Ducktails (Not Not Fun, O.E.S.B, New Jersey) Ducktails is Matthew Mondanile, a New Jerseyian whose pop is drenched in a warm drone. There is a pretty amazingly realized aesthetic running through this stuff, with all its plastic nostalgias -- like Ninja Turtles pizza, fake palm trees, sugary cereal -- and the lo-fi tape fuzz that also permeates his other projects, Predator Vision, Real Estate, and Dreams In Mirror Field. It's home recording with one of the comfiest feels you'll find, reminiscent of Ariel Pink but with an exploratory nudge. Matthew prefers cassettes as scuffed-up homes for this stuff, but he's just released a vinyl full-length on LA DIY label Not Not Fun.

www.myspace.com/ducktailss
http://pitchfork.com/artists/27801-ducktails/
www.last.fm/music/Ducktails
www.tinymixtapes.com/features/ducktails

Dolphins Into the Future (Not Not Fun, Belgium) Dolphins Into the Future is the musical project of Belgium’s (Antwerp) Lieven Martens. Spin-off projects are Duncan Cameron, L.R.J. Martens, In the Eye of Vision, etc Martens also runs the labels Taped Sounds (formerly known as Dreamtime Taped Sounds, or Dreamtime Tapes) and Cetacean Nation Cassettes, and works as an ambassador for the Cetacean Nation. Furthermore, he hosts the weekly Oceaan Der Geluid radioshow on Radio Centraal, which airs (almost) every tuesday from 10am till noon CET. Dolphins' commander, Lieven Martens, shares his name with a book by a lady called Joan Ocean, who took a 20-year spirit quest to commune with real life dolphins in Hawaii. Dolphins Into the Future's new LP, On Seafaring Isolation (which is out on Not Not Fun), is pretty much a soundtrack to Ocean's work. These long ambient tracks are distant bursts of lushness funneled through DIY tape loopery. They share a Skaters-style plastic otherworldliness, and an obsession with naturalistic synths.