If you’ve been following this whole lo-fi lazy summer meets surf rock movement with bands like Real Estate, Washed Out, The Young Friends,Small Black, etc. there is a whole range of tones and tempos. One band that needs more releases out is this Beach Fossils group which I think has some great guitar parts, i’ll keep you updated on new material by them since they sound pretty promising.
Sbtrkt is one of the guys that has hit me over email with tracks, I really love his production work, he has a line list of releases this year and one that really impressed my ears was his remix for Modeselektor, looking forward to the vinyl.
If you’ve read the blog for awhile now you know I love Lusine, I suggested him and Hatchback to remix Tycho awhile back for Coastal Brake. This single which came out this week shows off more of his new direction of using a lot more female vocals which is the perfect follow up the his Two Dots single.
Below is the new Jonsi(singer of Sigur Ros) music video, I like his direction, he definitely stays with his sound and is pretty fearless visually.
You may have seen this Carl Sagan video floating around which is a remix done by Colorpulse that Mux Mool shared with me awhile ago that I loved. Recently, Mux got parts and remixed the song with great results, below is his remix of the remix for the ISO50 blog, feel free to share it.
Ryan Schude (Site | Flickr) is a Los Angeles (via Chicago, San Francisco, and San Diego) based photographer. I’m loving the honesty in a lot of these, they feel really raw and relatable. The staged shots are nice but I’m really gravitating toward the more candid moments he’s captured. Definitely getting a Joe Stevens vibe off the various automotive shots in there, really cool stuff. Also, my new dream is to have a yellow tent full of photographic equipment.
There’s a single shared already from the new Loscil LP, sounds really promising, i’ll definitely post more once the album is out but here’s a teaser.
You can count on the label Kranky to never disappoint, while digging for Loscil I stumbled upon this band named Ethernet, not the best band name but they make up for it with this aquatic drone track called Seaside.
Any Wisp fans here? i’m a huge Wisp fan, in December his LP dropped on Rephlex with an array of epic melodic fantasy music that puts most new video game/fantasy movie music to shame.
A label called Twoism does a great job of taking the Boards of Canada sound the extra mile and finds musicians that love making the PBS sound, a definite net label that i’ll keep look visiting.
I do not know what to write. I am sitting here staring at the screen, running sentences in my head, and turning my music on and off. Earlier I went foraging for food (in hopes of sparking some magical words), but ended up getting distracted by Arrested Development for 20 minutes. This happens just about every time I sit down to do anything. I’ll probably go play the guitar between this paragraph and the next.
Of course this is a familiar situation. Often referred to as “writer’s block”, the concept of an inspiration rut is unfortunately very familiar to every creative in any field. Sometimes ideas just don’t show up to work. Given this, we all develop strategies to combat such a scenario. Not all are foolproof, but it’s safe to say that most creative people have some battle plan for dealing with the dreaded “blank page”.
Knowing this I decided to ask some of today’s most exciting artists and creators what they do when the ideas aren’t flowing. I left the question fairly open ended and asked, What do you do to inspire your creativity when you find yourself in a rut? As expected, I was presented with an array of strategies, ranging from listening to Boards of Canada in a forest alone, to cooking up a storm (recipe provided) and waiting for the mind to clear.
What follows are 25 strategies from these creatives to spark your inspiration; hopefully you’ll find something helpful in there. I encourage you to list your favorite strategies as well in the comments. We can never have to many of these…
This is what might happen if a trash compactor had impeccable taste and color sensitivity. The work of Michael Johansson is unique and impossible to categorize. You really have to look closely to see how random and unrelated the objects that make up these blocks actually are; yet they still match up perfectly. I can’t imagine how long it must take to source materials and eventually place and align them so precisely. Would be like building a puzzle where each piece was made by a different company and then scattered throughout the world.
With that wave of mom and pop record stores closing monthly winding down and completely gutting the support for physical music for people to discover, iPods building closed personal shells running mostly ringtone quality sound thru tiny white earbuds instead of record players playing aloud, and faceless torrents and file sharing sites handing out music like its those frickin’ free Auto Mart gazettes sitting in those bright yellow stands in front of your local closed down Blockbuster’s, i’d like to spend some of the young readers time by sharing how I got into electronic music. For what its worth I want to keep sharing what musicians first turned me from a casual listener to something that involves more time than people are willing to sometimes spend to keep up with something.
This music by Dntel was more emotional than any other electronic music I heard at the time, I feel like it almost paved the way for a ton of new genres to start. I really only listened to it when I worked or was falling asleep but then started sharing it on mixtapes and became a favorite of mine. I needed more and at that time in Detroit there was a flurry of solid record stores filled with enough employees to answer any of your questions happily with great suggestions, can you imagine that? well it was true especially one called Neptune Records which I was happy to drive the 45+ minute drive weekly to see what was new. I’ll prepare a 3rd playlist and share more, hope some of you can relate.
