From the Guardian's arts section, with guest editors - Scottish band Franz Ferdinand (via Hard News - Russell suggested the local equivalent would be getting Dimmer to edit the Star-Times magazine section for a week. I'd like to see the Back of the Y lads edit the Sunday News. Can you picture that?).
"Blog all about it ..."
Salam Pax: A tip on how to make your blog popular: position yourself in a place where a bomb might fall on you. Tickles everybody and makes your hits-counter happy. Possibility of death is a downside, but hey! You get linked by A-list bloggers.
Gregor Wright: It's nice to be able to keep a record of things, but I'm more interested in keeping a record of the minutiae of life that I would otherwise forget rather than a catalogue of inner thoughts and feelings. Nutters on the bus are more interesting than angst. Don't put angst-ridden stuff on the web; write it down and hide it somewhere.
Oliver Wang is a very talented US writer/DJ/editor (check his book Classic Material: The Hiphop Album Guide) who has come across our own Scribe. Here's some of his thoughts via Soul Sides... "... What's interesting about both these songs is that after years of finding int'l hip-hop (i.e. anything outside the parochialism of American hip-hop) to be subpar, it's pretty damn that at this point, folks outside of the U.S. can easily hang with many of the Yankee rappers out there. To be sure, Scribe really does owe Jay-Z some royalty points for how blatantly his style borrows from Jay's...their voices aren't that similar but on the album, he uses very similar phrases, from a simple, "yep" to proclaiming, "we made it" just like J does. That said, Scribe's flow is mostly his own and he pops nicely in the pocket with his rhymes, rhyming sans-accent and if you told me dude was out of L.A. or N.Y. I certainly would have believed you without question...." There's more, read the whole review here to get the picture.
Oliver also makes a mean mixtape - check out his latest one of cover versions, and peep his review of the Grey Album. He's even down with Mo Show. Cool.
And here's hiphop meets Hobbits - the Lord of the Rings Rap.
Beatdiggers alert! Searching for old funky records is a lot of fun, and here's an Oz cat who has set up The Tasman Connection, a tribute to such records from this part of the world. Everything from Renee Gayer to Claude Papesch to Doctor Tree.
And getting back to where we started, I saw the new Dimmer video at the weekend, at Semi-Permanent, a one day design seminar featuring local and overseas designers/animators. Local designers Kelvin Soh & Simon Oosterdijk from The Wilderness talked about designing cd covers (amongst other things) - they did the cover for the new Dimmer album, and Shayne Carter liked it, so he asked them to do his next video. They said yes, and went away and panicked for a bit, as they'd never done a music video.
After calling in a few friends for advice, they shot the clip - using 3000 polariod snapshots. Then they talked some mates into scanning all them into a computer, and then they animated the vid. The record company wanted more shots of Shayne and Anika, so they shot another 500 polariods, scanned em in, and animated them. Its for the song Come Here, and it looks absolutely wicked.
Other notable guests were UK designer Vince Frost, a gentleman with a very dry sense of humour, who designed the literary mag Zembla - it's an incredible read; great layout, intelligent content (Seen it once in Mega Mags - somebody please distribute it here!). He talked about one of his projects, a book design for photographer Nan Goldin. She was quite difficult to work with, he said. She was in rehab for 3 months during the books production, after a suicide attempt. Frost said there was also some conflict between Goldin and the publishers - she tried to stab her editor at one point - and his role was more one of mediator than designer. There was some amazing animations, clever fonts - like the embroidered font used by Black and White - inspiring stuff.
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