The Vatican re-lit, the fingernail as a weaving tool, and a drawing of a big shelf for lots of houses. Plus: new yacht rock, a song about a bear climbing a tree, and 1980s funk pop from Nigeria.
Aishy, usually a photographer of city nightlife, took these photographs of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, bathed (in post-processing) with red and blue light. The effect is stunningly weird, highlighting every detail of the Renaissance architecture while also suggesting a future world in which the meaning of this cathedral and its symbolism has changed.
If you like these, please also see Aishy’s photographs of Tokyo, edited to suggest a certain style of anime background art. More of a pastel thing, way less sinister.
Japanese weaving company Kiyohara Orimono employs a traditional weaving technique called tsumekaki hon tsuzure ori, which requires the weaver to carve little notches in their fingernail to hold down the threads. You can buy things made this way.
Sora News 24 (“yesterday's news from Japan and Asia, today”) brought this to the attention of the English-speaking internet last year after it went modestly viral in Japan. Here’s a video that shows the process and the results.
An imagining of a neighborhood of single family homes that is also an apartment building.
New music: Long Long Lonely by Jimmy Montague. (Bandcamp or Spotify or YouTube). The album is called Casual Use, and it’s a deliberate throwback in style to the great soft rock of the past— George Harrison and Paul Simon and the Doobie Brothers, sure, but also Elliot Smith (check out 70th Avenue Hustle, Smith fans) and Rufus Wainwright.
Brooklyn Vegan quotes him in their review:
I wanted huge arrangements, huge horn sounds, huge drums, huge everything. I wanted the Wall Of Sound energy without the Wall Of Sound wash-out. I wanted the feel of the big brass bands of the '70s with the lyrical content of my contemporaries. I wanted to be able to reach for anything without hesitation.
New music: Climbing Bear by Explosions in the Sky. (Bandcamp or Spotify or YouTube). Explosions in the Sky are long-time purveyors of arty, instrumental indie rock. Their 2003 album The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place got passed around my high school on CD-R for everyone to rip to their home PC.
This new album is called “Big Bend (An Original Soundtrack for Public Television)” and it’s not some kind of hipster joke: Explosions in the Sky wrote the soundtrack for a PBS documentary called Big Bend: The Wild Frontier of Texas and you can watch it right now if you’re a member of your local PBS station.
Old music: Sweet Music by Dizzy K. (1984). (Bandcamp or Spotify or YouTube). Nigerian synth-funk, off a 2018 remaster of his greatest hits— that is, the hits from before he got born again and started making funky gospel albums.
I love the old-school synthesizer tones. I love the light sweet melodies, the smooth vocals, the bouncy bass line. I love the non-synthetic drumming that ties the whole thing together. I love this track.
-Thomas