Sound the trumpets! We're ready for our weekly digest, The Weekender

Date
10 April 2015

Some Fridays drift into the abyss of the weekend with gradual abandon; other pivot off that 5pm blue touchpaper and fire off into the freedom of two sweet nectary days. This week is the former – maybe it’s the sunshine here in London – but we feel we’ve arrived here on the cusp of nothing rested, ready and raring to go. Sound. Those. Trumpets.

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Aakash Nihalani: Squares, Interactive Projection (still) All Images © Aakash Nihalani

– Aakash Nihalani is doing mad things with interactive projections now. How badly do you want to jump up and down in front of one of these?

– Thinking of starting a magazine? We’d strongly recommend reading this first, from Steve Daniels of Makeshift.

– The founder of The Anonymous Sex Jounal, Alex Tieghi-Walker shared some of his favourite publications in this week’s Bookshelf.

– This week’s Studio Audience got more bemused comments than any in (our) podcasting history. We strongly recommend listening! Particularly if you’re partial to a bad West Country accent.

– And this week Apple made history when they launched their new iOS update, complete with multi-ethnic emojis!

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Roger Dean: Yes Logo

In this week’s Art + Music medley we watched a man change himself through Dungeness, went behind the scenes on a (sort of) photo shoot with Björk and cosied up with a master of psychedelia to talk about why art school is rubbish. Don’t say we never do anything for you…

– Bella Union’s Luke Jarvis chatted to us about his process of working with bands to realise their wildest creative dreams.

– Pitchfork’s creative director Michael Renaud took us behind the scenes to his studio where he shot the cover of the latest Pitchfork Review at 3am, the nutter!

– The aforementioned master of psychedelia was Roger Dean, designer and illustrator of some of Rock’s finest album covers. Favourite quote from this piece? This one: “If people want to play a musical instrument, they are taught about the instrument and how to play it properly. The same doesn’t go in art school. Imagine wanting to play guitar like Steve Hackett, and you go to a music college and you are told ‘that’s a bourgeois affectation’ and then you have to stand your guitar up in the corner and throw ping pong balls at it.”

– Hot Chip made us very sad indeed with their new Shynola-directed video for Need You Now, which is effing brilliant.

– And we chatted to the lovely Panda Bear about art, music, fear and death – which was actually more cheery that it sounds.

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Henri Matisse, The Dance, 1909–10. Courtesy of The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

AnOther Magazine celebrates the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s new Modernism exhibition by tracing the ten steps which led to the movement.

– Data Vis pioneer Nicholas Felton talked about the shadow over data in this excellent piece for Fast Co Design.

– Some genius compiled every song ever used in a Wes Anderson film in one giant 166-song playlist.

The Guardian picked out some of our mates in this nice piece about indie publishing, including brilliant Riposte magazine.

i-D asked, what is going on in the weird world of celebrity apps?

Maisie Skidmore

While the rest of the world has been waging angry wars against him, his music, his wife, his fashion line and his general egotism, I’ve been cultivating a quiet love for Kanye West, partly by emailing various videos vaguely related to him back and forth with Liv. Here’s one of them, and it’s an absolute beaut: a super rare old clip of Kanye and his mum Donda rapping along to Hey Mama in 2003, posted by Solange Knowles on Saint Heron. Gorge.

Rob Alderson

Every year my friends Paul and Helgi hold a legendary Eurovision party complete with a killer buffet, a sweepstake and utterly non-ironic watching of the show. The invite arrived this week (accepted, thanks very much) and it reminded me of the first single I ever bought; the UK’s 1995 Eurovision entry Love City Groove by Love City Groove. I remember at the time my mum’s horror as I sang along to the lyrics, which are frankly wrong coming from an 11-year-old’s mouth. Still it was a nostalgic treat to remember it again and so with great pride I present the greatest Eurovision winner there never was…

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About the Author

Maisie Skidmore

Maisie joined It’s Nice That fresh out of university in the summer of 2013 as an intern before joining full time as an Assistant Editor. Maisie left It’s Nice That in July 2015.

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