Jturits

Upstream Color is now available for viewing, buying, and downloading with a wide array of options. Among them, DRM-free digital download, Blu-ray/DVD from Amazon, rent/buy at Amazon, and buy on iTunes.

i think i hear words, but…what?

Three grinning men smoke from intricately carved pipes in Austria, January 1961.
Photograph by Volkmar K. Wentzel, National Geographic

“It’s a up north trip”

Brooklyn vinyl hotspot Dope Jams closed back in January to much dismay from local dance fetishists (and applause no doubt from some sides), and while the shop was claimed at the time to be continuing solely as a mail order venture, it was revealed via the Dope Jams Facebook page that the store will re-open this summer. The new location is unsurprisingly far away from their old priced-out Brooklyn location, and is way over in upstate New York’s Oak Hill, a small town that in 2000′s census registered a population of 376.

At around a three hour drive from the previous location it’s not going to be able to get the same walk-in traffic, but should probably be worth a trip for East Coast diggers who miss the alluring collision of classic house 12″s and Satanic drone CDs. For those of you with cars and a bag of snacks there’s an opening party on Sunday June 9. [via Resident Advisor]

If there’s one thing Inglourious Basterds needed more of, it’s comedy podcast-style riffing on the fantasized events of the movie-theater massacre that takes out the Third Reich at the end of the film. And who better to offer commentary from a theater balcony than Statler and Waldorf, resident zinger experts on The Muppet Show?

After a Redditor posed the question of which Muppet would have the best chance of assassinating Hitler (our money is still on Beaker), a documentary editor took some clips of Statler and Waldof, cutting them into the climactic movie theater scene, so now Mélanie Laurent’s maniacal revenge laughter and burning Nazi flags are interspersed with the Muppet geezers flinging puns. It creates some incredibly morbid humor, but still oddly fascinating.

Louis Leakey and his family inspect the campsite of an early hominid in Tanzania, November 1961.
Photograph by Robert Sisson, National Geographic

[m]

Human experience is weird; it’s full of wonder – and it’s also full of fear. The sounds, for me, should also evoke that.
Jad Abumrad

From reading online, electronic music as a scene seems in a nasty sort of malaise, ranging from existential angst over everything from genre popularity to gender issue crises and pessimistic views of any new technologies. Maybe it’s time to return to why you’d want to make weird noises in the first place.

This is just a teaser for The Pleasure of Sound, a forthcoming documentary that follows Jad Abumrad and Matthew Dear for two days of music making. But the couple of quotes here for me speak to why we’re involved in this field. Jad Abumrad, the Tennessee-born composer and journalist known best for his work on WNYC’s adventurous Radiolab program, says it best, above.

(I may be biased, reviewing Jad’s bio. I was also born in the south – Kentucky – and I’m also of Lebanese-American descent and the son of two doctorates. I even had my first introduction to electronic music at Oberlin College. Funny how these things can go in parallel. I can be a Radiolab fanboy, though.)

I thought back to Abumrad’s quote last night, listening to stellar live shows by NHK’Koyxen, Holly Herndon, and Laurel Halo. Each of these three artists manipulated sounds into the dream worlds Dear and Abumrad describe in the teaser, even against the frame of danceable rhythms and drum machine conventions. Somehow, in those odder and otherworldly timbres and compositions, I hear something that I can’t express any other way – not in words, not even in my head, deeper feelings that only music can turn into sense.

When music and sound give you pleasure in ways that nothing else can, then you know why you’re doing it. I can’t wait to see the film.

The Pleasure of Sound

From WDET Detroit, which also has an amazing-looking series on the connections between Berlin and the Motor City.

Making remixes is easy.

Four Tet man Kieran Hebden posted this brand new mix today with the accompanying soundbite “It’s so fucking good”, we agree – this is proof from Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich that their Atoms For Peace project is far more far-reaching than we might have first expected. A clanking two-steppy refix of Hebden’s ‘Pyramid’ (from 2012′s Pink) it brings back memories of Fridge while slotting perfectly into the recent revivalism of Disclosure et al.

While Thom Yorke might not have any love for DJs right now, he certainly is giving them a gift with this one.

Warp Records have made the video for Mount Kimbie‘s ‘Made to Stray’ live.

Taken from the group’s forthcoming second album, Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, its a candy-coloured treat that suits the warm, wiggy feel of the music. It’s directed by Leif Podhajsky and can be watched above; a recent FACT interview with Mount Kimbie’s Dom Maker about signing to Warp and the duo’s new album can be read here. You can find out what the FACT Singles Club thought about ‘Made to Stray’ here.

amazing race

The second part of Boards of Canada’s 12″ single mystery has been found in London’s Rough Trade East.

The Brick Lane store has confirmed the news on Twitter, and has posted pictures of it here, here and here. The single was sold to a customer two hours ago today (April 23), hidden in the store’s racks in a similar fashion to the first single, which was found in New York’s Other Music this weekend gone.

As with the copy found in Other Music, its sleeve reads “—— / —— / —— / XXXXXX / —— / ——” (note: with both this single and the last one, the XXXXXX occupies the fourth spot in the pattern, meaning that the theory that there has to be six of them placed around the world, in a similar fashion to the listening parties for past Boards of Canada album Geogaddi, doesn’t necessarily ring true). The single was played once over the Rough Trade counter, but to our knowledge the music has not been uploaded anywhere yet, so we’re not sure whether the music contained on the 12″ is the same 20 seconds as on the first single or different.

Meanwhile, BoC obsessives continue to theorise. The 2020k blog, which has been following the mystery since the start, points to a YouTube channel called Hell Interface (a past alias of Boards of Canada), who recently used this video (which is blank, but does feature an image if you hover your cursor over the timeline) to link to this one, which features some BoC-esque music and a number being read in the same style as the 12″ discovered in Other Music. The video is titled ‘csch’. csch.ca is the website for the Canadian Society for Circumpolar Health. Crikey!

To read up on the intriguing story of Boards of Canada’s mystery singles so far, and the possibilities of a new album from the elusive duo, click here.

Peter Sellers and Stanley Kubrick

Muscles ripple as an Arabian steed rears above its trainer in Jordan, December 1964.Photograph by Luis Marden, National Geographic

When a hilariously nasty letter from a University Of Maryland sorority sister started making the Internet rounds last week, the use of phrases from the letter, like “cunt punt,” became insider winks at those in the know. You’d either read the lengthy screed from the Delta Gamma sister, or you hadn’t. (But, seriously, read it.)

Fortunately for the world, Michael Shannon read it, liked it, and decided to bring his sardonic reading of the text to Funny Or Die. The resulting four-minute clip is essential viewing and is so great that it should, arguably, be the final word on this burgeoning meme.

Michael Shannon Reads the Insane Delta Gamma Sorority Letter from Michael Shannon

Wow. Awesome prop from the Human Giant days.

After our April Fool’s prank, we’re well aware that the phrase “boy cries wolf” might apply to this story, but trust us: Boards Of Canada actually released some new music on Record Store Day. 

As part of Saturday’s Record Store Day festivities, Warp released a solitary 12″ credited to the pair through NY record shop Other Music. The disc features a short clip of a woozy none-more-BoC piece, plus a vocodered voice reading out the numbers “9-3-6-5-5-7″. It appears the record may be one in a series of jigsaw pieces: the record is credited as “—— / —— / —— / XXXXXX / —— / ——” , and features dead space on either side of the clip, implying a fill-in-the-gaps approach.

We obviously approached the story with the requisite skepticism, but Pitchfork now claim they have had direct confirmation that the record is legit. An Other Music employee, Mikey IQ Jones, has also got in touch directly with FACT. According to Jones: “It’s real. We were given a copy to secretly place in the racks at Other Music; we’re really psyched that it was found by a big fan!”

As expected, there’s been a whirlwind of fact-scavenging and speculation on the web in the days following the record’s release. Dedicated BoC fanboys 2020k have been thoroughly documenting information about the 12″ as its emerged, and point towards a recorded phone conversation with Other Music, who confirm that the disc is the only US copy and that five others have been released in different countries. BoC, it should be noted, have some prior in this department. After practically zero promotion, 2002′s Geogaddi was premiered at listening parties in six churches across the world. The sessions took place in London, New York, Tokyo, Edinburgh, Berlin and Paris. The site also confirms that a Warp employee also delivered the album by hand to the store at 3pm on the day before Record Store Day, and that BoC have an official listing on the Record Store Day page.

There have also been some hijinks going on the BoC Youtube channel. A video to Geogaddi track ‘Julie And Candy’ was uploaded onto the band’s official YouTube channel, originally with “——/——/——/——/–­—-/——” in the subject line. Although this was subsequently removed, the title was also embedded into the clip at 4:20. 2020k note that, the following day, the message had moved to 4:19, suggesting there might be some sort of countdown in progress (although the clip has yet to move this morning).

As ever, BoC fans have been furiously parsing what the numbers might mean. The best lead on the Twoism message boards notes that, when the mysterious numbers are converted to ASCII to text, the resulting answer is the letter ‘m’. If ‘XXXXXX’ is substituted for ‘m’ in the title, it’s possible that Warp are alluding to a six letter word with ‘m’ as its fourth letter – “summer” being the most natural choice.

The disc might seem like a bolt out of the blue, but the release of BoC’s first material in seven years isn’t entirely unprecedented.  Back in February 2012, BBC6 Music stand-in presenter Peter Serafinowicz dropped a casual hint that the pair were working on new music, saying: “They’ve got a new album coming out soon and I think it’s gonna be a double album and I’m so excited, I really am-to hear their new one”. The news was followed the next month by some tantalising activity on the band’s official Facebook page. A fan’s message – “rumours of a new BOC album are rife? Any truth in this?” – was answered with the unambiguous (if terse) reply “yes”. In somewhat more insubstantial news, a Twitter user, Iain Stewart – who claims to be an associate of a friend of a band – reported on June 11 that a new album is “ready”, and moots a possible June release.

A Reddit user who claims to have picked up the disc has also uploaded a snippet of the track; click below to listen. FACT’s bumper guide to the 10 essential Boards Of Canada records is available here.

How do you make a potato?

you make it inside your brain

Major League Combat is a sport that combines juggling, rugby, Capture the Flag, and maybe Quidditch? I can't make out how you score, but keeping your juggle from end-to-end seems important.

Weird sport or the weirdest sport? It's definitely up there with chessboxing. (thx, benjamin)

Captain obvious

Apollo 10 audio transcript

Zing.

Apollo 11 audio transcrpit

In Simon Reynolds’ book Energy Flash, he refers to a 1988 cartoon published in UK newspaper The Sun at the heart of their anti-acid house campaign, depicting “a devil-in-disguise handing out pills like candy and ushering kids into the ‘Acid House’; in the next frame, the welcome mat turns into a trapdoor, dropping the youths into the flames of Hades”.

In the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s death, flickr user KRS-Dan [via History is Made at Night, via Dorian Lynskey] has been uploading newspaper clippings from the acid house era, including the hilarious cartoon referenced by Reynolds. For those who haven’t seen it, check it out above; the rest of KRS-Dan’s clippings can be viewed here. Meanwhile, you can read FACT’s piece, Rocking and Raving Against Thatcherism, here.

Last July, during press rounds for the fifth season of Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan mentioned the possibility that he might, maybe, sort of possibly be interested in a Breaking Bad spin-off centered around their weasely lawyer, Bob Odenkirk’s Saul Goodman. “I think a Saul Goodman show could have great legs,” he told EW. “I love the idea of a lawyer who will do anything to avoid going to court. He’s always going to settle on the courthouse steps.” In November, after the fifth season had wrapped, Bob Odenkirk also noted that he’d be open to the possibility of doing such a show.

So, basically, you got one guy interested in maybe doing a spin-off, and another guy maybe interested in starring in it. Now, along comes Deadline, which “hears” that such a project is in its “nascent stages,” although it’s hard to know if “nascent stages” means that its further along than when it was mentioned as a possibility last year, or if Deadline is just re-introducing an old story on a slow news day. They do add, however, that the show would come from Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, the guy who created Saul Goodman (another obvious point) and that both hour-long and half-hour formats are being considered (also obvious).

Gilligan also said last year that no one should consider Saul Goodman to be safe, although if he dies by the end of Breaking Bad, there is the possibility of a prequel. I would not, however, expect any kind of backdoor pilot. I also know for a fact that Deadline often does favors for studios, networks, etc., by floating rumors to see how the Internet responds (see, e.g., all those rumors about shows like Jericho and The River being resurrected by Netflix). So, grain of salt, people. Grain of salt.

(Source)

The post A ‘Breaking Bad’ Spin-Off — ‘Better Call Saul’ — May Really, Really Happen. Maybe. appeared first on UPROXX.

The hip-hop heavyweights collaborate on a new project.

While El-P remained behind the boards for Killer Mike’s R.A.P. Music, the alt-rap mainstay will join the Atlanta rapper on the mic for their next project, Run The Jewels.

The first glimpse of Run The Jewels is the vicious ‘Banana Clipper’, featuring an amped-up, New York-styled boom-bap and equally aggressive lyrics from the pair. Preview the track below; the project is due out this summer.

Killer Mike is staying busy — last month, the Atlanta rapper detailed three projects: I Pledge Allegiance to the Grind IV, a sequel to R.A.P. Music, and his long-gestating Elegant Elephant.

Space turd #3 (First crap around the sun)

Apollo 10 audio transcript