Hey, George here – Milky is away for a bit so I did this for a laugh until she is back and we can make some proper songs… I was recently reminiscing old-school children’s TV and I remembered Round The Twist had an awesome theme tune. So I had to do this.

Part 2

Pogo – Mary’s Magic

Bjork <3 – Isobel

Joanna Newsom – Sprout and the Bean

Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Julie Ruin – Stay Monkey

Amelie – La valse d’amelie

Crystal Castles – Black Panther

Blonde Redhead – Misery is a Butterfly

Radiohead -House of Cards

Bon Iver – For Emma (from La Blogotheque, they do cool things)

A rather random collection of songs, part one…*

CocoRosie – Spirit Lake

Bat For Lashes – Horse and I

The XX – Intro

Paprika movie – Opening theme

Siouxsie and The Banshees – Cities in Dust

Beirut – Nantes

Nirvana – Dumb, MTV Unplugged

The Kills – Last Day of Magic

Ummm, just a little blog to say we had another awesome gig in London, at the Social, for Huw Stephens Introducing night.

Some things we enjoyed about the night:

• Chatting to Huw
• Tiny, cute stage
• Concrete tables and chairs
• Meeting all the city slickers
• Meeting Y Promatics…they were nice
• Accidentally stealing someones hoody…didn’t really enjoy this though, oops!
• Accidentally stealing a keyboard stand, then returning it
• Milky’s expensive snazzy John Lewis glitter. Went down a treat!
• Some lovely comments after the gig
• Awesome friends who travelled to see us. Yey!

Sweet times. Thanks Huw!

And everyone who has posted comments on our website! :D

P.S Little fact for you…Huw means ’soul, mind, intellect’. Nice.

Hey friends, this is our review from the Guardian band of the day. We like it. Also enjoying the references to some cool and crazy 80’s bands from before our time. Thanks to Paul Lester for writing this review, you’re awesome! :)

Milky’s favourite sentence would have to be about her voice possibly filling you “with homicidal loathing.” Yes!

…

Muchuu … they probably won’t appeal to fans of Slayer

Hometown: Tillington.

The lineup: Milky (vocals) and George (synths).

The background: People are either going to find Muchuu enchanting, exquisite, an ethereal delight … or they’ll crucify them as insufferably cute. But that’s OK: there was a similarly mixed response to Kate Bush when she emerged with Wuthering Heights, it was the same when Björk came gambolling out of Iceland with the Sugarcubes’ Birthday, and more recently Lykke Li has divided punters with her kooky electro.

Muchuu (pronounced “Moo-chew”) are a brother-sister duo from Herefordshire. Milky is 20 and sings in a dizzy ickle-gurly voice that evokes those high-pitched singers from the 1980s, such as Clare Grogan of Altered Images and the Strawberry Switchblade girls, which either moved you or filled you with homicidal loathing. George– who hilariously calls himself G-man – is 18 and supplies the beats and melodic synth lines using a keyboard he bought for £29 on which you can apparently only play three notes at a time.

Pretty cute, right? It gets cuter. “Muchuu” is Japanese for “to be in an ecstatic, delirious trance or dream”. Milky writes lyrics about “the little things that make you smile – like the birds singing in the morning and playing tap-on-it – and generally living in your own little world of niceness”. They put on Muchuu parties. At one, in a pub garden, there were candles everywhere and they served scones with cream and jam and Milky’s own homemade fairy cakes. They blog about cakes, too, and sweets and marshmallow chocolate bars, and they sing about being covered in glitter and showered with flowers. On their website you can play Pacman, Tetris and Asteroids and other classic arcade games.

We’re not sure if they’re students of C86 (their MySpace lists their likes as Bat for Lashes, Joanna Newsom and Coco Rosie, which sort of makes sense), but this is redolent of that era: the idea of arresting one’s development before the ugly onset of adolescence, and fetishising childhood and all its innocent joys and wonders, really does smack of Tallulah Gosh, the Shop Assistants et al. Musically, though, it’s more modern, electronic and poppily synthetic than that. The rhythms are quite tech-y and 2step/dubstep-py, actually. It might have been produced on a budget, using items that George just happened to find lying around such as a bicycle bell and a brush, but there’s a surprising lushness to this music, George and Milky’s voices harmonising nicely over keyboard sounds, live percussion and wind instruments. And there’s a pleasing Oriental quality to it all – the group love Japan and the Japanese will probably love them back. It works on both a “meta” level that will appeal to brainiacs, and as straight pop. Their songs really are quite quirkily commercial, making Muchuu seem like the Ting Tings’ more experimental kid siblings, but they’re not easily forgettable. These melodies will stay with you, haunt you, like childhood memories you didn’t even know you had.

The buzz: “They’re Enya meets the Ting Tings.”

The truth: The best songs – The Place That Knows Me and Paint Me Rain – are lovely enough to make you forgive their cutesiest transgressions.

Most likely to: Slay fans of cute pop.

Least likely to: Appeal to fans of Slayer.

What to buy: Debut single Somebody Tell Me is released by Kii on 30 November. Muchuu’s debut album, Adventure We Go, will be released in 2010.

File next to: Peter and Sophie Johnstone, Strawberry Switchblade, Lykke Li, Ellie Goulding.

…

Since it went online we’ve had a lot of great comments about our music – we are very grateful so thank you!

So our first single is going to be released, and it has a release date too, which is now set deep, deep in stone – the 30th of November. 2009.

I guess we hope to spread the Muchuuness as far as we can, and just hope it puts of few smiles on people’s faces. Or maybe encourage exercise, if people dance to it.

Somebody Tell Me was our choice for the single because it got the best response from people online as well as friends. I made the track when I was still at college a few months back. I probably should have been doing some work. I was planning on doing a orchestral epic piece, but I liked the pizzicato strings and found myself making an up tempo thing with some kind of metal work percussion on it. Pizzicato and metal work. Yes.

Oh, and when Milky and I try to come with a melody, we sometimes just get random phrases and sentences from what we see and improv over the track. There were some roof bars for a car in the garage at the time so the chorus came about when we started singing “I am a roof bar”.

“Pick up a penny” and the rest of it soon followed when it popped out of Milky’s imagination later on. I was adamant that “I am a roof bar” should stick but maybe Milky was right to change it.

*George*

Off to Norway!

No explanation needed. Trondheim, go!

We only use the very best travelling equipment. The handle snapped off before we even got on the plane, but the bunjee saved the day, like every situation involving bunjees.

Is diplom? Yes, yes it is.

We wondered what the name of this restaurant meant, and the hotel receptionist said ‘Smak’ means ‘taste’ in Norweigen. And the food smacked good.

Norway is beautiful. Here are some photos to prove this.

On the 6 hour train Journey from Oslo to Trondheim through the snowy montains…

Some chocolate bars… biscuit + marshmellow + banana jelly + chocolate = mmm, Hobby. It tasted like a banana Wagon Wheel…

This just tasted like salt.

Sleepy Milky.

This is brown cheese. It’s made of goats milk and sugar and it tasted like banoffee pie! It was terrifyingly beautiful.

When we asked the super nice receptionist what it was, she offered us more to try, along with fresh warm bread and ham and jam and juice. We loved her!

The gig venue with bat man-esque lights…

Backstage times… with chocolate coated crisps, no lie.

Yum yum yum.

Setting up.

All the possessions you really need. Especially two evelopes stuffed under a table. Magic.

On stage with some epic lighting.

BIRO!

The final stage of our little adventure.