Wow. Nick Bertke . Remember that name. The last time I read about Nick, he was nineteen years old and had just released a fantastic EP called Wonderland under his alias Pogo. That was half a year ago. In that release, he cleverly cut-and-paste Alice in the Wonderland samples and rehashed them into trippy, melodic, and very fun tracks. His cleverness (for lack of a better term) is not just in choosing nifty phrases from the Disney classic - rather Bertke seemingly took one or two words from different samples of varied tones from Alice herself and transformed and tuned them into fantastic melodies. You can watch his music video on youtube to see exactly what I mean.

Since his successful trip to Wonderland, Nick has released yet another EP called Broken Beats, which continues along the similar vein of taking samples from children/family films. The result is another successful collection of nostalgic and incredibly melodic tracks reminiscent of The Avalanches. Such goodness. And when it rains, it pours. Shockingly, the young Australian has four fine EPs listed on his last.fm page, all available to download for free. His song ‘Go Out and Love Someone’ from the Table Scraps EP is another case in point, and my personal favourite. I must say, these are perhaps the best free songs I’ve ever received.

Similar to: The Avalanches, Air France, Lemon Jelly (?)

Download:
Pogo - Go Out and Love Someone
Pogo - Drunk in the Mat Mobile!
Pogo - Dot’s Vinyl Gone Bad
Pogo - Alice

Pogo on The New Balearic:
‘Alice’ on Episode 29

Download Broken Beats, Wonderland, Table Scraps, and Weave and Wish all for FREE! at last.fm

Pogo on MySpace