I'm eagerly awaiting the release of Portishead’s “Third”, an album which has been a long time coming.



The limited edition box set looks pretty sweet too. For £40.00 you get a usb stick shaped like the band's logo, a double vinyl album, an etched vinyl 12" of the frightening Machine Gun single and a limited edition print by Nick Uff.

The box set looks enticing but unfortunately there’s very little info on the band’s shop about what you get. I've no idea who Nick Uff is (turns out with a little research that he's an animator), and no info is given about the 5 “films” which come loaded on the USB drive.

The band have obviously put a lot of effort into the production of the box set, which looks beautiful, but at £40 a pop they need to try harder with their online shop.

If you can't wait three weeks to hear the album you can catch an exclusive preview on Current TV at 10pm GMT tomorrow evening. I’ll be tuning in for sure.

Great video for Goldfrapp’s “Happiness” by Colonel Blimp. I also urge you to read the copy on their biog page. Best analogy ever.

Video originally picked up at the CR Blog.

I'm not going to talk about this at length as Paul Glazowski has already done the job at Mashable, but I would like to express my concern at the recent trend in bands and artists creating their own social networks. The most high profile of these have been Radiohead's W.A.S.T.E. Central and 50 Cent’s thisis50.com.

I'm all in favour of bands creating and nurturing communities around their official sites – this has been happening for years with artist forums, and has grown to include commenting and user generated content such as photos and fan remixes.

It's possible that if OpenSocial takes off then this kind of fragmentation of the social web will be easier to manage – but until then it makes sense to engage with your fan base on the existing (and hugely popular) social networks such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. We only just got everyone together in one place – why leave so soon?

French artist Gregory Chatonsky made this piece of audio art which generates sound via some sensors placed on a broken hard disk. The amount of vibration is picked up and changed into sound via a program running on a PC. Hit the play button below to listen – it sounds kind of beautiful but eerie and reminds me of the ambient music of German glitch pioneers Oval.



Original article at Make: Blog

An interesting twist on the usually oh-so-hip graphic design tome, Band ID looks at over 1,000 of what the authors consider to be the most powerful examples of band and artist logos. Unlike the likes of my Stefan Sagmeister book, there’s a small chance that if I put this on my coffee table my friends might actually pick it up. It’s not out till June but you can pre-order it from Amazon or the publisher Chronicle Books. I'm going to order it – stand by for a review soon.

The 80s–tastic “Video Killed The Radio Star” by Buggles.

Great motion graphics in this video for DVNO by french electro types Justice.