Can’t wait to see this.

When we saw Grace Jones at the meltdown festival last month, this was the promo that opened the show. It managed to both half scare us to death and prove she still had her edge in four freaky minutes.

Maneater.

Olt Aicher’s complete set of posters for the Munich Olympics from the flickr set of design shop blanka.

via coudal

Three years ago today, basilika, a blog I co-write with some deejay buddies, took a break from talking up the gigs we promoted and the latest obscure disco track we’d stumbled across and became something else entirely.

It’s amazing how much life can happen in 3 years, how different things could have so easily been. As I write this, just eight weeks away from meeting my unborn son, it staggers me to think how much was stolen from the victims and their loved ones.

It hit me recently how much I’m missing the Wire.

It’s the lack of something comparable that really smarts.

Hopefully this will help

But chances are, I’m gonna be losing my mind and signing Season 6 online petitions in six months.

Manni’s blog ‘Those City Nights‘ is one of the best researched and consistently well written music blogs out there. The level of detail and work that goes into it, puts most blogs to shame.

Today there is a great interview with House pioneer Jesse Saunders who talks at length about the evolution of house from disco-it’s fascinating stuff;

So whenever I played, my first record on the turntable would be this bootleg ‘On & On’ record because that was like my signature tune. When I put that on, everybody knew that I was in the place because nobody else was playing that side but me, no one even knew what it was, and I wouldn’t tell anybody, even though there were a few people that had it. When I would go up on stage I would make sure that security cleared it so that no one would know what it was that I was playing. It was amazing to me that they hadn’t flipped that record over and found it themselves.

The bootleg, Mach’s ‘On & On’, was put together in Miami by a local Cuban club dj (hat-tip discomusic.com) but remained unloved till discovered retrosptively by music historians and deejays wanting to pay homage to the roots of house. DJ Rahaan certainly falls into the later category as the video above so vivdly illustrates, reminding us, if nothing else, that one man with ‘a b-side and a plan’ can change the course of music forever.

Gotta a lot of love for Blackjoy.

Both ‘Moustache’ and ‘Untitled’ got heavily caned back in the basilika love disco days.

I stumbled across their blog a few months back (probably via chris’ ever-heavy another night on earth blog) and it’s just the kind of thing I would love to see more of; artists using blogs to give out real quality unreleased edits and mixes.

To celebrate summertime they have released three Disco mixes to download.

So get busy people

And as a bonus here’s a snippet of an unreleased track I got from their myspace years ago (and have been known to loop up and filter to death)

Blackjoy-Anubis

image via

If you’ve ever spent any time on OilDrum finding out the lastest dire predictions on Peak Oil, you’ll know how quickly any lingering hopes for a bright and secure future can wither and die.

Whilst I can well accept the severity of the problems now facing athe globalized, consumer driven society, I wonder if our collective guilt over years of living selfishly hasn’t made us embrace a vision of a post-Oil apocalypse a little too readily.

Obviously things have to change dramatically-and probably that’s where most of the hope evaporates, but every so often something comes along to challenge my overbearing cynicism and allow a brief and fragile hope for redemption.

BlackLight Power is one such thing. The company claims to have created a technology which generates electricity from water at almost no cost.

Too good to be true ? Probably

You can read all about it here, and make sure you trawl through the comments at the bottom where couple of people seemingly close to the project weigh-in. It’s almost enough to make you believe that maybe it won’t be so bad after all.

Almost.

Heavy!!

With early reports comparing it to Godfather II, Heat (!!!) or Empire Strikes Back-I can’t remember a film I’ve been more excited about.

Slashfilm has an early (spoiler free) review.

“The Dark Knight is a masterpiece - an almost flawless comic book movie adaptation“

Sometimes (most of the time) I find Monbiot just a little a little bit too harsh but true.

But this sounds like something that could work.