Los Angeles, California serves as home base for the concept group called Vitamin String Quartet. The group is made up of studio musicians who are brought together to interpret and record orchestra style covers of music from all types of genres ranging metal, techno, country, pop, rock and hip-hop dance music. While the quartet uses a wide assortment of artists and instruments, one fairly constant member of the group is violinist Tom Tally. Tally has been intimately involved in the composing, arranging and conduction of many songs on approximately 50 of the albums that have been recorded by the group. While the group is referred to as a string quartet, the reality is that more individuals are usually involved, using instruments such as violins, cellos, percussion, brass and woodwinds. The group was originally brought together in 1999 as an experimental project. They wanted to determine the effects of using classical style instruments to create new and different sounds on popular recordings. Early on, the FM broadcast station WWHK in Concord, NH would play the group's music 24 hours a day, every day, for a period of time. The popularity of the group's music has led to the music being featured on TV and in the movies. Credits include So You Think You Can Dance (2008), TV show The Vampire Diaries (2010), the 100th episode of Gossip Girl and the fifth season finale of Modern Family (2014). Throughout the years, the group has been involved in the recording of over 200 different albums. In 2009, the group stepped out of the box a bit and recorded some original material provided by some of the various musicians on the album Per_Versions.

Rapper, Healer, Dream Life Concierge
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New album 'Accelerator’ out now on Epitaph Records https://badsuns.ffm.to/accelerator

Capital Cities are an indie-pop duo from Los Angeles, California.

Official SoundCloud Channel of Jon Bellion.

POWERS is Mike Del Rio & Crista Ru.

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Here’s a partial list of things that have inspired L.A.-based alternative duo POWERS in recent months: found recordings of ancient Peruvian tribal music, a centuries-old Swedish hymn, a PBS retrospective on the making of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and a 1993 Baywatch episode titled “Island of Romance.” “Songs can spark from anything,” says Crista Ru, who co-founded POWERS with co-vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Mike Del Rio in 2014. “It’s just like love — it hits you out of nowhere, you can’t ever predict it. But when you feel it, you need to do whatever you can to hold onto that feeling and follow through and bring something good to life.”

For POWERS, bringing songs to life means tapping into their own eclectic backgrounds from playing in underground punk bands in New York City to co-writing for the likes of Kylie Minogue and Selena Gomez.  Citing the cut-and-paste art of Robert Rauschenberg and Terry Gilliam among their longtime influences, they’ve taken a collage-like approach to constructing crystalline pop. Working to achieve this vision, POWERS has been praised by LA Weekly for creating a sound “as classic as it is cutting-edge,” matching their expansive musicality with genre-blurring ingenuity. As heard on their debut album Alpha, the result is an endlessly shapeshifting breed of pop that’s both intricately composed and graced with timeless simplicity.

In creating songs for their forthcoming album, POWERS continue to embrace their oddball inclinations and exercise their pop instincts while shaping a more lavishly arranged sound. Along with working from a musical palette now filled with world-music-inspired rhythms and tones and textures, the duo have achieved that bigger sound in part by building off their recent experiences touring with bands like DNCE and X Ambassadors. From the brilliantly warped vocals and gospel-like harmonies of “Sunshine”, to the late 70's New York bass line of "Heavy", and the life-affirming, anthemic gospel of “Real” (featuring Sam Harris of X Ambassadors), the new songs match POWERS’ natural magnetism with an arena-ready grandeur. “Whenever we have an idea, we always ask ourselves, ‘How would this feel for a live audience?’” Crista says. “If something feels really good to us and we’re excited and it’s all flowing, it usually translates that way to people’s ears and turns out to be something special.”

Partly recorded at the legendary Sunset Sound studios with mixer/producers Rich Costey (Vampire Weekend, Chvrches, Bastille) and Mark Rankin (Iggy Pop, Florence + the Machine, Santigold), Alpha is an emotionally ambitious look at "the process of growing up in your twenties.” According to Del Rio the album embodies, “those characters you meet and the characters you become, the left turns and right turns all while learning how to celebrate the full color spectrum of your individual story.”  Lead single “Dance” is a gloriously bombastic and frenzied defiant anthem described by Crista as “our way of coping with the social and political environment of the world right now. It is our state of the union”. With “Man on the Moon” — a song about “the paradox of being simultaneously connected to everyone and everything via the internet, but still in complete solitude of real contact" as Del Rio explains — soulful grooves and spacey psychedelia both warp and heighten that sense of euphoric isolation. Meanwhile, on the disco tinged “Georgie,” POWERS animate classic lovesickness from a more carefree perspective. “‘Georgie’ is a fictional character inspired by real friends of ours going through the motions of love and rebound ,” says Crista. “The idea behind the song is to get out of your own way and enjoy life, know that something good can come from all the heartbreak even if it is just for one night”.

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