What are you listening to?

Belleruche, Emiliana Torrini, Fink... All fairly safe for the season.

What i can't get is Sia without Zero 7... Except for one fourtet remix of one of her tunes which is awesome.

Trying to remember names of stand out stuff firefm has pulled out of last.fm for me this week that i want to check out more, i think one was mattafix... Heard any? The others i bookmarked on my laptop, will dig out another day...

I've had Sia's 'Some People Have Real Problems' for about 6 months now, and it's a lovely album to come back to after a while. She's got a lovely voice that you never really heard much of with the Zero 7 stuff.

Try and get hold of some of the Zero 7 EPs if you can - tracks like 'Spinning', 'Salt Water Sound' and 'Monday Night' are sublime.

Depending on how you like your downtempo stuff (electronic or guitar), I can heartily recommend:

Toymaker - The Kindergarten. Lovely electronic stuff that unfortunately keeps getting compared to the earlier Air stuff, when it's actually a sound all of its own.

Ullrich Schnauss - Some beautiful tracks on any of his albums, but I'm enjoying 'Far Away Trains Passing By' and 'Goodbye' at the moment. I listen to a lot of Boards of Canada, so this is probably best described as a more musical version of their stuff.

Sebastien Tellier for obvious reasons...

Naoki Kenji - Versatile. More electronic stuff, but it helps if you've had a really shitty ride home to stick this on.

The problem with stuff like Zero 7 is that it's so unique - I've been looking for similar sounds for years now and haven't found anything that's quite there, but it's been fun wading through a huge pile of good music to get there...