Link Highlight: Delight!

I've mentioned my friend Christian's loop-core band “Vampire 9000”. What I haven't written about yet is one of his other artistic endeavors; Delight. Delight is the brainchild of Christian and his girlfriend Lizelle. Here's how they describe what they're about:

"We are delighted by: Dear Friends, Giant Trees under Open Skies, Handmade T-Shirts made with lots of Love and Care, Love Stories and Love Songs, David Bowie, Dancing in Video Stores, Fortune Cookies after every meal, 8 Bit Video Games and Old Movies. Thank You!"

While it's all very true, the part you should pay most attention to is the "Handmade T-Shirts made with lots of Love and Care" bit. This is what delight is really all about, but what they've neglected to brag about is how the Love and Care they put into their shirts make them turn out. The passion that goes into crafting these pieces translates into some of the most awesome rock and roll attire to have been thrown over torsos this side of the equator. Just check out these examples of their latest creation, The Frankenstein: I was lucky enough to have been included in the label's first collaborative effort a few months back. To commemorate the first ever Vampire 9000 show (at the ultra cool City Slickers illustration exhibition) delight did a limited run of Vampire 9000 shirts. I was asked to create the artwork for the shirts as part of what will hopefully be an ongoing project – "Delight.by.for".

The idea behind "Delight.by.for" is to create a series of collaborations between Delight, illustrators and bands. Every entry will be "Delight by some artists for some band". So in the case of my one it was "Delight by Ben Rausch for Vampire 9000" - here's what I drew for them: And here's how it turned out: They packaged the shirts in awesome, purple boxes. I drew them this little coffin, which was printed onto cards and inserted into the package:

For their next collaboration Delight will be working with awesomeness-making superkids Doktrine, a combination of talents that's sure to result in something really special. Now go forth, check out what delight have been making, drool and then make a plan to own a little piece of their love.

Good weekend 0.5

Dogbox on Friday night was awesome. So awesome in fact that I drove home in total daylight.

Joe and I had a really fun head to head. Nathan Scott Phillips played the most awesome set of rock and roll I have heard in like forever. That said I missed the last part of it to head off to Chad's car and listen to the almost final mix of "Friendship Test", the massively anticipated debut EP by Us Kids Know (recorded by Andreas and Martinique of the mighty Sticky Antlers and KRNGY).

I'm counting that time spent in Chad's car as some of the best 30 minutes I've experienced all year. As high as my hopes were for what Friendship Test might have been, they were totally surpassed. All recorded live, in single takes, onto reel to reel, the songs capture the bands energy perfectly. Beyond that, the way the songs were recorded reveal intricacies that I've never caught when seeing them live. Over the course of it's 5 songs Friendship Test gets everything right that almost every recording act in South Africa gets completely wrong. I can see myself ranting about this EP loads leading up to (and following) it's December 12 release date, so let me not go on about it too much. For now all I will say is Friendship Test is sounding very very very good.

I spent Saturday in the great company of a bunch of old friends for Nick-apalooza, which was a rather awesome birthday celebration bursting with sunshine, guitar amps blaring Weezer and delicious butternut and mushroom friends.

Yesterday I recorded the vocals for a song! I mentioned before how Jar, Col, Cam and i had started making sweet sweet music together. What come out of my mouth yesterday will form a part of our first recorded song. Hopefully I'll be able to be able to share the finished thing with you through an animal call soon!

Friendship Test...

... is sincerity in sound.

Apocalypse then pt. IV

Kidofdoom - My Faith in War - album launch - Tings, PTA - 2 0ct 2009 As documented by our dear friend Colin Sackett This is the 4th post in the "Apocalypse Then" series, looking back on the My Faith in War tour. For photos from other cities check out:
Part I
Part II
Part III

For summer!

I'll be dropping in for a surprise hour set with Moe Joe. It'll be my second last set of the year. it'll also be the third and final Dogbox for the year. Did I mention the second Dogbox was even crazier than the first one? I'm a little afraid for tonight...

I just dropped off 3 really important tapes at MK.

Soon an unsuspecting living room in Pofadder will be getting invaded by screams and sings from Birmingham.

Link Highlight: The 20th.

This is the first in a new series of animal calls; In link highlight posts I'm hoping to quickly (or not so quickly) write a little about one of the sites I link to through this blog:

For this debut Link Highlight, I'd like to let you know about a very new blog called "The 20th" which you'll find under the links sections as "Kid you'll move mountains". Only started earlier this week, The20th offers little snapshots of images captured by Patrick Dineen. I've posted some of his party photos in the past and I love his work.

I strongly urge you to "drop by The 20th", follow/bookmark/whatever it and be sure to keep checking in on what promises to be a very special little blog.

UK.2.2.T in the Park - Friday

Friday was mostly spent hanging around waiting for 5PM when the arena would open. Anja and I took this time to plan who we'd be watching over the next 3 days.

T in the Park has a tradition called 'Fancy Dress Fridays" and kids make the most insane effort for this. Loads and loads of people dressed up, but the 2 groups that stick in my head were a couple dressed as the milk cartons from Blur's "Coffee and TV" music video and a gang of 12 kids dressed as storm troopers, led by Darth Vader, with a Princess Leia handcuffed and held prisoner. Cam, Col, Rod and I brought back their old Greenisforturbo power ranger outfits...

Considering the arena only opened at 5, the lineup for the Friday was a lot smaller than it would be on Saturday and Sunday. But one of the acts I was most excited too see at the festival were playing Friday night; The Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
As soon as I first layed my paws on their "Master" EP, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were instantly one of my favorite bands. reading about their live shows made me wish I could be in some tiny club in NYC seeing Nick Zinner creating walls of sound with a single guitar or Karen O swallowing her mic while screaming "Aaaarrrrt Staaaarrrrr".
While, for me, the bands past 2 albums don't hold a candle to their first album and earlier tracks, I really love them for what they are. So yeah, I was pretty massively excited. Anja and I even sacrificed seeing Camera Obscura to make sure we could be right in the front for YYYs.

The show was pretty great, with stage design matching the artwork of their single "Zero".

The band performed in front of a massive eyeball. There were also giant inflatable eyeballs bouncing around on the crowd.
Anja told me that when she saw them in London the huge eyeball at the back of the stage rolled back and they started projecting stuff onto it. I'd like to have seen that.

Everything about the show was quite perfect. They played a good amount of the old songs, and the newer songs translated live really well. But the whole thing was just kinda sad for me - seeing the 4 members spread out over this massive stage, even where we were from the barrier they were miles away. Just wished I could be seeing them in some tiny club, crammed onto a little stage, with all that energy contained and bouncing around the room, not just drifting off into the Scottish, evening air.

That said, seeing the band perform "Skeletons" with an eight piece bagpipe section was a pretty freaking incredible moment that just wouldn't have been the same anywhere else in the world.

So Friday was pretty damn awesome, but nothing could have prepared us for what would happen 12 hours into the next day...

THEY made robots.

This is pretty awesome...

In the past I posted about the 1st, the 2nd and the 3rd robot building sessions we had in the lead up to the first Dynamo and both the first and second prototype parties we threw before officially launching the series.

Today I'm really happy to be able to share these with you; they're some photos from another robot crafting session that was organized by a cool kid called Kyle Wallace.
Seeing Kyle and his gang embracing the spirit of Dynamo like this was just too cool. Hopefully, as we throw more Dynamos next year, I'll be able to share more awesome instances of kids taking matters into their own hands and organizing similar robo-construction get-togethers.