If You Find The Earth Boring...

I really dig the Toys and Techniques blog.  Just thought you should know.

Answer ten questions and see which city you align with.  Urbanology.

You’ve probably read all about the London riots already (and forgive me if you’ve read this  somewhere else because it’s been making the rounds in the news), but one of the repercussions has been the burning and destruction of the PIAS (otherwise known as Play It Again Sam) Distribution Warehouse in Enfield, an area with pronounced looting and damage. [youtube 0N_A8mmQtcw 480 390] Most importantly and unfortunately, the warehouse was the three floored home to the UK’s sole distributor for independent record labels.  The extent of the damage to the warehouse is still not known, but it’s estimated that this was the largest destruction of vinyl records ever, and it looks like there was a total of 25 million discs destroyed.  There could be far-reaching impacts not only to independent music artists and record labels in the UK, but also around the world. Here’s a link to some of record labels affected by the warehouse fire (Images come from Boomkat). Here’s a post from Tom Ewing’s blog on one specific event during the riots and how social media transforms how news is transmitted to the masses. Updated post from Warp Records here: Unfortunately some releases may never be available physically again.

These short films have been making the rounds so you might have come across them, but they are so well edited I wanted to post them here.  The three movies are called: Move, Learn, and Eat, and they were filmed by three guys who went to 11 countries over the course of 44 days. [vimeo 27246366 700 463.75] [vimeo 27244727 700 463.75] [vimeo 27243869 700 463.75]

This is a pretty good deal if you’re into Native American songs, history, and field recordings.