KJ Sawka - “Montreal” dir. Clay Lipsky

A couple months ago I blogged about a music video for Daedelus’ Sundown, which was pretty great, directed by a fella named Clay Lipsky.
He sent me an email to inform me, and maybe a little promotion which is cool cause he has some great stuff, about his latest work.

It’s a music video for, a drum ‘n bass electronica artist, KJ Sawka. I’m not really into the music, all thought I like some Aphex twin or Squarepusher from time to time, but the artist seems really driven and that’s all you need to make good music, love for the business. Check out a live session on the tube.

Again, the video looks great, it nicely blends in with the music (flash, ifilm/ytube).
Apparently Clay also did the Coldcut True Skool video with Roots Manuva and some other artsy projects.
Anyway check his website and props to you, Clay, go clay go.

What can I post on this f* blog?

Since I haven’t had a lot of time lately and had nothing to post, decided to look in ye ole archive for a funny video and found some with the new Vista search tool. Didn’t wanna upload videos so I tracked them down on the series of tubes we call the internet.

• Office Fall
• Stage Fall

I remember myself, in geeky terms, rofl over that first video.

They both fell pretty deep so I bet they broke something.
I don’t know if it’s the sadist in me, but I keep laughing at the most cruel videos.

Vista and some thoughts

I know I haven’t been posting too often lately, but I’ve been busy playing around with Windows Vista. Yeah, I installed it a few weeks back on a separate partition to see what it does and now I completely switched over.

I didn’t install Vista because it’s newer and possibly better, but since I’m a power user I think I can benefit and work more efficiently with features like on-the-fly disk searches or file tagging.

I must say my first impression was very good. I’ve got a Dell pc and on XP I had to install tons of drivers to get everything functioning properly (Hyper-Threading and stuff) and on Vista I had to do squad, everything worked right out of the box, the installation was done within 30 minutes.

Off course every feature they implemented already exists and might be taken from other operating systems like OSX or Ubuntu, but all in all I think it’s a big step in the right direction for Microsoft.
It’s a very clean UI, I’m not a fan of the Aero Glass eye candy but it isn’t distracting either. I’m not gonna talk about the other features cause I haven’t had time to explore them thoroughly.

Together with Vista I installed the new Office 2007 suite which has a very cool and intuitive user interface.

As you can see I’m speak highly of the new Microsoft products, maybe it’s a first impression, maybe not. I hope I don’t change my mind.

Josdigital’s favorite albums of 2006

I know I should’ve done this around New Year, but I was still too busy discovering new music. You see, the internet was a gold mine for discovering new music and movies at that time cause every blogger came out with their “Best of 2006″ list and so am I.

This isn’t what I feel is the best of 2006, cause I know I’ve been missing out on a lot of underground hiphop, I’ll pick up on that later on. But what I find interesting is that I discovered a lot of new styles and genres this year, and I think that has partially to do with the online music service Last.fm that I’ve been using for the last year or so.
I used to listen to mostly hiphop, instrumental or down-tempo, but since I’ve been using Last.fm I got to know genres like post-rock, electronica, indie rock, ambient and others. BTW this is not an ad for Last.fm :-).

I know I’m a little late but here are my most memorable albums of 2006, in no particular order:

• “Hello Everything” Squarepusher
• “Mr. Beast” Mogwai
  
• “The Eraser” Thom Yorke
• “Days to Come” Bonobo
  
• “The Mouse and the Mask” Danger Doom
• “A Piece of Strange” Cunninlynguists
• “Donuts” J Dilla
  
• “Eigen Wereld” Opgezwolle
• “The Soft Machine” Ozark Henry
• “Swallowed by the Machines” Goddamn Electric Bill
• “The Audience’s Listening” Cut Chemist
• “Return to Cookie Mountain” TV on the Radio
• “Remixes” Four Tet
• “The Information” Beck

Honorable mentions: “Into the Blue Again” The Album Leaf, “So This Is Goodbye” Junior Boys, “The Crane Wife” The Decemberists, “The Garden” Zero 7, “Everything All the Time” Band of Horses

Hiroshima, the pictures they didnt want us to see

Here are a series of pictures with description of the suffering after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I must warn you for our sensitive readers, these are some very disturbing pictures.

I’m not approving the bombings or anything, but I want you to see why the Americans decided to kill so many in advance. I mean NOTHING justifies killing thousands of innocent people.

These are pictures of the Nanking Massacre in 1937, where the Japanese killed and raped thousands in a very cruel manner.

Aren’t we blessed to live in this western society where we feed the hungry and help the lesser fortunate?

Myspace Will Censor You

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Myspace sucks as a company.

According to the guys from Ask a Ninja, Myspace is blocking external links to smaller, more innovative video and photo sharing sites like Revver, basically preventing users from posting Revver videos to their site, in favor of others.

If you’re not aware, sites like MySpace and YouTube host your site but also claim the rights to re-publish your videos for their own purposes. That’s right - they can use videos posted on their site in commercials promoting their services OR sell those videos to advertising firms without needing to share revenue with the author.

What MySpace has essentially done (and what would happen if Net Neutrality were ever dissolved) is put restrictions on services which compete with theirs.
If you don’t know what Net neutrality is, read an earlier post I did trying to explain the concept, and why I’m against it.

Ask a Ninja is an extremely funny video podcast that gained a lot of popularity over time. It’s revolves around a ninja who, in a satirical manner, answers user submitted questions about his every day life.
I myself think it’s getting a little “tedious”, I still think the first episode is the funniest.

» “Myspace Will Censor You” -Ask A Ninja

Boards of Canada - Dayvan Cowboy

Directed by Melissa Olson
The music video is composed from footage of 1960 Joseph Kittinger, the man that set the record for the longest free fall with a helium balloon for Project Excelsior, and Laird Hamilton’s ride of a giant wave.
The music and the visuals blend so nicely together, a real mood setter, could be my favorite song ever.

According to Last.fm, the 3rd most played track on my list is Dayvan Cowboy with 34 plays in total. I got El-P with T.O.J. on #1 and Madvillain with Great Day (Four Tet remix) on #2. Other followers are Sigur Rós – Starálfur, Amon Tobin – Easy Muffin and Cannibal Ox – Pigeon.
Yeah, I like all kinds of music, except country music of course, being from underground hiphop to post rock and from metal to indie electronica.

Rubber Johnny

Rubber Johnny is a 6 minute experimental short film and music video directed by Chris Cunningham in 2005, using music composed by Aphex Twin. The name Rubber Johnny is drawn from a British slang for “condom” as well as a description of the main character. The DVD comes with an art book, containing stills from the film, as well as conceptual drawings, photographs and more.

This must be the creepiest and weirdest video ever, except for David Lynch’s Rabbits of course. I first saw this about the time it came out and I always remembered the “hyperactive, shape-shifting mutant child”. A Cunningham and Aphex Twin combo can’t go wrong.

Also watch this surprisingly good parody and the Cunningham Portal.

2007

Let’s just knock it all out of the way now….
Here are some new year’s eve Flickr sets.