Last Monday Alberta Cross released their incredible debut LP, ‘Broken Side of Time’ and, with it, were the first band ever to use ‘Augmented Reality’ technology within their album artwork.

Lead vocalist Petter Stakee commented

“The album is pretty haunting in itself, we wanted the videos to show it and put that across” Stakee continues “Brantely and I talked about ideas to match the video with the music so he went to Salt On Sea in California, which looks like a ghost town that’s been blown up by a nuclear bomb to shoot the videos. It was on old posh Hollywood star’s getaway, they all bought houses there, and one night the whole place sunk into the sand because of a chemical reaction… Some of the old shit like old cars, houses, broken vinyl records are still there, half buried”

The content of each marker/code will be changed regularly and Alberta Cross will be uploading special videos, competitions and other content throughout the year, which will only be available to those who own the album artwork.
‘Broken Side of Time’ was released last Monday through Ark Recordings and

The album, Graham’s finest yet, features musical contributions from Robyn Hitchcock and Danny Thompson amongst others.

Graham Coxon releases his brand new album The Spinning Top on Transgressive Records on May 11.

The album was recorded in London in Spring 2008 and features musical contributions from Robyn Hitchcock and Danny Thompson, amongst others. It was produced by Stephen Street.

The single Sorrow’s Army will follow a week after the album, on May 18;  a limited edition single In the Morning, available on etched 10″ vinyl as part of ‘Record Store Day’. will precede the album on April 18.

Graham will be performing at the Transgressive showcase at South by Southwest, as well as at selected other events within the festival. He also plays with Peter Doherty on his tour later in March. Graham will preview his album with several low key shows in May, with a full solo tour to follow in the  autumn.

The Spinning Top features 15 brand new tracks and marks something of a departure in sound and feel from previous Graham Coxon solo work. It is also unusual in that the songs follow a narrative – nothing less than the story of a man from birth to death!

Graham says:

“The album is mainly an acoustic journey although there is, of course, some explosive electric guitar action. I wanted to show how exciting acoustic instruments can be, how dynamic and rich and heart-thumpingly raw they can sound at a time when acoustic music seems either too cute or too soppy. Obvious influences here are the amazing Martin Carthy, the late, great Davey Graham and the late, great John Martyn”.

“There are some guests too! Robyn Hitchcock supplies some counter-attack guitar, Jas Singh plays dilruba and jori with his friends Gurjit Sembhi on taus and Jaskase Singh on esraj. Danny Thompson plays the legendary Victoria, Graham Fox gives plenty of swing on the drums and sizzle cymbals and Louis Vause tinkles the ivories”.

“My friend Lucy supplies the voice of the wife and Natasha marsh channels the voice of the Medea-like enchantress”.

Starting with a raft of digital marketing, web-build and film work for Graham Coxon, the time is nigh to launch a company: head, heart and feet first – curled up foetal position – into the crunch. We Are Humans.

This season Jean Charles de Castelbajac is taking fashion to Toytown. He unveiled his Spring/Summer 2009 collection through the magic of mime. No, ok he didn’t, but Jean Charles did unveil the collection through the magic of LEGO.

JCDC Versus LEGO from Four H on Vimeo.

Finally the Web’s most ubiquitous rich media plug-in opens up to search.  The ability to index encapsulated rich media sites has been a huge want and need since the early commercialisation of the Web.  It seems Microsoft has been excluded from this list of partners as they have been developing Silverlight -Microsoft’s rich-media suite- since early 2006.

The announcement [discussed at The Register] means that millions of RIA enabled websites will be immediately visible – and therefore searchable – for search engines without any intervention from web developers.

This is tremendous news. It is a key moment in Flash’s evolution and a vital movement towards compliant and practical rich-media + semantic-web development.  This makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

The original Hoxton Twat will be pleased (Nathan Barley).  Until now most domain names have been restricted to a website’s country of origin, as in .uk (the United Kingdom) or .de (Germany), or names relating to commerce or institutions, like .org, .net and .gov.

According to The Inquirer the The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), a non-profit governing body, is considering allowing owners to incorporate branding into URLs for the first time.  So you could expect to see lots of websites like coca.cola, apple.mac and benny.hill. There is sure to be some serious clashes of interest here.  Fantastic branding potential ahead.

A worthy winner of the Integrated Cannes award. A compelling treatment from Projector Inc.  This online (embedded-blog-widget and micro-site) and offline execution (in-store digital display) is beautifully executed.  It inherently epitomises the spirit of the Global Uniqlo brand.  Functional, unique, charming and quirky, simple and complex with the product firmly centred at the heart of the experience.  Wonderful.