David Emery OnlinePassion Pit - Sleepyhead
The current big blog buzz band - definitely worth a listen. From http://pastaprima.net/?p=979 via hypem.comPassion Pit - Sleepyhead Visit ➔
Out East
This is a little bit late – blame the much needed holiday I’ve just taken – but a couple of weeks ago was the inaugural Concrete and Glass festival, which took place in a range of venues across East London.
It was a resounding success – no mean feat for a festival in its first year, it must be said. Unlike most similar events – think SXSW, Great Escape and Camden Crawl – as well as the music component there’s the art side as well, with a whole host of galleries and artist participating. I had a mild sense of trepidation about the art contingent – was it going to be poncy, bad art? – but what I saw was really quite impressive, especially the main ‘Heart of Glass’ show in Shoreditch Town Hall basement which contained a whole variety of delights.
However, that’s not to say that the music side was in anyway inferior – it was definitely the best ‘city’ festival line-up I’ve seen this year, packing an extremely varied collection of musicians. From people you’ve not heard of (but worth hearing) to something utterly odd (but extremely enjoyable) finishing with something you already love it pretty much...
Read more ➔Foals - Super Unuit (Holy Fuck Cover)
From http://www.likesounds.com/2008/10/13/foals-holy-fuck-covers/ (via hypem.com)Foals - Super Unuit (Holy Fuck Cover) Visit ➔
Huffduffer
Using the service is pretty straightforward. First of all, you have to sign up. No, I haven’t implemented OpenID support. Sorry. I hope to get around to it at some stage.
Secondly, you find MP3 files out there on the web. Using either a bookmarklet, or a form on the site itself, you “huffduff” the file: give it a title, description, and tags.
That’s pretty much it. People can subscribe to your podcast and you can subscribe to other people’s podcasts. You can also subscribe to a podcast of files with a certain tag or a combination of files from a particular person with a particular tag. Basically, if there’s a page for it on the site, there’s probably a corresponding podcast you can subscribe to.
Very nice way of automatically creating a podcast feed out of MP3s you find on the web – think Delicious but just for audio. Perfect for micro-mp3 blogging – I think I’ll integrate my Huffduffer feed into this main blog feed when I get a chance…
More info on Jeremy’s Blog.
Visit ➔Reflections on the new MacBook Pro
I love almost everything about the new MacBook Pros. The new “unibody” case, carved out of a single piece of aluminum, is a stunning achievement, making the device feel both light and solid. The new “no button” trackpad is brilliant. Use it once and you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. The machine, from top to bottom, is the most elegant, powerful, perfect laptop I’ve ever touched.
And then they ruined the whole thing by hiding the display behind a mirror.
People seem to be up in arms* about the lack of a matte display option on the new MacBooks (which look great, in my opinion), citing all sorts of things like ‘colour reproduction’ and reflections meaning you couldn’t ever possibly use these computers for professional work. (As an aside, this is a commendable debating tactic: “Oh, you don’t mind the new displays? You obviously aren’t as professional and skilled as me, then”.)
How, then, did we survive all those years using CRT displays – which I’m still told are better for colour reproduction – which are all glossy? We didn’t seem to have a problem with it then…
* As in ‘people on the internet’, which means about 10 people in reality…
Visit ➔But It's Not Flash...
So… We’re launched, and starting to make the blog rounds and the site is receiving a tremendous amount of criticism for being in Flash. This post is to address the comments we are hearing. I’ll try to make them a running list, updated as we hear feedback.
I love the way they have a big list of standard html features that the plan to develop for their flash-based blog; way to make the point for us, guys…
Visit ➔Rough
Not being the types to rest on our laurels, we’ve just launched probably the most complicated site we’ve done all year – a new site for Rough Trade Records:
When we started working with Rough Trade their site was in a pretty sorry state; it was all frame based, with no CMS underpinning it so updates took far to much work – it was in dire need of a complete overhaul. One of the side effects of having such an old site was that their wasn’t really anything for us to work from – no coherent ‘look’ or branding short of the iconic logo, so it was clean-sheet-of-paper time.
We quickly focused in on the key things that are important about Rough Trade – records and artists. It sounds pretty obvious, but with some labels you find focus elsewhere – the label often has a brand and look of its own that transcends the individual artist or record, but this isn’t the case here. To represent the records properly, and to provide some kind of aesthetic bedrock, we decide to use the artwork as large as we could get away with – hence the jQuery based carousel at...
Read more ➔Win
Last week it was the annual Digital Music Awards; it’s probably a mark of how busy things have been recently that I haven’t written about it sooner…
The awards themselves are a rather awkward collision between an industry pats-on-backs type affair and a glitzy, Brit-awards style mainstream show. So, the latter half brings us a red carpet outside the Roundhouse, the Sugababes, Iglu and Hartly and a show on ITV2, and the former nets us awards like ‘Best Artist Promotion’ and ‘Best Mobile Campaign’ with everything being collected by the people behind the work, not the bands themselves (with the exception of Hadouken, who actually bothered to turn up).
As Jonas from Last.fm says this leads to a pretty odd atmosphere; the tackiness that you often encounter in certain sections of the industry without much of the redemption that comes in the form of ‘decent’ music (with the obvious exception of British Sea Power, who – as always – rocked). It’s a shame really that the pretence of glamour has to be there – most of the awards have a diverse bunch of entrants that deserve recognition; with the world of digital music moving and changing so quickly it’s good...
Read more ➔An industry with a great future behind it
Sister Ray Records in London… was my favourite record store in the capital. Or at least – I thought it was. In fact, Sister Ray was not my favourite record shop because I liked Sister Ray. It was my favourite record shop because it fitted a romantic, nostalgic notion about London independent record shops.
Great article, and I firmly agree – small indie record shops are great in theory but less so in practice. However, I do quite like the new Rough Trade East although it’s telling that I’ve never bought anything there – I like it for the instores…
Visit ➔