Brooklyn’s Collin Palmer aka Calmer fuses psychedelic elements with Jazz influenced compositions in the most well constructed and exciting ways. In this song “Past is Present” Calmer offers up a real dreamy yet driving piece that will take you from having goosebumps to completely relaxing within seconds by dropping a wall of colorful sound in front of you. Calmer is known in Brooklyn for his unique setup on stage usually playing on custom shaped cymbals that he has cracked or bent himself and 60’s surfing documentaries playing in the background, well worth your time to catch live if you haven’t seen him. Head on over to XLR8R to pick up a free track of his called “Open Source”.

It’s Friday and I know you wanna hear some J Dilla since you haven’t probably put on Donuts in a month atleast and thats a shame.

I have to thank Praveen for sending me over a record that I would of probably never picked up unless I was bored in line at Starbucks. The CD would have be playing on the speakers and the CD case was the only thing within reach to read besides the menu. I’m not saying Bon Iver is playing at Starbucks but I wouldn’t be surprised, it has indie-pop singer/songwriter written all over it and everyone is talking about this record. I actually found 3 tracks on it that I really like, i’m actually looking forward to them popping up on shuffle. Bon offers what I like in acoustic guitar playing which is this slow repetitive drive but thats not what is grabbing, a lot of the simple background additions really make this song plus his voice doesn’t sound like some annoying kid from Austin or Seattle or David Gray.

I grabbed this Marius Vareid track from Tom Croose who’s mixes I sometimes post here and i’m pretty sure he got it from the talented crew on Dream Chimney. Guess what it is? yes some slow disco but this time more on the drumkit and guitar angle. I thought it would be nice jam to gradually head into the weekend.

Calmer – Past Is Present

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J Dilla – Gobstopper

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Bon Iver – Lump Sum

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Marius Vareid – Skumle Planer

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Came across this very cool CSS/HTML grid designer today. Aptly named “Grid Designer 2″, this tool allows you to mock up grid-based page layouts and set typography styles. A very handy page to have in your bookmarks, now they just need to make a widget out of this. Grid Designer 2

Related Reading: Five Simple Steps to Designing Grid Systems, Aisle One