The Boys Look at the Rolling Stone "Hot List" / Plus: What's Hot in Larryville Hipster Culture?

Obviously, Rolling Stone is not hip, but we do love its annual "Hot List," because we enjoy knowing about "hot" things.

Here are a few items that caught our attention on this year's list:

"Skweee" is designated as a hot new "nano-scene," or mini-genre. And what is "skweee"? It's "spare Scandinavian electro featuring high-pitched analog synths. Devotees dig puns ("skweeed," "skweeelicious," etc)."

We're not sure those are puns, but we're certainly about to start listening to "skweee," a lot, perhaps exclusively.

Chip: "Ten bucks says someone writes in to the comments claiming to have been into 'skweee' for many years and laughing at us for just now having heard of it."

The "Hot Rediscovery" slot goes to Arkansas' own Charles Portis, since the Coens' are about to bless us all with their (supposedly much more faithful to the novel) take on True Grit this Christmas. Rolling Stone champions his other, more comic, novels, as "futile-quest picaresques marked by humor so dry that you almost can't explain what makes it funny."

Richard: "Actually, I can explain it, at pompous length, while reading you my favorite passages of Dog of the South and Norwood. I might even let you borrow my dog-eared copies, if you ask sweetly."

And the "hot breakthrough" of the year goes to Die Antwoord: "Ninja and Yolandi Visser, the surreal South African hip-hop duo...who play high-energy party rap in in a style they call 'zef.'"

Oddly enough, Richard encountered them via a tweet from Pitchfork earlier in the day. Watch the video here (perhaps not at work) if you enjoy truly crazy shit:

http://pitchfork.com/tv/#/musicvideo/8418-die-antwoord-evil-boy-cherrytree/

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But what's "hot" here in Larryville today. We're going to give that prize to Larryville "sound collagist" C V L T S, whose new work is Black Hole, Hi Five. Check out the purple prose of this review from the website www.alteredzones.com:

"C V L T S lifts his looped compositions from the murky waters of cassette culture and lays them out to sparkle in the sun. “Flooded Forest” and “Microrangers” make the upper octaves of a synthesizer in a faux-piano setting seem as dazzling and awe-inspiring as the contents of your mother’s jewelry box. But they radiate with an internal warmth that can only come from plucking those black pearls from memory-- the glass beads of a remembered chandelier-- and holding them for an hour in your hand."

According to the site, "BLACK HOLE, HI FIVE EP is available for digital download via Atelier Ciseaux, and in a limited edition of 30 hand-painted black cassette tapes with vintage picture postcards + free download."

We want one of those cassette tapes very badly, and hope C V L T S will offer us one for plugging the work.

Chip: "Cassette tapes are hip? Then I may be hipper than I thought, since I was listening to Huey Lewis' Sports on cassette this morning on the way to work."

Go here for some sound collage:

http://www.myspace.com/cvlts