It's been brought to my attention that some people aren't seeing new items in the Sleevelessness feed. If you haven't seen anything new for a while, please re-subscribe to the Feedburner URL. Sorry for any incovenience.

A few months ago I started a Sleevelessness Tumblog which was intended to work as a scrapbook for things I might feature here, and a place to post items I considered “off topic” for this blog. Unfortunately for Blogger, Tumblr makes it much easier to quickly post content such as photos, video and music. It also automatically creates curly quotes and em dashes, saving the typographic obsessive in me from having to type all the entity codes manually in Blogger.

All this has meant that I’ve gradually moved from posting lots here, to posting lots on Tumblr. So now the time has come to do two things:

1. Move Sleevelessness to Tumblr with immediate effect.

2. Widen the scope of the blog to include the little things outside the music and / or design space which Tumblr has made it so easy for me to post.

Those of you who have subscribed to the Sleevelessness feed need do nothing. The feed is powered by Feedburner, so I’ll simply swap the Blogger feed source for the Tumblr one. I'm also going to redirect the www.sleevelessness.com domain to the tumblog. The Blogger blog will remain available as an archive at sleevelessness.blogspot.com. I may at some point get around to working out how to import these posts into Tumblr.


I'd like to thank all my readers for your continuing support. Please to get in touch if you notice any problems with the switch over.

A magic marker, a camera and some snappy editing combine to brilliant effect in this clever promo for Field Music‘s “In Context” directed by Dan Lowe. This is a great example of how pure creativity can cut through the bullshit and achieve over two million YouTube views.

Picked up at the always excellent Make: Blog...

There’s a lot of talk in the music video world at the minute about how low budgets are making it difficult to produce innovative promos. I can’t imagine this piece of madness for MGMT's “The Youth” cost much to make, and it certainly helps them stand out from their contemporaries.

We just finished this rather unorthodox project to promote “Black Ice”, the latest album from giants of rock AC/DC. The idea came about because we realised that many people work in offices where there’s a fairly heavy internet usage restrictions in place, and we loved the thought that we could subvert those policies with AC/DC’s music.

We decided to use the Excel format as it’s almost universally allowed through corporate firewalls. The result is the world’s first (and probably only ever) music video in Excel format, which plays back as ASCII art directly in the fields of the spreadsheet. You can download the spreadsheet here and try it out yourself.

Andrew Godwin’s LastGraph is a clever tool which allows you to produce information graphics from your last.fm data.

The service’s coolest feature allows you to create a PDF (or SVG) poster of your listening history between two dates. Here’s mine from August 08 to today:


See a larger version

The fancy visualisation technique for the posters originally came from Lee Byron’s “What have I been listening to?” project.

The site also offers some premium features which allow you to hotlink graphs for inclusion in your own website (as well as helping out the project) for only £5 (or $10) a year.

Upon checking out the app store this morning, I was pleasantly surprised to find Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers’ “Bloom” for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Simple and beautifully executed, the application allows you to create your own ambient music via a simple and intuitive touch interface. You can also run the app in “listen” mode and watch it generate the soundscape for you. Perfect for falling asleep to.

This app succeeds in three ways – simplicity, immediacy and beauty. You don’t have to know anything about music to achieve instantly great results. Your gran could understand the interface intuitively, and because it’s Brian Eno the music is beautiful and the aesthetic minimal. Ten out of ten.