David Emery Online

The Horrors Live

We’ve just launched this simple site for The Horrors – we’ve put a web cam in their studio and it makes for strangely compulsive viewing:

Version 12

I have – as you have probably noticed unless you’re pottering around the RSS feed – redesigned.

Again.

The last one lasted just under 6 months which, quite frankly, is probably not quite long enough. Oh well. This new one, while obviously a complete visual departure is really an evolution of the last one – it keeps the same fading background setup I wrote last time round, along with all the other major bits and pieces (per post smaller images, twitter status, same sections etc). It really feels like I’m slowly but surely building up quite a code-base round these parts, with all of it easily skin-able and modular.

This design is primarily motivated by two main things – I desire to keep line widths reasonable and to show off the background photos more. The line widths on the previous design were really bugging me – I have slightly fallen out of love with Helvetica at medium sizes (at 14th point it just looks a bit boring to me right now) and the long lines just exasperated that irritation. Hence a much smaller column width and Times as a body text font, with italic Avenir (if you have it, Helvetica if not)...

Days with My Father

Photographer Phillip Toledano documents a series of photographs of his elderly father; beautiful and heartbreaking.

Living Life Online: pitfalls and perks

I’m really quite interested in the potential side effects of all this internet openness, especially with things like Twitter and Facebook where people seem to reveal a lot more then the would have previously.

It’s a temporary phenomenon, though – the kids growing up don’t live (and have never lived) in a world where this doesn’t happen.

Psychedelic Horseshit vs Half Machine Records

“to: half machine records
subject: new wave hippies ep

dude, got the ep’s today, what the fuck is with the spaces in between the tracks. they were strung together with care. THERE ARE GUITAR AND DRUM PARTS CHOPPED IN HALF. i am beyond pissed off. this is why bands are supposed to get test pressings. this thing is a piece of junk now, completely worthless, and all copies must be burned or otherwise destroyed. i am deadly serious about this. if this gets out i will personally make it my job to see to it that every copy is retreived and destroyed. starting at yr offices.

-matt horseshit”

They’re going to burn all the copies; I love music industry stories like this…

Work For Me

Further to my previous post, we are at work currently extremely busy. Large projects are doing the things that large projects do (taking a long time being the primary thing) and the small projects are puffing up their chests to try and look large as well.

The natural conclusion to this is that we’re hiring.

We’re after someone to come in and work for about 6 weeks or so (although it could be a little longer) in our London office doing html/css/design type things. You should know what standards based semantic markup is, what things in CSS3 work in IE 7 (and all that jazz) and have half an eye for design (it will mostly be front end coding but that always helps).

You’ll be working for the largest group of independent record labels on bands like Radiohead, Beck, TV On The Radio, British Sea Power and many more – it’s the perfect gig for someone that loves music looking for some really great experience.

Drop me a line if you’re interested.

Concrete and Glass

I would encourage everyone to go to this – looks like it’s going to be good fun.

Monkey: Journey to the West

One of the many, many things I’ve been working on recently. The album is amazing, by the way, and the BBC are going to use some of the music and animations as part of their Beijing Olympics coverage so you’re bound to come across some of it soon.

Devendra Banhart - Carmensita

Featuring a certain Miss Natalie Portman:

Points of View

Some thoughts:

• I am, as ever, extremely busy. This is undoubtedly a good thing, as their is nothing worse then boredom, although I’m not sure if I can really comprehend the concept right now.

• Some of the things you won’t get to see, sadly (or at least most of you, anyway); some of the things you might and one of the things is yet another redesign for this site that works better for the content I seem to be producing right now (link posts will look nicer, as will photos).

• There seems to be a distinct lack of things going on right now – nothing surprising, big or interesting; both in the online/tech and music fields. This (coupled with point 1) is why I haven’t been writing much – if I have things to write about, I will, but if not coming up with something more original takes more time then I’ve got right now.

• Season 4 of The Wire is not helping; it’s stunningly good and I need to watch another 5 episodes by tomorrow evening when Season 5 starts.

• Similarly, Wall-e is amazing. You could make a serious argument for the performance of that little robot to be the best piece of acting...