Bell X1 get blown away for Zuckerberg's Irish visit and a Mumford waters folk's Flowerpot in this week's roundup of music online
Last week, following a presentation to the G8 leaders in France, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg visited his company's European headquarters in Ireland. To celebrate, the Dublin office put on what was touted beforehand as the "first-ever music Facebook streamed concert", featuring a live set from the underrated (on this side of the Irish Sea, at least) rockers Bell X1. It's fair to say things didn't exactly go to plan. First up, Eliza Doolittle had played a live show on Facebook seven days earlier. Also, the weather for Bell X1's open-air show, on the roof of Facebook's HQ, was decidedly inclement (it's a wonder they didn't blow away). Worst of all, the live stream didn't work properly, forcing the band to upload the half-hour performance to vimeo.com/bellx1live so fans could actually see it. Looking on the bright side, that means we can all still enjoy it. Zuckerberg was spotted afterwards chatting happily with locals in a Dublin pub, so he didn't seem to mind.
As well as helping Mumford & Sons to the unlikely position of being one of the world's most popular acts, the band's keyboard/accordion player, Ben Lovett, somehow finds time to run the excellent Communion Records with two of his friends. For a week last summer, the label took over London's now defunct Flowerpot venue, inviting like-minded, folksy acts including Matthew and the Atlas, Damien Rice, Lissie, Marcus Foster and Mt Desolation to collaborate and record together. The resulting 23-track compilation, The Flowerpot Sessions, is out this week, and there's plenty to sample online. At bit.ly/fpotvid you can watch a five-minute film about the sessions; at flowerpot.communionmusic.co.uk there's a fancy (and complicated) family tree of the acts that contributed, with short song clips; and at bit.ly/fpotsongs, you can hear four rather lovely full tracks.
Brought to you by the fashionable people at Vice and the techy people at Dell and Intel, noisey.com is an impressive new video site that showcases musicians from across the planet, via expensively filmed concert footage and interviews. Their latest live show features grime kingpin Wiley performing in London's Victorian Basement. In truth, it's not one of their strongest sessions, as Wiley relies on his audience for vocal accompaniment, but we can't really hear them. Instead, there's more fun to be had trawling through the videos from acts you're less familiar with: French indie/electro types Bot'ox belting out a set in Paris; South Carolina's Toro Y Moi bringing the chillwave funk to Atlanta; and, in particular, Spanish garage rockers Mujeres unleashing their terrifically loose, rollicking noise in Barcelona.
Nelly Furtado Leeann Tweeden Bali Rodriguez Izabella Miko Cameron Diaz
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