Archive for December, 2010

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A handful of talented musicians were kind enough to do a last minute holiday cover song for all of us. Beautiful Bells might have won my heart over with probably the best experimental beat holiday song ever made. While Sun Hammer and Direwires duel it out over Silent Night, both takes will hold your patient ears with warming results. Toronto’s Warren Hildebrand aka Foxes In Fiction does an impeccable job of covering John Lennon and label mate Weed takes on the ever popular All I Want For Christmas and roughs it up perfectly with his notable garage sound. Last but not least the duo The Depot-Tones:

“Attached is a cleaned up, restored version of The Depot-Tones covering “Wonderful Christmas Time”. This was from a 7″ culled from the 45 dollar bin from Cousins Records during a recent digging expedition. The true identity of the Depot-Tones is shrouded in question, and every answer leads to five more questions. The best I’ve been able to figure out is the lead singer lived near Prospect Park and the rest of the band were all employees of the Chick-Inn drive in. This was a holiday promotional item sponsored by the Ypsilanti Chamber of Commerce and given away to customers. This is indeed excellence aged in cuban rum and virgin oak barrels and bottled in containers of crystal.”

Tatiana Plakhova has some beautifully complex work at her Behance page. Loving the complexity and color scheme of these, very dark but still a lot of life.

Tatiana Plakhova via Designspiration

Nearly ten months ago, I (Shelby) had an idea that was inspired by the design community, one that I became very passionate about. The idea was to create some sort of platform to share what inspires you. We’ve seen it done before, but what I have for you is something I hope and believe you’ll really enjoy.

Designspiration is the outcome of my efforts to realize my idea, evolving into a site occupied by a diverse range of inspiration curated by its users. Designspiration or DSPN for short, focuses on the core principles of sharing inspiration and utilizes some great features; like a search function that works like a Swiss army knife, which I will discuss more in the post. Little did I know when starting this project that I would be clocking in more than 1,000 hours over the past ten months.

If you’re eager to check out the site, you can hit Designspiration.net or Ds.pn. With that said, I’m really excited to share this project and process with you…

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This is the S1, Leica’s first digital camera. Introduced in 1996, it was a digital scanning back that could work with various lenses. Each exposure took 185 seconds to complete so had to be shot using continuous light. You might think that such an old digicam would produce inferior results, but apparently it was quite the opposite:

“Though slow, the S1 yielded 76Mb @ 24-bit (151Mb @ 48-bit), 5140 x 5140, 12-bit RGB image files that contained little if any of the artifacting, blooming, and fringing that continue to plague us to this very day” – B&H

And it operated at ISO 50! (the film speed) Pretty good for ’96, and it would only set you back $21,500… I’m loving the look of this thing which stands in stark contrast to the subsequent and far more familiar looking Leica S2 model. The second to last (with the rackmount processor) apparently depicts the “Highspeed Kit” which dramatically reduced the scanning time per image.

Here are some pages from the original brochure featuring some example output from the S1: Page 1 . Page 3 . Page 5 . Page 7 . Page 8

Image sources eBay Auction, B&H, Leica Forum via Gizmodo

DubaiLand is a very surreal series by Aleix Plademunt. Something very eerie about these shots, probably due to the lack of people.

I know little about the actual place…looks expensive.

I’ve been finding myself watching more fan made videos than the actual official videos I guess because I love all the found footage. Don’t get me wrong there are some quality directed videos out there but I just seemed to love both equally as much right now. Back in 2008 I shared my Top 5 favorite videos, the ones below i’ve recently enjoyed.

Stellar Om Source

Active Child

Memoryhouse

Small Sails

The Avalanches

At first I wasn’t a TRON fan, but it has definitely grown on me. After seeing this TRON Suite at the world-famous Swedish Icehotel in Jukkasjärvi, I might have to watch the movie. The designers of this suite, Ben Rousseau and Ian Douglas-Jones, utilizing ultra-low energy lights that appear to be frozen in or behind the ice—brilliant!

The whole thing reminds me of a nightclub. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised to see a night club made of ice pop up next door to the hotel sometime soon. What are your thoughts on this—would you stay here?

Via Flavorwire

NPR featured We’ll Never Stop Living This Way: A Ghostly Primer, you can listen to all these songs before the release on their site in 3 parts, it includes plenty of exclusives and some of the hit singles by the main crew of artists that have released on the label.

Tracklisting below:
1 GOLD PANDA – Peaky Caps
2 SHIGETO – Eternal Life
3 OUTPUTMESSAGE – Bernard’s Song
4 MATTHEW DEAR – Fleece On Brain
5 DABRYE – Jorgy (feat. Waajeed)
6 MOBIUS BAND – Multiply
7 TYCHO – Coastal Brake
8 DANIEL WANG – Berlin Sunrise (Diskjokke Version) [Unreleased]
9 SCHOOL OF SEVEN BELLS – Half Asleep (Lusine Remix)
10 AEROC – My Love, The Wave Break
11 LAWRENCE – Five Leaves
12 CHOIR OF YOUNG BELIEVERS – Hollow Talk
13 TADD MULLINIX – Exchanging Modes
14 THE SIGHT BELOW – No Place For Us
15 LOSCIL – Union Dusk
16 BENOIT PIOULARD – Little A Strongly More Go I
17 PALE SKETCHER – Dummy (Bahnhoff Version)
18 CEPIA – Tape
19 MIDWEST PRODUCT – Clarity
20 OSBORNE – Outta Sight (Luke Vibert Remix)
21 LUSINE – Double Vision
22 SOLVENT – Loss For Words (Solvent’s CompuRhythm Mix)
23 JDSY – Horizon Line
24 DEASTRO – Tone Adventure #3
25 MICHNA – Redline Flights
26 THE REFLECTING SKIN – Traffickers
27 MUX MOOL – Crackers
28 KILN – Flycatcher
29 KATE SIMKO – The Creative Part
30 COM TRUISE – Cyanide Sisters [Unreleased]

Three Covers 001  |  Source: Joe Krall via Designspiration

Excuse this dark tone period i’ve been highly enjoying, it definitely has something to do with the winter and also wanting to listening to more than just drone, diggin deep for colorful and moody material. One of the less ambient pieces on this new A Setting Sun EP is this remix by Dial81, if you like it download it for free.

I fully support anything by Rafael Anton Irisarri but this one is an absolute gem, he needs to be scoring film on the highest level, he can grab sounds and articulate an emotion so well.

I don’t usually stream music like Swans on ISO50 but I can’t hold back on this one, too much passion behind their own sound, I can only share and sit back and be blown away.

The Soft Moon video for “Circles” premiered today, check it out: