Archive for January, 2011

Perched on a sea cliff in Phuket, Villa Amanzi is making me wish I was anywhere but home right now. The “luxury villa” hotel built in 2008 by architects Original Vision, is a spacious 2,644sm. I was going to throw this into the category of “stuff I can’t have” but then I looked at the rates/reservations page. If you go at the right time you can get the place for $2000/night, and it sleeps 12 people. That’s $166 / night each; not so crazy really. Now I just have to get back down to Thailand. Speaking of which, I was lucky enough to visit there once, I took some pictures.

Photos via Top Box Design

I’ve been hearing a lot lately about this Vivian Maier person, a street photographer operating during the 60’s and 70’s in New York and Chicago. The work is great, but the story behind the discovery of her work is equally fascinating. Maier passed away a couple years ago and a guy named John Maloof ended up purchasing around 100,000 negatives of her work — 20,000 of which were still in undeveloped rolls — from a furniture store (the store had acquired the work through a storage space non-payment auction). Maloof has been developing the work and posting at VIVIAN MAIER – HER DISCOVERED WORK.

While it’s sad way that Maier never lived to see her work appreciated on a large scale (well, who knows if she even wanted that) but I do find it pretty lucky that her work finally fell into the hands of someone with the interest and skills to bring her body of work to light.

Photos via VIVIAN MAIER – HER DISCOVERED WORK

The time has come to pick the winners for the ISO50 Holiday Giveaway. It was high stakes this year with a choice of snow boards or skis and a bunch of stuff from The ISO50 Shop up for grabs. So without further ado, drum roll please:

The grand prize winner is Michael S. Gallegly. Congrats Michael, you’ve won your choice of an ISO50 designed snowboard or pair of skis along with some ISO50 prints, shirts, and music.

Second Prize goes to Ryan Stotts who gets some ISO50 prints, shirts, and music.

Third Prize was awarded last month.

Congrats to the winners and thanks to everyone who entered!

This song is worthy of its own post, James Blake just demolished my mind, I don’t know how i’m going to be able to DJ tonight I just feel like staying in and watching this over and over, my recommendation to listen to this is thru the roof.

We’ve been rolling thru these Guest Music Posts this week, we will wrap the week up with a female focused post by Will Wiesenfeld aka Baths / Geotic, beautiful choice to start it off Will!

CocoRosie – R.I.P. Burn Face
In CocoRosie’s bizarre pop aesthetic, they’re able to maintain this perfect level of darkness and experimentation
without it getting in the way of melody and songwriting. I’ve always been jealous of how effortless they make it seem.

Björk – Sun In My Mouth (recomposed by Ensemble)
Ensemble (Oliver Alary) also produced the Björk song “Desired Constellation,” my favorite song of all time. This is another great collaboration by the two.

Robyn – Hang With Me
Pop music perfected. Everyone alive should take notes.

Husky Rescue – Beautiful My Monster
My favorite song of last year. Coming from such a wonderfully gloomy album, this song serves as the light at the end of the tunnel.
It ties the record together beautifully.

Image by: Dieter Sayler

Clearly we’re fans of Erik Nitsche as we’ve posted a number of times about his work in the past. These three pieces are some of my favorites. The first and second were annual reports completed in 1955 and 1959; the third is a cover that was designed in 1956.

It’s really a shame the Flickr stream that held Nitsche’s work is now down. These images were found here.

Many of you know Michael Cina’s work as a Graphic Designer but he also has a great taste in music, he set some time aside and shared some music for the ISO50 readers, enjoy:

Supersilent
I am waiting for my copy to come, I preordered this half-way into
listening to an advanced copy last year. I think Supersilent is pretty
good (I love Deathprod), but this is Supersilent at their best. Parts
of the lp hint at a sparse Miles Davis when he was in his fusion
years, other songs sound like Vangelis. They really precisely capture
tones and moods on this album.

Talk Talk
I have been on a steady stream of the last two Talk Talk lps for the
last six months or so. There is something hauntingly beautiful about
these sincere records. From what I understand, they locked themselves
in a dark room and didn’t talk with anyone while making these albums.
You can hear it, you can hear the room swallowing you.

Nicolas Jaar
I won’t pretend that I know anything about Jaar, as I don’t, besides
he is somewhat connected to the Wolf + Lamb crew. You can tell from
his production, that he loves sound. He seems to be expanding off of
the road that Matthew Dear has paved and is making his own way. I am
looking forward to see where he goes with his music.

The Blue Nile
One of my friends Rob turned me onto this a little while ago. I have
heard of the band but really never knew what they did. This is the
second song is off their “Hats” full-length. It’s magic from start to
finish. They really create a vivid picture in this song.

Tycho will be playing in Sacramento at SEMF on Thursday, January 27th. SEMF is the Sacramento Music Festival which, if you haven’t been, is well worth the drive. This year’s line up includes Daedelus, Dusty Brown, Little Foxes, Bonjay, Sister Crayon and many more.

Sacramento Electronic Music Festival: Tickets / Info

Hope to see you out there!

Oh how I wish the 31 megapixel, full frame sensor Camera Futura camera phone were real. Unfortunately it’s just a design study by Seattle firm Artefact Group. According to the concept, the sensor is housed within the lens which continues to function when removed from the body, thus allowing the screen to be used as a remote viewer. Renderings are all well and good, Artefact went so far as to stage a fake CES demonstration of the device for this video:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgBl0ejQ8c0

The video seems to have raised the ire of many a tech-blog commenter, and led many to believe this was just some elaborate hoax. But Artefact states that “we created these assets to spark a discussion around the question of “what if” the product was really available”. I hope something like this comes along sooner than later, I give it 10 years if they were even able to find a big enough market for such a device. I honestly can’t imagine the average cell phone user caring about interchangeable lenses and full frame sensors. Or wanting to lug around a big hunk of glass all the time.

Go here right now icelandwantstobeyourfriend.com. This marketing campaign is absolutely hilarious, genius, and refreshing. I want to be Iceland’s friend, a lot, after reading through all this (go to the Twitter or Facebook page for more fun). I’ve always wanted to go there anyway, but this certainly supplements my desire. I had no idea Iceland was such a cool person, thanks Takk Takk.

I have heard that many people use the Inter-nets to make friends, and to talk about themselves. So that is what I want to do, too. I know you are probably very busy doing important things, but if you want to be my friend, you can.
– Iceland

Still from Heima, the beautiful Sigur Ros documentary.