Well, here we are, last throes of listmas and just time to publish the annual Kyan Festive 50. It’s been a great year for music, bring on 2010.

So, without further ado here are some of the tunes/tracks/jams (delete as per your sensibilitites) that have gained heavy rotation on the office jukebox over the last year.

In some, but no particular, order …

Read on...

Like any office there are a wide variety of musical tastes represented amongst us here at Kyan.

Through our communal jukebox these tastes come together to form a musical backdrop to our time spent working in the office.

A few months back we created a last.fm account, hooked up the Jukebox with the last.fm api and now we are recording a full history of our playlist with some 10,000+ tracks ‘scrobbled’ so far.

Here’s the top 5 artists we’ve been playing the last few months…
1. Lone
2. Yeah Yeah Yeahs
3. Florence + The Machine
4. Little Dragon
5. Gorillaz

Our current top 5 artists of all time are…
1. Yeah Yeah Yeahs
2. Lone
3. Mr Scruff
4. The Beatles
5. Röyksopp

That top 5 artists list changes quite regularly, but it’s an interesting snapshot.

Those artists have certainly been helping us drown out the constant drilling from the building work going on over the road from us on Guildford High Street.

Alright pop pickers? Not ‘arf!

Well, it’s that time of year again, best of 2008 lists abound so I thought I’d put together some of the top tracks to be rocking the Kyan jukebox from this year’s releases and now that Saint John no longer graces our airwaves the top 50 tracks seemed like a fitting tribute to the great man.

So, in no particular order…

Read on...

Genre: American Twee Pop; Label: Krecs

Formed in early 80s, Beat Happening were early leaders in the american new lo-fi musical sound, and have been releasing their ‘twee/indie pop’ . Deliberately using simple and primitive recording techniques, Beat Happening produce a very rough and deep sound, mixed with strong deep american vocals mixed with simple backbeats.

• Angel Gone
• Cast Your Shadow
• Left Behind

We happy folks here at Kyan really like music. In fact, we like music so much that there were rumors that Bald Steve might get fired for doing a crap job of rewiring the Office speaker system. Wires were checked and swapped. Amps were tested, phono sockets were cleaned and twiddled. Then some bright spark noticed the cable wasn’t plugged into the back of the speaker properly. Crisis averted, listening pleasure restored and a new law passed never allowing Steve to do anything technical related ever again.

In search of new music

Because it would be boring to listen to the same song perpetually looped for 9 hours everyday, some of us take it upon ourselves to bravely wander the interwebs complex network of tubes, pipes and tunnels in search for the greatest and bestest new music. During our short period of musical limbo, I had a chance to check out some bands websites and see I could find anything half decent to listen to. Well it turns out that the interweb has plenty to offer. It really amazes me just what you can find online these days, it really does. Anyhow, it would be a sham if we kept or obscura playlists to just the office, so I proudly present to you the KyanMP3 blog section. [Guy’s we’re going to have to come up with a better name than that]

Bodies of Water

Folky, mixed with modern themes

So, to kick start, we have a quartet from Los Angeles. 2 guys, 2 girls, usually all singing at once while mixing sounds from traditional american folk, punk rock and metaphysically intensive gospel (whatever that is?). Still, it really does sound pretty darn good, sounding slightly vintage, and it kind of reminds me of The Polyphonic Spree mixed with some strong lady vocals.

Go check them out http://www.bodiesofwater.net

• I Guess I’ll Forget the Sound, I Guess, I Guess (mp3 6.55Mb)
• Doves Circled the Sky (mp3 6.1Mb)
• Everybody Hurts (mp3 9.5Mb)