleigh Bells released their debut full-length album entitled Treats. The album's immediate popularity and the band's reputation as an energetic live act have helped solidify the duo's widespread popularity. Amidst blown-out drum beats, fuzzed guitars and synth-pop sensibilities, Krauss balances each song with a voice that is both forceful and elegant. After playing Pitchfork's summer music festival, Sleigh Bells set out on their North American tour in July 2010.

Brooklyn based Liturgy is Hunter Hunt Hendrix, Greg Fox, Tyler Dusenbury, and Bernard Gann. Aesthethica, their second album and third release, shows the band exploring, in greater depth, themes initially touched on by their critically acclaimed debut album, Renihilation. The band used every instrument, literal or figurative, to produce meaning and intensity, disregarding the genre boundaries of black metal, hardcore and experimental music.

On Renihilation, Liturgy made use of simple song structures, and concentrated on sustaining a blindingly high intensity level from start to finish. Aesthethica, a more controlled and polyvalent effort, finds the band operating at multiple levels and using more varied forms. The music is both elaborately crafted and chaotically performed. Songs often begin in the form of a simple chant or hypnotic abstraction, then evolve into something dense and complex. A constant sensitivity to the states of attention that different musical patterns activate and foster, yields a paradoxical result: the more complex the music, the simpler the message. Cycling through the fundamental modes of being: stasis, chaos, repetition and entelechy, Aesthethica is a metaphorical exercise in affirmation.

The record is a unified whole. A major concern, sonically and lyrically, is the question of what it is to be meaningful, and how intensity relates to emotion or affect. Many of the songs activate and manipulate cliches relating to heroism, tragedy, hope, and so on by connecting black metal techniques to the spirit of film score writing (Vangelis, Badalamenti) and post-Romanticism (Scriabin, Sibelius). "High Gold" presents a vision of apocalypse, "Harmonia" presents a judgment on the meaning of life, and so on. The resulting collection of songs, at once, embodies and transcends these tropes. The music is supersaturated with lofty melodies and lyrics, bursting with frenzied execution, and builds to a boiling point of chaos, distorting all meaning and distilling to reveal the raw core of pure sonic joy. Liturgy surrounds these fractured islands of meaning with a sea of a-signifying ritual repetition and sound (Branca, Sleep, Lightning Bolt). Tear at the seams of the straitjacket of ordinary life, release the energy from the field of potentiality that it binds, enter the realm of the good and the beautiful, so commands Aesthethica.

Highly technical musicianship, poetico-mystical gesturing, and a minimal directness; all singular elements, whose interactions and reactions are contained in and bursting from a black metal framework. Revelatory contrasts presented in an intensely physical performance whose energy is palpable and whose abatement is as illuminating as its arrival.