Tycho Comes to NYC this Wednesday

San Francisco based musician Tycho will be performing at Le Poission Rouge in Greenwich Village this Wednesday, September 24.

Scott Hanson, who often goes by his stage name, Tycho, is a Californian graphic designer who discovered a passion for electronic music in the late 90's. Hanson began his swoop of electronic music with the release of "The Science of Patterns EP", later followed by his first full length album "Sunrise Projector" in 2004. By the winter of Through the years, he has been able to use his artistic background to create his own unique musical style. Those who have listened to Tycho are aware that his music is like no other. His attention to detail and use of multiple sounds, instruments, and voices truly set him apart from the rest of the ambient genre. The sound is completely peripheral, it envelopes you in a dream like state, one that is often difficult to wake up from when the three minutes and thirty seconds is over.

Here is one of Tycho's more well known singles, "The Daydream"

Since the release of “Sunrise Projector”, Tycho has launched 5 albums and EP’s, the most recent being “Coastal Break” in December of last year.

Hanson quite an avid blogger himself, as can be seen in iso50, his website. The blog is a collection of artistic inspirations, some of his personal artwork, as well as music and up and coming events.

The blog has some other contributors as well. Jakob Alexander, who lives in Brooklyn and is president of Moodgadget Records. Sam Valenti, the culture correspondent, is the founder and CEO of Ghostly International Records (the label that signed Tycho). And lastly, Beamer Wilkins, a friend of Hanson and president TRNSFR, a software company.

The site also has an online store if you want to rep your Tycho pride.

Can’t get enough Tycho? You can hear his music on Myspace, Facebook, and LastFm. Keep it coming man.

Until next time!

Reading Journal 2

I thought it would be appropriate to read Robert Macky's "The Lede" after his visit to class last week. As we continue to discuss the differences as well as the advantages and the disadvantages between print media and blogging, I wanted to closely analyze Macky's methods of writing and communicating news to his audience.

The first thing I noticed about Macky's blog was his tendency to use video in most entries. As he mentioned in class, he considers blogging to be more closely joined with televised news casting as opposed to traditional print media. With the crucial principle of rapidity in news broadcasting, video may be the most important medium in achieving this goal. For example, in his article titled "Protests in Pakistan at Long Jail Term for Scientist in U.S.", published on Friday, September 24th, Macky uses a video clip to convey the chaos in the Pakistani streets. It is simple examples like these that truly show the importance of video in the way we absorb news. To actually "see" the conflict is far more powerful than just reading about it, which is perhaps the most critical advantage blogging has over print media.

Another element of blogging that we discussed last week was the instantaneous quality of this medium. Unlike a newspaper, a blog has the advantage of working on a 24-hour cycle. If the author has obtained incorrect information about an event, he or she can simply update the blog and fix the mistake (or add more information). For example, (I may be reading this wrong but this is what I inferred) in Macky's article titled "Obama Calls Ahmadinejad's 9/11 Comments 'Inexcusable'", the headline begins as "updated 3:13pm" Although I was not able to read the original article, that leads me to believe that Macky had written something, and then went back at a later time to add more information to the article.

Reading Journal 1

I have to admit that reading publications such as the New York Times and the Guardian is a completely new activity for me. As a nineteen year old in 2010, I usually find myself getting caught up in the menial articles displayed on my google news feed. So, I plan to use this blog to stay informed on some current events, which is pretty exciting.

In The Guardian, there was an article titled “Iranian court jails human rights activist for waging war against God” by Peter Walker that was particularly interesting. The piece was about the arrest of Shiva Nazar Ahari, a 26 year old activist an journalist working in Tehran. I really enjoyed Walkers style of writing, but what I appreciated most was the kicker. After and concise and informative article, he ended the piece with “The opposition insist that June's election was rigged. Authorities in Iran deny the claims and have blamed foreign countries for fomenting sedition.” (Walker) Definitely memorable.

A random side note: After a reading of the New York Times, there was an article I found particularly interesting. It was the front page, titled “Cuba Resets the Revolution” by Marc Lacy. The article was about Cuba’s slow transition from communism to a more capitalistic society. Although the content of the piece was relevant and extremely interesting, it got me thinking about something else… the brief shelf life of what we call hard news. I potentially could have made this observation from another piece, but this one stuck out more than the others. For instance, the article begins with an anecdotal lede about the lack of advertising in the Cuban landscape; however, the bulk of the report is an analysis of an announcement made by the Cuban government last week. I noticed this in many other articles, as well as when I was trying to find topics to write about for class. Essentially, there is a minute window of when breaking news becomes soft news. Although the as my knowledge of journalism expands, I’m starting to notice that the lines have been blurred between hard and soft news. For instance, the Cuban article does not have a traditional lede per say, but still uses other methods found in hard news such as the inverted pyramid and the who what where when why style of reporting. Also, this article is not titled “what to avoid in a new laptop”, it is a political piece exposing a global topic with quotations and evaluation from experts. So my question is can hard and soft news exist together?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/19/iranian-court-jails-human-rights-activist