Trying to keep my cool and not get trapped in an ever increasing iphone mania.

No Country for Old Men looks like it could be film of the year.

I’ve got to run (it’s almost friday night)

Here’s Simbar by Antonio Carlos Jocafi.

(which is all kinds of awesome)

image courtesy of butukgirl via flickr

right now i’m tired. i’ve done a day in the office, a stint at the gym, managed some ad-hoc dinner and i got to get me this blog post done or y’all’ll have nothing to read when you get to your desks tomorrow.

but there’s something keeping me awake, something calling me from across the room. a place i’ve started to escape to in the evenings. at weekends. damn, even on holiday when i’m already supposed to have escaped.

that place is maryland. tighter than that, that place is baltimore. and deeper even; darker than that, the place i keep going back to? well currently its the city docks. a bit ago it was the west side projects. rumour has it (though i’m not one for spoilers) that i’ll be moving to the halls of government soon enough. Read more »

Saturday night was my brother’s shindig at the cosmo bar in clerkenwell. The bar was a little on the shabby side but had a killer soundsystem (complete with wonderful Rane rotary mixer).It was a strictly third floor selection which was great for me and jimmy (probably not great so for everyone else).

It’s become a bit of a thing to spend sometime ‘in the studio’ for our closest and so my saturday afternoon was spent looping and tweaking for the big night.

No time for anything to clever-it was all about getting a track together that was heavy on nostalgia, but not too inclusive.

The result….

well listen for yourself.

jaksoul-hiphop jim kelly

We’d all heard the rumours, but seeing henry’s departure confirmed late on friday night was certainly no way to start a weekend. Such was the depth of connection between him and the club, it was almost too much to take in. The thought of him not being there to work his magic …..

Thankfully I have arseblog to help me in times of footballing crisis and after the initial shock had subsided it’s clearly not as bad as it could be. It’s been a while since he could skip past players at will, after a injury-laden season on the sidelines chances are he may quite be the player he once was.(well here’s hoping anyway)

Putting partisan bitterness aside for a moment-there have been so many good times (that hatrick against Liverpool in 03/04 season), so many happy memories of his time at arsenal. It’s too soon to be watching henry’s best goal compilations on youtube (they make me want to cry) and I’ll be zoning out of any barca media coverage for a few months, but in the meantime thank you titi.

You really were the best.

Jeff Buckley-Lover You Should Have Come Over (Live Acoustic In Japan)

seems like everywhere i turn on the internet there’s more and more beautiful things, my ongoing quest to read the whole of the internet honestly didn’t get much further today but did reach a peak with my faith being restored in the scientific community. finally i understand where all the research budgets go to with the application of science for an enormously fruitful end, yes; the formula for making the perfect bacon sandwich…

N = C + {fb (cm) . fb (tc)} + fb (Ts) + fc . ta, where N=force in Newtons required to break the cooked bacon, fb=function of the bacon type, fc=function of the condiment/filling effect, Ts=serving temperature, tc=cooking time, ta=time or duration of application of condiment/filling, cm=cooking method, C=Newtons required to break uncooked bacon.

although, personally i’d skip the science bit and head straight to canteen - that way someone else does the washing up.

thanks to another dear friend of the latitudes, joebocop, for a hook up to a superduper blog run by some guy he met at a barbeque this weekend. we have emense respect for anyone who can blog regularly and still bring home the… erm, bacon so while i can (somewhat bitterly) put the fact that these kids manage it twice in a day and have also found time to publish a book down to youthful exuberance, you all should check out out it’s nice that. i love their utterly covetable mini frisbee of a calling card which you can see hob-nobbing with the cream of beautiful blog business cards above. it’s nice that brings together so many lovely bits of design, music, film, photography, fashion… everything destracting and inspiring to my magpie eye you wonder how they have time to find the stuff let alone write the damn thing.

still, mine is not to wonder why… get to it.

and if that’s not enough then the new coco electrik album, army behind the sun, comes out today too. buy it here.

photo via gu

Never been a particular fan of camping, so missing Glastonbury this weekend doesn’t feel like any kind of loss, especially when you see pics like this-maybe next year? (or not)-could go into a big rant about how lame and tweely guardian reader-y it has all become, but I think it will probably come across as sour grapes (and quite frankly, it probably is).

Instead I have a super-hl-exclusive from the wonderful, The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain who have a new album out soon (which is lovely) and are led (in part) by a good friend of ours Kitty Lux (who is also lovely).

The album, Precious Little, continues their winning formula of mixing clever re-interpretations of well known songs with a few of their own, equally fantastic, original tracks.

Here is their version Joni Mitchell’s (He Played Real Good) For Free.

Have a great weekend.

Speaking of dilla.

Me and Saint Christophe came across these dudes last night.

Their album Tribute is a very dilla-esque collection of 1-2 minutes sketches. Not much in the way of depth maybe, but nothing like a wickedly cut-up soul break to get me through till friday. The guys originate from france, a nation which seems intent on monopolising my ipod at the moment, which brings me on to the other big french related news of the day;

BUY YOUR OWN DAFT PUNK MASK !!!

Not sure what you’d do with it exactly (apart from rule over all mankind) but next time I have a spare $65,000 then count me in.

Anyway whilst I dream of robots, here is the Curtis Mayfield sampling, Arts and Policy-heavy.

Returning from holiday to overflowing rss feeds in bloglines has reminded me of the need to pursue simplicity and avoid unnecessary distractions as much as I’m able (which isn’t very, if the truth be told).
I’ve started to deleting blogs I don’t read that often and am trying to be much more selective about things I subscribe too.

It probably won’t happen, but I think post-holiday resolutions should generally be encouraged (except the ones about never going back to work of course) Thankfully as part of the hl family I have constant 24 hour global backup against ‘missing’ any music that could otherwise slip beneath my wide and deep musical radar.

The great thing about having a collective is that you don’t have to cover all the bases yourself. Every now and then one of the gang stumbles across something you have been after for a while and sends it your way and all is well with the world.

Today, it was the ever beautiful jb with this little nugget from blue note’s ‘hope for the hiphop generation’ Robert Glasper. Generally (for which you can read always) I tend to give jazz/hip hop a really wide berth, but the idea of someone re-interpreting the dilla aesthetic within a jazz context sounded really interesting.

And so it is.

Clocking in at a concise 4:28 the track borrows stylistically from dilla, coming the form of a mini-montage (complete with tired but generic answer-phone intro) of two tracks, one live/one recorded. Both sections sound amazing, hinting at something really fresh without ever really developing the ideas too much. (maybe a nod to dilla there as well) The second part is a cover of Ahmad Jamal’s majestic Swahililand, used by dilla on the seminal de la track ’stakes is high’, and something I will never get tired of .

All in all it’s a great piece-’bout time jazz started looking forward again.

*update* thanks to cubikmusic for pointing to this interview with Mr Glasper which puts his work in a bit of context and has soundclips for loads more of the album.

The more I hear this guy the more he seems like the real deal.-able to bring so many different influences to bear on his work (just like any decent post modern jazzer should)-the Maiden Voyage/Everything is in it Right Place track is particularly worth a listen.

Robert Glasper-J Dillude

*update2* damn it!-just seen those upfront mothers at analog giant posted this sucka last week, so here is the ace, if very E.S.T.-y sounding, radiohead/herbie track I was talking ’bout instead.

Enjoy

Robert Glasper-Maiden Voyage/Everything is in it Right Place

 

you know, ten days out of the city might be just about right. long enough to get some distance, far enough away to achieve perspective but not soo far gone you lose touch completely.

for me this week just gone was a watershed (and not just because of the torrential rain and plentiful opportunities to wear my brand-new, bright-yellow poncho) much like in a box of that beautifully branded Dorset muesli - if you shake it up enough, once the rattling has subsided and the oatmeal levelled, all the big stuff finally is left on the top. same thing happens in my life (only with fewer raisins) so with a week in the deafening quiet of the Poitou-Charente countryside, the dust seemed to finally settle on the last year and half and the view ahead started to clear. but i won’t bore you with the minutae of my own personal revelations because we’re here to talk about the music/film/culture/miscellania.

over the great glassy sea to my right, j.tillman’s been busy working on his new album, the Territory, and posted another beautiful demo which you might have seen on gorilla vs bear or his myspace, but since we’re always happy to lend him bandwidth on the latitudes and since it’s (somewhat unsurprisingly) achieved the repeat-repeat-repeat-feat on my itunes since i got back, High Enough to Raise is a welcome back track today.

i know i’ve waxed lyrical about josh’s gently effortless talent loads before, but his is a voice which has followed my last eighteen months through the dust storm, the chiming tales in his lyrics ringing truer than is sometimes comfortable but always worth listening to, i’d urge you buy his records so he can record more and finally get the bits of cement out of his beard.

j.tillman - high enough to raise

buy j.tillman records at fargo, yerbird, amazon or your local record store.

So for the next week or so HL is taking a well needed summer break.

Jb and I will be in france, walking through empty corn fields with kids and dogs, eating wonderful food and drinking a bit too much wine.

Nothing like getting away from everything to give you some perspective. It’s so easy to spend so much time dealing with everyday concerns that you never really appreciate all the amazing stuff that goes on the macro scale of your life.

As well as being one of my all time favourite ’sunshine’ tracks, Grace Jones ‘La Vie En Rose’ reminds me of sitting in a bar saying goodbye to a workmate (who’s wedding we’re going to tomorrow) and the way our memories seem to add rose-tinted hue to our lives, when we look back in retrospect.

It’s been 9 months (and almost 200 posts) since we started HL and so
much has happened, personally, in that time, it feels like we’ve been
on somekind of epic journey.

Well now it’s time to look back, enjoy the sun, and appreciate how far we’ve come.

Cause when we do, it gives us hope-hope that if keep moving with this velocity, then we might reach still greater heights.

Grace Jones-La Vie En Rose (Tom Moulton Mix)