Mark this, then bookmark this: You Are Listening To Los Angeles combines live LAPD police radio with ambient music. It all started when Eric Eberhardt saw some tweets about a live police scanner webcast from soma.fm and gave it a listen: ‘Interesting stuff to be sure, but I got bored listening to just the voices and started playing some instrumental music in the background.

‘I liked the results but it was complicated to explain to people how to replicate the mix (i.e. opening multiple copies of iTunes or VLC) so I made this site to simplify the process’.

The curious project started with Los Angeles, but since then, more cities have been added: besdies LA, you can also listen in to these ambient mashups with police radio from a whole lot of other cities like New York, Austin, Montréal, Boston and Phoenix.

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Want a free cab ride to the next venue at South by Southwest this year? No problem! All you have to do is tweet the Kendo UI team using the hashtag #SXSWTechCab and Irin Slutsky will let you know if she can swing it. The Kendo UI cab ride is completely free in exchange for the confession of your deepest darkest Tech Sin. Hey, you even get free stuff with the Kendo UI logo on it. What do you have to lose?

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Jad Fair is an underappreciated American icon. You may not know him by name, but his old band, Half Japanese, helped shape modern Alternative Rock. Since Half Japanese, Fair has essentially not stopped working. He is as prolific as ever recording new music, as well as drawing and doing elaborate paper-cuttings. His drawings and designs can now also be worn on a t-shirt through his super cool new store.

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Austin-based website and app developer JD Hancock professes to snap pictures for fun. His sense of adventure is evident and infectious in his photography series iPhoneland — the silly juxtapositions of his extremely tiny toy figurines frolicking against the iPhone screen landscapes make us chuckle.

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I admit, I generally don’t ‘get’ a lot of installation art pieces. But two mechanised, suspended statues gently grinding themselves into one another for many years until they are dust, seems to me to be a perfectly relatable analogy for anyone who has experienced an exhausting relationship. Thank you Jonathan Schipper.

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David Thomas Jones, leader of the Austin rock troop Watch Out For Rockets, decided to go rogue for a few moments and do a solo record. His role in Watch Out For Rockets already entails most of the writing, recording and playing of instruments on said recordings, which have all been captured on a Tascam 4-track cassette machine. Jones, admittedly, isn’t too good with gadgetry. However, his songwriting prowess is a mean machine. Jones stepped into a real studio for his first solo EP, entitled Comfort Creatures. The 7 songs on this 24-minute mini-masterpiece cover styles ranging from rock, folk, psychy pop and even some fancy danciness. Keep an eye and ear on David Thomas Jones, the Austin, TX 3-name-man-machine of music. And it officially releases today.

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A good friend of mine, Austin Lotz, recently got a job and moved up to New York to pursue design. I have all the faith in him, because this kid leaks talent. His work displays creativity and intelligence that most illustrators and designers lack.

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Amanda Cargill Austin uses beautifully handcrafted borosilicate glass beads in her amazing line of jewelry and small accessories. Cargill Austin is a self-taught artist whose teenage hobby led her to become an artisan jewelry designer. She creates one-of-a-kind beads and pieces in her home lampwork studio on the Oregon Coast.

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Sadly, our favourite Sydney band, The Paper Scissors, have just announced they are breaking up. We invited frontman and songwriter, Jai Pyne, to tell us about his favourite TPS memories: ‘There are so many memories over the last seven years. Lots of good times, lots of really stressful hard times. I was just the other day lamenting about when I felt like I was having a nervous breakdown in the back seat of a hire car when we launched our first album. But hey, this is about the good times’.

2007. The Kids
Our original drummer Bryce’s girlfriend Thalia managed a daycare place. It turned out the kids loved our first EP and would dance around like crazy to it after their nap time. So a gig was organised. We played in the back garden of the place, with drums and amps on the paving, to a group of kids, all under 5. It was a pretty memorable experience, all these kids rocking out to our music.

2009/2010. Falls Festival/Southbound.
This was a really fun time for TPS. It was the first time we’d been to Perth, and we got booked for both these massive festivals. I remember the show from falls really clearly, I remember it was by far the largest audience we’d ever played to, it was a crazy buzz, having a packed tent of people all becoming this one mass of party, of energy. I jumped onto of my amp and remember coming very close to stacking it in front of all those people. After Falls we went to Perth and played a show before going down to Southbound Festival. Southbound wasn’t the greatest show, we were on at 12 and there weren’t many people there. But more than anything it was just a nice trip, we had our own self- contained unit by the beach and we cooked and we went for a drive to Margaret River and swam. I think TPS were more into travelling and hanging out sometimes- the shows were just a good excuse.

2007. The Great Escape Festival
The Great Escape was a short-lived but awesome multi arts/music fest out at an old army base in Sydney. We played the first one, and the year after we played as well. We were lucky enough to be playing the one indoor stage ( I think it was called The Bunker) of about 5 or 6 stages and it started pissing down rain just before our set. I can’t really remember many details, but just remember it being really humid and jam packed with people. Sometimes the wet weather can be your friend.

Late 2006. Making ‘Less Talk More Paper Scissors’.
We took two months off work and relocated to Byron Bay to make our first album in our family studio (my dad and Xav’s uncle and his dad owned it) called Fracas. It was a pretty run-down bunch of rooms in an old small goods factory on the outskirts of town, but we had free rein and as much time as we wanted to fuck around with sounds and make an album. We experimented a fair but and that kind of led to the sound of the album being pretty diverse, or eclectic. There were lots of memorable moments- recording Tipped Hat, my brother must have been 13 or 14 and he and Bryce (original TPS drummer) and I played and tracked the drums with three kits in one room all at the same time. One other thing that I remember clearly is mixing the song Restless Through The Night- it is a weird kinda throwaway disco tune about not sleeping well, I was mixing and some family friends dropped in and one of their kids who must have been no more than 6 started going bananas and I cranked the monitors and we danced around the studio together.

2008. Less Talk More Problems.
I had hung out with Jake Stone from Bluejuice a few times, seen each other at The Mandarin Club and The Hoey. He was always telling me how much he liked the production on We Don’t Walk. We both had albums out and we decided to do a pretty hefty national tour together. This was a bad idea. It was the most drunken, exhausting, homoerotic tour that you could conjure up. We were usually a pretty timid band, we go wine tasting for fucks sake. But somehow the collective synergy of 9 band members, plus PHDJ in tow and crazy tour managers, made it a beast of booze and liver damage. The most memorable moment was when we played in Launceston. The gig was bad, there was hardly anyone there and this was a real comedown from the last few we’d played which were jammed. Our accommodation was above the club, very basic, no heating, pub accom- and after our show they turned the venue over and it became a drum & bass party. So there we were with no heating in Tasmania, freezing our arses off whilst this bwwaaaaaaaggh, thud thud, boom tish, boom tish rocked us into a sleepless stupor. The only saviour was the big bag of weed we’d been given by a family friend that lived in Tasmania, and we were flying home the next day, so we inebriated ourselves enough to get an hour or so sleep. It was awful, but memorable. As a side note, this was the tour that included a fateful evening that was the impetus for bluejuice’s ‘Broken Leg’ when Jake broke his limb whilst dancing in The Valley in Brisbane.

General.
I think one of the amazing things about being in a band is just the amount of people you meet and good excuses we got to travel and get drunk and listen to music. Some of the best fun has just been driving around in his cars listening to The Meters, or whatever we were digging at the time. Bands are a pretty weird thing and there have definitely been some really hard and harrowing moments that you can ask me about if you see me, but I won’t go into detail about here. But most of all it has been a blessing and an absolute privelege: just being able to make art, make music, pretend we were film makers, have people actually want us to sign their clothing they just bought off us (I always felt like I was wrecking their shirt), drive taragos, play in front of strangers, play next to Sydney Harbour and see Cate Blanchett grooving to you music out the corner of your eye, hang out with friends and argue with them about musical decisions, learn how to write, learn how to produce music, learn how to screen print, learn how to sing and not yelp. All these things and so much more that can’t all be rattled off, that all came about because of a thing called The Paper Scissors.

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You know those afternoons spent clicking though the suggestion videos on YouTube? It’s not always a waste of time. It’s how I came across Chelsea Wolfe, an American-singer songwriter from Sacramento. Using pedals and other effects to create her intense, elemental sound, she has already caught the attention of critics at The Guardian, LA Times, Pitchfork, I-D and Nylon Magazine. She also performed at this years SXSW festival in Austin. Now signed to Sargent House Records, Wolfe and her eponymous band are about to release their first album, A Collection of Acoustic Songs, for the label Unknown Rooms.

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I met Christine Wu personally last summer in Copenhagen, Denmark. We took a Scandinavian Furniture class together and we’ve been friends ever since. She just graduated from her BFA Design degree in Austin, Texas, and now she’s a furniture maker and designer in New York City. She is still pretty new to the furniture-marking world, but her skill is exquisite. This Mesquite chair has a beautiful live edge which goes along well with the whole design. The chair is very crisp and functional. 

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I actually saw Bernie at a screening in Austin, Texas, which is where the director of the film, Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused; School of Rock), resides. Bernie is a brilliant bittersweet comedy, based on a true story (remarkable though that may seem) and starring the incomparable Jack Black, alongside a strong cast of exceptional character actors, including Shirley MacLaine. [If you're an Australian-based reader, you can win screening passes and DVDs for Bernie. See here for more details]

The plot is suitably surreal for a real life comedy: ‘In the tiny town of Carthage, Texas, assistant funeral director Bernie Tiede is one of the town’s most beloved residents. Bernie befriends Marjorie Nugent, a sour and affluent older widow. Soon Bernie and Marjorie become inseparable and Marjorie becomes very dependent on Bernie, stifling his extroverted personality. Bernie is forced to quit his job and philanthropic activities in the community, leaving him deflated. Then things suddenly get better for Bernie and he seems his old generous self, while Marjorie is mysteriously absent. When Marjorie is discovered to have been dead for months Bernie Tiede is charged with murder, to the great surprise of the local community’.

I enjoyed the film immensely, its inherent quirkiness allowing Black to steal the show with his well-timed delivery and over-the-top physical mannerisms. Bernie opens in Australian cinemas on 16 August 2012.

BERNIE COMPETITION:
Win one of 20 double passes and DVD packs! To enter, be Australian-based, watch the trailer above, and leave a comment below this post telling us who you would take to see the Bernie screening. We’ll award the prizes to our favourite 20 answers. Entries close August 23rd.

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LEBORED is Alex Shilin and my answer to ‘What should we do now?’ after we left our advertising careers in New York and moved to Austin. We make limited-edition, one-of-a-kind home decor, because we believe life should be filled with art.

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Filmmaker Henry Dombey traveled to Austin to interview the founders of HourSchool, a website that helps people organize bite sized classes in their community. ‘The HourSchool mission is to help people realize their full potential, and not to be afraid to fulfill it’. We believe everyone can, and should, teach, after all, you are the expert of your own experiences.

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Shakey Graves’ sincere folk ballads fall somewhere in between Townes Van Zandt and The Tallest Man on Earth. His album, Roll The Bones, has been a great traveling companion so far this Summer but seeing him live is a real treat, so if you’re an Austinite, go catch him and his handmade suitcase kick-drum at one of his many local shows.

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I’m a self-taught artist and illustrator kicking it in lovely Austin, Texas. I didn’t start drawing until I was 21, but now I happily spend the majority of my days with my dear micron pens.

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Pillow Talk by Austin’s folk-pop band, Wild Child, is a perfect soundtrack for that road trip you’re taking this Summer. It’s probably still good if you listen to it on the way to work in the morning.

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Our friends over at the awesome photography site, Feature Shoot, are presenting the group exhibition, Underage, at this year’s Photoville Festival in Brooklyn between June 22-July 1, 2012, featuring work by six young photographers who document the joys and travails of growing up: a time of first loves, experimentation, and the search for belonging.

Photographers include Olivia Bee, Aiden Morse, Claire Oring, Violet Forest, Charlie Brophy and Lissy Laricchia. Underage is curated by Feature Shoot founder and Editor Alison Zavos and Amanda Gorence and is part of Photoville 2012, a large-scale photographic festival featuring 30 different shipping containers-turned-photography exhibits scattered throughout Brooklyn Bridge Park. Photoville will be open to the public between June 22-July 1, 2012. Admission is free.

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I’m a self taught artist out of Austin, Texas. My Haunted Ground series touches on addiction and destructive self behavior that we all can relate to in one way or the other. But it’s our job to turn our ugly side into something beautiful, such as in the case of my subjects. Johnny Cash’s addictions were well known, as were Edgar Allan Poe’s. But through their addictions, they wrote and cultivated it into something haunting and splendid and that have truly stood the test of time.

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A pioneer of glitter art, Sue Zola has been a fixture of the Austin art scene for the past decade, with subject matter ranging from pop art, rock stars, movie posters, portraits, and other nostalgia. Her art is expertly executed, glitz, and glam, and all around fabulous. Her work will be showing at Halycon Coffee in Austin in September.

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