San Zhi - Static Hearts

The last time we heard from San Zhi they were on their way to France to record some new material. In honour of this, today’s blog post is delivered in French. ("Bonjour" to all our French readers).  Except we can’t speak or write French so we’ve used the powers of Google translate. Apologies to anyone who can actually read this. Merci.

Il a été quelques mois depuis duo garçon / fille San Zhi a chuté de leur dernier titre, une superbe pochette / remix de I Love You de Woodkid, mais maintenant ils sont de retour avec quelque chose de nouveau à nous ravir avec comme ils ont mis la touche finale à leur premier long joueur. Coeurs statiques comporte tout ce qui nous fait aimer à San Zhi dès le départ, à savoir de belles mélodies vocales de suraya et instrumentation magique qui lance des sorts de la même manière que le château de Cendrillon serait alléger le visage d'un petit enfant à Disney Land. Perdez-vous dans celui-ci comme il grandit et couches doucement lui-même dans votre cerveau.

Now just imagine if the album was actually all sung in French. That would be all sorts of A.M.A.Z.I.N.G or should we say I.N.C.R.O.Y.A.B.L.E

San Zhi - Static Hearts

San Zhi - I Love You (San Zhi vs Woodkid)

Before setting off to France to finish their record San Zhi uploaded this rather gorgeous remix / cover of I Love You by Woodkid to the world wide web. Normally a remix is an opportunity to take a non-dance track into the club, putting banging beats where they’re not welcome and making hips shake where they were never intended to. 

Thankfully San Zhi do nothing of the sort.  By adding Suraya’s chilled nearly whispered sweet soul vocals I Love You becomes a dreamy, gentle lullaby. “Whatever I feel for you, you only seem to care about you, is there any chance you could see me too?” takes on a whole new perspective both with male and female voices singing to each other. Are they both misreading the signs?

San Zhi - I Love You (San Zhi vs Woodkid)

San Zhi - The Ex-Factor

Having become rather animated about San Zhi’s debut EP last year, we’re now pleased to see that the band have put the whole thing up online for your listening pleasure, and what a pleasure it is. Back in the days of the Madchester scene of around '89 and '90 Inspiral Carpets fans wore t-shirts that proclaimed that they were as ‘cool as f*ck’. Well we couldn’t give a hipster on a snowdrift about cool, but if we did, we reckon that the Ice Light EP would be the musical equivalent of those t-shirts. 2 original songs and 2 covers (of Robyn S and Lauryn Hill respectively), it’s a highly desirable musical experience, demonstrating that just because something is cool doesn't mean it can't be brilliant as well. Important note: This is probably the only time we will ever describe the words Ex-Factor and brilliant in the same line ( albeit the spelling is slightly different). Stream one of the covers below. 

Warning - even the frostiest amongst you will probably just melt when you hear Suraya sing “this is crazy.” And it's OK, you can blame (or maybe thank) us as you part with 2 measly quid by clicking here to actually own these beauties. You’d be mad (or very tight) not to do so.

San Zhi play alongside a great line-up that includes previously blogged Brolin, Syron and Please at the Old Blue Last in London on the 23rd Jan and entry is free. If only we were a few miles closer, we’d be there like a shot.

San Zhi - The Ex-Factor

San Zhi - Ice Light (Video)

Warning. This post is largely mindless waffle ("aren't they all?" the crowd shouts). If you don't like blog posts about blogging and the concepts behind them go straight to the bottom and press play on the video. Otherwise read on.

Last week we had a small twitter conversation with Mike Taylor of Amazing Radio and The Big Beat Blog fame. He posed a question about music. “How old does something have to be for it not to be considered new?” Our reply was that it largely depended on context; new to you personally, or an audience? Then the next criteria is how musically educated are the audience? 

Breaking More Waves is primarily a new music blog which means that by and large you won’t find us posting about a song released five years ago, unless we’re running some sort of special feature such as last year’s Music That Made Me which was purposely designed to give some background to the authorship of Breaking More Waves and to react against the throwaway culture that new music blogging can arguably help perpetuate.

However our difficulty in deciding what to post as ‘new’ (providing that it meets the most important criteria – that we must like it) is that we don’t know our regular readers. What have they already heard and what haven’t they heard? It’s why quite often we like to write more than just a standard review / description of the music, because at least if as a reader you already know the song or band you might find something of value / funny / entertaining / thought provoking in the text to make your visit worthwhile. It always gives us great pleasure when people say to us that they don’t like all the music on Breaking More Waves but they enjoy reading it anyway.

It’s why yesterday today we posted a ‘new’ act called Twigs.Twigs is an artist that many blogs first posted about this summer, but we hope that our post shed a little more light on Twigs than most. For example the post linked to a piece of music that Twigs was streaming 2 years ago, way before any blog had featured or probably heard of her, which other blogs hadn’t picked up on. This leads us back to the original question; how old does something have to be for it not to be considered new? With only slightly over 100 plays for most people the ‘old’ Twigs track is probably ‘new’. Yet it’s actually quite old.

New music blog? Or new-old music blog perhaps? Does it really matter? Probably not. But then it probably does, because despite our waffle what probably first brought you here was something to do with the discovery or finding out more about new music.

So here’s some more new-old music, as we’ve featured this alluring tune before as a stream in September, but now the band in question, San Zhi, has a video. Except the video has already been on line a month. So it’s not particularly ‘new’ either. But then at the time of writing the video only has just under 3,000 views which means that there’s a huge amount of people who haven’t seen it. We can only hope that you’re one of them. This is San Zhi and the video for Ice Light. New or not it remains absolutely lovely.

San Zhi - Ice Light

San Zhi - Ice Light

Ever since we first heard the forthcoming songs from San Zhi’s debut EP we’ve become rather infatuated with them. These dreamy and very pretty pop tunes have been whirring around our head like a growing affair of the heart taking gradual steps of excitement. So today we’re streaming the first track that the band has put up on line for sharing from the record. It’s called Ice Light and it provides everything we could possibly want from music. Don’t be fooled by the crashing drums - this song is one of restrained and delicate beauty. The fragile boy girl vocals from Peter and Suraya melt together like chocolate and in turn may possibly sweeten your heart.

The words ‘new favourite band’ tend to be thrown around by music bloggers every week but we make no apologies for this; if we fall in love too easily it’s because life is too short for cynicism, negativity and not appreciating the things that are special in this world. We think the songs of San Zhi are pretty special and we hope you do too.

San Zhi - Ice Light

San Zhi - Soma

Remember your first boyfriend or girlfriend? It probably felt like true love for a few days before you moved on and realised that you were just two ships passing in the night. Well the internet is creating that same temporary status with much of the music we now consume. From constant next big thing hype and then disappointment to d-i-y laptop producers banging out a track from their bedroom and uploading it for five minutes of blog buzz adoration before someone else does exactly the same round the corner and ears are dragged off elsewhere.

Yet it’s not only listeners who get easily distracted by something sexier / prettier on the other side of the room. One of the peculiarities of the internet is that it’s altered the way in which music is available to us. In the past a band could only release something physically and once somebody had purchased it they owned it forever – as an artist you couldn’t take it back or throw it in the bin once it was out there. Yet now some music (like that boyfriend or girlfriend) is only temporary, uploaded or withdrawn in a single click; what was there before can be hidden from wanting ears.

San Zhi sneaked onto Breaking More Waves last month almost unnoticed in our Saturday Surf feature with a song called Towards The Sun, but then they then proceeded to remove it from their Soundcloud just a short while later. It no doubt had something to do with the sort of words that industry types use like ‘strategy’ and ‘campaign’ yet one question that we’d like to ask is how can fans gain a long term attachment to a band when they’re giving and then taking away again? Play hard to get too often and you’ll end up being dumped.

Anyway, thankfully San Zhi have put up a new track to keep us entertained  – rather like kicking one girl or boy out of bed and letting another one in. This one’s called Soma – it’s all cute and curious with a pretty boy-girl chorus that even with its fairly lo-fi production can’t disguise the fact that there’s a dreamy pop sensibility just desperate to get out. Maybe one day it will be taken down from the internet and replaced with a big glossy big studio version of the song, but for now enjoy this version, no matter how temporary it may be.

San Zhi - Soma

The Saturday Surf #35

This weekend Breaking More Waves home city of Portsmouth will see thousands of people watch a man (or woman) run along its streets with what looks like a giant cheese grater on fire whilst Rizzle Kicks jump around on a stage a bit. All of this will happen near the seafront where there will probably be some waves breaking and maybe even someone attempting to surf. This is our attempt at internet surfing, we call it the Saturday Surf. Our weekly round-up of new music we nearly missed or didn't find time to post, but never more than five songs.

Plant Plants – Embrace The Real (Vision Of Trees Cold Skins Remix)

Plant Plants is London-based electronic duo Stuart Francis and Howard Whatley. The original version of Embrace The Real from their sample driven EP2 was smart enough as it was, but we’re fancying this remix from Visions of Trees even more. Sounding partly like a lost Grimes track with the recognisable tinkles of Visions of Trees raindrops electronica this remix is exotically underground and pleasure giving.

Ellie Goulding featuring Tinie Tempah

Back in 2010 Ellie Goulding guested on Tinie Tempah’s Wonderman. Now Tinie repays the favour on Ellie’s cover version of Active Child’s Hanging On. Our initial thoughts were ‘meh’. Three days later we can’t get enough of it, although we still have some reservations about Mr Tempah’s part. However we’ll forgive him because Ellie’s vocal is just come to bed sumptuous. We still heart Ellie Goulding and it seems America does as well, with Lights recently entering that countries Top 5. 

San Zhi – Towards The Sun

Out of Egypt and Bournemouth San Zhi are a boy girl band consisting of Suraya and Peter, who sing intimately of ripping each others throats out, over a gentle keyboard led melancholy dreamy Sunday pop backing. Nice. They’ve named their band after an unfinished futuristic pod-village resort built in Tawain, which if you want to take a break from music for a while you can read about and see some fascinating pictures of on My Several Worlds.