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.
I’m probably posting this against better judgement, but here’s the raw footage from the FITC "Conversations" segment Si Scott and myself did in Toronto this year. I was under the impression this would be edited, but it just plays straight through, sort of funny. There are a lot of other conversations in the series, they can be found here. Some of them get pretty interesting, everything from pron to drugs…
Our conversation clocks in at 51:55 and sort of rambles all over the place, but Si Scott is an incredible artist so it’s interesting to hear his take on things. You can find Si’s portfolio here.
If you cared at all about hip hop during the early 90’s, chances are you’re a big fan of the two albums Digable Planets released during theie brief but brilliant career (Apparently they are touring again, but I’ve yet to hear of a new album). This was way back when, just as rap was turning into the complete mess we hear today and before "what what what what what what what what" was an acceptable refrain for a song. I know, I know, it’s not like everything back in the day was great, and it’s not like everything now is trash; it just seemed like it was easier to come by a well thought out, intelligent hip hop album back then.
When Digable Planets released Blowout Comb I was a Junior in High School and I had spent the previous summer installing a ridiculous sound system in my car. I think I played this album about 500 times in a row the first week I had it; I distinctly remember blasting this particular song (9th Wonder) on repeat on the way to taking my S.A.T.’s that year. Strange how you can forget whole chapters of your life but somehow you remember something seemingly as trivial as the song you listened to on the way to a test. I guess that’s the power of good music. It seems today I consume most of my music through headphones on planes or coming out of computer speakers, neither of which do this song justice, this one has to be played through the 12’s in your trunk to get the point…the bass is massive.
As for the cover art, this was the sort of thing I coveted when I was younger. I wasn’t exposed to anything even approaching good design where I grew up so album covers were one of my only windows into the world of somewhat decent graphic design. I remember being blown away by the design and packaging of this CD when it came out. Now looking back, I see it wasn’t exactly perfect, but still well executed considering. The version on the bottom is the cover for the single, which I think I had in cassette form before I got the album on CD.
Some very exciting news about the new CS suite (dubbed "CS Next"). It is being reported that Photoshop CS Next (CS4) will have GPU acceleration, meaning that it would be able to leverage the extremely powerful processor that, for 2D work like Photoshop, usually sits dormant on that $400 gaming video card you have in your computer. This is really big news and could lead to very big performance gains for large computations like filters and screen rendering. No news on how the lack of a 64-bit flavor of Photoshop for the OS X platform will affect this development. Via TG Daily. There’s also some more info over at TUAW.
We’re in Detroit for DEMF (Movement) and it’s pretty insane. I played a set today, thanks to everyone for coming out. I had no idea this thing was so big, and loud. The first picture is unfortunately from my iPhone, so the quality’s not so hot, but it’s all I had on me at the time. I did have my Nikon for (a very small) part of the day and got some interesting stuff here and there. Incidentally, that’s your faithful correspondent Jakub in the last shot; if you see him out, ask him for more information about Willits. We’ll be out and about tomorrow so hopefully I’ll get some better shots of the festival and Detroit in general. I think we’re also taking a drive up to Ann Arbor (always wanted to visit) so maybe I’ll get some up there too.
After all is said and done, I am very happy with the finished product. Unfortunately the colors on the JPEG above don’t come through as well as they did in print and there’s a lot of fine detail that’s lost at this size, so you’ll have to stretch a little bit to imagine what the real thing looks like. I just got into Detroit, will be playing a set at DEMF tomorrow, so I won’t have time to put together a good case study on the process of creating this print until I return on Sunday. But I wanted to post this up in the meantime after holding it back for so long.
Right around the time the Ghostly Swim tracklist was coming together i had to check out some more releases by some of the new faces and picked up this limited 7″ vinyl from School of Seven Bells called Silent Grips. You might remember them from the last Prefuse 73 record or saw them on a tour date with Blonde Redhead. They have this wonderful full sound that is worn down, its like if you molded together some of the best parts of Slowdive and replaced the guitars with warm synths and but brought the vocals up front and add some slower dusty Black Moth Super Rainbow percussion. I hope you enjoy.
