Royksopp is an electronic duo from Norway started in the late 90s by Torbjorn Brundtland and Svien Berge. They have experienced moderate success and their music has been used for commercials by companies such as Apple and the BBC.

This video is for their song ‘Remind Me’ from their first album, ‘Melody A.M.’ and it features some really cool animation. The video seems to represent the general absurdity, over complication and detachment that goes on every day in modern city life.

Genghis Tron are a three piece band from Philadelphia that do an impressive job of combining two very different styles of music: extreme metal and electronica. It doesn’t sound good on paper, but after hearing this song, Board Up The House (from their album of the same name) I was sold.

The video just captures their elaborate live show. To compensate for the fact that their live performance is more or less just three dudes playing with computers, they play with a bunch of visual/light effects sequenced to their music. Pretty neat.

Midnight Juggernauts are a Melbourn, Australia-based indie rock/electronic band. After a series of EPs they put out their debut album ‘Dystopia’ on Siberian Records in 2007. It’s a great album start-to-finish, my favorite tracks were ‘Nine Lives’, ‘Ending of an Era’ and ‘Road to Recovery’ The band features Vincent Vendetta, Andy Juggernaut and Daniel Stricker; they often draw comparisons to David Bowie and Kraftwerk.

Remember the Crystal Castles video I posted? Well Midnight Juggernauts have toured with Crystal Castles.

See more on the Midnight Juggernauts

A friend sent me this video for MGMT’s song ‘Time To Pretend’ and both the video and the song have really been growing on me. MGMT, consisting of Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden just released an album on Columbia called ‘Oracular Spectacular.’

If you pay close attention to the video, you’ll notice a reference to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s psychedelic opus, The Holy Mountain, about halfway through. The video itself is pretty psychedelic itself, they seem to have deliberately used some crappy editing to finish the effect. I really like the backing bass/synth in this song, I just wish there were live drums instead of the drum track. The lyrics are obviously meant to be ironic, poking fun at the typical idea of rock star success.

for the full effect, i would watch the hi-res version available here: http://court13.com/TimeToPretend_480.mov

Crystal Castles (Ethan Kath and Alice Glass) are an electronic indie band from Toronto that utilize a lot of retro sounds; this genre is often referred to as ‘chiptunes.’ Crimewave is from their 2008 self-titled album and is actually a remix of a song by HEALTH.

The group was actually formed as an accident, when Alice Glass recorded some vocals over an instrumental track by Ethan Kath as a test, which eventually ended up in the hands of record label executives who offered them a deal.

Recently there has been some controversy surrounding them, as apparently Ethan has been accused of lifting sounds from other electronic artists. It’s hard for me to really care about this though, because the entire genre of electronic music is founded on people stealing the sounds of others.