I wanted to show off some amazing album art from my music library, so I've picked 24 of my absolute favorites (arranged alphabetically). My rules for selecting these was to purely judge them based on the artwork, not on the actual music itself.
Some just have amazing photography, others just focus on great use of typography. All in all, I love each piece of album art (and the music.)
Here's some great videos I've found recently. This first one is a short documentary by Northern Lights about a still working 8,000 pound analog letterpress called the Kludge. Beautifully filmed!
KLUGE from Northern Lights on Vimeo.
This is a great music video by McBess - I'm overly impressed that they not only made the animations, but also the music! Everything here was made by them (or this one guy, I can't tell how many people...)
Another great music video for Death Cab for Cutie's song "Little Bribes", but this one's made by Ross Ching. Really catchy song, which is really enhanced by this awesome stop motion/time lapse video.
Death Cab for Cutie - Little Bribes from Ross Ching on Vimeo.
Lastly, a series of time lapse video from Tokyo.
static : pulse from Samuel Cockedey on Vimeo.
One of my favorite bands of all time, The Mountain Goats has written a short but sweet song about the original Mario game, but from the perspective of Toad. Really a great song, and the video below is worth a watch.
Recently I discovered woot.com, they sell one product a day and only have a limited supply - so demand is usually high and the sell out fast! I was up late one night last week and saw they had a seven-album Radiohead box set for only $45! With Radiohead being my all time favorite band, I had to spring for this. For those less fortunate, you can still pick up the Radiohead Box Set on Amazon
The box set itself is just plain gorgeous, not to mention the art on each of the seven albums and their respective booklets. I took some photos, click though for a larger version.
Thinking back over all the new music I discovered this past year, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite albums (in no particular order). Not all of these were released in the past year, it’s just that I’ve discovered them in the past year. They’re are amazing albums I can listen to over and over again. If you haven’t heard anything on this list, go get it right now!
There’s links to download music after the jump, and there’s even some free stuff too!
Read more...Check out this video from Chad Pugh. He spent 40 hours in Illustrator and took a screenshot every 5 seconds while creating this amazing drawing he calls "Science Machine."
You can view the full length 18 minute "director's cut", or buy the print online.
Music by Portishead.
When a video is uploaded to YouTube, the default view is a 320x240 video stretched to fit in a 640x480 player with a low audio bitrate. For some newer videos, youtube also retains a full 640x480 copy of the video with higher quality audio. Sometimes you will be allowed to see a button that allows you to watch the higher quality videos, but it’s not on every video.
I recently discovered that by adding &fmt=18 to the end of the URL, you can view the higher quality video for those that have it! Check out the screenshot comparison below from the Starcraft 2 trailer:
Watch the videos here to see the real difference:
Standard: http://youtube.com/watch?v=30MBljXxg3M
High Quality: http://youtube.com/watch?v=30MBljXxg3M&fmt=18
For another example, here’s Radiohead’s “Nude”
Standard: http://youtube.com/watch?v=JsLn9Wl1u_Q
High quality: http://youtube.com/watch?v=JsLn9Wl1u_Q&fmt=18
I found a new artist today, and he's got some great music. Jack Conte classifies his music as Indie / Alternative / Electroacoustic, and he's a great songwriter as well. He also has done a cover of a Radiohead song, which is my favorite band and what got me interested in him in the first place. Visit his myspace page, and listen to his music. If you liek it, please consider buying his album and supporting him! It's less than $4 on iTunes and Amazon, which is less than what I paid for dinner last night!
Click the link to see some of his music videos. They're great, I promise!
Read more...
Nine Inch Nails dumped their record label late last year, and now they are allowed to to basically whatever they want with their music. Today they decided to pull a move similar to what Radiohead did with their latest album In Rainbows. NIN has released a 4 volume instrumental album entitled Ghosts I - IV, which features a total of 36 tracks for just $5 to download in almost any format you want (MP3, FLAC, and Apple Lossless).
If you aren't sure yet, you can download the first volume for free on Bittorrent - the band them selves put it up on The Pirate Bay. I paid my $5 and I'm downloading the 600MB Apple Lossless files right now, and I haven't even heard a full song yet. More than anything, i support what this band is doing. They are once again proving to the record industry that they are no longer needed to sustain music sales or to keep customers happy with their product. If you make good music, fans will come.
If you want to buy this album, head over to ghosts.nin.com or Amazon.com and spend that $5. There's also some really nice box sets available for order, where they basically give you everything...and I mean everything, like a Blu-Ray disk with HD audio(24bit), all the multitrack files so you can remix the album, etc.
After spending a weekend at a southern gospel music conference, it’s time to listen to something else. Now I really don’t normally like techno/electronic music, but Daft Punk does it so well you can’t hate it. I’ve been a fan of theirs for a while now and I don’t listen to them as often as I probably should, but recently I found they had a new album, Alive 2007.
This is a live album where they perform remixes, which is pretty bold since your fan already love your music and you re-work it for them in a live venue for the first time. But they’re all great songs, I’ve been listening to this album a lot this past week. I love to crank up the bass on this album because it’s so powerful (my neighbor’s dog seems to hate it though).
How can you not love music from guys that dress as freaking robots? Here’s a video form the Alive 2007 tour.
I just found out about Bat for Lashes tonight via the video below, and I think they’re great. I just got the whole album Fur and Gold and so far it’s great, it’s some very slow and sometimes haunting trance-like music. I think I’ve really begun to like a lot of indie female-led bands, I have a quite a few in my music library and I don’t think I noticed that until just now.
Here’s the video for What’s a Girl to do?, it’s very strange and reminiscent of Donnie Darko, but a really well put together video, and from what I hear it’s what most people think is her best song.