Jacob Sutton – LED Surfer

I just found this over at QBN and could watch hours of this. Such incredible footage combined with a perfect background of minimal piano and the crackling, echoing audio of what sounds like communications between planes and an air traffic control tower. This is really something that could have been taken in a completely different direction with faster music and tons of cuts between the footage. Luckily for us, it wasn’t.

As described on nowness.com:
Fashion photographer and filmmaker Jacob Sutton swaps the studio for the slopes of Tignes in the Rhône-Alpes region of south-eastern France, with a luminous after hours short starring Artec pro snowboarder William Hughes. The electrifying film sees Hughes light up the snow-covered French hills in a bespoke L.E.D.-enveloped suit courtesy of designer and electronics whizz John Spatcher. “I was really drawn to the idea of a lone character made of light surfing through darkness,” says Sutton of his costume choice. “I’ve always been excited by unusual ways of lighting things, so it seemed like an exciting idea to make the subject of the film the only light source.” Sutton, who has created work for the likes of Hermès, Burberry and The New York Times, spent three nights on a skidoo with his trusty Red Epic camera at temperatures of -25C to snap Hughes carving effortlessly through the deep snow, even enlisting his own father to help maintain the temperamental suit throughout the demanding shoot. “Filming in the suit was the most surreal thing I’ve done in 20 years of snowboarding,” says Hughes of the charged salopettes. “Luckily there was plenty of vin rouge to keep me warm, and Jacob’s enthusiasm kept everyone going through the cold nights.”

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Steve Hauschildt – Tragedy & Geometry

In a quick scan of Pitchfork’s latest reviews, I came across the album Tragedy & Geometry by Emeralds member Steve Hauschildt. I like Emeralds quite a bit because it’s a contrast from the usual electronic I like in that the rhythm comes more from the percussive waves of synth drones and pulses than it does an outright repetitive drum beat. Tragedy & Geometry is a synth driven album of minimalism and arpeggiation that feels like the perfect background music for floating through a retro-futurist take on space stations of the future. One could play this over the top of Kubrick’s 2001 and probably end up with an experience better than just watching the movie itself. Besides the music itself, I’m really loving the cover art on the album. Included below is the eleven minute track Music For A Moire Pattern.

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Buy Tragedy & Geometry on iTunes

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Polica – Give You The Ghost

Polica

I’ve not been as completely addicted to a new album in a long time as I am Polica’s Give You The Ghost. It’s a credit to the band’s influences and creativity that I was dumbfound to find out they’re from Minneapolis, and not a far more chilled-out and exotic location like Spain or Brazil. I couldn’t tell you a single band from Minneapolis besides them, but if they’re at all a sign of something good going on there, I’m obviously missing out. The entire album plays out like a single song to me, ebbing and flowing with good rhythms (often with dual drummers), buzzing and twinkling synths, funk bass, and vocals that show a ridiculously perfect use of auto-tune, delay, and reverb to turn singer Channy Leneagh’s voice into a powerfully hypnotic and seductive instrument. It’s easily one of the most instantly mesmerizing albums I’ve heard in a few years and I don’t think I’m going to get tired of it any time soon. It’s silly to call any one song a stand out song… but Wandering Star is included below along with the equally excellent Violent Games. A live version of The Maker from 89.3 The Current in Minneapolis is included after the jump. Give You The Ghost will be released on February 14, but has already been out on iTunes for the past month or so.

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Buy Give You The Ghost on iTunes

Visit Polica’s Website

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Red Bull Supernatural 2012 Video

It’s fitting that my first post of 2012 is about snowboarding, because this time of year it’s pretty much the main thing I think about. Landlocked here in the Midwest, the big mountains are a bit out of reach without a decent amount of travel. So, people like me turn to videos and all kinds of footage to live vicariously through the pros who do what we can only dream of.

Since news came out in 2011 about the Red Bull Supernatural contest that Travis Rice created, I’ve been obsessed with following its progress. The course looked like nothing else that has been used in competition, and it was fun to read Twitter updates and look at pictures on Instragram from the riders during the competition this past Saturday. It was rumored that no video would be released until the competition is shown on NBC in late March, but how could they let the awesomeness go unseen until then? Luckily, the teaser video below was released this week and offers a nice little glimpse into what will not only be some of the most epic contest riding ever, but also a highly stylish production. The video is include below.

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Active Child – You Are All I See

I seriously can’t get enough of Active Child. In anticipation of seeing them open for M83, I gave the album a listen on iTunes a few weeks ago, and it didn’t do much for me. Maybe it was the mood I was in, who knows… but after seeing them live I was completely won over. As a three piece with a mix of harp, keyboards, electronic and acoustic drums, and guitar, the music on it’s own was stunning next to the vocals that might go down as the some of the best I’ve ever heard live. Pat Grossi, the man behind the band, sings with a mix of heavy reverb, harmonies, and sampled vocals, and it just filled the venue unlike most other vocals I’ve heard. It was hypnotic and I would see them again in a heartbeat. Now that I’ve got the album, it’s been on heavy rotation and I love every single second of it.

Two videos are included below: the official video for Playing House, and a live performance of Hanging On performed at KEXP in Seattle. Not included below but available here is the full 24 performance at KEXP.

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Jeremy Jones – Further Trailer

It was only a few days ago that I posted the trailer for Xavier De Le Rue’s upcoming movie This Is My Winter, and now I’m even more excited to see the trailer for the followup to Deeper, aptly titled Further. in the upcoming film, Jeremy Jones and a variety of other snowboarders take the purpose of Deeper to even greater lengths to hike and ride terrain that – you guessed it – is further away than anything they did in Deeper, with locations including the Arctic Circle, Japan, and the Picket Range in Washington. Going “further” in their world doesn’t necessarily mean distance from civilization, but instead represents just how far they are willing to hike and explore to get to the places they ride. Sure, there are helicopters, but the journey makes the rewards far more memorable than a quick flight to the top of a peak. Further will be released this Fall by Teton Gravity Research. On the site it refers to Further as “the second installment of the Deeper Trilogy…” I can only imagine what’s in store for us next.

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Visit the official Further website

Visit Jones Snowboards

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Arbor Collective – Scotty Vine Full Part

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I just saw this video via Snowboarder Magazine - more goodness to help get excited about the upcoming winter. So much creativity in this and more backflips than some full videos!

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Xavier De Le Rue – This Is My Winter Teaser

One of my favorite things about some of the past year’s worth of snowboarding films is that they’re not just showing snowboarders, they’re showing adventurers. Snowboarding, by default, is an adventure no matter where you are, and when you don’t have jaw-dropping terrain at your doorstep, the adventure aspect is often  a fantasy in your mind, hopefully built on your own experiences and memories.

Watching the heavyweights of the sport in movies like Deeper, That’s It, That’s All, First Descent, and The Art of Flight is an opportunity to live vicariously through their lives and opportunities to ride in places that most people would get dizzy standing a mile away from. Snowboard films have only gotten bigger and better in the past few years, but only a few are blending the riding itself with the adventure of getting there. You could say that Jeremy Jones defined an entirely new genre of exploration-based snowboard movies with 2010′s Deeper, a film which saw Jones and a variety of riders hiking and climbing epic terrain across the globe in Antarctica, Alaska, Europe, California, and Utah, and only riding the terrain they climbed. Deeper was the kind of movie that would inspire you even if you’d never even been in snow; it was an adrenaline overload and a documentary-of-sorts of the limits some riders will go to for untouched terrain.

Xavier De Le Rue, from France, was one of the riders in Deeper, and I’ve seen him around the web in a variety of clips and movies, so I was excited to see the teaser trailer below from his upcoming movie This Is My Winter. My only exposure to him has been through big-mountain free riding, so I was surprised to learn he’s also a competitive snowboard-cross rider who competed at the 2006 Winter Olympics. He has won the Freeride World Tour three years in a row, undoubtedly making his mark on the sport and within the realm of riding jaw-dropping terrain. The trailer below is filled with previews of the limits taken to access never-ridden terrain, and the spirit of adventure that most of us only get to experience through a movie. I’m really excited for this to be released, and though no release date is mentioned, it should be out early this winter.

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Apparat – Song Of Los Official Video

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One of my favorite songs on the new Apparat album The Devil’s Walk is the second track, Song of Los. The video is something I could watch over and over as the emotion of the song is fit into a video showing a woman controlling and interacting with a robot she built. I’ll need to watch this a few more times to really try and get the meaning – it’s been a long week and my mind is drained – but I really like seeing somewhat lo-fi videos like this that prove you don’t need an insane budget to create something highly emotive and unique.

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Tycho – Dive LP

The long awaited new album Dive was released by Tycho today and it’s a thrill to hear the songs he’s spent the better part of the past year or more working on. Tycho is actually touring with a band these days and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they come to Chicago.

For those unfamiliar with Tycho, it is the musical output of San Francisco based artist and musician Scott Hansen, who, along with a few others runs what is easily my favorite design and music blog, iso50. I’ve been exposed to more greatness in art, photography, design, and music on his blog than I have anywhere else on the web. In terms of his own work, whether music or design, everything Scott touches ends up being something you wish you’d come up with first. Musically, Tycho is incredibly inspiring to me personally as these days I’m working more and more delving into electronic and instrumental music on my own. As I write this I’m only on the fourth track on the new album, having subsided on the already released track Hours for a few weeks now. That song is included below.

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Buy Tycho – Hours

Visit blog.iso50.com

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