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Surveillance
Totally Looks Like
And not just kind-of-like. Totes.
For a long time I assumed Dr Phil was Hey Now Hank.
14th Aug 2008 - 1 comments - Add Comment - Tweet
SP20: Flying High With The Conchords
Strangely enough, it's a comedy two-piece from New Zealand who scored Sub Pop's first Grammy award - and they have turned out to be a canny signing for the label.
Headlining the recent Sub Pop 20 festival, the crowd shouted out for an appearance from Flight of the Conchords manager Murray - to which Jermaine replied "The TV show's not real ...Murray couldn't organize this gig!".
For non-related amusement only, here's their Ladies of the World promo.
14th Aug 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
Heroes 2.1
Hamstrung by the writer's strike, Heroes Season 2 seemed hacked up and disappointingly incomplete. With season 3 arriving soon, the season 2 boxset offers some explanations - with a bunch of alternate endings and bonus scenes.
13th Aug 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
Minotaur Price Shock
Bristol musician David Edwards is taking the internet pricing model one step further with his new Minotaur Shock album Amateur Dramatics on 4AD.
Instead of offering a fixed price, or even a pay-what-you-want price - Edwards has rated the tracks on "technical difficulty, musical difficulty, extra musicians, computer crashing and other considerations" - with prices ranging from 33p to 75p.
You can pick up the album at www.minotaurshock.com - as well as read Edwards reasoning behind each rating, which is thoroughly informative.
"David has since taken his scoring system idea to other aspects of his life and is currently working out which child of his he should save first in the event of a fire."
13th Aug 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
Some Photos Of That Day
Great piece up on website Some Photos Of That Day, a blog documenting daily Polaroids taken by a film student called Jamie Livingstone who shot one every day from 1979...
13th Aug 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
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Don't Choke: New Radiohead En Route
Radiohead have taken up the offer to write a track for the movie adaption of Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk's book Choke ....except they liked it so much they wrote a whole soundtrack. The movie is due in November.
12th Aug 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
Hold Steady @ Rough Trade East
Springsteen-esque Husker Du fans The Hold Steady are playing in-store at Rough Trade East on Brick Lane next Monday 18th August at 7.30pm.
This will be the last opportunity for fans to see the band play London til their Roundhouse show in October. The in-store is part of a month of gigs to celebrate the first year in of an award-winning record shop Rough Trade East shop. WRISTBAND COLLECTION IS 1 HOUR PRIOR TO GIG, ON A FIRST-COME-FIRST-SERVED BASIS.
12th Aug 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
Chimpomatic vs Sub Pop
We're all about Sub Pop this week, celebrating their 20th anniversary by revisiting 21 albums from their huge back catalogue, as well as getting the inside scoop on Seattle's finest from label insider Megan Jasper. We're starting with 1988-1991 today, with Green River, Nirvana, L7 and Mudhoney - check back all week for 1992-2008.
INTERVIEW
Sub Pop's impact on team Chimpomatic's musical background cannot be underestimated, so it was our pleasure to catch up with Sub Pop VP Megan Jasper to discuss the label's impact on music, and music's impact on Seattle. Read the full interview here.
COMPETITION
Our selected Sub Pop reviews are a hand picked list, trying to cover where the label was at down the years, but trying to avoid covering any band twice - trickier than it sounds. Think we missed something? Well, send in your 200 word review to subpop[at]chimpomatic.com by August 15th and you'll be in with a chance of winning 20 Sub Pop CDs.
11th Aug 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
Skate or die: Natas Kaupas
After the nostalgia trip of my recent Welcome To Hell revival, I thought I'd run a weekly series of skate classics. Here's Natas Kaupas - who pretty much invented street skating - from the video Street of Fire, from 1989.
Check out Skip Engblom (Skate legend, played by Heath Ledger in "Dogtown And The Z-Boys" - the movie not the documentary) as the jailer.
Musical legacy: My first encounter with fIREHOSE (Brave Captain is the song here), this video single handedly kick-started my personal post-punk revolution, with a soundtrack composed almost entirely of SST Records bands: Minutemen, fIREHOSE, Sonic Youth, Black Flag, Descendents and more.
Bonus fact: Natas went on to work in graphics for Quicksilver and designed the logo they've been rocking for the past ten years or so.
8th Aug 2008 - 4 comments - Add Comment - Tweet
2012
how's London going to top Zhang Yimou's Olympics opening ceremony?
8th Aug 2008 - 5 comments - Add Comment - Tweet
They Don't Make Them Like They Used To
TV sign-offs aren't what they used to be.
8th Aug 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
TV Conversation
AMC, the channel that's brought us Mad Men, is heading for the 1970s w plans to make a TV version of Coppola's excellent 1970s surveillance classic The Conversation
8th Aug 2008 - 1 comments - Add Comment - Tweet
Accidental @ Cargo, Herbert's new Big Band
Accidental have got a night at Cargo coming up on Aug 25, with Micachu & The Shapes, Finn Peters and The Invisible. Pitchfork have got details about the new Matthew Herbert Big Band album There's Me And There's You
7th Aug 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
Not Cuil
New search engine Cuil (pronounced 'cool' - meh.) has been getting a bit of press recently, but every time I've tried it it stinks - if it even works at all. Started by a bunch of ex-Google workers, it claims to be "The world's biggest search engine" and is currently searching 121617892992 web pages. Not a big deal if it doesn't give you the right answers, or just a load of irrelevance.
7th Aug 2008 - 2 comments - Add Comment - Tweet
Trailer Park: The Informers
trailer for Bret Easton Ellis's The Informers - good 80s cast - Mickey Rourke, Kim Basinger and Winona Ryder; like the fact the band's called Lunar Park
7th Aug 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
Wolfm-over
Struggling to finish a new album, and probably troubled that they'll never reach the highpoint of X-Box endorsed fame again, Aussie rockers Wolfmother have called it a day - sort of. Bass player Chris Ross and drummer Myles Heskett have departed the band, leaving fuzzy haired front man Andrew Stockdale to carry on with new personnel - G'n'R style.
Mike Patton doesn't think much of them.
7th Aug 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
My New Favourite Planet
The 300km high volcano plume might put some people off, not to mention the 300 year old storm, but the views are spectacular.
6th Aug 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
Caprica on Sky1
Sky1 (it's been re-branded so it's not Sky One anymore - see! totally different. and new) has got the rights to Caprica, the Battlestar Galactica prequel starring Eric Stoltz, Paula Malcolmson (Deadwood, ER) and Esai Morales (NYPD Blue, Jericho) as Joseph Adama.
"Set 50 years before BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, CAPRICA follows two rival families – the Graystones and the Adamas. Bound together by tragedy, their ensuing struggle will determine the fate of the 12 Colonies."
Sounds lamer than it looks - but it's worth pointing out that "hey, what about a serious version of that old Battlestar Galactica show" wasn't the most promising of pitches for what's turned out to be one of the greatest shows of recent years. It'll be on in November.
6th Aug 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
In Search Of In Search Of
one of my favourite all-time shows popped back into my mind the other day - and hey presto - YouTube's brought it all back. way before the X Files, In Search Of... was the only place you could hear about the Sasquatch, Mayan Temples or Aztec UFOs - all brought to you with together with the gravitas of Leonard Nimoy. great soundtrack too
6th Aug 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
Melvins in 2-D
Great poster for the Melvins upcoming show in Athens Georgia. Why don't we get this great fly poster culture over here?
5th Aug 2008 - 2 comments - Add Comment - Tweet
Mad Men 2008
what would the Mad Men look like in 2008? some kind of dotcom office party?
5th Aug 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
Wordle
Worlde.com is a pretty handy tool for generating nice representations of internet content. Paste a URL or a page of text into the form and it orders recurring words from the site, depending on usage. We seem to be keeping it pretty balanced ....maybe a little too much tech.
5th Aug 2008 - 2 comments - Add Comment - Tweet
Concrete and Glass Line-up
The line-up has been announced for the Concrete & Glass festival on Thursday 2nd and Friday 3rd October 2008. TV On The Radio and Port O'Brien look like the chimp highlights:
20 Jazz Funk Great/ Anni Rossi/ Apes & Androids/ Barringtone/ Bass Clef/ Beyond the Wizards Sleeve/Bjorn Torske/ Blacktape Records/ Blacktape DJs/ Bloggers Delight/ Bodies of Water/ Border Community/ Casper C/ Cats in Paris/ CMN/ David Thomas Broughton/ Dead Kids/ Eat Your Own Ears DJs/ Errors/ Euros Childs/ Ezra Bang (Hot Machine)/ Fairmont live/ Frightened Rabbit/ Greco-Roman/ Grovesnor/ James Holden/ James Yuill/ John Kennedy presents/ Kid Harpoon/ Kim Hiorthoy/ Kimmo Pohjonen/ Let's Wrestle/ Lindstrom/ Liz Green/ Lucius Works Here/ Ludovico Einaudi/ Magistrates/ Matthew Sawyer & The Ghosts/ Mechanical Bride/ Merok Records/ Micachu/ Muscleheads/ O'Death/ One Little Plane/ Oren Marshall/ Owl Project/ Pete and the Pirates/ Pilooski + Dirty Sound System/ Port O'Brien/ Primary 1/ Screaming Tea Party/ Semi Finalists/ Serious Presents/ Sky Larkin/ Small Town Super Sound/ Stolen Recordings present/ Sweet Baboo/ Swn Fest present/ Telepathe/ Ten Thousand Islands/ The Big Pink/ The! Local present/ The Oscillation/ The Real Heat/ The Stool Pigeon/ Younghearts/ Threatmantics/ Time Out Barcelona/ Time Out London/ Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs/ Truckers of Husk/ TV On The Radio/ Twisted Wheel/ Untitled Musical Project/ Vladislav Delay/ Wave Machines/ Wet Paint/ Wichita Recordings/ Zun Zun Egui
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5th Aug 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
Lost in Space
After selling his company Paypal to eBay in 2002, entrepreneur Elon Musk set up his own low-cost space-delivery system for launching satellites and other payloads into space (don't any of these dot-comers have their own ideas?). Unfortunately three rockets in a row have now been lost, with the most recent carrying a distinct payload. Besides the three satellites on board, the most recent rocket was loaded with the ashes of 208 people - including Mr Scott himself (aka James Doohan).
4th Aug 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
Black Lips + King Khan + BBQ = Heaven
Garage band revivalists Black Lips are set to play a special one-off show at London's Heaven on September 16th, with support is coming from Garage band revivalists King Khan & BBQ.
4th Aug 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
24: Exile
Jack Bauer's in Africa for the upcoming TV movie 24: Exile, which bridges the extended gap between Season 6 and the delayed Season 7. He's taking a break in an attempt to "find himself" and has ended up helping ex-black ops / schoolteacher / buddy Robert Carlyle.
Strangely it's set in 2017, forced I imagine by the continual skipping forward they have to do to allow a new President for pretty much every season. Jon Voight plays "a very serious villain".
4th Aug 2008 - 1 comments - Add Comment - Tweet
Bon Iver + Bowerbirds
Nice video up of Chimp/Everybody's favourite Bon Iver, on stage with with some help from Bowerbirds for a cover of Sarah Siskind's "Lovin's For Fools."
1st Aug 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
Hold On To Your Hat
Damn, I thought they'd turned this thing on already - and we'd survived. Turns out the first planned particle collisions won't be until "before the end of the world year."
Monster snaps via The Big Picture.
1st Aug 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
Eclipse
No, it's not a stunt to promote the new series of Heroes - there's an eclipse scheduled for today - should be around 10.16 in the UK. that's just enough time to get in a perilous scrape with some natives up a volcano and impress them with your awesome command over nature.
1st Aug 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
Birth of Cable TV
Cable TV is 59 years old today - more or less. In the 40's, Ed Parsons of Astoria, Oregon was having trouble receiving the TV signal from far-away Seattle, so he rigged up an antenna on a tall building in town and cabled it over the street to his house. Pretty soon everybody wanted a piece of the action...
1st Aug 2008 - 1 comments - Add Comment - Tweet
Digital Dominos
Boom! Domino Records has gone digital, with their own online download store. Files are 320 kbps MP3, but you can also get full quality WAV versions at the same price (79p per track). Being a nerd, that future-proofing issue often holds me back, so this is a great step forward.
While 79p isn't expensive I still think the prices need to come down enough to undercut CDs - else what's the point? The Last Shadow Puppets can be had for £6.99 over at Play or £6.99 at Amazon, while it comes in at £7.99 here...
31st Jul 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
Welcome Back To Hell
A recent Paris mission resurrected old chimp favourite Welcome To Hell back to the top of the skate video pile. Great Artwork + Cool Hooded Tops + Black Sabbath remains a career goal.
It certainly can't be legit, but Google Video has the whole film, including an iPod download....
31st Jul 2008 - 4 comments - Add Comment - Tweet
Trailer Park: The Rocker 'n' Rolla
Early word on Guy Ritchie's new movie Rock 'n' Rolla has been surprisingly positive, after his last chimp hq related effort sunk slowly and painfully. Doesn't look that different to his previous movies to me (not a diss), with Jeremy Piven, Tom Wilkinson, Thandie Newton, Gerard Butler and new Bond girl Gemma Arterton amongst the cast this time. HD trailers on the website.
After this, Ritchie's moving on to a gangland Sherlock Holmes re-working, with RDJ wearing the new-era deerstalker.
Full Monty man Peter Cattaneo also has a new movie involving the 'R' word - The Rocker tells the story of a 'Fish" (no, not that one) drumming his way into a comeback, 20 years after being booted out of his band.
Released in the UK 17th October 2008.
31st Jul 2008 - 1 comments - Add Comment - Tweet
This Blood's For You
ad for Alan "Six Feet Under" Ball's new vampire show Tru:Blood
31st Jul 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
Chimp Biostudies Science Update: bananas don't like fridges
As you know, we're always beavering away in the lab facilities of Chimp Towers to maintain our position on the cutting edge of important chimp-related research, so today we're pleased to be able to bring you the results from one of our latest experiments. On the left, one half of a bunch of bananas, kept in a fridge for 24 hours. On the right, the other half OF THE SAME BUNCH kept at room temperature.
Conclusion: bananas don't like fridges.
30th Jul 2008 - 3 comments - Add Comment - Tweet
Tunecore
The tide seems to be turning with internet music sales, as bands take control of their assets and start making the descisions themselves. Following on from our article about distribution platform Top Spin, check out Tunecore, which offers artists the opportunity to get their music onto all the major platforms (iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster, eMusic, Amazon etc).
They charge incredibly reasonable fees per track/album, leading the the astounding fact that Trent Reznor must have paid Tunecore $56.61 to distribute his Ghosts I - IV album via Amazon.
Meanwhile, Amazon's MP3 store hits the UK soon, while Yahoo Music has gone the way of the dodo - potentially leaving music fans with a ton of unplayable, DRM 'protected' music.
30th Jul 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
There Will Be Half-Blood
Trailer up for Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince. As noted on AICN, they seem to be handling the fallen protege angle much better than Lucas ever could...
30th Jul 2008 - 1 comments - Add Comment - Tweet
Jetpack To The Future!
that's more like it: Glenn Martin has lifted off a whole 3ft in his new jetpack. been waiting for these to come online by now
30th Jul 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
Accidental will happen
lots of new stuff kicking in over at accidental records
30th Jul 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
Brand: New
I'm pretty sure I've covered the Brand: New website over the years somewhere - educated examinations of minor and major tweaks that big name brands make to their identites.
The Minnesota Timberwolves and Phillips make for pretty good pretty good examples.
Anyways, today they're linking to a homage, drafted by blog Adventures In Urban Living, which covers the re-branding of the Dharma Initiative in the coming months (or years, or the past - who nows?).
29th Jul 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
Lucas vs Spielberg
The Times have an interview up with George Lucas, discussing the new Clone Wars movie and future Indy movies amongst other things. Bottom line is Lucas felt like he had to accommodate Spielberg with Crystal Skull, which maybe stopped the movie from being everything he's hoped for. I dread to think.
29th Jul 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet
New KOL & Scorsese gets Hitched
free download of a new Kings Of Leon track all this week - and check this Scorsese Hitchcock tribute The Key To Reserva - looks like Freixenet are jumping on the Meredes Benz short film school of expensive ads
29th Jul 2008 - 1 comments - Add Comment - Tweet
Amie Street
New album out from Chimpovich favourites The Walkmen, and you can get it over at Amie Street - who also have an interview with the band. Haven't got much data on this site, but price wise there's plenty to write home about. $5 secures you The Walkmen album, and all that goes to charity - but beyond them there's bigger bands like Thom Yorke ($8.82) and Blonde Redhead ($6.55) and older stuff by the likes of GBV ($3.61) and even David Axelrod ($1.73). It seems like the majors aren't on board, but who's counting these days.
It's built on a Social Networking backbone, with pricing set by demand:
Amie Street uses an algorithm to determine song prices based on demand. The price for a track starts at zero when a song is uploaded onto the site. It then rises according to the increased demand and purchase of the song. The maximum price any song will rise to is 98¢.
Nice idea, but surely the better something is selling the cheaper the price should be? Otherwise it'll end up like the White Album in the HMV sale. 50% off! £19.99!
29th Jul 2008 - Add Comment - Tweet