A couple of weeks ago Ollie Teeba (one half of the mighty Herbaliser) followed myself, DJ Format, Andy Smith and Mr Thing at the Classic Material night in Old St. The year he was helping celebrate was 1991 and, whilst researching records to play for the night, he found he had 17 hours of material!
He ended up playing a 3 hour set and kindly put down over 4 hours for us to enjoy via his new mixcloud page. The next night is on April 16th with Big Ted and the year will be, you’ve guessed it, 1992.
I can’t recommend this enough, a very good read for designers or even people with a just passing interest in design. You don’t have to know your kerning from your baselines to appreciate the information in this great book. Simon Garfield take a humorous, but well researched, look at fonts and typography across the ages, from design giants like Helvetica, Univers and Gill to the underdogs of the lettering community.
Chapters on Comic Sans prove he’s no type snob, a fascinating story about a lost typeface that drowned in the Thames and even a few eye openers will keep you turning the page. Who would have thought Eric Gill was into that? Also the new Olympic font comes in for a good kicking before he’s done.
If you’re a student just starting, a seasoned pro or you just know someone who likes their design but is really hard to buy a present for, this book is for you. I only wish something like this was around when I was in college, it might have saved me from making some of those dodgy font decisions in the past.
With every penny of the proceeds going towards relief in Japan, this exclusive Japanese Defence Emergency Armstrong figure is on sale now for a limited time only. Sorry, it seems no sooner had I posted this, 15 minutes after the sale started, than they had sold out, raising 30,000 USD for relief aid in Japan. Ashley Wood‘s new book ‘Fuck It’ #3 is also just up for sale at the link above though.
[youtube width=”636″ height=”520″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grmxEOawT7w[/youtube]
[youtube width=”636″ height=”480″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRShLb49EhI[/youtube]
“68 years ago Disney has asked Dali to draw a cartoon film which would be an embodiment of idea of surrealism, but turned out it was so unusual to the ordinary spectator that display have closed and have not given to publicity already till 2003.” Thanks to Kelly for the hook up.
In June I’ll be mixing the next installment of the 64 Bar Music challenge, first instigated by members of the Ninja Tune forum. A quick crash course in 64 Bar Music: the concept is simple, a tempo is decided upon for each new challenge and you write a piece of music, in any style, no longer than 64 bars. The poll to decide the bpm for 64:6 (there have been five so far) has just been set at 110 bpm.
Anyone can join in and the best of the entries will be turned into a mix by yours truly, debuting in July. If you fancy a bit of that then hop along to 64BarMusic and check out the details, deadline is June 1st. It’s an excellent way to get your production heard in amongst producers both released and unreleased. People like Dr. Rubberfunk, Proof of Concept, Remdog, Tom Central, dtnl, AGT Rave Cru and DJ Moneyshot have already contributed and there are many excellent unknowns who have taken part in the past.
Nicely done collage of images over the making of 10cc’s best known song.
[youtube width=”636″ height=”478″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq7oGenbp2I[/youtube]
Yes, I know what you’re thinking, Katy Perry, I would too, but…
Aside from the fact that I have a thing for women in black bob haircuts and none other than Noisia have remixed her new single into a dubstep ‘anthem’, check out the font on the cover.
No, really. I don’t know who the designer is but I love some of those letter forms, the K, A and E especially. Shame they had to go and spoil it with the terrible dot matrix font for KanYe, no less than he deserves I suppose.
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The Op Art work by Jean-Pierre Yvaral, the son of Victor Vasarely, three posters from Paris, 2000. This was from one of his final exhibitions whilst he was still alive as he died in 2002. One of the posters is signed.
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Mike Hinge was an illustrator, typographer and graphic designer, born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1931. Early in his illustration career he worked for the largest ad agency in New Zealand before moving to Los Angeles, where he attended the Art Center of the College of Design. In 1966 he moved to Manhattan, where he worked as an art director for several ad agencies. His graphic designs were notable, and his colorful and psychedelic illustrations appeared on numerous science fiction paperback books and magazines during the 1970s, including Analog, Mediascene, Heavy Metal, Fantastic, and Amazing.
Hinge also did design work for 2001: A Space Odyssey and produced illustrations for mainstream publications like Time magazine, including covers featuring Richard Nixon and Emperor Hirohito. He was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist in 1973, plus nominated for 6 Locus awards in the ’70’s. His designs for typefaces and graphics won him several awards and were exhibited, including a show at the Brooklyn Museum. A book about his art The Mike Hinge Experience was published in 1973 and he featured in the 1982 artists anthology The New Visions. He died of a heart attack in 2003 and still remains relatively unknown outside of the sci-fi community, for more info check out Ivan Richards’ Onyx Cube blog for many examples of his original artwork.
[youtube width=”636″ height=”382″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpPVPEoJdb0[/youtube]
Taken from the new Wagon Christ album ‘Toomorrow’, out now on CD, LP and download
The ‘Chunkothy’ video is directed and animated by Celyn Brazier at Nexus with Beccy McCray providing invaluable production skills. Bali Engel helped colour and provided the beautiful animated sequences for the insect loop and fishes. Margot Tsakiri-Scanatovits and Manav Dhir also provided colouring skills and contributed to the animation of the insects. Steve Mc Inerney constructed the final edit with perfect timing and imagination.
The animation was created in Photoshop, with most sequences on one layer. It was as simple as that really. No gimmicks, no tweeny motion tricks, no cgi. Celyn created small beat guides for reference, sometimes following the rhythm, for example on the bouncy ball loops, but mostly as many random patterns and as much weird sh*t that she could possibly make in six weeks.
CREDITS
Celyn Brazier – directing, deigning, colouring, animating
Beccy Mccray – producer
Steve Mcinerney – editor
Bali Engel – colouring, animating
Margot Tsakiri-scanatovits – assistant colouring
Manav Dhir – assistant colouring
News filtered out recently that The Beach Boys‘ (or just Brian Wilson if you’re being picky) original ‘Smile’ album sessions are going to get the deluxe box set treatment. If you don’t know what ‘Smile’ was / is then here’s a good place to start: Smile wiki.
A beautiful record that I’ve been fascinated with for over ten years now and never thought I’d hear finished. I was lucky enough to see it performed live by Brian Wilson and his band for the first time in 2004 – absolutely one of the best concert experiences I’ve ever had.
An interesting article with the engineer on the project, Mark Linett, is here which certainly promises the goods later this year. If your interest is not satisfied by the wiki then Dominic Priore‘s ‘Look, Listen, Vibrate, Smile’ book is excellent.
Cafe Kaput is a label run by Jon Brooks aka The Advisory Circle. He has a new release, to accompany the first D. D. Denham one, both available digitally via Bandcamp, iTunes, Amazon or Boomkat. It’s a radiophonic soundtrack composed specially to accompany Ian Hodgson (Moon Wiring Club)’s recital of ‘The Gateway Of The Monster‘ by William Hope Hodgson for Resonance FM‘s Weird Tale For Winter series.
Gutted I can’t go to this as I’m out of the country, lots of my favourite artists on one bill.
Live sets from Moon Wiring Club and Pye Corner Audio, Ghost Box & Outer Church DJs a screening of Julian House‘s short film Winter Sun Wavelength, Public Information Films, lost television and other odd visuals.
Thursday 14th April 7.30pm – 12.00 midnight
Komedia
Brighton
Tickets £7
www.komedia.co.uk
Box Office: 0845 293 8480
Resident Records: 01273 606 312
Dead Formats T-shirt Series No.3: Compact Audio Cassette by Michael C Place / Build 2003
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The Moebius exhibition in Paris ends this weekend at the Foundation Cartier. I sadly didn’t make it back there but hope it will come to the UK some day. Here are a selection of the films featured on the exhibition site.
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As subtle as a brick, no one’s pretending they don’t know what the ‘M’ stands for, debuts April.
Jim Mahfood and Ziggy Marley with writer, Joe Casey.
[youtube width=”636″ height=”384″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsbNtm8M9j8[/youtube]
New Jersey-based radio station WFMU is completely run by donations, each year they have a week long Marathon to raise money to keep the station operational. Their approach to music and breadth of programming is one of the best in the world. As they are paid for by the listeners they are not accountable to advertisers and the usual daytime radio playlists so many stations are. You can make a pledge and pick up some decent items in the process, I just got this Tim Biskup T-shirt for my troubles but over $75 gets you a handmade ‘DJ Premium‘, an artifact made specially for the marathon, usually a mix compilation of rareties or oddites.
Their Beware of the Blog pages are also crammed with so many audio treats it’s ridiculous. If you don’t know the station then now’s a good time to dive in, I mean, these guys let people like Steinski and Noah Uman have shows!
[vimeo width=”640″ height=”480″]http://www.vimeo.com/20765024[/vimeo]
From the Dangerous Minds site: Melody, a film based on Histoire de Melody Nelson made for French TV, was directed by Jean Christophe Averty with Gainsbourg and his lover Jane Birkin in the lead roles. Amazing.
The Six Ton Armour site hosts ‘Psychcasts’ – psychedelic podcasts – alongside artwork by Rimrimrim. They’ve recently started putting out mixes on CD too and I got a couple of them in the post last week. Beautiful they are too, with screen printed covers that recall some of the Twisted Nerve / Finders Keepers sleeves or Canada’s now defunct Bully label. The mixes are very good, sprawling across the psych realm and digging deep. Definitely worth keeping and eye and ear on for future releases and mixes. Buy these two CDs here… but you can also download the Black Olsun ‘Spells’ mix for free from here…
