When I was in Toronto I had the good fortune to hear an advance copy of Montreal-based indie outfit Wolf Parade’s forthcoming album, At Mount Zoomer (due out June 17th). Suffices to say, I was very impressed; this will surely be one of my favorite albums of 2008. The track below is a stand-out on the album, but still just the tip of the iceberg. And yes, the cover looks like a 3rd grade class project gone awry, but the colors bring it together and make it somewhat bearable and after all, this is the standard visually ironic fare I would expect from a release like this. As we learned the other day, sometimes a bad album cover can mean great things are hiding on the inside.
This post strays a bit from the normal audio / visual fare you might be used to finding here, but whether or not you care about the science behind this film, it’s a visually stunning piece and well worth the 5 minute run time.
Magnetic Movie is an aptly titled animated short which uses animation to visualize magnetic fields. We can normally only visualize magnetic fields in large scale contexts such as our Sun’s Corona or Earth’s Polar Auroras, so it is very interesting to be able to see the small scale fields that we interact with on a day to day basis. The animations and sound design in this short are superb. Now if we could just control these things maybe we could get a Tokamak working.
When I was in grade school the U.S. was trying to convert to the metric system. Obviously, it didn’t quite work out as planned. We used to have metric study sessions for a few years when the conversion attempt was at it’s strongest, but it seemed to sort of lose steam by the time I got to middle school. It’s really a shame; inches suck, and so do quarts. The conversions and units never really make sense, they’re always these arbitrary ratios. Metric is so clean, you can deduce any conversion based solely on the latin prefix and you don’t have to factor in the length of some king’s foot when you’re trying to measure things. But I guess that all goes without saying. Everyone else also have way cooler plugs than us, but that’s a whole other post.
Just a couple examples of the influential work Ken Garland was doing in the 60’s and 70’s. See more at his portfolio. Sorry for the quality on the second one, couldn’t find a large version so I had to scale it up.
Just a quick note to thank everyone for checking out the new single; Adrift is already at #17 on the iTunes charts.
Also a note on the iTunes exclusivity issue. Ghostly International, the label who releases my music, often grants iTunes exclusive rights to a single for a specified period of time. In this case, a month. But after that month, or possibly sooner, it will be available at all other online retailers as well as right here from The ISO50 Shop. I am sorry if this is an inconvenience to anyone, I will be sure to post as soon as the song is available via alternative channels.
Also, as Jakub pointed out in the comments, this is also available as iTunes Plus, meaning it is DRM free and encoded at 256Kbps, just the same as all the other retailers.
So if the last music post left you wondering what ever happened to Digable Planets here’s at least a small part of the explanation. My favorite member of Digable was definitely Butterfly, so when I heard he had a solo project called Cherrywine I was pretty excited. The resulting album is sort of middle of the road for me, but this single is definitely strong and while the subject matter is a far cry from the revolution fomenting intellectualism of Blowout Combit’s still an enjoyable listen.
Back in 2003 when this album came out I was able to catch Cherrywine when they came through Sacramento. It was noticeably underattended, particularly considering the fact that the group was headed up by none other than Ishmael Butler. While it was sort of disappointing to see such a poor turnout, it ended up working in our favor as we got to meet Butterfly and talk with him after the show.
