Via FFFFOUND

Shepard Fairey has re-designed the covers for two of George Orwell’s classic novels: his dystopian masterpiece, 1984 and his totalitarian allegory, Animal Farm. I can’t think of a better artist to tap for such a task, these two concepts fit nicely with the decidedly cynical slant of Shepard’s work. I really like his take on the covers, but must admit that the minimalist / modernist in me is still partial to Art Brenner’s original for Animal Farm (above).

More greatness from Mr. Aicher Via rallovallo

Here’s an incredible video of Elliott Smith apparently recording Angeles live in a living room. Amazing that they’re getting such great sound from one mic picking up both the guitar and the vocals. I use 3 mics just to capture one acoustic guitar, which might be overkill. I have been experimenting with mic’ing drums using just one condenser room mic placed at a good distance and a dynamic on the bottom of the snare only with decent results. (thanks to Dusty Brown for that technique)

I’m not sure "liveblogging" is even a word but I’m posting this from the booth at OFFF Lisbon so I suppose it’s fitting (the WiFi actually works this year!). All the above images are from today’s festivities, it’s about 3pm right now so we’ve a bit to go still. The beer is flowing and the sun is shining so come out; even if you don’t have a ticket you can hang out in the main area where there’s lots of people, food, and drink. So far Lisbon has been great, judging by the things I saw out the window on the cab ride from the hotel to the event I have a lot of walking around to do once I have a spare minute.

The first time I heard Funeral it blew my mind, it still does and I think this was the first track that really hooked me. 

Arcade Fire - Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)

About to catch a cab down to LX Factory to get the OFFF booth setup, see you out there.

We just got into Lisbon, already amazed. We had the good fortune of sharing a bus with the KDU on the way to the hotel, good people. I’m traveling with my youngest brother this time around, that’s him up there in the pics. This place definitely looks like a great town for photography so I’ll be doing my best to bring home some good shots. We’re here for the OFFF which starts tomorrow, we’ll be at the ISO50 booth all day so stop by and say hello if you’re in the area.

Chris clark, to me, is like Boards Of Canada, Aphex Twin, and a bit of Autechre thrown in for good measure (no wonder he’s on Warp, right?) His album Clarence Park is pretty much solid wall to wall. This track is a stand-out if not only for it’s Aphex slant. Sorry for the small cover art, couldn’t find a proper sized version. Also, I’m at Newark airport having some beers with my brother so not all that concerned with Jpeg resolutions at the moment.

Chris Clark - Lord Of The Dance

Headed out for Lisbon tomorrow morning for the OFFF. I’ll be bringing my camera and hopefully getting some good shots. I’ve never been to Portugal, just heard a lot of good things. If it’s anywhere near as great as Barcelona I’ll be happy. 

There will be an ISO50 booth at the OFFF Festival complete with shirts, prints, CDs, etc. Stop by and say hello if you’re in the area, the Mercadillo is free admission. See you out there!

Photos via rabataller, Matilde B. & rabataller respectively.

Some cool icons from crabstick via FFFFOUND.

70’s prog-rock band Yes are really hit and miss for me. I enjoy a lot of their earlier work but they shifted gears later on and started making the sort of music we now mock when lamenting the cultural shortcomings of that polarizing age known as The 80’s. That aside, they have contributed some amazing work over the years; their eponymous first album is largely considered to be the first Progressive Rock album and it’s certainly a classic.  One of my all time favorite songs is the track Survival from that very same album. The production and musicianship on these earlier songs is, to me,  perfection. It’s these sort of songs that really make me miss the hot summers of my home. It’s funny how the context of your first experience with a song colors your perception of it from that point forward. Although it is an incredibly beautiful song, hearing Survival usually gets me a little down, I start missing home and getting all nostalgic. The first minute is something altogether  transcendent. Being an electronic musician who doesn’t use traditional vocals, the instrumental parts of songs like this are great reference points for building emotion into a song without the need for vocals.

Yes - Survival

Yes was also a visually interesting band. The top five images are paintings by Roger Dean, some of which were used as Yes album covers. The second image is some random shot I found on Flickr while searching for Yes covers. This guy came prepared for whatever he’s about to get into: Portable tape recorder, box of tapes, joint, football, paper towels and of course, a Yes T-Shirt. The final image is from a series of Yes logos also by Dean.

This one’s for Zick, I bet you have this in a glass case somewhere: Save Frank’s homage to the Foo Fighters.

Cool Atari-esque concert poster by Shannon Palmer for Colour Revolt. Via Dusty Brown.

It really doesn’t get much better than this poster by Tribal DDB Senior Art Director Sergio Moctezuma (Gigposters User: Moctezuma). I am having  a tough time figuring out whether the type on the face is done by hand or if there is some complex type on path / warping being done in illustrator.  Any ideas? Via FFFFOUND via Panopticist.

Seeing such talented artists spending most of their time working at massive corporate ad agencies always makes me wonder what could have been.  What if a guy like this had spent the past 10 years creating posters and honing his craft, what sort of incredible art would have been contributed to the medium?  That’s not to say people like Sergio aren’t contributing to our world doing what they do at the agencies, I just happen to enjoy this sort of work more so in my own selfish way I wish they spent more time on this sort of thing.

Some more ads for the venerable Olivetti Valentine via Pink Ponk.

Great cover from one of ambient pioneer and David Bowie producer Brian Eno’s side projects. Via Sleevage where you’ll find an interesting comparison between this imagery and the Timothy Saccenti-Directed video for Battles.

Classic track from New York Collective Chocolate Genius.

Chocolate Genius - For One More Look At You

So by now you’ve no doubt seen this image. It was created by Shepard Fairey for the Barack Obama presidential campaign. It has received quite a bit of press and raised a lot of money. I really love this iconic image and have always respected Shepard’s work.

So about a month ago the Obama campaign contacted me asking if I would create the next poster and I of course accepted. After some rather grueling all-nighters working on it, I finally finished today. The print has been sent off and should be out very soon. It will be a limited run of 5000 copies which will sell for $70 each. For obvious reasons I can’t post an image here yet, but I will as soon as I get the go ahead from the campaign. 

A PSB file weighing in at 2.77GB with nearly 1000 layers, this is the most complex, largest scale work I have ever created. The print is 23×40" which had to be created at full 300dpi resolution, so you can imagine the strain this put on the hardware resources of the new computer. But the new machine came through; it powered through a lot of major operations with relative ease and I can honestly say I would never have been able to create the illustration without this new computer, my old one would have choked very early in the process. I did have to composite some of the imagery in separate files and bring them in flat at the end, particularly some of the complex vectors which had to be created in Illustrator and then imported. Most of the layers in the file were Smart Objects which were scaled at double the actual resolution of the image, so it was almost like working with an 80" image. Because of all this, it was often very tedious, having to wait quite a while for even simple operations to complete towards the end of the process.

Incidentally, this was the first project I created from start to finish within OSX. I really enjoyed working with OSX most of the time, but there were a few hiccups, particularly towards the end. I don’t blame them on OSX though, they seem to be issues specific to Photoshop’s memory handling as they began to crop up when the image became very large (in excess of 2GB)..Here’s to waiting for CS4 64bit for Windows. All in all it was a pretty smooth process considering the sheer size of the data being tossed around in there.

It’s a great honor for me to be able to work with the Obama campaign and I am very excited about the impending release of the print. I’ll definitely post more information as it becomes available, I hear it will go to print very shortly, next week probably. Stay tuned for a comp.

It’s all about the orange: Graphis Annual 1965/66. Via insect54.

The Boy With The Thorn In His Side was the first single off The Smiths’ 1986 album The Queen Is Dead. It’s certainly one of my favorite songs from Morrissey and Co., but I found a cover version by Jeff Buckley that might rival the original. The only problem is the poor quality, it sounds like it was recorded with a camera phone or something but it’s so good it’s still worth listening. Does anyone know where to find a better copy of the Buckley version?

The Smiths - The Boy With The Thorn In His Side

Jeff Buckley - The Boy With The Thorn In His Side

Sheet of Dutch stamps via DavidMcFarline.