Hardformat

If you’re in London, don’t miss the DJ Food/Henry Flynt exhibition – it’s on until 12th February.

It’s here: Pure Evil Gallery 108 Leonard st London EC2A 4RH. Here’s the Google map.

The hours are: 10am – 6pm daily.

No excuses :-)

YEARS from Bartholomäus Traubeck on Vimeo.

Via BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow:

This music — which sounds like a moody piano soundtrack for a existentialist movie about a rainy day — is made by slicing a tree in cross-section, sticking it on a turntable, and dropping a tone-arm with a PlayStation Eye Camera in the head, and processing its output through Ableton Live. It’s called Years, and it was created by Bartholomäus Traubeck.

Manuel S Z / Optigram was kind enough to send me a preview of an upcoming release. His work for a wide range of contemporary dubstep and dance-related artists is some of the most interesting design around currently. I’m looking forward to featuring it in 2012.

Boy who cried wolf is a little like how I feel at the moment. Thank you for the kind responses to my previous post announcing a hiatus. In hindsight I needed to write it to draw a line in the sand. The act of doing so has caused me to have a bit more of a think and I’m going to try to continue with HF. I can’t make any promises, but week by week I’ll see how it goes. If you know of any labels that need/deserve/would like coverage here please do let me know and if you ever see an opportunity to spread the word about the site, that would be great as well.

Thanks again for reading.

If you’ve enjoyed the website, please accept my apologies. I’m in two minds whether to continue with the site or not. My reasons are as follows:

• - Hard Format is such a strange pastime! It involves sourcing designs (I get sent some work by labels and designers, but not enough), photographing them, post-processing and setting up each weekly post (uploading the images, finding music samples, typing out the credits and writing about the design). It’s pretty repetitious and though I’m proud of the website and think it makes for a valuable/unusual/eccentric/interesting resource, I’ve been doing pretty much the same thing over and over since April 2007…

• - My day job is as a web manager for a large art college so there’s overlap of the mundane tasks
• - The site is up and down like a yoyo on Slicehost which is frustrating, but moving to a new host is quite a hassle
• - I’ve never managed to get the site mentioned in the places where I think it would have a chance of gaining a bigger audience, specifically The Guardian and The Wire magazine
• - I’m as huge a fan as ever of an ever-growing range of music, but as the result of the ending of a long-term relationship I’m also broke and unable to keep buying records like I used to
• - I’m increasingly passionate about my photography which takes up much of my spare time.

I still believe in the importance of physical media, even if it’s becoming a niche area. I’m not a big fan of the ever-growing number of expensive special editions. I think the work of Second Language and Kraftwerk best represent the twin poles of what I love about music design.

All of the above doesn’t mean that Hard Format is over. I’m still thinking about it. I  have a few more posts to publish. In the meantime, I suggest you follow the site on Twitter/RSS/Facebook so you’ll get a notification of new posts. You should also read DJ Food’s blog and { feuilleton }, both great resources for intelligent and passionate commentary on visual matters, frequently music-related.

Thank you for reading.