DDR Design – East German Design from 1949 – 1989.
Taschen most of the time never fails, I could probably close my eyes and grab a book by them at random and find something fascinating to look at. The products here are a showcase of consumer products from East Germany during this period in time. The simple shape and color schemes make today’s consumer product designs look like gimmick covered nonsense in my opinion.
Not to be bias but i’ve listened to plenty of Radiohead “Reckoner” remixes in the last few weeks and this Mux Mool one is the by far the best. You can put it up next to anyone’s even the Flying Lotus and Diplo ones, here it is for free, let me know what you think and if you’re a YTMND fan then you should listen to it this way.
The last few days i’ve had Label owner/musician Peter Kersten(aka Sten or Lawrence) stay at my place and we’ve shared a lot of videos and music back and forth until the early mornings. He has a couple of beautiful releases out this month on Dial and Spectral Sound, this Divided song is out tomorrow, it is by far one of my favorites, if you like any of the softer melodic 4/4 songs i’ve posted then this is a must have.
Kompakt’s Mikkel Metal has his own genre I believe, he puts out these dark shuffle songs that just keep me entranced until the last note and its accompanied by some really nice hints of vocals.
I don’t know much about this Paul Lansky track besides reading somewhere that Radiohead sampled him and this track isn’t for everyone but if you can get in the mindset and take on 9 mins of this then by all mean do it, I think its rewarding in a way and enjoyable.
Last but not least Peter showed me this Werner Herzog footage from “The Great Ecstasy Of The Sculptor Steiner” its the opening scene, I will be hunting this video down, the camera shots and color are breathtaking.
I designed the ROOST line of snowboards for Forum and will be giving one away this holiday season. Just purchase anything from the ISO50 Shop between now and January 31st and you’ll be entered to win. The board in question is the Forum ROOST Devun Walsh 161 pro model with all the upgrades. If you win and would prefer a women’s size you can trade it out for an ISO50-designed K2 Solace (women’s). You can also choose to have the board signed or unsigned. All the details are over here. Good luck!
There’s a little something for everyone here today. Rough Trade Records picked up a lovely group from Los Angeles called Little Joy which I heard about from a girl that I met while selling merch at the M83/School Of Seven Bells show.
As for some deep house this Rene Breitbarth track is tip! let it simmer for a bit and golden up, by far my favorite track to play out right now.
If you have been diggin’ the latest Gas box set or The Sight Below then Yagya is a definite good addition to your collection, it keeps you on course and will take you into winter all warm and cozy.
I guess Thom Yorke remixed himself and it didn’t come out that bad, i’ve been playing on repeat while I work and it made me revisit The Eraser LP which was good because so many people trashed that LP and I thought if it was anyone but Thom Yorke making that LP it would put that person on top of the indie world.
Life Magazine and Google have partnered to make over 10 million photos from the Time/Life archive available online. The images are searchable and all available at pretty good resolutions. (Athough probably not quite big enough for print) You could have some fun lifting textures and elements for web stuff I’d bet, the quality is more than enough for the screen. What’s even crazier than scanning 10 million photos is that apparently 95% of the them have never been seen before. The few I posted above were just from a couple minutes of random searching, I can’t imagine what you could turn up with a little effort. Check it all out over at Google Images’ Life Archive page.
There are 3 new T-Shirt designs now available at the ISO50 shop. “77” Cream / Royal is printed on American Apparel 100% Cotton and comes in all Men’s and Women’s sizes. The two Tycho shirts are new typo / colorways of the original “Tycho Avian” shirts which have been out of print since last year. “Tycho Avian” Cream / Brown is printed on American Apparel 100% Cotton and “Tycho Avian” Black / Aqua-Grey is printed on American Apparel 50/50 Cotton/Poly. Each are available in all sizes, M/W. I’ll bee officially releasing these through the newsletter on Monday but I thought I’d post them up here so the blog readers could get a crack at them first. The product images at the shop page are temporary, I’ll try to get some close-ups and alternate angles posted up tomorrow. Enjoy!
On a side note, I can’t seem to get enough of Trade Gothic Bold Extended lately (the face used on the Tycho shirts above). I’m currently redesigning the interface of the shop and laid most of it out in TG with headers being Extended. For those in San Francisco: There’s an old California Savings (closed) on 16th & Mission (across from BART) with a very cool sign that looks a lot like TG Bold Ext. Has anyone seen that? Is it TG? It’s for sale so they’ll probably redo the exterior, I’ll try to walk over tomorrow and get a couple shots before that happens. Probably not a big rush though, 16th & Mission isn’t exactly hot property.
There’s plenty of music that really hits that sweet spot when it comes to analog synthesizers playing melodies. I wonder why it gives so many people such nostalgia though? We all weren’t watching the same children’s show were we? When our parents showed us old photos there wasn’t a button that made the photo play Geogaddi like some musical greeting card. I think I have narrowed it down to the show Nova, TV commercials, and the speaker quality of shopping markets playing 80s muzak. You all know Christ (The 3rd member of Boards of Canada that left after the Twoism album) and of course Boards of Canada (the Fonec track posted is from the album Closes Vol.1 EP) but I have found 2 young musicians that really caught my ear Minnesota’s Boreal Network and UK’s JC Harnell both are notable talents and carry on the torch properly of that sound in my opinion.
Ok, chalk this one up as random-camp-kitsch, but I just couldn’t resist posting. Pedro Oliveira sent this link in response to my assertion that “everything was cooler in 70’s Sweden” in the Vint post. As the images above make painfully clear, that certainly was not always the case. As infinitely lame as most of the stylistic choices going in in these photos are, some of the typography isn’t half bad. I don’t know what they were eating in Sweden back in those days, but this is one unhealthy looking bunch of people, Toreson look like they hid out in an ice cave for 3 years before taking their big promo shot. Which is probably what really happened, they then emerged from the cave, decided on Cooper Black and the rest is history. There are a lot more over here.
After I posted about the Poladroid app some people were asking about a Lomo version of the concept. My friend Erik Pettersson has released a set of photo processing apps for the iPhone which give your digital shots that vintage warmth. There’s a Vint Red, Green and B&W plugin, each treating the colors a bit differently. My favorite is the Green, it definitely gives you that low ISO Lomo feel complete with vignetting. More examples are available on Erik’s Flickr.You can download the Vint plugins from the iTunes store or on your iPhone, one is free, the other two are $1 each.
Erik also sent the photo below he says he found at his parent’s house and which was the inspiration for the plugins. Everything looked cooler in the 70’s in Sweden.
I have been meaning to get a watch, lately I kept searching for the older gold Casio watches with the calculator on them but then I took the search a little more serious and narrowed it down to 2 brands NOOKA and VOID. First off this pretty much is a aesthetic competition in my opinion since not many people buy watches at this price range are looking for a Rolex plus their both digital. Nooka offers an attractive layout with a good amount of information and with a very clear face. Void attracts me because of the color of the digital light, finish, and that VOID font couldn’t of been picked any better with that style of watch. Which one appeals to you more? I think it would interesting to hear what you have to say because when I look at each watch I think their each made for a different kind of person.
Also, had to pick out some decision making music.
[audio:murderer.mp3]