Latest Entries
Hipster Youth
Hipster Youth is 19 year old Dubliner Aidan Wall. His debut, Teenage Elders, is a collection of simple bedroom electronic / pop tunes, released digitally and on CDR. There’s only 50 CDRs, and they all come with a poster.
The music doesn’t pretend to be anything it’s not. The arrangements are simple and the sound is an interesting union of lo-fi, fuzz and hip hop. It’s quite clearly a bedroom project but there’s an earnest vibe to it all that makes me really happy. There’s no tongue in cheek here, Aidan’s songs are just catchy, joyful little numbers.
It’s interesting, this kind of thing wouldn’t necessarily catch my eye normally, but I sort of fell in love with the DIY attitude and the simple grace each of the tunes carries with it. Even the silliness doesn’t come forced. Don’t get me wrong, it’s dance music … it’s just completely unaffected. That’s a good thing.
Hipster Youth “Crying Outside Clubs”
Hipster Youth “Things I Should Say”
Mixtape: Academy of Altered Lovers
I’ve been trying to keep up with all the good music that’s out there, and lately I’ve felt somewhat discouraged. I fall behind in my reading but when I catch up, there’s still only a couple of things that really grab me. I don’t blog about new bands that often because I just don’t think I can fake it — I just don’t find 10 bands a day that I think are awesome. If I did, maybe I’d have a super popular mp3 blog. Anyway, I do find lots that I fall in love with, and I always tuck those gems aside to include on mixtapes. So while it’s taken a bit for this latest one, I can assure you it’s full of stuff that I think is entirely worth the listen. I start with my favorite of the bunch, the Nut Brown tune, “I Need a Love Like That.” It’s been the jam in my car for a week. Enjoy the whole mix, and as always please feel free to send your music projects my way — I do love to listen and hear new things, even if once in a while I get grumpy.
Photo by Leon Levinstein.
DOWNLOAD: VA – Academy of Altered Lovers (zip)
01 Nut Brown “I Need a Love Like That”
02 Salem “King Night”
03 Active Child “Weight of the World”
04 The Golden Filter “Moonlight Fantasy”
05 Julian Lynch “Ears”
06 Keep Shelly in Athens “Fokionos Negri Street”
07 CFCF “Big Love” (Mathemagic Remix)
08 Lonski & Classen “At a Push”
09 Candy Claws “Silent Time of Earth”
10 Lands & Peoples “Restless Legs”
11 Arp “White Light”
12 Suckers “Black Sheep”
13 Bushman’s Revenge “Kill Your Jitterbug Darlings”
Cool Tools: Tour:Smart
"There is an unwritten underground contract that strangers in a city honor when they trust and open their hearts, homes, showers, beds, washing machines, and high-speed DSL lines to a beat-down band on the road. To deny that contract, to deny that 5 a.m. conversation, to deny their ability to make a massive difference with a bed, a blanket, a bagel, and a bath is to deny the bond that will reverberate for years afterwards. Maybe part of touring in a band has nothing to do with the music. Maybe it has more to do with meeting people, seeing differences across the country, and discovering their changing attitudes. All you see inside the bus is the changing landscape, the mold growing inside the refrigerator, and the bass player's growing porn collection."Gallagher Is a Paranoid, Right-Wing, Watermelon-Smashing Maniac
Then Gallagher gets going. And fuck. Bremerton is a military town and a conservative one: It's more than just a slide into obscurity that delivered Gallagher to the Admiral rather than, say, the Moore in Seattle. You see, Gallagher is—how best to put this?—a paranoid, delusional, right-wing religious maniac. I HAD NO IDEA.Waste not, want not
" I also do not like hardcore, or fucking Panda Bear, or whiny white dudes, or muffled production. So why would I like something made up entirely of things I don’t like? There is lots of current music I like. It has been a great year! (Some of these things, I hear, are even liked by young people! Should I not like them? Am I appropriating asshole culture?) But then there are things I dislike, sometimes whole swaths of things, and maybe sometimes I feel like I could like these things, were I a different person. But other things would never have been liked by me. And that’s fine! But I think there’s an important difference. The former I try to stay away from because I know why I dislike them and it’s not an interesting thing to discuss. But if I have a sort of systematic criticism of a way of making art that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and talking about, then it would seem to be useful for me to express that."Where I’m At
This week I’m settling into a new full-time position working on content strategy (and a few other things) here in Austin. Posting might be scarce but I’ll return … and I’ve got a couple of mixtapes in the works for next week.
Thanks to everyone stopping by to read the Top 100 List — I had no idea when I started working on it that anyone except me would care. It’s been a real treat talking with everyone, arguing and re-examining albums with you all along the way. Thanks!
Ben Millen’s iPhone Deconstruction
It’s hard not to post every single thing I see on Information is Beautiful, but this one I just can’t pass up. Ben Millen analyzed the infrastructure of the iPhone and the results are beautiful. (Zoom on the images here and here). See all Ben’s work here.
VaultPress: A New Way to Back Up Your WordPress Sites
Here’s something cool. VaultPress is in beta, and offering unique protection for WordPress sites from hosting issues, server errors, and hackers. It’s about $20 / mo. to have complete confidence in your WordPress network of blogs, which seems incredibly reasonable to me. Sign up today.
1: Beatles’ Revolver (1966)
I’m a Beatles girl, I guess. And I’m one of those Beatles girls that doesn’t grow tired of the songs she loves. Sure, White is incredible, and yeah, there’s a lot of incredible stuff out there that the Fab Four are responsible for, but what can I say, this is my favorite. “Eleanor Rigby”, “Taxman” and come on, one of the greatest songs ever, “Tomorrow Never Knows” completely changed the way I listen to music more than once. It’s my favorite song of all time. Besides that, the theme of groups experimenting with different genres comes to full fruition on this one, as it stands as one of the most successful attempts at playing with different sounds ever.
The Beatles “Tomorrow Never Knows”
Autistic Child Tommy Westphall Imagines All of Television
Nicholas W Skyles has created some incredible images to accompany the Tommy Westphall’s Mind theory.
A little back story:
“Tommy Westphall was an autistic child on the TV series St Elsewhere who, it was revealed in the closing moments of the final episode of that series, had dreamt the entire run of the show.”
From there, St. Elsewhere‘s producer, Tom Fontana, took the opportunity to take characters from St. Elsewhere and insert them into new projects. Characters appeared in Homicide: Life on the Streets, Law & Order and The Wire. Soon the web grew even further, and to date, the spreadsheet that keeps track of the connections is almost too large to digest. The connections include references to fictional places, character names, awards, newspapers, cigarette brands, and companies.
So, at some point it begins to look like most of the television world exists in Tommy Westphall’s mind. This might be the best “I dreamt it” series ending ever, considering it continues to live on with such mystery. I recommend Skyles’ illustrations to help simplify the digestion process — it’s pretty complex!
Get The Key, which will walk you through the details of each connection. I was excited to read that the airplane that crashed and strand the cast of LOST was Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 also featured on Diagnosis Murder. There are many more LOST connections (including a cute one that involves Alias
Why You Can’t Get a Date (Here’s the Math)
There is a proven mathematical theorem for why dating and finding a job in a large urban area is difficult and frustrating.
Google has glimpsed the future…and it may be yours
"Terrestrial Radio will have to either get serious about their streaming efforts to level the playing field or abandon these efforts, throw their arms up in the air, and lock themselves in the proverbial cellar as Google and Apple zombies trash the house and pound on the cellar door, pillaging advertisers as they rampage by. Get serious or step aside."
