Congrats to the Outliers Vol. 1: Iceland Kickstarter Project

A quick congratulations to the team of Scenic, musician Deru, photographers Tim Navis and Kim Høltermand, and others on the successful funding of the Outliers Vol. 1: Iceland project! This is the first Kickstarter project I’ve helped fund and, while originally interested well before our trip to Iceland, being there on vacation made it all the more meaningful to help out what I’m sure will be an incredible project.

This October, with the help of the Kickstarter community, a small group of filmmakers, photographers and musicians are setting out on a journey to explore the remote countryside of Iceland and document their experiences with the landscape, residents and traditions they encounter. The end result, a beautifully packaged box set of the film and companion soundtrack, will be released to backers of the project as a physical artifact of the unique and awe-inspiring experience.

They’ll be sharing their trip in inventive ways with supporters, providing a real-time window into an experience that the community helped to make reality. Upon return, Scenic will edit a series of short films, featuring an original score by Deru and a full-length soundtrack featuring contributions from select musicians and contemporary composers. Tim + Kim will create an archival photo book and release a limited run of exclusive prints for the Kickstarter community.

Deru is curating a full-length soundtrack compilation of tracks contributed specifically for the film.  Artists include:

• Shigeto (Ghostly International)
• Loscil (Kranky)
• Goldmund (Unseen)
• Asura (NonProjects / Leaving Records)
• Tycho (ISO50 / Ghostly International)
• Joby Talbot
• Ryuichi Sakamoto
• Take (Alpha Pup)
• Thomas Knak/Opiate (Co-Producer of Björk‘s Vespertine)
• Heathered Pearls
• Eskmo (Ninja Tune / Warp)
• Son Lux (Anticon)

• More to be announced

More information about Outliers Vol: 1 Iceland is available here.

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Iceland 2011 Vacation Photos

My fiance and I returned from our week-long trip to Iceland a few days ago, and while the weather in Chicago was fantastic this weekend, I managed to stay indoors and go through all of the photos we took to put together an initial gallery of some of our favorite things from the trip. Not an easy process… I was still working on adding photos to Flickr from our trip to Ireland this past May as recently as a week ago, so those will be posted here very soon!

I plan on writing much more about Iceland later this week, but for now I’ll simply say that the country is a fascinating and incredibly beautiful place. As you’ll see in many of these photos, the endless variety of landscapes never stops – it is a place of constant beauty and ability to feel a connection to the earth and unlike any other place I’ve ever been. We had a car for the week and drove nearly 1,000 miles around the country, and all I could think about was when I could go back someday and hike, camp, and generally rely only on my feet to get where I need to go. I can’t suggest a trip there enough if you’re looking for something unlike any other trip you could take. I’ll have more about the overall trip in another post later this week, as well as some video we took along the way. Enjoy the photos!

Iceland 2011 – View Photos

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Bon Iver – Holocene Video & Iceland Vacation

What incredible timing… Less than 24 hours before my fiance and I leave for a week long trip to Iceland, I came across this amazing video for the song Holocene from the new Bon Iver album. Directed by Nabil Elderkin, the video shows a wide range of Icelandic landscapes that I am so excited to be seeing soon in person. I’ve wanted to go to Iceland for years – I blame Sigur Ros – and we’ll be arriving in just over 24 hours. We are renting a car to drive around the country’s Ring Road that travels about 830 miles. We’ve got lodging set up for each night, and no real plans other than to see what the travel company is suggesting that we see. I feel like this video is spoiling the surprise, but we’ll be there soon enough.

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The Horrors – Skying

I am completely loving the new Horrors album, Skying, and after what seems like 100 listens this week it still isn’t getting old. Their previous album, Primary Colours was excellent, but the overall sound on the new album is such a great leap forward. Primary Colours always felt like a dark album, and more so now that Skying sounds like a total 180 from it. I’ve seen people criticize Skying for the excessive reverb and the backwards guitar, and I find that odd because THAT IS THE SOUND of The Horrors. Sure, it’s been done before, but they have a sound all their own no matter how much they’re borrowing from My Bloody Valentine or The Jesus and Mary Chain. There’s a sense of positivity on the new album that Primary Colours lacks – you don’t expect a good summer album from a band like The Horrors, but that’s what they’ve delivered.

The more I listen the more it’s impossible to pick a favorite song, but Oceans Burning is bound to be one of my top five favorite songs of the year. At nearly eight minutes long, it could easily go on for eight more and I don’t think I’d get tired of it. Below you’ll find the official video for Still Life. They’re coming to Chicago in November and I’m definitely planning on seeing them.

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Visit The Horrors website

Download Skying on iTunes

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David Guttenfelder Photography

I came across the photography of David Guttenfelder today in the article Lost world: Scenes from North Korea’s closed society, published on the theindependent.co.uk. North Korea is a place that is as fascinating as it is frightening to me, and like many people my interest in the country has as much to do with the rarity of photos and knowledge of their way of life as it does the hope that someday people there can have a better life than they do under their current leader.

Guttenfelder is the chief Asia photographer for the Associated Press, and the photos found within the article provide a new glimpse into life in North Korea. I was glad to find more of his photography on the web, and he has an impressive collection of photos from locations in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, many of which capture conflict in some of the most dangerous locations in the world. A few of my favorite pictures of his  after the jump below.

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The Art of Flight – Metal Trailer

As summer wears on and I get to daydreaming more and more about winter and another hopefully great snowboard season, it doesn’t help when a brand new trailer for the upcoming Travis Rice / Red Bull / Quicksilver movie The Art of Flight is released. The riding and filming just look jaw dropping. This movie is going to be amazing and I’m really hoping it shows at a theater somewhere in Chicago. However, it looks like we’ll be missing out here – midwest snowboarders get no love sometimes.

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The Art of Flight Official Website

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Richard Mosse Photography

Richard Mosse Photography

Richard Mosse Photography

Richard Mosse’s infrared photographs made the rounds recently on several blogs, and I was really impressed with them, as well as other photos on his site, especially The Fall series, which is filled with the beautifully decaying wrecks of aircraft. The Infra series includes many images like the first one above taken in Eastern Congo, and is discussed in an interview by The New Yorker here. To take the photos, he used Aerochrome, an obsolete technology, to create an alternative image of the complex social and political dynamics of the country. The film, designed in connection with the United States military during the Cold War, reveals a spectrum of light beyond what the human eye can perceive. As discussed in the article, he aims “to shock the viewer with this surprising bubblegum palette, and provoke questions about how we tend to see, and don’t see, this conflict.”

Visit Richard Mosse’s Website

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Noel Gallagher – The Death Of You And Me

I wasn’t incredibly shocked or disappointed when Oasis broke up, in fact, like many people I hoped it would allow us all to see Noel Gallagher step away from the band and make the incredible solo album he’s bound to make without the scorn of brother Liam for breaking apart from the typical all-for-one, one-for-all band mentality he’s always spoken of. To me, some of Oasis’ best moments were when Noel was on vocals – the MTV Unplugged in which Noel led the entire show while Liam cursed at him from a balcony was proof enough that no matter how much of a rock star he really is, the band would be nothing without Noel and some of the legendary songs he wrote.

So they broke up, with Liam forming Beady Eye along with Oasis members Gem Archer, Andy Bell, and Chris Sharrock. Their debut album, Different Gear, Still Speeding was alright, but I don’t recall listening to it too much after buying it. In the past few weeks, Noel Gallagher has revealed that he’s been quite busy with his solo project, and release the first single The Death of You and Me this week. I was right: expecting big things from any future solo outing, the new song is fantastic and instantly more memorable than anything on the Beady Eye debut. Don’t get me wrong, there’s good stuff on that album, but nothing stands out like even the guitar riff at the beginning of Noel’s song. The vocals and overall song is everything I’d expect from one of the UK’s best musicians. If this song is any indication of what we can expect from the full album, we’re in for quite a treat when Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds is released October 17th.

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Noel Gallagher Website

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WU LYF – Go Tell Fire to the Mountain

I was browsing Pitchfork this week to see what new music was out there that I’d missed recently, and the album artwork above instantly caught my eye. As luck would have it, the music didn’t disappoint, and it’d be a letdown to not know about this band. WU LYF is short for “World Unite! Lucifer Youth Foundation,” a band from Manchester, England who released this debut album, Go Tell Fire to the Mountain on June 13, 2011. I’ll admit that the gritty almost indecipherable lyrics seem a little annoying at first, but they grow on you and are backed by some of the best guitar tones I’ve heard recently. I can’t pinpoint what band their guitar sounds remind me of… maybe a little Explosions In The Sky, with a nice thick tube tone and plenty of reverb. Now that I think about it, the guitar sounds are much like long-defunct Dallas, TX band Lift To Experience, who I saw back in the late 90′s, and was blown away by an equally beautiful guitar tone.

WU LYF seem to operate with a degree of anonymity, but formed in Manchester in 2008 and have been called “a band likely to define 2011″ by the NME, and The Dutch magazine Kicking the Habit described them as sounding like “Tom Waits in a church under the guidance of stoned garage.” I really love the sound of the album overall; it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they recorded in an unused church because the reverb and instrument tones are exactly what you’d get in such a place. The band are actually label-less, having turned down offers from established labels, choosing to release the album on their own. I suggest checking out their website as well – the video background is pretty cool, though I have no idea if this is a band video or footage from a movie.

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WU LYF Website

Buy Go Tell Fire on the Mountain on iTunes

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Instagrams Of Old Photos

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I often pick up old books around town; there’s a good used bookstore down the street that puts out their excess books on the sidewalk for free. I grabbed one last year called America The Beautiful, published by Reader’s Digest in 1970. Many of the photos have a look that is common these days, though produced with Photoshop filters and settings to produce an older saturated film appearance. I’m a big fan of this but find the irony in owning a DSLR to take 10+ megapixel photos only to make them look old.

I used the Instagram iPhone app to take photos of some of my favorite pictures in this book, and I’m really pleased with the outcome. The photos in the book are already very old and somewhat degraded to begin with as you’d expect from a book that’s 41 years old. The Instagram filters really brought out the best in these pictures.

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