Posts in Music

Here are some older tracks that I’m pretty surprised I hadn’t posted before. All 4 tracks are a few years old at least, tomorrow i’ll put up some newer releases like TV on the Radio.

Colder – Crazy Love

Arab Strap – Cherub

Cim – Shift

Tim Tetlow – Mind is Moving

This week iTunes is featuring 2 great records, one from Michna who is currently based in Brooklyn NY, Adrian Michna (aka DJ Egg Foo Young) has become a staple in the NYC club scene, known for his chameleon like abilities. Outside of the club, he has been able to pursue a few hobbies such as building furniture, bicycles, photography, skeeball, and gloss lustre collages. While working on his solo album, he also found time to remix the mysterious Jandek (the only artist ever to do so) and produce on Brazilian group Bonde Do Role’s debut LP for Domino/Mad Decent.
Milosh just released a follow up LP last week, its getting alot of love everywhere, its a great step forward from his previous work, the production has added tons of depth and his voice just works so well with everything he does.
When i DJ out this Michna track i usually play this My Morning Jacket song after, it reminds me of Radiohead or Midlake i think its the rim hits and the way the song swells and fills up then releases.
As for this Marumari track, i wanna share more old melodic IDM that has a lot of crossover potential, IDM can be such a focused genre of music that takes forward thinking steps on composition, i just don’t want it to ever die off and Marumari was a classic example of of focus track, the song revolves around a repetitive hook that keeps morphing and all this detail gets unveiled thru out the song.

Michna – Do What You Want To Do

Milosh – Another Day

My Morning Jacket – It Beats For You

Marumari – Way In The Middle Of The Air

I have been meaning to do more posts with good examples of contemporary poster art and after seeing Well Medicated’s 50 Amazing Gig Posters Sure To Inspire article I thought now would be a great time to start. Concert posters were always my biggest inspiration for getting into art and design. I like to think of my work as sort of straddling the disciplines of pure graphic design and the more illustrative styles featured in the Well Medicated post so I’m always excited to see new work from these types of artists. It always amazes me how they do so much with so little and how they stay true to the classic modernist typographic ideals. It’s very rarely that we as designers get to be truly idealistic with our design so it’s a breath of fresh air to see work like this, unmolested by the hands of middle-men and marketing departments.

On a side note, seeing a large collection of stylistically similar prints like this always reminds me of the rather strange disconnect I’ve noticed between the world of gig poster artists and graphic designers. A good example would be FlatStock at SXSW; that whole scene always seemed to me to be quite insularly while a lot of the design festivals I end up presenting at seem to fall short in their representation of the poster art world. Perhaps I’m missing something, but you’d think there would be more overlap between the two worlds given how much the output has in common.

Since there are 1,000’s of 12″ electronic vinyl still coming out every week to record shops a lot of the labels have taken design more seriously to catch the record buyers attention by keeping a consistent layout and font for their stock sleeve jackets that hold the vinyl. I collect alot of these stock sleeves, i thought this would be a good way to post some vinyl versions of songs too and show you some of the record sleeves that don’t make to the people that only buy CDs and MP3’s. These first 2 are Kompakt’s TOTAL series and REKIDS regular stock jacket that usually changes up alot but they keep the same font and usually keep it centered.

UPDATE: One other thing is that a lot of vinyl doesn’t make it to CD unless the musician does an album with the same label and CD’s are pressed or if it gets licensed to a DJ mix CD or podcast.

DJ Koze – Zou Zou

Radio Slave – Screaming Hands (Cosmo Vitelli’s Radioaktivitat remix)

Here are 4 tracks to take you into the weekend full of melody and kinda have a “getting ready for fall” feel.

Black Moth Super Rainbow – I Think It Is Beautiful That You Are 256 Colors Too

Yo La Tengo – Autumn Sweater

Born Ruffians – I Need a Life (Four Tet Remix)

Lykki Li – Dance, Dance, Dance

This has yet to leave my car the entire summer. Another friendly company re-pressed this for CD, possibly saving it from extinction.

Good summer-time Italo.

I wish I had more information than this, so if you have any, please leave it in the comments!

Ago – Trying Over (1982)

Ago – You Make Me Do (1982)

Music site Better Propaganda picked recent Tycho single The Daydream as song of the day today (9/9/08). They’ve posted a review and a free MP3 download. Check it out here

These last couple of days i’ve been going to shows and heading to a few more this week. The one i’m most excited about is Deastro, he has great energy to his music but keeps it together without getting too noisy and replaces it with catchy looping of synths. I saw Flying Lotus and Daedelus Sunday at Le Poisson Rouge
in Manhattan where all these shows are going on, both of them are unreal live, they take their album songs and strip them down and make the songs really come alive on stage. Tonight is Deerhunter, haven’t heard much of this band to he honest even though they’re everywhere, i just liked that the lead singer listens to Markus Guentner so it should be good. The last track is a Kooks cover of the ever popular MGMT, i think this acoustic cover is almost competing to be better than the original.

Deastro – Michael, The Lone Archer of the North Shore

Flying Lotus – Auntie’s lock/Infinitum (featuring Laura Darlington)

Deerhunter – Hazel St.

MGMT – Kids (The Kooks cover)

An interesting CG clip from Discovery’s Miracle Earth depicting our destruction via giant asteroid set to Pink Floyd’s Great Gig In The Sky. The song is apt for many reasons, not the least of which being that the vocalist sounds like she is actually being burned alive and/or crushed by a giant asteroid. But I’m a sucker for that 70’s bass sound so I can’t hate. It’s actually a pretty sad video to watch, and the final sentence of the titles is rather ominous. Although 6 events in 4.55 billion years isn’t really much to worry about considering the cosmic blink of an eye humanity has occupied in the universal timeline. Also, I am pretty sure you don’t really notice/care when you’re instantly vaporized, you just turn to vapor, and so does your Macbook Pro.