Back in 2010, divers off the coast of Finland stumbled upon some astonishingly old booze : champagne and beer preserved underwater in a 170-year-old shipwreck. Naturally, they had a taste. But now scientists are back with a rigorous chemical analysis of the beers.
The 3D printing industry is still very much in its infancy. But that could change if the CIA has its way. The intelligence agency's venture capital firm just invested in Voxel8 , the company behind the first multi-material, 3D electronics printer.
When Activision's newly resurrected Sierra label announced a revival of the King's Quest series late last year, I was too cautious to be optimistic. As a long-time fan of this classic adventure game series, I've been conditioned to expect the worst.
The trial of 21-year-old accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is underway in Boston, and as his lawyer opened the defense by saying, "It was him," there's only one way this road is going. As per The New York Times, the question facing the jury is whether Tsarnaev will get life in prison or the death penalty: a decision already (seemingly) tilted by the "death qualified" aspect of jury selection, in which opposing the death penalty precludes jury duty on a case like this.
Bridgeti like the antiquated notion of sending people letters in the mail about this as opposed to calling them
The same superbug that infected several patients at UCLA also infected patients at Cedars-Sinai. [ more › ]
Over the past year, the journey of the single-copy Wu-Tang album, “Once Upon A Time In Shaolin,” has managed to keep our attention, as the group’s attempt to sell it has seen many iterations. Aside from a very short and distorted clip, little had been revealed about the record until a select group of people were treated to 13 minutes of it earlier this week, and RZA used that evening to confirm it will be their final album together. It also won’t be commercially available for the better part of a century.
Taking place at MoMA PS1 on Monday night, a handful of music industry insiders and contest winners were gathered so interested parties could promote the importance of the record which will be auctioned off on the Paddle8 website. The one big catch for the lucky buyer is that the public and commercial rights are owned exclusively by the performers and producers for the next 88 years, after which the buyer can release it should they so choose. The number was chosen to represent the original members of the group, as well as the sum of the digits 2015.
Along with these restrictions, RZA took a moment at the end of the evening to confirm that as a group, Wu-Tang Clan will not record formally ever again. When asked this direct question by esteemed music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, RZA responded with an emphatic, “I’m done, kid!” In reality this means that aside from a very small handful of individuals, the final recording of Wu-Tang Clan will never be heard by those who helped make the group hip hop icons: the fans.
While RZA and his partners can go on all they want about this being an art project and trying to “change the perception of both art and music,” in the eyes of most people, it’s simply pretentious. Oddly enough, most fans have just shrugged their shoulders and chalked it up to a man thinking far too much of himself. Combine that with the lukewarm “A Better Tomorrow,” and all you have left is a tarnished legacy.
Theoretically, the winning bidder could release the 31-track album for free, but after paying what is likely to be a seven digit figure for the album itself, logic says it will become a museum piece or hidden forever in a private collection. There is perhaps no better fitting a way to describe the real motivation behind the project than the words of one of Wu-Tang’s best known songs: “cash rules everything around me.”
Joel Freimark hosts a daily music-related webseries here and you can follow his daily music musings and suggestions HERE as well.
BridgetNO
Award winning childrens novel Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH will be made into a new CGI-centric live-action film, Deadline reports.
MGM recently acquired the rights to the Robert C. O'Brien novel and has reportedly hired writer Michael Berg, known best for his work on the Ice Age films, to pen the script. The film is said to focus on an origin story that follows an "imperiled mouse protagonist" who befriends a group of hyper-intelligent lab rats, with hopes to create a franchise.
The original O'Brien novel was followed by two sequels and later turned into a Don Bluth-directed animated film, The Secret of Nimh, which was released by MGM in 1982.
When disaster strikes, every minute counts—especially when it comes to rescuing survivors who could be trapped. In an effort to find survivors more quickly, researchers have developed bionic cockroaches that can be controlled to maneuver through rubble and tight spaces better than a robot would be able to. The research, led by Hong Liang of Texas A&M University, was described in a new paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
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Artist and designer Ashley Eva Brock. All photos by Jessica Holland
"Björk is not an artist," the Brazilian fashion designer Geova Rodrigues said forcefully at the opening reception for the singer's much-anticipated exhibition last night at MoMA. He was sipping champagne underneath a spectacular black, feathery fascinator, and he said that that his favorite artists were Van Gogh and Picasso. "She is a musician," he said. "But I love her."
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Designer Geova Rodrigues
Reviews of the show have started coming in that use phrases like "unambitious hodgepodge," "bad, really bad," and "I felt sad and embarrassed leaving the museum." It turns out that a bunch of inanimate objects—dresses, robot mannequins, an airmail jacket—no matter how beautiful or iconic, can't capture the singer's mercurial spirit.
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Elliot Young
What the party managed to do, on the other hand, was show her impact on a generation, from the 20-something Biophilia fans, who were the only people dancing in front of the DJ booth, to artists like the Icelandic hair sculptor Hrafnhildur Arnardottir (a.k.a. Shoplifter), whose own ponytail was bound up in a kind of black-gridded hairnet, and who was hanging out with fashion consultant Edda Gudmundsdottir. (Both have worked on Björk's avant-garde looks.)
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Peaches and friend
It's a testament to the breadth of Björk's talent that it's impossible to generalize about her admirers and friends, other than to say that they are good at being themselves, and that they aren't afraid of wearing outlandish clothes.
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Artist Juliana Huxtable and friend
"She makes people want to show off," said MoMA visuals manager Jade White, who saw the singer buying "two or three gigantic bird feeders" at MoMA's design store with her daughter, Isadora, earlier. "She's an icon, man. She puts Lady Gaga to shame."
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Graphic designer Victor John Villanueva
Although the singer herself only made a brief appearance, Peaches and Le1f were circulating, and looking fabulous, as was the star artist of the New Museum Triennial, Juliana Huxtable, but there was a lot of competition for who was best dressed.
Susanne Bartsch, the influential party promoter, looked like an evil, seductive sprite in a sheer, floor-length black gown over a corset and suspenders, with eyelashes that reached to her hairline and a black pointy headpiece that was somewhere in between a unicorn's horn and a witch's hat.
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Promoter Susanne Bartsch
"She's the shit," she said of Angela Goding, the MoMA PS1 director of development, who joined her on the mezzanine overlooking the ground floor. "No, she's the shit," Goding insisted, pointing out that Bartsch had achieved generation-defining, fashion-icon status in her own right.
The designer and artist Ashley Eva Brock, who made leg-warmers that were in the exhibition, could have been a benign cult leader from the future in a hooded dress dyed with indigo. She'd used seawater for the process, collected near her home in northern California, because it was eco-friendly, she said, and because she's kind of a hippie.
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Heidi Lee and friend
It was a crowded field, but my vote for the look of the night goes to the scientifically minded milliner Heidi Lee, who was wearing her "Endless Echo Hat." 3D-printed from a scan of her own face, it made her look like a robot with eight overlapping faces, and according to Lee, is intended to raise questions about surveillance technologies and the age of the selfie.
The night ended early, and the only climactic moments were when a plasma globe suspended above everyone's heads crackled with electricity in the middle and at the end, but still, the event was full of clashing opinions, boundary-pushing couture, and active artists of every imaginable kind. It did a good job of encapsulating Bjork's boundless, curious energy—better, some might say, than a swan dress on a mannequin.
Dying Light will get its long-awaited "hard mode" on March 10th, Techland said today. Can't wait! In addition to that free update, a $5 "Survivor Bundle" will also be released, giving players three additional character skins and four new weapons.
In less than 30 seconds, it all came flooding back, as my flack cannon suddenly struck gold.
Some people who make (or made) video games are dirt poor. Others, however, could start campfires using $100 bills. In this post, we're looking at the latter.
Winter, much like swiping through Tinder, feels like a practice in endurance and hopelessness. Despite your efforts to stay optimistic, to keep swiping right on life, it only gets harder and harder to find the will to go on. But one industrious Boston woman has found a way to make both Tinder and 2015's never-ending series of blizzards a little bit easier.
Where Kim Kardashian’s outrageous photoshoot for Paper Magazine broke the internet, Marilyn Manson’s may give it a heart attack. In a heartwarming display of father-son bonding, the shock rocker glammed up his father for a recent interview with the culture mag. We have more on that, as well as a photo of Prince in his middle school basketball uniform, and Modest Mouse and Blink-182’s eerie UFO theories. It’s a weird day of Music Dispatch.
Like father, like son. Or, in this case, like son, like father. In the latest edition of Paper Magazine, writer Kory Grow and notorious photographer Terry Richardson introduce us to Hugh Warner, the Vietnam vet who raised the ringmaster of the dope show. Manson shares, “The first time I saw my dad in makeup was, ironically, the second concert I ever went to. He dressed as Gene Simmons and took me to the Kiss ‘Dynasty’ tour when I was 11.” About his son, the elder Manson says, “You know, he came from my nut-sack.” See more photos at Paper.
Less shocking but still pretty fascinating is this photograph of a tween-aged Prince, wearing far less lace (excluding his laced up Chucks) than we are accustomed to seeing him in. The Star Tribune’s Libor Jany unearthed this priceless image from an old article detailing The Artist Formerly Known as #3’s time balling for Bryant Junior High in Minneapolis. According to Deadspin, he was also a gifted high school athlete, but his small stature and exceptional teammates limited his time on the court. [Nerdist]
Marina and the Diamonds have released the music video for “Forget”, in preparation for March 16’s release of their third studio album, Froot. The mostly monochromatic video is the latest in a unrelenting campaign of sleek videos leading to the album’s release. Previously, we’ve seen/heard “Froot“, “Immortal“, “Happy“, and “I’m a Ruin“. [Spin]
Studio 360’s Kurt Andersen was interviewing Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock about the new track, “The Best Room”, when Brock revealed one of the more interesting inspirations for a song: Brock’s direct experience witnessing the famous “Phoenix Lights” UFO sighting in 1997, and being corralled into a police-taped hotel until the event was over. For years, he kept the sighting a secret. Listen to the snippet above. [Pitchfork]
More vocal on the topic of aliens, and a lot more paranoid, too, is Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge. Like Manson, he recently sat down with Paper Magazine and discussed his fascination with space, expressing concerns with Area 51, tapped phones and mind control. You can give it a read here.
Get your heart racing with “Slipping Away”, the new track from synth duo Tanlines. The track comes with the announcement of their sophomore album, Highlights, which releases May 19, and marks a departure from electronically leaning sounds (thanks largely due to a computer melt down “in a burst of sparks and clouds of smoke”).
James Murphy, formerly of LCD Soundsystem, has shared an ethereal track from his score for Noah Baumbach’s upcoming film, While We’re Young. The track, titled “Only The Stars Above Welcome Me Home”, is available to stream at Pitchfork. The full album will be available later this month.
Chance the Rapper is collaborating with everyone from Action Bronson to Madonna. Latest on the list of on-point features is his appearance on Nosaj Thing’s cool and luscious “Cold Stares”. [Pigeons and Planes]
Big Sean brings out the big guns for his extended version of “Blessings”. The track features Drake and Kanye West, and now has an accompanying dark and gloomy music video, fitting for the Dark Sky Paradise single. [Rolling Stone]
Last week, we learned the soundtrack to Clueless would be receiving a special edition vinyl reissue. Now we learn Universal Music is going full tilt into the vinyl game, reissuing twenty-six (!!!) soundtracks over the next five months. Among the chosen titles will be O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Friday Night Lights (film), Boogie Nights, Animal House, and Beetlejuice. [Consequence of Sound]
On a related note, for an interesting insight into the business of selling and collecting “hot stampers”, read Wired’s article, “Why Audiophiles Are Paying $1,000 For This Man’s Vinyl“.
Feature image from Paper Magazine
Prince image by journalist Libor Jany
That’s all for today. See you tomorrow with more Music Dispatch!
One of the coolest things about Alien: Isolation was how thoroughly it put players into the quaking space-boots of its protagonist Amanda Ripley. There was a button for re-focusing her eyes!
Bridgeti call people dude all the time :(
The world of gaming is such a wreck when it comes to gender issues there are freakin' Law & Order episodes created about it, but gaming has gotten slightly better about admitting women are real people who exist and play games, at least in a few small ways in the past decade. Here's a quick bit of proof.
This video shows how GameStop used to view women who came into its stores. This is a real thing shown to employees, and the cringe-inducing nature of the advice given makes it hard to sit through in its entirety. The video was mocked heavily when it first surfaced, and it's been making the rounds on social media once again. At least now it looks like a relic, which is at least a kind of progress.
So enjoy!
The MP3, the file type of most songs you listen to on a computer, is compressed. Part of the reason people love vinyl records so much (even though they don't necessarily sound "better" than digital formats), is that they are closer in format to the way you would actually hear a song if you were standing in the room with Rihanna instead of listening to "FourFiveSeconds" on your phone.
Compression happened because (especially in the 1990s when this change was happening) file size needed to be small enough to live on your computer in mass quantities without slowing it down. Now, many computers have the space for higher-quality formats, but the MP3 format has become an industry standard. And information is lost as songs are converted to MP3 format.
The very first song to become an MP3 was Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner." A German engineer played the song over and over again as he tried to squeeze the song into a smaller size without changing its sound too much. Here's "Tom's Diner" in its MP3 format.
The MP3 format can reduce the file size of a song as much as 10-fold, but in the process something has to be filtered out. Which sounds get filtered out of a song to make the file smaller was determined in 1993 by a group of European sound engineers who using songs like Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car," and Vega's "Tom's Diner." In 1994, MP3s became a public format and, after the advent and widespread use of the internet, they are now the primary format that most people listen to music in.
But what happened to those filtered out sounds?
Ryan MaGuire, a a Ph.D. student in Composition and Computer Technologies at the University of Virginia Center for Computer Music, created a project called "moDernisT" to find out. McGuire's project pulls out those missing sounds and lets them live on their own. Here is the lost material from "Tom's Diner" as found by MaGuire:
You can hear so many unnecessarily rejected sounds. The buzzing of the small diner, in the first verse for example, and even some of Vega's softer vocal tones in verse 5.
What MaGuire has proved here is that the songs we listen to every single day are not the exact master copy that the artist recorded and wanted for us to hear. Instead, they are slightly stripped versions of their art run through a set of standards created by a bunch of engineers in 1993. For many people, that won't matter. The songs sound almost the same, but the compression of music into an MP3 format is an important question to weigh when considering artistic intent and analyzing songs that aren't exactly the original.
For a heavier analysis, check out MaGuire's personal findings and his Soundcloud account.
Scientists have discovered a new hormone that appears to regulate sensitivity to insulin and normalize metabolism. When the researchers administered this newly identified molecule into mice fed a high-fat diet, it not only prevented them from becoming obese, but it also promoted a restoration of metabolic balance, which are two of the beneficial effects associated with exercise.
Bridgeti honestly bet having my gamer cred doubted online is why i'm such a trophy whore
