dan le sac Vs Scroobius Pip - Waiting for the Beat to Kick In (naked edit)

At seven minutes long, with nothing but spoken word and some droning loops, “Waiting for the Beat to Kick In” is going to strike many as pretty terrible. Boring. Except this is Scroobius Pip on the mic and dan le sac on the beats, and this isn’t a song: this is a story. Scroobius Pip drags you along as he falls through the rabbit hole, and it isn’t until the end, when you start to see the ground rushing faster and faster to meet you, that you even realize you’ve been knocked off your feet.

Now quite accepting of the totally surreal time I was having I rounded a corner,
And continued onto my next encounter,
Resigned to the fact this was some dream or hallucination,
I made my way through the now dark street,
To the one window that had a light on,
I walked through the unlocked door which incidentally had blinds down,
And a sillhouetted figure like a film noir scene,
But sadly no sign saying Private Eye.
As I entered a voice promptly said..

“This journey’s almost over, I’m the only one left,
Allow me to introduce myself; my name is Walter Nepp,
The other guys have taught you things of great positive worth,
But I’m afraid I’m here to bring you back down to Earth,
See you can live your life in control and be nice,
But even that will not promise you a happy life,
You may think yourself in general to be a nice guy,
But I’m telling you now - that right there is a lie,
Even the nicest of guys has some nasty within ‘em,
You don’t have to be backlit to be the villain,
Whether it be greed lust or just plain vindictiveness,
There’s a level of benevolence inside all of us,
You can paint yourself an image and live in your own little dream,
But this ain’t a dream, it’s one big silver screen,
So when you think you’ve got your happy ending don’t ever forget it,
It ain’t over til you hear the sound of your end credits,
You’ll be waiting for the beat to kick in,
But it never does,
Waiting for you feet to grow wings,
That lift you above,
All of these tiresome things,
That you know and love,
Waiting for the beat to kick in,
But it never does,
Waiting for the beat to kick in,
But it never does,
Waiting for you feet to grow wings,
That lift you above,
All of these tiresome things,
That you know and love,
Waiting for the beat to kick in,
But it never does.”

In 1998, HUSH opened shop, fueled by the bourgeoning technology of CD burners. In the ten years since, HUSH has subsisted on the passion and community of the Portland music scene. But they are offering a gift not just to local fans and friends, but to the entire world. DECA: A HUSH 10th Anniversary Compilation is a tribute to the changing record industry, and a small and beautiful peek into the long list of wonderful acts HUSH has worked with over the years. And it is as free as you want it to be.

We’ve decided to offer this exclusively as a digital download because we’re intrigued by the idea of creating something that takes up more space in your heart and your head than in your house, or in our house, or on the postal truck.

This naked mix is a smattering of the tracks offered on DECA. If you hear even one moment of one song that you like, I implore you to go to the website and download the entire compilation. (If only for the Colin Meloy track you won’t hear anywhere else.)

1. Novi Split - Hollow Notes - There is that inevitable point in the generic Hollywood romantic comedy when the star boyfriend does something terrible to his star girlfriend and loses her, seemingly forever. Filled with anger as he is thrown out of his own apartment, he walks the streets aimlessly, realizing he has lost the one thing that matters most in the world: love. Slowly this regret melts into determination, and he rushes back to reclaim her heart in hand.

This is those moments wrapped up in a song; not because the song is saccharine or banal, but because, like those scenes, they tug at your heart despite their predictability. They hit just the right notes, reach just the right crescendos, have just the right feeling to accompany those weak journeys home at night.

4. Run on Sentence - The Afterlife Pt. 1

7. Norfolk & Western - Hiding Home

10. Loch Lomond - Elephants & Little Girls

21. Casey Daniel - Asleep at the Wheel

27. Dat’r - Humm-na

From symmetry breaking:

The Large Hadron Collider saw its first protons today, around 6:30 p.m. at CERN (12:30 p.m. US EDT), as scientists conducted the first beam injection test in one section of the collider. The protons traveled just a few meters into the LHC in a clockwise direction. The tests will continue through the weekend to transfer the beam from one section of the accelerator complex to another. A second beam injection test is scheduled for later in August. Protons will circulate around the entire collider for the first time on September 10.

Yay!

CERN has a press release going over the ramp up to September 10th a bit more, as well as a link for a live webcast to be streaming as soon as the LHC is. After that, the collider is set to be officially unveiled on October 21st.

August 8, 2008: The start of the South Ossetia War, Summer Olympics, and, now, the Large Hadron Collider.

Godzilla tracking just got easier.

Google has now photographed Tokyo for Street View, which means you can now see both the Golden Turd and the next nuclear attack all in one panorama. The WHOLE city isn’t done, but you can see quite a bit.

Actually, Tokyo wasn’t the only recent unveiling Street View had. Joining the list is fellow cities Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Sidney, Perth, Melbourne, New Orleans, El Paso, Savannah, and a ton in between.

Encounters At the End of the World, the new Werner Herzog documentary film about the community of American scientists in Antarctica, is coming to Pittsburgh. Roger Ebert gives the film four stars, saying:

It is a poem of oddness and beauty. Herzog is like no other filmmaker, and to return to him is to be welcomed into a world vastly larger and more peculiar than the one around us.

Here, the film is showing alongside, but sadly not a part of, “Life on Mars: New Perspectives”, a series of films every Sunday during August co-sponsored by the Carnegie Museum of Art. The series of movies “explores similar themes of alienation, dystopia, and new ways of seeing the world,” themes begging to be explored in a film covering the world’s largest desert. And though Encounters is ostensibly about the people living in that cold world, it is ultimately about the cold world itself.

Over the course of Herzog’s journey, nature-in-the wild shares equal time with human nature. His encounters are alternately surreal, absurd, profound and sometimes, all of the above.

Hopefully, Herzog takes us through not only the beauty of Antarctica, but also the unflinching desolation lying just below a thin, cracking layer of ice, or in the midst of a blinding snowstorm. That thick mix, hardly separated from one moment to the next, is where Antarctica’s real wonder comes from.

Garfield Minus Garfield: The Book

Clockwise:

1. Assembly and installation of the ATLAS Hadronic endcap Liquid Argon Calorimeter. The ATLAS detector contains a series of ever-larger concentric cylinders around the central interaction point where the LHC’s proton beams collide.

2. Lowering of the last element (YE-1) of the CMS detector into its underground experimental cavern.

3. Transporting the ATLAS Magnet Toroid End-Cap A between building 180 to ATLAS point 1.

More at Boston.com’s The Big Picture.

CERN Rap from Will Barras on Vimeo.

© M. Mararian

The Superest: Who is the superest hero of them all?

What is this? The Superest is a continually running game of My Team, Your Team. The rules are simple:

Player 1 draws a character with a power. Player 2 then draws a character whose power cancels the power of that previous character. Repeat.

“Fresh Born” is the first single from Deerhoof’s upcoming record, Offend Maggie. Download the sheet music, make your own version, upload it to your webpage or blog, then post the link here. Deerhoof’s version of “Fresh Born” will be shared soon too.

We are a nation of consumers.
And there’s nothing wrong with that.

STOP THE CHAIRS! STOP THE CHAIRS!

Objectified - (uhb-jek-tuh-fahyd) n., the new documentary film on industrial design by Gary Hustwit, the filmmaker behind Helvetica.

Objectified is a feature-length independent documentary about industrial design. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the people who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability. It’s about our relationship to mass-produced objects and, by extension, the people who design them.

Through vérité footage and in-depth conversations, the film documents the creative processes of some of the world’s most influential designers, and looks at how the things they make impact our lives. What can we learn about who we are, and who we want to be, from the objects with which we surround ourselves?

Read Hustwit’s post about the film.

Tired of Google’s stagnant, antiquated approach to search, a group of ex-Googlers and other techies have opened up their own shop: Cuil.com.

Pronounced “cool”, the Cuil search engine has an index spanning 121 billion web pages, and operates by comparing your keyword to the rest of a page’s contents instead of relying on “superficial popularity metrics”. This mechanism calls to mind the semantic web, but Cuil’s About page is too ambiguous to tell for sure how Cuil works.

What is sure is that Cuil’s team sees their engine as the future of search. Anna Patterson, who moved to Google after building the search engine used by Internet Archive, has low hopes for Google. From CNN Money:

Patterson enjoyed her time at Google, but became disenchanted with the company’s approach to search. “Google has looked pretty much the same for 10 years now,” she said, “and I can guarantee it will look the same a year from now.”

With these bold words and the talent behind them, as well as Cuil’s claim to fame of indexing a hypothesized three times as many web pages as Google, it is hard dismiss this Google contender along with all the others. But even a cursory glance at the engine’s functionality shows a less-than-polished product without much bite.

A lot of people have been finding massive differences in the number of search results between Cuil versus Google. An interesting example is found in “banana” and its French translation “banane”. “Banana” returns 47 million results in Cuil versus 97 million in Google, while “banane” closes the lead a little bit by returning 5 million results versus 11 million (though still roughly the same percentage-wise). A clear numbers win for Google, but dig a little deeper and you see Cuil vastly improving within only 24 hours since its launch. PontifexPrimus originally found only 15 million results for “banana”, and none at all for “banane” (unless you, curiously, turned Safe Search off).

Of course, the raw number of search results is much less important than the number of useful results. Unfortunately, Cuil falters here as well. Searching for “Spencer Sugarman” on Google returns maybe every individual website I am involved with, all on the front page. Cuil, on the other hand, returns 10 links to Undress Me Robot, and 1 link to an article about Burt Sugarman. The “banana” search mentioned above is much better, providing many relevant and unique results. But what Cuil fails to do on any search I have tried is surpass the quality of Google’s results. Instead, all they manage so far is to land somewhere along the spectrum of Much Worse to As Good.

This is likely to change. It is difficult to tell whether Cuil is incorporating changes as its engine is stress-tested, or if the learning is built-in, but either way the engine seems to be improving. If Cuil expands its hardware to ward against the downtime problems they were experiencing yesterday, and continues improving its search results, the search engine could soon stand strong against Google. But as CNN points out, Google’s immense power as a brand means winning will take a lot more than just marginally better search results or a slicker design.