from the diary of David Vallade
Amazing work from the tumblr of Volume 2a aka Australia designer Simon Bent.
Remember this a few weeks back? Well, they are available to order now if you send a ten pound note in an envelope to:
Matty Skylab c/o The Bootstrap Company, The Print House, 18 Ashwin Street, London, E8 3DL.
.
They are also asking people to include with their order anything related to The Night Sky – Space, Planets, UFO’s, Space travel etc for a mail art project.
Loving the new Martyn album on Brainfeeder, you can listen to a stream of it on their site.
The cover art by Erosie from his ‘Horror vacui’ series’ is exceptional as well.
I think we’ll be seeing more and more of these, this one is Star Wars meets Full Metal Jacket.
Today sees the release of DJ Shadow‘s new album, ‘The Less You Know, The Better’, in case you hadn’t seen all the press and publicity recently. He’s taken a fair bit of knocking these last few years, since ‘The Outsider’ rode into town and divided opinion, with the majority, unfortunately, not in its favour. It had its moments, others were tucked away on B-sides and extras on special editions too, but the mix of Hyphy Hip Hop and indie rock with too few of his usual beat workouts led to a very uneven record that would have worked better as a series of themed EPs in my opinion.
It’s a favourite pastime to build ’em up and knock ’em down in this country, and being a Shadow fan was almost a dirty word for a bit. His involvement in the DJ Hero game probably didn’t help that situation but the appearance of limited handmade records, a series of archive tape compilations via his site and then the Shadowsphere has helped rebuild his profile ready for the new release.
The new record has some great material on it and is a return to form whilst still taking steps outside his comfort zone. ‘Border Crossing’ and ‘I Gotta Rokk’ are as strong as any of his more guitar-led material like ‘The Number Song’ and ‘High Noon’ and ‘I’ve Been Trying’ is an update on tracks like ‘6 Day War’ and ‘This Time’, using a sampled vocal entirely as the voice of the song, a trick he seems to repeat a few times here. One of the highlights of the album is ‘Redeemed’, a female vocal-led number that, on first listen, didn’t do much for me but just gets inside your head. For those that love the Shadow of heavy breaks, spoken word and scratches, there’s plenty of that and we get possibly the first RnB pop ballad(!) in ‘Scale It Back’. The howling Beat poetry in ‘Give Me Back The Nights’ doesn’t quite work for me and, again mystifyingly, several bonus tracks are more worthy of album inclusion in ‘Come On Riding’ and ‘Let’s Get It’. I’d like to know how many get involved in compiling the running order for his records these days as album sequencing is an art in itself.
It’s a shame the UK media has wanted to focus on ‘Endtroducing’ so much in the press surrounding the new album rather than let it stand on its own merits but it has produced a couple of very worthwhile radio shows which you can hear below courtesy of the ever faithful Joost over at Solesides.com. Coupled with his live show, which I saw a few weeks ago, and the self-depreciating artwork by Tony Papesh, it’s a great return to form.
DJ Shadow – THE MUSIC THAT INSPIRED… by Solesides on Mixcloud
I’m always messing around with photography apps on my phone, whether on boring car, train or plane journeys or just capturing artwork I see on my travels. Here’s the best of last months snaps in the order they were taken. Top to bottom, left to right: Kid Koala at Music To Draw To – London, Eurostar window shot, Judge Dredd – Shoreditch, Cept – Village Underground – London, Zombies vs Robots vs Amazons x 2 – Hoxton flyover – London, The Shard – London Bridge, on the way to Gatwick, aircraft window – Gatwick, street scene – Montpelier, spiral staircase – Rockstore backstage – Montpelier, Off World T-shirt – mine, train interior double exposure – Luton, tower block – Elephant & Castle, London.
It was my boys’ birthday last week and Friday saw fourteen 6 year olds descend on a bouncy castle in 23 degree heat. To combat that I had made lollies from an adapted Star Wars ice maker, three flavours, orange, apple and lemon. They tasted even better than they looked.
[singlepic id=3206 w=302 h=233 float=right]
[singlepic id=3207 w=302 h=233 float=right]
Going through a couple of recently acquired Mediascene magazines today from the late 70’s and I was struck by how much more imaginatively designed the headers on some of the articles were. A lot of them riffed off of film or comic logo design of the age but were mini works of art in themselves. I’ve included various shots of comic logos from ads in the mags too.
The Complaints Department from Sculpture on Vimeo.
Beautiful new release by Sculpture – ‘Toad Blinker’ – on Dekorder
Sculpture “Toad Blinker” (Dekorder 058) by Dekorder
Sculpture “Elk Cloner” (Dekorder 058) by Dekorder
Blinker Device from Sculpture on Vimeo.
As mentioned before on this blog, Pepe Deluxé‘s next album – ‘Queen of the Wave’ – is an incredible journey in both audio and fantasy. Details of exactly how much of a journey it has been (and why the record hasn’t appeared yet) are just beginning to emerge with the release date scheduled for early 2012. There’s digging and then there is journeying underground to find sample sources for your record, Pepe went the latter route for one track, ‘In The Cave’.
The main reason for the delay of the record was the duo’s desire to record on the largest instrument in the world, the Great Stalacpipe Organ in the underground caverns of Luray, Virginia, USA. The organ is situated underground in a 14,000 square meter cave where the stalactites have been tuned to concert pitch by oscillators and are then struck by rubber mallets in a complicated set up connected to the organ by over 5 miles of wiring. I’m not making this up, it was conceived in the mid 50’s by mathematician Leland W. Sprinkle after his son banged his head on a stalactite and it rung with a pleasant sound. When Pepe first discovered its existence in 2005 (via the 365 Days project) they found that it had fallen into disrepair and had to be renovated completely, this ended up taking several years but they got the green light in late 2010.
Paul Malmström from PD wrote an original composition for the the organ – the first ever written and recorded for it – and traveled from his home in New York to record it earlier this year. In front of a crowd on onlookers (it was a public holiday so the cavern was open) he managed to record several takes and complete the final piece in the jigsaw for the record, forthcoming on Catskills in January 2012. A single – ‘The Storm’ – is released on October 10th and many things are afoot on the Pepe website and new Facebook page. 2012 is going to be a mighty fine year for music…
(Paul and his giant organ – insert suitable double entendre in the comments please)
DJ Food – ‘The Search Engine’, the promo CD, I can’t quite believe it.
DK and I played an excellent party in Paris last weekend at a night called ‘Excuse my French’, great venue, people and awesome flyers too.
More from the same artist here
I suppose it had to happen sooner or later, better than the actual original posters too. By Olly Moss, riffing off the Olly Moss ideas of the original trilogy.
