I was a contributor for Chromatic, a 400-page book on the intersection color and music, published by Alarm Press. Recently Buzz Poole gave it a generous review over at The Millions.

I’m really happy to report that The Millions posted a generous review of Chromatic, that book by Alarm Press I’ve been harping about for several months. The book’s almost 400 pages explore the intersection of music and sound—synesthesia, stage design, album art, symbolism—and Buzz Poole writes, “Chromatic is a first in the way it documents a segment of today’s music scene by favoring exciting and important visual examples that contribute to a sensory overload that better represents the music than words or notes ever could on their own.”

A spread from Chromatic, which includes 400 pages of stuff pretty much like this (with some normal words and pictures too).

It’s weird seeing my own name about halfway down—though it’s now an extinct pen name. Poole singled out the part of book devoted to Jónsi’s set design, though in my opinion there were far better sections (chapter seven and the second part of chapter two come to mind). But I’m grateful for the mention. Here’s what Poole writes:

Take for example Timothy S. Aames’s account of how the charred remains of the Deyrolle taxidermy shop in Paris connect to the set design for a tour by Sigur Rós frontman Jónsi. From a book of photographs to full-blown multimedia spectacle, Aames reveals how Jónsi and Fifty Nine Productions brought to fruition something neither party had imagined until collaborating on the presentation of a narrative arc built of music and color.

A rendering of Fifty Nine's plan for Jonsi's set design, which drew from images of a burnt-out taxidermy shop in Paris.

It’s been a long time since I interviewed Fifty Nine’s Mark Grimmer and Jónsi about all this, but this review and the recently posted online version made me revisit it. And I must say, I still really love the intro. I’ll leave you with that.

A year after On February 1, 2008, one of Paris’ most cherished stores burnt to the ground. When the sun rose, it shed verdant light onto the gray, smoldering shell of an oddity-filled taxidermy shop called Deyrolle. Inside were hundreds of animals, among them a zebra whose stripes dissolved into a black, charred mass and a lion whose disfigured snout gave it a dark, Victorian-era mask. The tragic beauty of the scene caught the attention of a photographer named Martin d’Orgeval, who got permission to shoot the now half-burnt curiosities that had awed generations of Parisians since the mid-1800s.

D’Orgeval published his photos in a book called Touché par le Feu (Touched by Fire), which was purchased as a Christmas present the following year for one Leo Warner, the director of a group called Fifty Nine Productions, which was rapidly altering the landscape of theatre and opera with its video and set-design work. Now the company was working on a new type of project — a music tour.

Read the rest here.

I looked up "blackout" on Wikipedia today

Sent a letter to Rep. Luis Guiterrez about this SOPA business. Read::Zebra is dark today too. (Metaphorically, because I don’t have time to do anything cooler than that.)

As good as 2011 was for music—the debut record by NewVillager was enough for me—I’m already excited for 2012, unfortunately for reasons I can’t disclose here. Not yet. But change is coming, and it should be quite the experiment. Safety goggles are recommended.

For now, without the further ado, my favorite new music of 2011, and what I actually listened to the most.

BEST ALBUMS OF 2011

NewVillager

1. NewVillager, NewVillager
A guaranteed way to ensure a life of gravitating toward the weird of the world is to grow up a theater kid, a creative-writing kid in small-town Kansas. Things were always happening to make me feel just a little outside the group. Once, I was pantsed during a rehearsal for The Wizard of Oz. I was the Tin Man. The pantser was the Wicked Witch of the West. I prayed that night that a house really would flatten her.

NewVillager appeals to that odd but—I like to think—imaginative kid in me. The one who played dress up, fought with swords, and wrote lengthy stories at the family computer in the basement. NewVillager is a duo: Ben Bromley and Ross Simonini. The latter is an editor at The Believer. Their eponymous (self-titled) debut was the album I had the hardest time resisting this year. It’s dancey but avoids the heavy, on-the-beat pulse that infects nearly every pop song on the radio (an odd residue of techno?). It’s optimistic musically but enigmatic lyrically.

I keep saying that it has all the glory of classic rock, but I have no idea if that’s the right way to put it. I do stand behind my assertion that they defy most cliches and dodge the tropes of genre. Certainly, their videos, which bring to life the complex mythologies behind the music, connect with my theatricality.

They also bring to mind the storytelling of Maurice Sendak. I imagine NewVillager to be as universally loved. In reality, though, I’m not so sure. I didn’t see their debut on anyone else’s Best of 2011 lists. Maybe they’re just fantastic in my odd little corner of the world, that esoteric sphere of reality where weirdness is a virtue.

Bon Iver

2. Bon Iver, Bon Iver
When I first heard “Skinny Love,” I thought Justin Vernon was black. His falsetto was so smooth. I imagined some East Coast crooner, half hipster and half nostalgic Casanova. Turns out the black guy was white, the East Coast was Wisconsin, and this recording artist had not a drop of hipster or Casanova blood in him—to my delight.

In interviews, Justin Vernon, aka Bon Iver, comes across as one of the most down-to-Earth guys in the business. His hair is legitimately ruffled, he curses in unfashionable ways, he classifies recording with Kanye as both weird and not that weird. He’s honest and true to his roots. When he and his band played his hometown of Eau Claire, Wisconsin—where he still lives—they made the tickets only available at a box office in town, to ensure that fans from the surrounding cities and states didn’t flood the show and price out Eau Claire residents.

Bon Iver, the album, Vernon’s second full-length, astounds me. Repeated listens only reveal more depth, especially compared to For Emma, Forever Ago. I feel certain he picked up a few production techniques from Kanye, with whom he collaborated on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. With horn parts and rich effects, utilized perfectly, the album serves to open up new worlds for Bon Iver and other bands that a few years ago were pigeonholed as “neue folk” or “folk rock” or whatever critics called it.

“Perth” is my favorite song but not, probably, the best on the record. Its opening lines and then its heavy—relatively speaking—salvo of electric guitar and drums were enough to hook me after one listen. There’s a comfort in knowing that everyone else was hooked too. These days, it seems like people decide who to like based on the size of an artist’s fan base (the smaller the better)—and I fall into that on occasion—so it feels good to acknowledge something collectively, even when it leads to Grammy nominations. Bon Iver’s up for four, but I can happily report it hasn’t gone to his head. In an interview after the announcement, the interviewer had to explain to Vernon that if you’re nominated for a Grammy, you do, in fact, get to go.

Tom Waits

3. Tom Waits, Bad As Me
Swordfishtrombones changed my life. It answered questions I didn’t know I had and, later, connected musicians as disparate as Anais Mitchell and Kanye West. Its marimba line taught me that marimba could be cool. Not just cool, but haunting, mysterious, the perfect backdrop for a 20th-century bard. The instrument could somehow become the sound of Vietnam and psychopathy and storytelling.

Tom Waits has since become a more potent fascination for me than anyone, or anything else ever has. I read David Smay’s book about him and spent too many hours browsing the online stacks of the Tom Waits Library. There’s a reason to pay attention to this guy: I don’t know anyone else who’s inspired that level of historical archiving and independent cataloging. When news broke that Waits was releasing a studio album this year, a lot of people got excited. And yet, though it may have changed my life, Swordfishtrombones is not a very palatable record, and so I never expected to love Bad As Me as much as I do.

Its start is the opposite of slow, “Chicago” being a runaway tune led by banjo, piano, and saxophone and featuring a line I was destined to fall in love with: “Maybe things will be better in Chicago.” The songs on Bad As Me oscillate, like they do on Swordfishtrombones, between manic and maudlin, flip-flopping throughout the entire album. Where a Depression-era blues tune ends, a ballad begins. It takes some getting used to, but Bad As Me is worth the effort. Don’t go to the grave without hearing what Tom Waits has to say.

Feist

4. Feist, Metals
I’ve been a fan of Feist since our college newspaper reviewed Let It Die. I adored that album, “Mushaboom” summing up a certain mentality a lot of us had then. Then came The Reminder, and suddenly Feist was in Starbucks and on Sesame Street, but the music wasn’t any worse. It was better. We shouldn’t forget this. “The Water”—and the film it inspired—is beautiful. The remix album Open Season didn’t disappoint either, despite the fact that such endeavors usually do.

Metals, four years after her last album, is charged with a very human energy. It’s neither as smooth as Let It Die or as fun as The Reminder. Instead it feels more real. More lifelike. Though her music isn’t overtly complex, Feist does write songs that challenge our intuition. First, she often writes, at least on Metals, in a three-based time signature, as opposed to the usual four, (the ratio of left-handed people to right-handed people is probably an accurate comparison for the two forms’ relationship). She puts another twist on this though by playing a few of those three-songs in a way that feels like four. Instead of a languid, Waltz-like grace, “Graveyard” and “How Come You Never Go There” both appear to leave off a beat that should be there. In another words, if you’re swaying to the music, you’ll be out of sync every other bar.

This is just one reason Metals is an interesting album. “Caught a Long Wind” is another. Co-producer Valgeir Sigurðsson is yet another. If you listen to it openly, not hoping for another Reminder, I think you’ll see that Feist is maturing beautifully. I once thought I could make a case for why she’s the best musical artist to emerge in the past decade. I’m no longer quite so convinced, but my ambition tells you of the respect I have for her. And why I’ll eagerly be awaiting her next project.

Erik Friedlander

5. Erik Friedlander, Bonebridge
The pedal steel guitar has been unfairly relegated to country music. Granted, like any member of an outlaw gang, the instrument is guilty by association, and if we’re honest, we can admit that it’s committed its fair share of crimes. But in the right environment, the instrument can thrive. One such place is in the company of cellist Erik Friedlander and his jazz trio.

Bonebridge caught my attention with “Beaufain Street,” a song that brought to mind river boats, wheeling their way up the Mississippi from New Orleans to Chicago, a hub for gamblers and the men who would rob them. It’s music fit for carousing or for laying low above deck, watching the water turn to gold and then to nothing.

“Low Country Cupola,” “Tabatha,” “Hanky Panky.” They’re jazz-tune names. And Friedlander gets some good cello licks into each song. But the pedal steel steals the show and allows Bonebridge to inhabit a small space within Americana, a lonely corner I hope is more populated soon.

Bjork

6. Bjork, Biophilia
There’s a reason that Björk, the Reykjavík-born queen of avant-garde pop, is a household name and also remains respected as an artist. It’s because she’s adamant that music is an art and be seen as such. Art isn’t always looking to be liked, and Björk’s music — characterized by a vivid and stubborn imagination since the beginning of her solo career in 1992 — is hardly snuggly. There’s always been a chill to it, an intensity we don’t always know what to do with. Biophilia is no exception.

The much-hyped release is as ambitious as anything before it. For weeks before, geeked-out music critics were drawn like moths to a porch light thanks to Biophilia‘s extra-musical elements, which included an iPad app, featuring graphic explorations of each track; live shows that used custom-made instruments like the Gravity Harp or twin musical Tesla coils; and a laser-laden video by French director and longtime Björk collaborator Michel Gondry. But it would be a shame if people forgot that beneath the chatter is an album. Biophilia may be unique because of its multiplatform release, but that’s not what makes it good.

Musically, it’s expansive, dramatic, and remarkably accessible. “Crystalline” is a pulsing, glowing sleeper that erupts into a hammering drill-’n’-bass salvo. “Virus” uses the hang masterfully, its warm metallic tones being a suitably alien backdrop for Björk’s iconic voice. These intrasong dynamics are great achievements, as is the subtle emphasis on melody. But the most important thing about Biophilia seems to be its subject matter. In the compositions, the lyrics, and—most noticeably—the album art and apps, the central theme is our physical universe. Björk embarks on a meditative musical exploration of nature, science, and technology, and we’re fortunate to be invited. There’s plenty to explore alongside her.

Other Lives

7. Other Lives, Tamer Animals
Maybe five years ago, my brother, my then-girlfriend (now-wife), and I went to see Spoon in Fayetteville, Arkansas. It was a memorable show because that rare thing happened: the opening band stole the show.  They called themselves Kunek, and they understood music. They’d mastered a particularly beautiful realm of it, as well as the art of the performance. The frontman spent the set bent over his keyboard, hair in his face, giving every bit of himself to the show. I think all of us were in awe.

Later we would find out how to spell that name we’d only heard spoken, and  learn they were from Stillwater, Oklahoma, and buy their debut, Flight of the Flynns. And then they disappeared. That odd name never resurfaced. I assumed the band had, somehow, been swallowed by the vastness of the country’s center. Given itself to the soil, for nutrients. There was a part of me—the dramatic part—that mourned this loss. This year, however, I discovered that the band’s death had been faked. It had changed its name and was living and making music happily as Other Lives. It was living an other life.

Tamer Animals, the band’s 2011 release, is masterful, an evolution of the promise we’d seen in Fayetteville. It draws on folk music for its dreamy compositions but is hard to define in genre terminology. It’s easy to love, and we need music like that. It doesn’t necessarily push musical boundaries, doesn’t open new doors or lob projectiles at the ceiling or attempt to tunnel out under the walls, but what it does do is make wondrous the room contemporary music currently inhabits. If I was ranking these records by what I fell in love with the fastest, this album would be at the top.

WU LYF

8. WU LYF, Go Tell Fire to the Mountain
Sometimes you learn something that forever affects the way you see something, or hear it, or think about it. Every time I listen to WU LYF (World Unite/Lucifer Youth Foundation) see an abandoned church in Ancoats, England. This is my imagination’s version of the church in which they recorded their debut Go Tell Fire to the Mountain, a place that was vital to its big, echoing sound.

The band is actually a group of Manchester kids—can’t find their ages, but they look somewhere between 16 and 20—who say they’ll retire at 25. Chances are that statement will later be filed alongside the disenchantment they’re already allegedly feeling about their choice of a name. Normally, when I learn a band is that young, I stop paying attention, figuring that if they’re still around in five years, they’ll a) be better musicians and b) have lost their impetuousness and sense of entitlement.

But WU LYF hooked me with Ellery Roberts’ garbled howls, which, though he is saying words, sound like the muted yells one might hear walking down the hall of a mental hospital. And yet they don’t convey pain, or anger, but more just a frustrated, almost animal attempt to communicate. This vocal styling lured me in and then set the hook; I couldn’t ignore these guys, despite their youth (and their impetuousness). Go Tell Fire is just the beginning for these guys, though a part of me hopes they do retire at 25. The other part hopes they make music as long as I’m alive.

The Roots

9. The Roots, Undun
I was a young drummer when I first puzzled at how to pronounce ?uestlove (answer: quest-love). His name was everywhere in the music magazines I read as a teenager. Yet it wasn’t until this fall that I knowingly heard The Roots, via this year’s Undun, a concept album that does for Philadelphia what The Wire did for Baltimore—portraying the dark and ruinous underworld of a drug trade that preys disproportionately on certain races and classes, especially their young.

Tracing the final hours of a fictional dealer named Redford Stephens, the story is unraveled backwards from the time of death. The music stands alone—the album doesn’t need its narrative any more than Fucked Up’s David Comes to Life needed its—but the words share an urgent message, and its the courage of these lyrics that earned Undun a spot on this list.

I’ll be honest and say that without a year spent in one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods, a place full of men like Redford Stephens, this record might not have packed the same punch. But then again, without that year, I wouldn’t have been much of a hip-hop fan either.

Cults

10. Cults, Cults
I didn’t know about Cults until this fall and didn’t hear “Abducted” possibly until it was included by Bob Boilen and his gang on All Songs Considered‘s year-end review, but the band’s debut quickly became one of my favorite albums of the year.

I don’t have a lot to say about it; I don’t know much about the group (it’s a guy and gal from Brooklyn, I think) and don’t know any interesting facts about the record (its sound is interesting but not revolutionary). I will say that if you’re in the mood for some infectious lo-fi pop, you’re in luck.

Also bonus points for some of the best album art of the year.

:: :: ::

Portions originally published by ALARM Press.

Strange, listening to that voice through the filter of seventy-five years of American pop culture, a voice trapped in Woody Allen movies and PBS documentaries, a familiar shorthand for smoke-filled lounges and doomed genius.

Check it out.

Anaal Nathrakh, In the Constellation of the Black Widow

:: :: ::

I don’t know the first time I heard music. It was probably my mom playing the piano and singing. Maybe at my first Christmas. I would’ve been eight months old. There might’ve been tapes before that, or kid’s videos. I guess I overheard commercial jingles pretty much immediately and the opening songs of mid-’80s sitcoms. And my family being a churchgoing one, I would’ve been exposed early on to hymns and choirs and the pipe organ.

My musical education was sparse at best. Rarely did music play in our house. Listening to records on our old, dusty turntable was a whole-evening affair. My mom, brother, and I gathered around the dining room table while Dad dropped the needle into the groove of the vinyl. It was comedy as often as it was music. George Carlin and Bill Cosby. My dad looking embarrassed when Carlin used profanity or got too sexual. The music was a bizarre collection. Neil Diamond, the Bee Gees, the Dirty Dancing soundtrack. There was a lot missing.

“We need specificity as much as we need hyperbole. But there’s a certain attractiveness to our ability to say that a piece of music could fight against, or at least  distract us from desperate loneliness.”

Since music first was made—it’s an odd picture, imagining a human discovering how to make its voice sing—there’s been a temptation to describe it grandly, with lofty words, florid descriptions, and abstract ideas that usually have nothing to do with the music’s style, composition, or instrumentation. Why? Where does that temptation come from?

Because music connects emotionally as well as aurally, and because instrumental works are sufficiently capable of conjuring imagery without the use of lyrics, to simply describe a song by discussing its sound—which instrument is playing what type of line for how long, etc.—would fail at capturing what that piece of music is doing. Instead, we require the elements of figurative language—the metaphor, simile, general hyperbole. We require language that paints a scene, which becomes the kernel from which our imagination can grow an understanding of a song’s extramusical components. This is why we really don’t find it odd when someone writes that a black metal band from Birmingham sounds like a man being turned inside-out by a lawn mower.

:: :: ::

In the current music scene, we read, there is a vocalist who earns his living “grunting like a possessed lumberjack.” A mixtape-maker who’s been “something of a spirit animal” for a fellow hip-hop artist. A dubstep EP that “shrouds its cycling arpeggios in reverb so they sound like they’re off in the distance, lost in a fog.” We find a critic claiming that “a lifetime on a desert island would get awfully lonely” and that Dan Deacon’s Spiderman of the Rings “seemed like a solution to that problem.”

Dan Deacon, Spiderman of the Rings

An album as company—as an interactive entity that can provide that which is usually provided by another human soul. It doesn’t get much more hyperbolic than that. And yet, doesn’t Nitsuh Abebe’s statement tell you something about Deacon’s record that other language just misses?

Here’s another bit from Abebe: “As Bromst rushes steadily by, mostly avoiding the big crowd-pleasing breakdowns and exclamations of its predecessor, the clearer production lets you sink into the minutae of it—say, the Steve Reich-style rhythms of different mallet or drum patterns overlapping one another.” That tells me a lot. But it’s a very specific kind of a lot. And it certainly doesn’t give me any clue how to feel about this music. Which is okay—we need specificity as much as we need hyperbole. But there’s a certain attractiveness to our ability to say that a piece of music could fight against, or at least  distract us from desperate loneliness. Whether or not anyone agrees with the statement, to make it is, I think, a valuable exercise of the mind.

If I didn’t have a day job, I’d spend my hours combing music sites for the best and weirdest analogies ever used to describe music. Even the past few months’ archives are rich vaults of hyperbole as gruesome as Montoro’s lawn-mower line. “If men are indeed pigs, then Greg Dulli’s body of work amounts to a veritable slaughterhouse.” That’s Stuart Berman, writing about Dulli’s project Twilight Singers for Pitchfork a week ago. A Stereogum writer reviewing pop-country princess Miranda Lambert’s Four the Record is assisted by a beautiful, stinging simile: “And there are some diamond-hard snarlers on here: ‘Fastest Girl In Town’ and ‘Mama’s Broken Heart’ in particular. Those are the ones that linger like a slap to the face.”

“If I didn’t have a day job, I’d spend my hours combing music sites for the best and weirdest analogies ever used to describe music. Even the past few months’ archives are rich vaults of hyperbole as gruesome as Montoro’s lawn-mower line.”

An album that doesn’t sound like anything I want to hear is described this way: “It’s not barren trees and howling winds so much as ostentatious Christmas light fixtures in the pure, driven snow.” And then Martin Douglas gets carried away in his adjective-prone review of Thee Oh Sees’s Carrion Crawler/The Dream. “Thee Oh Sees are like the house band for a runaway train.” “You can practically hear Dwyer swallowing microphones and spitting upwards to the rafters.” “The last remnants of Castlemania‘s woodwind-centered psychedelia sputtering out like smoke from a 1920s automobile that ran out of gas.” “Dwyer’s guitar playing is best described in terms usually reserved for feral cats.”

Thee Oh Sees, Carrion Crawler/The Dream

:: :: ::

It’s especially interesting to note the differences in brand. Stereogum isn’t nearly as reliant on abstract analogies as Pitchfork, and I know from working with Scott at ALARM that he prefers as little of that stuff as possible. Given Pitchfork‘s derision by other, smaller music channels, are analogies seen as cheap tricks when it comes to music criticism? The grabbed-at lifelines of under-educated bloggers who get gigs writing for music sites but don’t know pitch from timbre?

I don’t think so. A major fault of music media is that it always seems to be talking to itself. Its reviews are for other critics, rather than the public. There are exceptions, but if music criticism is to be read by anyone other than its own propagators, figurative language will be at least one tool we have at our disposal.

“Given Pitchfork‘s derision by other, smaller music channels, are analogies seen as cheap tricks when it comes to music criticism?”

There’s an enjoyment that comes from reading a well-constructed analogy that doesn’t register when reading a technical description. Figurative language gives writing life and so imbues music with that life as well, albeit a subjective kind. Perhaps more knowledgeable music writers don’t care for metaphors because in a certain way they spoil the music. The way a film forever destroys a reader’s imagined characters, so perhaps an analogy can destroy a music connoisseur’s first, untainted listen. If I’m told to hear “distraction” or “fog” or “desert,” then I probably will. It’s the reason coffee tastings are done completely in silence. Just the mention of “walnut” overpowers the signals my own tongue is sending to my brain.

And yet, if metaphors, similes, and other hyperbolic descriptors were stripped from music criticism, what would be left? It would be a barren landscape from a literary standpoint. It wouldn’t be any fun to read. And assuming that people are looking for more than a catalog that evaluates and reports technical details—a Consumer Reports for music—then the enjoyment that comes from good writing is at least one thing music writers should keep striving for.

But I think the main reason to maintain a landscape that allows for both literal and figurative language is that analogies connect music to something beside itself. It doesn’t require a knowledge of history or theory or a band’s earlier work. All you have to do is be able to imagine what it might sound like for a lawn mower to tear a human being to bits.

Here’s why I’m interested: the opera is constructed from the music of Spears and Timberlake, single lines time-stretched until they lose all resemblance to the original song. Behind the wavering vocals is original music that ranges from free jazz to shoegaze.

The conceit might bore or annoy you, but I can’t escape the ache in the music. Slowed down, the songs become the soundtrack for the tragedy that is popular music. And Britney Spears.

Watch the music video for “Worst Fantasy” below and you’ll see what I mean. The real footage they included almost makes me weep.

The sky today is lidded with clouds that glow like ugly fluorescents. Perfect for Lynch’s “ark,” which seems to literally flood my headphones, the sound of rain on pavement sampled into its timeless melancholy.

And yet by the time I get to “The Night Bell With Lightning,” the crops are dead from drought. There’s something about this song that makes me feel like I’m walking blindfolded through West Texas. Heat lightning just hazy green flashes through the black fabric. Drum hits faltering like my steps over the loose rock and prickly scrub that makes hatch marks on my legs.

The feeling is so strong, it’s almost overwhelming. And then there’s this abrupt end, just a chord that alights in the song’s brooding sky. I come out of that dark drone, and it’s like having the blindfold torn off. And I realize I’m still alive.

Six of the year's best album covers, according to Paste Magazine

Paste Magazine‘s List of the Day yesterday was the year’s best album art. Scrolling through, I realized I’d seen a lot of the covers, even if I hadn’t heard the album, and I remembered being struck the first time I saw the art for Gloss Drop by Battles (No. 26) and Mastodon’s The Hunter (No. 6). Cut Copy’s Zonoscope was one I’d missed, but it definitely deserved its place at number five. And though King of Limbs lost its luster after a few listens, I did love its artwork, so I’m glad it made the list at seventeen.

The blue ribbon? Iron & Wine’s Kiss Each Other Clean, an album and cover that didn’t mesmerize me. Assuming I was missing something, I searched for some information on who made it. Turns out it was Iron & Wine’s own Sam Beam. He’s done several of the band’s covers, including The Shepherd’s Dog. He told the people at Design Sponge what his inspiration was and how he did it.

“Remember when we were kids and you’d color on a piece of paper with a crayon and you’d paint over that with black Tempera paint and then etch out the drawing? The idea was to do something like that, so I actually did a bunch of physical ones. But I kept fucking up, so I did it with, like, black ink and a brush—just drawing on white paper. And then we flipped it in the computer and then we were able to color it.”

Below is the album cover in question as well as the rest of my favorites.

#1. Iron & Wine's Kiss Each Other Clean

#5. Cut/Copy's Zonoscope

#6. Mastodon's The Hunter

#17. Radiohead's King of Limbs

#26. Battles' Gloss Drop

Check out Paste’s collection of album covers here.

Newspapers for 99%, such as the Occupied Chicago Tribune, are sprouting up all over the country

Miles Kampf-Lassin tells the story of the Occupied Chicago Tribune:

“This week, the Occupied Chicago Tribune officially came to life. The first issue, printed Wednesday evening, will be distributed throughout the city—far beyond the Loop’s financial district, where Occupy protests have been held since late September—in the coming days. It includes a feature on Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s budget cuts and their effects on Chicago’s poor, an interview with two seniors arrested protesting social service cuts, a timeline of the global Occupy movement, a look into why hundreds of thousands of people are moving their money out of predatory banks, commentary on the Occupy movement from Naomi Klein and Chris Hedges and more.

“As winter sets in and more Occupations transform their tactics while being evicted from their encampments, the role of independent media sources … will be increasingly important.”

Similar publications to the Occupied Chicago Tribune are springing up across the country, including the Boston Occupier, Occupied Washington Times, and the soon-to-be-published Occupied Providence Journal.

As winter sets in and more Occupations transform their tactics while being evicted from their encampments, the role of independent media sources dedicated to honestly reporting on and informing the Occupy movement will be increasingly important. We are extremely excited for the part this newspaper can play in helping to advance the goals of the Occupation: Now is the time for a new kind of politics that puts the priorities of ordinary people above those of big business.”

Hopefully folks like Cornel West and Barbara Kingsolver will take a break from writing for Wall St.’s paper and lend their voices to our own struggling protests.

Before he made 2001: A Space Odyssey or A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrik was a photojournalist for Look magazine, “their youngest staff photographer on record,” writes Caroline Stanley. “Kubrick’s striking black and white images of 1940s New York City—which were often shot on the sly, his camera concealed in a paper bag with a hole in it—hint at the dark beauty and psychological drama of his later creative output.”

A photo by Stanley Kubrik during his tenure as a photojournalist for Look magazine

Kubrik's work is largely cinematic, writes Caroline Stanley

More of Kubrik's photos can be seen at Flavorwire

via Kottke