Sxip, you rock socks all over the world!

Sxip (pronounced 'skip') is a multi-instrumentalist genius who makes his own instruments out of stuff. He appeared in the goddarn weird but funny Insane Yeti Squirrel comic strip a while back.

At first it seemed like another crazy guy who does experimental stuff, but he's one of the few to do so compellingly, methinks.

Beatboxing, guitar playing, and weird sound effects, heck, I wonder, he does them all live yet I wonder how he gets all those sounds. Watching some of his stuff I initially thought he was playing along a backing track of sorts or using special effects!

So, without further ado, I present the one and only Sxip Shirey:

Moon In Her Belly (featuring the amazizing Adam Matta)



Pandora


In a song with Jason Webley (must check him out one day) - Days With You



Few people are able to do all these wildly different things with all kinds of people, have a blast and make awesome stuff... you heard me, Britney Spears- take note.

Now, you might not remember him by his music in that case (maybe by his mad scientist hairdo), but it's kickass music. I loved his new CD, Sonic New York. It sounds as if all the different grooves and melodies of the city that never sleeps had slept together and had a million babies. Truly some kind of thing that's not heard often. A bit Bowie-ish, Zappa-ish with everything in between! Will buy sometime :D

Dj Shackles . Crazy Dubmetalstep thingy

Dubstep is a new kind of thing to me, even though it's been around for like a decade now (as if I'd listen to music through the web when I was nine...), and I've been growing to like it a lot. I dunno, it can be harsh, heavy, it can make you wanna get up and shake your goddamn booty or get you into a trance. And still I don't really know how to describe the music since it all sounds so different... isn't that great? Not like other kinds of music (gangsta rap, reggaeton, metalcore and trance, you all heard me).

So! Dj Shackles (what a name) makes some grindingly heavy dubstep that occasionally sounds more like heavy metal, really, really dancy heavy metal. Anyway listen for yourself this oddity:

SHACKLES - WOLVES AMONG SHEEP by SHACKLES

The mixture is cool, the drums alternate between realistic heavy metal drumwork and more dubstep-ish sounds. The guitars sound a little glitchy for my taste.

Here it almost feels like it could lead nicely into a DnB track but he artfully brings all the weird crap that makes dubstep dubstep. Interesting indeed:

SHACKLES - DARK HARMONIX by SHACKLES

GE: Home Appliance Energy Use

I find this little flash application in the General Electric of great use to all those who ever wondered how much each appliance used. Not only it tells you in watts the usage, but also it can show you in dollars and the equivalent in petrol, or how much does a kilowatt hour yield for each appliance, in addition to ranking them from the biggest users to the least..

Apparently electric furnaces use the most with a big-sounding 17,211 watts, while things like laptops barely use 30 (printers use around the same). However, I'm curious about how much things use when they are off but they remain plugged. Would it be relative to how much they use when in work?

Also, I see plenty of people who would be interested in seeing all this in the equivalent carbon footprint and all that stuff.

Barnbrock studios

I ran into this creative studio based in the UK a while back. Works for book covers, fonts, posters, CD covers (including David Bowie's ''Heathen'') and all sorts of stuff. Some heavy political messages, succinctly and subtly expressed?

http://www.barnbrook.net/

http://www.barnbrook.net/archive/

Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music

Trance? Techno? House? Jungle? Hardcore? What's the difference between them anyway? They all sound like un-tss un-tss because all electronic dance music does so. I found this neat little (massive) guide to electronic music made by some mysterious person by the alias 'Ishkur'. Pretty cool, years are like the rings inside a tree trunk and different music styles that split and form nodes and crazy lumps and things and you can hear examples of each style of music and learn how sounds change through the ages and travel different cultures. Although in the last 10 years there has been an explosion of new styles of music (dubstep, reggaeton that has actually been around for a while, this new trancey DnB sound and a resurgence of electro), the guide still kicks ass an is not that out of date. How much work was put into it!

http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/

Noah's Ark

I was gonna go through some crazy silly theory someone used to explain Pangaea according to the Bible and all... but I couldn't bother.

Instead, I'm gonna put these 3 videos making funny stuff out of the story of Noah's Ark. Amen.

My current obsession with flamenco guitar

As my next album nears completion, there's a track that was a bit like flamenco that I decided to re-record. It wasn't that bad, but I lost the original files and couldn't polish the mix, so I opted for doing the whole thing again. And me being me, I dived into the world of flamenco guitar and listened to Paco de Lucía for hours. I'm really getting into this; it's so much fun playing this kind of music, but it's also as hard as feck.




So, in my quest to unlock gypsy and middle-eastern roots in my Spanish guitar, I've found tons and tons of flamenco techniques that I had no idea about. It's amazing how many awesome ways of making the guitar sing exist!

So here are the ones that really really got me:

Golpe technique:


Rumba flamenca:


Rasgueado (the most known one):


Different Rasgueado:


Bulerías (this is the hardest one I've found, aghh!!)


Crazy-ass mofo comes up with a flamenco-ish technique when trying a Victor Wooten slap bass thing:


Using ''picado'' (fingerpicking) to play arpeggios:




So yeah... I've had my hands doin' these crazy gitano things lately, and also, this has sparked my interesting in Gypsy music. Last Friday was listening to things ranging from Django Reinhardt's gypsy jazz music to Bulgarian wedding music, seriously some of the craziest and most awesome music in the world!

Scott McCloud's Awesome Infinite Canvass

Paper, a cloth canvass, a wall, 140 characters on Twitter, they are all restraints on dimensions. Price/advertising space on newspapers force comic strips to be usually just 3 small panels for this reason. And of course computers and that sort of stuff has been eroding these size restrictions gradually on the web, cartoonists tend to forget that really, a comic strip can be pretty much any size!

Reading through genius comic artist Scott McCloud's website, an article precisely about the infinite canvass (a must-read for comic artists!), he gives us a few examples of ways in which we can elegantly defy size. Because size matters, yo.

This one by McCloud himself: (click on the images)

Pup: Heat Death - by Drew Weing

So, as Tool say in a song of theirs

And following our will and wind,

we may just go where no one's been.

We'll ride the spiral to the end and may just go where no one's been.

Spiral out. Keep going.

Spiral out. Keep going.

Spiral out. Keep going.

Spiral out. Keep going.

Polyrhytms in pop music

I tend to avoid the music in the radio; it's derivative ballads and reggaeton, overproduced and uninspired music of all sorts, dance-rock-rap, all the things under the 'pop' umbrella term. Sure, there are amazing songs now and then which are pop and not all pop is inherently bad, but most is inherently... stupid.

It's probably just the fault of the people who listen to things and vote. ANYWAY, sometimes interesting things do get through.

I'm not a J-Pop fan at all. But this to me seemed awesome. You know why? No, it's not because prettygirlsstupidcostumeseverythingprettyprettycutekawaiiblargh, but because of that genius bridge in the song that sounds like NOTHING ANYWHERE ON ANY POP CHART AROUND THE WORLD.

Note: it starts at around 1:37.



I guess that the 'Poririzumu' (Polyrhythm) bridge is appropriate, something about love being like two different rhythms playing at the same time. Moving on from that, Marty Friedman approves this song. Therefore, he made a cover with the awesomeness only he can give:



I think I would have liked it more if that crazy part had been used more than just in the bridge of the song and in the end. Or make the end as beat-heavy as the first bridge. Oh well, it's a start. I didn't like how lifeless the voices sounded. But hey, most pop music tends to be lifeless!

Alexa Meade: Realism turned upside down!

Recently I posted an entry on an upcoming Chilean artist Nicolás Radic who is awesome because his hyperrealistic paintings are at the same time, abstractions of the things portrayed in real life. This time, I found Alexa Meade, who challenges the definition of what a canvass is. I'd say her approach is maybe the inverse to Nicolás'; she paints on her subjects and turns the real thing into wonderful paintings:

Mediation 2

alexameade.com
24x15 Chromira Print. Limited Edition of 7. For pricing information, please contact lauren@irvinecontemporary.com

Amazing, eh? From afar you could actually believe it's an oil-on-canvass, only the hair seems to give away the true reality of the piece of art.

Blake

24x18" Chromira print. Limited Edition of 7. For pricing information, please contact lauren@irvinecontemporary.com.

Seems like tons of fun, and probably a lot easier than it really is. Now, I wonder how would it feel to be there in person and walk around the 'painting' (as a photograph we no longer perceive depth, hence our illusion of it being flat), and if it would be equally convincing.

Probably not but that's maybe not the point. If only, then we'd be able to one day achieve amazing effects... remember that Robin Williams movie 'What dreams may come'?

Alexa Meade's official Page

Another person who blogged about her art (more pictures! And stuff she says about her own work)

Scene from What Dreams May Come

Talking Correctly v.s. Talkin' Sensibly

Ok, I made this comic strip but I don't really think it's that funny, I mean, the punchline... what is it?
Ok.. yeah.
Go to this image's page instead.


Henry Fowler by ~skinsvideos21 on deviantART