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(version_industries)

what’s to say? there it is. the cover of 65daysofstatic’s fourth studio album, we were exploding anyway. simultaneously unlike anything we’ve done before and yet, we feel, very us. of course an LP cover can’t be entirely judged until you hear the music that goes with it, but know that it was made to try and walk both sides of that line. this is a record that will forever mean more to us than we can begin to put into words, so we hope pictures suffice.

album is out 26.04.10.

here’s the poster we just designed for the sonos smash up party in SXSW down in austin, TX next week. a big thank you to greenshoelace.com for the commission. we’re actually looking forward to finally getting down to the festival ourselves this year, rather than just being nominated for stuff from afar. of course we’re mostly there this time around because of our good friends the protomen playing not one but four shows throughout the music week. with that many performances it’d be impossible not to at least see one show, right? seriously though, be sure to say hi if you do come to one of their shows, as we’ll most likely be filming or photographing them in some capacity.

as many folk out there already know, 65daysofstatic are on their way to releasing their 4th studio album, we were exploding anyway. what they don’t know however is how incredibly exciting it is to have designed the artwork for the first single. released exclusively in japan on march 10th, the new cut is titled weak4 and is accompanied by a japan-only exclusive track, pacify.

you can purchase the release through their japanese label, here.

on march 16th the man in the ski mask otherwise known as makeup and vanity set (MAVS) will be releasing his new, self-titled album. a few months back he allowed us the great honour of designing the sleeve for the record, and you can see the fruit of our labours above. MAVS is often more widely known as the touring DJ for the protomen and was responsible for their uncanny 8bit remix album, makeup and vanity set presents… the protomen.

the new album will be available on CD and mp3 at the time of release along with a supporting range of awesome t-shirts. in the meantime you can listen to some of the music from the new LP here:

myspace.com/matthewpustimakesmusic

if you’re getting really impatient, you can also download a copy of MAVS’s excellent experimental music side-project DAAS, here:

daas.bandcamp.com

we’ve been featured on the digieffects website as part of a ‘user profile’ series they’re doing. we’ve been included because of our use of their awesome damage plugin in the documentary we made for 65daysofstatic last year. there’s a brief interview and a chance to watch the promo video we made for radio protector again.

ioncinema.com, a webzine / blog website dedicated to american independent film, world cinema, documentary film and the world film festival scene, has just posted this article in praise of the HERE website. this is the site we built in collaboration with filmmaker braden king, to promote and provide information on his forthcoming feature film of the same name.

it’s also worth mentioning that the site was built using the ever more relevant ‘website-in-a-can’ setup offered for FREE over at wordpress.org. more than just a powerful piece of blogging software, it’s an extremely affordable, plug-in based solution for almost all your basic website needs these days. provided you’re happy to undertake the task of a little coding and skinning, you can build a very easy to update and maintain online platform to serve a variety of immediate needs.

worth a look.

the meier group’s new website is the product of a great collaboration between us and company founder michael meier. if you know what you’re looking for in a real estate website, you’ll notice the site has a few new tricks up it’s sleeves. it also represents one of our more major forays into HTML 5. enjoy.

director paul biedrzycki’s powerful new political documentary the ballot or the bullet just made the cut for this year’s CMJ music festival. it’s a film detailing the political climate surrounding the creation of the new album by long-standing brooklyn rappers, a-alikes and explains the band’s radical stance on america’s recent government overhaul.?the film stars such hip-hop luminaries as chuck d of public enemy and dead prez. included in the film are a series of music videos, one of which we were asked to ‘destroy’ both video + audio for. the end result is what it would be like if you were trying to watch the video using a broken tv and rabbit ear antennae in some forgotten about part of brooklyn.

you can watch the video in quicktime here –

kill a revolutionary

this could be something of a game-changer: flash cs5 will have an option to export your apps natively to the iphone. keyword there is ‘native’: as the proponents of c64 emulation know well, apple doesn’t permit 3rd party runtimes on the phone. more detail on the compiler changes is available here:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/abansod_iphone.html

at the same time they’ve opened up flash partnerships with, well, pretty much every single other mobile handset creator to bring flash to their web capabilities. so to sum up – everyone gets flash on the web except apple, who instead get their app environment opened up to a legion of as3 coders who, for one reason or another, can’t or won’t learn cocoa. personally i think apple have the best of it – i’ve yet to see a compelling use case for flash on mobile devices, especially when you have apps which can do pretty much anything a desktop app can anyway, but time will tell.

the above, giant, 3′ x 4′ poster was available exclusively at the protomen’s act II release show last weekend in nashville, TN. we created it with the band as a thank you to fans for making the long trek, as they all did, to see the band perform both their albums back to back in thunderous, conceptual glory. version industries representatives, myself included, attended and helped make sure the performance was recorded both in HD video and with digital still photography. below is a taste of the material we gathered –

you can view the rest of the photographs we took here. you can also expect video footage of the show from us in the coming months. in the meantime check out this incredibly flattering review of the new album by nashville resident?yewknee. a perfect come down to an incredible weekend with our friends in the south.