Sound collage artists The Books have spent the past decade making music more gorgeous than the gentle waters of a summer lake. They’ve made good on the art of sampling’s boundless potential, proving that those oft-maligned tools of remixing can be used for far more than repetitive house music and hip-hop hooks.
The Books’ live shows have always been special experiences, due largely in part to the hypnotic video collages projected while they play, carefully matching torrents of found footage with the group’s ethereal tunes. In 2007, the duo released a DVD entitled Playall featuring 13 of their videos plus some weird special features, like archive footage from the ’30s of a dapper fellow emotionlessly performing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” entirely in hand-farts. Lovely stuff.
No surprises here, which is to say, Ryan McGinley has just put up a new crop of mind blowing photos on Tiny Vices that will no doubt change the current trajectory of modern post-blog photographers the world over. No surprises.
Allen Bleyle is a musical chameleon. Indulging in roaringly noisy punk one minute and crooning beautiful folk melodies the next, Blyle’s versatility and love for the song in all of its forms has lead to an unexpected career as a “nutrition musician” named Apple Brains, performing far and wide at summer camps and farmer’s markets, in elementary school classrooms, and anywhere else where “kids ages 1-98″ might lend their attention to his irresistably fun tunes.
Singing lo-fi odes to the heartbreaking beauty of tomatoes, the little-known first encounter between peanut butter and jelly, and the magnificent nature of H2O, Apple Brains is closer in spirit to the whimsical folk of Jonathan Richman at his narrative best– or early Of Montreal (before they went synth-pop)– than the canned elevator music and frozen smiles packaged by the mainstream children’s music industry. What started as a part-time gig has evolved into a full-length album entitled Get Fruity!!. What’s it like to live the life of a children’s musician? Find out below in our interview with Apple Brains!
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What music did you listen to in your early childhood? Were you into Raffi?
Hmmm…. I don’t remember much about music I listened to in early childhood. I know that the first tape I owned that I chose myself was Weird Al Yankovic… not sure which album, either In 3-D, Dare to Be Stupid or Polka Party. But that was when I was 8 or so. Before that, I don’t remember listening to music, to be honest! I played Suzuki piano, and my Mom was in the choir at church, and I do remember having the Beatles’ Help lying around the house, but my parents were never much for playing music in the house, though they both like music and my Mom is quite musical herself. I didn’t listen to Raffi though at all, didn’t even know who he was til I was an adult. Oh, but I did LOVE The Muppets and all that music!
Here’s the situation (hypothetically). You’re allergic to cats. You don’t have room for a dog. Birds make too much noise. Goldfish live boring and die young. But your heart aches for a pet…something to call your own…
Enter Triops, the prehistoric creatures that survive in suspended animation through droughts and dry spells until re-animated by coming into contact with water. This is not science fiction. It’s not even science class. Triops are real-life animals that have an appearance somewhere between a shrimp and a cockroach, but with three eyes. THREE.
The Triassic Triops kit comes with a tank and a pouch of Triops eggs which you add to water. 24 hours later, boom. Hatched. The things grow to a respectable size and are happy to swish around in their tank, doing the backstroke and hanging out. Best of all? They’re available at your average toy store.
Mark Portillo’s sassy grayscale GIFs are nostalgically dithered and faded, recalling endless pilgrimages through The Oregon Trail on so many early Macintoshes. On his blog, Drop Me Off In Harlem, Portillo sketches celebrities, animals, and everyday objects for his very brief animated GIFs, usually comprised of fewer than 10 frames. Who doesn’t love a good GIF? Especially when it’s a Freaks and Geeks homage:
We just got a bundle of beautifully printed hand-made zines in the mail from one of LA’s most fantastic artists and zine makers Mel Kadel. Her latest work Spring Lounge is a limited edition series of teeny tiny detailed drawings printed on stained paper with each copy signed and numbered. A real treasure that will make you wish you could pay as much attention to detail as she does. Thanks Mel!
Remember that music video for Sour’s “Hibi No Neiro” we posted? You know, the one with dazzling displays of intercontinental webcam synchronicity? We wanted to know how they did it. Somehow, dozens of individuals had filmed themselves responding to carefully crafted choreography, and the resulting mountain of footage had been combined into something far greater than the sum of its parts– a geometrically beautiful display of cyber-social cooperation, like some sort of remote flash mob. How do you pull something like that off?
The answer lies in the massive pooled talents of four clever filmmakers– a brain trust, if you will– at the helm of this mind-bogglingly complex music video, shot on a $0 budget. The aptly named co-director Magico Nakamura graciously granted us a peek inside the bag of tricks that brought the Sour video together, providing sketches, screenshots and even an exclusive rough draft of the video, showing off rad techniques that didn’t make the final cut.
How many people participated in the video, and where did you find them all?
More than 80 people were involved in the production. Most of them were Sour fans that we’d gathered from the band’s website, from other social networking sites and from contacts we’d gathered while making Sour’s other music videos.
Could the participants see any of the other webcams, or were they blindly relying on your directions?
We filmed everyone separately so there weren’t multiple webcams on the screen however, we made quite detailed animatics of the entire music video and would send it to the people before filming, so generally people had a fair idea of what they were contributing to.
This provided a helpful guide that helped the fans wrap their heads around the choreography. For the more complicated action i.e. the dance sequence, we created individual movie files that people used to practice with before filming began. They also used these as an on screen guide while we directed them.
A delightful smidgen of Where The Wild Things Are fiction from our illustrious screenwriter can currently be found at The New Yorker. The story is taken from Eggers forthcoming novel Wild Things which is loosely based on the screenplay itself. Eggers explains more about the process and the final product in this New Yorker interview. Read up!
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