TIL that director Gary Hustwit - of Helvetica, Objectified, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart - has a new documentary on Eno. Suffice to say, I'm quite intrigued. Brian Eno has done so much in the last fifty years, it will be a helluva feat to see how Hustwit weaves it all together.
I have one complaint about the portfolio of Nada Hayek - I want to see the images bigger! Way bigger! There is a stunning combo of striking simplicity and minute detail that makes you want to pore over each and every one.
If you're clever, you can do a little manipulation on the URL images to achieve those goals.
Obviously I'm kidding about the complaints. There are none to be had. This work is wonderful. I randomly stumbled across it from this Fake Fruit album cover and quickly discovered there are manyothercovers to appreciate. Follow them on Instagram @sloppyjohansson.
You know that thing that happens when you click on a YouTube video and then YouTube assumes everything else you want to see is exactly that same topic? Well, that happened to me with Ween recently and YouTube has, correctly, offered me a bounty of goods.
I was reminiscing about this public access performance of "Buckingham Green" - possibly the greatest (presumably coked out) performance of the band - which led to this performance of "The Final Alarm", a song they only play live that absolutely crushes here.
From there, I was led to Easy Listening Ween, a compilation of b-sides, rarities and high quality live tracks that capture the gentler side of Ween. Unfortunately, Volume 1 and 2 are blocked entirely on YouTube (tho you can see Vol 1 on Vimeo) but Volume 3 is a real treat!
May this unlock a Ween rabbit hole for you as well. Enjoy.
Big round of applause for this Ilithios video "How We've Faded." It's hard to pull off an engaging music video in 2024, much less one that uses a single simple trick - backwards footage. Others have done it but that doesn't make it any less fun to watch. I wonder how many times he practiced walking that path backwards before they filmed it?
I don't recall where I ran across this but it's a fun one. The story goes: back in 1978, Stewart Copeland of The Police had written a song that Sting was having trouble connecting with. So, instead of scrapping it, Copeland recorded it with himself singing lead and released it under the pseudonym Klark Kent so as not to detract from any attention The Police was receiving. The track got traction and the "band" was invited to perform on Top of the Pops. Since the band was really just The Police, they all wore masks to hide their identities. Copeland's singing was too muffled, so he ditched the disguise and wore face paint instead. This pretty much gave away the secret of the band, tho Copeland denied his involvement for a number of years.
Most surprisingly, there's a Deluxe Edition of the Klark Kent material with 30 tracks of odds and ends. Quite a side project!
It's always an interesting case study when a giant company spends a year and a half developing a typeface. More details on the undertaking are here but really just watch the great promo video.
This 1984 animated short Jumping is bonkers. Creativity aside - of which there is plenty - the skill and time to illustrate these animations is hard to imagine. Forty years later, this would all be done in a computer with models and shading but in 1984 Osamu Tezuka did not have that option.
Take the 6 and a half minutes to watch the short and then take a spin through the Tezuka Wikipedia - he is considered the godfather of anime and by the time he made this short, he'd been working with manga and animation for nearly forty years. His career started at the age of 17 in 1946. If my napkin math is correct, that means Jumping was created around the time he was in his mid-50s. Sadly, he passed just a few years later. His last words to his nurse were "I'm begging you, let me work!"
I'm a big fan of Zookin general and this latest EP, Cicada Cymphonie, is trippy offering fueled by everyone's favorite bug-eyed buddies. The presence of the Cicada song isn't used in an obvious way but it's definitely in there - manipulated and running through each composition. It's a damn good listen.
A few weeks ago I posted about my continued fascination with Toynbee Tiles, even after thirteen years! The impetus for my latest renewed vigor is that I was asked to be a guest on the Dizzy Spell podcast to talk about the phenomena. Today, the episode is released!
I am very happy with how it turned out and hope that you'll give it a whirl. Despite the tiles being a primarily visual happening, the story behind them plays well in the podcast format.
It's on their website, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Overcast and anywhere else you listen to these sort of things - including the embed above! Smack that play button, enjoy!
If you're a long time reader of the site, you may recall that I built a site in 2009 for an endeavor called "Lake Fever Sessions." Some friends of mine ran a recording studio called "Lake Fever Productions" and some other acquaintances had a video production house called "Tugboat Productions" - together, they captured performances from a number of different bands and I helped get them on a nice looking site under the Lake Fever Sessions name.
While doing promotion for The FeaturesSome Kind of Salvation LP that I reissued, I ended up posting some in-studio performances from their LFS session and realized it might be a fun challenge to revive the site. The recordings were all still on Vimeo, they were just kind of languishing there.
So, I unearthed an old Dropbox folder of PHP files for the site and got to renovating. The database that powered the site is long gone but the internet archive had all the missing pieces I needed. Many of the techniques used for web development in 2009 are unnecessary now (anyone remember sIFR?), so I modernized where I could. The site is responsive now and uses iframes for video, not objects. Other than that, I tried to leave it alone as a testament to what was.
It was a fun exercise but I hope people do take the time to actually watch the sessions. There are loads of local Nashville bands on there that probably have less broad appeal but sessions from St. Vincent, Cursive, Travis, Brendan Benson, Those Darlins, Sondre Lerche and more should appeal to plenty.
posted TWELVE YEARS AGO - a trailer for a Cicada fueled sci-fi series. It looks like a cross between Starship Troopers and backyard fun. Maybe with the return of the creatures they can finish it
