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Toro Y Moi hit the stage at Lollapalooza and most of us weren’t there BUT someone did get great footage of a new track that is absolutely wonderful, I can’t wait for this album if its anywhere near this caliber than we’re all in for one of the best records of 2012.

Clark’s new EP ‘Fantasm Planes’ will be out on vinyl early September, head over to Warp’s site for a free download. This one is really gentle on the ears.

Michna and I have djed a few times together, we would be asked to play “lounge stuff” while people walk into the event. During that time we always joked about djing under the name “Quiet Boys” and set the volume knob to 3 all night. I’m soo happy for him and his new EP, its been almost 4 years since his release and this EP is chock-full of melody and fun, can’t wait for the live show rework.

Our very own(at one point in time ha) Slow Hands has been travelling the world DJing, he’s really becoming a club favorite with his slow disco sets and i’m sure they even get more interesting later and later into the nights in Berlin. He’s about to release on Future Classic with a jam I remember him working on years back, its completely changed and sounds really opened up, soo happy for him.

18 Carat Affair

Kansas City’s Denys Parker has just released a 30 track album under the alias 18 Carat Affair. The album is called Pure Gold and he has a limited of a 100 CDs available here and it comes with the digital download, its a no brainer. I asked him to donate his time and put together a video playlist for the ISO50 readers and he nailed it. I guess the best way to describe it is by taking his definitions and making my own so enjoy this Slow Televised Funk playlist that veers in a few different and excellent directions.

Geneva Jacuzzi “Do I Sad”

Nudimension “Amour Programme”

Alan Vega “Wipeout Beat (Live 1983)”

More videos after the break. (more…)

Here’s a compilation I put together on Ghostly’s behalf for the Freunde von Freunden blog. It’s comprised entirely of Ghostly releases. Honestly it’s not hard to put something like this together, considering the depth of the Ghostly catalog. Endless gems. My three faves from this one are Shigeto’s Ann Arbor Part 1, Tycho’s Melanine, and of course Dabrye’s We’ve Got Commodity. I’ll never forget previewing One/Three on the busted turntables at Kim’s Video in NYC in 2001.

Freunde von Freunden is an online “interview magazine that portrays people of diverse creative and cultural backgrounds in their homes or within their daily working environments.” The latest feature is none other than Ed Templeton and his wife at their home in Los Angeles. Amazing. They have also been running a ‘mixtape’ series for some time, they are now on #29.

Brian from The Ghostly Store made this happen, and this is the second time Sam, Brian and I worked on a compilation together: the first was for Moss in 2006, delivered on a USB stick. (it was the FUTURE)

Le Révélateur and Sabrina Ratté are my favorite audio and visual collaborators since we first saw them on the blog via Beamer. The proper way to see this though is live, they played in Brooklyn and I still wish I brought my camera with me to videotape it and share it with you. Data Daze is forthcoming on cassette on NNA Tapes via the Horizon Fears EP.

Michael Cina and Matthew Dear team up to show some amazing ways to introduce art and an upcoming album to their audience. You just have to watch it yourself.

TEEN on Carpark Records is a 5 piece girl band that has the outlook of bringing back where Stereolab left off with more of a pop sense.

I have no information about this video, absolutely none, and that’s completely fine with me.

If you haven’t seen any Nardwuar interviews then i’d suggest having a few hours to watch a handful, its great seeing the musician reactions to the gifts he gives them.

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Beacon’s rework of this Bear In Heaven single is jaw dropping, it really opens up nicely, early Sade levels going on then blossoms out of the darkness. Download it here.

What a perfect pairing this remix worked out to be, Washed Out should be doing more work like this, its a perfect step in a different direction, so damn impressed.

I hear that Benoît Pioulard has finished an album, I hope its something like this, he has such a good ear for the most delicate adjustments in his sounds, they sit perfectly in the mix like a delicate blow on thin linen curtains.

Only in my dreams I can picture djing to a dancefloor that wants a deep dubbed out techno set, Silent Servant makes the tracks that fulfill that setlist, its that entrancing moment where all the sounds start to align and then you notice the small flutters that are rewarding and I don’t even take any drugs.

With the London 2012 games (along with their controversial branding) in full swing I thought I’d revisit one of my favorite — Olympic or otherwise — branding campaigns ever: that which was created for the 1968 Mexico Olympics. Graphic Ambient has some beautiful images of the work in the real world, some of which I’d never seen before. I definitely have to say that I prefer Otl Aicher’s work for the 72 Munich games; but this has it’s own thing going on and after all it did come first! Related reading: Design Magazine #237 Via Graphic Ambient

Dug thru a few sites to make this Japanese Sci-Fi poster collection bigger, anyone else a sucker for airbrush? seems like it took great concentration and a steady hand that doesn’t offer an eraser really. There’s something really romantic about most of these. I can really respect an artist that can create a terrain off the top of his head.

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A true heap of remixes are raining over this summer, this one from Four Tet who never fails us, I heard he went to school with Hot Chip, is this true? anyway this one is pretty stripped down and direct. Matthew Dear preps his album release by dropping a Poolside remix of his recent single Her Fantasy, the edit is laid back and defines their “daytime disco” personas. Fort Romeau ramps up the tempo on Picture’s debut on Cascine, the dub edit has a hint of more upbeat than i’d expect, definitely feeling house piano. I’m not sure if this Hatchback mix of Grovesnor ever made it to vinyl but its at summer jam level once you get comfortable with Grovesnor voice, its almost reaching this slow electro Rod Stewart feel, thats kind of impressive.

I have been trying to catch The Field live for years I think, sadly this is the closet i’ve gotten, totally love it, I thought I wouldn’t like the drummer but I was dead wrong.

Fiat (Italian Automobile Factory of Turin) released the 131 to little fanfare in 1974. It was aimed at the family demographic, offering sedan, avant, and coupe layout. They were modestly powered and featured nothing truly ground breaking. So why bother featuring it? In all honesty, I think the 131 was one of the better looking economy cars of the day. It nearly stole the 3-series’ thunder, with a very evolved and elegant design for a mid-seventies car. Its proportions are pleasing, it has geometric, minimal shapes between the pillars, and anything with fog lights framed in a boxy fascia, I’m a fanb0i of.

While a lot of the cars I feature in my posts have some sort of tie-in with rally racing, I’m more a fan of european car design from the 70’s and 80’s in general, and in those days the WRC was a cost effective way for carmakers to achieve a global presence in motorsport. BMW has M Sport, Mercedes-Daimlers has AMG, Nissan has NISMO; Fiat’s tuning division was called Abarth. And in 1976, Abarth turned this mellow grocery-getter into one of the last great carbureted, rear-wheel driven rally cars. It took the World Rally Championship 3 times in ’77, ’78, and after a 2 year drought again in 1980, with a total of 18 victories over 5 years.

As good as the road-going model was, the Abarth 131 is truly a work of purpose-built art, everything from the bespoke brake ducts and flared wheel wells to the subtle spoiler lip added to the boot lid puts this particular variant in my top 10 list of best looking cars ever produced. Whenever I look at an E30 M3, I can’t help but think it looks a little sterile compared to the Abarth.

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Really beautiful pixelated looking vases from Phil Cuttance. Now based in London, the New Zealander’s FACETURE series consists of vases, side tables and lightshades, all handmade using his custom FACETURE machine and molds. The reusable molds are made from an extremely thin polypropylene sheet, which when handled, allow him to reshape the form due to the malleability created by his “live hinge” system. The results are that no two objects cast are the same.

In the era of stereo lithography and other 3D printing methods, Phil’s analog workflow is inspiring, and the process seems just as important as the results, which are impressive to say the least. Head over to his site for a more in depth look at the process.

Posted by Rob Fissmer