My love for Mark Lanegan began back around 1992, one night in the Coventry University Student Union, when I heard "Nearly Lost You" for the first time. You couldn't help but be drawn in by that voice.

Through Screaming Trees, Gutter Twins, Queens of the Stone Age, Soulsavers, his trio of albums with Isobel Campbell, and his solo work, he has been a constant soundtrack to my life.

Of course there's that voice, but he also brought an emotion, dignity, and heart to everything he did. One of the great musicians of the last 30 years.

RIP Mark x

It's important to know your history and where you've come from.

This is lovely.

An international game of Telephone through multiple art forms, seeded from a paragraph in Mike Shanahan's book Ladders To Heaven (which is a cracking read).

More details on the project from Mike on his blog.

The Black Music History Library

This digital library was born out of a need to make resources about Black music history as comprehensive and accessible as possible. It contains well over one thousand entries (and counting) in the form of books, articles, documentaries, series, radio segments, and podcasts about the Black origins of popular and traditional music, dating from the 18th century to the present day. These materials range from informal to scholarly, meaning there is something in the library for everyone.

There are many notable archives doing similar work, yet it isn’t uncommon for some to have a limited view of Black music—one which fuels US-centrism and a preference for vernacular music traditions. This collection considers the term “Black music” more widely, as it aims to address any instances in which Black participation led to the creation or innovation of music across the diaspora. Plainly speaking, that means just about every genre will be included here.

Black artists have often been minimized or omitted entirely when it comes to the discussion, practice, and research of many forms of music. This library seeks to correct that. It is time to reframe Black music history as foundational to American music history, Latinx music history, and popular music history at large.

via Kottke.org.

Irene Posch used historic gold embroidery materials and knowledge to craft a programmable 8 bit computer.

Solely built from a variety of metal threads, magnetic, glas and metal beads, and being inspired by traditional crafting routines and patterns, the piece questions the appearance of current digital and electronic technologies surrounding us, as well as our interaction with them.

Via Metafilter.

Bryan Boyer built an e-ink device powered by a Raspberry Pi that displays films at 24fph (frames per hour).

Brian explains:

Films are vain creatures that typically demand a dark room, full attention, and eager eyeballs ready to accept light beamed from the screen or projector to your visual cortex. VSMP inverts all of that. It is impossible to “watch” in a traditional way because it’s too slow. In a staring contest with VSMP you will always lose. It can be noticed, glanced-at, or even inspected, but not watched.

As a self-confessed film nerd I love this idea:

Can a film be consumed at the speed of reading a book? Yes, just as a car city can be enjoyed on foot. Slowing things down to an extreme measure creates room for appreciation of the object, as in Brasília, but the prolonged duration also starts to shift the relationship between object, viewer, and context. A film watched at 1/3,600th of the original speed is not a very slow movie, it’s a hazy timepiece. A Very Slow Movie Player (VSMP) doesn’t tell you the time; it helps you see yourself against the smear of time.

And for me, 25 years on, what I love about this is being able to give this to somebody and say, “See, this is what I mean by comics.” It is not a genre. It is simply a medium. And it’s a medium that you can do anything with.

Neil Gaiman.

The Big Picture looks at abandoned and incomplete housing developments in South Florida.

Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the “Aha.” Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in — the one that we think is reality.

Alan Kay

I've linked to this site via delicious and twitter but I really had to publish something here too, it deserves to be seen by as many people as possible.

Found Functions is a short series of photographs by Nikki Graziano that overlay mathematical functions and graphs over shapes in nature. Such a simple idea but executed beautifully: what mathematicians see when they look at the world.

Nikki can also be found on Twitter throwing out wonderful little thoughts such as this.

has anyone ever really stopped and thought about ∑ n=0 to n=∞? "add up all the stuff there is between nothing and everything." shit.

Well it made me laugh, must be a maths geek thing.