AWESOMECON

This reminds me of the Fire-engine water powered flying car from Mythbusters.  I seriously want to know what kind of design and engineering went into this contraption.

Read [via Geekologie]

There has been many-a-time where I read about a band (new/old) and wonder what they sound like.  Usually, I search for a MySpace page or a Imeem page, but I just found a new way to find music called Just hear !t

Just Hear !t is a music oriented search/aggregator that finds music videos and tracks from sites like YouTube, Seeqpod, etc.  Its a simple and fast Adobe Flash UI that plays the music and video’s within the site.  I am impressed by its simplicity and it turned up some pretty amazing results.  A great resource for SXSW too!

South By South West (SXSW) is the annual interactive/film/music conference & festival held in Austin, Texas.  This year is the 22nd annual conference and it will be Niki and my 4th year in a row.  To say SXSW is awesome is an understatement.  Its has been one of the best and most amazing music experiences I have ever had, and each year gets better.  As my friend Cyrus said: “Its like the Disneyland of music. You can see a year’s worth of shows in four days”.  And he was dead-on.

One of the challenges of SXSW is preparing for it.  With 1500+ bands playing at 70+ venues over four days and nights you have to have a gameplan.  Who are you going to see?  When are they playing?  What day shows should we hit?  Can we get in for the show?  You have to ask youself all of this to achive the best SXSW musical experience.

SXSW posts a band list, which is daunting in itself, to help you find out who is playing this year.  Seeing that many names on one page, its really easy to lose your place and everytime you re-read it you see bands you missed last time.  Luckily, some people over at Sun are hosting a SXSW Artist Catalog with band notes, pics, links and a tag cloud.  Its a great tool and really helps you see who is attending. Expect to see more on the blog about SXSW over the next month as the March 13th kick-off is rapidly approaching!

Read [via SXSW RSS]

It seems that Animal Collective (AC) has become the 2009 music blog darlings.  Everywhere you look AC’s new release “Merriweather Post Pavilion” is already being called the best album of 2009.  Pretty strong comments for the 28th day of the year.  Recently, Spinner.com streamed “Merriweather Post Pavilion” in its entirety and by the second song “My Girls”, I was sold.  I passed the link to Yap, and around the same part of the album he was sold.  It really is an amazing album, just for the fact that it got me in two songs.  Its been a long time since a band made me want to go out and buy an album after hearing a just song or two, one time.

Photo -- 2009 © J Caldwell

Last week, AC played the legendary NYC venue: The Bowery Ballroom.  NYCTaper was there with an amazing portable rig and recorded the whole show.  The fact that they use a pair of Neumann KM-150’s says a lot right there.  You can listen to and download the entire set.

Read [from GorrillavsBear]

Flinging toast far to reach one’s plate,
Hopeful the distance is judged just so.
Butter prepared, sliced thick like slate
Angles precise, before my bread does bake.

Read [from Ivovos via Ryan]

Back in my day, MTV played music videos nearly 24 hours a day, not this glam-ality TV crap we have now… and we liked it.  Red Fang’s “Prehistoric Dog” reminds me of the mesmerizing times we used to have sitting around drinking Dr. Pepper (later on Beer), watching videos and waiting for Liquid Television.  Ahh… the days of high school.

“Prehistoric Dog” is a well shot and great sounding rock video, with a nice nod to the Monty Python boys.

[link via Victor]

Parks on Fire from neither-field on Vimeo.

Parks on Fire is a new piece of video art by Scott Pagano. Mr. Pagano, with his fancy-pants RISD cred, has done a lot of amazing work with a large list of world-class electronic musicians. Seeing him live at the Recombinant Media Labs (R.I.P.) in San Francisco as visual counterpart to Speedy J (oh, don’t get me started on him!) was inspirational. This particular piece is set to the chilled-out sounds of Trifonic.

Parks on Fire is the latest short graphic film creation of digital artist Scott Pagano. It is an exploration of the complex, interpenetrated, and reflective relationships of structure, form, and motion that both bind and conflict the natural and manmade worlds. The experience is a visual and aural expedition through a series of uniquely explicated environments. Stunning synthetic worlds of micro precision evolve and meld in to landscapes of natural forms evoking the achingly unknowable sublime that is here captured, redefined and expressed via intensive digital reprocessing. Sound and image drive each other to create the uncanny sense that both are emerging from the same dammed-but-divine ethereal engine. The lush cinematic soundtrack is by Trifonic, and is available on their debut release Emergence.

Parks on Fire [vimeo.com]

Photographer David Bergman was covering Barack Obama’s historical inauguration when he shot the above image at an amazing 1474 megapixel resolution. The photo consists of 220 individual pictures taken with a Canon G10 strapped to a Gigapan Imager. The final image is, understandbly, huge at  59,783 x 24,658 pixels and almost 2gb in size. The level of detail is simply incredible. You can zoom right into every single person’s face, practically. Is it me, or is Bush playing a Gameboy?

Read. [davidbergman.net]

Click for full size

The above is a photo from 1910 entitled “The Attack on Juarez”. It’s one example among many, many more at the Library of Congress’ Flickr account, where they have been steadily scanning and uploading their entire photo archive. Currently they have several collections: news photos from the 1910s, photos from 1930-1940 in color, World War I panoramas, photocrom travel photos, which must be a mere fraction of their inventory, so it seems that there will be much more to come. Tagged and searchable even!

The Library of Congress’ photostream [flickr.com]

I’m a big fan of my boys Ed and Joshua, who together form electronic music act Time Slips By. Between the two of them they have over 35 years of experience in the crafting of awesome, highest-quality electronic sounds. Techno, drum n’ bass, ambient, electro, hardcore, breakcore, IDM, drill n’ bass, dubstep, early “rave” etc etc and on and on, together and separately, they’ve done it all. Except maybe big club trance, maybe not that so much. And wasn’t there some club affliction called “handbag” at one point or another? Maybe not so much that either, but they’ve covered a huge range of music either way.

In their current incarnation as Time Slips By, Ed and Joshua create lush ambient soundscapes, while at the same time staying true to their darker, harder instincts and pasts. Rather than trying to fill up every moment, however, TSB uses the silences to express feelings as well. Here’s a link to their latest live PA, which took place on a beautiful night in the Northern California forests at Cloudfactory Collective’s Chillits campout. The guys put many hours of work into creating a full environment experience: the audience was surrounded by MIDI controlled LED lights of various shapes and sizes, all precision controlled for maximum effect when viewed in concert with the audio.