Archive for November, 2008

There’s a little something for everyone here today. Rough Trade Records picked up a lovely group from Los Angeles called Little Joy which I heard about from a girl that I met while selling merch at the M83/School Of Seven Bells show.
As for some deep house this Rene Breitbarth track is tip! let it simmer for a bit and golden up, by far my favorite track to play out right now.
If you have been diggin’ the latest Gas box set or The Sight Below then Yagya is a definite good addition to your collection, it keeps you on course and will take you into winter all warm and cozy.
I guess Thom Yorke remixed himself and it didn’t come out that bad, i’ve been playing on repeat while I work and it made me revisit The Eraser LP which was good because so many people trashed that LP and I thought if it was anyone but Thom Yorke making that LP it would put that person on top of the indie world.

Little Joy – The Next Time Around

Rene Breitbarth – Sphere

Yagya – Snowflake 9

Thom Yorke – Harrowdown Hill (Logic Jump rmx)

Little Joy – The Next Time Around (LIVE)

Life Magazine and Google have partnered to make over 10 million photos from the Time/Life archive available online. The images are searchable and all available at pretty good resolutions. (Athough probably not quite big enough for print) You could have some fun lifting textures and elements for web stuff I’d bet, the quality is more than enough for the screen. What’s even crazier than scanning 10 million photos is that apparently 95% of the them have never been seen before. The few I posted above were just from a couple minutes of random searching, I can’t imagine what you could turn up with a little effort. Check it all out over at Google Images’ Life Archive page.

There are 3 new T-Shirt designs now available at the ISO50 shop. “77” Cream / Royal is printed on American Apparel 100% Cotton and comes in all Men’s and Women’s sizes. The two Tycho shirts are new typo / colorways of the original “Tycho Avian” shirts which have been out of print since last year. “Tycho Avian” Cream / Brown is printed on American Apparel 100% Cotton and “Tycho Avian” Black / Aqua-Grey is printed on American Apparel 50/50 Cotton/Poly. Each are available in all sizes, M/W. I’ll bee officially releasing these through the newsletter on Monday but I thought I’d post them up here so the blog readers could get a crack at them first. The product images at the shop page are temporary, I’ll try to get some close-ups and alternate angles posted up tomorrow. Enjoy!

On a side note, I can’t seem to get enough of Trade Gothic Bold Extended lately (the face used on the Tycho shirts above). I’m currently redesigning the interface of the shop and laid most of it out in TG with headers being Extended. For those in San Francisco: There’s an old California Savings (closed) on 16th & Mission (across from BART) with a very cool sign that looks a lot like TG Bold Ext. Has anyone seen that? Is it TG? It’s for sale so they’ll probably redo the exterior, I’ll try to walk over tomorrow and get a couple shots before that happens. Probably not a big rush though, 16th & Mission isn’t exactly hot property.

There’s plenty of music that really hits that sweet spot when it comes to analog synthesizers playing melodies. I wonder why it gives so many people such nostalgia though? We all weren’t watching the same children’s show were we? When our parents showed us old photos there wasn’t a button that made the photo play Geogaddi like some musical greeting card. I think I have narrowed it down to the show Nova, TV commercials, and the speaker quality of shopping markets playing 80s muzak. You all know Christ (The 3rd member of Boards of Canada that left after the Twoism album) and of course Boards of Canada (the Fonec track posted is from the album Closes Vol.1 EP) but I have found 2 young musicians that really caught my ear Minnesota’s Boreal Network and UK’s JC Harnell both are notable talents and carry on the torch properly of that sound in my opinion.

Boreal Network – Steel Whirl

Christ. – Cordate

JC Harnell – Lost

Boards of Canada – Fonec

Ok, chalk this one up as random-camp-kitsch, but I just couldn’t resist posting. Pedro Oliveira sent this link in response to my assertion that “everything was cooler in 70’s Sweden” in the Vint post. As the images above make painfully clear, that certainly was not always the case. As infinitely lame as most of the stylistic choices going in in these photos are, some of the typography isn’t half bad. I don’t know what they were eating in Sweden back in those days, but this is one unhealthy looking bunch of people, Toreson look like they hid out in an ice cave for 3 years before taking their big promo shot. Which is probably what really happened, they then emerged from the cave, decided on Cooper Black and the rest is history. There are a lot more over here.

After I posted about the Poladroid app some people were asking about a Lomo version of the concept. My friend Erik Pettersson has released a set of photo processing apps for the iPhone which give your digital shots that vintage warmth. There’s a Vint Red, Green and B&W plugin, each treating the colors a bit differently. My favorite is the Green, it definitely gives you that low ISO Lomo feel complete with vignetting. More examples are available on Erik’s Flickr.You can download the Vint plugins from the iTunes store or on your iPhone, one is free, the other two are $1 each.

Erik also sent the photo below he says he found at his parent’s house and which was the inspiration for the plugins. Everything looked cooler in the 70’s in Sweden.

I have been meaning to get a watch, lately I kept searching for the older gold Casio watches with the calculator on them but then I took the search a little more serious and narrowed it down to 2 brands NOOKA and VOID. First off this pretty much is a aesthetic competition in my opinion since not many people buy watches at this price range are looking for a Rolex plus their both digital. Nooka offers an attractive layout with a good amount of information and with a very clear face. Void attracts me because of the color of the digital light, finish, and that VOID font couldn’t of been picked any better with that style of watch. Which one appeals to you more? I think it would interesting to hear what you have to say because when I look at each watch I think their each made for a different kind of person.

Also, had to pick out some decision making music.

Low Motion Disco – The Low Murderer Is Out At Night (Mark E Edit)

After what was perhaps the most arduous musical experience of my life, I’ve finally wrapped the new Tycho single. It’s a rather dense arrangement so getting everything to work together ended up taking 3 mixing sessions in SF and LA. I definitely learned a lot though, first, SSL is the most useful, greatest sounding EQ and compression I’ve ever used. Second, my monitoring situation at home is garbage. Time for some more Auralex and Adam A7s. Anyways, it’s done, and I’m done…for about a week or so then it’s back to work on the album.

I spent the free time I had between mixing sessions last week creating the cover art for the single, luckily that process ended up being a bit less stressful (you can see a small snippet of the artwork above). All the details will be coming shortly, the estimated release date is looking like late January. As always, you can keep an eye out here or subscribe to be notified when more info is available.

I hope some of you are sketch comedy fans here, i’m sure if Scott and I could add one more element to the site we would post youtube videos of Tim and Eric or other Adult Swim shows. For me comedy started with the Canadian show Kids In The Hall that was produced by SNL’s Lorne Michaels. The theme song to this show was by a group called “Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet” I’m sure many of us here that grew up close to Canada can hum the bassline to this theme song flawlessly.
I usually check out every release on Plug Research since they put out quality artists like John Tejada, Dntel, etc. I found this classic jam really catchy, it would of probably been huge in the 70’s but it reminds me alil too much of the song “We Will Rock You” but if you can get over that then this track has some parts to offer.
I look back and I don’t think I posted one Animal Collective song here and that blows my mind alil. So without posting one of their hit singles here is “Visiting Friends” a 12 min entrancing psych-folk song.
Small Sins is a very easy listen, super simple for a indie rock song in my opinion and I can’t help myself comparing the songs to Yo La Tengo or even Brendan Canning of Broken Social Scene.

Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet – Having an Average Weekend (Kids in the Hall)

Chessie – Intercity

Animal Collective – Visiting Friends

Small Sins – Too Much To Lose

Just a heads up that Adobe finally switched it’s trial downloads section to CS4 over the weekend. All of the CS4 apps are available via a Java downloader, and all are fully functional for 30 days. Link via 9to5 Mac