Wednesday, March 16, 2011

The Nannan Morning News

One of my favorite LEGO builders is Nannan Z. On The Dallas Morning News website, there is a video of Nannan talking about the LEGO hobby and showing off his massive collection and some of his creations.



If you want to get a closer look at that awesome space station he made, you can check it out here.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

You are sort of listening to Los Angeles.

Many times while I'm writing, I like to listen to music that fits the mood of whatever I'm writing, just to get my head in the right setting. It's often difficult to find something to fit the mood you want, but I usually listen to film scores.

I came across these "You are listening to..." pages which pair ambient music with police radio chatter from a city, complete with a beautiful photo of that city as the background to each page. The cities available are below:

Los Angeles
New York
San Fransisco
Chicago
Montréal


While it's a cool idea, I think it would be much better if the ambient music was actually from the city. While listening to the "You are listening to Los Angeles" page, I was clicking on the SoundCloud pages of each musician to find out where they were from. The whole time, I only noticed one musician that was actually from Los Angeles, and that was probably a coincidence. It would feel a lot more like you're listening to Los Angeles if there's not music from Portland, Brooklyn, or even Sweden playing instead of just music from Los Angeles. I e-mailed the suggestion to the maker of the "You are listening to..." pages.

Moby explores empty cities with new album Destroyed

I found out about another album to look forward to this year. On May 16th, Moby releases his new album Destroyed. Suffering from insomnia while on tour, Moby would write music at 2 AM when it felt like everyone else in the world was asleep. When he was done touring, he'd take the songs back to his studio to finish them. In an attempt to sum up the album, he described it as "broken down melodic electronic music for empty cities at 2 AM." Sounds like my kind of music!

The cover of the album is a photograph taken by Moby, who is releasing a photography book with the album. Wandering around LaGuardia airport after his flight was delayed, he came across an electronic sign that said "Unattended luggage will be destroyed." The small sign could only fit one word at a time, so when it just said the word "destroyed", he took a photograph. I love wandering around airports, so this just makes me want to listen to the album even more.


He has already released the Be The One EP, which features three songs, all of which will be on Destroyed. You can download the free EP below.









I'll, however, wait until the full album comes out to listen to any of it.