Whenever I find out about websites like Albums That Never Were, I get a little giddy.

Okay. A lot.

A music fan called ‘thesoniclovenoize’ meticulously reconstructs and documents famous unreleased albums (or imagines new ones in some cases) from a variety of sources.

Browse through the collection and I’ll see you in a few days, once you re-emerge from this rabbit hole of musical delights.

This is a link post – You can visit the site mentioned by clicking the main link above (or just click here).

If you’re like me and you look forward to pretty much anything that Bonobo (a.k.a., Simon Green) puts out, then I suppose that today is very good day for both of us. His new album ‘The North Borders Tour – Live’ has been just been released – and the CD version even comes with a full-length companion DVD.

The release is made up of 11 tracks recorded at various stops (London, Seattle, Croatia, etc.) on the 18 month tour for the studio release of “The North Borders”. And European fans – take note! “Golden Tickets” are being hidden in some of the albums stocked at indie record stores which will enable you to attend the final shows of the tour in style (check out this post on the official site for more details about this Willy Wonka-esque gesture).

Listen or buy it on Spotify // iTunes // Amazon.

(Video is for ‘Prelude – Kiara [Live]’, taken from Bonobo’s DVD of ‘The North Borders Tour – Live.’)

I have all kinds of love for this art project by Álvaro Franca, a Brazilian designer who, it seems, loves typewriters and also some of my favorite authors.

(Via BoingBoing)

“Futurism” isn’t really an adequate label for ‘The Woman With the Bionic Eye’ because Rose Eveleth‘s fascinating piece for The Atlantic shows that the long-imagined future where sight can be restored electronically has actually arrived.1

Fran Fulton, a woman fully blinded by retinitis pigmentosa for 10 years, has regained vision via electrodes implanted in her eyeball:

What’s the experience like?

“When they ‘turned me on’ so to speak it was absolutely the most breathtaking experience,” she says. “I was just so overwhelmed and so excited, my heart started beating so fast I had to put my hand on my chest because I thought it was going to pop.”

Her story–and the description of the technology which enables it–made me shake my head in awe at what human beings are now able to accomplish with our accumulated scientific knowledge.

  1. So… viva “Now-ism”, I suppose. []
This is a link post – You can visit the site mentioned by clicking the main link above (or just click here).

My first reaction to this New York Times piece about Thailand’s new robotic food tasters – Call me when they attach a high-powered laser that instantly vaporizes the dishes which don’t pass the test.

This is a link post – You can visit the site mentioned by clicking the main link above (or just click here).