I Hear a New World (June, 2008)

Employee of the Month – Brainwave Corrupted

Call it jazz or post-rock if you like, and it’s true that Edinburgh band Employee of the Month bear comparison to the likes of Boards of Canada and Tortoise, but their hyper-modern aesthetic is all their own. What’s even more striking is how well the band recreate their recorded sound live. From the pristinely produced Brainwave EP, this track is crying out to be used to soundtrack a film with similarly innovative, mind-blowing visuals.

Stanley Brinks – Stanley Brinks

The artist formerly known as Andre from the band Herman Düne no longer plays live with his brothers, though he contributed a number of gorgeous tunes to their last album Giant. Since leaving he has reinvented himself as Stanley Brinks, a self-proclaimed 'enemy of society' and an amusingly unlikely moniker for a Frenchman. This song is an autobiographical statement of independence, detailing his life right up to the transformation into his new persona.

Gummi Bako -I’m Depressed

Let’s face it, without the odd dose of depression most songwriters wouldn’t have produced half of their output. Here, Gummi seems to have the bakery-related blues (“too much hot-cross loving”), but then things take an abrupt turn for the positive as he sings “I wanna go ballooning, right up past the Moon and Mars, and get lost amongst a million billion drillion, zillion super-shiny shooting stars” and you realise he has the ability to free himself from adversity through sheer, glorious absurdity.

Wounded Knee - Anthem for the Call Centre Worker

Some might say that it is the shortsighted economic policy of the past that has led to a large proportion of Scotland’s workforce being qualified to do little else other than man the phones. Working in a call centre is, on the whole, low-skilled, low-paid work with an extremely high staff turnover - due to the fact it is soul-destroying in the extreme. Edinburgh’s Wounded Knee takes the corporate-speak of the robot voices that greet us on the other end of the line and reclaims them as a call to arms for all downtrodden customer service representatives. Using his sublime skills with repeating vocal loops, he transforms a common depression into a perversely uplifting anthem.