Gallery: I’ll Be Your Mirror, Alexandra Palace, May 4th 2013.

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‘Returning for a third outing, if this year streamlined to but the one solitary day next month is to witness the return of All Tomorrow’s Parties’ tangential I’ll Be Your Mirror festival to Alexandra Palace for an afternoon-cum-early evening-cum-black night shebang which looks set to be explosive, and so too expansive as any other. For where previous editions have focussed on altogether gloomier aesthetics (Portishead called upon anyone and everyone from DOOM and Company Flow to Swans and GY!BE, whilst last year featured the likes of the Melvins, Slayer, Codeine and so on) this year’s bill is of a rather more optimistic, and thus estival disposition. Only time will tell if it’s able to compensate for the drastic lack of springtime Britain at large is currently suffering from, though our sprightly highlights for this May 4th are thus.’

Featuring the likes of The Field, Dirty Beaches, Anika, Prince Rama and of course headliners and curators Yeah Yeah Yeahs, we present Dots & Dashes’ Fest Bests for next month’s IBYM 2013.

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“I just kinda started asking myself these questions about what pop music’s role is in carrying these mass messages; these unconscious messages of mass destruction. Or mass salvation? It just depended on the song. For one of them, we were looking to channel the ‘Jonestown Massacre by way of the Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive, and that’s almost this message, you know, of survival. And I was like: ‘Well, if the world were to end this year, I wanna write the Top 10 singles album documenting whatever it was that was the number one hit at that particular time.’ I guess that’s kinda how it turned out.”

Dots & Dashes talk the impending apocalypse, pop, and Paw Tracks with Prince Rama’s Taraka Larson…

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‘Embarking on a concept album comprising a vague top ten rundown of spectral pop numbers channelled from deceased, fictitious stars post-apocalypse is unreservedly weird. Though with us here having conjured the above – an intrinsically outré concept in itself – that is of course what Paw Tracks-signed sibling pairing Prince Rama recently unleashed in Top 10 Hits Of The End Of The World. The record, however, transpired to be a by and large triumphantly good weird, as opposed to bad weird or purely weird weird, and a track entitled “So Destroyed” – recorded under the guise of Rage Peace – then really stood out. Now, six string wunderkind of visionary intergalactic instrumental outfit Emeralds Mark McGuire gets his hands on its lustrous synth-pop whimsy, and turns it into something all the more ambiguous. Synths masquerading as the stars and the sea all at once bloop about Taraka and Nimai’s aloof cooing whilst Minehead arcade noises come heavily manipulated and largely hidden beneath wholesome undulations; smothered by contorted vocal harmonies. As joyously disorientating as Emeralds’ latest, Just To Feel Anything, which we deplorably neglected earlier on in the month. Stream this below, and then go get that.’