You never know what the eclectic Hot Chip crew will put out next, but you can always bet it’ll be tuff.Their newest song,”My Piano,” was released as an exclusive on the new DJ Kicks album, but last week they dropped it as a single.”Piano” is a surprisingly dark, hypnotic journey into Electro-House.

While it’s certainly uptempo, they take their time introducing the song’s melodies. But anticipation makes some things better, and you’ll be glad you waited once they get around to them.

The sound quality isn’t all that great on this file, but if you hurry, you can get it for free from the terribly designed Kicks website.

(In case you’re confused, DJ Kicks is not a person. It’s more of an ambassadorship, the title of which is given to a new musician for every album – in this case, Hot Chip – who chooses the songs. Kinda like DJ Food, I guess.)

Track listing after

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Magnetosphere
Volcano Kit

iTunes visualizers will one day change the world. Cyke. But they’re fun.

And this new one that everyone’s blogging about – Barbarian’s Magnetosphere – is pretty cool. Click here for a good quality video of the least interesting version they have, and click here for a terrible quality video of one of the better ones.

Now imagine that the visualizer plays on your walls, which are covered with wall paper that is actually a video screen

But, on the usefulness tip… this Volcano Kit visualizer makes for some discussion beyond simple aesthetics (not just because it’s lacking in them, either.)

While bare bones in it’s presentation, it tries to represent what your music is doing in a visual manner.

Things like this can definitely be useful in helping people follow musical composition. Instead of aiding low quality music in get ting over by adding another distraction to the experience, this assists the listener in appreciating it. Adding visuals can help to distinguish notes, differentiate instruments, or even follow melodies.

Walls

I would venture to label Apparat‘s recent stuff as Dub-Tech, with its highly structured, mid-tempo electronic loops. While eclectic in his “instrumentation”, he never veers too far away from his electronic comfort zone.

Following up on his collabo with Ellen Allien on Orchestra of Bubbles, he released Walls this week; his new solo project 2 years in the making.

Now, I’ve never been more productive working at my laptop than I was when I rocked Orchestra. Its perfect tempos, quality sounds, and smooth transitions made it very endearing. But to be honest, it was a bit loopy and repetitive – I definitely didn’t listen to it all that often when I wasn’t doing something else. (Eric Satie once described this as wallpaper music.)

Where can I cop that hoodie?!

With this in mind, Walls is not as consistent in value as Orchestra. (On a more personal preference, I also don’t like the fact that he relies on vocals more than in the past.) But it’s still got some hot shit, and the star of the album, “Useless Information,” is going to be on my playlist for a while.

So enjoy “Useless” here, and sample all of the songs on his web sites.

Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University wants you to learn. He created this video mash-up below to help explain it you – and to poke fun at Disney.

“A Fair(y) Use Tail“

Design Observer – Via Core 77

Oh, and on the subject of intellectual property: possible changes in patent law around the corner. According to the Wall Street Journal, the federal government’s aim is to make patents harder to get and easier to challenge in an attempt to help spread ideas throughout society.

The changes come in the wake of recent lawsuits like that of Microsoft vs. Alcatel-Lucent. In that case, a judge ordered Microsoft to pay $1.52 billion dollars for its use of the MP3. Yeah, the MP3. Apparently, Microsoft licensed the technology from a different organization, but Alcatel claimed they had a part in developing it, and thus deserved a cut. Now other companies that use MP3s are at risk of similar suits.

On Flykiller’s rusty surgical table lay the rhymes and hook by someone resembling a Gothic version of Blondie. Intensely focused, Flykkiller stitches these onto a sample of Dead Prez’s “Hip Hop,” and for good measure, adds glitched-up slide ruler and eerie piano key melodies.

Waiting intently in the silence of a dark abandoned operating room, lightning finally strikes and brings alive “Peroxide” with a burst of electric decadence.

Flykkiller, made up of Stephen Hilton and Pati Lang, manage to invoke the recent nostalgia of a benchmark song, and then take into into a new, more wounded realm and claim it as their own. I can’t understand most of what Lang’s saying, but her delivery and voice are on point.

Peroxide just dropped yesterday, and is available for purchase on the group’s MySpace profile.

(Learn why they are so dark after the jump.)

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