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Really proud to announce my sophomore album ‘Body Complex’, there are a few things that come along with the announcement: the first single Interior “Architecture Software” which started streaming today. The record comes out August 7th on Ghostly International on vinyl/CD/Cassette, pre-order is below.

PRE-ORDER Coke Bottle Clear Vinyl / CD / Emerald Green Tinted Cassette HERE

This sculpture that I created which is about 7 inches tall and weighs close to 6 lbs made out of hydrostone which is a hi-tech cement pretty much. Also, I went more in-depth on the story of this album and sculpture below. As always, would love some feedback! Thanks for reading and listening.

For Jakub Alexander, the languages of music and visual art are permanently intertwined. And he’s always been this way—from his birthplace in communist Poland, to growing up outside of Detroit, to his current home in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. “When music like Gas, early Dial Records, and Mille Plateaux releases in the 2000s popped up in my headphones,” Alexander begins, “it was completely visual for me. Something clicked from collecting pages out of old Architectural Digest magazines and being completely overwhelmed with inspiration for my own visions of interior architecture.” The concept carries on still, now as an integral part of Body Complex, his second album as Heathered Pearls. Body Complex represents a new form of Alexander’s visually inspired sound creation, but just as it points to changes in direction for the ambient-inclined producer, it also revisits the past experiences that make his music possible.

Perhaps the most important era referenced in Body Complex is Alexander’s mid-teens, when he was a 15-year-old DJ going to raves with the older kids. Sure, the parties themselves were influential, but it’s the afterhours that resonate the strongest on Body Complex. “I remember those mornings better than the holidays during those years, the drives home from Detroit at 7AM were always stimulating. Everyone was so content, we’d usually listen to something deep and easy on the ears. This was a perfect time to let your mind wander.” It was also an opportunity for him to discover the likes of Terrence Dixon and Lawrence, artists who would eventually offer encouragement to Heathered Pearls as he moved into a new beat-centric sound. “I respect [Terrence Dixon and Lawrence] because they can ride the same thin lines of what I love: electronic music that is heavily repetitive, melodic, and deep. They both can find this elegance in techno beyond the dark warehouse.”

Body Complex doesn’t necessarily aspire to recreate the music of Alexander’s youth. But while taking inspiration from !K7’s classic audio-visual mix series, X-Mix, and early-aughts techno compilations, Heathered Pearls has moved himself closer to the dancefloor. “Loyal was these indirect, huge, heavy, slow ocean waves off in the distance at night,” he says of his beatless debut album, “and Body Complex is a stunningly bleak, uncharted landscape of man-made cement and artificial foliage.” Take a track like the desaturated “Sunken Living Area”, where flickering synths and chrome-plated drum patterns sketch out Alexander’s conceptual backdrop. You can almost envision the sounds as columns and plateaus protruding from a dusk-lit valley. “Personal Kiosk”, an exuberant ambient-techno highlight with The Sight Below (who also mixed and mastered Body Complex), might best represent everything Heathered Pearls brings to his second album: whorls of deep texture, abstract melodic drifts, elegiac beauty, and illusory dance music.

Of course, the artwork is another integral aspect of Body Complex, especially as it was conceived around an object designed by Alexander. “The shape came from wanting to create an imperfect sculpture that, from a distance, looks like a display piece,” he shares, “but when you get closer and you have more time with it, you see its flaws.” And that sort of ever-changing perspective reflects how the album itself can be heard differently in various contexts. Put on the Shigeto-featuring “Abandoned Mall Utopia” at home, and it’s a softly pulsing current of astral dust; put it on in a DJ set, and the music becomes a heady balm for the dancefloor. “You’re given this body and mind to build on, and everyone has their imperfections they don’t love,” Heathered Pearls explains in regards to the double meaning of his album title. Indeed, Body Complex is an elaborate expression of personal memories and visual metaphors as nuanced electronic music, and just like any fully realized body of work, it’s best understood from more than one vantage point.

Do you remember when Microsoft first introduced the Kinect? It was one the first times where I thought to myself that The Jetsons way of life may actually one day be a reality.

Well things just got a little more closer to that reality with Microsoft’s HoloLens. Instead of products like Google Glass and Oculus Rift, which put the user in a virtual world – the HoloLens puts you in a virtual environment by taking elements from a digital world and making them an interactive part of your world.

Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times had a chance to use it with Minecraft:

“In one demo, a Minecraft scene was displayed over a real living room. A Microsoft minder asked me to select a virtual hammer (a tool in the game) and start smashing the coffee table in the room. She wanted me, in other words, to use a digital object to interact with a real one. I did so and was stunned by what happened: Before my eyes, the real coffee table splintered into digital debris, and then it was no longer there. HoloLens had perfectly erased the coffee table from the environment.”

Here’s what Nick Statt of CNET had to say:

“Using real photography from the Curiosity rover, Microsoft was able to re-create a Martian landscape and overlay a 3D-map around a small, conference-room-size environment. I can walk around, bend down and look at rocks. I can even see NASA’s Curiosity rover, which is larger than a standard motor vehicle.”

“With HoloLens, I’m not just able to see what it’s like to walk around on Mars, but I’m also able to interact with the contents on the surface. Using a finger gesture called Air Tap, the HoloLens lets me mark certain spots on the surface for investigation and even lets me talk with another floating figure and collaborate on examining the surface.”

You can read more about Windows Holographic and the HoloLens on The Verge.

– Chad Kamenshine

A big heads up that we’re having a 30% off sale now through Monday on Tycho / ISO50 prints and shirts at the shop. We’re also doing free shipping on US orders of $50 or more and $5 flat shipping on International orders of $75 or more through the end of the year. We’ve restocked a lot of designs and there are some brand new items available as well so there’s a lot more to choose from now.

ISO50 / Tycho Shop

Have you ever wanted to hear Radiohead on a $3.99 AM only clock radio speaker? well maybe wait around and just buy the wood cut version or just download the vector of it for your 3D printer.

Here’s Joy Division as well if you just couldn’t get enough of that Radiohead video.

Adam Fuchs and Flying Lotus team for a psychedelic video to promote Moog’s Sub Phatty. Moog claims that this is their “grittiest Moog synth ever”, they definitely found the right man for the job, this “Such a Square” track refreshes FlyLo sound.

“Car art” is always a contentious subject for me, there’s alot of cartoonish colored pencil stuff out there that Road & Track likes to pass off as “fine art”. If there’s one thing i’ve tried to showcase in my livery posts, it’s that the geometric body of the car itself makes for a great canvas.

Earlier last week, fellow car porn addict (although he gets paid for his addiction) Jim Lau sent me the innocuous “you’ve seen this, right?” message. Above are some examples of Ricardo Santos’ work, and I think they’re absolutely fantastic. You’ll notice some farmilar ‘faces’ from alot of the car posts I’ve done here on the blog, needless to say I’ve solved the problem of hanging up pictures of cars on my wall without looking pubescent.

These prints all come in a variety of sizes & formats, the stretched canvas is barking at me and the moths futzing outside my window will soon find a nice warm home in my wallet. You can find all of Ricardo’s works seen above over on his Society 6 page.

Wim Crouwel: A Graphic Odyssey – Digital Catalogue for iPad is an expanded and enhanced version of the printed catalogue published by Unit Editions and the Design Museum to accompany the recent Wim Crouwel exhibition at the Design Museum in London.

The App is more than the just the printed catalogue, it offers a comprehensive overview of the work of the great Dutch master, not only in pictures, but in words as well. The viewer also has access to a filmed interview with Crouwel, a photographic record of the show itself, and a range of animations using the letterforms designed by Wim Crouwel during his long career.

This all-encompassing digital catalogue offers a unique insight into Wim Crouwel’s work and archive, as well as the successful exhibition co-curated by Unit Editions co-founder Tony Brook. It’s a chance to either discover or relive the exhibition.

Editors: Tony Brook and Adrian Shaughnessy
Compatibility: iPad2 & iPad3
Size: 364 MB
Design: Spin
Price: $5.99

Available on the iTunes Store

The 2012 Land Rover Defender XTech. In the United States, we can’t get our hands on these and that’s a tragedy. In my opinion it’s one of the best designed off-roader / SUVs ever and now there’s an XTech version which is much more rugged and has a new engine. I’m not sure if I like the original or the XTech version more, but it definitely brought me around to posting about the Defender.

The thing that I truly admire about the design of this car, it’s simple and done right. There’s no weird pattern in the seats, the instrument panels are symmetrical and the exterior colorways are that of a machine. Sure there are a lot of technological enhancements and the glaring safety features missing. No airbags keep it from coming stateside. However, it has a timeless appeal to it. Of course, it’s diesel and weighs A LOT and with what we’re all paying for gas right now it’s not really an option. However, I’d ride my bike to the studio during the week and take this out on the weekends to offset my carbon footprint.

Never thought I would ever really be fascinated by moss…but somehow that all changed as soon as I came across Mosser.

Mosser is a small glass terrarium filled with a simple round moss ball crafted by NY based designers Jennica Johnstone and Noah Atkinson, who I found out by speaking with them, personally cultivate, jar, label, package, and ship all units individually. They are very easy to care for and only need to be sprayed once every two weeks with filtered water.

Here are a few words and images Jennica and Noah were kind enough to share with us about Mosser, how it was conceived, what goes in to producing each unit, and a few ideas we can hopefully expect to see in a near future:

Mosser is about capturing simplicity and and keeping it alive in ones space. We recognize the need to have something natural at your fingers tips in this day and age.

The project had a very natural and unplanned start, one day we just decided to make a terrarium and not much has changed since that first one. There was no point in the beginning were we thought that we would end up creating a brand and selling these things.

Keeping it simple is key. Let the moss shine, it is such an intriguing plant. Its one of the oldest plants on earth and it can tolerate so many elements, yet it is rootless.

For the future, we would hope to have different customized containers to hold the moss, maybe a wooden base with a glass lid or a rectangular glass container.

Jennica and Noah have also launched a new project by the name of Co/Labs which intends to bring the design community together in many different ways.

Purchase Mosser

Posted by B3PO

Many of us artists/designers/musicians love dreaming about our ideas becoming a physical piece that you can hold, touch, gift or make available for others to have. I really appreciate the printers, warehouses and studios that have to deal with our minds and files. So here’s to CutLaserCut, a well branded youthful laser cutting company that I dream of using someday soon, check out their Flickr and keep these physical type of companies close, I hope to see more creative uses of what they offer in the future and thats up to us.