Music News: The Fiery Furnaces, Nine Inch Nails, Kind of Bloop

If you’re hungry for more chiptunes and what it might sound like jazzstyle, check out Kind of Bloop (a play on Kind of Blue) – an 8-bit Miles Davis tribute helmed by tech blogger Andy Baio and a small army of chiptuners: Virt, Astor, Sergeeo, Shnabubula and Disasterpiece. Check out Baio's blog to find out more about the project.

Techno-head Richie Hawtin has combined micro-blogging with an application that syncs his live sets with Twitter (@rhawtin) at 30 second intervals. Fans are calling this ‘tweejaying’ – and before you get all ‘been there, done that with blip.fm’ – keep in mind that this real-time set-up is best saved for the pros.

Not content with releasing their eighth album I’m Going Away this July, the Fiery Furnaces are busy on the side with a mysterious ‘silent record’, another album under the working title Stories from the Old Testament by the Fiery Furnaces and Blackoutsabbath a ‘democ-rock’ project; the latter seems to be inspired by balled-up paper thrown at the band while on tour last year…

Nine Inch Nails – slated to play here in August – ran into trouble last month with their new iPhone app. Apple rejected the NIN iPhone update because of ‘objectionable content’ from 1994 album The Downward Spiral. Trent Reznor launched a heated protest but removed the song in question (‘Closer’) soon after. He probably has his hands full with fiancée, West Indian Girl singer Mariqueen Maandig, who recently posed for Playboy and claims her ‘whole family is built this way… We were corseted by God’.

In the studio

• Adele
• Aphex Twin
• Band of Horses

New releases

• Eels, Hombre Lobo, 2 Jun
• Mos Def, The Ecstatic, 9 Jun
• Major Lazer, Guns Don’t Kill People, Lazers Do, 16 Jun
• The Mars Volta, Octahedron, 23 Jun

Originally appeared as 'Off the record’ in the June 2009 issue of Time Out Singapore