Duffy
Musically, Duffy, fits loosely into the ‘soul’ bracket, although the diverse talent strutting across her work makes it hard to truly categorise. Comparisons are most commonly drawn with Dusty Springfield: her voice is distinctive and astonishingly powerful, soaring out of the speakers and injecting the listener with a sense of nostalgia and longing. This is in part driven by the lo-fi production — courtesy of ex-Suede guitarist, Bernard Butler — which gives a timeless quality to the 23-year-old Welsh singer-songwriter’s music that both harks back to the pre-rock era, and yet feels perfectly at home in 2008. Rockferry [above], her first single, is laden with imagery and atmosphere. The song centres on the hackneyed story of broken love — incorporating elements of folk, country, blues and soul — yet is delivered in a mature and distinguished fashion: incredibly haunting yet lasting, and likely to stay in your head for a good while after.
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Also by FRANCIS ANDREWS
James Mackay’s Even Though I’m Free I Am Not
Award-winning photojournalist James Mackay’s latest project comes at a time when the world’s eyes are fixed on Burma and the trial of Aung San Suu Kyi. By photographing former political prisoners displaying the names of their colleagues and friends who remain behind bars, Even Though I’m Free I Am Not exposes the enduring pain faced by Burma’s opposition movement. Over 2,100 activists, journalists, lawyers and politicians languish in prisons across the country, and on Friday Aung San Suu Kyi will likely join them. Read more
The blind date of the food world has finally arrived, and it’s proving more palatable than the awkwardness of an evening spent in superficial conversation. Secret Supper clubs are springing up in the backstreets of London: what are attics and living rooms by day get converted into makeshift restaurants catering for an evening of surprise tastes and conversations. Read more
Young British designer Adam Farlie takes a leftfield approach to how people experience interaction with objects, often taking everyday items and toying with their potential to harbour deeper meaning and greater usage than first perceived. He transforms a bed into a ‘vessel that captures and contains the audio-memories of past occupiers through sound’, allowing those who lie on the bed to recall past intimcaties or conversations from years ago, while his take on a chest of drawers’ purpose of holding records of people is similarly intriguing.
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Nebraska-based artist Jake Gillespie makes huge graphite-and-chalk drawings and black and white murals. His sparse lines (often just gestural) and dark, smudgy fields of color make for expressive, impermanent-seeming images that read like thoughts and memories scribbled in a notebook. Read more
An archaeologist at Stanford, Michael Shanks, has completed an interesting study of the ‘prodigious amount of thought’ given to the design and layout of a casino’s gambling floor, such as the pictured Las Vegas Venetian. Read more
Daft Punk eat your heart out! This striking looking watch from Tokyo Flash packs enough LED punch to blind innocent bystanders.
Argentinean artist Benito Laren’s illustrations roll through the mind like a restless childhood memory. They remind me of building blocks — solid, inviting and always full of potential.
The Boston Globe has posted some pretty phenomenal pictures taken from the space shuttle Discovery during its recent mission. It’s almost impossible to imagine that one day views like these could become mundane. Read more
An intelligently told, morally complex tale with a raft of unexpected twists, Gone Baby Gone is one of the most original films of recent times. Most films give you a sense of their narrative arc and it is easy to recognise the major plot points. Read more
The Los Angeles musician, Ariana Delawari — aka Lion of Panjshir — is half Afghan and half Sicilian and makes wonderfully enlightened weirdo folk rock. I hope she takes that as a compliment! Her music is delicate and powerful and she is a pure artist. Everything she does has that magic light in it. She made her new album partially in Afghanistan, and many of the lyrics deal with the continued oppression of people’s liberties by the Taliban.
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1970s and 80s Soviet Union buildings
Cambodian born photographer Frederic Chaubin is the editor of French magazine Citizen K. His photo series on bizarre buildings built in the former Soviet Union during the 1970s and 80s is absolutely fascinating. Read more
Our celebrity-saturated culture makes many of us irrationally hateful of the faces we see on our TV screens and magazine pages. Good thing there’s Celebrity PunchOut to let off some of that steam.
I live the upbeat, feel good tempo of the new single — A Hundred Hearts — from Philly group, The Swimmers. Off their latest album, People Are Soft, this song is a strangely fitting anthem for the blustery day outside.
T-post: the world’s first wearable magazine
So here’s the scoop. Every six weeks, T-post subscribers get a new t shirt issue in the mail, with a news story on the inside and an artist interpretation of that story on the front. Yes, we agree. It’s clever, clever. Read more
Thanks to Sony Australia, four Lost At E Minor readers will win personal audio prizes, including the new 8GB Walkman S series video MP3 player and the MDRXB500 Extra Bass headphones. Read more
Fragile Vases is a new collection of vases made from recycled materials by Itunube. All parts have been carefully selected and put together, so each vase is totally unique. So now it’s possible to give a second chance to old pieces instead of throwing them into the trash. We have a selection of these vases for sale in the Lost At E Minor store for just US$85. Read more
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