"Your dreams begins here, have a sweet one" 

An euphoric set with beautiful ambient sounds mixed with vibrant beats. Abstract, creative and experimental with tracks from; Apparat, Ryan Davis, Max Cooper, Dusty Kid and Dominik Eulberg. 

The set as MP3 can be downloaded from here: http://goo.gl/HxCKw

Twenty years since Serge Gainsbourg’s death, he remains one of France’s most popular – and controversial - cultural figures. With the anniversary of his death Wednesday, France is paying homage to one of its favourite pop icons.

When Serge Gainsbourg passed away on March 2, 1991, there was a national outpouring of emotion in France on a scale rarely seen for the loss of one of its most popular and iconic artists, known not only for his musical talent, but also for his provocative personality.


“He was the French singer who best combined poetry and music to create French pop”, said Alain Wodrascka, the author of two books on Gainbourg, including last month’s “Gainsbourg, Gainsbarre”.

Today, Gainsbourg, né Lucien Ginsburg, is arguably one of the last great artists to emerge from France who seriously challenged not just the country's musical scene but its social and cultural landscape.
The anniversary of his death has been commemorated with a deluge of books, musical compilations, TV specials, radio programmes and art all paying homage to the singer and composer. In his lifetime, Gainsbourg revelled in questioning, reacting and toying with French traditions, but it seems posthumously he has become something of a benchmark by which all other French artists judge themselves.
In the last five years alone, Gainsbourg has been the inspiration of museum exhibits, films, and numerous song adaptations. At least 115,000 people alone visited Paris’ Cité de la Musique for “Gainsbourg 2008”, a retrospective of the artist’s life, making it one of the museums most popular exhibits.

In 2010 the musician was the subject of the movie “Gainsbourg (vie héroique)”, which went on to be nominated for multiple Césars, the French equivalent of the Oscars, and won three, including best actor.
The temptation to keep looking back so many years after Gainsbourg’s death may be because no one has succeeded to push, prod or provoke French culture in the same way since.

Turning provocation into an art

In 1969 Gainsbourg stirred music fans into a frenzy with the orgasmic crescendo of his duet “Je t’aime…moi non plus” with long-time partner Jane Birkin. The song caused an outcry globally, with the BBC banning it and the Vatican denouncing it.

Gainsbourg’s musical daring sparked national ire with his reggae interpretation of France’s national anthem “La Marseillaise”. The lilting rhythm of the song riled patriots to the point that he received death threats, and spurred Le Figaro journalist Michel Droit to lash out, writing a critique of Gainsbourg where he accused him of “provoking anti-semitism”. Perhaps most shocking of all, however, was the duet with his daughter Charlotte on the track Lemon Incest. The song caused outrage, with the video for it showing a 12-year-old Charlotte semi-naked lying on a bed with her topless father, singing about "the love that we will never make together". Despite incest being the universal taboo, the ensuing scandal only served to further increase his album sales.

Shoes too big to fill

Gainsbourg’s talent for music and scandal made him an irresistible figure for the French media and the public at large. His antics disgusted and delighted in almost equal measure. His passing left a gaping hole in French society and culture, and no one has come close to filling the gap. Frédéric Sanchez, who curated “Gainsbourg 2008” in Paris, describes him as, “one of the most important artists of the 20th century”.

While Sanchez would argue that some of the controversy that surrounded the musician was manufactured to sell albums or purely reactionary, he still insists that Gainsbourg’s shoes are just too big to fill. Sanchez argues, “There is no equivalent”. Gainsbourg, to Sanchez, was a man who seamlessly mixed a penchant for media attention with extreme talent as an artist. The two combined produced an oeuvre of musical genius and a lifetime of compelling and contentious public appearances.

As Gainsbourg once said, “In modern life, there is an entire language to invent. A language that is just as musical as it is based on words. There’s an entire world to create, there is everything to do”. One could argue that no one has succeeded in recreating the world since, which may be why 20 years later, France still clings to Gainsbourg.

Musician and composer Ben Lovett is no stranger to writing for film -- his award-winning work has been featured in 'The Signal' and 'The Last Goodbye' starring Faye Dunaway, to name a few -- but for 'Eye of the Storm,' it was Lovett who hired a filmmaker to bring his work to life. Director Christopher Alender used state-of-the-art special effects on a shoestring budget for the video, and the result is an eye-popping work that resembles a steampunk take on Frank Miller's 'Sin City' set to Lovett's haunting, acoustic-based song.

"Chris approached me with this idea for the film as an extension of the metaphor," Lovett tells Spinner. "The lyrics in the song deal with a difficult relationship through the portrait of a ship sailing through the heart of a storm."

The video, as described by the director, tells "the story of a lonely captain who has to unshackle himself from a troublesome past in order to move on to the next chapter in his life." To create the lush imagery, Alender exaplains, the process was a painstaking exercise in trial-and-error. "Simulating clouds and water vapor from scratch is extremely labor and computer-intensive and we just didn't have time or money," he says. "To make the different weather conditions, we ended up taking more of a collage approach, poring over thousands of photo sand videos of clouds to get every little piece exactly how we wanted it to look."

"The film is an interesting mirror to the song," Lovett explains. "The recording of 'Eye of the Storm' is all organic instrumentation with a single synthesized element, whereas what you see in the movie is nearly the perfect reversal of that."

A rescue dog with its own TV ad is the latest weapon of the commercial television marketing body Thinkbox.

In a 60-second spot set to Bachman-Turner Overdrive's You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet, a scruffy mutt called Harvey outwits cuter rivals for the affection of a new owner by showing a video in which he drives a car, cooks and plays chess.



The ad was developed by the agency Red Brick Road and is backed by Thinkbox shareholders including ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and BSkyB. It will start showing on Friday. The spot ends with the line "Discover the power of TV advertising... Television: where brands get their breaks". Thinkbox launched its first ad campaign promoting the medium last year featuring a hypnotherapy patient aping famous lines from commercials. "We have so much evidence proving how effective TV advertising is, but there's nothing quite like seeing it work for yourself, as we did last year, to convince you to have more," said Lindsey Clay, marketing director at Thinkbox. "We hope this new ad will be as well received and successful as our first."

The campaign will run for about six weeks on the TV channels of Thinkbox shareholders – including ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and BSkyB – in paid-for advertising airtime. Media planning and buying has been handled by MediaCom

For those of you that might have missed it, last year's muse.mu Christmas present was a 360 degree video footage of Uprising and Citizen Erased, filmed at Wembley Stadium on Saturday 11th September. This interactive footage allows you to choose both the cameras you watch from, and the angle of each camera! Controls under the video player let you pick from seven different camera positions, including of course Matt, Chris and Dom cams! You can then control the precise camera angle by dragging the video inside the viewer for a full 360 degrees view and watch anything you want from seeing Matt playing on the piano in Citizen Erased and standing in the front row!

Using multiple layers of tinted glass, artists Xia Xiaowan and David Spriggs transform flat artwork into 3D sculptures of distorted figures, storms, and dandelion-like explosions. Viewers are treated to different shifting perspectives of these “spatial paintings” depending on where they stand in the art space. 

On each pane of glass, Xiaowan and David draw an individal image using colored pencils, and only when they are combined on their floor racks, do the images create the whole hologram like effect.

It’s definitely a digital age in movies as more and more are trying to meld real-life with computer generated effects to find the happy medium. There are those who believe that the trend is damaging the industry. We won’t explore that here. 


What we will look at is a pretty darn cool video from a movie that demands the need to be digital. Tron: Legacy was born from one of the original fully-digital movies and in many ways carried out its charter splendidly. This video that shows some of the ways that the graphics were created takes us into a world that few get to see. When the veil is lifted, it’s clear that the technology used to create the movie is almost as amazing as the movie itself. Perhaps more so. But be warned, their are some light spoilers up ahead.

You know that feeling you get when you hop into a car you'll never be rich enough to own? It's full of fascinating technology, everything works great, it's solidly built, it definitely won't fit into the "compact" spots at 7-11 -- and it just doesn't care. If you're a DJ, entering the world of Pioneer's DJM-2000 is a little bit like that. Read on Engadget.com for more impressions of the multitouch-laced behemoth to see if it'll have you raving all the way to 2012.

We have come to the end of yet another year — just in time for another roundup of wallpapers for your New Year 2011 celebrations for your desktop! Made in Design wishes you all a Happy New Year and hope that 2011 brings you much success and prosperity in all your endeavors. And don’t forget to stay inspired and creative!

Ever been confused at a restaurant in a foreign country and wish you could just scan your menu with your iPhone and get an instant translation? Well as of today you are one step closer thanks to Word Lens from QuestVisual.

The iPhone app, which hit iTunes last night,  is the culmination of 2 1/2 years of work from founders Otavio Good and John DeWeese. The paid app, which currently offers only English to Spanish and Spanish to English translation for $4.99, uses Optical Character Recognition technology to execute something which might as well be magic. This is what the future, literally, looks like.

Founder Good explains the app’s process simply, “It tries to find out what the letters are and then looks in the dictionary. Then it draws the words back on the screen in translation.” Right now the app is mostly word for word translation, useful if you’re looking to get the gist of something like a dish on a menu or what a road sign says. At the moment the only existing services even remotely like this are Pleco, a Chinese learning app and a feature on Google Goggles where you can snap a stillshot and send that in for translation. Word Lens is currently self-funded.

Good says that the obvious steps for Word Lens’ future is to get more languages in. He’s planning on incorporating major European languages and is also thinking about other potential uses including a reader for the blind, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we did French next, Italian and since my mom is Brazilian, Portuguese.”

Says Good, modestly, “The translation isn’t perfect, but it gets the point across.” You can try it out for yourself here.