New music, starting a company, Contra

• Stuck at work and have a hot beat in your head you just gotta work out? Bookmark Beaterator, and lay down some crunk in your cubicle.
  
  
• The time is coming for me to start my own product venture. After a conversation at the housewares show with one of the co-founders of Vessel (a company I have praised previously for being on the edge between mainstream and boutique, and being founded by two industrial designers) I have decided I need to get things rolling. I know I was to have my own company some day, and a good way to start down that path would be creating a simple niche product and working to get it manufactured and sold locally in independent boutiques or on the internet. This will be a side project that I hope will give me learnings I can take forward in larger ventures in the future. I have a concept forming-- keep an eye out here for developments. I hope that I can get things swinging this spring.
  
  
• New Music first impressions:
• Caribou (previously known as Manitoba) - The Milk of Human Kindness - Hot! Psychedelic-influenced rocktronica similar to his last record, but somebody's been listening to a LOT of Can-- and that's a really good thing. This will be a great summer record. Excellent.
• Four Tet - Everything Ecstatic - Man! Kind of a let-down. He moved away from the folktronica sound that he made his name from, and into more of a boring lap-hop sound. I hope this will grow on me.
• Prefuse 73 - Surrounded by Silence - I'm starting to think he can't recapture the raw excitement and freshness of Vocal Studies and Uprock Narratives. Even if he throws a million guest collaborators and MCs on top. It's ok.
  
• The Decemberists - Picaresque - Very nice. The Decemberists make summer records for lazy days. I like lazy days.
  
• Airborn Audio - Good Fortune - High Priest and M Sayyid (the other 2/3 of the now-defunct Anti-Pop Consortium that aren't named Beans) drop an ok record that stays in the bizarre hip-hop genre they defined in APC. The tracks are inconsistent in quality, and there aren't any REAL bangers like APC used to drop. Well, until an Antipop Consortium reunion, where's my copy of Shopping Carts Crashing? Oh yeah, on my iPod.
  
  
• Fictional explanation of a large sticker on a dumpster in the building where I work:
  
  
  
  
  
  In the summer of 1988 a 19-year old college drop-out named Nick was working as a loading dock worker in a crufty building in Chicago's seedy West Loop neighborhood. He hated the job, but it paid enough to buy new Nintendo games. Every day he would load trucks from the docks of a warehouse at Madison and Morgan, and every night he would return home to his apartment in Bucktown and play Nintendo while listening to gun fire outside his dirt-cheap apartment window. One day he received some large promotional poster/stickers in the mail promoting a new video game called "Contra". The game looked exciting, so he took the posters with him to work and slapped them on the side of a dumpster in the loading dock area. Staring at those two soldiers during the day gave him the motivation to make it through the day. Eventually Nick left his job, enrolled in a business college, took an accounting job downtown, married a girl and moved to Naperville, but the legacy of his sticker still remains in that West Loop warehouse...

  3/30/2005