Tycho + Dusty Brown Live - Photo By Lead Into Gold
Photo from Ghostly 10 Year @ Mezzanine SF by Lead Into Gold 101.
I don’t listen to many lyrics nor do I rock out every week but these songs have been in my head, a nice little change up for a Tuesday. Some lyrics I think sound perfect with the song but once I look at them on paper they don’t look so special but here are few great moments:
“…I’ll keep you there / I’ll keep you there / So long…So long…” – Doves
My roommate brought up a good point, these guys should be bigger than Coldplay, after one listen of Rise I couldn’t agree more.
“…Shake shake / The clouds out / Shake shake / The stars down…” – Autolux
I saw these guys last week with some friends, they really brought out a diverse crowd, some frat guys, then also a few older vinyl heads, and shoegaze purists, either way they put on an amazing show, so much good guitar pedal work on the looping and echo.
Any sounds these guys make that aren’t words are great – Suicide
“…Maybe it’s not, oh who can say…” – The Horrors
The Horrors are the only band that I haven’t seen this year that I really want to see, I thing I want to know is if they can sell their look, its intense, I wonder if they break character?
Regular backups should be an integral part of any creative’s computer workflow, unfortunately it seems to be neglected by a lot of people. It seems like an easy thing to do given that the alternative means betting your life’s work on the health of your hard drive but I guess it’s sort of like flossing or taking vitamins. As I’ve recently come to realize, fear of hardware failure isn’t the only reason to backup; fire, flood, theft, and user error all threaten to rob you of your hard earned intellectual property. I’ve always taken backups pretty seriously, but I have had some close calls and a very recent one has compelled me to adopt a more robust backup solution.
Some years ago — shortly before I finished my first album — my main data drive experienced a mechanical failure. Luckily I had a backup drive sitting right above it. So I bought a replacement for the original drive and went about installing it. As I was putting it in the case I accidentally dragged a screwdriver past the IDE pins on the backup drive (which was at that moment the only intact copy of all my work) in just the right way to arc the power connector and fry the controller board. At that moment I thought I had lost everything I ever did, the new album, and my sanity. Luckily the damage was isolated to the control board and I was able to pick up a similar drive and transplant it’s controller and recover my data. I learned a hard lesson that day and every since I’ve been more careful about backing up.
Fast forward to last week when it had recently occurred to me that I should have off-site backups. In a city like San Francisco, fire is a big concern and all the backups in the world can’t help you if they’re sitting in the same place as your data when it all burns to the ground. So I started leaving my backup drive at a friend’s house and bringing it home during the day to backup work from the previous night. The problem is that two weeks had passed since the last time I brought that drive home and backed up. So last week I was partitioning a disk during a Windows install and accidentally deleted the primary partition of my main data drive and that past two weeks of work. Fortunately, Partitions are relatively easy to restore (Active@ makes a very powerful data recovery suite) so this wasn’t a huge deal, but it definitely gave me flashbacks of the near catastrophe I had experienced years earlier and got me thinking I needed to start using a new system.
James E. Gaskin defines a good backup system as “Automatic, redundant, and restoreable” and I would like to add off-site to that list. The system I was using until today only covered only two of those bases. Now, I would love to use an online backup service — it would solve all of these problems — but I have about 1.5TB of files that need to be mirrored and a typical night of work will generate around 2GB of new files and/or file changes which need to be backed up. Every online solution I’ve seen would end up being ridiculously expensive at these sizes and given that my Comcast internet upstream is less than 1Mb/s, it’s really not practical if I need to move a lot of data, which is more often than not. Given all of that I’ve ruled out online backups until they bring fiber into my neighborhood or the cost of the services come way down. So I’m left with simply scaling up the backup scheme and using multiple traditional drives. The system I ended up going with is laid out like this:
1. Main data drive: A RAID5 array with three 1TB drives. This is the main drive that I work from and where I store all of the work. RAID5 uses rotating parity so that even if one of the drives experiences a failure a copy of all your data can be rebuilt from the two remaining drives. Reading and writing data from/to a RAID5 array is also much faster than a single drive (sort of like a redundant version of RAID0 – more info here) so it’s a nice bonus to have this as the working drive.
2. Local backup drive: One 2TB drive which is mirrored from the main drive every night. I use Backup Magic to do the mirroring. It’s light weight, powerful, and best of all: it only runs when I tell it to. I don’t like automatic backup apps that run in the background, they always tend to overstep their bounds and eat up system resources.
3. Off-site backup drive: One 2TB drive in a hotswap SATA bay (similar to this). The plan is to pop this in every week or so, mirror from the main data drive and then take it back off-site for safe keeping. Even if both local drives fail or my house explodes or something, at least I don’t lose my entire life’s work.
Just a note: This backup scheme is for my PC, on my Macbook Pro I use time machine to backup to a single external drive but the problem is that there’s no redundancy. If both drives fail, you’re screwed.
It’s easy to forget that as computer based creatives, everything we’ve ever done, all of our intellectual property, is sitting in a little metal box and there are a lot of things that can go wrong with that box. Regular backups are a must and off-site backups are highly recommended. I know the system I’m using isn’t foolproof — I guess nothing really is — but I feel a lot more secure knowing the data exists on three drives in two separate locations. How about you, what system do you use to backup? For all you Mac users, is Time Machine enough for you or do you have a secondary system in place? Anybody using an online backup solution? (and if so, what size is your data?) Let us know the comments
Release Date: September 29th
– Warp20 (1989-2009) The Complete Catalogue
(192 page book)
– Warp20 (Chosen): Double CD album
(Ten songs chosen by you (Warp20.net), ten songs chosen by Warp co-founder Steve Beckett)
– Warp20 (Recreated): Double CD album
(Twenty brand new cover versions of Warp songs by Warp artists past and present)
– Warp20 (Unheard): Triple 10” Vinyl
(Completely unheard tracks by Boards of Canada, Autechre and Broadcast)
– Warp20 (Elemental): CD album
(re-edits from Osymyso, made from sections, samples, & fragments of Warp music from the last 20 years)
– Warp20 (Infinite): Double 10” Vinyl
(hand-picked locked-groove loops from Warp tracks)
One song that i’ve waiting to hear was Bibio’s cover of Boards of Canada, wow okay just say that out loud, now that just makes my ears smile. The man can do no wrong in my mind, he grabs the melodies from the original and I can tell from the start he has heard this song more than 100 times before, I can hear how this song is probably really close to his heart, its such a confident cover with such contrast in style and small amounts of unique character sprinkled lightly all the way thru it.
This piano piece by Leila covering Aphex Twin to me rips away at the original and gets to the core of it all, almost like a psycho analytical reinterpretation of how Richard D. James felt when he made the basic parts for the original song. One thing Leila did which is hard to match it that the tensity is almost matched to the original which would make any drill n’ bass fan fall to their knees and it was all done here by only piano.
Pivot was one of the highlights for me during the Warp 20 year show, their live show was consistently innovative and kept my attention. They picked a hard cover to mess up, its Grizzly Bear’s Colorado which has a great vocals in it, the synths they added at the 3 min mark are a complete treat and really takes this song to a new level compared to the original.
My boss/friend Sam Valenti IV is a big supporter of Gravenhurst and turned me onto them back when I worked in the actual Ghostly Office years ago, I think he’d fully support this cover of Broadcast, it has all the signature Gravenhurst elements of guitar picking accompanied by a soft voice.
– Warp fanboy out
[audio:kainibibio.mp3] [audio:vordhosbnleila.mp3] [audio:coloradopivot.mp3] [audio:foundgravenhurst.mp3]Ira Glass describes the importance of producing a lot of work to endeavor through the frustrating early stages of a creative career. The first two minutes of this video should be required viewing for anyone and everyone getting into a creative field. In his case, he’s talking about video production, but his points are easily applied to any other realm. Definitely one of the most inspiring (or illuminating) pieces of advice I’ve come across.
The first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good — it’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase and a lot of people at that point quit.
And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. We knew that it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have and the thing to do is — everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase or if you’re just starting off and you’re entering into that phase, you’ve got to know it’s totally normal and the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.
Cover Art by Alex Cornell
Synth Pop guru D. Gookin takes our middle school favorite teen classic single 1979 by Smashing Pumpkins to a raw fantasy land of where Dan Deacon, Luke Vibert and Tortoise collaborate to do our bidding.
The Worst Friends duo take the gentler side of M83 and nudge it just enough to open up the track a tiny bit more, kind of like a bright break in the clouds to the originals cloudy day.
Everyone knows Snap, if you haven’t then go to a gym or club and give it about an hour during peak time and it will come on the speakers, I promise. Mux Mool switches gears and takes this roller skating rink classic and runs it thru the arcade and struts down the street with it while saying hi to all the ladies, a definite head nodder for the underground collectors.
Jerome Covington is new to the blog, a musician that I met at a bar while I was djing over a year ago, he did this cover for us at Moodgadget and its still a favorite to put on because it might be one of my favorite songs from when I was a little. The tempo of the original will always feel a bit too fast after you hear this, he added that touch that makes you want sway while you drive down the ocean coast.
If you brought your attention span today then this cover might be one of the more relaxing and rewarding ones, A Setting Sun aka Guardian does a number on Air’s Le Soleil Est Pres de Moi. The dusty howl gradually disperses while the recognizable sounds slowly creep in, it would make any Air fan smile.
DOWNLOAD THE FREE EP HERE
[audio:sp_dg.mp3] [audio:m_wf.mp3] [audio:s_mm.mp3] [audio:jc_ps.mp3] [audio:a_ass.mp3]
I had to scan this Home Entertainment Center out of a vintage magazine for you all, imagine just having that control panel to drool over and look at or it just being part of your interior architecture of your home. I love that there is soo much space used with beige panels, buttons, reels, and wall design, thats what makes a ton of the design in the past more admirable to me sometimes.
Sébastien Hayez’s Designers Books blog has a great post on Lettering Art In Modern Use and various other design-related books. I love that last one; I was at the printers the other day looking at some samples and they showed me a letter-pressed wedding invitation with that same script style. It was embossed into the paper with inlaid gold leaf, so nice.
Via Surfstation
Cover Art by Alex Cornell
I love the tempo of Dubstep even if I play it for a friend that doesn’t like electronic at all they always react in a positive/surprised way towards the tracks as something completely new, I mean who doesn’t like good heavy low end and dark spacey sounds that you’ve never heard before every once in a while.
Tomorrow a few friends and I are going for the first time to see BBC Radio 1’s Mary Ann Hobbs DJ some Dubstep at Dub Wars which should be killer. A little about Guardian, he is one of the best Dubstep producers I know, he’s from Detroit but lives now in Brooklyn, he is one of the best Dubstep DJ’s i’ve heard out too because of his range and he peaks out into rowdy tracks at perfect times but doesn’t rely on it and its more about track selection for him, hope to see him play around the US/UK this year.
TRACKLIST
A Setting Sun – En el Mes de Agosto (Moodgadget)
The Others – Hear Dis Style (Boka)
James Blake – Air & Lack Thereof (Hemlock)
Ramadanman – Blimey (Hessle Audio)
Ike Release – Jenova (Infrasonics)
Spatial – 90121 (Infrasonics)
Millie & Andrea – Black Hammer (Daphne)
Cyrus – Bounty (Tectonic)
Loefah – It’s Yours (White Label)
Pinch – Gangstaz (Tectonic)
Headhunter – Prototypes (Tempa)
Skream – Chest Boxing (Tempa)
The Bug – Jah War (Loefah Remix) (Ninja Tune)
The Bug – Jah War (Ninja Tune)
Pressure – Money Honey (Hyperdub)
MRK1 – Revolution 909 (Earwax)
Guardian – Charm Dub (unreleased)
Joker – Untitled_rsn (Tectonic)
Martyn – Vancouver (2562 Puur Natuur Dub) (3024)
TRG – Harajuku (Tempa)
Ramadanman – Humber (Apple Pips)
Spatial – 81012 (Infrasonics)
Sully – Duke St Dub (Mata-Syn)
Ramadanman – Carla (Soul Jazz)
Martyn – Everything About You (Tempa)
Pinch – Motion Sickness (Tempa)
Martyn – Velvet (~scape)
Untold – I Can’t Stop This Feeling (Hessle Audio)
Ramadanman – Revenue (2nd Drop)
Ramadanman – Revenue (Untold Remix) (2nd Drop)
2562 – Love In Outer Space (Tectonic)
MRK1 – Borderline (Contagious)
DJ Mujava – Township Funk (Skream Remix) (White Label)
Pinch – Punisher (Skream Remix) (Planet Mu)
Pinch – Punisher (Planet Mu)
Pinch – Punisher (V.I.P.) (Planet Mu)
Shigeto – Beat It Up (forthcoming Moodgadget)
In honor of the currently unfolding (ha) Fashion Week in NYC, I thought I’d post on some of the terrific typography at work in the fashion world. When I first got into design, I used to think the typeface for the Louis Vuitton logo was the epitome of graphic design. I remember writing everything in Futura Medium for a good month (even research papers, nothing was spared). These days, I still to pick up the occasional GQ or etc just for the ads — usually can pick up a few interesting things. There are always a number of logos that catch my eye, continue reading to see some of the marks that resonate most.
The mark for The Fashion Center (above) is perfectly simple. How brilliant to utilize the button holes to form the F! This is probably one of my favorite logos of all time. What it comes down to for me is that the 5th button hole is slightly smaller than the rest — this subtle scale shift makes the whole thing. Developed at Pentagram.