David Emery OnlineNew Julian Casablancas - "11th Dimension"
It’s a lot better then I thought it would be – Strokes + electronica + Ratatat + pop = goodness:
Visit ➔Vampire Weekend - Contra
File under “what I did today”. Also, check out what happens when you resize…
Visit ➔Girls - Album
You can now listen to one of the best debut albums for quite a while via this handy SoundCloud-based player:
Visit ➔Gil Scott-Heron
In early 2010 Gil Scott-Heron will release a brand new album entitled ‘I’m New Here’ […] Here are four excerpts from his first album of new material since 1997; ‘A.M.’, ‘I’m New Here’, ‘Me And The Devil’ and ‘I’ll Take Care Of You’.
We’ve just launched this little site and I’m really happy with the way it turned out; nothing too crazy, just trying to sweat the details and make it right.
Visit ➔Google News: A Payment System and A New Search Bar
Google is developing a micropayment platform that will be “available to both Google and non-Google properties within the next year,” according to a document the company submitted to the Newspaper Association of America.
A Google Checkout powered micropayment system could be really quite interesting – not many people have the scale, infrastructure and reach to (finally) make micropayments work, but Google certainly could.
Visit ➔Sche-dual
I find it slightly amusing that several marketing departments around the world decided that, purely because of the aesthetically pleasing date, today was the day to announce and/or sell new things. Which of course possibly made today the worst day to announce anything without getting lost in all the noise, although maybe if you had techie news that needed burying that might be quite useful…
First dibs of course went The Beatles, who somehow managed to coax some more interest over selling some albums that everyone already has. Oh, and a videogame. Big whoop. I have nothing against the Beatles; in fact, they probably have the best back catalogue out of pretty much anyone but I know that because I already have the albums already.
Of course, potentially of more interest is the now annual Apple ‘stuff we want you to buy at christmas’ event. This always used to focus heavily on iPods but since the iPhone came along and made that party look pedestrian the September event seems to be sliding in a more ‘software’ direction.
By ‘software’ I of course mean ‘iTunes’, and this year round we got a fairly substantial update. I can’t quite be arsed (‘This word cannot be...
Read more ➔It’s Only Rock and Roll Event Prelude
So my guess is that Cocktail is going to be like a sort of next-generation Dashboard.
I’m thinking (and hoping) the same thing. Not exactly sold on the idea of an iTunes rewrite based on WebKit though – Apple have shown they can write cross platform Cocoa-based apps with Safari, so why wouldn’t they do the same thing with the inevitable Cocoa re-write of iTunes?
Oh, and put me in the ‘Beatles will be on iTunes’ camp – why else would they be doing the event today (Wednesday) as opposed to the more traditional – for Apple -Tuesday?
Visit ➔Dithering: Jonny Greenwood
SASHA FRERE-JONES: Is the MP3 a satisfactory medium for your music?
JONNY GREENWOOD: They sound fine to me. They can even put a helpful crunchiness onto some recordings. We listened to a lot of nineties hip-hop during our last album, all as MP3s, all via AirTunes. They sounded great, even with all that technology in the way. MP3s might not compare that well to a CD recording of, say, string quartets, but then, that’s not really their point.
Exactly.
This is probably the moment I gleefully point out I’ve never used a record player…
Visit ➔Leica M9 and X1 leak out ahead of schedule
We’re told the M9 will sport a full-frame 18.2 megapixel sensor and improved low-light performance, but the real surprise is the X1, pictured above, which’ll supposedly have a 12 megapixel APS-C sensor, a fixed 24mm lens and that funky grip handle, by which we’re oddly fascinated.
The X1 sounds really interesting – a decent sized sensor, auto focus and a nice fixed lens sounds perfect to me. The M9, with a full frame sensor and hence hopefully low noise, is what I will lust for until they bring out a M10 – I will forever want a digital Leica…
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