Archive for December, 2009

For those of you who listen to a lot of the songs here on the blog this should make your lives a lot easier. We’ve added a new audio player to the site for individual music posts which supports playlists. This means that you can just hit play and let them go without having to click each song individually. The new system is based off the same JWPlayer framework as the normal ISO50 Playlist player (top of the center column) but it will now be for individual posts as well. We will continue to update the main Playlist each month or so, but you can think of this as a new mini playlist each day. The skin is just temporary as I refine it, but all the core functionality should be there.

So far it’s only been implemented on Jakub’s recent “Top 50 Songs of 2009” series but it will be used for all music posts moving forward. So give it a try and let us know how it’s working. If you find any bugs or issues please let us know in the comments.

Enjoy!

…and the list gets longer, after listening to few of these songs in the 30’s I feel like some of them should be in the Top 10 but then I look the Top 10 and understand why its like this. Hopefully some of you are clicking the links and checking a few older posts out, we posted a ton of music this year, its blowing my mind.

40 – Juana Molina – Un Dia
39 – Kurt Vile – My Best Friends (Don’t Even Pass This)
38 – Tim Hecker – Sea Of Pulses
37 – Paul White – Highlife
36 – The Mercury Program – Arrived/Departed
35 – The Horrors – Sea Within A Sea
34 – Washed Out – Phone Call
33 – Piano Magic – The Faint Horizon
32 – Holiday Shores – Edge Of Our Lives
31 – White Rainbow – Tuesday Rollers and Stroller

This is part of a series of posts on the top 50 songs from 2009. Click here to view all posts in the series →

Determined to find out the history behind these beautiful posters, Frederico Duarte did some extensive research and learned how “Pan Am’s short-lived Helvetica dream” came to be. He chronicles this process over on the Eye Blog and in an article for Eye Magazine. These posters are incredible and their story is well worth the endless emails and phone calls he had to make to determine their origin.

Pan Am is no longer. But the story of its redesign, as told by the people behind it, proves personal connections, proximity and chance are all makers of (design) history. How many other great design stories are left untold?

Fredrico’s post reads like a design mystery and I lamented how little of this research I do, or even curiosity I possess when I come across work that interests me. For example: I wake up, see something amazing on FFFFOUND, then I bookmark it. End of story. If it’s especially awesome maybe I blog about it, but I rarely dive deep into whatever visual universe I’ve uncovered. I usually just absorb it quickly, then move on with a slightly augmented sense of visual understanding. This is why I both love and hate sites like Dropular or FFFFOUND. While they allow me to quickly consume lots of high quality design, they remove context and discourage the exploration that would otherwise go along with finding out about a new artist. (Of course there are many benefits to sites like these, but the removal of the ‘story’ that goes along with the work is one of the primary downsides.)

As Fredrico mentions in his article, the research was done for an SVA class where the rule is “No Google”. I thought this was interesting because I tend to use Google and “research” interchangeably, especially when thinking about design. To be stripped of my only research tool! Of course this makes sense these days, as most of us young designers primarily exist on the web anyway (which is a scary thought if you think about it…if the hardrives go, so do I). What the story hammered home for me was the importance and overwhelming benefits of a design education. What allowed Fredrico to take this much time plunging into the depths of design history (and what allowed me to spend so much time with Playboy) was the freedom and time provided by the design education environment. While you could always try and inspire yourself to do this on your own, it’s hard to beat limitless boundaries coupled with external motivation.

This week we’ll unveil the Top 50 songs of 2009, a new playlist at the end and then the Top 10 albums of the year. Hope you enjoy the list, some memorable tracks from the year and some of the linked previous posts.

50 – Nite Jewel – Artificial Intelligence
49 – Empire Of The Sun – Walking On A Dream
48 – Real Estate – Suburban Beverage
47 – High Places – From Stardust to Sentience
46 – STL – Silent State
45 – Legowelt – Day Sailor
44 – Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Can’t Hear My Eyes
43 – Volcano Choir – Island, IS
42 – The Field – The More That I Do
41 – 2562 – Lost – Unbalance

This is part of a series of posts on the top 50 songs from 2009. Click here to view all posts in the series →

I did an interview for the excellent Grain Edit blog recently and they’ve posted it up today. We covered a lot of ground from coffee shops and design to music production. There’s also a couple bonus shots of the studio in there. Check it out at the link below.

Grain Edit ISO50 Interview →

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54Hjn45Yh7E
Thanks to everyone who made it out last night, I had an incredible time and the energy was great. I really appreciate you all sticking around until 2:30am on a sunday night, you’re probably hating me this morning though, wish I could buy you a coffee. It was great to be able to check out the other bands too, I’ve been meaning to see all of them live for a while now.

Shigeto turned in an amazing performance with his drums with some great backing visuals by Alex Headup, Adam Hunt, and Martin Thoburn. A Sunny Day in Glasgow came with some really dreamy stuff and they were a perfect counterpoint to the decidedly electronic vibe of the other acts on the bill. The highlight of the night for me was Casino Versus Japan’s set. He very rarely plays shows (I think the last one was like 6 years ago?) so it was a rare treat to say the least. I had the honor of doing visuals for him during his set which was really a great experience. I rarely get to just do visuals for other artists so it was nice to be able to focus on that side of things. As you might imagine, his set was super mellow and ambient. The energy ebbed and flowed perfectly and made for a very moving experience. Hopefully he starts playing more shows because I doubt you’ll see anything like that again any time soon.

All in all it was a great time, I hope to be back again soon. This was my last show for a while as I’ll be focusing on wrapping up the new album through the early part of the year but as soon as that’s ready I’ll be getting back out.

Photos by Kyle Moriwaki | Video of Casino Versus Japan by Raffi Asdourian

This is an old video but it’s amazing and I had to post it. I was blasting around the web looking at various inforgraphics and I came upon the fantastic indexed again. The video above, Le Grand Content, was inspired by the site, and is a similarly excellent collection of random and insightful anecdotes (this time in motion) about nothing in particular. Any time you have a graph with time on one axis and “the adventures you’ve taken” on the other, I am going to be intrigued. The voice over by Andre Tschinder is my favorite part — the delivery is oddly perfect (…”but speaking of forever, it’s obvious that this takes some time”.)

Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent Powerpoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand ‘association-chain-massacre’. which challenges itself to answer all questions of the universe and some more. Of course, it totally fails this assignment, but in its failure it still manages to produce some magical nuance and shades between the great topics death, cable tv, emotions and hamsters. by Clemens Kogler

Update: Cesar & Moira won, thanks everyone for playing. See you tonight.

We’re giving away 2 tickets to tomorrow night’s show at Le Poisson Rouge in NYC. The first two people to answer the following question correctly will each get a free ticket:

Name the B-Side of Casino Versus Japan’s 2001 10″ release on Wobblyhead.

Enter your answer in the comments of this post along with your email in the address field (email is not publicly visible). Please enter only if you actually intend to come to the show.

Good luck, see you tomorrow night… (set time is 10:30)

A Sunny Day in Glasgow, Casino Versus Japan, Tycho, Shigeto
Live @ Le Poisson Rouge – 158 Bleecker St. NYC

More Info / Buy Tickets

If you follow the blog you’ll noticed a repeat talented culprit always bringing me to a daze, Mark E is the king of dizzying slow repetition, I can have his songs on repeat for hours maybe even days.

The NEW Adult Swim Compilation is now available for FREE to download, It includes remixes of ATL rap artists by Dabrye, Flying Lotus, Prefuse 73, Michna, Mad Decent, Starkey, Memory Tapes, Salem, etc. If you need to get rowdy in an Escalade this weekend then here’s your soundtrack.

And now for something completely different, keeping the folk pop ball in the air while the end of the year draws closer is Emperor X, I like this song but I wouldn’t at all if it wasn’t lo-fi, definitely a nice wake up song if you get a chance to make it to a cabin this winter in the woods.

I feel like I shouldn’t post this song because overall I don’t really like it, its wanting to be clubby puts a bad taste in my mouth but the downtime with Fever Ray’s voice made it bearable, I hope you can wade thru the garbage and find the beautiful glimpses.

Good Guy Mikesh & Filburt – Cleaning Up (Mark E Remix)

Goodie Mob – Is That You God? (Dabrye remix)

Emperor X – A Violent Translation of the Concordia Headscarp

Fever Ray – Now’s The Only Time I Know (J-Wow Mix)

Update: Thanks Wilamagamid for pointing me over to Blanka, where you can purchase these prints.

Albert Exergian created this series of posters depicting popular television shows boiled down into their most simplified forms. He describes them as “A HUMOROUS VIEW ON TV CULTURE” but they don’t strike me as being particularly humorous. Intriguing is a better word, Exergian’s sense of efficiency is uncanny. This would make a great set of screen prints, if only he were selling them. I guess he might have some legal issues though. Although, he’s only really putting words on a page; does writing “Dexter” (my favorite poster by the way) constitute copyright infringement? I hope not. Anyways, if anyone knows where to get prints of these, please let me know.

More posters at Albert Exergian’s portfolio (scroll down)

Update: Found better images over at Blanka, but the following gripe still stands! Major tangent here: Sorry for the white lines around the edges, I got these directly from Exergian’s site and that’s how they came. This brings up a HUGE gripe I have with Photoshop: If you don’t flatten a file before you resize it, the edges tend to show through to the transparent background so when you save as JPEG, it ends up with these annoying white lines. I have no idea why this is so, but it is. I guess it’s time for another “Dear Adobe” post.