Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
Wu-Tang vs. the Beatles: Enter the Magical Mystery Chambers
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
Tom Caruana made this killer mixtape of Wu-Tang vocals and Beatles-related instrumentals and has just released it for free online here. I made the official album cover as seen above. Even if I wasn't involved I feel like I'd be recommending this to friends, it's just that good. The samples especially really run the gamut from expected to totally-far-out-"what was that?"-style-awesome. Reception has been pretty good so far, Raekwon put the link out on twitter and it really started blowing up! Looking forward to doing more stuff like this.
Tags: album covers, beatles, wu-tang
Posted in Music, Portfolio | 3 Comments »
Quarter Circle Forward
Monday, November 2nd, 2009
This is just a quick post to announce/promote/remind everyone that I now have a weekly radio show on WDET HD2. The show is called Quarter Circle Forward and it airs every Wednesday at 9EST and goes to Midnight. This Wednesday will be the third show so far, and it's shaping up pretty nicely. A link to stream the station online and copies of previous setlists can be found at the official show page. For a sampling of what gets played on the show, here's a sneak peak at the first few songs from this week's show:
Necessaries - Detroit Tonight
the Mantles - Bad Design
Best Coast - Sun Was High (So Was I)
Summer Camp - I Only Have Eyes For You
the Flaming Lips - Worm Mountain
Kim Sun - The Man Who Must Leave
Kanye West - RoboCop
Islands - Heartbeat
Islands - Vapours
Fuck Buttons - Space Mountain
Neon Indian - 6669 (I Don't Know if You Know)
Tags: quarter circle forward, radio, wdet
Posted in Music | No Comments »
Function13 Album Cover
Thursday, July 30th, 2009
Cover design for Function 13's "Prostitution" remix album. More information and a link to the free download are available on the official site.
More work coming soon, things are getting kind of busy right now but I'm going to at least try and finish up the Wu-Note Project before the end of summer.
Tags: album covers
Posted in Music, Portfolio | No Comments »
Wu-Tang Design Remix Project pt.2
Saturday, May 30th, 2009
So I want to take back something I said in Part 1 -- "almost all of the Wu-Tang album art was horrible" is a bit too harsh I think. Some people have really run with that and gotten quite upset, and rightfully so. There are definitely some good ones in there. I've thought about it and I think it would be more accurate to say that my real problem with the original covers was how disjointed they all looked when put in the same playlist. The cleverest thing the Wu-Tang Clan ever did was negotiate separate contracts for everybody, but since these came out on so many different labels the cover art varies drastically. The "Wu-Note Project" is my attempt to amend this all the covers work as a set.
Let me know what you guys think of Part 2, either in the comments here or on Flickr, where I'm posting each as they're made. All in all I'm pretty happy with them, although I wish there was a Killa Bees Volume 2 fit into this series chronologically so I could do that Thelonius Monk yellow/red trick.
Tags: album covers, blue note, Design, remix, wu-tang
Posted in Design, Music, Portfolio | 17 Comments »
Wu-Tang Design Remix Project pt.1
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
A little while ago I put a bunch of Wu-Tang (both group and solo) albums on my computer. 21 of them, in fact. I inherited some mild OCD from my mom, and as anyone who has seen my iTunes can attest to, it manifests itself in weird ways. I need to have decent-quality album art for every album on my computer, which currently equals over 90 gigs. The problem was that almost all of the Wu-Tang album art was horrible (ODB's two albums being the only real exceptions) -- no offense to the original designers, but as iconic as they might be they're looking pretty dated these days. So, armed with inspiration from what Olly Moss and others are doing (as written about by me here, and later by Kottke here) and a book of Blue Note Records covers, I set out to remake all 21. The first seven are here (click for full-view):
I've changed the art for these in my iTunes and love the results:
So seven down, fourteen to go. From here on out I'm going to start uploading them to my Flickr Photostream as soon as each is done, so you guys can bug me if I'm not making them fast enough. I'll post the next set of seven here when they're done. In the meantime, enjoy, and let me know if you have any comments or suggestions.
Tags: album covers, blue note, Design, remix, wu-tang
Posted in Design, Music, Portfolio, Uncategorized | 104 Comments »
Pavement live c. 1994
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008
Missed a few days due to server issues, but this is as good a reason as any to get back: New video of Pavement playing on MTV is making its way around the innertubes and I can't help but join in. Above is Cut Your Hair, but you can find Stop Breathin and Unfair here. Pavement was a really important band in my high school development (the gateway band between Weezer and almost everything new I listen to now, I think) but I never got the chance to see them live. Since they broke up in 2000 (the year I graduated...) I've seen Malkmus a handful of times, once even with Bob, but as good as he and the Jicks are they'll never be Pavement for a lot of people.
Can't post any new design work because I'm in deep with a top-secret project, but I think it would be worthwhile to start posting all the old stuff with a "Portfolio" tag, which might be enough to move this over and unshackle it from the "/blog" yoke.
Tags: live, malkmus, pavement
Posted in Music | No Comments »
Deerhunter – Microcastle
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
2008 so far for me has been the year of the D bands. New albums by Dr. Dog, the Dodos, and Deerhunter have all been on heavy rotation for me lately. It's hard to pick one, but I came across this video of Deerhunter playing two new songs from Microcastle and it pretty much blows my mind. I never liked Deerhunter before, too dress-up for me maybe, but I got really into the Atlas Sound record and they seem to be going more in that direction. Seriously watch this video, the second song is even better than the first.
Expantse Mix 2 is coming hopefully by the end of the week. It's all songs "inspired" by amateur basketball. And yeah, don't ask me how it fits, but the second song from the video above is on it.
Tags: 2008, deerhunter, dr. dog, the dodos
Posted in Music | No Comments »
Times New Viking
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
I stopped following it for awhile, but recently I've become reacquainted with WFMU's Beware of the Blog. They post great rare stuff all the time, but this week there was a special treat. Times New Viking, creators of one of my favorite new albums in recent memory, stopped by the station and played a live set. They posted the whole show (9 songs, 18 minutes) the very next day, download it here.
Also, I finally caved in and got internet for my house, so I'll probably be writing here a bit more from now on (although I also got Fox Soccer Channel so I may be busy).
Tags: times new viking, wfmu
Posted in Music | No Comments »
Strange Victory, Strange Defeat
Friday, June 20th, 2008
Sorry for the lack of activity here recently. Fun stuff happened on the internet this week; if you haven't downloaded Firefox 3 yet, you really should. Also the Silver Jews stopped by Juan's Basement on Pitchfork.tv to play a set and to talk about the new album Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea. The actual Pitchfork review was a little harsh but mostly accurate I think, the production on this album sounds tinny and off. Live they seem to be as ramshackle as ever, the video above is a live version of my favorite song off the new album.
Tags: live, pitchfork, silver jews
Posted in Music | No Comments »
Muxtape
Thursday, April 17th, 2008
It's already had a fair amount of blog hype, but I finally created my muxtape today. 12 songs chosen more or less at random; were this a real mixtape, considerable more time and effort would have gone into which songs were picked and in what order. The service itself is pretty decent, it's nice to click on tapes randomly and discover something new -- but I really wish it wasn't broken up by track, and was instead one long mix (or, to be needlessly accurate, two). Oh well.
Tags: mixtape, muxtape
Posted in Music | 1 Comment »
Animal Collective – Water Curses
Monday, April 14th, 2008
Pitchfork.tv just debuted this new video from Animal Collective, it's the titular track from their new EP "Water Curses." The record is solid, basically feels like an epilogue to last year's epic "Strawberry Jam" album. The video is nice too, lots of big blocky pixels.
I've been working on a couple more design-centric posts. Gotta avoid video-dump syndrome.
Although if you're in the mood, the aforementioned Pitchfork.tv is a really nice resource. Only one week old, but already a ton of killer content. One to bookmark.
Tags: animal collective, pitchfork
Posted in Music | No Comments »
Fred Thomas – Old News
Saturday, April 5th, 2008
Former Ypsilantian Fred Thomas, of Saturday Looks Good to Me (and a bunch of other good bands), recently pulled a Deerhunter and started keeping a nice mp3 blog under the band name City Center. The offerings have been pretty good so far, sounding a bit like Animal Collective or Atlas Sound while still being very much Fred Thomas songs. A recent post announced a new cd of rerecorded old songs titled "Old News," I picked up a copy today and it's really good -- I didn't think the original recording of "When You Fuck Things Up With Your Baby" could be any more fucked up and beautiful but it totally is. Accompanying said post was an mp3 of the one cover on the new album, "Living Waters" by one of my other favorite bands the Silver Jews.
Download Fred Thomas - Living Waters (the Silver Jews)
Fred has instructions for buying the full cd on his site.
Tags: fred thomas, mp3, silver jews
Posted in Music | No Comments »