22nd Century Shoes

July 22nd, 2010 by Ultimate Cowboy

I just picked up a pair of these futuristic Nike Lunarglides, and they’re pretty fast.

Anyways, I normally listen to music when I go running, and I’m pretty sure that this Blaze Tripp remix of 22nd Century by Kelis is going to make for a great soundtrack.

Kelis - 22nd Century (Blaze Tripp Remix)

Catch this kid on Myspace or say hello to him on Twitter.

Bunnies

July 16th, 2010 by Ultimate Cowboy

picture-4

KA SO RE dropped me their track “Bunnies” a few weeks ago, and its a fun little ditty.

On a related note, the January/February 2010 issue of Playboy had some amazing pictures of Tara Reid.

KA SO RE - Bunnies

Gettin’ Sleazy In The Big Easy

July 14th, 2010 by Ultimate Cowboy

I went down to New Orleans to see a good friend of mine get married last week. Apparently its tradition at these things to get blasted and wear masquerade gear.

The band at the wedding was playing mostly Motown and blues type stuff, but you didn’t come here to hear that. Here’s beats from zomby instead. zombies are big in New Orleans, aren’t they?

Rumors and Revolutions - zomby

PR Girls Like Their Lattes Hot, Thick And Creamy

July 13th, 2010 by Ultimate Cowboy

Its been a while since a song made me laugh out loud. Thankfully, The Deli Boys dropped me their track PR Girls, Inspired by the chicks in public relations that they know.

Is it reinforcing the stereotype of PR girls as nothing more than dumb, gold-digging sluts that are into lattes, brunch and fashion? Definitely. But that’s what makes it good.

From their blog post about the track:

“It talks about the large boot, small dog, fancy bag culture that has taken over the city streets across our nation. We recognized a type of girl that was repeatedly emerging from the deep jungles of urban culture. Owning the street with their over-priced bags, they developed their own language of terms by using weird melodic lisps and slurs. These women, no matter if they were in the Public Relations field or not, were dubbed “PR Girls”. This term catapulted the idea of writing and producing this song. We hopes you like.”

The Deli Boys - PR Girls

Here’s a few other tracks to go with the theme:

Toktok vs. Soffy O - The Lookalikes

Wax Dolls - Spoiled Rich Bitches (Trash Yourself Remix)

If you like The Deli Boys, I have a feeling you might also like The Girls Can Hear Us.

1172 NASA Pictures

July 12th, 2010 by Ultimate Cowboy

A few years ago, Jens gave me a CD that had a folder on it with over 1000 old-school NASA photos. He says he has no idea where he got them, but that doesn’t matter: all the photos are amazing.

I uploaded them to Flickr here, and while you’re looking at them here’s some music to get you into the orbital mood:

Miami Horror - Moon Theory (Sam La More Remix)

(via)

Crystal Castles - Celestica (The Sonixx Remix)

Monarchy - The Phoenix Alive (Disco Bloodbath Vocal Radio Edit)

Cypherpunks Write Code, Cyberpunkers Drop Beats

June 27th, 2010 by Ultimate Cowboy

Back in the day when I first got into blogging I came across A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto.

Back then, it was pretty much the most bad-ass thing I’d ever read.

From the text:

“Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can’t get privacy unless we all do, we’re going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use, worldwide. We don’t much care if you don’t approve of the software we write. We know that software can’t be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can’t be shut down.”

That’s some heavy stuff right there. Fight the good fight, Cypherpunks.

Then list to some equally heavy beats, courtesy of Borracho! and Cyberpunkers

Gooseflesh - Dodgems (Cyberpunkers Remix)

Cyberpunkers - OMG (Tom Deluxx) Remix

HAEzER - WTHIF (Cyberpunkers Remix)

Borracho! - Voynich Cipher

Alejandro is from Chasm City

June 13th, 2010 by Ultimate Cowboy

I just saw the video for Alejandro by Lady Gaga, and I couldn’t believe how much it reminded me of an Alastair Reynolds book.

The world Alastair paints for his readers is far-future: humans can live for centuries and are able to genetically modify themselves, yet the world they live in is still very full of pain and suffering, much of it self-inflicted. The awe of long-distance star travel is coupled with dangerous and painful conditions for travellers that make it possible.

There’s this overwhelming sense of discomfort and unease in the books, like something terrible is going to happen. Most of humanity lives in an asteroid belt called The Glimmer Band, and it is full of remnants of previous advanced technology that has been rendered unusable by an alien threat. Constant reminders of that pervade that remind the reader that not everything is alright in this future, and while its unspoken much of the population seems to think the same. This has given way to bizarre decadence by some, and masochistic religious cults in others in the world of The Glimmer Band.

I liked the books, yet I have a hard time reading them: none of the main characters are likable, and terrible things happen to people. Everyone is uncomfortable, sleep-deprived, on-edge, going crazy or all of the above.

Like I said, I got pretty much the same feeling when I watched the video for Alejandro.

Anyways, here’s a Rusko rework of the Gaga original (via Gotta Dance Dirty)

Lady Gaga - Alejandro (Rusko’s Papuseria Remix)

Lady Gaga - Alejandro

Toronto’s Finest

May 15th, 2010 by Ultimate Cowboy

electroto

If you’ve been in Toronto for the past years, you’ve probably noticed that the city has some serious electronic talent.

Part of that talent includes some of the city’s finest music blogs:

Salacious Sound posts some great party tracks on a very regular basis, and they’re often the first place I read about tours coming to Toronto. A recent post they wrote stakes the claim that Toronto might just be the Remix Capital of the World, and I think the might just be right.

Here’s a couple of choice tracks from Toronto artists they posted recently:

Autoerotique - Gladiator (Torro Torro Remix)

Barletta - Panther (Torro Torro’s SalaciousSound Remix)

As a bonus, their History of Electro series kicked off the other day, and promises to be a great series of posts.

Pugged Not Thugged is a blog that I’ve only been reading for a few weeks now, but I already like it a lot, especially the fact that there were the first place I heard the O-God Ducksauce remix:

Ducksauce - Barbara Streisand (O-God Remix)

ElectroTO is like a shrine to the city’s finest electro. In their “What’s Good Wednesday,” posts the blog’s writers Trackson and The Vamp give everyone a good heads up on the city’s best parties. The image at the top of this post comes from them (thanks, guys), and is one of the better redesigns of the Jay’s logo that I’ve ever seen. Close seconds are the one where the Blue Jay looks like an uzi and one I’ve seen of the Blue Jay wearing headphones.

A recent fave from ElectroTO:

Jesse Rose - Where Were You Last Night

Plus, ElectroTO has some wicked t-shirts available for sale.

Torontette has been blogging her little heart out for the past couple of months and while her tunes of choice aren’t always the pumping electro I prefer, she’s still got a feel for the city.

I especially like the Van Schie tracks she had up recently:

Matt Van Schie - Saturday Night (GLOVES Remix)

Finally, this blog post is dedicated to the memory of The Curb Crawlers - the first music blog I started reading (single tear rolling down my cheek) and despite having folded up shop, still one of the internet’s finest pieces of HTML and CSS.

What are your favorite T-dots artists or blogs? Hook me up with some new stuff to listen to.

“Love you, Cat Mother”

May 12th, 2010 by Ultimate Cowboy

panthermoderns

The Panther Moderns were a sort of youth terrorism organization in the book Neuromancer by William Gibson:

“Panther Moderns,” he said to the Hosaka, removing the trodes. “Five minute precis.”

“Ready,” the computer said.

It wasn’t a name he knew. Something new, something that had come in since he’d
been in Chiba. Fads swept the youth of the Sprawl at the speed of light; entire subcultures
could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly. “Go,” he said. The
Hosaka had accessed its array of libraries, journals, and news services.

The precis began with a long hold on a color still that Case at first assumed was a
collage of some kind, a boy’s face snipped from another image and glued to a photograph
of a paint-scrawled wall. Dark eyes, epicanthic folds obviously the result of surgery, an
angry dusting of acne across pale narrow cheeks. The Hosaka released the freeze; the boy
moved, flowing with the sinister grace of a mime pretending to be a jungle predator. His
body was nearly invisible, an abstract pattern approximating the scribbled brickwork
sliding smoothly across his tight one piece. Mimetic polycarbon.

Cut to Dr. Virginia Rambali, Sociology, NYU, her name, faculty, and school pulsing
across the screen in pink alphanumerics.

“Given their penchant for these random acts of surreal violence,” someone said, “it

may be difficult for our viewers to understand why you continue to insist  that  this

phenomenon isn’t a form of terrorism.”

Dr.  Rambali  smiled.  “There is always  a point  at  which the terrorist  ceases  to
manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond
which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we
ordinarily understand it is inately media-related. The Panther Moderns differ from other
terrorists precisely in their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness of the extent
to which media divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical intent….”

In the book, the “random acts of surreal violence” described above take the form of the Panther Moderns facilitating a raid on an office building by hacking into the building’s computer network to basically hypnotize everyone inside into thinking they’ve been poisoned. At the same time, some of the Moderns called the police to tell them that:

“an obscure sub sect of militant Christian fundamentalists had just taken credit for having introduced clinical levels of an outlawed psychoactive agent known as Blue Nine into the ventilation system of the Sense/Net Pyramid. Blue Nine, known in California as Grievous Angel, had been shown to produce acute paranoia and homicidal psychosis in eighty-five percent of experimental subjects.”

Throughout the raid, the Panther Moderns refer to themselves as ‘Brood’ and another character as Cat Mother.

Since Neuromancer is pretty 80s, here are some synthed-out tracks to get you thinking about the original cyberpunks:

Crystal Castles - Untrust Us (Alex zelenka Remix)

Ghostland Observatory - Sad, Sad City (Pretty Girls & Lasers Remix)

Valery Gore - Shoes of Glass (TEEN Remix)

Streetlab - Rat Racer (TEEN Remix)

(get more music from TEEN on her Myspace)

Part of me wants to think that those tracks are what the Panther Moderns would be jamming to if they were actually around today. A bigger part of me knows that they’d probably be fucking around on 4chan instead.

If you like this playlist, you might also like the Space Dub playlist I put together (smiliarly inspired by Neuromancer), or the mix I think Thanos would have given Death.

Dracula’s Moon Base

May 11th, 2010 by Ultimate Cowboy

draculamooncastle

I don’t know what is more awesome about that panel - the fact that Dracula has a castle on the moon, or that he also appears to be in fairly regular contact with Dr. Doom.

The panel is from an issue of Captain Britain where the two super villains team up to take over Britain. I’m sure good eventually triumphs, but Victor and Vlad make for a pretty dangerous combo.

You know what kind of music goes with Vampiric Moon Castles? Fake Blood. And it’s even better mixed with sugary female electro vocals.

That’s why I love these track that Its Overture and Brand X dropped me last week.

Its Overture - 100% Fake Blood ((Crystal Waters (Risk One Remix) vs. Little Boots (Fake Blood Remix))

Brand X - Banging On Mars (Fake Blood versus Rye Rye)