David Emery OnlineGod Help The Girl
The new project from Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, which we launched yesterday. Contains my first use of the new CSS 3 ‘column-count’ property to have multiple columns of text, which was so crazy easy (and degrades nicely to one column in IE) that I’m probably going to use it all over the place now…
Visit ➔Celebration Electric Tarot
We as Celebration, have felt the continual growth of web culture’s need for barrier-free exchange. We also feel that the traditional methods of releasing music have put too much distance between us. As we see it, the current music business model is crumbling. The birth of the MP3 has dreampt the death of the CD, and so all across the board Cd sales have dropped. What has given way is something so magical and evolutionary, that we have only begun to understand the cultural impact of this sharing. So, past the piles of broken CD cases and badly scratched, polycarbonate, rainbow discs, there lies a fantastic world of freedom—freedom to share instantly with little or no impact on the evironment, in a seemingly infinite, eternal and virtually cost free universe of the World Wide Web. This is our emancipation. Without the need for manufacturing CDs and the danse macabre of the promotional corporate machine, we can be free to release our music when and how we want—no waiting. we know nothing of the marketing world and don’t care about the vampires anymore.
Our plan and experiment is to post new songs monthly, as we create and record them. Under the creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike license, all of our new music will be free to download on our new website. When we have enough music for an album, we will release it on vinyl for those who want to have something to hold. As artists we can only stand for our music, our art, our creation. So here it is—laid bare.
Good luck to them – I’m a big fan. If you have the means, making your music free like this could have some interesting repercussions artistically (free of the shackles of the album format, ‘hit singles’ and the like).
Visit ➔Department of Eagles - No One Does It Like You
A simply lovely video for one of the best tracks of last year.
I particularly like the singing ghosts:
Visit ➔The Dead Weather - Hand You From The Heavens
Jack White + Alison Mosshart (from The Kills) – it sounds as good as you might think it would.
More information here: http://www.thedeadweather.com/
And you can buy the track on iTunes as well: http://tinyurl.com/deadweatheritunes
The Dead Weather – Hand You From The Heavens
Visit ➔Pitchfork Redesigns
Obviously nicer then their previous old-school design, but it’s all a little generic, isn’t it? Take away the logo and you’d have no clue that it’s Pitchfork – it looks like a slightly inferior Drowned In Sound.
Also, they’ve taken the nicely designed pitchfork.tv and genericised that too, taking their embeded video player – which was my favourite embeded video player, due to its simplicity (yes, I have favourite embeded video players…) – and ruining it in the process (it even autoplays if you embed it!). Oh well…
Visit ➔"I never felt magic crazy as this..."
I spent a large chunk of Tuesday in a car with a friend driving up to Manchester. He and I were at the University there in the 80s and we were driving up to spec out a project for later this year. He’s a record exec (of course! which of your so-called friends aren’t? I hear you crow). His job requires him to be constantly in contact with people who work with and for him and so I sat in the passenger listening to his speakerphone conversations: lawyers telling him how he was “their guy” and how and they honestly wanted to sign to him, American executives telling him how genuinely excited about their projects they were , new employees telling him how sincerely they were looking forward to their job… It was a veritable sea of love and sincerity. It reminded of my A&R days and how so much of what got people out of bed depended on passion.
Not linked to for any massive ‘point’ that it makes, but because it’s just a nice read.
Also, I feel duty bound to point out that Adele isn’t on a major, and doesn’t have wads of cash behind her (well, she does now but that’s because she’s earned it).
Visit ➔