Warp Films: All Tomorrow’s Parties




Warp Films has done it again with a great film on All Tomorrow’s Parties, below are the first 10 minutes of the film and also its available on Warp’s new Download Store, i’m really digging the live footage of The Battles and Belle & Sebastian.

All Tomorrow’s Parties (Opening 10 Minutes) from All Tomorrow's Parties on Vimeo.

OCZ Z-Drive R2: 1.4GB/s



You may have noticed that I’ve posted quite a bit on the subject of SSD drives over the past couple years. The speed this technology can afford has the potential to finally set us free as artists so that we can focus on our work and not beach balls and hourglasses. The main bottleneck of modern computers is the hard disk drive, which has inexplicably been frozen in time at speeds which have remained constant almost as long as I can remember. Remove this bottleneck and a whole new world opens up.

The problem with SSD so far is it’s failure to truly deliver on it’s promises of speed. Sure, 250MB/s is fast, but only marginally quicker than a standard HDD. So I was excited to see the announcement from OCZ that a new version of their Z-Drive, the “R2” is due out soon.

The original Z-Drive was somewhat of a disappointment but — at least from the specs on this one — they seem to have learned some lessons from that initial attempt. The new model sports an 8 way RAID 0 setup (basically like 8 SSD drives in RAID 0 on a hardware controller — beats the heck out of my setup) — and speeds around 1.4GB/s. In case you didn’t read that correctly: 1.4GB/s. Insane speeds. And that’s both ways, read and write.

Imagine having this thing set up as your Photoshop swap drive (or, as the Engadget article suggests, editing raw 1080p footage in real time). In PS, I’d imagine you could tear through 24×36″ @ 300dpi with hardly a delay. And at 2TB (the largest possibly configuration), the Z-Drive is truly massive for an SSD. You could fit your entire OS and your data on there for quick file open/saves. And with 1.4GB/s of overhead, I wouldn’t think twice about using the drive as my OS and swap at the same time.

Now for the price (which hasn’t been announced yet): expect ridiculous. The original model ranged from $1500-$2700 and I don’t see this one coming too far down from that. But for performance like this, you have to pay. And when you consider the potential cost of eight SSD drives totaling 2TB and a hardware RAID controller the Z-Drive starts to sound a bit more affordable.

OCZ Product page
Further reading at Engadget & Hot Hardware

Holger Schilling’s photos of lost regimes





A nice collection of old train stations in East Germany by Holger Schilling, I always love this kind of material documented, also I like to search for the slight detail of where they add bright color to the building like a red roof or a aqua pole thats among mostly manila colored walls.

Take + Sun Araw + Moodymann + SBTRKT


And you thought Real Estate was chill(wave) for summer lazy days? try a bit of Sun Araw, its makes falling asleep fishing on a calm pond sound like a monster truck rally.

Take does a nice edit of the classic Fall In Love by Slum Village, short n sweet.

More from Detroit, Moodymann isn’t really a blog musician, I like to imagine him as vinyl only and buying his stuff strictly from his site. He has stuck to his sound and might be one of the more pure musicians out there, enjoy this one, its dirty.

A new EP from Sbtrkt this week, one of the few artists i’ve found out thru just direct emails and him posting comments on the blog. 2020 seems to be maybe a new direction for the whole dub sound, its more straight forward like early Detroit House, if that’s whats happening then i’m really excited for things to come.

Science and Tech





A few selections from the artwork portion of these Science and Technology adverts. I often like the text layouts on these old advertisements, but in these cases it was the artwork that caught my attention. I see a little Matthew Lyons in that first one. Be sure to check out the rest of the set.

via Ministry of Type

Free Tracks by Tycho + Mux Mool + Shigeto


Ghostly International has a new compilation coming out next week called Horizon Line which is a collection of classics and ten new, forthcoming, and unreleased songs. The tracklist includes these 2 FREE songs from Tycho and Mux Mool which Ghostly is giving away here. This will also be available in a 2xCD format inserted into a DVD-style case in May 2010, so enjoy the digital but the CD will definitely be a nice piece to have.

DOWNLOAD (right click and save):
FREE – Tycho – Adrift (Shigeto‘s Adrift A Dream Mix)
FREE – Mux Mool – Wolf Tone Symphony (Paul White Remix)
FREE – Mux Mool – Morning Strut (Shigeto‘s wakenbake edit)


As for the Morning Strut remix by Shigeto, it was offered today in the Ghostly newsletter which also included this great 1 minute video of Mux Mool being interviewed, I love the part about them asking if he has health insurance, I wish more musicians did shorts like these.

Sulki & Min





I am very excited about the work of Sulki & Min. I saw these on but does it float this morning and they jump-started my mind. I’ve been in a bit of a creative funk recently and these posters were just what I needed to get excited about design again. I’m not exactly sure what specifically it was, though I suspect the type lockup in the top right quadrant of the 2nd poster down may have had something to do with it.

I also love the subtle details in the first poster — the line weight of the circle around the D, the differences between the two fours — simple yes, but boring no. (I’m sure some may disagree with me on this, but I can’t help but admire the restraint/confidence it takes to call a poster like this finished.)

Sulki and Min are Korean designers who both got their MFA in design from Yale. They have an astonishing body of work and have been exhibited many times. I am also a big fan of a few of their typefaces designs.

via bdif

Modern Analog Consoles


Neve 5088


Speck LiLo


Wunderbar Console


API 1608


Toft ATB Series


All I’ve ever wanted was an analog desk. Since I started recording it was my goal to someday have a 24 track analog mixer to work with. I’m still not there yet, but the stuff you see above keeps me dreaming. These are some examples of a new type of analog console that a few boutique manufacturers have been releasing in recent years. Most are compact, relatively inexpensive ($30-40k instead of $500k+) analog consoles. They tend to be scaled down versions of classic large format consoles from the pre-digital age (the Toft ATB, for example, is a mini Trident, which was also designed by Malcolm Toft)

As a designer I find myself obsessing over the visual aspects of my musical equipment. Sometimes I wonder which I love most, how the machines look, or what they do. While I do think these newer machines are beautiful, I miss the old style interfaces which have shifted quite a bit from their original forms (see an example of an older Neve below).

Neve 5315


This got me thinking about how little these machines have changed over the years and how I dislike even the most minor of those changes. I’m always amazed at how a subtle order has emerged over the years in pro audio interface design. It’s sort of like the mouse on PCs; the metaphors and interaction models have remained essential unchanged since inception yet no one seems to mind. I guess it’s a testament to how thoughtful the designers who pioneered these systems really were. Either that or we’re just slaves to habit.

At any rate, it’s all just fun to think about. The reality is that I don’t really need a desk like this. I’m rarely recording more than two tracks at a time so I have four channels of Neve clones and a patchbay — it sort of acts like a modular 4-track console (minus the faders and cool meter bridge). The only thing these would really come in handy for would be as a summing bus during mixdown and I have places I can get that done (although I do prefer having everything in-house).

800Beloved+Nice Nice+Efdemin+Bell Hollow


800Beloved‘s sophomore LP Everything Purple has matured leaps and bounds when it comes to an album flowing as a whole, Bouquet the debut album had many great tracks that I still listen to today yet didn’t have the tracklist that this LP(stream it in full here) has. As a constant listener of new post rock I feel like this LP has more depth than most these days with Sean Lynch literally living the lifestyle of what this album sounds like. I’ve been to his place each item you pick up has some kind of meaning and ties into this record somehow from his 14th Century Transylvanian casket in the living room to the J Crew catalog on the coffee table. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

If someone came up to me and told me: “I made this record and it sounds like about 100 instruments are looping” i’d be skeptical to think the album was any good but Warp‘s new signing Nice Nice makes it happen and makes it sound like its easy to do. Beautiful rhythms make this song one of kind and never do I feel like the song is out of their hands, super impressed with this.

Ever since I started making 4/4 material as early as 2002 I always wanted to make a song that gave off the same feeling like this Efdemin track. The key moment is the signature tone at 1:03, when it drops in you know its a Dial record, the air becomes warm around you and you’ve distanced yourself from everything in your peripheral vision, well at least that’s what its like for me.

Have you ever wanted a post rock song instrumental? well I think this Bell Hollow would be on my list, I just don’t know what to enjoy about the vocals yet the guitars and synth is really on point so I keep listening.

Joakim Faxvaag





Joakim Faxvaag is a Norwegian lighting designer and visualist. He’s been traveling with Phoenix for the past year while constantly evolving the visual aspects of their shows. Joakim is using (among other things) the excellent modular video app VDMX — the same software that I use for visuals during the Tycho shows. To see what he’s been able to do with it is inspiring to say the least.

He lists his setup as follows: “custom quartz patches, 15000 ansi front projector, 6 x dl.2s, 6 x mac 700s, 10 x mac 2000s, 6 x atomics, mac pro running vdmx, kineme artdmx + grandma fullsize ++”. You can see some more examples at Joakim’s site.