These Czech Olympic matchbooks are excerpted from one of my favorite design books, Cesky Filumenisticky Design. I don’t know much about these other than that they date from 1967. I’m also not sure who designed them since the book is in Japanese. I ran it by my friend and she said the caption says something about the name "Peter Togram". Not sure, fill in the blanks if you can read that caption.

Hot on the heels of me gushing about the stability of Windows XP, I wanted to give a heads up for those of you XP faithful out there considering the Service Pack 3 Update.  I setup of a new partition on my machine a when SP3 came out to test it out with Photoshop and Sonar (the app I use to record music). For Photoshop at least, the experiment was a total disaster. SP3 somehow managed to cripple PS CS3 to the point that it was crashing every 30 minutes or so. I limped along like that for a couple weeks then tried uninstalling SP3 just to see how well the rollback would go; needless to say, it didn’t work out too well. I’ve since deleted that partition and gone back to my SP2 install. A quick Google search on the topic will turn up some people saying the same thing.

Of course this is not a very scientific study and your mileage will vary, just wanted to note my experience with the update. Besides, from what I’ve read SP3 doesn’t really add much and given the proven stability of SP2, I don’t see much of a reason to gamble with this new service pack. And if you Mac fanatics are thinking "If you just bought a Mac this wouldn’t happen!" just remember: the Leopard 10.5.2 update (the OS X equivalent of a Service Pack) completely screwed a lot of musicians (me included, I have a Mac Pro as well as a PC). Just sayin’, we all got problems!

If you are running SP3 with Photoshop, let us know how it’s going.

I always try to find electronic songs that are perfect to play for everyone since the genre has such a bad rep. Don’t get me wrong about 85% or even more of electronic music is pretty bad but that doesn’t the whole genre has to be set next to all the trance compilation CD’s at Best Buy. I picked this Portable track because it has these lounge/world sounds that people are use to hearing, so why not nudge people closer to something that is on the lighter side of deep tribal house.

As for Lusine, he might be one of my favorite producers when it comes down to making all his sounds sound so good each and everytime. Every bell and kick sounds like its right in front of you straight out of the box.

Shigeto is brand spanking new, i find myself always skipping straight to this song on my mp3 player. The beginning is soo crunchy & loose, it sounds like it wants to start up but the track keeps falling apart in your ear. At the 2 min mark is what i wait for, its the ultimate lush opposite of what you started out listening to.

Efdemin doesn’t need much help with any plugs, this record was on every electronic publication’s top 10 list for 2007, i thought maybe if anyone missed out that here’s another chance to check it out for free.

Portable – Down Stream

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Lusine – Dr. Chinme

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Shigeto – Helicopter In The Sky

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Efdemin – April Fools

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Gotta have one of these, if only it snowed in San Francisco. This is sort of like the Aptera’s arctic counterpart. More info and pictures over at Gizmodo.

Last night I was working on a poster for the upcoming Terrabyte 3 show (L.A. Sept. 14). I had the MP3s on shuffle and Ladytron’s Mu-Tron came up. It prompted me to go back and play the rest of their 2001 release 604 in it’s entirety. It’s not that I really forgot about Ladytron, I guess I just forgot how good they are. Maybe I played them out back when Light and Magic was in full swing. They have a new album out entitled Velocifero which is in the vein of their previous record Witching Hour. Both albums are a departure from the 80’s inspired electro sound of 604 and Light And Magic. It’s good that they evolved (the two latest albums are superb in their own rights), it’s just sad that we won’t be getting any more gems along these lines:

Ladytron – Playgirl

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Ladytron – Mu-Tron

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