To use basic pop culture analogies, Darwin Deez’s Radar Detector is essentially many fun things crossed with Napoleon Dynamite. This man’s hair terrifies me a little bit, but luckily no clip is longer than 3 seconds so my eyes don’t have a chance to fidget, so it all works – even him. Perhaps it’s easy to win people over with upside-down umbrellas too. Any home made gadget in a music video and I’m sold basically.

I’ve just bought tickets to the album launch party next month. It sounds like silly, fun and ridiculous music.

via Matthew

Here’s my very old video from Kinetica that I’ve just put together. Because of camera ineptitude there’s no video of my favourite part: the lights that reacted to sound, but there’s an inadequate photo of them here on Flickr.

The exhibition had a section with the pencils that rotate and make circles (above) – which drew on our ability to stand aimlessly watching pencils draw motorised circles. Something I noticed is that the holder design didn’t allow for the pencils to get shorter – it didn’t compensate by pushing defaultly against the wall, but left them suspended away from the paper when they were blunt going round in sad little circles. Perhaps I’ve got too much pencil empathy.

There’s also the small beer robot that poured you beer into plastic cups and then flashed red in an alert to tell you it’s drinking time. Lots of good stuff there.

New from OK GO – move over Honda. Bright colours and simple things for my eyes seem to be a keen trend in music videos. “No doubt an intern that did the dominoes” was my first thought, although I can’t imagine any dominoes I’d be happier stacking. I love the glasses that make up a musical part of it, although wonder if that was done separately. Ideally in a magical word each glass would contain a small microphone and sound would be directly recorded from the video filming. Perhaps not.

“Filmed in a two story warehouse, in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA. The “machine” was designed and built by the band, along with members of Synn Labs over the course of several months.

“This is the Rube Goldberg machine version. In other words, a video depicting complex devices that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways.” – hellokinsella

I no doubt appreciate this much more after living with five lovely male housemates for the last half year; all into DJing, dubstep and drum and bass (as one must be if) from North East London. They’re all fab.

I still love this after a week – especially the Pink Floyd shorts, which terrify me.

via crackunit

Beth Jeans Houghton played at Komedia on Wednesday. I wouldn’t have found this gig without Jonathan writing an entry for Bored of Brighton which is good because she was fantastic. She’s like Gaga’s outfit, but wonderful and singing excellent music. I can’t think of a better description than his really:

“Her songs – and Beth herself, if you take her interviews as evidence – inhabits a creative world which is winningly magical. It isn’t the wistful, wide-eyed universe of a Bat For Lashes, but rather an arch, colourful terrain which seems to owe more to Cindy Sherman or Tony Hancock than it does Kate Bush.

Her musical palette – she is a young, female, folk singer – may seem familiar at first glance, but she has practically nothing in common with the likes of Laura Marling, Emmy The Great, Florence Welsh et al. First, her voice is more interesting – an effortless, husky hum which recalls 70s icon Bobbie Gentry, and her music is informed by deeper, darker, more esoteric strains of folk, country and progressive rock; by the likes of Tunng, Pentangle and Melanie.”

Here’s my hand-held video from the gig (new E-P1 cam does far better recordings than my point and shoot, unsurprisingly, though I wasn’t expecting sound to pick it up as much as it did). Stornaway, the main band, were less exciting but Beth J Houghton & The Hooves of Destiny (her band) were fantastic.

I’ve finally got round to sorting my videos. My Mac has become sluggish because I need to restart it. It’s a terrible habit, along with my ability to accumulate 20 tabs and corresponding open notepads for each.

There’s an independent record store in Brighton called Resident. It seems very pleased with its status, very into new bands, folk and good things, and is good at sending out newsletters/blog posts with their record of the week and such, all in a lovely enthusiastic tone. They also have in-store gigs which are free and tend to be promoting real gigs taking place later in the evening at more serious venues. I’d never been to until last week (actually last Friday – this is horribly late) when I went to see Jesca Hoop in an acoustic set.

“Her music is like going swimming in a lake at night” – says Tom Waits.

It was lovely – not a ‘one man and his guitar’ acoustic sort of way, but Hoop and a guitar, two very harmonious backing singers, and er.. yes, a bloke with a guitar nipped in for a bit. It’s a small store and twenty or thirty people stood very politely. Really intimate, really nice.

And a video, of course. Taken on zoom, and I got heavy arms whilst doing an impression of an army drill with the camera, but it’s a taste:

Faris recently Tumbled this image. Interesting, I thought. But I have no radio (and in other news my TV watching stretches to iPlayer, surfthechannel, and 4od, the latter of which I rarely go near out of interface laziness) and wasn’t sure this average quite applied to me*, so I reflected upon my week of insane laziness and drew a picture of what I’ve probably done.

*or perhaps I was just fidgety and had a tablet handy.

I suspect that the book part is in fact fictitious. I’ve been halfway through 2001: A Space Odyssey for three months now, although perhaps this is because I’m more of a Phillip K Dick fan, rather than having a dislike of books (which I do not).

I stole an idea, but we’re sticking with Faris’ notion that that’s okay and it somehow makes me a genius. Bitchbag takes videos and cuts them together in snappy chunks; nice insight to life I think. I liked the idea back in November and also had no video editing skills – a good excuse to master the simplicities of iMovie, if you can call those video editing skills.

Anyway, I got distracted playing around with video from the last half year but finally cobbled together my bits for November and December (which is good because they’ll become massively more irrelevant the minute it hits 2010) . I’ve learnt the pain of removing long chunks of video that I love but no one else would (mostly gig footage), but soon got over it. I quite like them.

Lost my camera charger in December so there’s less chunk-age. Although all that really means is there’s slightly less fit-triggering Christmas lights footage, which I had plenty of anyway.

I absolutely love this from BBH for Google Chrome. Unpretentious, good designs with layered card, home-made sewn bits, Pong, big bundles of wool lying around in studio, and a plinky-plonky music box soundtrack. Yum yum.

How do you spell Summer Fate? One issue Google hasn’t been able to help me with.

Anyway, the new Vampire Weekend video is ace. It has lots of fun bright things including summer fate(?) flags and bright paint, and confetti, and bells. And coloured paper circles doing what they do best (falling and bouncing).

Not just any confetti either (not the church kind) – speedy swirling confetti the video zooms along its dolly tracks in to. (Use of running up and down the dolly tracks – another things I like about this). Cheap budget, crap props, ace video.

I wasn’t a massive fan of the song when I first heard it, but whilst watching it in order to compile the above list of fun and bright things it grew on me a lot. Actually I’ve had to restrain myself from bouncing around in my chair. I’m cool.

Made by Garth Jennings, the director of Hitchhiker’s guide director. It’s not the first interesting person they’ve had direct – Richard Ayoade did a couple too.