Anyone who is interested in organic electronic music that will make you feel like you're in the misty Oregon mountains should check out this awesome artist. Emancipator has a few albums out and they seem to be related to the seasons. This album, with its pitter patter, sandy drum machine and twangy string instruments, makes you think of a hot foggy spring the whole way through. His first album, Soon It Will Be Cold Enough, with its echoing drones and resonating serenity gives the feeling of trotting through blowing snow in the forrest. 

If the sounds didn't give away the season, the album artwork surely does. You can see the foliage climbing its way up the cliff face from a dense green pine forrest. The humidity makes its presence known by obscuring the cliff's summit and by creating a thick atmosphere in the distance. A skewed off rule of thirds seems to take place here where horizontal slices are taken for the sky, landscape and then an even thicker fog. Although the title is obscured slightly, emancipator boldly makes his presence known with a Baskerville-like black font on top of thick white fog. 

The limited pallet here does not take from hierarchy here. Although green is our only hue with tones of gray, emancipator's album name is obviously placed and although the scene is a beautifully epic one, it doesn't overpower whats most important here. 

Whatever you do, go pick up an emancipator album if you can. He is one of the few artists i could put out money for and its totally worth it. Also, if ya haven't checked out that Sigur Ros yet, ya better do so haha. peace

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Yeah, so this is totally cool here. We have a new google page here and i just recently realized they were interactive! I must be really be behind here or something... Basically, you can change all these effects just by clicking on the dials and moving your mouse up and down. you can even record with that player on the right! My only problem is the nature of the mouse where you can only click on one key at a time. Not sure what you can record like that, but its totally a cool idea. 

Not only is this a pretty rad idea, but theres some cool graphic design elements there too. First off, the typography plays off of the sound adjustment knobs where each letter in is a type of adjustment. (By the way, excuse my poor understanding of music producing equipment) Anyway, the final two letters of Google are shown as wires attaching to the recording deck on the right. I felt like it took me a second to realize what happened to Google's logo, so in that respect the idea is a little flimsy. 

In the end, the vintage feel of the whole primitive recording system is what I think makes it so classy. Of course, they used vintage recording equipment influence because Google is always celebrating something. In this case, it is Robert Moog's 78th birthday today. He's the founder of Moog music and inventor of the Moog synthesizer. Some examples of his technology in modern synthesizers would include the Minimoog, Minimoog voyager and other bass and effects pedals. Most of this info is pulled from wikipedia of course. It is where the google link sends you for information on him. 

Whatever the case may be, you can find cool design anywhere, even while in the process of looking for good gd (however much that doesn't make sense but does at the same time, given the subject). 

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For all of my Legend of Zelda fans out there, heres a pen and ink for ya done in about an hour or so. Being inspired by the Ocarina of Time, i would sketch Link as a kid pretty often and once in a while you need to experience a bit of nostalgia and remember those good old days. 

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Hey folks figured I'd show ya some cool art ya might not have heard of. This ex-shaman is Pablo Amaringo who used had lead and took part in many ceremonies which included the drinking of an archaic brew called ayahuasca. This is the potion in which the shaman and other participants drink in order to communicate with the spirits of nature. The spirits lead the participants through their experience, sometimes one by one and others collectively. While the shaman might regularly drink the brew, most others are only only amerced in the experience on special occasions like coming of age ceremonies, initiations into the tribe, and when one is struck with a sickness. 

As the shaman embarks into nature under the influence of the brew, the plants communicate to him their medicinal and spiritual applications. This is his time to collect herbs for the brew he might not otherwise be able to grown in his garden. Every brew is different from the last because potency, quality and spiritual properties of each ingredient depends on very minor details like location picked, time of day, color and texture and even depends on how the shaman's mood is! Ever shaman has a different recipe for their ayahuasca which is his closest guarded secret.

Pablo's art depicts every aspect of the experience. His art contains two elements; the physical world and the spiritual world. The physical world always contains a circle of participants and our shaman who are sharing the experience with always the pot in the center containing the shamanic potion. Plants, animals and other natural elements make up the scaffolding of his art. Its as if no other humans exist in the world besides those sharing the profound experience.

Laid onto of this is our second element; the spiritual world. Spirits of plants, animals and higher beings populate the forrest and interact with our ceremonial trippers. They morph with nature, create and manipulate their natural energies and seem to exist as natural companions of the forrest and its inhabitants within his art. At this point, its safe to say the participants watch the fairytale-like happening as if watching that Avatar movie with 3-D glasses... only its totally not a movie. 

I have several of his pieces on my computer backgrounds and I love to study each work of art to find some other detail i passed by before. It seems as if every time I look at this stuff, I always find something new. Its like every hue, tint and shade in the rainbow is used in each piece but somehow it never seems too gaudy. There are endless patterns, esoteric symbols, metaphoric ideas and all kinds of trippy shit all over the place, i couldn't possibly get tired of gazing upon each wonder. In the end, i can't possibly do him justice by describing his styles and techniques, nor can i even adequately explain such an experience. I feel like everyone needs a bit of ayahuasca once in their life to put things into perspective, not to mention experience a bit of ego loss. 

Love talking on this subject, can't even include enough details here, so you ought to look into Pablo Amaringo and shamanism in general. Goodnight folks!

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