Wow, talk about a labor of love. Someone was just commenting to me about how long it’s been since I added new projects to this site. Well, long story short, there are two top-secret projects that have taken up the past few months of my life. While you’ll hear more about the later in a few weeks, today I can officially announce the launch of Coachella Digital Magazine.

A next-level publication for the good people over at Goldenvoice, I had the pleasure these past few months to work this them designing and coding their new digital magazine. In short, its just like your favorite mag, only filled with fantastic little goodies like videos, mp3s, and animations. It also includes some Coachella line-up additions after the announcement.

So click here and check it out! I’ll do a full case study for the site in a few days when things are less hectic.

Lawrence Lessig is the founding father of the Creative Commons License… one of the most radical and influential ideas in the history of copyright. A staunch supporter of the idea that sampling, remixing, and creating new art from existing art is the lifeblood of modern creativity (aside: look into the works of Pablo Picasso, Roy Liechtenstein, and Andy Warhol for while this should not be a new idea).

Lessig has recently released a new book, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy,  as a “final” opus on the subject as he moves away from 10 years of copyright activism and into a discussion of the corruption of our political system (note that I did not say corruption in our political system) .

This video, above, is from a recent interview between Lessig and Haight Street’s The Booksmith in San Francisco. For the uninitiated, this recent interview with Lessig is a nice introduction to the plague of copyright in the digital age. For those familiar with the Stanford Law professor’s thought patterns, it’s a nice introduction to his future endeavors.

Bonus: You can watch the whole interview here, here, and here.
Also: Check out the Eclectic Method remix of Lawrence Lessig’s interview on The Colbert Report.

Just squeezing this one in under the wire for January. It’s actually been sitting on my desktop for a while but I’ve been on-site a lot this month (aka out of my studio doing covert work for mega-corporate clients) and did not have a chance to wrap up the loose ends.

This month we trade the nu-funk for some classic electronic dubby downtempo. Warm tones for these cold months for sure. The rest is traditional studio fare, lots of new piano and shoegaze composition work that I’ve been into as of late. Throw on your headphones and enjoy!

TRACKLIST (links coming soon):
As it Were - Hans-Joachim Roedelius & Tim Story
Two Sides - Mark Springer
Andover - Francesco Tristano
A Last Meeting - Bliss
Clementine - Pink Martini
Paper Smile - Fragile State
Arrival of the Birds - Cinematic Orchestra
Loaf - Sounds from the Ground
Leaving Babylon - Blutech
Contact - Telepath
Teardrop (Mad Professor Marazuni Vocal Mix) - Massive Attack
Things are Gonna Get Easier - Slow Motion Disco

Click here to download in full 320k glory

A lovely piece of information popped up in my inbox today in regards to my beloved Roku Box:

First, you can now watch, in high definition (HD), the hundreds of movies and TV episodes offered in HD instantly by Netflix. Second, an incredible 40,000 movies and TV shows from Amazon Video On Demand will soon be available to choose from on your Roku player.

Why is this important? Beyond the foreshadowing that my credit card bill will skyrocket with microtransactions from Amazon the same way it currently does with Beatport and Apple, this news puts another nail in the coffin of the “why would I want to buy an Blu-Ray player” argument.

Let’s face it, with the exception of the printed word (sorry Kindle, I’m still holding out), there is no experience at this point - beyond nostalgia - from physical media that digital media does not trump in cost effectiveness and ease of delivery. I’d rather download an album instantly for $10 than wait for the weekend, go to the store and buy one for $20. And now I can rent/buy an Amazon movie in HD for $15 rather than spend $20 for the physical version. In our age of instant-satisfaction, there’s really no competition.

But the best part - beyond satisfying our inner Veruca Salt - are the capabilities of the video once we release it from a physical, hard coded format. Look out this year for the rise of and - of course - experimental “buy it now” features. Needless to say, things are not looking so up and up for the good people at Blockbuster either.

Hurray Hurray!

artwork by Beau Bergeron, photographed by SimonK, and found on Creative Review

Auditorium is about the process of discovery and play. There are no right or wrong answers; there are many ways to solve every puzzle.

Need a new coffee break game or recession distraction? Look no further than Auditorium… a update to the classic Pipe Mania (sort of) with a music tinge. This online puzzler, built by the Philly agency Cipher Prime, will have you redirecting sonic flows and making sweet melodies until those email alerts call you back to reality… well done.

Click here to play Auditorium

Urb.com asked me to pen out a “best of 2008″ list for the website and so here it is… The top 10 songs from 2007 that were still putting in work in 2008. This list is definitely dance-centric and I am sure a few of these tunes will still be getting a good spin in 2009. Anyway, here we go….

10. Shake it to the Ground - Rye Rye & Blaqstarr
Rye Rye hooked us in 2007 with some infectious lyrics and remixes by everyone from Claude VonStroke, Detboi, Switch and others kept this one moving right into 2008. My personal favorite came from Pistol Pete with a slow roller thats a bit electro and a bit Baltimore.

9. Hold On - Holy Ghost!
Ah cosmic disco, spacey disco, nu-disco… call it whatever you like but it was a hard pressed trend this year which - at least here in NYC - never really got any mainstream love. Holy Ghost! really kicked things off with this one last year and it’s still getting play with recent remixes by the UK’s Mock & Toof.

8. Ready For The Floor - Hot Chip
“Do it do it do it now…” so goes the followed smash to “over and over and over and over and over…” It seems the Hot Chip boys have found magic in the repetitive chorus. Ready for the Floor killed all year long keeping these electropop wonder-kids on the clubland radar for 3+ years straight.

7. Rihanna - Umbrella
A little top 40 in the countdown as Rihanna was a force to be reckoned with for the first half of 2008. This may be up there with one of the most covered tunes of 2008 as well with reworks popping up by Manic Street Preachers, Passenger, and even Mandy Moore.

6. Fancy Footwork / Tenderoni - Chromeo
Take you pick on this one. P-Thugg and Dave 1 were an unstoppable funk beast in 2008 bringing a solid groove to the world of electro.

5. Cross the Dancefloor - Treasure Fingers
In a year when everyone wanted to be Daft Punk (again), Treasure Fingers cured my filtered-house its with this bounce electro jam. But it was Laidback Luke’s remix that blew things up on an international level. This one still gets a great response every time I hear it.

4. Good Life / Stronger - Kanye West
As 2009 is ushered in by the whiny auto-tune of 808s and Heartbreak, I’m reminded of what a great album Graduation was. Both Good Life and Stronger are still mainstays on the weekends.

3. D.A.N.C.E. - Justice
Justice are an unstoppable force. So much so that they could release a CD/DVD this year of the same material as last year and the blogs will still go crazy for it. Must be those giant Marshall stacks they carry around with them to the shows…

2. Steve Angello & Laidback Luke - Be
Dancefloor killer from the midtown clubs to the Williamsburg bars and all points in between. Be reminded us just how good “Show Me Love” really was.

1. M.I.A. - Paper Planes
Just when you think this song is done, someone flips it, kills it, and it’s back again. Whether it was LAZRtag’s electro rework, Scottie B’s Baltimore Club version, or T.I.’s resampling for “Swagger Like Us”… Paper Planes was is everywhere and not ending any time soon.

Honorable Mention:
Cut Copy - Hearts on Fire
Claude Von Stroke - The Whistler
50 Cent - I Get Money

The New Scientist recently released word that 2008 would be extended by one second to adjust for a small slow down in the earth’s rotation.

UTC time is counted by atomic clocks, but it is adjusted occasionally to accommodate changes in the length of the Earth’s day. Tugs from the Sun and Moon are gradually slowing the Earth’s spin and causing its days to get longer. But this deceleration occurs unevenly.

The speed of the Earth’s rotation sometimes gets a subtle boost due to a complex coupling between the Earth’s mantle and core, which are thought to spin at somewhat different rates. To accommodate the unevenness of this slow-down, leap seconds can be added twice a year - at the end of June and at the end of the December.

This recent bit of news re-piqued my longstanding interest in time as a measurement. In this case, it reawakened my fascination with how fixated we are on regimented time, time as a distance, and time as a container we can “fill” with appointments and to-dos. It seems that the need to “tinker,” if you will, with our precise system is proff in itself that the rest of the universe has no regard for our coordinated universal time system. (It is, after all, odd enough that time does not resolve to our beloved metric system.)

Back in college, I attempted to bring light to this awkward system by creating an audio “clock” of sorts. In a 60 minute audio file, simple beats were synced with key demarcations of time. Thus, a tom drum would sound every second, a snare every 10, a chime every minute, gong every hour, and so forth. The idea was to (1) demonstrate how awkward and unnatural the rhythm of time was and (2) to attempt to subconsciously align our natural rhythm with the mechanical rhythm of time. The result was awkward, slightly alarming, and even drew parallels to shamanic drumming and other induced trance-like states, although this experiment was driving towards more of a military march than a higher consciousness.

Marshall McLuhan goes into depth on the top in his excellent essay from Understanding Media (MIT Press, 1964) where he writes:

As a piece of technology, the clock is a machine that produces uniform seconds, minutes, and hours on an assembly-line pattern. Processed in this uniform way, time is separated from the rhythms of human experience. The mechanical clock, in short, helps to create the image of a numerically quantified and mechanically powered universe… Time measured not by uniqueness of private experience but by abstract uniform units gradually pervades all sense of life, much as does the technology of writing and printing. Not only work, but also eating and sleeping, came to accommodate themselves to the clock rather than to organic needs. As the pattern of arbitrary and uniform measurement of time extended itself across society, even clothing began to undergo annual alteration in a way convenient for industry. At that point, of course, mechanical measurement of time as a principle of applied knowledge joined forces with printing and assembly line as means of uniform fragmentation of processes.

Here, again, we are touching upon the awkward “fragmentation” of the organic human experience in exchange for efficiency and organization. Or, as McLuhan puts it “When a thing is current, it creates currency.”

Triple Nine Clock, pictured above, available here.