psychocandy by david shrigley.

“only love can pull you through
the way you have been feeling
but there is no love
there is just interior design
and furniture.”

new kelley polar? oh me oh my.

2008 is set to be an even better year for good music than 2007, dear reader. i know it sounds slightly implausible, but i’m quite sure it’s going to be the musical equivalent of a grande annee viticole. so you want proof? okay.

• new magnetic fields, distortion, out next week. and yes, it’s good.
• new beach house, devotion, out in a month or so. it’s painstakingly gorgeous and expansive.
• new stereolab, out sometime this year. hey, that’s a major event right? (riiight.) laetitia sadier’s side project monade will also come up with a new album, monstre cosmic, soonish.
• new of montreal, skeletal lamping, out in fall.
• new broadcast, probably out in fall.
• new my bloody valentine, quite possibly, although you never know with that fat pillpopper shields and his demonic hordes of pitch-perfect shoegaze.
• new hot chip, made in the dark, out in february, or at least i think so. infectuous synth pads galore!

AND. kelley polar, my favourite revelation of 2005 (check love songs of the hanging gardens out if you haven’t already), is returning in march with yet another set of staggering, scintillant space disco symphonies, seductively titled i need you to hold on while the sky is falling. whoooa!

via fact magazine:

polar about the new album:

i wanted it to be like the audio equivalent of one of those mythical sci-fi movies where there are hundreds of special effects shots per minute, juicy and transporting. … much of the time i am singing like i am in some psychotic space musical.

polar about his classical ensemble, the kelley polar quartet:

siggi got deported back to iceland, i can’t say why because of the pending legal stuff, and max got a job with the northern sinfonia over there in england as principal bassist, and now he has a serious alcohol problem. elise suffered a crisis of conscience which was well-deserved, and joined the seminary permanently.

who said classical musicians weren’t able to rock? okay, one last one: polar about his bandmate claire de lune:

she was originally from alsace, i believe, but the rest of her family disappeared during a rather ill-advised camping expedition in late 70s algeria. she was mostly raised by bedouins in the tassili n’ajjer, until one night, around a desert campfire, she was discovered by a visiting raï singer and brought back to paris…but the big city was too much of a culture shock, and so she had a nervous breakdown, convinced she was a refugee from the moon, born of a long-forgotten lunar aristocracy.

so, i’m officially excited about new releases now. none of the above-mentioned indie mammoths could achieve what kelley ‘one ten-track album’ polar just pulled off. wheeee!

***

in other news, i’m going ever so slightly bonkers about my classical chinese and korean exams. to quote stephin merritt: should i freak out/should i seek out/something i could keep? (and concentrate on religion and chinese philosophy?) quite possibly the case, stephin dear.

voting advice by sc.

yes, this is what we’ve all been waiting for! advice about whom to choose for president of the usa, by, well, me. our american cousins can start rejoicing… now.

a) voting advice for the egalitarians

cthulhu is arguably the only candidate who can make the united states of america a firm, great nation of equals again. he/she/it will be absolutely fair: liberal or conservative, redneck or illegal, he’ll eat you all with a generous serving of hp sauce and capers. cthulhu has even promised to eat hillaire clinton, which appears to be the only way to get rid of her.

b) voting advice for the religious right

the ‘count’ started campaigning for the 2008 presidency in 1908. he’s john the baptist, too. that’d make him at least 120 y.o., probably 150 or so. don’t americans usually elect old, white christian men? the count is as old as it gets (though hillaire, again, comes close), AND, well, he knew jesus personally, being john the baptist and all.

either way, with candidates like these, i’m confident the people of the united states of america will get the leader they deserve. huzzah!

computer programmers and serial killers…

can you tell them apart? i got 5/10. geeks and creeps look the same, dear reader, so beware next time you’re going to see that geeky cousin who’s into linux, xbox gaming and super mario action figures – he might hide a chainsaw in that vintage IBM mainframe of his.

industrial non-design.

i was looking at jonathan glancey’s design hall of fame the other day. he’s the guardian’s architecture critic, but that doesn’t really matter now.

i wonder where we collectively went wrong. in the 60s and 70s, industrial design had a formalist, utilitarian tinge that’s just, er, gone nowadays. let’s look at the british rail logo (from when there still was a british rail as such. you still see it here and there though):

isn’t it awesome? extremely simple, but conveying everything a railroad should stand for. design from 1965 that looks way better than the awful crap you see everywhere these days. if we look at today’s corporate logos, most of them are really busy, messy, and consequently very tacky.

of course test groups and marketing panels think they’re really iconic and have mass appeal. logos with mass appeal mostly look… simple, use fonts like helvetica, and instantly tell you what you need to know. and yes, they happen to be iconic too. word art and comic sans ms are not iconic, they’re the lowest common denominators of what happens to be called design these days. on the other hand, we still do have wonderful logos like the apple logo, and the european motorway sign:

this is what all industrial design should be like. we’ve had motorways, let’s look at a well-designed car now. i’ve always fancied old citroens, because they look like they’re the epitome of modern technique (never mind the fact they fall apart or start to crumble after a year or five). the citroen sm, dear reader:

i think it looks fabulous, especially compared to the aerodynamic, amorphous things they call cars nowadays. another classic, the rover sd:

what a car. don’t even get me started about 70s packaging, road signs, pictograms or whatever: i could go on and on about how those stark lines and images have always been misrepresented as ‘brutalist’, when they really just were functional. if you buy a bottle of, say, orange juice, these days, it comes with a wrapper that will probably prominently feature either a) an orchard in spain, photoshopped to some pastel blur; or b) an orange, photoshopped to an uncanny level of perfection. form over function, anyone?

i want what i buy. i don’t want it to tell me it’s healthy, sexy or energetic; i don’t want it to be covered with smiling children or gaudy ‘art’; and i don’t want it to look like it was designed by a panel of suits, navaho baseball coaches, black lesbians and blond housewives.

maybe this is entirely my own problem though. i really like the hysterical 60s-70s vision of a computerless future, where we’d all have flying cars, glass houses, vague communist sympathies and gogo boots, and where marketing would be a profession for sad old men. that’s the world designs like these were conceived for… and i much prefer it to the real world.

such a pity the retrofuturist utopia never came to be.

rest in peace, stylus magazine.

as of today, stylus is no more, buh. for five years, they covered all kinds of under-the-radar music and films, and they had some insanely good features from time to time (such as on second thought and seconds). even if their music reviews were a bit sucky every now and then, i’ll miss them!

they were a good alternative to pitchfork, and i think we’ll see their writers resurfacing at other webzines. still, the short list of sites i really like just got a bit shorter…

failsafe clocky.

check out this clock, it’s wonderful. i wish i had it running in one of those posh lcd picture frames.

in other news, i’m effing ill and coughing, i had too much codeine today and got really high and then really down, and yeah. codeine is, if anything, a very deceptive drug, ladies and gentlemen.

and in yet other news, the korean alphabet is surprisingly fun and easy to learn! it’s all really logical, rational, and lego-like. the compulsory religion class we had for the first time was totally over the top. an aging pollyanna-like creature couldn’t stop screeching about how she wasn’t there to preach and/or convert us, and then continued to try to, em, convert us to catholicism, i suppose. her effing textbook was 22 euros as well. is the lord love? whateva!

and in yet other news… only god, or maybe benedicta, his trusty textbook-wielding bride, knows whatever my boyfriend is up to/thinking. it would be so much easier if i just lived in fairyland with dancing teddies and bisounours. or if decent, attractive males weren’t straight so bloody often.

(failsafe clocky courtesy of graceful flavor)

swooning in this age of capitalism.

rarely have i seen such beautiful t-shirts. i want to spend ALL MY MONEY AT ONCE! and, so will you.