Shonzilla, a pattern-seeking animal

Robert Glasper and his Robert Glasper Experiment will be release the new album called “Black Radio” on 28th February 2012.

Jazz, soul, r&b and hip-hop join hands and a whole bunch of accomplished singers/musicians have lent their hand: Erykah Badu, Lalah Hathaway, Lupe Fiasco, Bilal, Ledisi, KING, Musiq Soulchild, Chrisette Michele, Meshell N’degeocello, Stokely, Yasiin Bey (a.k.a. Mos Def).

Also check out this video about wetting your appetite even more.

Do you want more? Here’s an extra free tune. 

Glasgow-based producer and  Ross Birchard (a.k.a. Hudson Mohawke) has already been delivering some big, fresh sounds, but this, this is the next level.

The tune “Thank You” is how reverse engineering goose gumps might sound like.

Thank you, Hudson Mohawke!

If your speakers or headphones have a fat bass, you’ll be thankful again for making the investment.

The visuals you see here are not from the original “Thank You” video which doesn’t exist yet anyway. These appropriately energetic scenes nicely cut-up by Petriqor come from “Summer Wars” (Samâ wôzu) anime. It’s a pretty amazing movie that won the Japanese Oscar for the best animated feature in 2010.

The new mantra: Break To Build

Who said drum’n’bass is dead?

The d’n’b shamanism from Dub Phizix with the tune “Marka” is here to prove your wrong.

p.s. Tell your kids to go to bed and use their earplugs before you hit play…

Nature has it way of ruthlessly unleashing cuteness power on us.

How? OMG, just watch how this domesticated (?) slow loris is attached to his cocktail umbrella.

NOTE: next time you need to put a smile on, just search for “slow loris umbrella”. ;-)

Yes, there’s so cute and everyone would like to have one but - don’t think about it! All five slow loris species are either in vulnerable or endangered status because either the exotic pet trade and traditional medicine (you don’t want to know what idiot people do with them). What you see online is enough.

If the best ads get embedded into your mind, than this one takes the cake.

The idea, the concept and the ad come from the French Paper Plane. Watch how they managed to imprint BMW into the back of your eye and mind. It’s worth noting that this idea is relatively easily transferable. Pretty cool!

Next time your non-tech savvy aunt/dad/neighbor asks you “what is this Android thing?” send them this.

This nice infographics shows the period from October 2008 (when the first Android smartphone, HTC Dream a.k.a. G1 a.k.a. ADP1, was released) until January 2011. Notice how the scale counting the number of Android device activations, scales up to catch up with the growth.

They’ll like to know what an “device activation” is. It’s the moment which comes after buying the device and starting it for the first time. It’s the moment when the love for Android (and device choice freedom) is (re)born.

Thanks to Fee Beyer for the link.

Here’s the explanation of this experiment from Vimeo.

A Sequence of Lines Consecutively Traced by Five Hundred Individuals is an online drawing tool that lets users do just one thing - trace a line. Each new user only sees the latest line drawn, and can therefore only trace this latest imperfect copy. As the line is reproduced over and over, it changes and evolves - kinks, trembling motions and errors are exaggerated through the process.
A Sequence of Lines Consecutively Traced by Five Hundred Individuals was first created as a tool to be used in conjunction with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk - an online labor market. Mechanical Turk workers were paid 2 cents to trace a line.

One might split hairs, but this $10 experiment illustrates pretty well how the evolution works.

This is how I (fore)see the decade that has just begun.

No, it’s not about (Mandelbrot) fractals or Inception (or Matrix).
It’s about relaxed awesomeness!

NOTE: If you want to view this full-screen, you can do it here. If you want to enjoy the full-beauty in HD, then you should go to Vimeo and hit the full-screen.

…

That was cool, wasn’t it? 

If you’re wondering about the background of this video clip, here’s some info I managed to dig out:

Music: Astroblast by Musicians with Guns (Alexandre Lehmann’s side project; @zzzzra), from the “Using the Iaxian key” album which is to be released in 2011 Q1 on Entropy Records.
Animation: Ricardo Montalban (couldn’t find much about him apart that he seems to be tweeting @zzzzra; obviously he’s not the deceased Mexican actor)
Software: Adobe Photoshop CS5 (!) with Adobe Pixel Bender plugin and 3D Mandelbulb (background, download the ray tracer)

Here’s a wonderful and emotionally gripping tale about the highlight of Yugoslavian basketball, the downfall of Yugoslavia and one very close friendship retold through the story of Vlade Divac and late Dražen Petrović who were “Once Brothers” which is also the title of the documentary.

Dražen was surely the best player in Europe at the time and many consider him all time best. I remember his games, he was amazing. I surely haven’t seen anyone in Europe play that good and I’m a basketball fan for almost 30 years. Really, a Mozart of basketball, as the film puts it. Those were the times when basketball was more about creativity, elegance and technique and less about raw strength, body mass and fat contracts. After accepting the challenge of playing in the NBA for the Portland Blazers, he struggled because he wasn’t given enough play time to show his amazing talent and skills, and he apparently had to go through another hardening phase. His friend Vlade Divac, an amazing player himself was 3.5 years his junior, considered Dražen the idol in his youth. Vlade went to LA Lakers the same year as Dražen and, even he knew no word of English, managed to integrate more quickly, get more attention and more minutes on the court. More than anything else, this documentary tells the story about their unique relationship and unique times they went through together and away from each other. In a way, it explains how normal people, just as these two amazing athletes, were estranged one from another by circumstances beyond their control.

Because of all the tensions that troubled everyone in ex-Yugoslavia from the times of its painful breakup, this is one of the heartbreaking stories that was waiting to be told until this documentary was finally made.

If you want to learn more about Yugoslavia, puzzling relationship between Serbs and Croats, the most powerful national basketball team at the time, if you’re ready to have your heart touched, or if you need to see a very nice documentary - this is the one to watch.

This story is of special importance to me. I was born and grew up in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. My father is Serb, mother Croatian. I have relatives in Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia - all over the place. I have distant ancestors from Montenegro even Greece. You could say that the Yugoslavia and the Balkans flow in my veins. Up until the Yugoslav Wars (looks really scary seeing a plural here) I was spending my summer vacations with my wider family in our family house on the Adriatic coast near Split, place where other basketball stars like Toni Kukoč and Toni Rađa come from. I was playing and training basketball at KK Partizan, European Champion in 1992 and the team where Vlade Divac grew to be such a great player. You can try to imagine in how many ways this documentary resonates with me.

So if you want to see the entire film, you’ll find he first of six parts embedded above, while you can also watch here the remaining parts two, three, four, five, and six by watching them in a pop out window.

Enjoy!

p.s. Kudos to ESPN “30 for 30” documentary series for making and NBA Entertainment for producing this documentary and, last but not least, to Vlade for pulling this out. Also thanks to Belgraded blog for being an early reminder about this documentary.