Saturday is Make Some Noise Day: Aphex Twin

No Make Some Noise Day feature can be complete without Aphex Twin, the man with the oddest beats and most pseudonyms ever. "To cure a weakling child" and "Girl/Boy Song" are absolutely amazing.

Album of the Day: The Album Leaf - Into The Blue Again

Urgh. I need something gentle and soothing today for a variety of reasons. The best way to experience The Album Leaf is live - always a great performance, always fun visuals, always a good time. I had a hard time picking a representative album from the AL discography, I have 5 of them (and some EPs) of which 3 have about equal high song ratings (yes, I am an obsessive song rater). There are at least a couple of amazing songs on each album. But I had to pick and it is this one. It's the one which introduced me to AL, it's one of the later ones so technically and artistically more well-rounded than some of the earlier work (or so I think), and I'm pretty sure I'll get to the other ones here sooner or later. Enjoy.

Playlist of the Day: I Don't Know What To Call This But I Was Thinking Of You When I Made It

I'm in the mood for a playlist today. And actually I know exactly what to call this but...

Album of the Day: Beck - Sea Change

Sea Change, Beck's 2002 "heartbreak album". Man, if my heart gets broken I just mope around and get drunk for a bit, this guy makes one of his best albums. Have a listen.

Album of the Day: Yo La Tengo - Popular Songs

Epic opener, amazing songs in a variety of styles, a discography of 12 albums - you may not like everything Yo La Tengo does but they do a lot of it very well. This 12th (wow, from 2009? Time for a new album!) is like a Yo La Tengo sampler: you get a bit of everything. And a lot of it is good.

 

Rating:*****
Comment: All over the place but that's not a bad thing

Album of the Day: Medeski Martin & Wood - Shack-man

Lazy Sunday is lazy. So kick back and relax with this classic MMW record.

 

Rating: *****
Comment: Holy smoking Hammond jazz fusion, Batman!

Saturday Is Make Some Noise Day: Makai

Brutal German classic D&B from the late 90s. I dare you. Massive bonus points if you recognise the singing used on the first track.

 

Rating: *****
Comment: Minimal and dark and fast and hasn't lost its edge in over a decade.

Album of the Day: Electric Guest - Mondo

Yay, it's Friday! Time for some uncomplicated poppy electronica! Some hits and misses on this debut album, but the hits are good hits. Enjoy.

Rating: *****
Comment: very decent debut

Album of the Day: Way Yes - Walkability

Please put the first song of this album on repeat, like, forever. I wasn't able to reconstruct the entire (short) album on Grooveshark but who cares? First song. Repeat forever. Commence swaying and sashaying. Never stop.

 

Rating: *****
Comment: Okay so the other songs are fun too.But the first one defines the summer.

Album of the Day: The Modern Lovers - Live

If this doesn't cheer you up you have a hole where your heart is supposed to be. Really, you should get that checked out.

 

Rating: *****
Comment: Instant cheer-up.

DIY: James Marshall Technicolour

I've had my iPad for well over two years now. Two new generations have been released since I've bought it (and how I've fought my inner geek full of WANT to not buy them). And in all that time I've never seen a really good doodling app. What gives? It's the non-pressure sensitive touch screen isn't it? Odd that old technology like resistive touch screens would work better for sketching than this spiffy multi-touch capacitive one.

Recently I've been messing with Bamboo Paper for the iPad. It's one of the few sketching apps which doesn't suck total donkey balls. It's free (aside from possible in-app purchases) and it comes with a decent set of tools. Bit of a limited palette, though. And the canvas is exactly as large as the screen. And it's all a bit ham-fisted without a stylus, you can forget about really detailed work. Though I suppose I could make my own stylus. But still, it IS a ton of fun to noodle around with.

Album of the Day: Sun Kil Moon - Among The Leaves

Ouch. I'm declaring Monday "ease in day". No talky, just listen. And bring me some more coffee.

 

Rating: *****
Comment: A nice laid-back acoustic album

Album of the Day: Four Tet - Pause

How about a nice mellow bit of electronic weirdness this lovely Sunday? Yes, I think that will do nicely. Enjoy this great album, released in 2001.

 

Rating: *****
Comment: one of my favorite Four Tet albums.

Saturday is Make Some Noise Day: Calyx & Teebee

SATURDAY IS MAKE SOME NOISE DAY

 

Rating: *****
Comment: Dark, hard, and in your face. Jump, sucker!

DIY: Astroids Wall Mural

So this is pretty much the laziest way to DIY - have blank wall, buy wall stickers, stick them to wall. Still very happy with the result :)

Those guys sell a ton of awesome stickers, check them out.

Movietime: Prometheus

A lot of people seem to be hung up on or disappointed in this movie, I don't really get it. I mean yes, it would have been far better if I had just walked out for the last 10 minutes and missed the grating sequel setup, not to mention the annoying "getting crushed by a giant spaceship because you're dumb" scene, and yes, forget about the aliens having inscrutable motivations, half the time I didn't even know why the humans (and robot) did what they did but after all that and a huge run-on sentence I really did enjoy watching it. Especially on IMAX, it was huge and impressive and Ridley knows how to get that shot across. The whole story wasn't as grand as I had hoped or as deep as I had liked, and perhaps this is what disappointed some. It was sort of implied to be both by all the trailers and interviews etc. leading up to it. Still, well worth giving it a go.

Rating: *****
Comment: pretty solid SF flick with some beautiful shots and a few nods to Alien

Album of the Day: The Mountain Goats - All Eternals Deck

I've been tracking my listening habits on last.fm since 2004. I know that before that, starting around the mid-90s, Radiohead was absolute king of my top played artists. Because, well, they're very, very good. And eventually this reflected in my last.fm statistics, all the way up to ~2008 when I found The Mountain Goats. And then, very quickly, they overtook Radiohead as the top played artist. All this is relevant in that it demonstrates that I love The Mountain Goats very, very much.

The guy (because there is really only one core member) has a huge discography, but a lot of the earlier work was done on cassette and by home recording and so the audio quality leaves something to be desired.  This eventually changed around 2002 according to wikipedia although according to my ears from 1996 onwards the audio quality starts getting much better. This album is currently the latest (although there is a new one in the works, yay!) and was released in 2011.Enjoy.

If you're in the mood for more Mountain Goats, check out my "best of playlist" on Grooveshark.

 

Rating: *****
Comment: 13 songs, only 4 have less than a 4 star rating in iTunes. Yeah, I like this album.

Album of the Day: Bill Callahan - Rough Travel For A Rare Thing

I love Bill Callahan, I do, ever since I heard him the first time when he was still recording under the name Smog with crappy recording gear and badly-tuned guitars played badly. Distinctive voice, dry delivery, dark irony, what's not to love? This is a fairly recent record, a live recording, and he's come a long way. There's a whole band there now, he's more secure in his delivery, but there is still that core sound I fell for years ago.

 

Rating: *****
Comment: There is never a bad time to put this album on.

Album of the Day: DeWolff - Orchards/Lupine

The psychedelic rock of the late 70s isn't dead, it moved to the deep south of the Netherlands! I'm kind of happy to present a Dutch band to you - honestly, there aren't that many Dutch bands I'd recommend to anyone. This three-man band may have a collective age of under 60 when added together, but man, they rock oldschool. Shades of Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin, bits of Cream and Pink Floyd. They've already played the bigger venues and festivals of the Netherlands, and are slowly branching out to other European countries.

By the way, I'm sorry the albums of the day listening widgets won't work on ipads and iphones, since they're Flash-based. Can't be helped, you'll have to listen to them on a proper computer.

 

Rating: *****
Comment: I can't believe most of these guys are under the age of 20!

DIY: Super Mario Triptych

So I have this room I call "the Red Room". Because the theme is 'red', not because of a literary or Twin Peaks reference. In fact, there are several colour-themed rooms in my home, but perhaps we'll talk of that some other day. Anyway, the red room had this one wall that needed a nice big painting or something. Except I couldn't find anything suitable; it was either too small, or had the wrong proportions, or the colour scheme was off. So one day I was walking through town and this local art store had a blowout sale. I came away with three massive 115x75cm canvasses, a bunch of acrylic paint in various bright and happy colours, and a couple of brushes, all for less than 40 euros.

But what to paint? Also, how to paint? I hadn't touched a brush since high school. And then I stumbled across this old Super Mario Bros spritesheet. I always did love the old 8-bit sprite art of the NES era. And my art teacher always told me to paint what I love. I never got what he meant. Now I do.

I'm still fiddling around with the spacing and getting it all level so they're not perfectly aligned but yay! Super Mario triptych! God I'm such a geek. If you spot the error in the middle painting, you're at least as much of a geek as I am. Click on any image to see a larger size/slideshow.

 And for funnies, a couple of "work in progress" animations I threw together from snapshots I took along the way. This is the first painting I did, I was all over the place, ha ha. I learned a lot from it, and I may even give it away and make a new one to replace it. Still, it turned out okay.

This is the second one, it went much smoother. I didn't shoot any in progress pictures of the third.

I had a ton of fun doing this. I'm not sure how many hours I put in, but it wasn't that many. The most time-consuming was setting up the grid, after that it was just "paint by numbers" on a large scale. After spending so much time analyzing and reconstructing these sprites, I am more impressed than ever by just how much personality and expression they managed to eke out of a 32x16 grid and three colours.

Saturday is Make Some Noise Day: Squarepusher

Saturday is make some noise day! And who makes better and more obscure noise than Squarepusher? For me Squarepusher takes me back to my messy 20s, VJing for peanuts and dancing in dank basement clubs to glitchy Drum & Bass, emerging only when the sun has risen again to stagger home and sleep. Good times. Weird times.

This is by no means an easily accessible album, although it may be one of the more accessible ones in the Squarepusher discography. But since when is accessibility a plus anyway? Would you like your steak pre-chewed too? Fuck that shit. Hit it, Tom. Feed me weird things.

Rating: *****
Comment: Not the best squarepusher album but certainly worth a repeat listen.

Album of the Day: Califone - All My Friends Are Funeral Singers

Califone's unique sound is easy to detect but hard to pin down. Twangly is one of the words which comes to mind. Oh, that isn't a word? Deal with it. Clamorous is another. Freaking awesome, too. Wait, that's two words. Anyway, this 2009 album is less "out there" than their 2006 album Roots & Crowns, also a favorite of mine. More coherent. More... folky? Eh, whatever. Like I said, it's a unique sound, and it demands a few listens.

 

In fact, here is Roots & Crowns too, because it's Friday and I'm a nice guy and you really should listen to it. A couple of times at least.

Rating: *****
Comment: in a class of its own.

Album of the Day: Isbells - Stoalin'

Another Belgian band - a very different one from dEUS which I posted about two days ago but in its own way just as good. Gentle, wistful, restrained, Stoalin' is beautiful and sometimes haunting, sometimes uplifting, but always immensely enjoyable.

 Rating: *****
Comment: I think I said it all in the post.

The reading list: Powers

Powers is an American creator-owned comic book series by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Michael Avon Oeming. It has been ongoing since 2000. It combines the genres of superhero fantasy, crime noir and the police procedural as the series follows the lives of two homicide detectives assigned to investigate cases involving people with superhuman abilities, who are referred to colloquially as "powers".

It's extremely well-written, gritty, and weaves complex storylines and backgrounds together to create a gripping universe and compelling tale all while looking absolutely gorgeous. It's also pretty shocking at times, because, well, the lead characters are homicide detectives after all. Currently people are working on turning it into a TV series, and I hope that works out.

Rating: *****
Comment: Dark, engaging, with stunning visual art and lots of homages and cameos.

Album of the Day: dEUS - Following Sea

What the hell, dEUS? 6 albums in like 18 years (and a 6 year break somewhere in between) and suddenly your seventh within a year of the last one without advance warning?

I'm not sure what "the audience" for this weblog is, I'm mostly just talking about stuff I happen to like personally, but in care you don't know them, dEUS are a Belgian rock band who have made some extremely weird and awesome records in the past, their debut album Worst Case Scenario is absolutely fantastic (see such songs as Hotellounge and Suds & Soda - amazing stuff) but all their albums have at least a couple of great songs and several interesting ones. Just listen and enjoy.

 

Rating: *****
Comment: where the hell did this come from?

DIY: Zelda faux stained-glass windows

Even since I saw these stained glass Zelda Wind Waker pictures on the web a long time ago, I've wanted to do something with them. I just never had windows where they would work. And then I moved shop, and now I do. A nice row of 4 windows in my lounge. Yay!

As a first step, I enlarged the pictures to 4xA3, printed them out, glued them together, and stuck them on cardboard. Then I took a boxcutter, and cut out the silhouette of the window shape. Then I fixed them over the existing windows. By which I mean I took a hammer and nails and pounded the suckers in place.

I'm rather happy with the result, even if right now you have these stupid bars where I pasted the separate pieces of papers together. I'm still debating on having them printed (in a single sheet, of course) on transparent plastic (versus just regular paper). The thing is, the colored paper doesn't alter the colour of the light coming through like 'proper' stained glass would. I did not expect that. I think transparent coloured plastic will, which I hope will enhance the stained glass effect further.

First a shot of the entire array, sorry if it looks fuzzy, my cheap-ass digital camera doesn't handle the extreme differences in contrast well. Click on any of the images to see a larger version/slideshow.

And some shots of each window individually. I wasn't entirely careful in cutting out the window silhouette as this is just a mockup of the final version, but it turns out this gives a nice sort of "glow" effect around the window proper.

 As mentioned, the "cross bars" are just because these are A3 sheets stuck together, the final version will hopefully be in one piece.

 Number three of four...

 Yeah, this one needs a little work, I wasn't entirely careful doing the cutting.

Movietime: Iron Sky

Space Nazis - who fled to the dark side of the moon after 1945 - build a space fleet and come back to conquer the earth with giant space zeppelins towing meteors to throw on cities. There is nothing about that sentence I don't like. Sadly, the movie doesn't execute this bizarre yet humorous premise very well. The jokes fall flat, the story wanders all over the place, and the pacing is off. The CGI is pretty well done though, especially for what is essentially a very low-budget movie. All in all it's a shame, I feel there is a better movie hiding in there somewhere.

Rating: *****
Comment: I had such high hopes when I heard "space Nazis"

Movietime: Project X

The synopsis of this movie is "3 high school seniors throw a birthday party to make a name for themselves. As the night progresses, things spiral out of control as word of the party spreads.".

And that's pretty much it. Three social outcasts throw a party, post it on Craigslist and other places, and about 1500 people show up and a midget gets stuffed in the oven, everyone gets wasted beyond belief, and a guy with a flamethrower shows up and torches the neighborhood.

There's really not much of a story, and it's all shot in that annoying "found footage" style. And yet, and yet, I had fun watching it. The whole thing reminded me of the current generation's take on "National Lampoon's Animal House", but with far less narrative and way more excess. And it really does spiral out of control beyond all belief. I went in without expectations and came out grinning.

Rating: *****
Comment: Mindless fun riot