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.