LANZAROTE from Take Courage on Vimeo.

LANZAROTE – the birth of a collaborative club night launching at a secret EC2 warehouse with a live and unhinged performance from HEALTH.
9pm – 4am | 16.10.2010 | secret EC2 warehouse | £12 advance TICKETS

A truly stunning interactive video from the Arcade Fire and Chris Milk. Using all the jiggery-pokery involved in HTML 5, and, in particular, its video embedding capability. Enter a postcode, or area, and the video becomes tailored around a distinct place, with video segments popping up all over your screen. Ground-breaking stuff. [Best viewed in a Chrome browser]

Choreographed windows, interactive flocking, custom rendered maps, real-time compositing, procedural drawing, 3D canvas rendering… this Chrome Experiment has them all. “The Wilderness Downtown” is an interactive interpretation of Arcade Fire’s song “We Used To Wait” and was built entirely with the latest open web technologies, including HTML5 video, audio, and canvas. Link

Autumn is just around the corner and adjustments to the wardrobe are gonna have to be made. I’m hoping to get some key purchases in early to get full use of them, these are two items that recently caught my eye; SeaVees trail Boots, I’m into the moccasin style and I prefer these to the Yuketen ones and this Ally Capellino rucksack, which offers a really good modern twist on the vintage scoutpack.

London is no longer a stranger to an alfresco cinema, but this one has a twist (and a roof) as it’s housed in a derelict petrol station on Clerkenwell Road. The Cineroleum promises to be a fascinating and enjoyable experience hailing the golden age of cinema, with paper tickets, popcorn and, err, seats constructed from reclaimed scaffolding – all  ‘Enclosed by  an ornate curtain strung from the forecourt roof’. Part of a wider project initiated by artists, designers and architects to find uses for public space, it opens this weekend and tickets can be booked online. Personally I can’t think a better venue to watch Night of the Living Dead.

It’s been a while since I posted anything so it’s about time for a new slice of self-congratulatory promotion. This is a new club mix I made for Erol Alkan’s Phantasy Sound label to go alongside a piece on why Gonzales’ Take Me To Broadway means so much to me as a DJ. It’s all in celebration of Phantasy’s next single, Erol Alkan’s rework of Chilly’s Never Stop (out 06/09/10). You can read the whole thing here. The artwork is by a good friend and amazing designer Kevin Scully who works under the name Biology Project. You need to check him out!

PHANTASY SOUND PODCAST 003 – stopmakingme by phantasy sound

Yes! Hood-lum.

A friend of mine forwarded me a link to this Youtube clip of Studio 8 creative director, Matt Willey setting out about designing a magazine spread. Sounds boring I know but I actually found it incredibly engrossing. This simple, quite non-eventful video really resonates with the graphic designer in me.

Stuff like this takles a LONG time and finding the perfect solution through a little nudge here and little tweak there is the painstakiung stuff that never gets seen by the client. This is why intend to record everything I ever do as a designer, bang and happy tune over the top and include the video with my invoice.

Etienne De Crecy live at matter.

So far this year I haven’t been to any weekend festivals and frankly, with the exception of Glastonbury, I’m not that bothered. Previous summers have been spent weekend after weekend under canvas getting grubby, so it’s felt good to have a summer off. However as we roll into August and the realisation that the summer is on the way out, the Englishman in me couldn’t quite accept that this would be a season with no festival antics. With the market at saturation organisers are being forced to up the ante on detail in order to make their event stand out; for the bigger festivals line-up and bar space are all important but small or ‘boutique’ festivals need something extra.

My friend and owtic contributor Dan Avery put me onto Standon Calling; set forty minutes out of Liverpool Street in the grounds of country manor in Hertfordshire it has a 5000 capacity (a quarter of the size of Field Day) and boasts amongst other things a pool, excellent food, a 24hour music license, plenty of space in the campsite and festival fairies that leave a refreshing drink outside every tent in the morning. What’s more for its size the line-up is cracking, Buena Vista Social Club headline with; Liars, Etienne De Crecy, Gold Panda, Clock Opera, Summer Camp and Dolorean all making appearances, whilst Filthy Dukes and Greco-Roman host the late night parties. I can’t wait. Weekend tickets are still on sale, we’ll be covering the event and hopefully sneaking a slot on Diesel radio. See you there..

I’m currently trying to talk myself into regular excersise, I haven’t done any since I was 18 and the beer consumption is starting to show. I think swimming is the way forward and alfresco is alot more pleasant, so living in Hackney, London Fields Lido is the place but what to do when it closes over the winter? indoor public pools are usually so rank. The newly re-opened Marshall street baths (yes I read the Metro too) in the middle of soho looks to be the answer, originally opened in 1931 and closed in 1997 for health and safety reasons, Westminster council have spent a few million quid refurbing them for the public and as you can see they look bloody great. What a great setting to swim in.

I agree with these guys.