I’ve tried to stop thinking about this video for months but I can’t, its got to be the most epic thing on the internet arguably speaking, I mean orange sharks, hockey goalie masks, and Kraft mac ‘n’ cheese…. < sigh > tooo much!

Shigeto comes back with a mini LP that touches on the more organic instruments that he feels natural working with. There’s beautiful Rhodes work along with flutters of good feelings with a pouncing beat, a must have.

CFCF floored me with this one, there is not enough music with grand piano and synth arpeggios dueling for your attention to the point they both end up molding together and completely pleasing your ears.

I’ve been a big fan of Sean Byrd for years, I still have his demo from 10 years ago somewhere stored away, his new work drew me in like never before, this is IDM at its best state when hazy emotional tones meet puttering heavy kicks, really beautiful.

Came across Grain Mountain on soundcloud randomly, felt like a nice release after digging thru over 100 tracks of nothing from all over the place. It definitely will appeal to the Balam Acab lovers.

Teeel’s new blog I Heart Synths hosts a nice collection of vintage and modern synth paraphernalia. The latest post even features some shots from my own studio.

I Heart Synths

Model of the 1962 Republic Apollo LEM proposal. Loving the type on this. The bottom two images are concepts by competing manufacturers.

On July 25, 1962, NASA invited 11 firms to submit proposals for the LEM. Of the 11 invited, 9 submitted proposals. The firms that submitted proposals were Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, Ling-Temco-Vought, Grumman, Douglas, General Dynamics, Republic, and Martin Marietta. Grumman was the winner. This model is owned by the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Long Island NY.

Via Pcarsola

The February ISO50 Newsletter is out! Check it out here and sign up to automatically receive future editions here.

nickspud – Nick captures gorgeous clean shots that have a lot of natural details.

oyshal – Always light on the filtering and captures Norway beautifully.

thomas_lloyd – Nice saturations and layering, I see some good ideas brewing.

This should be a treat for the blog readers that love Mux Mool who remixed Tycho’s From Home. We have the full album stream below of his follow up to his debut LP Skulltaste. I’d head over and pick up the limited to 100 white vinyl at the Ghostly Store.

I’ve been having a good deal of fun editing on my iPhone lately and its even spilled over into some of my design work. I recently discovered a great little app called Grid Lens (well worth checking out), and created a custom grid for myself of skinny columns (Some inspiration from this painting) and took a sequence of photos of a white wall… It turned out like this (see image above).

I figured I was onto something and brought it into Image Blender (another invaluable app) and started layering it. First horizontally and then diagonally. I ended up with this:

This got me pretty excited, especially because it started with a photo of a white wall… I then layered it over another photo that I mirrored for more symmetry and ended up with this:

I find accidental creativity to be some of the most exciting, especially when it comes together quickly, when you almost cant keep up with it.

A few more examples of the same technique:

I am working on a logo right now and I figured this is great application to try out this same technique. I did it all in illustrator but the inspiration came from a $2 app.

Tools that fit in my pocket fit much better into my life.

All images by Seth Hardie
Find me on Instagram here: @hallwood

Explorers of Tomorrow is the title of the first book project I completed at the Academy of Art University in Spring 2009. Up to this point our projects consisted of posters and small printed materials, so this was the first time we were pushed to develop a consistent visual language and extend it across multiple pages. The assignment was to take a subject of interest, research its future 10 years from the present, and display our findings in a book.

Growing up, one of my favorite books was Automobiles of the Future by Irwin Stambler. Written in the 60s, it imagined the automobile in the 80s, 90s, and even the new millenium. The book was a window to a strange parallel dimension, where everything inside was a streamlined, pastel version of reality. Its pages held promise, for the future of automobiles was about more than spark plugs and oil filters, it was the story of man’s struggle to better himself. At the same time, it was very naive and simplified the world of tomorrow to a utopia that answered all of the problems facing their society. It never considered the possibility that the future would have its own set of obstacles to overcome. But that was its biggest appeal to me, to see the ways our society had advanced so far from their wildest dreams, yet fallen short on its fundamental ideals.

Space exploration has always been a fascination of mine. With that in mind I began to think about our future. 2019 will mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 flight, and I thought it would be interesting to look at the future of space exploration 10 years from the present, but from the perspective of writers in the past. Specifically, I wanted to look at how a society that had just landed on the moon would view space travel in the future: how would our idea of 2019 compare to a society’s that looked to the stars for answers?

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Warp Records’ Clark comes with a beautiful ballad named Com Touch, pretty much a synth journey that bubbles and grows into a classic for all the early lovers of IDM.

RxGibbs puts together a high gliding dreambeat piece for those who would want a gentle version of early Kompakt ala MFA.

The new Memoryhouse tracks keep coming which means the LP isn’t far from release date, the production is far from buried or lo-fi and much more glossy, I can see this becoming big this duo.

I did a rework of one of my favorite Warm Ghost tracks, plus testing out the new HTML5 on Soundcloud player below, looks pretty amazing.