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Retail Insights: Current Footwear Fashion Trends Jun 29, 2015 - FDRA News Beth Goldstein, Executive Director, Industry Analyst, Accessories & Footwear, has been following the Fashion Footwear and Accessories industries for more than 10 years. Beth advises clients on how to turn information from The NPD Group's Consumer Tracking Service and Retail Tracking Service into actionable insights. We spoke with Beth about the current state of fashion footwear retail and some hot trends she is seeing today.
- Puma to Sell Tretorn Rights to Authentic Brands Jun 30, 2015 - Newswire
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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26460970890196331712015-07-04T23:52:22.584+01:00Rouge's Foamexcessive aestheticsAdam Harperhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-74823765288581657682015-05-14T13:58:00.001+01:002015-05-14T13:58:09.378+01:00Review: Ben Zimmerman, The Baltika Years

This little electronica column review fell out of the latest Wire because someone else had already done a longer one. Thought I'd post it up here as it's quite a special release. Video below.

Ben Zimmerman
The Baltika Years
Software DL / 2×LP
With this archive release, Joel Ford and Dan Lopatin's Software have found something that reaches right into the core of the label's interest in the curiously soulful side of late-twentieth-century computer music. Between 1992 and 2002, Ben Zimmerman used a series of Tandy machines working with low-quality waveforms to make short sketches and suites sat everywhere between outright experimentation and vernacular tunefulness. What emerges is a meeting between Moondog and Daniel Johnson in the age of the floppy disk. Most intriguing is the timbre itself - FM synths imitating older instruments alongside samples tuned into sonically matchless keyboards, all coated in a thick oxide layer of digital lo-fi. These are wound up like music boxes and let go, spiralling forward into minimalist abstraction, character pieces or clubbier grooves (including breakbeats) as they eat through their slatted programming. Not only is the limited context intimately audible, but the varieties of mood and texture achieved within it are nothing short of inspiring.

Adam Harperhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-51755227100938514842015-05-05T22:09:00.000+01:002015-05-05T22:09:59.549+01:00System Focus: If You've OD-ed On The Internet, This Music Will Save You (Soothing Sounds of East Asia)

The latest System Focus concerns my attempts to soothe my worn-out brain after - as the elders know so well - it got fried by the internet, and how much of the salve concerned or came from East Asia (click here to read it). Featuring Haruomi Hosono, a few bits of vaporwave and future funk, Nujabes and some of his followers, Horse Head, Swimful Buterfly and Chinese hip hop, and a catch-up with MAGIC YUME and ZOOM LENS, and a little discussion of orientalism. Shout out to the label Home Normal, who while they are based in Japan (or were until recently) are basically an international label and didn't quite fit the piece, especially how long it was getting. Really good and relaxing stuff though.

They said the internet would melt my brain and I laughed and turned up the heat, threw in armfuls of hi-octane, hi-tech, hi-speed, hi-intensity music. I dissolved at the speed of sound, fragments free-falling, dispersing and disengaging like it was meant to happen. But then my hard drive got corrupted, and my gray matter got flooded with exclamation marks, misfires, and "file not found" notifications. The music went straight through me like massless particles, and I realized I'd forgotten stillness in the surge of desire and transcendence...

Paraiso by Haruomi Hosono

 What's interesting about Paraiso and Yellow Magic Orchestra is that they both play on the exotic associations Westerners have with Japan and other islands in the Pacific, whether it be quaint local color encountered on holiday or the electro-technological spectacular that is associated with the region. In doing this, Paraiso also drew on American lounge and exotica music rooted in the 1950s, rendering both sweet but ultimately insipid...

神秘的情人 by 泰合志恒

Keats has been branching out into hip hop and chillwave sounds, too, with some wonderfully crafted releases by Pyxis, Cahunastyle and Timid Soul, who deftly mixes sloppy-cosmic-funky beats with J-pop's cuteness sensibility via vocaloids.While eschewing the weirdness and conceptual edge of much vaporwave, future funk and its associates frequently maintain this link with Japanese sounds and their richer harmonies as well as text and imagery from the island, mixing them all with the faded retro-USA imagery that surrounds chillwave and old-hipster music...

Bubblefunk EP by Timid Soul

 The Tokyo-based hip-hop producer Nujabes died in a traffic accident just over 5 years ago, at the age of 36. Since that time, he has (rather like J Dilla) quietly built up a considerable reputation, especially online, where dozens of tribute releases can be found (few them quite matching the skill and subtly of Nujabes himself). Beginning in the 1990s, Nujabes's signature sound was based in that era's soul and jazz beats, and typically uses piano, often flute or soprano saxophone too, with the rich chords often favoured in Japanese musical smoothness. His sound is the perfect and surprising union of coolness (and I mean that as an aesthetic with a long history and particular feel) and sentimentality...

Modal Soul by Nujabes

One of the greatest practitioners of drum-machine production with a more traditionally East-Asian sound is from Shanghai: Swimful Buterfly. Swimful has produced for US rappers Lil B and Main Attrakionz, and released a warmly euphoric debut album 馬路天使 (Street Angel) in 2013. Last year's follow-up, 归梦 (Return to a Dream), is even better, perfectly following that trajectory whereby a producer gets both more skilled at crafting beats and more original. It samples both Chinese and Japanese zither instruments and singing try "But Maybe". The track "Air Between Toes" even samples the song "Tsukematsukeru" from J-Pop's kawaii princess Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, transforming its torrent of soda-pop into a cooling stream of sweet mountain water...

归梦 (Return to a Dream) by Swimful Buterfly

Aristophanes 貍貓 is a fantastically charismatic female rapper from Taipei, Taiwan, who prefers to spit ("sigh," "sidle" and "swoon" might be better words) over the sloppy style that has come to be known as glitch hop. Back on that Nujabes thing, Nanchang's Aosaki explores Chinese folk sounds and high-love piano riffs, while SoundIzImage is even more giant-hearted, especially on the album Fragrance. And if you want to go more sentimental still, there's Shirfine from Xiamen, or α·Pav, whose music mixes hip-hop, new age, and Chinese instruments and could be the soundtrack to an indie game that helps kids come to terms with the fact that everything dies.

春夏秋冬・終 by α·Pav

What about pop? Magic Yume and Zoom Lens (who I talked to here) are two of the best places for Japanese-inspired indie pop in the online underground, and they both have everything on a continuum from laid-back dreaminess to footwork and hyperactive chiptune, showing us that cute and upbeat doesn't have to be intense. At the calmer end, Magic Yume has Tokyo Princess (東京 姫) by Ikaros イカロス (as well as plenty of downtempo beats) and Zoom Lens has Yeule, Girlfriend by Philippines artist Ulzzang Pistol, the gorgeous Paradice by LLLL, and the Yumetatsu Glider EP by Japanese artist Yoshino Yoshikawa, who's affiliated with Tokyo's richly hyperactive Maltine label.

Yumetatsu Glider EP by Yoshino Yoshikawa
Adam Harperhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-67747129951646960362015-02-17T22:15:00.000+00:002015-02-17T22:15:50.998+00:00System Focus: What Health Goth Really Means

Le1f photographed by Sam Bayliss Ibram
After a brief hiatus, System Focus is back, this time a look at Health Goth, its roots, some of the music surrounding it, and how it represents a turn towards particular aesthetics rather than scenes / genres (click here to read it). Nonetheless there's a geographical convergence in Portland (the piece's working title was 'Health Goth, Portland Hi-Tech and the Age of the Aesthetic.'). Featuring Magic Fades, Club Chemtrail, Karmelloz, C Plus Plus and the return of Vektroid.

How about this: these days there are no scenes or genres, only "aesthetics." A scene implies a physical community in physical architectures, and as such is a fatal slur against the URL everspace and its viral lungs. A genre implies limits, intentions, rules, fixity, and—as every itchy-fingered Facebook commenter knows—is a hateful thing. Nothing exists anyways, not really, only names, only hyperlinks, only patterns that work up to a point and then need an upgrade. Backspace your tearful emojis, hypocrites, it's always been that way; it's just more obvious now that code flows through our arteries rather than squeezes of blood and other smells. But it's not homogenous out there and never will be, the online underground and the cultures tapping its magma are built on a vector field that ripples and clumps together, each blob too quick and continuous for your Dad's rock collection. An aesthetic is not an object, it's a way of looking, a way of finding beauty and sifting experiences, originating with process and behaviour rather than product, or, indeed, a journalist with a butterfly net...

Magic Fades: Push Thru
As the Facebook group curators put it in an interview, "Health Goth is not a lifestyle, it's an exercise in aesthetics. Any publication trying to tell you that Health Goth is about working out has simply taken the two words at face value and opted for a less challenging, and extremely boring alternative." It seems to me that saying that Health Goth is gymming for goths is like saying that cyberpunk is Johnny Rotten doing spreadsheets on a Dell. Let's make something clear: in its original context of the Facebook group and the curators behind it, Health Goth is at a significant remove from music. Health Goth shouldn't be regarded as a musical genre, even if it was given its name by people operating in the online underground music community. What it is is an aesthetic, one that primarily concerns fashion...

The roots of hi-tech, and Health Goth in particular, go way back, but gained particular momentum around 2011. As the Facebook curators recognize, Health Goth is just as reflective of aesthetic trends that preceded it as it is constitutive of new ones. Surprisingly, none of the pieces I'd read on Health Goth mentioned the GHE20G0THIK club phenomenon pioneered by Venus X in NYC, which was a major force in associating pop and hip-hop with dark underground weirdness. Organized alongside Hood By Air designer Shayne Oliver (who often performed), the parties provided an early context for Fade to Mind names like Total Freedom and Nguzunguzu, and were attended by a nascent Arca...

Karmelloz's Silicon Forest, named after the nickname for the Pacific Northwest's hi-tech industry, confirms him as one of hi-tech's best ambient artists, whose subtle work balances heavenly sweetness with the nausea of future shock, and always puts me in mind of giant vats in which amoral artificial biospheres are roused and stirred. C Plus Plus's Cearà is a rich take on a clubbier sound, catching the light of grime, vogue, house, pop and transatlantic styles as it spins eerily in a space of apparently infinite connections. Most notably perhaps, the Push Thru remix album sees the return of Vektroid, one of the key players in the development of vaporwave between 2010 and 2013 as New Dreams Ltd. and Prismcorp Virtual Enterprises. Vektroid is from Portland and the Pacific Northwest of the USA originally, and her remix of "Ecco" is palpably weighty, shifting through a range of cyborg textures in its eight minutes until it feels more like crawling through a digital wormhole or watching a short film demonstrating some horrifying artificial transformation than hearing the usual shuffling of riffs... Adam Harperhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-27691999366133369532014-12-31T14:37:00.002+00:002014-12-31T18:39:23.366+00:00stuff I wrote and stuff I liked in 2014

Another pretty busy year for me, writing-about-music-wise. Below is a list of everything, if you're interested. Below that is a list of some releases I particularly enjoyed this year in alphabetical order. If something's not in there, it could well be because I haven't got round to listening yet (sorry). I didn't join in with any of the year-end stuff in print or online magazines this year, not because I disapprove - vaguely because I'm finding it difficult to claim I've listened to enough to make the call, and find it really difficult to compare online underground music with more traditionally distributed underground stuff within single assessments - not to mention the fact that great stuff is increasingly coming in chunks smaller and/or less official than the album. But mostly it was because I was really busy at the time all that stuff was due.

Stuff I wrote

Pattern Recognition: Cold Forecast - a broad look at the aesthetics of coldness in recent underground music, and how it's an exploration of modernity. Ft. Egytprixx, Logos, Diamond Black Hearted Boy, Mykki Blanco and more

Pattern Recognition: Pon! Cuter Love - on the rise of cuteness and kawaii. Ft. JACK댄스, Sophie, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, Meishi Smile.

Pattern Recognition: Gangnam and Beyond - selections from recent K-Pop and how it might reflect underground aesthetics.

System Focus: The Divine Surrealism of Epic Collage - on the striking and sublime music of E+E, Diamond Black Hearted Boy, Total Freedom, TCF and more.

System Focus: Inside the New Digital DIY Labels - a look at a handful of digital DIY labels, with interviews, ft. Illuminated Paths, Ailanthus, 1080p, Zoom Lens, Dopefish Family and Aural Sects

System Focus: The Evolution of the Voice in the Digital Landscape - a look at the spectrum of technological uses of the voice, ft. Nima, Metallic Ghosts, Blank Banshee, vocaloids and more.

System Focus: Today's Hi-Tech World Has given Birth to a New, Gleaming Grey Sonic Vocabulary - hi-tech dark luxury beats from bine☃, DYNOOO, Dutch E Germ, M-O-R-S-E, Sentinel, Subaeris, Weed Konducta and James Ferraro.

Cute Computer Chaos (for Boiler Room) - the new wave of digital desire, ft. Hudson Mohawke, Oneohtrix Point Never, AG Cook, SOPHIE and more.

System Focus: Bridging the Singular Sounds of Lisbon's Underground - I take a trip to Lisbon to investigate Portugal's underground scene and consider what it means to be local in the digital age. Ft., the AVNL and Golden Mist labels, and artists including RAP/RAP/RAP, Old Manual, Marie Dior, Conan Osiris and Lake Haze.

The Online Underground: A New Kind of Punk? (Resident Advisor Article) - big bad polemical account of the online underground and the aesthetics it takes from its context, with running comparisons to previous generations of punk and indie. Key examples in vaporwave and PC Music.

Indie Goes Hi-Tech: The End of Analogue Warmth and Cosy Nostalgia (Berlin Music Week Talk) - a talk tying together all the various different hi-tech sub-trends I've been writing about lately.

System Focus: High-Speed Sounds to Blister Even Internet-Accelerated Brains - more cuteness, this time at high speed and high complexity. Ft. Guy Akimoto, DV-i, Miami Mais, Maxo, Yeongrak, Friendly Sneakrz, Onika, Ba-Kuura, Xyloid, So So In Luv, Lockbox and more.

Future Instruments 2214 (for Red Bull Music Academy) - I was one of a number of artists and writers invited to imagine a musical instrument of 2214. Mine was 'Gan,' 'a cross between a synthesiser, a record collection and a game of golf.'

System Focus: Fandom Music is as Underground as it Gets - an exploration of the music made as a manifestation of fandom, and its sincerity in particular. Ft. Pokémon, Adventure Time, Minecraft (those note blocks), Homestuck and My Little Pony.

Review of Arca's Xen (for Electronic Beats) - feverish and gooey writing on one of the year's best albums.

Electronica column, reviews and other small-to-medium pieces for Wire throughout the year.

Stuff I Liked

Click on the links to listen...

Arca: Xen

AWALthe1$t: Empty

AyGeeTee: Imminent Orphan

bine☃: THINGS WILL BE BETTER FROM NOW ON

Brood Ma: P O P U L O U S

Chronovalve: Trace of Light

Conan Osiris: Silk

DYNOOO: These Flaws Are Mine to War With

E+E: The Light That You Gave Me To See You

Friendly Sneakrz: Flowers From Above

Geotic: Morning Shore (Eon Isle)

Giant Claw: Dark Web

GOP (Geniuses of Place): 10.9†01;9

Guy Akimoto: BaeBae EP

James Ferraro: SUKI GIRLZ

Karmelloz: Source Localization

Kyoka: Is (Is Superpowered)

Lockbox: Prince Soul Grenade

LXV: New World Spa

Magic Fades: Push Thru

Miami Mais: A Popcorn Diet

Nima: See Feel Reel

Old Manual: リング

Palmistry: Ascensión

Ramona Lisa: Arcadia

RAP/RAP/RAP: Killing and Matisse Graveyard

Sentinel: Hybrid

t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者: ゲートウェイ

Untold: Black Light Spiral

18+: Trust

Adam Harperhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-39408031087944417282014-12-30T19:38:00.000+00:002014-12-30T19:39:46.127+00:00Review: Arca, Xen (for Electronic Beats)

Did a review of Arca's brilliant Xen for Electronic Beats (click here to read). This sentence was cut:

Digital de Koonings jounce down oozing hallways dragging trains of femme paraphenalia, kawaii cenobites howl and squeal in holes, and sugared children restlessly pound plucked keyboards, enthralled in the boom of the tingling strings.

But others weren't (such as these):

Xen is a multiplicitous figure. Many tracks contain several life forms coiling around each other, each with its own sense of time and space, all crowded into the same fractious textures and struggling for expression and independence. New limbs and organs burst through the skin, feelers fly in every direction and prehensile tongues curl. Disasters of pleasure, showers of sex. The title track is an electrical injection, with strobes of percussion whipping up a club nimbus as stallions rear their heads and the wreckers come whirling and squeaking over the polished floor; at the center of it all a daughter's dancing class on a tightrope.

But other tracks are solo portraits, often keyboard improvisations. "Sad Bitch" pliés forward tentative and lonely before exploding into pirouettes and dovetailing melodies. "Family Violence" is a forest of jabbing and pointed fingers. "Promise" shudders and teeters as if shaking off an ice age, and the piano sketch "Held Apart" waits at the windowsill with memories in its big eyes. The parameters of Ghersi's self-exploration are readjusted with each track, causing constant surprise—dance beats, noise, song, cinematic strings and rave stabs all rotate the album in a space of unexpected dimensions.

Xen artwork by Jesse Kanda
Adam Harperhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-34208698354404150682014-12-30T19:30:00.003+00:002014-12-30T19:32:04.355+00:00System Focus: Fandom Music Is As Underground As It Gets

Horizon's 'Confinis'

Possibly the most out-there System Focus yet, this one looks at recently-emerged fandoms and the way they practice their fandom through music-making online (click here to read). It looks at Pokémon, Adventure Time, Minecraft, Homestuck and My Little Pony. There's some really unusual stuff in this one..

One of the major drivers of underground music culture is sincerity. The underground seeks musicians for whom making music is an art and a passion, rather than a performance or a get-rich-quick scheme. You might have heard a lot about 'The New Sincerity' or 'post-irony,' ideas dating back to the 1980s which have been applied to music with a notable level of (usually positive) emotion and innocent frankness. But the search for sincerity goes back as far as its perceived opposites in, say, industrial capitalism go—back to the Romantics and beyond. That's not to say that all underground music culture is sincere. Irony and satire are arguably stronger than ever as the underground re-engages with hi-tech modernity, shunning the ubiquitous, twee, and now almost empty sincerities of the indie aesthetic. But to find music today made from pure positive passion alone, try an online DIY music almost completely outside the remit of the hip underground sites: the music of fandom...
One Year Older by Erik "Jit" Scheele
Fandom music, especially by the most popular musicians, is very well made. It doesn't tend towards the minimalism and primitivism in some areas of the underground, where too much effort and ability—especially on non-vintage equipment—can get a bit uncool. (But even when it isn't well made in the traditional sense, it's interesting for its surprising results.) In the same vein, fandom music tends to be complex—it often uses the best and broadest tools available to contemporary musicians, and likes to draw on many different instruments, harmonies and forms in the course of a song or album, rather than just deploying a few riffs or loops. And if variety itself can be a characteristic, it's definitely a characteristic of fandom music, which manifests in any and all genres, some which don't even seem to be genres. One of the most tangible qualities of fandom music, however, is linked to its sincerity—it explores a level of emotional or sentimental expression that more cynical listeners would consider kitsch...

Lethe Wept on Fortissimo Hall

The tracks by Pengosolvent are quite unlike anything else—contemporary orchestral VGM squashed imaginatively into a jovial, frenetic and slightly disturbing blur. Try the crazy "Breaktime Over," the highly cute "Enamored Regard" (below), or the proper creepy ghost-type "Paved With Good Intentions" (belated happy Halloween)...

Intriguingly, Adventure Time is a recurring reference point for some fairly parental-advisory hip-hop—here, here, and here. Then there's Oddpauly, who raps about the attractions of the show on one of his tracks. Pauly also has a YouTube channel featuring a music video of his highlight track "Rain," and a video of him playing Minecraft while eating Fruit Rollups...

April Days by oddpauly

But with a game as rich as Minecraft, there's also music within it too, and this is where things get really interesting. The game has 'note blocks,' which can be directed to play a certain pitch and change timbre depending on what material they're on top of. There's also a form of electrical wiring that can activate the blocks remotely (using a switch) and in sequence, setting off the notes like a pack of dominoes. Thus by placing several note blocks in the right configuration and activating them through the wires, players can create music boxes that can play certain tunes, even polyphonically. Here's a tutorial on how it's done. To really get a polyphonic tune playing for its full length, players have to create vast structures several stories high and almost a kilometer in length, that witnesses can move around inside as the music plays. Then they upload the videos to YouTube. This is music and architecture as the very same thing...

The largest musical instruments in the virtual world

One of the most visually striking fandoms online is Homestuck, an epic webcomic about some teens who inadvertently bring about the end of the world, and then get involved with these bizarre troll-like beings that are perfect to dress up as. But don't take it from me—there's a fan song to introduce you to it all... The weirdly great-looking official Homestuck Bandcamp page compiles the soundtrack (made by fans) music and more, and it tends to subtly evade genre, skipping through all kinds of sound worlds, seemingly guided more by emotion (and whatever's going on with those trolls) than form. I've been oddly mesmerized by Erik "Jit" Scheele's One Year Older and the cosmically soppy Song of Skaia.

Artwork for 'Firefly Cloud' from Erik "Jit" Scheele's One Year Older

The fandom has a hefty contingent of Bandcamp customers whose pony avatars can be seen lining up on the pages of the most popular albums. But the music only rarely reflects the child-like aesthetic of the show, often bringing out the darker, more romantic connotations of characters and its stories. Alongside sometimes Friedrich-like digital paintings of the relevant ponies, pony musicians regularly put weighty, grand, maximalist and very technically accomplished music. There's punk rock, happy club sounds, ambient electronic, funky song-writing, hardcore, soft rock, epic orchestral, and metal. One of the most popular artists is Eurobeat Brony, who has three volumes of hyperactive 'Super Ponybeat.' Another is TAPS, who has an ear for glitchy vocal science deriving from samples of the show: ponies fractured and suspended in enormous spaces...

 Feather's In My Mind
Adam Harperhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-47799360272761796062014-12-30T18:46:00.003+00:002015-01-03T15:25:08.854+00:00System Focus: High Speed Sounds to Blister Even Internet-Accelerated Brains

DV-i's 'Optical Mode' in its browser context
Proper packed System Focus on speed cuteness (click here to read). Kind of a follow-up to the earlier cuteness article (here), with a look at jungle and footwork references too. Featuring collectives such as JACK댄스, Activia Benz, Donky Pitch, STHWST, Hope Sick Cola, Mecha Yuri, Magic Yume Records and Manicure Records and artists like Guy Akimoto, DV-i, Miami Mais, Maxo, Yeongrak, Friendly Sneakrz, Onika, Ba-Kuura, Xyloid, So So In Luv, Lockbox, DZA, Doss, Yandere and more. I made a tracklist for it, but not all of it ended up in the SoundCloud playlist at the bottom of the article. Here it is in full (click the links to listen):

Guy Akimoto: BaeBae

DV-i: Shenzhen Miracle

Miami Mais: Goose

Maxo: Hiya

Yeongrak: estrogen

Friendly Sneakrz: Morning

Onika: Bffs

Ba-Kuura: Dual Wield

Bames: BYB (Pablo)

Xyloid: Neptune Pool

SO SO IN LUV: 1 + 0nly

Lockbox: Human Makeout

Maxo: Snow Other

Yeongrak: shabushabu

DV-i: Fractal Mode

Lil Mystic: Hiryo

Friendly Sneakrz: Restless

WALLACE: OutAspAce

DZA: Fluffernutter

Lockbox: Brainhead

Yeongrak: flowerkingdom

Doss: Extended Mix

Ba-Kuura: Let's Go

Kaleidoscope: Royal Flash

Slugabed: Pure El Nino Vibes

Yeongrak: all i do

Xyloid: Zephyr

Yandere: u know

Lockbox's Prince Soul Grenade
What a month it's been for cuteness! The deliciously hyper-camp new aesthetic, in its element online, is most famously embodied by the PC Music label—everyone's been messaging and tweeting about them! Then recently the movement got its anthem in the form of "Hey QT" by QT, a snappy lil number which is also the official tune of a new energy drink I can't wait to taste (that's the artwork above). But QT and PC are only the cherry on top of a vast cutie pie. Not long ago, #Feelings boss Ben Aqua set the net ablaze with his Resident Advisor podcast, a celebration of cute club intensity from all over the clouds. Finn Diesel's DIS Magazine show on Rinse FM, a haven for cuteness and other flavors since May and previously featuring SOPHIE, A. G. Cook and Felicita, entered its third installment on September 25, introducing Onika and So So In Luv. And trans-national club sensation JACK댄스 has returned, this time in New York with a whole new roster of US-based cuties...

 So So in Luv: 1 + 0nly
Those high twinkly notes, that high-speed syncopation, that high helium voice. Hints of '90s hardcore rushing unrepentantly into the digital age. And the network that links JACK댄스, DIS Magazine, Ben Aqua and PC Music with labels like Activia Benz, Donky Pitch, STHWST, Hope Sick Cola, Mecha Yuri, Manicure Records and more has converged on this style from many different points of origin: jungle and hardcore, seapunk, footwork, trap, the sparkly HudMo-Rustie sound, pop, J-pop, video game music and experimental breaks. Just as chopped and screwed lethargy seems to be everywhere between beats and vaporwave, this convergence amounts to the return of speed and complexity in ways guaranteed to blister even your internet-accelerated brain...

Guy Akimoto's BaeBae EP, something of an ode to digital communication, begins with the itchy-fingered title track, which includes a demure robot lady announcing, Reality escaping me, emotions with velocity, log me on, sign me out, give me something to type about. Hype tunes, low tides, sending emails all night. Me and bae, bae and me, HDMI, USB...

Adam Harperhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-34234406506843456282014-12-30T17:49:00.001+00:002014-12-30T17:51:36.360+00:00Indie Goes Hi-Tech: The End of Analogue Warmth and Cosy Nostalgia (Berlin Music Week talk)
At Berlin Music Week I gave a talk (video above) that summed up the wider trend behind basically everything I've written about for the past two years: 'hi-tech,' which I like to oppose to traditional indie aesthetics. It includes a summary of many of its sub-trends which looked at in past articles. With apologies for the apparent reductiveness, the slides for the talk are below in all PowerPoint 2003's splendor.

Adam Harperhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-76851641609095092612014-12-30T15:05:00.001+00:002014-12-30T15:05:18.408+00:00The Online Underground: A New Kind of Punk? (Resident Advisor article)

Resident Advisor suggested I write an article for them about the emerging online underground, and the result was my most comprehensive (and polemical) statement on the topic to date (click here to read). It's running theme was a comparison to late-C20th punk and indie, and it went into the aesthetics of vaporwave and PC Music too. The piece appeared alongside a (controversial but, I thought, pretty brilliant) podcast by #Feelings boss Ben Aqua.

How many times has the concept of punk been redefined? Far too many to count, and besides, no one seems to want to label music any more. Even in the early '90s, barely 15 years into its life, the definition of punk had been broadened and warped in surprising directions—punk could mean naive pop, heavy metal in the charts, or even doing something yourself, whatever that might be. In a new music culture where guitars have been replaced by cracked copies of Ableton, bands have been replaced by anonymous individuals with SoundCloud accounts, and where rock as such hasn't really been on the underground agenda for years, what significance does punk still have?...

In each of these areas, the processes and problems of the online underground were those of the punk underground in the late 20th century. Building a musical culture on SoundCloud, Bandcamp and Facebook might seem new and strange (if only due to the technology involved) or—more negatively—unimportant or a sign of decline, but these paradigm shifts have happened to the underground before, and they hint at the opportunities and difficulties of the current situation....

Just like the classic punks, PC Music can be heard as dramatizing the decline of good taste at the hands of modernity, and in 2014 that means noble underground traditions like all that monochrome club/post-club music that rakes reverentially and melancholically through 30 years of analogue production all being displaced by digital decadence, rampant excess and fucking children. PC Music are trolling old ravers, the generation that built the hardcore continuum; they're trolling old punks and their insistence on realism. They're saying, "We might as well sound like this. In a world of gloss and accelerated desire, this is what society made us." And in this regard, they're punks... Adam Harperhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-85624031757887571682014-10-13T15:56:00.000+01:002014-10-13T15:56:33.729+01:00System Focus: Bridging the Singular Sounds of Lisbon's Underground

My most in-depth System Focus essay yet involved a trip to Lisbon in search of Portugal's electronic underground (click here to read). It focuses mainly on the AVNL and Golden Mist record labels and includes artists such as RAP/RAP/RAP, Old Manual, Marie Dior, Conan Osiris, Lake Haze, Onto Hek, Hajtand, Ana3, Purple and Pedro o Mau. But it also looks at the way influences and genres (kizomba, tarraxo, kuduro) work in the emerging scene, and particularly the role the URL vs IRL relationship plays in connection with global, post-colonial and local forces.

How does a musical community form? What binds it together and keeps it going? Where is the overlap between personal and musical connections? And does it really matter where you're from, or where you're going?...

Golden Mist flyer
Something certainly seemed to be going on in Portugal this year, and it wasn't limited to the new Afro-Portuguese sound either. What I found by chasing hyperlinks until I reached a physical city—unsurprisingly, perhaps—was a curious and unique mixture of URL and IRL. As the above writers couldn't fail to observe, Lisbon's Afro-Portuguese and white communities are highly separated by geography and culture, considerably more so than in London or New York. Where Príncipe and friends had formed a very local scene, albeit one with global roots, the (as it turned out) relatively whiter and wealthier musicians in the network I sought, many of whom had art-school backgrounds, had one foot in the physical necessities and local musics of Portugal, and one foot in global new-music culture. For them, the internet is both thousands of miles away and right next door. This community had almost unconsciously used this duality to develop an unusual and distinctive flavor, one that's now beginning to leave bedrooms and laptops and, perhaps, Portugal altogether...

 Manuel Robim (Old Manual) and Tiago Miranda (Conan Osiris)
Similarly, the name 'AVNL' is a gothy, MNML-ised version of Avenal, a part of town where they all lived as students, and the Bandcamp label formed as an informal platform to put out their different projects and collaborations. Manuel tells me that the three would go "driving around at night in a car, outside the city and it was like fields and endless roads, and we did that listening to contemporary music, and I daresay that's how things started." Cars do seem to crop up repeatedly in the imagery around Tiago R and Manuel's music...

Tiago Rodrigues (RAP/RAP/RAP)
As befits someone whose YouTube avatar is an internet explorer symbol, Tiago R always seems to originate from the information superhighway. Earlier this year, the result of Gonçalo's Facebook message was Killing, one of RAP/RAP/RAP's most comprehensive records to date, a panorama of club tics, console percussion and cosmic stares with a faint luxury theme that could make it platinum beat going lounge. Another album, Matisse Graveyard, appeared on AVNL and was shortly followed by an album of field recordings capturing nocturnal crickets in Viseu. Notably prolific, Tiago R admits that he's "obsessed with making tracks. I'm doing it for me." And it's not just sounds but "the aesthetic—the video, the image. For me the music doesn't work just for itself, it has to be related with an image or a video..."

Manuel Robim (Old Manual). Image by Francisca Tadeu.
At the centre of [Manuel Robim's] sound these days are synths—heavy synths, grand staircases of them, varying in their closeness to club styles such as anthemic house, trance and hardstyle. "I wish I had a house made of synth," he jokes. "I would sleep in a synth bed if I could." He's especially into trance pop from around the turn of the millennium—acts like ATB, whose kitsch status is about due to expire and get remade as an affectionate reference point for underground tastes. Earlier this year, Old Manuel's most comprehensive release, リング ('Ringu'), landed on Aural Sects (one of the labels I interviewed for the second System Focus column) running a gamut of rock-hard synth club styles and exploring Afro-Portuguese rhythms in tracks such as "Pump" and "New Goal..."

 Diogo Lima (Lost Tapes) and Tiago Miranda (Conan Osiris)
Marie Dior has cycled through several kinds of club sounds, including the exploratory, subterranean loops of Minimalist; Repetitive; Slow; Sad; Dance; Music, the hard house of House is Where the Beat Is (again, on Aural Sects) and the deep oceans of "6' 2"." His most unique flavors appear on releases like 0061565377-(F), Encore, Again, Encore, and the baffling Euphrates—works whose contours seem to be generated by unfathomable non-human logics, and yet they gently caress you with anemone tentacles...

Gonçalo Salgado (Lake Haze)
Golden Mist, however, has been dancefloor-focused from the beginning. Gonçalo has produced under the name Lake Haze, releasing EPs of London-flavored grime and garage for Unknown to the Unknown (Force of Nature EP) and inventive techno for One Eyed Jacks (Ruff Cuts EP). He founded Golden Mist as a genreless home for Portuguese and Portugal-based musicians: "I thought [of] the label as a catalogue, a variety of styles, not like a grime label, a house label, a techno label. I wanted to show the world what our artists were and the internet was the tool to communicate to the world." Ironically, by keeping things Portuguese, the label becomes more diverse. And the label's extremely diverse: alongside RAP/RAP/RAP's Killing, Ana3's Street Clamor has exhilarating, high-energy, syncopated house, Onto Hek's Object Oriented Ontology moodily explores lo-fi techno soundscapes, and Hajtand's Electric Boulevard offers three beauties of immaculately composed synthwave. May's Lisbon Underground Catalogue Volume 1 collects a number of other artists, and Shcuro's upcoming Black Mist EP takes on a cybernetic stance...

Cover of Marie Dior's House is Where the Beat Is
I ask the group what they think a Lisbon sound might be, but for them it's largely that of someone else. What they emphasize instead is the diversity of their community—a collective of individual artists rather than one working on a particular sound. "It's very hard to create a movement in Lisbon based on what one guy created," explains Gonçalo. "Not like London, London is a city of movements in electronic music. Lisbon is not as good to create movements, but it's great to create diversity. Everyone is singular, artisans." Tiago M, sat at the end of the table with his long black hair in two braids, agrees. "Our relationship wasn't borne out of musical connections. Our music is really different but it collides on some vortexes that make us common in some way, even if it's not in the hearing sense. Our sameness is that we all do this alone, we do it ourselves."

Cover of Ana3's Street Clamor
Kizomba is like the Afro-Portuguese R&B—slow, sultry, a little cheesy, ubiquitous. Whether exuding from cars or shops, you're never far away from its lolloping charisma. Later that evening, before visiting the city's leading club Lux, Gonçalo, Diogo L and I sit in a gently neon café with tiny cups of Portuguese coffee and glasses of Super Bock beer—apparently most clubbers have decided that drinking in the clubs is too expensive, and hit the streets for hours first instead—and we hear kizomba ballads one after the other, some eliciting an almost embarrassed grin of recognition from the guys...

Cover of Old Manual's リング
Tiago R describes one of his biggest influences as Rom Di Prisco, who wrote hi-tech video game music for titles such as racing game Need For Speed and sci-fi shooter Unreal Tournament over a decade ago. Manuel had mentioned ATB, whose hit "9pm (Till I Come)" provided the intro theme for the PS1 game FIFA Premier League All Stars 1999. It might go some way to explaining the prevalence of sports culture in his and Tiago R's work, and listening again I start to hear RAP/RAP/RAP tracks as disassembled video games playing themselves, and as Old Manual's tracks as garish yet unrepentant celebrations of championship hope and glory...

Cover of RAP/RAP/RAP's Matisse Graveyard
The weather couldn't be more different from that in Lisbon days earlier—the rainiest of rain, beyond a cliché of Britain. Manuel doesn't seem thrilled with the leaky stairs in his Brick Lane digs. I begin to wonder why anyone would want to leave sunny, beautiful, reasonably priced Lisbon, with its small but unique networks of emerging sounds seemingly on the cusp of something, for London's rat race of billionaires and insane rents.But of course the grass is always greener. Portugal's major problem is still the economy... Manuel felt limited in Portugal: "It's important to expand yourself. Portugal is difficult right now to find work and even internships. It's really difficult for them to pay. There aren't a lot of opportunities. Maybe the mentality of Portuguese people in general, it's... I don't wanna say they're closed, it's just different than what I personally need, and lots of people that are going out—we need different things..."

With URL increasingly dominating IRL, and not only the internet itself but the spread of musical style and technologies like video games all over the world, the only vestige of locality might be where a birth certificate was written. The tension lies between where you have come from and where you want to go—I wanted to go to Portugal, and many of the Portuguese wanted to come to London—and it can be difficult to find an artistic curiosity about where you have come from if where you want to go looks so much better, newer, or even just more practical. Or even just different...

Adam Harperhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-48299369460864386172014-10-13T14:14:00.002+01:002014-10-13T14:15:11.874+01:00'Cute Computer Chaos' (Boiler Room article)

I wrote an article to go with a Boiler Room gig featuring Hudson Mohawke, Oneohtrix Point Never and QT (click here to read). It takes desire as its theme, and excavates some of the history of the contemporary cuteogeddon.

This erupting soundworld is controversial today, blasphemously flaunting its colour and excess against the monochrome lo-fi minimalism of so much electronic music and provoking accusations of infantilism and overfeeding. A decade ago, among the guitars and disco and dubstep, these lands of cute computer chaos seemed scarcely imaginable. Like coal turning into gaudy diamond under immense pressures, these musicians seem to have metamorphosed the 'twee' of that decade's nu-folk and indie, as well as the wry playfulness of its gameboy grime, into the infectiously crazy grin of 'cute'. Kitsch, you say? Oh, you mumble sweetly along to Casio and gentrify cities with cupcakes? Here's a lavish synthesiser panorama, glittering with HD twinkle and silky vocals. You like to put a little bit of 8-bit into your dubstep? Here's a helium hardcore extravaganza blaring with preset simulacra and convulsing towards post-human ecstasy. Be careful what you wish for. Where has this pressure, this ever more lurid escapism come from?

Daniel 'Oneohtrix Point Never' Lopatin in the video for Ford & Lopatin's 'World of Regret'

As well as enjoying this music in itself – intensely, almost to the point of panic – you notice symbols of enjoyment represented within it, now crushed and squeezed into so many objectives of hyperreal desire and compulsive fantasy: soul, swagger, sex, sparkle and sweetness. The underground has spent decades avoiding pop – now it's out-popping pop, seizing its thrills and simulations and partying with them as hard as possible because tomorrow never really comes.Adam Harperhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-45647312388464776482014-08-18T18:56:00.002+01:002014-08-18T18:56:46.873+01:00user703918785 [James Ferraro]: SUKI GIRLZ 18Ferraro's SUKI GIRLZ is little more than a collection of loops of sketches, or sketches of loops, sounding like offcuts from Cold or NYC, Hell 3:00am. It doesn't get more beats than SUKI GIRLZ really, and the instrumental Ferraro still feels underrated in the shadow of his earlier releases. Yet as ever there's a lot you can read into his sounds, culturally, if you want to. 'SUKI GIRLZ 18' is one of the stranger tracks in the collection, its samples heavy with (beige leather) baggage. I first heard it at sunset while trespassing through this environment, which couldn't have been more appropriate. I wrote this in the platinum piece: 'Its sparkly bell tree blossoming as if unveiling some spectacular luxury product on a slowly rotating pedestal, while android voices provide inscrutable commentary.'

It's one of those tracks that's the perfect union of understanding and not understanding. A hymn-like hush behind a kick drum with a lumpy, breathless quality, like a skipping heartbeat or a faltering, exhausted trudge. It kicks up clouds of gold glitter within which ecstatic voices and whistles curl upwards. And as if to label this image, inscrutable voices are superimposed onto it, not warm but insistent, and calmly, fatalistically logical:

m... m... m... ambi...
m... m... m... ambi...
Colorize

Adam Harperhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-1656073680991243632014-08-16T19:05:00.000+01:002014-08-16T19:06:49.336+01:00M-O-R-S-E: Keep MeEmpty (Extended) by M-O-R-S-E

track down pillared marble halls,

silk hangings whisper in that a.m. dark,

the subjects are asleep or dead and the king is still on the throne.

Only the finest.
Adam Harperhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-87146982152932088572014-08-11T15:48:00.004+01:002014-08-11T15:48:38.881+01:00Dutch E Germ: Nami NamiAnother platinum-plated beat: of all of the releases covered, Dutch E Germ's In.Rak.Dust is one of the most varied, because ensconced within its hard-edged casing are several ethnic musics derived from areas that are currently a focus of Western anxiety. 'Black Sea' might be sampling something like the Ukrainian lira, 'Elephant' is a lurid hologram of China, and this one, 'Nami Nami,' can't be sure where the sample comes from but it appears to be an Arabic lullaby popularised by Tehran-born American singer Azam Ali. Alongside the cybernetic percussion, the whole album has an air of tension and ominousness, as if sounding out potential future conflicts in all their hi-tech sublimity. Yet as this track best exemplifies, there is also a balance of elegance and beauty to it.Adam Harperhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-44242827800003793162014-08-08T20:08:00.000+01:002014-08-11T15:48:49.976+01:00bine☃: PATIENCETHINGS WILL BE BETTER FROM NOW ON by bine☃So I'ma do a series of tracks coming out of the piece on gleaming grey / platinum beats. First up, strong newcomer bine☃ (h/t Hi Hi Whoopee, thanks :D).

Ringing glass tubes, each containing a rising executive elevator. Postmodern chandeliers twinkling. Underpinning it all, though, sad to say, that thug heart. Delicate luxury elegance riding in an armoured car.Adam Harperhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-36006999242642266982014-08-07T17:55:00.001+01:002014-08-07T17:55:41.386+01:00System Focus: Gleaming Grey

The cover of bine☃'s IT HURTS 2 INHALE

The next System Focus is here, and it's on a new wave of gleaming grey, platinum beats (click here to read). It looks at producers such as bine☃, DYNOOO, Dutch E Germ, M-O-R-S-E, Sentinel, Subaeris, Weed Konducta, and James Ferraro on his new SUKI GIRLZ, and how their music is made of metal, glass, tasers and luxury. I'll post some of the best tracks from it and relevant to it up here in the coming days.

Beat-making is typically a low-concept process, and such styles emerge organically like storms over the sea. In the past few months, and in many ways over the past few years, one has emerged with a particular brooding, hi-tech, alienated feel, spanning hip-hop and more experimental forms. It's marked out by metallic or glassy sounds, spurts of cybernetic hi-hats, atmospheric synth pads washed in reverb, a downcast, captivated, sometimes almost depressive mood, and the vague but provocative suggestion of luxury and distant climes...

 sentinel's hybrid

If these beats were made of something, it might be platinum, the most precious metal. Platinum is the gold beyond gold... Like a symbol for a kind of empty wealth addiction, platinum is a lonely, joyless metal, somehow more inhuman than all the others. It's highly unreactive, but that's just another way of saying it won't tarnish, remaining intimidatingly perfect. Like the music of Drake, The Weeknd and Kanye on Yeezus, platinum beats bring the golden bling associated with some more straightforwardly entertaining hip-hop beats styles into a grim, heavy, flawless, extreme, post-human and, eventually, downright weird greyness...

 DYNOOO's These Flaws Are Mine to War With

In any case, there's certainly a lot of metal in these tracks, clanging and gleaming between the struts of percussion like commodities laid out all nice in a window display. But these tracks also suggest cars on the assembly line, pieced together by the stop-start movements of robotic arms. Tuned metal percussion (or 'metallophones') has been used by both Ferraro and Al Qadiri since 2011...

M.E.S.H's Scythians

Glass (at least traditionally) is what screens are made of and it's been a popular office-block building material lately, it divides and shields people from the outside world—or the inside world. Glass can be both beautiful and dangerous, it's delicate, precarious; hitting it, even for music, is asking for trouble. Or maybe the glass sounds are really diamonds. In any case, it's often difficult to tell the sonic difference between glass and metal, so musically speaking they merge into the same substance: hard, cold, inorganic, mirror-like...

 M-O-R-S-E's Empty

Rather than using it as just another beat-making tool, these producers really seem to understand the inherently strange qualities of this percussive structure. It's a thin, rapid-fire sound that at first seems too pervasive and mechanical to be pleasurable, but soon makes a compelling contrast to the smoother material beneath it. The sound's technological connotations are many—it could be a robotic hummingbird, a detailed manufacturing process using a tiny drill or jackhammer, a money-counting machine, or even the taser that police forces and militaries all over the world are now armed with...

 bine☃'s THINGS WILL BE BETTER FROM NOW ON

Something else that marks out this style, underlining but complicating its theme of luxury, are the hints of ethnicity that run through it, adding a dimension of globalisation to its darkness... Ferraro reflects the globalisation of luxury lifestyle on SUKI GIRLZ (the word 'Suki' has many different significances across Asia), many of its tracks (for example, "2″ and "19″) opening with synthesised female voices boasting simultaneously with Asian accents or in Asian languages about their status and decadent appeals, as if they were talking commodities made bilingual for sale to the travelling business class...

James Ferraro's SUKI GIRLZ

DYNOOO's brilliant tape These Flaws Are Mine To War With is particularly rich in this way, each track a cyborg concatenation of fragments—not so much a beat as a bouquet of loops—that, like beats by Karmelloz, nonetheless suggest a coherent viewpoint, maybe that of an algorithmic science probe on the surface of an alien(ated) Earth. Alongside airy and glassy tones, DYNOOO places the cries of eagles, synthesised speech, laser guns, and what could be torn pieces of film music. The suggestion is of an intelligence that has great power but, frighteningly, is nouveau-information-riche and not yet fully mature...

Dutch E Germ's In.Rak.Dust
Adam Harperhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-59135636680724315062014-08-06T15:02:00.001+01:002014-08-08T11:07:48.871+01:00voltex: fireflyvoltex album by voltexVoltex's dazzling, exploratory tracks are just as unique as tac_'s - again, pseudo-primitive and drawing on vocaloid as a colour among many rather than a centre-stage source of The Vocals, but this time with techy synths alongside. As if composing purely by textural contour rather than harmony, the vocaloid leaps up and down, landing on a different spot each time, like an over-excited whippersnapper. This is part of a framework that seems to echo footwork, but is by no means adopting or conforming to its formulas - footwork approximated by a computer intelligence, or, indeed, a vocaloid. Difficult to pick a best track since they're all different consequences of more or less the same process, but I love that Windows 95 timbre in 'firefly,' from the recent S/T, melting quizzically downwards. 'night scene' is brill too (nice chordal weft), and 'beautyful moon light' and 'blue flower garden' are my favourites from the previous album spring.Adam Harperhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-38648598580160344242014-08-06T14:12:00.000+01:002014-08-07T08:17:58.618+01:00tac_: little_courage & my_magicmerotronica by tac_Someone else I touched on in the voice piece, Japanese artist tac_ has been doing some interesting things with vocaloid - chief among them being making them seem old-fashioned. Or perhaps not old-fashioned... perennial. Like the Polygon Prompt track, this one is dissonant, but only subtly - thin golden circles going gently in and out of alignment, both naively and according to Nature's cosmic design. tac_ threads the vocaloid like a vine into various grandma and grandpa instruments - organ, a mellotron and xylophones. The whole album explores similar combinations (the sequel I found a little too full, maybe), and suggests fairy kingdoms nestled and glowing in the hulls of old rusty tech. Here's what I wrote:

Then there's tac_ for whom vocaloids are a perfect element gently woven into dainty, elfin compositions. Another sound tac_ frequently uses is that of the mellotron, which in many ways is the forerunner of the vocaloid, being an analogue sample-based synthesiser where keys were attached to tape loops featuring recorded instruments such as strings and flutes (you might know it from the opening to "Strawberry Fields Forever"). Both dolls designed to emulate more organic musics, the vocaloid and mellotron complement one another not as fake, insufficient, robotic entities, but as toys that have run away to a miniature fantasy kingdom where they can now be loved only by history and nature.

Alongside the mellotron, the vocaloid becomes a velveteen rabbit, fleeing from revulsion and supercession and becoming magically real among the fireflies, brambles and dark blue evenings.
Adam Harperhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-56437083310742625712014-08-03T17:03:00.000+01:002014-08-03T17:04:50.327+01:00polygron prompt: avaricemisterious pieces by これすてろーる☆れこーず
Sorry for the mp3-blogging pause. Gonna upload a few of my favourite vocaloid tracks (in the wake of my piece featuring em). This one, 'Avarice' by Polygron Prompt, is from 2011, but it really got me, bringing out the strange, fragile quality of the medium. It's Hatsune Miku, and she's singing against a techy jungly beat that suggests a futuristic computer game circa 1998, all its constituent elements propelled forward and spread out into mystique diffusion as if in search of bots to frag. The kicker is the tangibly dissonant way Miku sits on top of it, especially at the ends of her phrases. Intended or not, it's the perfect setting for vocaloids' technocratic uncanniness.Adam Harperhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-61036655585523154272014-07-17T16:35:00.000+01:002014-07-17T16:35:06.477+01:00System Focus: The Evolution of the Voice in the Digital Landscape

Click here to read the third System Focus, which brings together a number of different strands in underground music under the theme of 'the voice in the digital landscape.' It was a chance to talk about some recent releases that had really intrigued me by Nima, Metallic Ghosts and Blank Banshee, as well as take a look at vocaloid culture and some of the uses to which these synthetic singers have been put, but there's loads in there.

You might say that the voice is the most human of all the elements in music. It comes from deep within our bodies, organically, ever since we came to be human, and indeed long before. It is probably the first musical instrument that we learned to recognise, and, since it is built into most of us, the first that we learn to use. Yet the voice is much more than just a sound, however primordial. It represents a person: their activity, agency, opinions, experience, their self-projection. In doing so, it differentiates itself from the environment around it, musical or cultural, either drawing power from this context or somehow standing against it. Or, most intriguingly, doing both at the same time...

 Roger Troutman of Zapp using a talkbox
There's a tendency to regard the digital world as non-human, as encroaching on humanity, but I think that's quite wrong. The internet is not just a landscape made up of technology, it is one made up of humanity. Like it or not, Facebook and Twitter are made of people, and of people's voices in particular. People's voices and the lives behind them reduced to assertions, opinions, arguments, anxieties, reduced to pieces of data, to samples—but sounding out nonetheless. And this landscape is reflected and explored in the music it produces, where the lines between the human and its technological environment are no longer clearly drawn...

The final tracks of both albums (called "Landscapes" on Spirit Sign) feature synthesised speech, as if completing a transition from human to machine, yet it's set against some of Nima's most elegant instrumental textures. At the end of SEE FEEL REEL, a voice almost obsessively repeats crypto-romantic refrains such as I'm… in love… with… the… digital age… over strings, before switching to breathy voice-like tones as if it were dissolving into air. Nima's music certainly lives in the digital age, and all the elements within it expand to fill the enormous space that results...

Nima's SEE FEEL REEL
Both musically and conceptually, the album suggests a dream cityscape as it might have appeared at the turn of the 1990s, a weird, multicoloured, postmodern union of the past and the future, where citizens of all professions glide beatifically down immaculate beige sidewalks past bright red fire stations, neo-1930s banking skyscrapers, parping bandstands, faux-eighteenth-century colleges, and green, green, lawns, all presided over by a moustachioed mayor who warmly greets his public at the exponential tree-planting and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. One of the crucial components of this digital landscape—now looking rather misplaced, both poignant and arrogant, in the post-recession era—is the voice. Fittingly, the vocals, and the human beings hinted at behind it, are just yet further objects swirling in the cityscape, forming its melodies, scatting ooh and aah or urging Work it! and Get down like feckless, automated cheerleaders. It's a landscape we might recognize and enjoy with a little disquiet mixed in...

Metallic Ghosts' The City of Ableton

Sampling processes of all kinds appear in Blank Banshee's album Blank Banshee 1, a masterwork of the new digital psychedelia, and it's quite easy not to really notice that the album is filled with voices at every turn, much like its videos are filled with virtual beings, objects and environments. Despite the fact that these voices are pitched up, down and all around, they're never more than virtual avatars of their owners: social media masks that are both freeing and constraining. Freeing in that they allow the voice to move to new places and be new people, constraining in that these surrogate people are not yet as infinitely flexible and free as they would like to think they are, and might still have an air of the uncanny about them. This double-edged nature of the human user in the modern digital playground, its mixture of strange new opportunities and dangers, might be why one of the tracks goes by the name "Anxiety Online..."

Blank Banshee's Blank Banshee 1
Voltex makes gorgeous footwork-like tracks from joyfully leaping vocaloids and stereophonically pingponging synths. Then there's tac_ for whom vocaloids are a perfect element gently woven into dainty, elfin compositions. Another sound tac_ frequently uses is that of the mellotron, which in many ways is the forerunner of the vocaloid, being an analogue sample-based synthesiser where keys were attached to tape loops featuring recorded instruments such as strings and flutes (you might know it from the opening to "Strawberry Fields Forever"). Both dolls designed to emulate more organic musics, the vocaloid and mellotron complement one another not as fake, insufficient, robotic entities, but as toys that have run away to a miniature fantasy kingdom where they can now be loved only by history and nature...

Top Vocaloid Hatsune Miku
Adam Harperhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-49159464563739499342014-06-25T17:45:00.000+01:002014-06-25T17:45:13.883+01:00System Focus: Inside the New Digital DIY Labels

Photo by Andrew Volk

Apologies for the delay - the second System Focus for the Fader is out (click here to see it) and it's based around a series of interviews with some labels in the online underground: Illuminated Paths, Ailanthus, 1080p, Zoom Lens, Dopefish Family and Aural Sects. This one was a real pleasure to put together, as I got to learn about how things work behind the scenes at some of my favourite labels on the emerging frontiers of underground operation, and discovered a real community.

You might have expected [the growth of the internet] to make labels—whose role it usually is to organise the discovery, representation, manufacturing and distribution of their artists' music—redundant in the modern era. And as a result, you might have expected music producers and their listeners alike to be reduced to an atomised population of lone computer-clickers. But curiously, labels are flourishing, and they form key nodes in a new form of DIY musical culture that is as sociable as ever. How did these online labels form and who's behind them? How do they work, and what drives them?...

The folks behind Aural Sects (image by Micah Clark)

One of the things that kick-started my curiosity about this new class of labels was when I received a box from Florida. It had been packed by Josh Rogers, the current manager of the Illuminated Paths label. As well as several cassettes (including a reissue of LATE NIGHT DELIGHT by Luxury Elite and Saint Pepsi, one of the key vaporwave albums), it contained a map of Historic Downtown Melbourne, FL, a State Farm Insurance keychain, a Lucky Charms straw, a section of a t-shirt from the Bluewater Network, a newspaper called Pet Gazette (featuring the cover line "Your Valentine Pet is Right Before Your Eyes-LOOK Inside!"), a couple of off-brand Pogs (remember them?), a toy cow you can clip together, all kinds of flyers, and, best of all, an expansive bib for a restaurant called Captain Quackenbush: The Seafood Specialist, featuring an ecstatic cartoon lobster (who is, in turn, wearing a Quackenbush bib). Not the sort of thing you find in England, where I'm based. Rogers often mails off cassettes with, as he puts it, "local and abroad ephemera from my travels and otherwise" included...

 LATE NIGHT DELIGHT cassettes, care of Illuminated Paths

"We made secret, closed and public Facebook groups wherein we actively developed brand new cultural signifiers for our new community. Each and every one of us was doing something completely different from the next and we were all coming from such vastly different backgrounds, cultures, generations, class, etc. Collaboration was key, we all supported one another and that naturally lead to collaborations, cross country meet-ups, labels, websites, web concerts, we started doing whatever we wanted. The community is different for everybody, but it means a lot to everybody."...

 Zoom Lens art

The Zoom Lens label goes even further with the net-based ideology than Aural Sects, emblazoning its Bandcamp page with the legend "WE ARE A LABEL AND COLLECTIVE OF MUSICIANS. HUMANITY ACROSS THE DIGITAL DIVIDE. DIGITAL PUNK ROCK SPIRIT. FUCK REAL LIFE." Today, the label has a clear Japanese-influenced aesthetic of sweetness and dreaminess, with joyous 8bit from Yasumiyasumi and Slime Girls, and gentle pop from Yoshino Yoshikawa, Yeule and i-fls, bittersweet like a green tea latte on a rainy Sunday afternoon... the Japanese connection "has given Zoom Lens its sense of 'punk rock' aesthetics. To enjoy anime in the United States is punk rock. To listen to J-Pop is punk rock."...

 Dopefish Family's Andrei Mitroshin

Many of these labels manifest IRL by releasing on physical formats, of course. For most online labels, that means mail. "Oh man, so much mail," says 1080p's MacFarlane. "These days I'll go once or twice a week down to the post office in Chinatown on my way to school, where I'm on very good terms with the ladies who work there." But it doesn't work everywhere: "Russian post is bloody hell," says Mitroshin of Dopefish Family. "So all physical stuff we make (or will make) goes only with our friends or people that can reach us here." MacFarlane is fond of cassettes, though: "The physical practicality of them, they are nice and small to post, cheaper and lower risk to manufacture than vinyl and I've always had cars with tape decks." They're also "like a more casual place to experiment than vinyl that can be released reasonably quickly."

1080p's Richard MacFarlane

Garrett hopes the label can "move into the direction of digitally tangible releases or limited art pieces. I feel like the existence of physical items is important in preserving our own attached memories to such listening experiences, yet sometimes I feel like it's impractical in an ecological sense and is slowly growing less acceptable for the shifting musical listening trends." Then, elegantly and poignantly echoing Zoom Lens's sonic and visual aesthetic: "We are in constant conflict in losing the physical things that bring us a sense of connection, yet we enjoy the ease of instant gratification." Ailanthus's Michael confesses, "I always wonder where these files will be in decades, like what if kids go to thrift stores and rummage old external hard drives for rare internet music."
Adam Harperhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-57378097507634385652014-06-02T17:24:00.001+01:002014-06-02T17:24:01.694+01:00DYNOOO: These Flaws Are Mine To War With
<embed src="http://www.datpiff.com/embed/mixtape/m3718422/" quality="high" wmode="transparent" pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="507" height="221" allowScriptAccess="always" allowScripting="on">
Download Mixtape | Free Mixtapes Powered by DatPiff.com
DYNOOO caught our attention last summer with Mesh N2 Air, with its flux-engineered biospheres populated by brave new creatures. This new free mixtape, These Flaws Are Mine To War With (grab it on Datpiff), I like even more. That air of hi-tech naivety (the mind of an AI) becomes more assertive, more captivating, as the newly evolved material (part plant, part fish, part plastic, part silicon) presses against the geodesic panels, and darkly, calculatingly shows its new visage to the supervisors. Try 'Beyond M,' 'CR X' or 'AXs (Ma Benchpress).' And like another comparable recent release, Sentinel's hybrid, it suggests all this without overt conceptuality. These are just some sounds. Sounds in strange and compelling arrangements. The way things sound today.Adam Harperhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-36276189481361288052014-05-26T15:43:00.001+01:002014-05-26T15:47:41.093+01:00yeongrak: can't rememberASCII GIRLS by yeongrakI'm always really interested to see what's occupying spaces formerly occupied by vaporwave. Solid (former-?) vaporwave label Business Casual 87 have been branching out lately into some seriously accomplished productions, and (among others) it's resulted in a gorgeous, rich EP of cloudy beats from yeongrak, ASCII GIRLS. Sealing that family connection between cloud rap and vapor, it comes a bit out of that Tri Angle sound (but isn't derivative) and yet has something of vaporwave's feeling of water condensation on the glass walls of a steamy Utopia. I like the main hook of 'can't remember' best - it somehow manages to strum a marimba AND suggest a hand swishing through a stream. But on a giant scale. 'stuff garden' is good too. Adam Harperhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-90288671294808826612014-05-20T16:25:00.000+01:002014-06-03T15:13:39.175+01:00sentinel: MELT-BUGATTI_ hybrid by sentinelPreviously just a Soundcloud account containing a few brilliant sketches and some mixes that'll give you a great guided tour of the emerging hi-tech world, sentinel's debut hybrid dropped yesterday on Bandcamp and it has me by the heart and lungs. Like an airborne nanocyte invasion. Essentially it's a compilation of those Soundcloud tracks (no longer there) but it's no less electromagnetic for that, and now they come in nutritious, terrifying FLAC. I name-checked sentinel (or SENTINL, then) in the recent System Focus on DBHB/E+E/FL/TCF/TF/YB, but really the Baltimore producer is part-way between their stuff, alien grime, Night Slugs' / Fade to Mind's machine club, Ferraro and hi-tech experimental noise too. So the soundworld isn't entirely unfamiliar, but it's still abrasively fresh, especially in this one's hands - sentinel is getting its armatures in there as well as anyone, creating something that is integrated, unpredictable, very affecting, almost incomparably future.

'MELT-BUGATTI_' is my favourite. Not metal vs muscle, nothing so C20th. Organic matter [user] <<ab54a98ceb1f0ad2>> non-organic matter [user] > graphene, smart surfaces, plastics, carbon fibres, breathables, exotic plant matter, gels > sudden peristalsis in the newly bleached gullet expels amniofluids </ab54a98ceb1f0ad2><ab54a98ceb1f0ad2>> may cause initial nausea > protocols retracted and re-injected in new entrainments > human senses exhaled.</ab54a98ceb1f0ad2>

(via the amazing Hi-Hi-Whoopee)Adam Harperhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2646097089019633171.post-13117471857944695952014-05-19T16:43:00.002+01:002014-08-11T15:49:22.475+01:00Syrrup: A1 come overR+B by SyrrupThis one's a little old (August 2013), but cmon, ain't it the sweetest. I've been listening to Syrrup's R+B on the way home every day for about a week, since it seems made for those summer nights where the heat gives way to the breeze and the birds give way to the rustling leaves (save for that distant nightingale). But this Viennese producer's music is so gentle and loving it can take you home wherever you are. Lil bits of R and lil bits of B roll in and out like stars from behind the clouds, while moonlight drones softly light up the sleeping world around you. S/he also has an equally beatific cassette album out on Illuminated Paths. Yeah, come on over.Adam Harperhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com


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Very small splash pool. Very expensive for what you got. Would be OK for toddlers and very young children.
I am afraid, the title says it all. The changing facilities are dirty, the pool is only okay, and it is over priced. Some of the staff are fine but a couple give you the impression that they are doing you a favour by being there. My kids go to swimming lessons there and they allow parents to leave the...
Went here with my husband and three children aged 8, 5 and 3 one Friday over the Easter break. It was 32 euros for basically a swimming pool with a couple of slides, which i thought was very expensive.
This was our first time here. We are from Dublin and we're staying in Dunmore East for on holidays.
The place...
Found the water cold on a few visits and had to leave. It's been open a while and needs a revamp. the staff are very nice and it's definitely a handy option for passing the day on wet or cold day during a holiday in tramore.
we were in Tramore last September with our kids and Splashworld was a place we visited twice. It is nothing more than a nice swimming pool! Don't expect a world of options...
We came here on a cold wet windy Monday morning and had a blast. The wave machine was a highlight of our holiday. Clean pool and changing rooms. Friendly staff
We cam here with our children. The pool is lovely and they enjoyed the slides. I felt they were quiet safe in the pool. But the changing room and the décor could do with a little updating. Not the biggest pool and I would say it gets very crowded in the Summer. The family changing rooms are a good size.
It was okey.
The service was okey.
Not very helpful.
Not friendly.
The pool was good.
Wave machine was great.
Clean, cubicles are big enough to get 3 of us in, kids loved it. we had a great day in Splashworld. Communal family room is good too. Baby seat in the family area, which is always handy for the toddlers.
Have been attending ad hoc since it was opened - kids love it but i wish more was in the baby pool and more mats in the changing rooms for standing on. Love the wave machine and hubbie loves the water pipes LOL
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Configure GrabPress feeds to deliver fresh videos for your blog.
This plugin is really helping me out with my overall marketing campaign. My inbound marketing procedures have sometimes been left wanting simply because I wasn't very adept at working with video... especially when it came to WordPress. With the Grab Media plugin, I'm able to automatically incorporate banner ads with these videos, and on top of that, I can easily search for the exact type of video that I want with the Video Feed. I can't complain at all about this plugin, and once I get fully accustomed to it, there's no telling what I'll be able to do with it.
I feel like this is magic! I have tried many times to post videos to my site, with utter failure and frustration.
Not only was it done easily- but it looks super!
My hits are already increasing! Keep up the good work!!!
I run a website that has a fair amount of bilingual viewers and GrabPress offers exceptional content for this audience, in both English and Spanish. The content partners include both newcomers and well-established brands – always professionally created. I experienced some initial trouble where the videos wouldn't always display properly when I selected them for a post, but the problem was fixed with the latest update.
My main suggestion at this point: display more search results and make it possible to search/view the latest videos by specific content providers without having to enter a keyword. I find that the videos are driving higher traffic to my website and they consistently meet my standards. When I make my posts, the only work I find necessary is adding a better featured image and at times adding a few more tags. Otherwise GrabPress is golden.
Experienced a number of issues with the Catalog Search functionality of this plug-in. Along with inconsistency in Posts from the Catalog Search vs. The AutoPoster of this plug-in. I'm also not very impressed with lack of layout options. The position of the Corresponding Graphic AD appearing below while the Video AD is playing.
Would be nice if this was banner Ad spanning the Width of the Video below instead of a crazy square Box AD. I'm not crazy about the UX Design issues with both the front-end and back-end.
The Video Feed Category content is not reliable. I selected Science & Technology for the desired Autopost content. Yet, got a business video titled "European Union News - EU Commission, China, Cyprus, Parliamentary Vote" Which has nothing to do with either science nor Technology. I'm not very impressed with the over all Quality control.
I recently learned about this rockin' GrabPress plugin and had to try it out after hearing about it from a few friends and then reading tons of reviews. I can't tell you enough that THIS is the ultimate plugin! It works with WordPress like a dream and makes my job a ton easier (integration at it's best). I love the customization available and the fact that I can quickly and easily search for relevant videos that my visitors will actually find useful. I'm so happy with everything that I've shared my experience on FB and Twitter just to spread the love and share with friends and followers! ;-)
I've been using GrabPress for a few months now and it's been so super to use a plugin like this to create relevant content via video that attracts more visitors as well as having them stay on my site longer. There's always the chance they might click on an advertisement or two also, but attracting traffic is golden. GrabPress makes it very easy to insert a video in a post, add some of your own content if you desire, and publish it.
A great plugin that works and pulls only the content you want!
Hey people this is Max Hart with http://www.musclebuilding4strength.com. I added grabpress and didn't realize how much I was going to get. There is so much video-content I get to help my site. There is all types of info and I'm sure my guests like it and stick around.
It's a great piece of equipment that will definitely help your site.Don't waste time-just use it.
I have been looking for an easy, hassle-free way to add contextually-relevant video to my website and blog posts, to better engage my visitors. Searching for videos on the web has been a pain - from trying to filter through to find only high-quality, relevant content, tweaking embed codes so they fit properly on my site and adding relevant metadata to help with discovery. I'm so glad I found this Grab Media plugin - it integrates seamlessly with WordPress and allows me to easily search for relevant videos, while on my site, saving me a ton of time in my workflow! In addition, all of the video metadata is already there and appears to be optimized for good video SEO. Lastly, I'm thrilled that this plug-in generates revenue for me and adds to my bottom line. Very pleased!
I was skeptical of this plugin prior to using it. I am incredibly surprised at how easy it can be placed on each post and how it seamlessly integrates into them as well. It also allows yuo to customize the video size and select each category that you desire.
Plus they pay you for impressions.
Overall, this is a fantastic plugin that is easy to use.
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What's Ringing Rachel's 'Belle'?
Rachel Belle
A preschool inside a West Seattle nursing home brings joy to young and old
Rachel Belle | July 06, 2015 5:49 pmWest Seattle's Intergenerational Learning Center is a preschool with participants between the ages of six months to 90.
Get your own, personal superhero action figure made by Bellevue's You Kick Ass
Rachel Belle | July 01, 2015 5:26 pmMark Cuban, of "Shark Tank" fame, invested $100,000 in Bellevue's You Kick Ass, a company that will turn a picture of any person into a superhero action figure.
Edith Macefield's Ballard home could be demolished
Rachel Belle | June 30, 2015 6:02 pmThe saga of Edith Macefield's 115 year old home continues as its latest owners find it is too expensive to get up to code. Now, it may be donated or demolished.
'A Taste of Home' tells the story of history, food in Seattle's Chinatown
Rachel Belle | June 25, 2015 5:41 pmTwo documentarians from Singapore became fascinated with the food and history of Seattle's Chinatown.
A local cop designed a manly, durable diaper bag for baby toting dads
Rachel Belle | June 23, 2015 2:41 pmLocal cop, Jeff Shepard, was not a fan of the floral, pastel diaper bags on the market. So he designed his own. Now he sells his Down Range Baby bags, designed by a Lakewood military bag and bulletproof vest manufacturer.
A Seattle man is throwing a huge retirement party for his service dog
Rachel Belle | June 22, 2015 3:40 pmSeattle's Alex Stone is never without his service dog, Fraser. Born with cerebral palsy, Fraser is the only reason Alex was able to live independently and travel. But it's time for 10 year old Fraser to retire.
Anxiety is now the No. 1 mental health issue plaguing college students
Rachel Belle | June 18, 2015 5:49 pmAnxiety is now the most common mental health diagnosis among college students, knocking depression into the number two slot. The American College Health Association says one in six college students have been diagnosed with, or treated for, anxiety within the last year.
A profile of the river rafting, four-letter word blurting nun on Shaw Island
Rachel Belle | June 17, 2015 5:32 pmOur Lady of the Rock's Mother Hildegard says it's hard to recruit new, young nuns these days, especially in the famously nonreligious northwest.
Prayer and Work: the life of a Benedictine nun on Shaw Island
Rachel Belle | June 16, 2015 5:41 pmOn Shaw Island, the smallest and least populated San Juan Island reached by ferry, is Our Lady of the Rock, a monastery home to seven Benedictine nuns.
An ex-con on how intelligence and street smarts equal a successful prison escape
Rachel Belle | June 15, 2015 5:33 pmEx-con Larry Lawton says intelligence, street smarts, inside help, and lots of free time are the perfect storm for a successful escape.
Ring My Belle on KIRO Radio
Listen: Ring My Belle
- Toddlers and senior citizens play together daily at West Seattle's Intergenerational Learning Center
- Get your own, personal superhero action figure made by Bellevue's You Kick Ass
- Ring My Belle: Why buy toys for your kids when you can rent them
- Edith Macefield's Ballard home could be demolished
- Ring My Belle: Religion is not an excuse not to vaccinate your kids in California
- Seattle has a high amount of middle-aged fathers
Who is Rachel Belle?
Rachel Belle's "Ring My Belle" segment airs Monday-Friday on The Ron & Don Show at 4:33pm and 6:33pm. You can hear "Ring My Belle Weekends" Sundays at 3:00pm. Rachel is a northern California native who loves anything and everything culinary, playing Scrabble, petting cats and getting outside.
Please send Rachel your story ideas, weekend events and taco truck tips!


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- 800.878.7323
Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economyby Dean Baker
Synopses & Reviews
For the second time this decade, the US economy is sinking into a recession due to the collapse of a financial bubble. The most recent calamity is likely to produce a downturn deeper and longer than the stock market crash of 2001. Dean Baker argues not only that competent economists should have recognized the developing housing bubble, but also that policy makers and the media cheerfully neglected those economists who did predict danger. Baker doesnt engage in 20-20 hindsight, but documents the fundamental policy changes since 1980 that destabilized the economy and eroded the broad prosperity of the post-war period. His expert analysis explains the outcomes clearly so we can prevent similar financial disasters in the future.
About the Author
Dean Baker has more than 25 years of research experience in occupational and environmental epidemiology. The primary emphasis of his research has been on community-based epidemiological studies. During the past several years, he has focused on developmental toxicity and children's environmental
health. He has conducted several epidemiological research studies examining chronic health effects of gestational and early childhood exposure to heavy metals and organochlorine chemicals. His other area of research has been on the health effects of psychosocial stressors in the workplace and in
communities exposed to environmental hazards. In both of these areas, Dr. Baker has made contributions to the epidemiological study design and methods. He was elected 3 times as Secretary-Treasurer of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology, and was a founding member. He is an
active teacher at the university, directing an occupational medicine residency program and supervising graduate students. Mark J Nieuwenhuijsen has been involved in various environmental exposure assessment, epidemiology, and health risk assessment studies in the Netherlands, the UK, Eastern Europe
and the US. His interests include the health effects of chlorination by-products in water, traffic related air pollution and metals, specifically in relation to reproductive, respiratory, renal and cancer effects. He has published over a hundred papers. He graduated from Wageningen University, the
Netherlands, and went to do a PhD at the National Heart and Lung Institute in London, UK. For his post doc he went to the University of California, Davis, USA after which he took up a faculty position atImperial College London, UK. In January 2007 he joined the Center for Research in Environmental
Epidemiology (CREAL) in Barcelona, Spain as a Research Professor. He is associate editor on the journals 'Occupational and Environmental Medicine' and the 'Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology'.
Thomas Frank is the author of "What's the Matter with Kansas? "and "One Market Under God," The founding editor of "The Baffler "and a contributing editor at "Harper's," Frank has received a Lannan award and been a guest columnist for "The New York Times," He lives, of course, in Washington, D.C.
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German soccer star does Miami right
After a night of celebrating the Miami Heat winning the NBA championship, German soccer star Jérôme Boateng decided to continue the celebration on Friday evening, heading to South Beach for dinner at CATCH Miami. Boateng, who's in town for a charity beach football match, was joined by a large group of friends "who enjoyed essentially everything on the menu," dishes an insider. Following dinner, the group stopped next door to SL Miami where they were seated at a VIP table beside the DJ booth. Says our spy: "Boateng was clearly letting loose for the evening, hopping into the booth to take over for the night." Indianapolis Colts QB Andrew Luck joined the delightfully named "Fux Friday" revelry alongside Boateng, who was seen "popping bottles" until the place closed.
On Our Radar
On Our Radar
- Actor Carlos Ponce selling home
- Kesley Grammer and wife spotted in Miami Beach
- Enrique Iglesias faces misdemeanor charges
- Jason Derulo talks new album, influences
- It's decision time for Dwyane Wade
- Launch party for Moscai hosted at The W
- Soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo spotted at W Hotel
- Magic Mike XXL stars at Miami Walk of Fame ceremony
- Irie Weekend a success
- Report: Prince Royce needs to pay up


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Comedian Ron White coming to Riverside
"Blue Collar Comedy" star Ron White is returning to the Riverside Theater April 12.
Last time White was in town was February 2012, when he performed stand-up at a sold-out Riverside. That's a typical accomplishment for White: he's sold more than 10 million CDs and DVDs and has been one of the top three grossing touring comedians in the U.S. over the past five years. »Read Full Article
Miley Cyrus showcases shock tactics, and talent, at BMO Harris Bradley Center
Miley Cyrus has described her polarizing new persona as "a strategic hot mess."
But from a short-term business perspective, the strategy seemed to have consequences at the BMO Harris Bradley Center in Milwaukee on Sunday. »Read Full Article(68)
Bel Canto tackles new sacred works
The Bel Canto Chorus and the Milwaukee Chamber Orchestra joined forces in the Basilica of St. Josaphat on Sunday afternoon to explore the topics on which the Christian world is focused at this time of year: death and resurrection.
The program, led by Richard Hynson, music director of both ensembles, opened with James MacMillan's "Seven Last Words from the Cross," written for chorus and string orchestra. »Read Full Article
Reports of 'flopping' Lady Gaga Summerfest show 'ridiculous,' says Live Nation exec
Reports of struggling ticket sales for Lady Gaga's upcoming tour--in particular her Summerfest headlining show June 26--have prompted a Live Nation executive to speak out to Billboard about the "ridiculous" claims.
"The run with Gaga over the last two tours has been incredibly successful, and this one is shaping up no differently," Arthur Fogel, chairman of the company's global touring division, producers of Gaga's forthcoming artRave: The ARTPOP Ball tour, told Billboard's Ray Waddell. Fogel added that the 29 North American shows currently on sale have grossed $26 million in ticket revenue, with 80 percent of all tickets for North America and Europe dates already sold. »Read Full Article(2)
In 3 weeks, Hank's gone from scruffy to star
Hank the Brewers dog was in rough condition when he wandered into the Milwaukee Brewers' spring training camp at Maryvale Baseball Park in Phoenix.
That was on Feb. 17. Since then — he'll have been in camp three weeks Monday — he's been cleaned up, checked up and loved up. »Read Full Article(22)
Free doughnut at Krispy Kreme Sunday as treat for Daylight Saving Time
Daylight Saving Time started today and Krispy Kreme is feeling sorry for all of us having to wake up an hour earlier (clocks should be set forward an hour).
So Krispy Kreme is giving out sweet treat freebies to make up for it: Visitors get one free original glazed doughnut Sunday, March 9. »Read Full Blog Post


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Professional Activities
Lawyers Club (advances women in the law and society)North County Chapter President
Lawyers Club (advances women in the law and society)Board Member
San Diego Chamber of Commerce - Legislative/Small Business AdvocacyCommittee Member
San Diego Chamber of CommerceState Budget Task Force Member
Mother Attorney Mentoring AssociationMember/Mentor
National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO)Member
American Bar InstituteMember
Society for Human Resources Manager (SHRM)Member - National and San Diego
San Diego County Bar AssociationEmployment Law Mentor / Member
Fisher & Phillips' Women's Initiative and Leadership CouncilChair
State Bar Association Member
Danielle Moore is a partner in the San Diego office. She also serves as a Co-Chair of the firm's Women's Initiative and Leadership Council.She represents and counsels employers in all aspects of labor and employment law, including employment discrimination, wrongful termination, workplace harassment, retaliation, unfair competition and wage-hour lawsuits, employment handbook and personnel policy preparation, and general preventive advice including hiring, discipline and termination practices.Danielle has experience litigating matters in state and federal courts, state administrative tribunals, such as the Fair Employment and Housing Commission, and in arbitration. She regularly conducts management training and lectures on labor and employment issues. Danielle also teaches an employment law course at San Diego State University's College of Extended Studies and serves on the Human Resources Advisory Board for the College.Danielle was selected as one of SD Metro's 40 Under 40 for 2013. The award honors the top 40 business people in San Diego under the age of 40. She was also selected as a San Diego County Top Attorney for 2014 in the Labor/Employment practice category and was chosen as one of the Best of the Bar in 2014 for Labor & Employment. Danielle is AV Peer Review Rated Preeminent by Martindale-Hubbell.Danielle started her career working on the United States Senate Judiciary Committee for Senator Charles Grassley in Washington D.C. While at the George Washington University Law School, she was a director of the Moot Court Board and was an award-winning, semi-finalist in the constitutional law moot court competition. Prior to joining the firm, Danielle practiced general business and construction-related litigation in San Diego, California. RecognitionSD Metro's 40 Under 40 for 2013Top Attorneys 2013 San Diego County - Semi-Finalist / Labor & EmploymentThe San Diego Daily TranscriptTop Attorneys 2014 San Diego County - Finalist / Labor & EmploymentThe San Diego Daily Transcript AV Peer Review Rated by Martindale-Hubbell News/MediaThe San Diego Daily Transcript, June 26, 2013Quoted: "Gay Marriage Gains Momentum With High Court Rulings"The San Diego Daily Transcript, March 1, 2013Quoted: "Paycheck Fairness Act Seeks To End Gender Gap"San Diego Business Journal, January 28, 2013"The Business of Law"The San Diego Daily Transcript, January 22, 2013"Influx of New Labor Laws to Keep Employers Busy"Union Tribune San Diego, January 21, 2013"On the Move"The San Diego Daily Transcript, January 8, 2013"Moore Elected to Fisher & Phillips Partnership"San Diego Metro, Daily Business Report, January 3, 2013"Danielle Moore Elected Partner at Fisher & PhillipsLawyers Club News, September 2012"New Member Profile"Lawyers Club News, June 2012"Lawyers Club Members Bring Their Kids to Lunch and Try Harry Potter"The San Diego Daily Transcript, June 2012"San Diego County Top Attorneys" - Nominated 2012For The Defense, Defense Research Institute, June 2005 Issue"Supreme Court Decision Radically Alters the Current Understanding of How CERCLA Applies to Private Cost Recovery Actions and May Deter Parties from Voluntarily Cleaning up Contaminated Sites"Quotes and SoundbitesPaid Sick Leave: Newest Wrinkle In Coordinating Leave August 25, 2014 E-cigarette Smoking In The Workplace May 28, 2014 Supreme Court's Gay Marriage Rulings Will Have An Impact on Employers June 26, 2013 Influx Of New Labor Laws To Keep Employers Busy January 23, 2013 PresentationsNew CFRA Regulations: Coming July 1, 2015 to a Leave Near You June 18, 2015The Affordable Care Act - Now That You Know The Basics, Come Learn The Next Level Tips and Advice You Need to Know About The ACA May 21, 2015Bring Your Own Devices - Just Don't Bring Me A Lawsuit! April 16, 2015Managing March Madness - Office pools, Alcohol, Marijuana, E-Cigarettes, Tattoos, Piercings and Other Maddening Behavior March 19, 2015Personal Relationships in the Workplace: Both Friend and Foe February 19, 2015Fisher & Phillips LLP Breakfast Briefing - The Top New Law And Changes To Make For 2015 January 15, 2015Fisher & Phillips LLP Breakfast Briefing In San Diego - The New California Sick Leave and How to Cure Legal Issues that Arise From Flu Season November 20, 2014Fisher & Phillips LLP Breakfast Briefing In San Diego - Invading Your Employees' Privacy: Finding a Balance Between an Employee's Freedom and an Employer's Need to Monitor September 18, 2014Fisher & Phillips LLP Breakfast Briefing In San Diego - Managing Employees and Social Media: Where is the line? August 21, 2014New Changes In The Law That Every Employer Needs to Know February 4, 2014ADA Master Class for BLR January 22, 2014The Top New Laws and Changes to make for 2014 January 16, 2014New Laws Every Employer Should KnowSpeaker, Pest Control Operators of California (PCOC)June, 2012, February 2013, and July 2013Featured speaker, One Day, Many Solutions - Employment Law Coast-to-CoastFisher & Phillips Seminar, La Jolla, CAMay 2, 2013Human Resource Management and the LawInstructor, San Diego State University College of Extended StudiesJuly 25 - October 17, 2012 Networking, Business Development and BalanceLead Organizer and Moderator, Lawyers Club, Carmel ValleyJune, 2012Employment Law Coast to Coast: Sick and Tired, Managing Employee Attendance Speaker, Fisher & Phillips LLP nationwide seminar for HR professionalsApril 2012New Employment Laws Your Business Cannot Afford to OverlookSpeaker, CEO Roundtable - IOA Insurance ServicesMarch, 2012Disabilities in the Workplace (Disability and Leave Law)Guest Lecturer, Long Beach State University Human Resources Management 460March, 2012Employment DiscriminationGuest Lecturer, Long Beach State University Human Resources Management 460March, 2012Labor & Employment Law Advice From a LawyerGuest Panelist, SCWC SHRMFebruary, 2012Harassment and Discrimination Training for Managers InstructorMidsize San Diego based company - 3 branch officesFebruary, 2012Harassment and Discrimination Training for ManagersLarge Los Angeles based companyDecember, 2011Employment Law 101 InstructorFisher & Phillips LLP Seminar for San Diego HR ProfessionalsOctober, 2011Hiring, Firing and Disciplining Without Getting SuedInstructor, Small San Diego based companySeptember, 2011Pest Control Operators of California - Board MeetingJuly, 2011Train the Trainer: Supervisor Anti-Harassment & Discrimination TrainingInstructor, Fisher & Phillips LLP San Diego SeminarJuly, 2011Employment Law Coast to Coast: Managing Leaves of AbsenceSpeaker, Fisher & Phillips LLP nationwide seminar for HR professionalsApril, 2011Changes in the Law Every Employer Should KnowSpeaker, Aspen Risk Management GroupMarch, 2011Harassment and Discrimination Training for Managers InstructorOrange County based company - 8 branch officesFebruary, 2011 CommunityWomen for Women (helping women survivors of war rebuild their lives)Mentor/Sponsor/MemberTrojan League Associates of San DiegoTrojan Club of San Diego (USC Alumni)Danielle is on the Human Resources Advisory Board for San Diego State University.