2009 was a creative year for musicians like City Center who has the perfect voice and a natural sense for lo-fi singer songwriter material, if you’ve worn the groove out of your Panda Bear record then look no further and pick up his self titled LP. We saw Dubstep take over in the US and UK clubs with unique takes on albums from Martyn, 2562, and many others. Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear showed the top 40 charts that indie rock has a big say in what people want to own and even Jay-Z thought so. Lo-fi is back on all different levels like surf, folk, and a fusion of a ton of different genres which really had a big impact on my daily listening.
I’m not going to ignore that some people didn’t like my #1 song and #1 album of the year and I kind of want to share why I liked it so much. At first they were a band that i wanted to sign but after seeing a few shows of them playing live I was hooked, soo much energy, passion and catchy parts plus the band is just fun to watch, the tambourine player even was more hyper than any musician I saw all year. The songs all have this mash of a lot of music that I grew up on and still to this day listen to frequently. I see them as a band that can jump into the top 40 and get a budget to be a great band to see live and I guess the live show did it for me this year and I loved sharing the bands songs with friends, so I guess those are some of the reasons why I loved The Drums release.
*Please note I did not include any releases by Ghostly International, Moodgadget, remixes, Tycho songs and ISO50 exclusives just to make this a fair collection. If you like this list then take a second and check out ISO50’s 2008 list.
The Auteurs has a post on their picks for the top movie posters of the decade. Considering that the vast majority of modern movie posters fall short of the standards set in heyday of film, this must have been a difficult list to assemble and a boring task to complete. Nevertheless, they have managed to dig up a few gems. Good to see The Bank Job in there — always a favorite — but I was pleasantly surprised by Funny Games, hadn’t seen that one.
My rebranding Playboy project came to a close last week with the end of our fall semester. If you read the last article, you are familiar with the first part of this project, which was the new logo for Playboy. While it is absolutely the flag bearer of the entire project, the logo development represented a small amount of the work we were required to do for the overall project. The final deliverable for the class was a book in which we the explain history of the brand, walk through our rationale for the new identity, explore the process of the logo development, present brand standards and guidelines, and show example brand implementations and extensions. Other than this required content, there was no specific criteria for the book. Each student also gave a short final presentation explaining their rebranding and the choices they made along the way. Everything was created for the Nature of Identity class at the Academy of Art, as part of the graduate graphic design program.
I really enjoyed the conversation the first post on this project generated. I was excited to see that the new logo was as polarizing as it was — I feel like these types of solutions are the most exciting and rewarding for me. I noticed that many people were up in arms about the idea of Playboy removing nudity and becoming an all article magazine. While I would like to note that the new strategy was purely a conceptual exploration constructed in an educational environment, I actually do think they might be well served to switch things up this drastically. Playboy was once irreverent and boundary shattering. They are no longer. I can think of no better way to recapture this audacious spirit than by doing something this extreme…
If you asked me years ago what would be my dream release to coordinate it would of been this one. Casino Versus Japan’s first album from 1998 reissued with ISO50 artwork?! I can’t think of anything better. Casino Versus Japan hasn’t released anything in nearly 6 years and having the honor last weekend to have him play a show with Tycho and now them working together on this release creatively, plus ISO50 merchandise on the way I think we will have ourselves something special that will be loved for many more years. The album consists of 23 songs split up in 4 parts full of some of the best drone and echoed guitar while the artwork by Scott has a gorgeous color palette with beautifully textured moons colliding and our friend faintly catching a wave in one of them. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on both the art and music on this one.
This release will be out on January 5th, 2010 on Moodgadget.
Here it is for those of you that have been following all week, the top 10 songs of 2009, Monday I will be releasing the Top 10 albums of 2009. Give your thoughts in the comment section on what you thought of these songs and what maybe its laking so 2010 can be all that you want it to be.
You may have seen the work of Robert Samuel Hanson here and there, Monocle and elsewhere. I’ve seen some of his wonderful illustrations before, but a few of the works above are still getting a good laugh out of me. The “I love you and I know where you live” piece especially cracks me up. I would totally send that around as a Valentines Day card if I thought the recipients had enough of a sense of humor to not get me arrested.
Not only is Robert’s work beautifully rendered and realized, but it’s just the right amount of clever without being too cute. Aren’t we lucky he works for so many terrific publications! It’s always a nice surprise to stumble on one of his delightful illustrations. His logo is amazing too, check it out on his front page.
We’re getting down to the select few, some serious time listening to these tracks, the play counts in my iTunes for all these songs are in the double digits and have had the loop function on my iPod used heavily on them, enjoy.
Everything you see in these stills and videos by Alex Roman is 100% computer generated. This is certainly the best CGI I’ve ever seen; I would normally say “virtually” indistinguishable from reality, but in this case the “virtually” doesn’t belong. The videos were created using 3dsmax, Vray, After Effects, and Premier. But what amazes me here isn’t just the execution, Roman crafts truly beautiful images with impeccable taste, something often missing from highly technical productions such as this. The man perfectly rendered a Mies van Der Rohe and an Eames, give him a medal! Maybe I can get some VR googles and map his work to the interior of my house and pretend to live in some modernist paradise.
I thought I had a bad workload trying to finish this new album, I can’t even imagine the man hours that went into just one minute of these videos. More videos at Roman’s Vimeo page and lot’s of stills and info at his portfolio site.
