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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Visit the official Further website

Visit Jones Snowboards

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!

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Buy Tycho – Hours

Visit blog.iso50.com

Yosemite by Ramin Hossaini on Flickr.

Beach by ?CubaGallery on Flickr.

A couple of weeks ago I finally got around to starting up a site on Tumblr after putting some thought into what kind of site I could create that wasn’t entirely about my own photography. After our vacations to Ireland and Iceland this summer, I came back with a large amount of landscape photography that made me realize how much I love images that capture the vastness of just being in one place and staring off to the horizon. StandHereForever.com is built around such imagery, both of my own and of those I’ve come to know through different websites and through Flickr. I hope to look back in a few months or in a year and find that I’ve cataloged some of the best landscape photography I’ve come across, and I’m also hoping to do some short interviews with the photographers I’ve featured to find out what inspires them and who some of their favorite photographers are.

Visit StandHereForever.com.

I was really excited to get the new album The Devil’s Walk from Apparat today, as my main exposure to him has been limited to a handful of songs, including the excellent song Circles found on the DJ:Kicks compilation he curated in 2010.

Apparat is German electronic musician Sascha Ring, and he’s released a number of albums and singles since 2001. My exposure has been a bit limited, but based on the songs I’ve heard prior to this release I didn’t entirely know what to expect. His remix of Telefon Tel Aviv’s song Lengthening Shadows, found on DJ:Kicks, was excellent.

On The Devil’s Walk, I’m impressed by the amount of instrumentation – especially some of the strings and percussion that’s not always electronic. For some reason the album reminds of of Bibio in the sense that it’s fused electronic and analog sounds so perfectly that they never dominate one another. As fall and winter approach, I don’t think there’s a better new album to go with the changing seasons. As a huge Telefon Tel Aviv fan, there’s something about this album that feels very comparable to the feel of their music, while also still being something unique to Apparat. Two songs off the album are included below, including the official video for Black Water, and the song Ash/Black Veil, which has such an incredible build of repetition and texture and reminds me highly of the song Circles on DJ:Kicks. I highly recommend picking up this album.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Apparat Official Website

Download The Devil’s Walk on iTunes

Swedish band Kent has long been one of my favorite bands. I think I discovered them in 1998 when their album Isola was released. They’ve not released any English language albums in several years, but Isola, Hagnesta Hill, and some older B-Sides are generally the only English language albums they released. The guitar sound, instrumentation, and vocals are incredible and even when you can’t understand the non-English songs, the greatness of the music holds up perfectly.

There’s a ton of info on Kent on wikipedia. The song below, Stop Me June, is from Hagnesta Hill, released in 1999. I used to search all over the place to find their CD’s since they were imports and difficult to find. This song just randomly came up on iTunes and it’s the first I’ve listened to them in a while.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A few more songs after the jump…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I am hooked on the new SBTRKT album and the song below, Hold On, has been in heavy headphone rotation for the past few days. “Post-dubstep” is a term thrown around quite a bit when it comes to SBTRKT’s music, and the album features a variety of guest singers behind the producer’s instrumentation and heavy bass. Not all songs are similar to Hold On, but all are just about as good. Pitchfork.com will give you a far more comprehensive description of the album than I can manage myself at 12:30 am, so take their word for it – it’s an excellent album.

Click here to view the embedded video.

SBTRKT Website

Download SBTRKT on iTunes