Update 1:41 EST: Mostly all mp3s should be working again.

Final Fantasy - "The CN Tower Belongs to the Dead (Many Lives Version)". A b-side from the new Many Lives -> 49mp single, here Final Fantasy takes a playful song from his debut and stirs it in with the string quartet work of He Poos Clouds. It becomes a much slower song, slower in tone more than in tempo, harmonies and dissonances rising like mist in a town of many towers. You can almost hear birdsong between the strokes of cello. The lyrics that stand out stronger: "bones", "alone", "never". At the end of the song - as in the original - there are these spiralling lifts of violin... But here they don't feel quite swift enough to escape the rest of the song's gravity. Too impulsive to get away.

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Pillow - "Mixologists and Waifs". The video treatment would start with a number. Which number? I think 8. 878. 8787878. Okay it would be 87878787878, repeating to infinity, just sevens and eights. And these numerals would roll slowly past, the eights maybe wheeling around a central axis, the sevens maybe leaning, and as the camera pulls back you would see the sea of 8s and 7s, the mass of them, the lines and the curves. I do not say "sea" lightly. There are waves! There is surf! There are storms! Further and further we go, the sevens and eights just dots, just points, grains of sand in the heave and crash. And what do you hear? You hear Pillow. An Italian called Luca Di Mira who is not a mathematician but rather a dj, someone laying strings and beats till the horizon recedes too far to remember, till you're floating and drowning at the same time, till you are lying on your back thinking only of Hood, and Sigur Ros, and the way a summer holiday might break your chest right open with pleasure.

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A lovely new lovesong by Hello Saferide at Swedes Please.

The Long sisters, who dwell in New England, have made a video called "Suburbs With You", which is a song by Herman Dune. The song is the soundtrack. It has recorders and handclaps. It's awesome. But the important thing isn't the one or the other, the video or the song - it's the conjunction. At least one of the Long sisters is a Gramophone reader and it seems her eyes sparkle with all the same things that mine do, (that ours do?,) because this is the brightest thing I have seen all week - in a week with sunshine and lightbulbs and white birds passing slowmo over a night street. Dan's videos are black and red, they're fraught, (they're great,) but this here is different: girls and greenery, bubbles and flowers, smiles and a life so loose that anything can happen. It's a video that celebrates, celebrates, celebrates; joy to the max; the easy pleasure of friends and running and a neighbourhood you know well. Watch it.

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Montrealers, go see Dan's comedy show on Thursday.