August 2009
39 posts
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-8-30) →
The Drums (11)
Desolation Wilderness (4)
Girls (2)
Beach Fossils (1)
Chaka Khan (1)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
new sounds
(This went up on 17 Dots today, but more of a personal Tumblr thing so posting here, too.)
Our fall will sound like summer. Not everyone’s but certainly indie rock’s, and three bands (a trend) — the Drums, Girls and Beach Fossils — will be partially responsible. Some of their music will remind you of surf rock. More of it like the electrified cicadas of early R.E.M. Most of it like California....
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-8-23) →
The Drums (5)
Flying Lotus (5)
The Chromatics (4)
Girls (3)
Phoenix (3)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
Emily Richmond's Solo Circumnavigation
If you’ve never backed a Kickstarter project before, I suggest starting with this one. It is sooo worthy of your $$$.
kickstarter:
From the moment we first laid eyes on it, Emily Richmond’s Let’s Sail Around the World has captured our imagination. It’s pure adventure, it’s whimsical, and it has a fairy tale quality to it, too. Here is Emily, this 24-year-old girl from LA, planning a...
Kickstarter in the New York Times
I’m in the New York Times today!
kickstarter:
Kickstarter is featured in today’s New York Times in an article written by Jenna Wortham. The article gives Kickstarter a nice overview, and focuses on a few specific projects, including Earl Scioneaux’s Electronola and Emily Grander’s 365 Postcards, and Emily Richmond’s solo circumnavigation, Sarah Sharp’s 50 States, and Grand Opening’s...
An Important Distinction →
Send Kickstarter to SXSW
kickstarter:
Yesterday, the South By Southwest festival, held every March in Austin, Texas, launched its “Panel Picker” microsite where the general public has a voice in deciding which topics will be covered in the gathering’s panels and chats. Kickstarter has three panels in the running, and we would appreciate your help in building support for them. They are:
Funding Your Projects from the...
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-8-16) →
Let’s Wrestle (62)
The Drums (15)
Charles Mingus (12)
Girls (9)
Dave Bixby (8)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
Radio Shack Renamed “The Shack,” Is Hip And Cool... →
“If it’s a good idea and it gets you excited, try it, and if it bursts into...”
– Jim Coudal
(via Daring Fireball + Design Glut + msg)
(via whitneymcn)
"Seven Truths about Viral Culture" →
Yesterday Alex posted a link to an album by Dave...
Kickstarter and Filmmaking
kickstarter:
“Here is the new way: filmmakers doing it themselves — paying for their own distribution, marketing films through social networking sites and Twitter blasts, putting their work up free on the Web to build a reputation, cozying up to concierges at luxury hotels in film festival cities to get them to whisper into the right ears.” — Michael Cieply, New York Times
This is how...
“The so-called birthers can’t accept that President Obama is really a...”
– Scientific American
Note on Tumblarity
tomewing:
I took an unintentional posting holiday this week. The interface of Firefox and my work Firewall screwed Tumblr for me, raising the effort threshold of posting too high. This should now have changed.
What interests me (as someone thinking for work about gamelike incentivisation systems) is the way my Tumblarity affected this.
After being initially horrified by it I’d grown to regard...
Selling the Project
kickstarter:
When it comes to successful projects, sometimes it’s not so much that a project’s goal is so compelling, it’s that its story was told the right way. Which brings us to two Kickstarter projects that do that very well: Jerry Paffendorf’s Loveland and Help Polyvinyl Save 10,000 Records From Destruction.
Polyvinyl’s project, which is our most successful to date at 1,553% funded, has a...
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-8-9) →
Let’s Wrestle (51)
Charles Mingus (25)
Zola Jesus (23)
Harappian Night Recordings (13)
Ty Segall (11)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
“Lots of recording devices out by nearly everyone. Uninformed people with cameras...”
– Talking Points Memo
Has anyone else noticed how stupendous Kelefa Sanneh’s pieces have been in the last two New Yorkers?
The Gates piece was excellent, detailing the emergence of anti-white racism as a standard defintion of racism. Very smart.
And then the Michael Savage piece (that link’s just an abstract), which was about as first-person as the New Yorker gets. So good. He made himself a character...
I wrote more about Zola Jesus today over at 17 Dots:
Zola Jesus‘ The Spoils is fucked up and maddening, and I can’t stop listening to it. The work of an 18-year-old woman from Madison, Wisconsin, named Nika Roza Danilova, The Spoils is as paranoid a record as I have heard, its lack of finish both pure home recording and a little bit horror film, too. The way it felt the first time you listened...
Rural Alberta Advantage: "Eye of the Tiger"
kickstarter:
Last night I caught the Rural Alberta Advantage — whose Kickstarter project finished successfully over the weekend — at Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn. It was packed, and as they always do, Nils, Amy, and Paul totally killed it. They finished up with an encore of Nils solo doing “Eye of the Tiger” and then they debuted a brand new song. My iPhone footage of both is...
Charles Mingus’ “Original Faubus...
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-8-2) →
Charles Trénet (26)
The Kinks (22)
Zola Jesus (14)
Charles Mingus (13)
Riechmann (10)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
I stepped down as eMusic's Editor in Chief →
So why leave? Three months ago, a site that I co-founded called Kickstarter launched. It’s a new way for people to raise money for creative and ambitious projects. And it works. While still invite-only, projects have had incredible success — from an 8-bit Kind of Blue covers record to a documentary on the Kinks to a woman sailing around the world all by her lonesome.
Kickstarter is a...
The Power of Quests
kickstarter:
If you want to go on a meaningful quest, you must be lacking in something. [T]he protagonist cannot focus on everything and thus must choose and discard priorities to define a preferred quest. — Tyler Cowen, Create Your Own Economy
Last week we used Cowen’s quote about quests in relation to Geoff Edgers’ Kinks documentary project. This was no accident. In the film, Geoff...
