Bibio’s Flickr is full of some great subtle saturated personal photos that would make amazing album covers for music of his nature. In a good way Bibio has this wonderful european back country feel to everything to puts his hands on. Seems to me that he spends his day taking photos of friends and surroundings with his Holga and records music onto a 4 track recorder in the forest and only goes home because the sun is going down. It’s like some odd Boards of Canada dream that features the early set of Fred Penner’s Place. Let me know if i’m losing you on the Fred Penner part.

Bibio – Aberriw

Bibio – Looking Through The Facets Of A Plastic Jewel

Bibio – Bewley In Grey

You can find all these tracks either off Bibio’s Fi or Hand Cranked LPs on Mush Records.

Jez Burrows’ expression of ‘Destroyer’s Rubies’ by Destroyer. They’re sold out but you can at least read a bit more about the idea behind them at Jez’s site. Great typography and color. Via FFFFOUND

Some of you that might read McSweeney’s lovely Believer Magazine(which my dad turned me onto) might already have this from last year’s music issue. Zach Condon aka Beirut put together a great track for the magazine which also does the Wolphin DVD series which features greats like Zach Galifianakis and i think David Cross. Venice is alil more lush and slower going than his Beirut music since he strips the track down to only him singing, a hypnotic synth melody, and muted horns. I first heard this track off a mix my DJ partner’s Worst Friend’s did last year and i had to have it by itself, they did an amazing podcast today for Ghostly International which includes Tycho’s The Disconnect. We sometimes see Zach at Macri Park Bar where we DJ at every Wednesday in Brooklyn, i’m always tempted to put the track on.

Zach Condon aka Beirut – Venice

When I was in Toronto I had the good fortune to hear an advance copy of Montreal-based indie outfit Wolf Parade’s forthcoming album, At Mount Zoomer (due out June 17th). Suffices to say, I was very impressed; this will surely be one of my favorite albums of 2008. The track below is a stand-out on the album, but still just the tip of the iceberg. And yes, the cover looks like a 3rd grade class project gone awry, but the colors bring it together and make it somewhat bearable and after all, this is the standard visually ironic fare I would expect from a release like this. As we learned the other day, sometimes a bad album cover can mean great things are hiding on the inside.

Wolf Parade – Soldier’s Grin

[audio:wolfsoldier.mp3]

This post strays a bit from the normal audio / visual fare you might be used to finding here, but whether or not you care about the science behind this film, it’s a visually stunning piece and well worth the 5 minute run time. 

Magnetic Movie is an aptly titled animated short which uses animation to visualize magnetic fields. We can normally only visualize magnetic fields in large scale contexts such as our Sun’s Corona or Earth’s Polar Auroras, so it is very interesting to be able to see the small scale fields that we interact with on a day to day basis. The animations and sound design in this short are superb. Now if we could just control these things maybe we could get a Tokamak working.

Watch Magnetic Movie

"A Semiconductor Film by Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt shot at the NASA Space Sciences Laboratory, UC Berkeley, California"

Last weekend i finally got to hang out with Scott again so with a few hours to spare i drove him to Ann Arbor, MI and on the way got to feel out his music taste beyond what we post on the blog. I remember this track coming up on shuffle among many others and we talked about it for awhile and i think i read somewhere that its one of Boards of Canada’s favorite tracks at one point in time or something of that nature. I would of posted the artwork but i think the true ISO50 fans here would maybe not ever want to see a post from me again just because its a bit on the silly side which isn’t a bad thing. Also, i think the last 2 covers i’ve posted have been beauties so instead i found a great photo of them live on Fujirockers.

Super Furry Animals – Some Things Come from Nothing

Some very nice information design going on in the top example from Ken Garland’s Portfolio.

When I was in grade school the U.S. was trying to convert to the metric system. Obviously, it didn’t quite work out as planned. We used to have metric study sessions for a few years when the conversion attempt was at it’s strongest, but it seemed to sort of lose steam by the time I got to middle school. It’s really a shame; inches suck, and so do quarts. The conversions and units never really make sense, they’re always these arbitrary ratios. Metric is so clean, you can deduce any conversion based solely on the latin prefix and you don’t have to factor in the length of some king’s foot when you’re trying to measure things. But I guess that all goes without saying. Everyone else also have way cooler plugs than us, but that’s a whole other post.

Just a couple examples of the influential work Ken Garland was doing in the 60’s and 70’s. See more at his portfolio. Sorry for the quality on the second one, couldn’t find a large version so I had to scale it up.

Chicago’s Kranky Records is home to the music that soundtracks my day like Loscil, Stars of the Lid, Tim Hecker, and The Dead Texan which i will share in future music posts. In recent years they have gained probably most their popularity from young guys like Deerhunter and Atlas Sound but the one musician songwriting wise that sticks out is Portand’s Benoît Pioulard. The artwork and photography is done by Will Calcutt who is a great photographer out of Los Angeles and probably couldn’t of pushed this artwork in my opinion closer to perfection for this album. Hopefully this hits the spot to carry you into the weekend.

Benoît Pioulard – Ash In The Sky

Event poster for 50 Exhibition via Blanka Supersize.