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Miller Beats
I had a chance to catch up with San Francisco-based, multi-talented, electronic musician Travis Miller while he was out on the East Coast before heading to Amsterdam for a semester at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. He offered up some insight into his work, influences and upcoming EP.
I guess to start from the beginning, how did you get into making music? Tell me about some of the really early stuff you worked on, what you’re up to now, that kind of thing.
I’ve been making music forever. I used to be super-into punk, and in like eighth, ninth and tenth grade I was in a ska band. I started making beats my first year of college; I was 18
—Omar Almufti, 07 November 2011
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Old School for the Next School
Being somewhat fussy about these things—actually, about everything—I found looking for a bike for my then-soon-to-be-six-year-old son Leif to be less than fruitful. At my moment of despair, having seen numerous overbuilt and predictably ugly offerings from other mainstream BMX brands, I stumbled across SE Bikes’ 16” Lil’ Ripper. I owned both the PK Ripper and 24” Floval Flyer back in my BMX days, so I had to have it. I mean, he had to have it.
The bike’s big daddy, the PK Ripper, is the most legendary of BMX frames. Named after Perry Kramer, a famed pro BMX racer of the late-70s, the PK stood out with its aluminium construction, flat/oval (or “floval”) maintubes and looptail
—Chris Noble, 18 October 2011
I have—sorry—he has the 2011 model; the 2012 has changed little—street tyres (which look a bit odd on what was never a “street” bike) and new colors. MSRP: $329
BTW, FYI, no kid ever needs stabilizers/training wheels: start them out on a scoot-along bike around 18 months and you’re golden
Tour de Kyoto
Bicycle culture is on the increase around the world; the number of related events, projects and collaborations seems to be growing every day. It’s good to see that the Paper Sky Bicycle Club is continuing to expand on their series of talks and events with their annual Tour de Kyoto in the old capital, Japan’s most bike-friendly city.
The event took place over ten days during the Golden Week holiday with the simple idea of bringing Japanese local culture and people together through cycling. The first stage began with a ride around the city, taking in beautiful temples and parks and a climb up the steepest hill in Kyoto. The day ended at one of the last remaining running water
—Lee Basford, 29 July 2011
Papersky ran this thing, with help from Sou Sou (who also have a US site), Groovisions, Cosset Bags and the artisans at Kameya Yoshinaga and kyoshibori
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Andy Jenkins on Bend 20
Andy Jenkins should need little introduction to the Level reader. His ‘Glimpses’ pages were a regular highlight of this magazine’s print incarnation and a fair proportion of you will know him formerly as Art Director/Master Cluster member at Wizard Publications “back in the day” and/or currently as Art Director and virtually founding member of Girl Skateboards.
In addition, his artistic endeavors will be familiar to many through his gallery shows across the globe, published works (such as his illustrations currently gracing the pages of The Skateboard Mag) and his less-credited artwork for a few good Hollywood movies.
Jenkins has a stubborn bent for print publications, having cut his teeth living and breathing them under Bob Osborn’s encouraging gaze, and his self-made, self-published
—Chris Noble, 28 July 2011
Find Bend 20 and more from Andy on his Bend Press web mechanism
Being an irregular contributor to this website, you can read what Andy has to say about himself right here
Ruination episode 2
Darjeeling the mouse almost overcomes his psychopathic tendencies to bring sweet mercy to Shitbag the Bulldog. In the end mercy is not on the agenda as nature takes its nihilistic course.
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Kenna’s Water/Music
Kenna understands that there is so much more to this world than silver and gold. A model of meaning guides his career moving forward from two remarkable albums with a series of three EPs, the Land 2 Air Chronicles. The first release, Chaos and the Darkness, is a gripping example of music with a distinct purpose. I had a chance to listen to Kenna talk about the record and play a few other songs on the piano and the spur of the moment in front of perhaps twenty people at the studio he’s been using in Manhattan. Then, when I called him up to do the interview, he made life easy by saying a lot of really cool stuff. Kenna
—Omar Almufti, 24 June 2011
Ruination episode 1
IT’S RUINATION BY GOLLY!
Fun and games with Darjeeling the mouse and Shitbag the bulldog, red in tooth and claw!
Oh what nature that lends such evil dreams!
And like our intrepid chums we will all eventually end up washed upon the shores of… RUINATION.
Timothy Ferriss’ investigative reporting style puts him somewhere between Neil Strauss and Morgan Spurlock, and his auto-ethnographic skills rival those of the O.G. human guinea pig himself, R. Buckminster Fuller. His latest, The 4-Hour Body (Crown/Archetype, 2010), is the result of a decade of experiments, expert interviews, and putting his own body through paces previously unpaced. His guiding research question: For all things physical, what are the tiniest changes that produce the biggest results?
I shifted over to a vegetarian diet about seventeen years ago. The switch was prompted by my girlfriend at the time, but after six months, she went
—Roy Christopher, 09 June 2011
My dude Timothy hath wrought it and brought it again. From the germinal Atoms Fam to the mighty Hangar 18, Tim “Alaska” Baker is an emcee who’s been slept on for too long, so long in fact that he’s pretty well over this rap shit. The Crack Epidemic might be your last chance to give him his well-deserved props.
If Alaska is just a big, cold state you’ve never been to and you don’t have any idea who Tim is, don’t worry. The opening track on The Crack Epidemic’s American Splendor, “Bright Lights,” is a brief history of the man on
—Roy Christopher, 09 June 2011
There are several bands jostling for the heavy, arty interstices between the monoliths of Neurosis and Radiohead, and though healthy hiatuses have left Cave In making less entries than say, Muse, they bring the best together like no other.
Cave In started off as one of the proto-metalcore ensembles of the late 1990s, but after a few germinal genre recordings (the undisputed classics Beyond Hypothermia and Until Your Heart Stops), they switched their vibe from introspection to outer space. A major change as such is not easy: Think Kill Holiday or Corrosion of Conformity, but on Jupiter (2000) and Antenna
—Roy Christopher, 07 June 2011
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