If I could ask for more of something right now in the music industry it would be another song like Think Twice by The Detroit Experiment, i’m not talking about another Carl Craig group to come out which is already happening and its called TRIBE or a Mark E edit of this song which is great by the way but just another band that can sound as good as this song does.
The most off the wall song that i’ve heard this summer has to be this song by Siriusmo which was played to me by someone that only listens to post rock/noise in his bedroom saying its like nothing else and described it over the phone as bangin’ like Audion, trendy like the Ed Banger stuff but with a unique angle, children vocals and some kind of cartoonish caribbean intro, very addicted in a good/weird way like pickled turnips.
Went to a bar a few weeks ago and you know right when I walked in with friends it was all girls which is never a bad thing but I realized I had no chance after awhile because it was a ladies night and pretty much no boys allowed. No biggie I just hung out and noticed the DJ was killin’ it right when this song came on, the cowbell is pretty much yelling at you to get on the dancefloor and the guitar is saying find a spot deep in the crowd and sweat it out, not bad if you love cowbells, I mean loooooooove cowbells.
Correct me if i’m wrong but is Loefah a legend in the dubstep world? I love his style of how he times his releases on the sounds and it always being very striped down, sometimes I feel like i’m left hanging but the low end makes up for that.
It’s been a hectic past month, I feel like I’ve been all over the place and I’m really looking forward to getting some time at home to focus. I head out to Austin tomorrow to play The Parish Room for the final show in this recent set and then I’ll have a few weeks until Seattle to get work done.
Luckily, during this time I’ve been able to get the new Tycho 12″ wrapped up and I finally got the test pressing in (shown above). The 12″ will feature a new single — “Coastal Brake” — along with 3 remixes by Lusine, Hatchback, and Manual. It feels good to finally have all the artwork and music done for this one, the final step is ok’ing this test copy. I also did my first offset print job in a while (click for some images) as part of this project, the posters will be included with the record. Looking back, this single has been about as much work as it was to put together my last album, funny how that works.
After I get back from Austin it will be time to really focus in on finishing up this new album. For some reason whenever I go out of town, when I return my house looks like a bomb went off. I guess things just get out of hand and disorganized when I’m rushing to get packed up. I hate returning to the mess because it’s really stressful to try to work in a disorganized environment. So I finally got some free time over the past few days and reorganized the place and got the studio back in order. Hopefully now when I return it will be a smooth transition back into work.
Fantastic album from Italian-based Baffo Banfi. Seems to be a mix of his previous albums “Ma, Dolce Vita” (1979) and “Hearth” (1981) mashed together for CD; but if anybody has better info than that, please comment!
Right at the time where Krautrock was morphing into the New Age sound, these albums straddle the fence very nicely. Very reminiscent of Manuel Göttsching at the time.
Released under Klaus Schulz’s new label at the time (Innovative Communication) – you can definitely hear his hand in it.
I was exploring the depths of my basement the other day and came across these books. My favorite is the first one, but I think they all have something interesting going on. (I remember the Animal Farm cover from Scott’s post a while back.) The typography of each cover is worth noting — especially the beautiful implementation of the lowercase Carousel on the “Secrets of Health…” cover! The ampersand in particular is pretty amazing. As much as I love Bodoni and Didot, Carousel has a few extra twists that make it more exciting to me.
Sometimes I wish I didn’t live in a design centric city; all the used bookstores were plundered long ago of anything with cool design at work. It is a rare occurrence that I find something worth buying at even the most remote vintage bookshop. Got out here too late!
Apologies for the iPhone photos — it was all I had at the time and I couldn’t pass up the chance to snap some shots. Also worth noting is the price of some of these…when was the last time you paid 25c for a book?
I usually post music that is easy on the ears and in my opinion will start your Monday morning off gently or some kind of pre festivities at home mix to listen to on a Friday right before you get the real deal at some venue with entertainment. Well its Wednesday and all I need is the strength to get me thru the weekday and Mogi Grumbles is all about getting us thru that by bangin’ out what he does best which is sharing his favorite disco french house songs. My favorite part about this mix is its a collection of songs that are classics that might catch anyone’s ear but a few surprises as well that come from a lot of crate digging since Mogi works at record store in Ann Arbor. Highlight track for me is Lifelike – Discomachine, reminds me of what Beamer would listen to on the way to the new Tron Legacy film screening.
TRACKLIST Sebastian – Dolami Thomas Bangalter – Night Beats Alter Ego – Beat the Bush (Ewan Pearson‘s Slow NRG Edit) Sebastian – Untitled Lifelike – Discomachine Daft Punk – Revolution 909 Le Knight Club – Rhumba Modjo – Roller Coaster Alan Braxe – Vertigo (Thomas Bangalter‘s Virgo Edit) The Phantom’s Revenge – Saturated Phat Impact Mr. Oizo – Gay Dentists Redman – I Hold the Crown (His Majesty Andre Gimme Back Da Crown Remix) The Lipsyncs – You Bring Me Up Stardust – Music Sounds Better With You (Juxx Remix) Kavinsky – Testarossa (Sebastian Remix) Boys Noize – Oh! (A-Trak Remix) Daft Punk – Alive
Gold Panda has been a busy remixer but finally got the chance to release original material. His efforts on Quitters Raga has a very current feel which isn’t bad to have, definitely has some unique world music sampling and mash up of tons of jerky editing in the sequencing of it, i’d maybe put it on a mix tape for a friend that needs something refreshing to listen to while they travel off into a hot destination.
Benjamin Curtis of Secret Machines and School of Seven Bells highly suggested Simple Minds to me one night weeks ago, I think I grabbed the wrong album but hey I definitely rediscovered and found some hits, gonna dig deeper now.
I love playing this DJ KO song for friends because of 2 reasons: A. its the only Talib Kweli song I have and everyone seems to love him so it always goes over well B. puts a smile on everyones face that hears it or they just always somehow start rapping along knowing every word.
This might be my favorite Dubstep track of all time, when I hear it I just want to open my window at my apartment and stick my head out and invite people over to dance around inside to it but obviously after the song is over everyone would need to leave quickly but during the song i’d be very friendly to the strangers in my apartment.
p.s. Sorry Scott for posting a triangle hipster cover on the blog, it was that or a bug holding a skull and I can’t even explain how bad the Simple Minds cover is.
Gold Panda – Quitters Raga
[audio:raga.mp3]
Simple Minds – Someone Somewhere In Summertime
[audio:simpleminds.mp3]
DJ KO – Someday feat. Torae, John Robinson, Talib Kweli & Tiffany Paige
After all my recent hyping of SSD’s (Solid State Drives) I thought it was time to jump in and try one out first hand so I went downtown to Central Computers this afternoon and got an OCZ Vertex 120. I decided to post up my initial reactions and findings after dropping the Vertex into a Macbook Pro Unibody and installing OS X today. If you’re not really a technical person, still have a quick read through the numbers at the bottom because if you use a computer for anything creative (or for anything at all actually) and are looking to significantly boost performance, SSDs should be on your radar. If you have no clue what an SSD is, here’s a brief primer from an earlier post.
After a lot of research on the various SSD manufacturers I came to the conclusion that OCZ’s drives have the best performance/quality-to-dollar ratio. I went with their Vertex 120 drive not only because it’s very fast, but also because it uses the Indilinx Barefoot controller. The concept of an SSD controller may seem a bit esoteric, but it’s very important at this relatively early stage in the development of SSD technology. Inherent to all SSD drives is a tendency to build up “garbage” which can slow performance over time (if you want to know more about SSD “garbage”, read this). The Indilinx controller has a built in mechanism to deal with this garbage and keep the drive running at optimal speeds. The garbage collection runs while the drive is idle and is completely transparent to the OS or user. This capability makes the OCZ Vertex and other drives that run the Indilinx firmware arguably the most advanced SSD’s available at this time. Only firmware 1.30 and up supports this feature but luckily the Indilinx controller supports updates. The drive I bought came with firmware 1.10 but I was able to flash it to the latest 1.30 with relatively little hassle. Apparently all new Vertex drives are shipping with 1.30 stock; mine must have been a couple months old. Here’s the method I used to update the firmware: Bootable Free-DOS for Mac ISO w/ 1.30 FW update.
While the Vertex 120 is not by any means cheap ($389 for 120GB), it is much less expensive than many comparable drives from other manufacturers. It’s the first I’ve seen that offers this kind of performance for anywhere near this price. Of course, 120GB isn’t a lot of room, so you’re going to sacrifice storage space for the speed unless you want to put up the $720 for a 250GB model. I’m not too concerned with that as I’m using the Vertex for my MacBook Pro and I don’t store most of my media and large files on there. I typically use it for live shows where I just need very high read speeds and about 20GB of space. If you’re using a desktop computer, you could alternatively keep your large standard drive and use an SSD as the OS drive.
Bare drive - same form factor as a normal 2.5\
So I opened up the MacBook Pro and swapped out the old drive for the new SSD. This was very easy on the new unibody MBP and only took a few minutes. I then did a fresh install of OS X and booted up. Even after all the hype about SSD performance I was still amazed by the marked improvement in overall system performance I experienced. I could go into the minutiae of interacting with OS X running on the SSD, but suffices to say it is incredibly quick and surprisingly enjoyable.
So, on to the numbers: I did some really basic measurements to gauge the basic performance of the new drive and compared them to the original drive that came with the MBP. First I timed how long it took from power on to login screen. I chose this method so that the amount of startup items and installed apps on either particular machine wouldn’t effect the time.
Power On to Login Screen – MacBook Pro OS X With standard drive: 75 seconds
With Vertex SSD: 28 seconds
The boot time for the SSD was nearly triple the speed of the standard drive. But this doesn’t tell the whole story, boot times are dependent on a lot more than raw hard drive speed so even though the difference is impressive, it’s still not telling of how fast this drive really is. For that we need hard numbers. I used the free Xbench to measure the drive speeds and give a better picture of the wide chasm that separates these two drives.
Original Drive Scores (Stock Mac Hitachi 320GB) Overall Score: 34.13
As you can see, the SSD destroyed the standard drive in every conceivable way. The speeds I am seeing are nearly comparable to my RAID0 system which has 3 drives and a highpoint controller and cost me over double the amount I paid for the Vertex SSD. Throw in the fact that the Vertex uses hardly any power (great for notebook battery life) and has no moving parts to break down and you’re looking at a bargain. If you’re looking for a way to speed your rig up I highly advise looking into getting a SSD. Just keep in mind that SSD is a very nascent technology in the grand scheme of computing. If you don’t really need a drive now I would hold off a little and wait for the industry to develop. Prices have been falling very steeply while performance and disk space has steadily increased. If there’s one thing that consumer computer technology has taught us it’s that this trend will most definitely continue until SSD drives become the norm.
If anybody currently has an SSD let us all know your experiences in the comments.
