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Playlist: Morning Furorey

KLJ3 — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 09:07:47 +0000

1. Imogen Heap – Hide And Seek
2. The Flaming Lips – I Can Be A Frog
3. Mercury Rev – Holes
4. Badly Drawn Boy – The Shining
5. Gomez – Whippin’ Piccadilly
6. Hefner – Trouble Kid
7. Beck – Girl
8. Cake – Short Skirt/Long Jacket
9. Weezer – Beverly Hills
10. Pixies – Tame

Listen to playlist here.

Listening to: ‘Endless Blue’ by The Horrors

Playlist: Warning! Contains Goldfrapp

KLJ3 — Thu, 26 May 2011 11:11:39 +0000

1. Los Campesinos! – You! Me! Dancing!
2. Goldfrapp – Number 1 [Múm Remix]¹
3. The Flaming Lips – Do You Realize?? [Postal Service Remix]¹
4. Gwen Stefani – Cool
5. Kylie Minogue – Wow
6. Yelle – Mal Poli
7. Uffie – MCs Can Kiss
8. Mos Def – Ghetto Rock
9. Lupe Fiasco – Kick Push
10. MC Solaar – La Belle Et Le Bad Boy
11. IAM – Je Danse Le Mia
12. Sébastian Tellier – Divine [Radio Mix]
13. Belle & Sebastian – Dress Up In You
14. Biffy Clyro – Many Of Horror (When We Collide)
15. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Skeletons
16. Arcade Fire – Maps²

¹ Original mix as not on Spotify
² Missing as not on Spotify

Listen to playlist here.

Listening to: ‘Chi Mai’ by Ennio Morricone

Review: Beastie Boys – Hot Sauce Committee Part Two

KLJ3 — Fri, 20 May 2011 09:00:23 +0000

A little less cowbell please…
Read more at The Music Cupboard

Listening to: ‘You Throw Parties, We Throw Knives’ by Los Campesinos!

Playlist: A Glass Half Full Is Still Just A Stupid Glass

KLJ3 — Mon, 16 May 2011 12:41:13 +0000

1. The Chordettes – Lollipop [Squeak E. Clean & Desert Eagles Remix]
2. Those Dancing Days – Run Run
3. Tilly And The Wall – Alligator Skin
4. Rilo Kiley – Portions For Foxes
5. Modest Mouse – Missed The Boat
6. Cake – Frank Sinatra
7. Eels – Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues
8. Dirty Projectors – Stillness Is The Move
9. The Knife – You Make Me Like Charity
10. Architecture In Helsinki – Heart It Races
11. I’m From Barcelona – Get In Line
12. Los Campesinos! – We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives
13. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Pin
14. be your own PET – Fire Department
15. Blood Red Shoes – It’s Getting Boring By The Sea
16. Art Brut – Modern Art
17. Hefner – Hymn For The Cigarettes

Listen to playlist here.

Listening to: ‘Albastross’ by Wild Beasts

Review: Bring Me The Horizon – There Is A Hell, Believe Me I’ve Seen It. There Is A Heaven, Let’s Keep It A Secret.

KLJ3 — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 17:54:08 +0000

Apart from the title there are no secrets here.
Read more at The Music Cupboard

Listening to: ’69 Guns’ by Rival Schools

Albums 2010 (Part 1)

KLJ3 — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 10:30:48 +0000

Wanted to put this out last Saturday actually at the beginning of the year but a busy week stopped this. One week late isn’t too bad. 2010 was a great a great year for music so there was a lot to choose from. In fact I had to list all the albums I’d come across in the previous 365 days before I could even begin to collate a top 10. This is obviously the best of the albums I have heard this year. I’m only one man with two ears after all.

In no particular order.

A hugely unpopular answer in certain circles to the above statement will be Kate Nash’s My Best Friend Is You. It’s a bit purile and it’s a bit immature but it’s infused with the same teenage heartbreak that made Emmy The Great’s First Love such an enjoyable listen two years ago like Nash’s debut, Made Of Bricks, a couple of years before that. From the faux-sixties shalala of Do-Wah-Dooto the slighty embarrassing monologue, Nash’s North London mockney carries you through an album of late night summer jealousies.
Stand out track: Later On

Albums with long expected release dates rarely live up to the hype. Just ask The Prodigy and Guns ‘n’ Roses but not Uffie. Three years with several singles and various guest appearances, most of which appear in the track listing for Sex Dreams and Denim Jeans alongside many more electro hip hop tunes produced by the likes of Feadz, Mr Ozio and Pharrel Williams. There have been many pretenders over Uffie’s comparitively long career but none of them have delivered anything near as polished or, more importantly, enjoyable.
Stand out track: First Love

Way back, around this time 2009 I discovered a band on Spotify that pretty much encapsulated everything I love. Pretty boy/girl vocals, obscure references, clever plays on words and lyrical turns of phrase, Los Campesinos! seemed perfect. Imagine my elation when it turned out that the bands third full length was due for release within the month. Romance Is Boring takes LC!’s previous twee sound and makes it “more post coital and less post rock” as Straight In At 101 states.
Stand out track: In Medias Res

There were several films that I really enjoyed this year Kick Ass, Inception, Scott Pilgrim vs The World and of course The Social Network with its fantastic soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Bearing similarities and even reworking tracks from Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV. I believe this dark ambient soundtrack went some way to making The Social Network the great film it was.
Stand out track: Hand Covers Bruise

When Kieron Gillen, one half the creative team behind musicentric comic Phonogram, recommends a band you take notice. So when I hear him mention in passing the name Sleighbells and their debut album, Treats, I took note. One month later and I had a copy in my hands on release and it didn’t disappoint. Combining noise pop with Derek E. Miller’s post Posion The Well, post hardcore credentials if I was hard pushed to name my album of the year this would probably be it.
Stand out track: Tell ‘Em

Listening to: ‘Not In Love’ (feat. Robert Smith) by Crystal Castles

‘Musical’ Review (Of 2009)

KLJ3 — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 15:17:47 +0000

Holidays are coming…holidays are coming…and now they’ve passed and we’ve hit 2010 at an exponential rate so it’s time to do a review of the year. A vintage year. Nay, a vintage decade. The two thousands (nouties never really sat right with me) is the decade in which I grew up. Sure I’m a nineties kid but I’m a consumer of the 2000s. Films, TV, books, comics, and probably the thing that has shaped me more than anything, music. Buying hundreds of CDs and dancing like a loon in the indie clubs of Bournemouth, Southampton and of course London. 2009 has been no different, maybe with the exception of the pretension of youth slipping away so that more mainstream but no less valuable music has vied with indie rock/pop gems and ghostly electronic soundscapes for attention. Here is my list Spotify playlist featuring tracks from the top ten albums (in my opinion) from 2009:

Top Ten Albums 2009

And if you don’t have a Spotify account here it is in no particular order:

Emmy The Great – First Love
Polly Scattergood – Polly Scattergood
Bat For Lashes – Two Suns
Wild Beasts – Two Dancers
Future Of The Left – Travels With Myself And Another
The Dead Weather – Horehound
Yeah Yeah Yeahs – It’s Blitz
La Roux – La Roux
Fever Ray – Fever Ray
Florence + The Machine – Lungs

The two audio depositories I have used above, Spotify and Last.fm respectively, are signifiers of how my acquisition of music has altered over the last year and will continue to change in the coming years. An early adoption of mp3 technology in the mid ’90s did not deter me from buying CDs and collecting vinyl in the ’00s. Maybe its that collector mentality that hasn’t allowed the CD and DVD go the way of the TDK SA C-90 (other cassette tapes are available) quite yet. I think the physical versus virtual space, bits versus atoms will be the final death blow to the compact disc for me.

Small amount of my compact discs on shelving

More compact and denser HDD

However, I’m pleased to see a very gradual equilibrium forming between the valuation of digital and traditional formats that is being forged democratically between end consumers and originators, such as Goliaths Radiohead and David IAMX, cutting the middleman label bosses out. Not it has to be said due to any misguided act of spite but because of the old guard’s inability to adapt.

On a more personal note, around this time last year I set four New Year’s resolutions. Two of which I have gone some way to achieving. Sometime in 2011 I shall hopefully have a story published in Accent UK‘s Victoriana anthology. Sooner than that I have provided the art to Mark Clapham‘s story The Beast Within in Accent UK’s 2010 anthology Predators which will be out before Bristol International Comic Expo. As well as this honour, I have also worked on several covers and lettering projects which have been equally as fun. Also, my personal project that was called SolNoir and is now entitled Singualrity has begun to take shape thanks to the fantastic talents of artist Gerald Forton and colourist Danjerzone. 2009 has been a kind year to me but I’m really incredibly excited about 2010 and the next decade.

Listening to: ‘Land Of My Formers’ by Future of the Left

House Party – Interactive Narrative/Audio Installation

KLJ3 — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 17:05:05 +0000

I did my BA in Interactive Media: Graphic Design but since then have settled on the latter part of that. I love creating imagery and always have. When most children were using their Commodore Amigas to play games I sat for hours in front of Deluxe Paint III. However, due to the nature of my three years at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth I collected a wealth of failed experiments and fully working art pieces. The first of which I’ll post up here is House Party.

House Party is an interactive installation that uses the intuitive interface of a traditional dolls house, albeit with anthropomorphized characters, to explore a narrative with multiple plot threads. By placing characters face to face spectators can listen into conversations in order to navigate the story and find out more information about events.

Inspired by the techniques of Victorian ‘Ingénieurs’ (the engineers behind magicians)and the imagery of contemporary Japanese designers such as Nagi Noda, the artist created a piece that augments the computer with the internal mechanics of a modern illusory toy. An exploration of author Arthur C. Clarke’s third law, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The installation uses the fidicial tracking patch developed by the Reactable team in 2003 to create their collaborative electronic music instrument. A webcam set in the hollow plinth of the installation points up, looking through the perspex floor of the dolls house tracking fidicial markers placed on the bases of characters. This allows VVVV to determine the x and y postions of characters as well as their orientation.

VVVV passes these values to Adobe Director through the OSC encoder to the OSCXtra plugin. Depending on characters orientation and distances from one another different audio clips are triggered giving the effect of conversations between the House Party guests.

The above text is the original blurb from the exhibition book. There is also a video to go with this but the voice-over narrated by myself is so dry I won’t subject anyone to that unless they really are a glutton for punishment.

Listening to: ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ by Billy Idol

Big In Japan

KLJ3 — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 20:50:08 +0000

Mere Mortals will be touring Japan in support of their debut album Rebel Radio which sports a front cover design by me. They will be playing the following dates:

4th Nov 大阪・江坂MUSE :Esaka MJSE/ Osaka
5th Nov 大阪・心斎橋DROP: Shinsaibashi DROP/ Osaka
8th Nov 東京・新木場STUDIO COAST :STUDIO COAST Shinkiba/Tokyo
9th Nov Apple Store 銀座インストアライブ:Apple instore live Ginza/Tokyo
11th Nov 愛知・名古屋ell FITS ALL: ell FITS ALL/ Nagoya
12th Nov 福岡・福岡LIVEHOUSE CB : LIVEHOUSE CB /Fukuoka
15th Nov 神戸大学 Kobe Univercity / Kobe

I apologise if the Japanese is illegible. I’ve copied it straight out of the email the band sent me.

Listening to: ‘You’re So Great’ by Blur

Mere Mortals – Rebel Radio (Japanese Release)

KLJ3 — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 22:36:00 +0000

Woke this morning to an email from Mere Mortals, the LA based rock band and the results of a project I worked on a while ago. The Japanese release of their album, entitled ‘Rebel Radio’, will be out on November the 4th sporting the above album artwork by myself.

Listening to: ‘Ziggy Stardust’ by David Bowie