Mogwai + Competitive Cycling + Norway

James Bowthorpe is the round-the-world champion cyclist who beat the previous record by an epic 20 days. Anthony's Crook's 30 Century Man movie follows him across the Norwegian countryside in the middle of a “white” night. It works perfectly well with Mogwai's “How to Be a Werewolf” playing in the background.

Move over Phoenix

My 2011 prediction is that Jamaica will be next "it" band from France. Following in the footsteps of Phoenix. Other video below:

Low Tech 3D optical illusion

Amazing installation playing by Mexican artist Gabriel Dawe. It's a 3D optical illusion rendered with low tech craftsmanship rather than hi-tech computering.

More Here 

Black Box Revelation

I've posted about these guys before. They're kind of like The White Stripes. Except from Belgium... Oh, and they're two blokes, not the Meg-Jack routine. I guess they're also named black box, kinda different from white stripes.So, basically opposites. Except for the sound. Anywho, for anyone who's been to Belgium, the clip is spot on. 

Two Door Down Cinema Club

Just saw this for the first time now. Meantime they're all over iTunes. Must have been living under a rock...

Darwin Deez. An Update

Posted about this guy back in March. He finally played at The Mercury Lounge before Thanksgiving and he is very much channelling Napoleon Dynamite. He quite literally had an 80's-music-mash-up-dance-routine between songs. Great show. 

There Are Times I Wish I Watched TV

Not often, mind you. But it would be fun to catch the above happening live. 

As seen on the streets of NY - Library car spotted in Chelsea

As Seen On The Streets of NY

Sociological commentary? New downtown band? All around racist insult? Just another graffiti?

 Seen in Murray Hill.

Perfect Summer Music

 
Sunny day... driving in the car... windows down... and the Radio Dept. on, playing Heaven's on Fire.

Nike: Write The Future

Nike's has a new elaborate ad out for the World Cup. The commentary on soccer in each country is the most interesting though:

- In Italy, Brazil and Portugal there's personal glory for their players, but only in England does it affect the stock markets. Anyone who's been in England when the national team plays will know that this is not too far from the truth...

- France's Frank Ribery is in the ad but doesn't have a write the future episode. Is that because his future is written already thanks to his underage prostitute scandal, or France's relative indifference to footie compared to say, Brazil or Italy?

- And Brazil's Ronaldinho? Didn't make the selection... Oops...

Seen on the streets of NY

Last week on 23rd and 5th avenue

Ghost Recon Game Trailer: Cool Video, Weird Timing

Real actors and high production values promoting a video game aren't new. But the game Ghost Recon takes place in Moscow. And the movie-like trailer released on March 25th is about taking out terrorist warlords in the near future.

Near future? Four days later Moscow's subway terrorist are in the headlines... Eery timing. The lines between video games, hollywood and news are decidedly blurred.

Shout Out Louds. They're their own band now

I always thought The Shout Out Louds were a little too endebted to The Cure. On Fall Hard, they seem to have ratched up the production a bit and it works. With a weird video to boot.

New Work Diggs

On Monday we moved into a new office space at 11 Madison. It's a magnificent landmark Art Deco building with an interesting (albeit stunted) history.

 












It was built during the great depression and was originally supposed to be the soaring skyscraper seen in the sketch on the right. But the building ran into financial trouble and they stopped building at the yellow arrow, resulting in the smaller tower seen on the left sketch. 


There's a magnificent lobby and although security would not let me take pictures, I managed to sneak one in:

Best of all though is the stunning view on the Empire State Building directly from my desk:

Actually, best of all is that 11 Madison, one of my favorite NYC restaurants is in the lobby...

Kid Harpoon - A Take Away Show

Kid Harpoon plays acoustic versions of some of his songs in a Paris park (in the 12th arrondissement, incidentally my sister used to live around the corner from there). The first song is really great. I'd never hear of Kid Harpoon so merci la blogotheque... More on his MySpace page. It's sweet pop, but not sickeningly sweet.

Facebook Facts

Digital Buzz has a fascinating infographic illustrating Facebook's transformation from a bunch of guys coding a nifty application from a Harvard dorm room to a full scale Web platform with 400 mllion users worldwide. 

One stat that jumps out at me: 

The average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook.  

Based on that extraordinary level of user engagement, it seems that the missing link for Facebook is still how to make (serious) money from it. Facebook's finances are not made public, but most estimates figure 2009 revenues around $500-600 million. Not shabby for a six year old company that's still under VC ownership/funding...

Nevertheless, they still haven't found the way to convert this amazing level of engagement into the kind of money that an ABC or Google are able to extract. I'm really intrigued to see if Facebook is able to find a "killer advertising app" that taps into all this user information or if it's going to be several revenue sources (virtual currency, apps, advertising etc.). Whatever comes first I guess. Assuming one does of course...  

Monkey Business: The Colbert Report reports

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Darwin Deez: Weird Spring Pop

Yep, it's a pretty wacky video. But it's also a pretty catchy single. If Napoleon Dynamite started his own band he'd probably sound (and would certainly look) something like Darwin Deez. Needless to say, the Brits love him already.

The Morning Benders

This is Promises from Big Echo, the Morning Benders' velvety new record. They're going to be one of the my music revelations for 2010. And just to drive the point home, and to brag a bit... Me and my mate Lolo have tickets to see them when they play Mercury Lounge ending their U.S. tour.

Facebook Bigger than Google

At least according to Hitwise's latest data for the week ending March 13, 2010: Facebook beat Google as the most visited U.S. Web site for that week.

Facebook had actually reached the #1 ranking on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day (as well as the weekend of March 6th and 7th). Presumably, a lot of people posting updates about their progressing state of drunkeness and overfedness...

Marketing Pilgrim points out  that Hitwise's methodology is fraught as they're comparing all of Facebook (videos etc...) against only google.com. Thereby leaving out Gmail, YouTube and other Google properties. Good point, but it does raise a couple of others:

While Hitwise may be comparing full oranges to orange quarters (rather than apples), the methodology is consistent over time and does show Facebook's growth on a property Vs. property basis. And it excludes any Facebook data for traffic from mobile phones... In other words, the headline overpromises but the data do point in the right direction. 

Beyond the ooh ahhing at social media's incredible growth and Facebook's in particular, what's interesting are the implications in the way people are using the Internet. And their relationship to the Web is changing. 

It's not going on THE Internet anymore, it's increasingly MY Internet. In fact the very vocabulary of "going online" or "being online" are starting to sound archaic as people are always online and updating their Facebook profiles through blackberries and iPhones.

Search was the big thing of the 2000s and its one-way information retrieval process is now being overtaken by Connectivity (and a multiplicity of (largely social) information exchanges. Social media's growth is hardly a scoop, but the shift and rebalancing from information search/retrieval to information exchange marks a new relationship and level of intimacy between Internet technology and people. 

Primary 1: The Blues

Perfect music for a monday morning.

Austin 2

Went to see The Strange Boys. A really good, local band with a retro garage/R&B sound. It's actually two brothers on bass and guitar. 

They're playing Radio City Music Hall in NY with Spoon and Deerhunter on March 26th.

Austin

I'm in Austin, Texas this week on a business trip. Having been here a few days already, I can see why it's dubbed the capital of live music. There are bands playing in every single bar, every single night.

But there's also some art culture, like the Mexic-arte museum that groups a few local collections of Mexican art. It's small, colorful and has some vibrant pieces spanning Mexico's history. Some of my favorite pieces below:

Top 10 Things to Watch Out For in 2010

Global trend expert Ann Mack from JWT Intelligence has predicted the Top 100 things that you should watch out for in 2010. It ranges from the predictable prediction (electric cars...) to the more obscure (dry shampoo). 

My favorite? Argentina's Lionel Messi coming in at #52.

The Future of Gaming

You don't need to speak Hebrew to understand how this application could take gaming outside of the living room and into the real world. Or virtual/real world.

This reminds me of a trip to Disneyworld about 8 years ago where I tried one of those bulky helmets and had a sword and was swatting around at virtual things that appeared. The experience was so not-immersive that I really felt like an idiot. Bridging the real world and the virtual looks like the real deal...

The Known Universe

The Known Universe is a new, and quite trippy, film produced by the American Museum of Natural History that is part of a new exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City.

Bombay Bicycle Club (Acoustic)

I've posted about these guys before. They're already getting big in the UK and are going to get bigger. They look about 15 years old, as per the bass player snickering at the beginning but boy can they play guitar...

Say Yes to Twitter

Say yes to Twitter from Marcus Brown 

No monkeys this friday. Just rats...

Rats. They're here, they're there, they're everywhere. That's rats for you... 
The Hot Rats is Supergrass dudes covering classic hits under a Frank Zappa song name. Their cover of Gang of Four's Damaged Goods is,well good.

Yes, friday is supposed to be..

... monkey business. As much as I like my simian brothers, frog muppets really say it as it is. Kermit stars in this LCD Soundsystem video.

Cibelle: Lightworks

If Amy Winehouse came from Brazil and dropped acid instead of shooting up, she'd sound something like Cibelle. Or at least look like her.

Black Box Revelation

Belgium is not top of mind when you think hard-thumping rock. But Black Box Revelation hail from Brussels and keep their sound raw and heavy, with a healthy dose of blues. The Black Keys' distant belgian cousins in other words...

Music + Visuals

Cool visuals by Japanese outfit Bonsajo. More of their work on Vimeo.

Phoenix: Acoustic Set

Click for a great acoustic set from the Versailles band for German magazine musikexpress.

Mixtape

This is cute... For anyone who has ever sweated over a mixtape or who simply likes The Kinks.

Camera, Monkeys, Action!

All three readers of this blog (Hi mum!) will know that Friday is Monkey Business at Swirl. This short preview is a result of a collaboration between the BBC and the fine simians at the Edinburgh zoo. Yes, this is the first film made by Chimpanzees!

More videos available here (if you live in the UK).

Augmented Reality Starting to Look Like the real Deal

The augmented reality applications I've seen so far haven't really grabbed me. They've struck me as a case of "we're doing because we have the technology to do it." But this collaboration between Mattel and James Cameron's people around Avatar is really cool and makes me think I would actually enjoy playing with this. As a hypothetical 12 year old.

I Want My Blob House.

I would LOVE one of these Blob houses. It looks like something out of Space Odyssey 2001 (minus the evil computer trying to kill you). 

Maybe it's a winter-cocooning thing because of the freaking cold weather, but it looks so cozy and fun and summery. It's got a kitchen, bathroom and everything.


If it's Hip, It's Here has all the details. Except price of course...

Whitest Boy Alive

For all the hoo-ha around Berlin being this uber-hip (hyped?) city, I can't name a single decent band from there. Until now... 

Whitest Boy Alive delivers the goods for Europe's new capital of cool. They come across as a white boy's funk band (wow... bad pun...) with a healthy dose of pop. And it's no wonder as the band includes half of Swirl favorite Kings of Convenience. 

Figures and 1517 are real stand-outs on their Myspace page.

Zettabyte is the New Terrabyte

This illustration shows the amount of data consumed by Americans in a day. Artist Rob Vargas transformed research from the University of California at San Diego, and breaks down the top categories.

Arguably more shocking than the 3.6 zettabytes per day (1 zettabyte = one billion trillion bytes), is that radio comes out on top. It must NPR-heads and Rush Limbaugh-ers skewing the statistics.

[via: Fast Company]

LP Cover Mash-up

So simple, but so cool. I wish I'd thought of that. And hadn't sold my LP collection...

Lots more here.