New in the annals of unique tributes to our ancestors, ‘Grandma Tapes’ sets a deceased grandmother’s love for Romantic music to an EP of sliced and diced craziness. When grandma Celia died in 2011, artist Ink Jet decided the best way to commemorate her love for music was to set her record collection to a dance-ready treatment of sample altering madness. Every sound you hear was lifted directly from the original Classical LPs (though the sources are not revealed), and shifted around through electronic programming.

What could sound like a self-indulgent piece of individual art, instead comes across as highly sensitive, with a global reach to anyone who’s lost a loved one. View the video to ‘A Canal’s Timeliness’ here. – Mike Levine (@Goldnuggets)

This band submitted their music for coverage here.

In most cases, a song is really all you need to understand how talented a band is – although if you want to go anywhere (in any field), talent must be integrated with consistence and persistence. "Visits" by BOYTOY (streaming) is a song that beautifully updates the sound of the 90s guitar pop in new exciting directions, with a mix of elements including the bubble pop of the 60s and the more sophisticated songwriting of bands like Camera Obscura. This is a great debut single for a new band.

We are checking out all the sites that are featuring some kind of "Best of CMJ 2013" lists and we are noticing a worrying shortage of NYC bands. Spires and Empress Of seem to be the hottest NYC things coming out of CMJ this year, but rigorous electro-pop experimenters Zula also got a nice (and deserved) mention on the New York Times. The band actually has a debut album entiteld "This Hopeful" coming out on 10/29, and the preview single "And More Business" (streaming) is very promising. Check it out below, and see them live tonight at Brooklyn Bowl with Yellow Dogs, Papertwin and Dinowalrus.

We added this song to The Deli’s playlist of Best NYC songs by emerging NYC artists – check it out!

We were quite late in discovering this album, but it’s so good that it deserves to be our NYC Record of the Month, even if it was released in 2012.

“Moon Money,” the second album by Nick Koenig (a/k/a Hot Sugar) continues the stylistic mashup introduced on the artist’s intriguing debut, “Muscle Milk” (2011). Merging elements of trip-hop, dub-step and electro-funk, Hot Sugar reignites the tone of ‘90s post-rock acts like Mouse on Mars and Autechre. Even the cover design of “Moon Money” is unabashedly retro, as in SO very 2010, with its indie-rock-meets-new wave layout. Incongruity rules the day here. Take “The Kid Who Drowned at Summer Camp,” which effortlessly crosses the dark/urban simplicity of a Mobb Deep backing track with the jammy melodicism of the Eagles’ “Hotel California” coda. Similarly, “#Mindcontrol” (streaming) boils Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” down to its bare elemental structure by employing a ping-pong pizzicato style common to early analog synth LPs, which then allows the song to capture the ephemeral nature of its Twitter-like title in satirical strokes. Later, “Addictions” draws melodically on Martika’s soaring 1989 hit single “Toy Soliders.” Yet here Hot Sugar submerges both melody and rhythm in much the same way that L.A.‘s Moog Cookbook had in 1996 by covering Nirvana and Green Day material with antique keyboards. The difference being that Hot Sugar, by plotting such well-known anthems as a jumping off point (as opposed to direct covers), is able to get at the core of electronic songcraft in a completely conceptual and mind-bending way. The strange cohesiveness of “Coconut Powder” best exemplifies the cavalier aesthetic by transforming a backing track straight out of the Lady Gaga playbook into an intimate cut-and-paste affair at once both cold and bouncy. Time becomes something of an extravagance in this music’s presence. Enjoy the trip. – Brian Chidester

When I think of music from the sixties, I think of three main genres: folk, psychedelic, and hard rock (hard rock in its original meaning). Of course a lot of bands blurred those genres and they were not so easily definable; in fact, that’s exactly what Prince Rupert’s Drops did at Union Pool on CMJ Friday, in front of a long-haired, heady crowd that danced and jammed along to their insanely unpredictable, Barrettesque psychedelic songs. The band has a really jam band feel as well, and it’s definitely the kind of act you’d have to see live to experience properly. – Read more about John’s CMJ Music Marathon here.

We added this song to The Deli’s playlist of Best psych songs by emerging NYC artists – check it out!