Do you remember when the Sci-Fi channel used to show anime every Friday night? I do…and I especially remember being super-creeped out by the movie Akira.
I mean, all the posters make it look like it’ll be classic cyberpunk: bad-ass bikes, tough Tokyo gang kids, that sort of thing. Then bizarro anime hell breaks loose and the movie just gets weird.
Anyways, Dane Jah ras is a Canadian poet/freestylist and he has put together a concept album based on Akira. From Dane’s blog:
“Each track features at least one sample from the film. Samples used include Japanese dialogue, the re-done English dialogue and segments from “The Akira Suite” (The film’s score). The mixtape was produced and recorded by myself. The concept, mix and master are from KnowSomething’s DJ D-Mass.”
A year or so ago I found a web comic called Gone With The Blastwave. It was about a group of soldiers wandering around a post-apocalyptic city, trying to find the other army and trying to find their way out. It was a Mad’s Spy Vs. Spy crossed with Platoon and it was amazing. Unfortunately, the author seems to have discontinued it.
If you still want to read the darkly comic tale of these masked troops wandering around a ruined city, you can buy the first volume on Amazon (or you can find some of the images on Google)
Speaking of ruins and the future, here is great Tommie Sunshine track and a bangin’ Tiga track, both remixed by the Disco Villains:
Tommie Sunshine - Dance Among The Ruins (Disco Villains Remix)
I saw Moon the other day. From the near-silent shots of the big-wheeled rovers rolling across desolate plains to the austere, functional interior of the base the entire thing is a beautiful love song dedicated to classic sci-fi. Without trying to give too much away, it felt like the film was channeling the spirit of every movie from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Bladerunner. There where wisps of Event Horizon, Solaris and even Aliens throughout. Director Duncan Jones knows his stuff, and Sam Rockwell played the lead role perectly.
Moon Safari is probably one of my favorite albums of all time, and I fell in love with it the first time I heard it. In fact, it could have probably been the soundtrack to Moon. It almost feels like Sam Rockwell’s costumes were even inspired by Air’s clothes from the cover of their Moon Safari album.
Edgar Rice Burroughs had one hell of an imagination - he didn’t just write the Tarzan books (including Tarzan at the Earth’s Core), but he also wrote a series of books about Mars featuring an immortal named John Carter. Rumor has it they’re making a movie about his adventures, and I anticipate it being awesome.
In the books, John Carter is supposed to be from Virginia. You know who else is from Virginia? Pusha T and Malice from Clipse, that’s who.
* If you really want to stretch the connections here, it makes perfect sense to include a Neon Coyote remix in this Mars-themed post because The Coyote was a major character in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. Throw your hands in the sky if you’ve read it!
I just finished reading House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds. In the book, two shatterlings named Campion and Purslane (the galaxy-wandering, six-million year old clones of a woman named Abigail Gentian) fall in love with each other, befriend a golden robot (Hesperus, of the Machine People) and arrive decades late for the gathering of shatterlings that happens approximately once every 32,000 years.
I absolutely loved the book, and the fact that parts of it span tens of thousands of years. Reynolds writes sci-fi on an enormous time scale. As Charlie Jane Anders writes:
“House Of Suns is one of those novels that assumes a shape after you’re done reading it. All of the elements that seemed purely random fall into place, and you realize quite what an intricate design you’ve been looking at all this time….This novel has everything: artificial intelligences that become sentient, post-humans, questions of faster-than-light travel and causality, cloning, virtual worlds, a murder mystery and a group of nigh-immortal people dealing with the burden of history in a more personal way than most of us ever do.”
Anyways, that’s not a picture of Hesperus, but of my Halo 3 armor. I was inspired by the book to make him golden and to give him the House of Suns insignia.
Anyways, here are some tracks that I’ve also been coincidentally listening to these days. I really feel like they flow with the book. The Empire of the Sun track makes me think of the love between Campion and Purslane, and the name of the original band and remixers just works with the book as well.
Why this Girl and the Robot? Because at one point in the book, the female shatterling (Purslane) spends a great deal of time with Hesperus (don’t worry, nothing weird happens).
There’s nothing quite as cyberpunk and sci-fi cool as a Bionic Commando, so I guess I should be pretty interested in the new game coming out. However, the description
As a neat little marketing gimmick they’ve gotten some dudes to remix the theme song of the original game and posted them on music blogs. The problem is that whatever cred amongst the music community they might have gained through this move they immediately lost for bragging that the main character in the game is going to be voiced by Mike Patton, former lead singer of Faith No More.
As an aside, the three blogs (DiscoDust, Mad Decent and Big Stereo) where they were originally posted have definitely become go-to music spots for me. Defs check them out.
I’ve been doing a bit of reading about the old RIFTS roleplaying game, and it sounds like Glitter Boy is pretty much the most bad-ass mech around. They’re made out of reflective armor so that beam-weapons can’t hurt them, and they carry around shoulder-mounted rail-guns. You wouldn’t want to mess with that.
Just as a bright, shiny mech like that would stand out on the post-apocalyptic battlefield, Kanye West stands out on the hip-hop war zone of the early 21st Century. I guess you could say he’s the Glitter Boy of rap.
For other Kanye news, recent articles that talk about 50 Cent referring to Kanye as “try-sexual” are pretty hilarious. And speaking of Glitter Boys, it sounds like 50 spent over $60,000 on his teeth.
“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will stay on the Moon to rest in peace.
These brave men know there is no hope for their recovery but they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.
These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.
They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.
In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.
In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood. Others will follow and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied but these men were the first and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.”
from the desk of Richard Nixon, via The Daily Express.
And while you’re thinking sobering thoughts of astronauts dying a slow death on the moon while the world helplessly looks upward, here’s some Space Disco courtesy of Edwin van Cleef (via Trash Menagerie). Its a nice long mix, so feel free to download it and listen to it on your own time.
Van Scott was right on when he dropped me an email tonight suggesting that I might like these tracks. They’re all remixes of the Drlkt Freddie track “Airtight” and they’re all pretty sweet, each in their own way.
I like the vocals because they’re reminicsent of One More Time from Daft Punk’s Discovery, and I’m sure that the Airtight track (particularly the Tronik Youth remix) would have fit perfectly in Interstella 555: Secret Star System.
If you haven’t seen that movie, you’re missing out. Its probably the perfect combination of one of the greatest love stories ever animated and one of the coolest, feature-length music videos that you’ll ever see.
Courtesy of Suckadelic comes this wonderful piece of religious iconography.
I used to love Star Wars, and Boba Fett in particular. In fact, my 11-year-old self even had a letter published in Star Wars Insider magazine letting the world know how cool Fett was. He had at all: cool helmet, jet-pack, wrist-gun, mystery. He might not have gotten a lot of chicks, but that thought didn’t really cross my mind back then.
In the face of today’s Master Chiefs, Dark Knights and assorted other Iron Men, he seems a bit outgunned and kinda lame. But back in the day, he was the MAN.
If you like Star Wars, be sure and hook it up with Band of The Lost Star Wars mixtape. You haven’t really gotten down with the Dark Side until you’ve heard Vader beatboxing through his respirator.
