[Jords]

Quite a few people I know listen to Skrillex too, and Frank Ocean, the others are quite oblivious atm although I have spread the word on good ol Azealia and 212

[Shaun]

Azealia's huge amongst alternative listeners already - she's been declared the coolest person of 2011 by NME and is all over Pitchfork.

Skrillex is gash. Appallingly gash. Blue waffle gash.

[Z]

I heard Goldie Lookin' Chain's new album is gonna be called Blue Waffle

[Fetch The Bolt Cutters]

i cant decide whether i like niki & the dove or not

[Shaun]

the last time I checked them out they hardly had anything on youtube and I only really got excited by this song:

Youtube video

(i'm fairly sure they were on NME's ones to watch out for list in 2011... guess they stalled a year )

[Shaun]

speak of the devil...

Swedish electronic duo Niki & The Dove, who want to be "the Bjorn Borgs of pop music", have come fifth in the BBC's Sound of 2012 new music list.

The list, compiled using tips from more than 180 tastemakers - made up of music critics, editors, broadcasters and bloggers - aims to highlight some of the most exciting emerging artists. We are revealing one artist from the top five every day in reverse order until Friday, when the winner will be announced.

It is approximately 16:00 GMT on a grey Tuesday, and in a hidden 50s-style tea room located above a pub in Soho, central London, Scandinavian electro artists Niki & The Dove are taking afternoon tea.

"We really like going for afternoon tea, it is becoming more popular in Sweden," says singer Malin Dahlstrom.

Gustaf Karlof, the other half of the band agrees: "When you're playing in the evening you have a few hours in the afternoon where you can have a rest and it's nice to go some place calm and have some tea."

Tea, it would seem, is the new rock and roll. "I think Sid Vicious had tea," muses Karlof.

Putting preferential beverages aside, the band is causing some serious buzz with their gothic-tinged club tunes.

The pair started recording as Niki & The Dove in 2010 and released their debut single DJ, Ease My Mind on independent label Moshi Moshi to some acclaim.

Earlier this year, they released the seven-track EP, The Drummer.

Karlof, who studied music in Gothenburg, has composed for theatre and recently played with Magnus Ostrom, a former member of Swedish jazz band EST.

He also briefly worked with Dahlstrom - who found some success in Sweden as singer in the electro-folk band The Dora Steins - before.

Describing themselves as friends for many years, Karlof says they did "play a bit together", but the decision to start a band together was delayed as "I was afraid to ask her".

"Because she worked by herself so well," he explains.

Describing Karlof as "the one I've felt most kinship in music with", Dahlstrom has some difficulty describing their music.

She says: "Our music is very different from song to song. It's electronic pop music but we use a lot of acoustic elements."

The pair are keen to see off any suggestion that Karlof is the main creative force behind their sound, while Dahlstrom is limited to providing the vocals.

Karlof insists: "We write the music together, Malin writes the lyrics by herself."

He jokes: "I'm not allowed to help.

"She wants to write because it's awkward to sing somebody else's words, and I can really understand that."

Niki & The Dove's inclusion in the BBC's Sound of 2012 list should come as no surprise to those following recent cultural trends.

The past couple of years have seen a resurgence in all things Scandinavian, not least the success of things like Denmark's Bafta-winning drama The Killing, Wallander - starring Kenneth Branagh - and the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series of books and films.

The Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In, effectively re-vamped a genre which was, to keep the puns going, a bit long in the tooth. Director Tomas Alfredson went on to the remake of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

But musically, there has been much celebration over artists like Mohombi, Swedish House Mafia, Oh Land, Robyn and Lykke Li and their brand of effortlessly cool Scandi-pop.

Using a colourful sports analogy, Karlof explains: "We have confidence, it's like when Bjorn Borg was the best tennis player in the world, six or seven others came after him because he told the Swedish people: 'We can do this, so let's do it'.

"Then after that, Stefan Edberg, Mats Wilander, Mikael Pernfors. But I don't want to be a Mats Wilander. We want to be the Bjorn Borg of pop."

A bemused smile and a shaking of the head from Dahlstrom signals that Karlof's flights of fancy are not a rare occurrence.

As if to try to make amends for his seemingly flippant sports analogy, Karlof continues: "It's also a political thing in Sweden, we have good welfare, we have time and money to make music.

"There is a lot of support as a child so if you want to do music or sport you can do that, you don't have to pay because they want to encourage that."

But is there more to it? According to actor Daniel Craig, who is starring in the US remake of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a land which, in the far north, spends large chunks of the year in darkness fosters a culture of storytelling, myths and legends.

While Niki & The Dove's songs don't necessarily have a narrative, their music is certainly filled with gothic darkness.

"We have a lot of mystical strange ghost stories," says Karlof, citing the work of Swedish artist John Bauer - known for his illustrations of fairies and trolls and on whose work Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal was based.

"I think the darkness in those pictures, as a Swedish person, you are very influenced by it. I think Sweden was quite a scary place to live before electricity, people were afraid of the forests."

However, Dahlstrom disagrees the band is part of any kind of emerging scene: "When you come from Scandinavia, you don't think of yourself as a Scandinavian musician that is part of a movement or a Swedish trend.

"It isn't your musical identity."

Niki & The Dove's debut album is due out in the spring.

[Black Dagger]

Only 5th? Are they taking the ****ing piss?

[Shaun]

-predicts Azealia, Emeli, Skrillex and Frank to be the top 4-

[Shaun]

oh Emeli Sande isn't on there. ASAP Rocky then.

[Jords]

Pleased for Niki

It will be Azealia, Frank, Skrillex and Dot Rotten I think.

[Shaun]

US DJ and producer Skrillex has come fourth on the BBC's Sound Of 2012 new music list, which showcases some of the most promising new artists for the coming 12 months.

The list, compiled using tips from more than 180 tastemakers - made up of music critics, editors, broadcasters and bloggers - aims to highlight some of the most exciting emerging artists. We are revealing one artist from the top five in reverse order every day until Friday, when the winner will be announced.

Skrillex is the new superstar DJ, the latest rock 'n' roll star with a laptop instead of a guitar.

His full-throttle synthesised symphonies take the most compulsive components from a decade of dance music and push them harder, faster, stronger.

The bombastic concoctions have made him one of the hottest properties in American music.

He plays to thousands of dedicated fans and crashed into the mainstream consciousness late last year when he received five nominations for the prestigious and normally sedate Grammy Awards.

Energetic and self-assured, the 23-year-old Sonny Moore grew up in Los Angeles and puts his burgeoning success down to the fact that his fanbase includes hardcore clubbers, rock fans and casual thrill-seekers.

"I can play a nightclub or I can play a concert or I can play a festival," he says.

"I can do bottle service clubs in Vegas where there are models, and then I can do middle America in Alabama and it's like a Metallica show. I play what I want to play and it's always high energy and it's always a good time."

As Sonny Moore, he emerged aged 16 as the screaming singer metal band From First To Last, who enjoyed some success in the US.

There was an abrupt change in musical style, if not attitude, when he discovered dubstep, the bass-heavy dance genre that grew up in England in the early 2000s and travelled across the Atlantic later that decade.

Along with the Grammy nominations, one sign of growing mainstream acceptance is a recent track he recorded with the surviving members of The Doors. "We all clicked together and drank wine together and jammed out," he says.

But Skrillex has built his following with little support from the American media, he says.

"I'm not played on daytime radio in the United States. I'm not played on daytime MTV. There's been not a dime spent on marketing for any record I've ever put out.

"We've just toured our asses off. That's all we've done."

On stage, Skrillex hops around behind a desk centre stage, his long hair flaying about, with one hand on a laptop and the other on the banks of knobs in front of him.

His figure is silhouetted against a giant LED screen that flashes up giant spinning shapes and scorching colours at a mesmeric rate.

Despite being described as dubstep, the music is a combustion of spleen-shattering bass, crunching techno beats, heightened house synths and twisted vocal samples, all delivered with the belligerence of a metal band.

The most distinctive bits of the Skrillex sound, though, are the barrages of wobbling, pneumatic, oscillating noise - pure tones that are arranged into rhythms and which crash into songs with an irresistible physical force.

The end result sounds like a combination of hyped-up video game effects and roadworks.

It is also probably what prompted The Guardian to say his song First Of The Year (Equinox), which had 25 million YouTube views, sounded like "it was commissioned by the US military for use in Abu Ghraib".

As well as attracting a legion of devoted fans, Skrillex has repulsed many who see his music as artless, hollow and as blunt as a battering ram.

When I mention that British electro-pop star Example recently described him as "the new punk rock", Skrillex takes this as an affront, as an accusation of atonality.

He is, it seems, fed up with being described as "noisy", insisting: "It's not noise. It's orchestrated. If someone says noise, right off the bat, you just don't understand it, you haven't given it a real chance."

In fact, Example's remark was meant as a positive, suggesting that Skrillex was ripping up the old, established order and creating something fresh. Skrillex's mood lightens.

One thing that does wind him up, though, is the mention of the critics who have become commonly referred to in Skrillex articles as "the purists" - the dubstep aficionados who have complained about what the DJ is doing to their beloved scene.

The criticism was encapsulated by James Blake, number two in the Sound Of 2011 list, who attacked producers who appeal to a "frat-boy market where there's this machismo", which was "a million miles away from where dubstep started".

"It's an illusion," says Skrillex, tetchily, in response to the general criticism. "You can get 200 people bitching about me in a chat room or you can get 100,000 people dancing to every single drop I play. All ego aside, that's just the truth, you know what I mean?

"They can go bicker and waste their lives... You know what I mean? Good for them. Be purists."

He may not be easy listening, but this 21st-Century punk may be on his way to muscling his way into the big time

[Marc]

Hmm this Azealia woman..

[Roy Mars III]

Hopefully it goes

1- Frank Ocean
2- ASAP Rocky
3- Azealia

[Black Dagger]

What a let-down... Skrillex ****ing sucks, no doubt the top 3 will be the ones I like the least.

[Jords]

Skrillex

[Smithy]

Azealia is 3rd

[Black Dagger]

**** BBC, none of my favourites in the top 4, how depressing.

[Jords]

Only third!?!?!?

[Roy Mars III]

Frank Ocean and ASAP Rocky for the next two spots.

[Black Dagger]

Originally Posted by Roy Mars III

Frank Ocean and ASAP Rocky for the next two spots.

Frank has came 2nd.

Lianne better win now, or I shan't be pleased with their results.

[Shaun]

Was convinced Frank would win with Azealia out... whoever wins now doesn't deserve it

[Black Dagger]

Lianne better win, the BBC are ****ing idiots if she doesn't.

Azealia sucks.

[Shaun]

i'm sry i couldn't hear that over how much more successful than Lianne she already is

[Black Dagger]

Originally Posted by Shaun

i'm sry i couldn't hear that over how much more successful than Lianne she already is

Lianne will be well known when she performs on The Voice, so it's all good.

I'm happy with the winner, he should have won Critics Choice at the Brits.

[Jords]

Michael Kiwanuka has won.

Soul singer Michael Kiwanuka has come top of the BBC Sound of 2012 list, which aims to showcase the best rising music stars for the year ahead.

With a voice that has won comparisons to Bill Withers, the 24-year-old has already supported Adele on tour.

The Sound of 2012 list was compiled using tips from 184 key UK-based music critics, broadcasters and bloggers.

Now in its tenth year, previous winners include Jessie J, Adele, Mika, Ellie Goulding, Corinne Bailey Rae and Keane.
Continue reading the main story
Sound of 2012 logo

Discover the top five acts

1. Michael Kiwanuka - interview & videos
2. Frank Ocean - interview & videos
3. Azealia Banks - interview & videos
4. Skrillex - interview & videos
5. Niki & The Dove - interview & videos

Watch the top 15 acts on the Sound of 2012 site

How the list is compiled

Kiwanuka, from London, cites influences ranging from Otis Redding and Bob Dylan to Miles Davis.

He started out as a session guitarist, working with Tinie Tempah's producer Labrinth, before stepping in front of the microphone and signing to the Communion label, which was set up by Mumford and Sons' Ben Lovett.

He said: "I never expected to be recognised in this way.

"It's a great surprise and it means a lot that people are accepting the music they've heard so far, and it will bring the music to many more people, which for any musician is a great privilege."

Kiwanuka came ahead of US R&B singer Frank Ocean, who has worked with Kanye West and Jay-Z and was at number two on the list.

New York rapper Azealia Banks was in third place, followed by high-octane dance DJ and producer Skrillex at four and Swedish electronic duo Niki & The Dove in fifth place.

The list was compiled using tips from 184 influential tastemakers, who each named their favourite three new acts.
Continue reading the main story
Previous Sound of... winners
Jessie J

Sound of 2011: Jessie J (above)
Sound of 2010: Ellie Goulding
Sound of 2009: Little Boots
Sound of 2008: Adele
Sound of 2007: Mika
Sound of 2006: Corinne Bailey Rae
Sound of 2005: The Bravery
Sound of 2004: Keane
Sound of 2003: 50 Cent

BBC Sound Of... hits and misses

The participants ranged from music magazine editors and newspaper critics to respected bloggers, DJs and radio and TV producers.

David Smyth, chief rock and pop critic of the London Evening Standard, who took part, said: "I picked Michael because his music really grabbed me when I first heard him last summer.

"Paul Butler of The Bees produced his song Tell Me a Tale, giving it a vintage psychedelic soul feel. It was an unusual backdrop for such a rich, warm voice."

The tastemakers' choices could be performers from any country and any musical genre.

Artists who had scored a UK top 20 single or album before 13 November 2011 were disqualified, as were those already well-known to the UK public - for example by featuring in the final stages of a TV talent show or already being a member of a successful band.

A longlist of the top 15 artists was published in December, and the top five have been revealed this week.

Jessie J came top of the Sound of 2011 list. She went on to sell 805,000 copies of her album Who You Are - the most successful debut for a British artist last year.

Dubstep producer James Blake and indie band The Vaccines were also in the top five.

The other previous winners are: Ellie Goulding (Sound of 2010), Little Boots (Sound of 2009), Adele (Sound of 2008), Mika (Sound of 2007), Corinne Bailey Rae (Sound of 2006), The Bravery (Sound of 2005), Keane (Sound of 2004) and 50 Cent (Sound of 2003).

Other artists in the top five in previous years include Hurts (Sound of 2010), Florence and the Machine (Sound of 2009), Duffy (Sound of 2008), Klaxons (Sound of 2007), Plan B (Sound of 2006), Bloc Party (Sound of 2005), Franz Ferdinand (Sound of 2004) and Dizzee Rascal (Sound of 2003).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-16424437

#fail