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Congrats to the Outliers Vol. 1: Iceland Kickstarter Project

September 4, 2011 by mg33

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

August 29, 2011 by mg33

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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David Guttenfelder Photography

August 5, 2011 by mg33

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

August 2, 2011 by mg33

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.

The Art of Flight Official Website

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Richard Mosse Photography

August 1, 2011 by mg33

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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WU LYF – Go Tell Fire to the Mountain

July 24, 2011 by mg33

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.

WU LYF Website

Buy Go Tell Fire on the Mountain on iTunes

Posted in Now Listening · Leave a comment

Instagrams Of Old Photos

July 20, 2011 by mg33

View All Photos

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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