Songbird Sing is out.

Yes, our own, bozeman’s very own, talented and musical duo, Nat Kendall and Page Rasmussen, have released “Songbird Sing!”  It’s beautiful lyrical and modern sound will keep you listening all of the way through.  Nat’s production has paved some new roads into an “electronic sound with soul” his voice is there to keep the rhythm and tell a backstory while Page and her amazing grace vocal strength and beautiful soulful songbird voice will keep you rocking.  Just wait till you hear, “Please Hold On,” it would make one wait for anyone through the dissonance and the harmonies of love. “Time and Time” is a story of reflection and love, full of beats and delicate strings.

The tales of love, the music of soul, of Songbird Sing take a journey inside a musical trip out down main street.

You can check it out at CD Baby, and Songbird Sing.

Historia de Un Letrero.

I found this film and it nearly broke my heart.

In Alonso Alvarez Barreda’s Cannes Festival 2008 short film winner  Historia de un Letrero (The Story of a Sign), a passerby changes the course of a blind man’s luck with a few carefully chosen words.

Objectified.

The documentary film “Helvetica” by Gary Hustwit was really fun to watch and insightful, I mean someone makes the decision at one point deciding what font goes on a street sign and then we easily take that decision for granted as it becomes part of the audiovisual wallpaper of our environment. It was really intriguing to hear from some of the inventors of these fonts, clear legible fonts, to zany and beautiful fonts, and how important the design and visual harmony is to them.

Well here comes “Objectified,” about industrial design and all of those things in our environment that we use, where they come from and why they look and feel like they do. Mr. Hustwit is intrigued by these objects and how they effect us. It is still in production and is set for an early 2009 release.

However, if you are interested in toasters only you could just go to the Toaster Museum instead and deliberate over if the Prometheus or the Westinghouse is better.

Lumen Eclipse.

There is an outdoor venue for motion graphics in Harvard Square.  And there are eight short films displayed each month! Julien Vallee has created a short piece that I especially love (great editing, stop motion animation and sound design!)

“The project exists in three spaces:  Outdoors: on a pair of large outdoor video screens.  The screens incite public interaction with motion-based art by bringing artwork to the street, outside the confines of the gallery walls.  Online: as an artistic and informational community, LumenEclipse.com showcases artwork, interviews, news and events so viewers may learn about the art and artists represented.  Screenings: intimate monthly screenings at local venues facilitate conversation between art, artists and audiences.”

Le:60, a motion graphics/ film festival where the top films from each category will be played in the venue, is on September 27th.  The submission deadline is August 15th.

It’s a fantastic opportunity for exposure.

Radiohead, “House of Cards Video.”

Talk about creativity and innovative ways of expressing the inner scape of imagination.

“Radiohead’s new video for “House of Cards” off In Rainbows was shot without cameras and instead used a “Geometrics Informatics Scanning System” that uses structured light to capture the 3D images. The Velodyne Lidar system used 64 lasers spun at 900 revolutions per minute to capture the large environments, actors and Thom York all in 3D.”

In depth by Promo News.  Make your own version.

Oh!  …And a making of.

These guys aren’t afraid of hard work and taking risks for artistic experimentation.

Annecy 2008, Kunio Kato

The 32nd International Animation Film Festival in Annecy this year celebrated two anniversaries: The centenary of France’s first animated film (Emile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie) and the 10th annual edition of the festival, which has run since 1960. The International Federation of Film Critics reports on the Annecy Festival.

The 2008 Annecy Cristal for Short Films has been given to Kunio Kato of Japan with “La Maison en Petits Cubes.”  The story is described: “It is difficult to keep the house made of blocks out of the water. The grandfather who has lived in it has been constantly adding to it as the water level rises. This is the story about his family memories.”

I couldn’t find any clips of the actual short film but found some of his animation style in, “The Diary of Tortov Roddle.“  It is a lovely work of imagination. I found the story and animation style almost surreal and the silence of the work, no spoken words, adds to the ephemeral quality of the story.

Misty Mountains

The forest was hushed and the trees and flowers were drenched with dew. An early morning photo of the Hyalite Reservoir caught the cool air and the stillness of the world just waking as the sun came over the ridge. To me it seems as though a chalice was tipped and is now left on its side as peaceful dreams were poured all of the night onto those sleeping in the world.

Waking Forest.

Filling Dreams.

1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89…

Perhaps a tree heals by degrees of 1:1.618.

Perfection in nature, nature in perfection.

Truest stories of the broken heartist.

The poetic tales of Paige Rasmussen and Nat Kendall join forces with a folk rock, hip hop, neo soul, beat machined, steel stringed orchestra to expose the spectrum of heartache to healing.  For salty eyed lovers and the broken heartist alike, Songbird Sing’s beat crushed doctrine plays out a struggling education in love’s ever-ebbing tides with richly balanced harmonies, emceeing that staggers from poppy to ghostly, sateen vocal hooks and stripped down but clever production.  Songbird Sing presents a truth in work with sounds drawn of drum machines, acoustic guitars, piano, wood floors, 0’s and 1’s, hand claps and bus lines.  This whimsical musical bares it all through the eyes of the abstract emcee, Nat Kendall, and the luscious vocals of Vegas songstress, Paige Rasmussen.

I have been looking forward to hearing the latest from the duo.  Nat granted me a little time to ask him some questions about the album and he and Paige’s work together, it will lift you up, read on in Nat’s words.

First off, what’s the title of this new album we’ve been waiting to hear?

The album is titled Songbird Sing and is released under the ‘nat kendall presents:’ series, similar to the Lovers and Ghosts album in ‘06.  The series is a concept to continuously collaborate with new artists that don’t typify the hip-hop genre and thus help me break out of the confines of one style.

Is there a story behind that title?

‘Songbird Sing,’ there is a visual that comes to mind.  It’s a little boy with a branch/stick staring at a birdcage.  Inside sits a bird just staring back inquisitively.  The title tries to capture expectations, as well as wants, from something that knows not what is desired of it, it’s almost a somber command of sorts, a plead for a melodious tone once known.

I’ve seen you expressing some musical soul prolifically.  What keeps you going, where does all of that inspiration and focus come from?

I’m not sure what keeps me going to be honest and I’m really struggling with that at this point.  I’ve been asking myself that same question after spending 2 years on this project with absolutely no expectations or thoughts on outcome.  What made me do it?  I know I won’t stop so why will I continue doing it?  It has depleted me financially, my time, my energy and I have absolutely no expectations for the success of the album.  So, why do I continue doing this? These questions have been reassuring that I started with the right
intentions and will finish with the right intentions.  I make music because I have to.  There is something in me, not success, money, fame or anything similar, that pushes me on.  I just have to create it because I need to get it out of me.  The focus comes from a state of Zen that says, just do.  I can’t seem to stop and it scares me at times.

The specific inspiration for Songbird Sing is love.  Yes, love… in all it’s facets.  It’s a flight through all of the emotions I’ve experienced in the last couple years of my life with no specific ending and no start… just like love itself, which should be an open ended feeling and learning process.  Some songs are very explicit, maybe too specific, while others teeter on abstraction, but all revolve around the “L” word.

I’ve listened to some of the work you have created and produced with Eight Track Mind and the song I found on URB seems to be taking a different direction.  What sparked the new sounds?

What I’ve done with Eightrack Mind is a whole different beast.  That project is driven by 8 people who all need to contribute to the songwriting process.  It’s a challenge to get a unified direction from that scenario.  Taking a break from that and collaborating with just one other person has given me so much more freedom to do what I want musically and thematically.  And again, collaborating with Cy Ducharme on Lovers and Ghosts, or Paige Rasmussen on Songbird Sing has encouraged me to go in new directions.  Songbird Sing is a complete departure and being the only producer behind it gave me freedom to really push some musical boundaries for myself.  I’ve been intrigued by the electronica lately and really wanted to fuse that into the hip hop.  Paige brings such a soulful voice in and I tried writing the album with a much more folkish approach.  It was all written on an acoustic guitar and then we electrified it in unique ways to get this
weird, neo-folk, neo-soul, hip-hop, elctronica sound that I think really sets it apart.

You can find a little preview of the new sounds at URB.  Drop them a line, give them some stars, send them some love. You can also check them out on myspace at:  Songbirdsings.  The album flies out on August 5th.

Friday at the Rhizome.

I have been visiting Rhizome, an archive of the ephemeral pieces of art that appear on the web since 1999.  I mean how many things on the internet are to a casual observer deemed a nothing?  For instance, This is Sand. Or Moving Toward the Inevitable.  However the intricacy and thought that went into making a seemingly simple visual is astounding.  When Sound Freezes Over.

The Artbase used to be open all of the time, but as the cost of space and time increases with an ever expanding collection, Rhizome had to start charging for a membership, $25 a year, a small price to pay to have a record of technologies people have come up with, concepted, even if there is no use for them, yet.

There are many new things invented every day, every hour and with the sheer volume what if something valuable is missed, passed over and then dissappears from the internet.  Like TheOtherEnd.  It can only be found here at the Artbase now. It used to be fun to log on in say Bozeman, have your friend log on in perhaps Sri Lanka, and by pressing the space bar a little red light would light up on your friends monitor in Sri Lanka, and vice versa.  Useless, perhaps, but it predated chat services and implemented new technology.

Modern Guilt

Is this Beck and DangerMouse standing ready for the album release photoshoot and this the shot they like best?

Here is a song from the latest of a muse I keep near. Definitely some tension and some new sounds.  Beck is surprising in this way, interpreting music out of what seems like chaotic noise if pulled out of context of the whole.

Buddah’s Caves

Tourism, experiencing a pseudo event… so how tragic is it to take a story almost tangible, yet out of the context of time, even farther away from the audience? A story of the fifth century Northern Wei Buddhas.

There are caves, caves carved out of a cliffside known as Mogaoku - ‘peerless caves.’ The first on record to be in A.D. 366 by an itinerant monk named Yuezun who said that one night he saw flamelike lights pulsing across the cliff face and took it as a sign to stay.  So he cut a hole into the sandstone wall and moved in to think and experience.

The caves are near the Silk Road, a couple miles outside of what was once a cosmopolitan town, Dunhuang, where people would stop and stay on their travels between China and India.  Buddhas traveled too going from India into China and beyond.

As a Buddha one would know that the material world is a phantom or a dream, “a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp,” as the Buddha puts it in the Diamond Sutra, “Sutra of the Perfection of Wisdom of the Diamond that Cuts Through Illusion.”  And the landscape on the cusp of the Ghobi Desert would do just that… show us proof that it’s all elemental and as the art is built of sand will just as readily turn back into the wind blown sand rushing over the desert floor.

To many the story that is preserved by these caves is important enough to try and preserve the elaborate rooms and art made by the hands of Buddhas who passed through.  As reported by the New York Times the caves have been thrown open to visitors in recent decades and the site has been swamped by tourists in the past few years. The caves now suffer from high levels of carbon dioxide and humidity, which are severely undermining conservation efforts. The short-term solution has been to limit the number of caves that can be visited and to admit people only on timed tours, but the deterioration continues.

Plans are under way to recast the entire Dunhuang experience in a way that will both intensify and distance it. Digital technology will give visitors a kind of total immersion encounter with the caves impossible before now, but that immersion will take place 15 miles from the site (Holland Cotter, New York Times.)

So the question remains, will the story, the way, be obscured by such a separation of place?  The time and context is already obscured to any tourist, so is it worth trying to stop time, wind and sand from taking back what was a simple changing element to begin with? Either way I suppose contradictions pile up, and unending change continues.

Skill-z (with a z)

This french art director, Sebastian Cannone, has some tight skillz.

Motion

I have been busy making phone calls, scheduling a shoot that will happen 1667 and then 1767 miles away.  So I haven’t been here for a bit.  And although I am working as a production manager now, my passion still is with art, creative, design and of course motion.

There are a couple of designers/ artists who through sheer creative impulse put out a large body of work, probably by staying up half of the night, inspire me to keep with the meditation and create output (as designiscasual calls it).  Some are already discovered, some are on their way to being discovered.  I will be posting a lot about work that I find inspiring.

One, ANOVA, is a Danish designer, who I found on a blog called Heavy Backpack and saw some time ago on The FWA after his site overhaul.  Anyhow, there is an interview with ANOVA on the Muse website.  He has been using all this software we have found to express his ideas and styles for himself and an impressive roster of clients.  It takes so much hard work to get noticed, he must have spent a lot of alone time at the face of a computer.

It’s obviously worth it.

Action Cats!

There once was a challenge… Adobe Photoshop Cut & Paste. The Motionographer did an interview with one of the honorable mentions, the action cats, who really did a super creative set of graphics using photography and animation. They gave all who would a peek into their process.

Let your imagination fly.

Does this look like the doorway to the center of the earth?

Jules Verne went there in his imagination in 1864 and then Charles Brackett adapted the same story to a film, directed by Henry Levin, I have seen it by the way and it was spectacular to my 5 year old imagination.

Yet this particular “Door” is in Darvaz in Uzbekistan. Thirty five years ago, geologists were drilling for gas when they encountered a large cavern underground filled with gas. They ignited it expecting it to burn off in a few hours. The gas is still burning. It has been dubbed “The Door to Hell” by locals.

The mysterious stories that are engendered by thoughts of what is really below our feet at the center of the earth… Of course now we are much too scientific and oh so logical to think that it would be possible, no?

As if…

*cynical disclaimer

Publishers usually give Amazon a ~50%  discount on books so they can then re-sell them and it is often not enough?  Now I don’t of course know all of the little details that go into keeping the bookseller afloat and ahead of the technology but what about the artists.  The New York Times reports that it has prejudices against publishers that won’t even further undersell their inventory.

Some criticism.

This blog, The Forager blog, has a good breakdown of different criticism that ‘The Happening’ is getting.

All is connected.

The Happening is a movie where all of the layers come together in an array of allegory and love. Story telling at it’s best, there is a subtle lesson. A lesson in love and the need to keep running, using energy.

I would love to be able to break it down in the literary sense but I am perhaps not yet well suited to recognize the techniques. Anyhow, the character development is done well, and in a short time, a picture of character mindset, lifespan, emotion, and perhaps folly. They are trying to escape what it is the storyteller never tells you directly, it is perhaps the plant-life of the planet reacting against the depletion of the earth and all of the negative energy that humankind pollutes the earth with, especially nuclear energy. All of a sudden the foil comes in to show that the characters are mythical lovers.

It is such a good film. Subtle and not jolting you or forcing one to see what it is to see but allowing one to come to terms with the moral of the story.

Brilliant!

Psychological

One of my favorite Directors is M. Night Shyamalan because he can tell a story, a story with mystical plots and suspense and they are full of imagination. They remind me of fairytales that really could be true, or if you can suspend your disbelief for the time they are.

Working in media/ entertainment production can really take the story away from you. It’s easy to tear the film apart for different reasons that pertain more to reasons such as inconsistent production or acting that is unbelievable because disconnected to the plot. The connection to the story is interrupted by… “oh, of course this is just a film.” So now I learn more about the devices one can use to bring in effects, like learning how to tell your own stories rather than being involved in someone else’s, but it takes a more masterful work to get my full attention to the story. Spectacular entertainment doesn’t work.

The Happening, and someone who has seen it is saying it’s really bad. Others are giving it better reviews.

The American Express commercial that he wrote and stars in is a beautiful work telling how it could feel to be able to see what demons lie behind some peoples masks, to let your imagination fly away with you.

I watch his movies all the way through gripping with my ears and eyes and imagination to his story.

It is scheduled for wide release on Friday the 13th.

Watch it on the web.

The Favorite Website Awards now has a Theater. I’ve found much inspiration from the FWA’s collection of websites from designers around the world. Now there is even more motion than before.

The immediacy of the color red.

Even before thought our minds perceive what we’ve encountered through our senses. The color red excites our eyes, it’s warm and attractive, so immediate. The cover for the new Smashing Pumpkins album, Zeitgeist, has been done by Shepard Fairey who picked red for the immediacy of the color which reflects the immediacy of the issue he alludes to. He uses red a lot.

I’ve been following Fairey’s work for awhile and I am always impressed by the depth of reasoning he goes through to get his artistic ideas out. One of his influences he has listed in his manifesto which he wrote in 1990 is Heidegger who’s phenomenology looks at how our conscious being is that which shows itself in itself. He has used the slogan, “The medium is the message” originated by Marshal McLuhan, a man recognized for his genius in recognizing how forms of communications changes our psyche. He has learned from the best how communication can effect change and has done so by cultivating audiences around the world. He uses many a cultural signifier to make his statements poignant. And he was not paid for this, he just likes the guy.

A light to read by.

In the 1930’s my grandfather had a wind machine that would charge a battery, it was out in the shop and the battery was huge. It generated enough energy so he and my grandmother could read in the evening. This was way out west where the grids of electric power didn’t flow, yet. Harvesting the wind.

Now in 2008 we can weave light into fabric, fabric that if set in the bright sunlight for around 3 hours can illuminate for 10 hours later. The idea, dubbed “portable light”, combines solar cells with light-emitting diodes attached to the surface of a fabric that can be made into bags, and thus carried around during daylight hours. In sunlight, the cells generate electricity that is stored in batteries stitched into the material. When it gets dark, the batteries power light-emitting diodes that are also sewn onto the cloth. A small portable source of energy.

I believe the led light element is a nano technology and could even just be painted onto a surface as long as it could reach it’s power source.

The solar cells themselves are made from a substance called copper indium gallium diselenide, made by Global Solar Energy of Tucson, Arizona. Kennedy & Violich Architecture of Boston, Massachusetts has developed the technology and made it into the fabric.

“In 2005, Kennedy, an anthropologist, and a group of architecture students from the University of Michigan took Portable Light to the Sierra Madre in Mexico, where they introduced it to a group of Huichol Indians. The students had incorporated the technology into a variety of potentially useful designs, among them a study desk and a poncho. Though the families seemed taken with the brilliant fabric, the real breakthrough came when one woman asked Kennedy if she could use the technology in her own designs. She ended up weaving the solar panels and LEDs into a traditional Huichol shoulder bag. “Portable Light is physically adaptable, but it has to be culturally adaptable too,” Kennedy says. “We create the technology, then allow local communities to decide, according to their own needs, how best to adapt it.” Later, the MATx team added a microprocessor to the fabric, allowing several squares of Portable Light to hook together, to share power and to be synchronized in regard to the intensity of their light.”

The Rocky Mountain Institute is involved in the “Portable Light Project.”

So people can read, write and talk in the light after dark. They are cheaper than generators, batteries and even candles, over time. Harvesting the sunlight.

How’s that for integrative thinking, using existing technology through creative design to make a really helpful, inexpensive, and less destructive form of energy for people around the world? Nice way to allow life to remain simple, subtle and magical.

Foxes

Does anyone remember the song about the fox family? My father may have made it up… it begins with the refrain, “The fox went out on a chilly night, prayed to the moon to give him light, he had many a mile to go that night before he reached the town-o, town-o, town-o, he had many a mile to go that night before he reached the town-o.”

Well there are many good stories about foxes, another being, “The Fantastic Mr. Fox”, a book by Roald Dahl, where the farmers shoot off the little fox’s tail in trying to stop the creature from eating their chickens.

Wes Anderson is doing an animated version of the story, and many of Wes’ crew are part of it. Bill Murray is, I think, one of the farmers, Jason is in it as is Ms. Huston and some new additions…. George Clooney is Mr. Fox and Cate Blanchette is Mrs. Fox. Wes wrote the screenplay with Noah Baumbach, who he wrote with for the “Life Aquatic” which was fantastic. Although I think some of Wes’ best work was written with Owen Wilson. But what I am excited for is that Wes-ness, the thing that he does with a story. He just has such a personal way of expressing childhood from the first person perspective. I always feel like part of the story, like I did when my father told me stories when I was little. Wes has adapted the novel but then added scenes to begin and end the film.

The original story is set in Great Missenden, a local in Buckinghamshire, England, also the major inspiration for the films environment. The sounds are to be recorded out in the field to capture the real sounds of trees and birds, stables and the grounds. The animation is to be primarily stop motion and was to be created by Revolution Studios, which seems to be dissolved, however it has been stated that Mark Gustafson is doing the animation, and it seems that he has clay-mation (an example of claymation by the Brothers Quay) in his bag.

The animated film is in production and is set for a November 2009 release.

New, “The Enchantress of Florence”

A new work by Salman Rushdie, “The Enchantress of Florence. The New York Times puts the new work in a dim light, but harsh criticism has only been adversity for making Rushdie stronger.

I was able to see an art history lecture by Rushdie and his knowledge of middle eastern art is spectacular and culturally relevant. I next want to read, “Haroun and the Sea of Stories.” I feel that the author is able to capture the things that are precious, but not by emotional means, more in the sense of the allegory capturing an essence of human existence.

First chapter to be read online. NY Times book review. Guardian book review.