There was a time when iTunes was a (relatively) snappy and meagre 10MB download and it played back music well enough. Nowadays, Apple’s free audio player software (now at version 8.0.2) is a jukebox, store, sync software and video player all rolled into one that weighs in at a grand 60MB. There are times when I wish there was an iTunes Lite option that did not have the extra features I don’t need and just played audio.

I can’t wait for Songbird 1.0 to come out — with iPod support baked in, it can completely replace iTunes for most people (on Macs and Windows).

Mashups don’t come better than Danger Mouse’s 2004 effort, The Grey Album, which combined an a cappella version of rapper Jay-Z’s Black Album with instrument samples from The Beatles’ White Album. Completely unauthorised and deemed illegal, very few people have the promo vinyls that were initially pressed. You will not find it on CD or on iTunes (or maybe you can) but you know for sure that it can be found floating around in the deep bowels of the interwebs.

Find The Grey Album at your own discretion/risk, but almost as good as the audio mashup is a video mashup done for one of the tracks. Not the most polished video in the world, but I guess the idea was good.

With all the money they made, I suppose the Arctic Monkeys‘ Alex Turner could do whatever the hell he felt like doing. And so maybe he decided to gang up with his friend Miles Kane, start a side project called The Last Shadow Puppets and release a ballsy and ambitious album titled Age of the Understatement that would pay homage and draw inspiration from retro ‘orchestral’ pop music.

Despite the arrangements sounding somewhat familiar (maybe nostalgic is the right word here), the sweeping strings, fulsome percussions and great energy make this a very, very good album. Already I am thinking this should be one of the best albums of the year.

The music is pretty nice, too…

You may have seen that awesome Beatles t-shirt from Experimental Jetset a couple of years ago.

If you liked that but your musical persuasion happens to be more rap than rock, this Wu Tang Clan t-shirt would be right up your alley.

Just to clear things up, there’s only one girl in the band Brazilian Girls and none of the band members are Brazilian. Their third album, New York City, is a continuation and refinement of their music style which can be described as an almost freestyle world music, down-tempo, electro-funk, techno-dub mishmash with jazz undertones. The schizophrenic nature of their music is definitely helped by the very delicious lead singer, Sabina Sciubba’s fluency in German, Spanish, French, Italian and English. It’s a good album with a high interestingness factor, although it sometimes feels like they are contriving to sound kooky in the name being experimental.

Sleevefacing is defined as ‘one or more persons obscuring or augmenting any part of their body or bodies with record sleeve(s) causing an illusion’. I saw some of these a few months ago but completely forgot about it, but on the interwebs, nothing remains forgotten for too long.

An awesome video made purely in 3D for Radiohead… processing anyone?

Grab some Threadless T-shirts on sale while they still have sizes.

You may want to close your eyes, sit in a quiet spot and loosen any tight clothing.

›› Don’t overdo the loosening if you’re in a public place

Amazing! Well done, NASA!
Send my love to the aliens. All the best…

›› Sir Paul McCartney is just thrilled, isn’t he.

A nice script and great music makes the Nokia N82 TV commercial my favourite ad on TV at the moment. No thunderous, momentous, great, big, bad ass idea, but the sense of imagination and wonderment is just great and it gets better with every viewing. Nice work on the ad by Lowe Singapore, though I have to say the N82 storytelling microsite is rather underwhelming.

A close second on that ever-changing list of current favourite TV commercials is for another Nokia Nseries product! The Nokia N81 commercial has a nice tense, pacing background music which I wish I could use for my morning run warm-ups. That and the talking cartoon head in the arcade game console (at around the 27 second mark) are two things that I keep looking forward to seeing every time this ad comes on.

[Via It's Nice That]

Super lighting work by celebrity lighting artists, UVA for possibly one of the best songs on Battles‘ 2007 album, Mirrored.