text: As proven in music history’s track records, every now and again, amongst thousands of new bands, DJ acts and solo artists, there comes one extraordinary musical force which changes the course of action for the rest of us. Usually they set a new trend, or a trend within an existing trend, then create a new wave of trends gaining them a huge amount of screaming fans and an ever so growing large number of wannabes and copycats.
  Franskild is exactly that and more. It is a collaboration between two Denmark based Swedes, Love Ojensa and Tim Söderström. When these two get together, collectively they create an utterly fresh and new branch of deep house that is as current as it possibly can be. They are strongly influenced by the blissful sounds and magnificence of the early 80’s house tunes, mixed with early ’90s break beat French wave, tipped with mid-00’s contemporary garage and combined with the highly influential Jacking house.
  Their upcoming EP will be released August 1st and includes the tracks “eden” and “shards”. “shards” has already been massively pushed by MixMag, with over 10,000 plays in 3 days and growing by the minute. One of the countless secret ingredients which makes this song stand out from the rest is the perfect blend between a melancholic sound scape and dream – like, happy, seductive and haunting vocals (performed by Love’s sister, Rebekka) which leaves the listener wanting more… and more…
  With growing backing from the likes of MixMag and artists such as Disclosure putting house music back towards the top of the music chain, now is the time for Franskild to make themselves known.
  When most people hear the words book club their first thought is of Oprah and her famous book club that made more than a few books hit the best sellers list; and while I am pretty sure that Penguin Books (@PenguinUSA) doesn’t foresee that happening it is using a rather unique way to promote its book lineup.
  In an interesting move the book publisher is taking to Twitter by suggesting a new book title each month and encouraging its followers to tweet their thoughts about the book using the hashtag #readpenguin. Then at the end of the month Penguin will hold a Twitter chat along with the author of the book as the chat guest.
  While it might be hard Penguin is also encouraging those taking part in the experiment to not tweet any spoilers to do with the book or by mentioning the end of the book.
  They have already kicked off this month with the first title being “The Weird Sisters” by Eleanor Brown who will get together at the end of the month on Twitter with the readers for a discussion on their thoughts about the book and to answer any questions that they might have.
  I have to admit that this is a really cool idea and it definitely show some innovative thinking from a traditional company looking to use social media in interesting ways.