You see what they did there?

It looks like that ad agency Microsoft hired came up with a decent idea: tap into the 80’s aesthetic of beige keyboards and King’s Quest games on 5 1/4″ floppy disks. It’s actually not a bad counterpoint to Apple’s spacey THX brand that no one has found an answer to yet.

The t-shirt above comes from a line Microsoft is releasing called “Softwear,” designed in part by Common. Of course, Apple’s sleek branding represents the way their products function. This shirt is good branding for a still-mediocre thing.

Maybe Microsoft should hire ISO50 to redesign their whole operating system to look like that shirt. Change from the outside in. Or something.

Gizmodo: Microsoft Jumps Into the “Softwear” Business with Ridiculous Branded T-Shirts

“The Gloaming,” live from Nigel Godrich’s basement in ‘07

Radiohead is probably the best live band out there, and since the Beatles quit playing shows just before they hit their peak, you could make a convincing argument that no one has ever been better on stage.

Of course it helps that they’ve got millions of dollars in toys and engineers at their disposal, but Radiohead earned those things by grinding their way through the club circuit like everyone else. The trick to their impact is in the way they get their samples, synths and beats to seamlessly mesh with the stadium-size guitars; Everything feels human and immediate. So how do they do it?

MusicRadar.com interviewed Russ Russell, the band’s live technician, about the details of their setup for the In Rainbows tour. Apparently the samples are being handled by Native Instrument’s Kontakt, running on multiple MacBook Pros.

Some other things that aren’t really highlighted but can be learned from this interview and the photos that go with it:

• They use Ableton Live from those same laptops to trigger beat loops.
• Jonny Greenwood sticks with a little Powerbook running Max/MSP.
• Everything isn’t original - they use some modified factory samples from Kontakt, just like everybody else.

Take a look: Radiohead’s live setup revealed
(via AtEase)

VBS, the infinitely awesome, Spike Jonze-headed online TV station has just finished up their “Mexico Month” with another documentary worth watching. It’s called “Alarma!” and follows a crime-scene photographer around the shockingly violent streets of Mexico City. Some of the images are horrifying and graphic, but they’re contrasted by very human portraits of the photographer, his family and co-workers.

Most certainly NSFW.

Link: “Alarma!” on VBS.TV (NSFW)

Want a pink Nintendo Wii? A Pulp Fiction-looking brown and gold iMac? Want to add a couple hundred dollars to these things?

Take a look at Colorware, which I found after I kept seeing adds for pink iPhones.

Link: Colorware

Danger Mouse is on fire lately, and I couldn’t be happier that he produced the new Beck album. I go back and forth on Beck - he’s one of those bands/artists that make consistently good records when they could be making great records. Kind of like Coldplay, but they’re more on the crap-when-they-could-be-great side of the scale.

So the addition of Danger Mouse can only be a good thing. He’s produced two of my favorite records of this year, the new Gnarls Barkley and Black Keys’ Attack and Release. I don’t know if he’s gone all analog or what, but he really captures something “old” on his latest work, something intangible that you feel when you listen to the best stuff of the 60s and 70s.

His collaboration with Beck is called Modern Guilt, and it’s out on July 6th. You can hear a few tracks on Beck’s iLike page, and they sound as good and old and psychedelic as I hoped they would. Reminds me of the new Caribou, a little.

Link: Beck on iLike

I made a donation to a political campaign today. They’re doing some sort of donation matching, where I give $25 and supposedly it inspires someone else to give $25, and then they write you an email so you can pat each other on the back. I got this in my Plastic Explosives inbox:

Like… really? This is only the second time I’ve had something like this said to me, and both comments came from members of the Obama campaign.

Sandi and I had a conversation about this when we first started the site, and decided we weren’t going to let Fox News Nation stand in the way of a great domain name. I came up with “Plastic Explosives” because it reminded me of our aesthetic and brought some kind of jagged, pink J. Mayer H.-like thing to mind. I figured the “DO THEY SELL PLASTIC EXPLOSIVES?” question would be answered by a cursory glance at the site.

We’re into art. They sell guns and weapons at Wal Mart, though.
Maybe we should swap names?

My portfolio for commercial sound design is now up and running at JonathanGraves.net.

Why don’t you have a look?

This is a wonderful video for Ensemble’s collaboration with Cat Power (Chan Marshall) - it appears to be made entirely of home movie disaster footage, and the song comes off sounding like peak-form Fiona Apple.

Courtesy of Pitchfork TV.

MacProVideo.com has the best tutorials I’ve ever used for stuff like Logic and Final Cut Pro, and they’re running a contest right now based on a recent release, Logic 404: Mixing Electronica.

You can remix a really generic dance track by Olav Basoski (sorry Olav), and if your remix is chosen as the best of the bunch, you win:

+ a copy of Logic Studio
+ a MacBook Pro
+ an Apogee Duet audio interface
+ a Universal Audio UAD-Xpander Xpress

I mean, that’s a lot of good stuff. It’d be worth entering for the laptop alone, I think.

Link: MacProVideo Remix Contest with Olav Basoski

Everyone knows that we’re supposed to learn from our mistakes, but it’s tough to remember to look back at your day/week/month and figure out what those mistakes actually were. I’ve been trying to keep track of things in iCal (with limited success) so I can see where my week went drastically off-course.

Productivity blogger Andre Kibbe has the same kind of idea - he talks about looking back at day-to-day forks in the road and figuring out what you might want to do differently next time. Worth reading.

Link: Upgrade an Unproductive Day by Mentally Rehearsing a Better One

(via Lifehacker)