Mr E’s is another one of my Flickr faves. He more or less invented the TTV technique of photography and stands head and shoulders about his many imitators. He also has a persona website, Mr. E. Cipher, where you can actually buy prints of his images too.
Inspired By Adam Neate… It’s inspiring just to read stories about how people are inspired, especially when it’s kids who are inspired to paint and give away their creations.
During our recent house move I discovered my long lost Amiga 1200 in the attic. It had stopped working properly a long time ago but I couldn’t bear to dump at the time. However, I had no room to store a broken relic so it had to go. Along with the Amiga 1200 went my huge collection of public domain demos. These demos came on single or double low density 3.5″ floppy disks and were self contained and self booting programs that, once loaded, would play up-to-the-minute moving graphics along with an 8-bit tune or two. Anyways, I just found a few stray demos and was about to throw them in the bin too when I thought I would quickly Google them…and I’m glad I did. It turns out that there are still communities that are interested in the demos, like the Amiga Demo Archive, and the search quickly pointed towards YouTube (Why hadn’t I thought of that earlier!?). Like I said, I had loads and they varied in quality but there were a few that stood out for various reasons and I managed to find every one I was looking for :-)
While many of them don’t really do it for me now, my all time fave’s still manage to hit the spot -
Part of the reasons I loved these demos was because of the 8-bit tunes. I was making my own music with OctaMED at the time so was totally into the whole scene. I was constantly amazed at what people were doing with limited sampling time and limited tracks. Soon after the nostalgic warmth came a horrible realisation…with all the disks that I dumped were all the ones with all my old tunes on! The first electronic music that I wrote :-(
Ho hum! Worse things happen…
Check this video of a guy scratching the melody along with the Beatles tune, Michelle. Pretty impressive.
Looks like Upper Playground have released a follow up of Dithers. The latest instalment is called The Run Up and it’s a much better DVD all together. It has a greater selection of featured artists (for my taste anyway) and is, on the whole, more stylishly delivered. Highlights for me include interviews from Jeff Soto, Swoon, WK Interact, Ryan McGinness, Mr Cartoon, Futura…hang on, if I don’t stop I’ll be naming them all! Anyway, I got mine from the US but I’ve just noticed that you can now get The Run Up from Amazon UK or simply through the Ektopia Store’s DVD section…blah blah!
WFMU’s Beware of the Blog is running a The Sixty Second Song Remix Contest. Compress a well known tune down to less than one minute and send them in because Station Manager Ken wants to collect 78 of them…for a CD I guess. Anyways, so far, the best of the bunch is a cracking version of Blitzkrieg Bop.
This is a neat idea - Personalised Guess Who. Take the classic game of Guess Who, dump the old characters and insert your own with this handy how-to (templates included). Imagine how much fun it could be. [via]
