hyperrealandsupercool.com/blog
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REMIX ME
Remix my track Ctrl U.
Download the stems and send your remixes to my Dropbox.
BUY ME
Now available again through AmazonMP3, my 2001 album Hyperreal And Supercool and the follow up, Advanced Emotional Engineering.
Buy my new book "Digitalia - Digital Abstracts", through Blurb and all the individual images as full size prints or greetings cards from Imagekind.
October 21, 2005
Why is it that my, Pre-ordered, new Depeche Mode album, released on Oct 17th isn't expected to be despatched until between 27th-30th I wonder? And yet it still says usually despatched within 24 hours on the product page. Has Amazon got to too big to cope? This isn't a first. Jake ordered FIFA '06 soon after it came out and paid extra to get it delivered quickly and it still took 5 days or more to arrive. I might have to join the downloading ranks of the iTunes generation at this rate!
Broadband is finally going in a week tomorrow... after which I'll be trying out the Flock browser - Not to mention all the other features of my Media Centre I've yet to experience. The TV mostly!
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Random Toss
October 20, 2005
Best in ShowOct 21st - Nov 22nd
Best Shop and Gallery
5, Back Hill, EC1
map
Shamefully, I've only read 12 of Time Magazines All Time 100 Books
The Melloman is a fantastic contraption, if you're of a musical bent and like that sort of thing.
Camera Toss - A blog for people that like to throw their cameras around in pursuit of the abstract! Probably not for those of you lucky to enough to own digital SLRs but do-able with a cameraphone - I've done similar in the past... I call mine Action Snaps! Shots taken with the solarise effect on and a random wave of a K700i.
After e-mailing Qoop to complain about the lack of my book of flickr pictures I have now received two copies! One from New York and one from Malmo! The 2nd one, from NY, arrived today with an invoice and Shipment summary - Interestingly, the summary says shipment date - 13/10/05 and yet the invoice is dated 17/10/05! I think the other one was edspatched around the same date as well. So I hope they were both replacements as they claim to have sent the original 5 weeks ago! Not sure if I will use them again or not - It might have been a glitch this time but I'm not impressed - Not only that, the print quality is a bit flat as well. Pity. It's a great idea, but for the price I expected a good deal more. [left] K700i Action Snap Comment | Permalink
Bums and Bugs
October 19, 2005
Dangerdoom
The Mouse & The Mask
(LEX036)
Lex
Lex Records' biggest release yet is the long awaited collaboration between producer Dangermouse [famed for last years masterwork The Grey Album and fresh from producing Demon Days for Gorillaz] emcee MF Doom [Madvillain, King Geedorah]. Inspired by and loosely themed around the cult Adult Swim shows on the Cartoon Network, this is Dangermouse totally on form and Doom in upbeat party mode!
Gillian Carnegie gets my vote for the Turner Prize 2005
And what's going on with the Ladybird population? I found 20 of these [right] things wandering aimlessly over the wall outside my living room window [6 floors up!] on Monday - Weird!!! Comment | Permalink
Brownjohn, Bond and The Stones
October 18, 2005
Famed for his decadent lifestyle and extraordinary talent, Robert Brownjohn was among the most gifted graphic designers of the 1950s and 1960s.After studying under László Moholy-Nagy, he made his name as an innovative typographer and image-maker in late 1950s New York before moving to London in 1960.
Brownjohn formed a film company with the producer David Cammell and director Hugh Hudson.
He captured the experimental spirit of the era by applying modernist visual theory to mainstream culture in the titles of the James Bond films Goldfinger and From Russia With Love, artwork for the Rolling Stones [left - cake baked by Delia "Let's be 'aving you" Smith!] and graphics for the Robert Fraser Gallery.
DESIGN MUSEUM
SHAD THAMES, LONDON SE1 2YD
Google Map
TICKETS: Adults £7 Concessions £4 Free for Under 12s
OPENING TIMES: 10.00-17.45 Last admission 17.15
Design Museum
Until 26 February 2006
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Smell A Rat?
October 17, 2005
Crude Oils. An exhibition of Banksy's re-mixed masterpieces is now open.100 Westbourne Grove W2.
11am-8pm
Admission is FREE but it only runs for 12 days and started on the 13th, so get yer fingers out!
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Kissopoly
October 13, 2005
Just wondering if anyone else other than X records in Bolton carries this Kiss board game - They only mention it in a list. Not if they have it in stock or purchasable online.These Little Britain things look like they'll be amusing for 10
minutes or so as well!
There might be a lull in Blogging for a few days, while I catch up with a few things.
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B Is For Blake
October 12, 2005
To celebrate the move of the Eyestorm Gallery to Charing Cross Road - They are holding an exhibition of Sir Peter Blake's Alphabet series.Peter Blake Exhibition
Oct 12-Nov 12
Eyestorm Britart
121-125 Charing Cross Road
London WC2
Q for Quarters
1991
Screenprint (Edition of 95)
30" x 40"
£960
Buy From Britart
Blake's album cover art now resides, permanently, in the Music School at Leeds University. Where thay have been since February of this year, according to this BBC piece. Can't say I noticed at the time!
Blimey! Simon Pegg has been cast as Tom Cruise's secret agent sidekick in the next Mission Impossible movie!!! We'll never get another series of Spaced now!
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Not Completely Superthriller
October 11, 2005
Went to see Superthriller at Shunt last night.A very sweaty affair in a collection of old railway arches .
I shot these [it's three shots stuck together] at 400 ISO but they are still dark - there wasn't an awful amount of lighting as they had the projections [The greeny bit in the middle]. I tried bumping it up with Brightness/Contrast!
There are plenty of them in the band: A charisma-less lead vocalist that seemed to have come as "Tortured Beat Poet" from a random 60's movie. A complete arse on percussion, that looked as though he had failed an audition for the 118 ads. Two synth players: One controlling backing tracks and the visuals, who looked like a medical student on Rag Week. The other had a bit of a Ron Mael [Sparks] fixation without the comedy moustache. They are backed by "three girl singers" in 80's macs that looked like actors playing the part of backing vocalists to me... Mind you, one of them did a very impressive display from a rope suspended from the ceiling [see left of photo] during "Upgrade". Not visually stunning then. The stage was very cramped, unsurprisingly, and consequently a couple of mic's went flying causing some unpleasant additional audio!
Musically, they played pretty much all of the album [may have been all of it - I didn't miss anything] and a cover of Lennon's "Cold Turkey". Sound wasn't great, percussion too loud, vocals too quiet. They certainly didn't do the album justice live.
The Prince/Scissor Sister songwriting comparisons are justified but they just don't look comfortable singing about sex, tongue in cheek or anywhere else. I expected a whole lot more personality than that.
Interesting venue, Shunt, if a little damp - there was a stream of water running down one of the walls by the bar. And it smelt, like a damp railway arch mostly!
Sounds like I had a crap time but the sum of all the parts wasn't as bad as they sound individually. I might have been less impressed had I paid to get in I suppose. I'll stick with the album for now until they get a bigger budget for live shows I think.
I must add some links to these last two posts - Where's the time!?!?!
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Audience Of One
October 10, 2005
Got home last night to find the new LoveGods album on the doormat - Initial play reveals that their time in the studio has been well spent and Joel has done an excellent job on the production.Their influences are probably from the wrong decades to win them too many fans in this country these days. I still hear elements of Fleetwood Mac in there - It's the bluesy roots.
There are touches of Led Zep and Janis Joplin as well but on "It's Only Words" there is a touch of Patti Smith sings Eurythmics in the outro! And "Mississippi" reminds me of the opening line of Last Train To Clarkesville here and there but is a great shoutalong number. "Mucha Lucha" even has a suggestion of MC5, albeit a very subdued one, with the additional sax.
As the album progresses though the American influences get stronger and stronger, "On and On" has a folky/country feel that I can't quite pin down and "17" could be huge in the States - I can imagine a stadium full of people singing along to it and I think to acheive any kind of major success they are going to have to get across to the USA. The US influences continue with the blatantly Sheryl Crow like " Wanna See The Stones..." although, oddly, there is a suggestion of Sabbath's War Pig's on the acoustic guitar at the beginning!
Closing track, "Head" doesn't exactly go out with a bang, although there is a not very well hidden track after it. I think it would have been better put in the middle of the album.
Now... "Otto's Song"? I'm not sure if they should have hidden this or not. It doesn't fit comfortably with the rest of the album but is by no means poor - An attempt at a Scissor Sisters track looking for a remix perhaps? - The only thing that lets it down for me is the U2-esque guitar, which drags the whole thing back to the 80's a tad and I would have used a dirty guitar line instead of the synth, which is a little uninspiring.
All in all though an accurate studio representation of a very good live band showcasing Deah's vocal talents well but not forgetting that the LoveGods are a whole lot more than that - They are all accomplished, passionate musicicans and it will be a crying shame if this album doesn't get the audience it deserves - As I said, I'm just not sure that enough of that audience live in this country.
Get over to the website and check out the clips/downloads and see for yourself.
Pic of Deah (c) Sara Bowrey
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Neon Bone Yard
October 07, 2005
I want to visit the Neonboneyard - Las Vegas by Eliot Shepard. Eliot is currently exhibiting at the Jen Bekman Gallery in New York.
The VJ Book looks interesting - I don't know anything about how this stuff is done and probably shouldn't find out for want of new toys but it reminds me of a great show I saw by Ebo Man a few years ago... Now what happenened to him?
I've been nosing around the Colour Lovers to get a few ides for a new colour scheme for this place but got inspired to create my own. Now. I'm sure there are better ways of doing this, using Indexed Color Mode, but I can't get Photoshop 7.0 to do that - So, I've been using Save For Web as a gif and reducing the colours to 32 and saving the resulting palette into Presets/Color Swatches and there they are available to use later on.
Just need to find out where to put them so I can use them in Dreamweaver now. I'm quite pleased with that!
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Clouds Underground
October 06, 2005
Gillian Rocca has had shows all over Britain and the Continent, including the Clapham Art Gallery and artLondon, She is affiliated with the Studio Voltaire group in Clapham. Gillian suggests that her work offers a way of overcoming feelings of confinement generated by city life: "I have been painting clouds and seascapes - since I moved to the city, which I am sure has had an impact upon my preoccupation with these seemingly limitless spaces."
As there is a bit of a sky theme this week, here is a painting, from the summit of Howth hill in Dublin, by Conann Fitzpatrick. I include this as the inspiration for it was, what I imagine to be a pretty typical, but no less spectacular, Irish weather phenomenon. Having been caught in a similar fashion on Bull Island and then pelted with hailstones!
Rainstorm Approaching HowthSize: 20"x 30"
Oil on Canvas
Price: £950.00
Purchase from conann.com
Kind of relates to the set I am working on of the sky from my window. Mostly overlookng Crystal Palace, where, years ago, the Palace itself would have stood. But I can also see Docklands, The Millennium Dome and Dulwich School, amongst other things. There are only a few pictures so far, taken at different times of the day but already there is a vast range of colours forever changing over this framed expanse of London.
Underground is a new creation inspired by Crime and Punishment. Dostoyevsky's most famous novel centres on Raskolnikov, an impoverished student, who commits a gruesome murder, then experiences a living nightmare in a desperate search for redemption.
Underground recreates the feverish, dreamlike atmosphere of Dostoyevsky’s world by luring you through basement spaces of the Old Abattoir in Clerkenwell.
This 15,000 square feet of industrial underworld is a labyrinthine of interconnecting chambers. Once inside, you have the freedom to follow a character or narrative thread, or simply to wander through the maze. Here scenes, film images and chance encounters will merge, transform and dissolve before you like a constantly shifting hallucinatory dream.
This amazing event, by DreamThinkSpeak is part of the Young Genius series and runs from
10 - 29 October 2005. The Old Abattoir is at 187-211 St John Street, Clerkenwell, London EC1 and tickets can be purchased from the Barbican. Google Map
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Superthriller Shunt In The Sky
October 04, 2005
This is the picture I took for the Sky on The 1st of October flickr group on Saturday. There are 718 pictures in all !
Got free tickets for one of Superthriller's exclusive shows at London Bridge's Shunt - Thanks to Rough Trade.
Ordered the new LoveGods album too.
Ordered the new LoveGods album too.
Still haven't received my Qoop book though, which is annoying. They claim that first class post from the States takes 2-3 weeks and it was posted on the 12th September - Which, even if you take weekends out of the equation means it should have shown up yesterday. Sigh!
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Taylor Made
October 03, 2005
suetaylor.co.uk is, unsurprisingly, the website of Sue Taylor!Sue lives in Brighton and paints... Quite a lot actually! Animals, flowers, landscapes etc. Which are all available to purchase as originals or limited edition prints through the website. The style is somewhere between fantasy and photo-realism depending on the subject matter.
The animal paintings would lend themselves to greeting card design whereas the flowers would suit repeat patterns such as wrapping paper. Maybe sending a portfolio to whatever the modern day equivalent of Athena is would be a smart business move?
Sue designed the website herself and for a first attempt at web design it is an ambitious project! Some of the navigation is a bit cumbersome but she does include a Site Map which make life simpler. Overall though it is well designed with good reproductions of her work. Sue also doesn't have an e-commerce set-up as yet and all business is carried out via e-mail. So I don't know if she can deal with credit card transactions.
So I thought I'd ask her about the design of the site, the upshot of which was...
"At the moment I am redesigning the whole web site to incorporate uniform navigation, a site search engine and shopping cart but that is going to take a couple of months to complete, The pages will look more like an image bank and there will be a lot more of my photography on there".
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