Steven Ellison is a tall, soft-spoken twenty-five-year-old who works under the name Flying Lotus. As part of a peer network, with outposts in Los Angeles, Montreal, and Glasgow, Ellison is helping to lead a small group of producers toward a new strain of hip-hop. He has been signed to the highly regarded London-based label Warp, which made a name in the nineties by releasing esoteric electronic recordings by Autechre and Aphex Twin. Ellison and his contemporaries have come up with a fusion of the extreme detail allowed by software programming (fractal spidering of sounds, a backdrop of crackles, and prickling, feverish rhythms no human hands could play) and the bedrock thump of hip-hop, the grounding beat that has bled into almost all pop music in the world. Ellison’s Flying Lotus releases this year—an album titled “Los Angeles” and a series of EPs—are a good index of how one branch of hip-hop is going to move into the next decade, detaching itself from traditional hip-hop rhyming and forming new splinter genres.

Dank des günstigen Wechselkurses von Pfund zu Euro heute bei Amazon.co.uk alle sieben Staffeln von Buffy, der philosophischen Vampir-Jägerinnen-Serie von Joss Whedon, bestellt. Dollhouse, die neue Sci-Fi-Serie Whedons, wird am 13. Februar 2009 in Amerika starten. Die Wartezeit bis dahin kann man sich mit dem knapp einstündigen, ziemlich tragischen Musical Dr. Horrible vertreiben.

»Watching MGMT played on the iPhone Ocarina shows the only chance you've got at getting laid because of an iPhone app.«

Paintings on Books.

Looking over Niko’s shoulder up at the virtual parachute jump in Grand Theft Auto IV’s version of Coney Island, grabbing a dollar hot dog off the boardwalk to get my health back, then leaping into a bullet-hole-riddled Hummer and smashing through my childhood neighborhood, flying over sand dunes on Manhattan Beach and finally drowning in the sea off Brighton Beach. Thinking, Man, I wish they made this game when I was a teenager. (Darran Aronofsky)

fading lights and indistinct vocal samples

BigChampagne's Garland says that BitTorrent users flock to aXXo for the same reason people go to, say, Pixar movies—a reputation, earned over time, for quality and reliability. There are other popular uploaders ("release groups" in BitTorrent parlance): FXG and eztv are both well-known purveyors of pirated TV shows and movies.* Garland notes the parallels here to the illegal drug trade. Just as labeling the product in a dime bag "Pineapple Express" might confer a certain renown, so can slapping a label on a computer file. "If you just go looking for a particular film or a particular TV show, you never know what you're going to get," Garland explains. "The logo or the mark or the brand ... is important because there's a reasonable expectation that you're going to be getting a high-quality product."

Dexter Dining Room and Kitchen. [q]

Pulshar: MixTape #17!

As health-food stores go, the Hardened Artery is as steady as any. Perusing its pricey nutrients last week in quest of some vitalizing herb or root to flush out a family of free radicals that had built their nest in my chassis, I came vis-à-vis a bottle of red fluid nestled like a krait between the ginseng and the echinacea and sporting the Ray Bradburyish title “Brainiac.” Plucked from its niche, it claimed to be a thirst quencher chockablock with gingko biloba and sundry antioxidants reputed to enhance memory.