synth

if you have any interest at all in electronic music, you should watch this stormin' bbc documentary about the birth of synth pop in the uk. here's part 1 of the 9 parts that can be found on youtube...

beached

i guess ideally blog posts are supposed to be on the leading edge of the hype wave. everyone trying to pick the next big thing. this post here is decidedly derivative - not terribly original at all. but i thought i'd like to point out 'beached az' - a series of animated shorts in which australians take the mickey out of new zealanders and do it very well. here's a sample - there's loads more on youtube...

zero massive chinese air

it's a big month or two for kids like me who like trippy downbeat music. three of the legends of this kind of sound have/are bringing out new material:

1. zero7 - released their new album 'yeah ghost'. (zero7 released their first album 'simple things' in 2001 - mellow loungey music but subsequent albums have explored new musical territory while maintaining that essential mellowness)
2. massive attack - have released their new ep 'splitting atoms' this very day. (the greatest band in the world. yes you heard me. released the groundbreaking 'blue lines' in 1991 thus changing the world's musical landscape forever. the new ep is four tracks long - the lead single (made with damon albarn of blur and gorillaz fame), and three superb remixes of songs that i assume will be on the full album - to be released sometime next year)
3. air - release their new album 'love 2' today too. (quirky french loungesters that march to the beat of their own drum exploring all sorts of sonic fields. very french. they released their severely popular and very classic album 'moon safari' in 1998)

and that picture up there isn't a still from some fantastic new (or old) sci-fi film, it is in fact rows of chinese policemen taking a break while guarding the aquatic centre during the beijing olympics in 2008. [source: time]

mos def

i've liked mos def for a long time since seeing him on a dvd doco called 'freestyle: the art of rhyme'. recently he's probably been more publicly visible (read: "visible in the mainstream") as an actor (ford prefect in 'the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy' and as chuck berry on the recently released to dvd 'cadillac records'). but while i enjoy seeing him in films, it has to be said that rap is where he really excels. his latest album 'the ecstatic' is fantastic.

so first up here's a little clip of him dropping some lines while walking along some japanese street:



and here's a clip from the aforementioned 'freestyle: the art of rhyme':

pull my heart away

i think you might need to be a hunk of wood not to like this song - and i think even some hunks of wood would appreciate it...

little house on the central plateau

this is a bit of a teaser... a short video clip from one of the locations of one of my current art projects. the project involves a paper model that i designed and constructed (based on our house) photographed in different locations. all part of my safe little world concept. on the weekend my brother and i went off photographing and i commenced my project with locations in rotorua, the desert road, mount ruapehu and turangi. the film clip was shot in the desert road location on the same camera as i was taking the house photos on (my much-loved canon g10). a spectacularly beautiful location with cold wind and views of mount ruapehu. afterwards we realised we'd actually been standing in an army training area...

safe little world: little house on the plateau from andrew killick on Vimeo.

a brittle filament

nice little animated music video from Hrishikesh Hirway who performs as 'the one am radio'. track is called 'a brittle filament'... music is available from emusic - oh, and if you decide to sign up for emusic (recommended) then let me know before you do - because if i refer you then we both get free music : )

audio player software break-down

me and mp3-playing software go back a long way. it all started with 'music match jukebox', which came with one of my computers about 8 years ago. in those days i wasn't really into the mp3 thing - i was most definitely listening to cds - frankly my hard drive would never have coped with a big music library. it wasn't until i upgraded to a computer with a 200gb drive that my hard drive-based music collection began to take precedence.

after a brief dalience with windows media player i moved on to itunes. most people go to itunes because they get an ipod but i was just using it because it seemed to work well. i liked that it was free and i liked features like 'smart playlists' etc. but apple kept on upgrading it and making it bigger and bigger so that it started taking up more space and i started to go off it. by then the itunes store had come to nz so i was using it for that and intitially i thought i was stuck because of the amount of itunes music i had (still in the days of itunes drm).

then i started doing some research and after a bit of trial and error decided on mediamonkey. it was feature-laden, had a smaller memory footprint than itunes and, when i tried it out, actually seemed to be making my music sound better. not only that but it played my itunes music fine and supported last.fm (another must).

and thus it continued for over a year. but mediamonkey - despite what they say - is not actually free. its advanced features are locked away until you pay. and unfortunately some of those advanced features are to do with smart playlists - limiting what you can do without parting with cashola. i always thought i would end up paying for the full version of mediamonkey... but just recently i decided to delve into the world of mp3 software again.

the first program that really caught my attention was songbird. it is a very cool concept that has a lot of features and is still in development so should continue to improve based on user feedback. songbird's particular claim to fame is that it also works as an internet browser, making it very handy when you come to interface your music collection with the resources of the internet.

i was happily using songbird one evening and playing the software version of risk when i noticed that risk was hesitating before certain actions - a sure sign that something was using a lot of ram. sure enough i discovered to my dismay that songbird was using twice the memory that mediamonkey had used and research on the net revealed that this a well-known weakness of the program.

so i went looking again and this time i came up with j.river's media jukebox. this software used to run on the same basis as mediamonkey with a free and paid version, but since j.river released a new software solution that encompasses all the media in your home they have made their music player 100% free. and it's a great program. you have to put up with a bit of advertising for amazon's music download service and i found that j.river want payment for the mp3 encoding feature (you can also use your own external encoder), but other than that it is feature-rich, sounds great, has native last.fm support and is very customisable. and for all that, its memory footprint is actually slightly less than mediamonkey, plus you don't need to run the last.fm program to scrobble so you save memory there too.

the shop

here are some pics of the new shop in cherrywood that we have opened... for more about annie blackberry go here.

magic llama

there's a mysterious magic llama for sale on trademe at the moment. it gives the owner a number of benefits including invisibility and, somewhat paradoxically, attractiveness.

realistically, i should be keeping this discovery under wraps, but i'm a generous soul who only hopes that the llama will go to a home where it is most needed.

the golden llama can be found here.