The Brunettes

Pink Frost

Back in the day, when I was a skinny teenager on the great pedestal of life, I had a real obsession for the understated, low-fi, deliciously melodic and somewhat blurry sounds of the New Zealand Flying Nun bands. I would pool my meagre savings and canvas the local record shops, scouring the racks for the latest cassettes from The Bats, The Chills, The Clean, and, later, The Straitjacket Fits. Read more

Forever Tuesday Morning

Andrew Fagan, lead singer of The Mockers, the poppiest New Zealand band of the 80s, came around to my place once when I was an impressionable 10-year old with stars in my eyes and a head full of shiny, shiny melodies. Read more

Die! Die! Die!

There’s not just an urgency about the Die! Die! Die! band name. Their music too is an insurgent mix of riffs and melodies. We spoke with the New Zealand group to get the lowdown: While your music is deliberately loose and abrasive, there’s something incredibly appealing about it. How do you maintain this sheer energy without striding too far into the obscure? ‘We always try and make sure we are not being too indulgent when we write songs. We come from a very “noise” background of just jamming and whatever sounds best turns into the song. So we try and make sure there is at least something which sort of resembles a hook of some sort. We also try and make sure that when we write songs there be a vibe and something exciting happening in the room. We like having fun’. Read more

Maths explains the origin of superhero characters

I love the colours and simple reasoning in this clever series by Scottish illustrator Matt Cowen, which uses basic maths equations to explain how certain pop culture icons came to be. Read more

Star Wars Uncut: a fully crowdsourced version of Episode IV

The project of creative technologist, Casey Pugh, this full length version of the George Lucas masterpiece was created from multiple 15 second segments recreated from the original movie and submitted by thousands of Star Wars fans, which were then spliced together by editor Aaron Valdez to form the final product. Genius, as both a commentary on contemporary pop culture trends (there are references to LEGO, stop motion, memes and the like) and on the power of tapping your audience for quality material.

Filmmaker creates LEGO stop motion to propose to girlfriend

Now, this is one for the ages: back in 2010, Atlanta film-maker Walter Thompson created a jaw-dropping LEGO stop motion to propose to Nealey Dozier, his girlfriend of four years. The video took 22 hours of shooting and some 2,600 pictures to splice together, a small sacrifice to pay for years of happiness together. Right? Right! Oh, and she said yes. Bonus.