+ Oceana – Clean Head EP

Greg from Moving Mountains turned me on to this band.  They used to be a deathcore/metalcore band but then changed their style and released an incredible 4 song indie rock EP.  Really digging this.  They just reached their goal on kickstarter so they will be recording a new album soon.  Can’t wait to hear it.

With Clean Head, the band have decided to incorporate this new aesthetic into their music – along with a progression so extreme it will either alienate fans or give them reason to rejoice. Clean Head is different. It is sorrowful. It is marvelous, yet most of all it is happy. Songs such as “Wool God” and “Joy” (obviously) are examples of this newfound happiness, while “Blue” and “Barracuda Capital of the World” showcase mourning, sorrow, wonder, and occasionally a restrained sense of euphoria. Together these songs form a cohesive whole that possesses enough quality to be perfect – yet it’s not quite there yet

via Sputnik

The New Yorker did a lengthy profile on George Hotz - the young man responsible for the first iphone jailbreak and the first Playstation 3 hack – and how a lawsuit brought against him by Sony was the catalyst for the hacker wars.

After Hotz uploaded a video of his hacked iphone to youtube:

Hotz’s YouTube video received nearly two million views and made him the most famous hacker in the world. The media loved the story of the teen-age Jersey geek who beat Apple. Hotz announced that he was auctioning off the unlocked phone. The winning bid, from the C.E.O. of Certicell, a cell-phone-refurbishing company, was a 2007 Nissan 350Z sports car and three new iPhones. Later, on CNBC, Erin Burnett asked Hotz if he thought that day’s uptick in Apple stock was due in part to his efforts. “More people want iPhones now if they can use them with any sort of provider,” he said, and added that he “would love to have a talk right now with Steve Jobs” about it.

I like this Steve Wozniak quote:

Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, who hacked telephone systems early in his career, sent Hotz a congratulatory e-mail. “It was like a story out of a movie of someone who solves an incredible mystery,” Wozniak told me. “I understand the mind-set of a person who wants to do that, and I don’t think of people like that as criminals. In fact, I think that misbehavior is very strongly correlated with and responsible for creative thought.”

+ Nate Jackson’s Open Letter to Future Football Stars

Nate Jackson addresses Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin III, two players that will (or did) go 1-2 in the NFL draft, on how their lives will change once drafted.

I think you can draw many comparisons to being in a band or any passion that takes you away from home for stretches of time.  Basically, don’t lose touch with the reasons you started playing the game.

And there’s more. You’ll buy a few cars, attend charity events and autograph signings, do endorsement deals, film commercials, go to golf tournaments, meet local investors and owners and politicians and more rich people on more Xanax and the surreal will become the real. The game that you fell in love with as a child will seem lost; a thump on the floorboard of your new Mercedes, swerved at high speeds to avoid a shadow in the night. The sights and sounds and smells of football, sensual memories that stir the passions in the soul, will be reconceived and recategorized, buried behind newer, odorless versions.

With all of this pushing against you, the role of friends and family becomes very important. There are people in this world to whom you’re just Andrew and Robert. Son, brother, lover, friend. You need to lean on these people when the Weirdos start to make sense. You need to run to the familiarity of genuine friendship. But even in this, there will be a loneliness, because, as a defense mechanism, you will have assumed a piece of your new identity, and your loved ones won’t understand it. Caught in between these two worlds you’ll drift. You’ll feast on the fruits of excess, and will only grow hungrier. You’ll dine with familiar faces, and find you’ve lost the taste. And so you’ll get in your Mercedes on your days off and drive to the facility and watch film. Ah yes. Football. That’s what this is all about.

Icelandic contemporary composer Ólafur Arnalds created and released a new song, one per day for a whole week during the month of October 2011. The songs were recorded and filmed live in the living room of his Reykjavik apartment and released instantly for free as streamed videos and mp3 downloads.

Ólafur Arnalds - Frysta

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ólafur Arnalds – Near Light

Click here to view the embedded video.

Watch the rest of the series/download his music HERE.  Visit his website for more music HERE.

Here’s a couple albums I enjoyed while I was away.

Now, Now – Threads

I listened to this record from front to back at least 2 times a day in the van.  Now, Now plays ambient indie rock vaguely similar to Tegan and Sara/Mansions.   Threads was released on Chris Wala’s (Death Cab for Cutie) record label and I was under the impression that he produced it also but wikipedia tells me that’s not true – a guy named Howard Redekop produced it.  He should pat himself on the back for capturing such good tones.  The synth parts on this record make me want to buy a mico korg to mess around with.

Threads – the second full-length release from Minneapolis based Now, Now – explores the fragile and often transitory nature of our existence, our perceived understanding of the world around us and relationships shared with others physically and emotionally. Produced by Howard Redekopp (Tegan and Sara, An Horse, New Pornographers), Threads forms a sprawling sonic endeavor that showcases the bands incredible growth as songwriters and musicians. Vulnerable vocals give way to oceans of sound retaining definition via deftly layered guitar parts augmented by lingering synths which alternate between background and center stage.

via Amazon

Buy//Download

First Aid Kit – The Lion’s Roar

Two Swedish sisters with great voices write folk/americana songs and then Mike Mogis produces their album and makes it sound like Bright Eyes.  Sounds great, right?

The Lion’s Roar is an intriguing listen, warts and all, simply because to hear a group of young women from Sweden, of all places, make such a folksy country record is so warmly appealing. They definitely have respect for not only the material they’ve written, but the forefathers (and foremothers) who appeared before them that they base it on. The end result is a record that is hard not to like. At its best, The Lion’s Roar is a staggering, beautiful recreation of the sounds of Americana long gone, with a few added sprinkles and melodramatic twists that contribute extra dimension and weight to the material. At its worst, The Lion’s Roar is simply serviceable – not great, but not horrible either. All in all, the long player establishes that even though the Söderbergs are definitely young, they are wise and mature for their years. Here’s hoping that First Aid Kit act as a salve to openhearted wounds for many years to come.

via Pop Matters

Buy//Download

Pianos Become The Teeth & Xerxes Northeast and Canada tour 2012

Feb 24 – The Studio at Webster Hall – New York City
Feb 25 – The Space – Hamden, CT
Feb 26 – 242 Main St. – Burlington, VT
Feb 28 – Cafe L’ Agitee – Quebec City, Quebec
Feb 29 – L’escogriffe – Montreal, Quebec
Mar 1 – Mavericks – Ottawa, ON
Mar 2 – Hard Luck – Toronto, ON
Mar 3 – The Mansion House – St. Catharines, ON
Mar 4 – Lounge @ London Music Hall – London, ON
Mar 6 – Sugar City – Buffalo, NY
Mar 7 – Carabar – Columbus, OH
Mar 8 – Bangarang’s – Covington, KY
Mar 9 – Smiling Moose – Pittsburgh, PA
Mar 10 – Altoona Masonic Temple – Altoona, PA

Stevenson traveled extensively to conduct field research into reincarnation and investigated cases in Africa, Alaska, Europe, India and both North and South America, logging around 55,000 miles a year between 1966 and 1971.^[3] He reported that the children he studied usually started to speak of their supposed past lives between the ages of two and four, then ceased to do so by seven or eight, with frequent mentions of having died a violent death, and what seemed to be clear memories of the manner of death.^[3] After interviewing the children, their families, and others, Stevenson would attempt to identify if there had been a living person who satisfied the various claims and descriptions collected, and who had died prior to the child’s birth.

Stevenson believed the strongest cases he had collected in support of this model involved both testimony and physical evidence. In over 40 of these cases Stevenson gathered physical evidence relating to the often rare and unusual birthmarks and birth defects of children which he claimed matched wounds recorded in the medical or post-mortem records for the individual Stevenson identified as the past-life personality.

+ Jaroslav Flegr found that a parasite which passes from cats to humans is responsible for changing how an infected person thinks and behaves.

The parasite, which is excreted by cats in their feces, is called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii or Toxo for short) and is the microbe that causes toxoplasmosis—the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats’ litter boxes. Since the 1920s, doctors have recognized that a woman who becomes infected during pregnancy can transmit the disease to the fetus, in some cases resulting in severe brain damage or death. T. gondii is also a major threat to people with weakened immunity: in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, before good antiretroviral drugs were developed, it was to blame for the dementia that afflicted many patients at the disease’s end stage. Healthy children and adults, however, usually experience nothing worse than brief flu-like symptoms before quickly fighting off the protozoan, which thereafter lies dormant inside brain cells—or at least that’s the standard medical wisdom.

But if Flegr is right, the “latent” parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents. And that’s not all. He also believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia. When you add up all the different ways it can harm us, says Flegr, “Toxoplasma might even kill as many people as malaria, or at least a million people a year.”

The link to schizophrenia is also kind of cool…

“Textbooks today still make silly statements that schizophrenia has always been around, it’s about the same incidence all over the world, and it’s existed since time immemorial,” he says. “The epidemiology literature contradicts that completely.” In fact, he says, schizophrenia did not rise in prevalence until the latter half of the 18th century, when for the first time people in Paris and London started keeping cats as pets. The so-called cat craze began among “poets and left-wing avant-garde Greenwich Village types,” says Torrey, but the trend spread rapidly—and coinciding with that development, the incidence of schizophrenia soared.

Robert Budd Dwyer (November 21, 1939 – January 22, 1987) was an American politician in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He served from 1971 to 1981 as a member of the Pennsylvania State Senate representing the state’s 50th district. He served as the 30th Treasurer of Pennsylvania from 1981 to 1987.

In the early 1980s, Pennsylvania discovered its state workers had overpaid federal taxes due to errors in state withholding. Many accounting firms competed for a multimillion-dollar contract to determine compensation to each employee. In 1986, Dwyer was convicted of receiving a bribe from a California firm trying to gain the contract. Throughout his trial and after his conviction, he maintained that he was innocent of the charge and that he had been framed.

On the morning of January 22, 1987, he committed suicide with a gun during a televised press conference at his office in Harrisburg, the state capital.

(via Wikipedia)

Here’s Henry:

If you’re playing the kind of punk that kids like to call screamo or hardcore,  sooner or later you’ll realize you’re under scrutiny. The critic will probably start off by reminiscing about Majority Rule and pg99, comparing you to Orchid or Envy before rightfully asking what your contribution is to a music that is said to have peaked ten years ago.

Personally, I’m fucking stoked because of bands like Code Orange Kids. I saw them for the first time Monday night at the Charm City Art Space in Baltimore. Something about a post-industrial city – all those tall rusting buildings, the rail yard, the harbor water – it all lends itself to this type of hard, grimy music. Not to mention how creativity always seems to spawn wherever affordable spaces are abundant. Hailing from Pittsburg I bet their town has had a huge influence on their sound.

Actually I first heard about Code Orange Kids from Welch Canavan, a friend from DC who transplanted with several friends to Braddock, a town outside Pittsburgh that is said to be dying. Welch and company has been working on rebuilding houses and have even started booking shows. Their efforts were covered two years ago in a short documentary series as part of a Levi Strauss campaign. Somehow, even though it wasn’t my hands that held the hammer, I still felt proud seeing pictures of their newly refinished houses.

Meanwhile, back in metropolis, forces like gentrification and growing economic inequality are closing community run spaces, banning all age venues and displacing families who lived in neighborhoods that were once cultural hubs. The music that became our religion growing up has been co-opted and repackaged into an embarrassment: whiny white boys screaming I hate my ex-girlfriend and these are all the violent things I’d like to do to her, while assholes in the pit punch each other in the face. This is why people hate on screamo.

During Give, one of the songs Code Orange Kids played off their new album, the song slowed into a sludgy break down. Jami, Reba and Eric, their three vocalists started screaming, hands clenched together in praise while the rhythm pulls away/ there are no walls that can hold this. Tremendous. Reminds me of why I love punk.

It makes sense doesn’t it? The labor of the re-builder and labor of us as musicians is the same. Our music, our old house on the outskirts of another dying city.

http://www.ccspace.org/
http://codeorangekids.bandcamp.com/
http://codeorangekids.tumblr.com/
https://www.facebook.com/codeorangekids

This is tight.  I guess she’s kind of big in the UK?