Friday Mixtape: a mammoth mix from school project turned great band, Lowly

Words by Lucy Bourton, Friday 23 February 2018

Last year, after a batch of swirling singles released from 2014, Danish natives Lowly quietly released their first record, Heba, to an eager fuss and now devoted fanbase. The Bella Union signees met during a music project at school, the type of assignment we imagine to be the sort when you’re reluctantly flung together with distant classmates, only these five kept going.

Described as being able to make you dance and cry at the same time (great), and after hearing gushes about their live performances, this week Lowly take over the It’s Nice That stereo creating a mammoth mix of brilliant songs full of detail.

Why have you picked these songs: what do they remind you of or make you feel?

These songs have a delicious sound or extraordinary and inspiring details in their arrangements. Also, they make you feel good when it rains outside and you let your body move slowly and lazily around with no specific purpose. They make me feel a sense of longing and soothing calmness at the same time.

When or where should this mixtape be listened to?

You should listen to them when you have time to listen, or if you need something nice in your life.

What records have you been listening to recently?

Just discovered Lambchop’s record Flotus, which is an odd combination of Eric Clapton and something…well, more modern. Which gives you the sense of nostalgia but also wants you to make new music.

If a feature film of your life was to be made, what song would be on the trailer?

Rihanna’s Needed Me.

Most Recent

More like this:

Regulars / Friday Mixtape Friday Mixtape: Mahaneela's mix of songs that have soundtracked her career

This week’s Friday Mixtape comes from creative polymath, Mahaneela. When not photographing bands or filming their music videos, Mahaneela also manages musicians too, dipping her toes in all the roles the music industry has to offer.

Lucy Bourton — 25 January 2019
Regulars / Friday Mixtape Friday Mixtape: illustrator pals Jan Buchczik and Timo Lenzen on their studio tunes

This week’s Friday Mixtape comes from not just one It’s Nice That illustration favourite, but two! While at After School Club in Offenbach during the summer of last year, we had a beer with resident illustrators Jan Buchczik and Timo Lenzen who told us about their love of music, often listening together in their shared studio.

Lucy Bourton — 18 January 2019
Regulars / Friday Mixtape Friday Mixtape: Anthony Naples takes us from the party to the after party

New York based producer and DJ Anthony Naples has been an It’s Nice That favourite ever since we first heard the effervescent Mad Disrespect on some sweaty dancefloor somewhere back in 2012. We were hooked from that half-remembered moment on.

Josh Baines — 14 December 2018
Regulars / Friday Mixtape Friday Mixtape: Benedikt Luft's mix of tunes from his teenage years

Frankfurt-based illustrator and designer Benedikt Luft has been a long time friend of us here at It’s Nice That. Writing about his practice over the years, it wasn’t until we went to Eike König’s After School Club in Benedikt’s home during the summer that he ended up telling us about his love for music. He might have even been dragged into singing a karaoke rendition of The Smiths Bigmouth Strikes Again to an audience of attendees, who then cleared the room, with us too… sorry Eike and everyone who witnessed that.

Lucy Bourton — 07 December 2018
Regulars / Friday Mixtape Friday Mixtape: Australian designer Bradley Pinkerton's welcomes the summer

Sitting at a desk the other side of the globe, but as it turns out listening to the same records as us, Melbourne-based graphic designer Bradley Pinkerton has created this week’s Friday Mixtape.

Lucy Bourton — 23 November 2018
Regulars / Friday Mixtape Friday Mixtape: Vanessa Carlton and Godflesh combine thanks to The Beautiful Meme

A few weeks back, London-based creative agency The Beautiful Meme got in contact asking if its team could make us a Friday Mixtape. We said yes and expected the usual pumped-up, deck-building bangers focused mixtape we often hear – and love – from graphic design-leaning studios. The Beautiful Meme’s mixtape instead begins with Shakira’s timeless hit Wherever, Whenever, ends with Kylie’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head, and Vanessa Carlton’s A Thousand Miles makes a surprise appearance too.

Lucy Bourton — 16 November 2018

Work / Publication Experimental photography magazine Bill plays with the notion of the image as a material object

Part magazine, part photo book, Bill is an annual photography publication by Roma which describes its initiative as “prioritising visual reading without distraction”. With editing and creative direction by graphic designer Julie Peeters, Bill collates new or unpublished work from 12 contributing photographers and presents the images with no accompanying text, upholding the capacity of pictures to speak for themselves.

Rebecca Irvin — 20 May 2019
Regulars / In Conversation Thomas Demand in conversation with It’s Nice That

Welcome to the first of our brand new series, In Conversation, a new fortnightly interview with a leading light from the world of creativity. Every other Monday, we’ll publish a new Q&A here on It’s Nice That. Today, for the first instalment, we chat to Los Angeles-based German artist Thomas Demand.

Ruby Boddington — 20 May 2019
Work / Animation For Alice Monvaillier, animation is a "pretty magical process"

Recently exhibiting at Pictoplasma festival in Berlin a couple of weeks ago, Alice Monvaillier showcased her new film, created specifically for the festival. “I was totally free to show whatever I wanted and decided to make an animation because I’ve always loved making experimental shorts, but never had the chance to develop a fully-fledged project," she tells It’s Nice That.

Jyni Ong — 20 May 2019
Work / Publication My Body Feels Amazing: Elevator Teeth uses words and images to conduct a dialogue with the self

The enigmatic illustrator Elevator Teeth occupies Twitter under the description “creator of missing content” and in the location “internet void”, periodically posting fragments of cryptic text: “professional sunflower seed”, “live pond scumming”, “built to spit”, “16 pages of guts”, “my cousin told me I smelled like a church”, “yeah, I licked the drawing”, “my ceramic head”. Their illustrative style is reflective of their online identity, combining text and image to visualise the obscure interior landscape of the mind. Speaking of this interaction between the linguistic and the visual in their work, Elevator Teeth says: “For my work, words are of equal importance to images, as both can help guide you into a certain place, or create a certain feeling, or a kind of confusion. And I like to play with words, in the same way that I play with lines, shapes, and so on in the visual realm.”

Rebecca Irvin — 20 May 2019
Work / Graphic Design City Edition Studio creates projects with a soft, collaborative and kind tone of voice

Working out of an old bathroom on Spike Island is City Edition Studio, a graphic design practice where process and conversation are key. Set up by Jono Lewarne, the designer has been working under the moniker of City Edition since his graduation from the University of West England back in 2010. After spending time in other studios – notably Europa and Fraser Muggeridge at Typography Summer School – Jono’s intention has always been to “pursue a collaborative approach to graphic design”.

Lucy Bourton — 20 May 2019
Work / Graphic Design Jack Smyth talks us through what makes a successful book jacket design

Despite the fact that Jack Smyth describes himself as someone who came “a bit late to the design game”, the London-based designer has racked up an impressive amount of book cover designs. Most recently, this includes Nigel Slater’s new book Greenfeast, and previously a collection of Benjamin Zephaniah’s poems and a revamp of Kurt Vonnegut’s works.

Jyni Ong — 20 May 2019

Work / Illustration Have an ogle at Sein Koo’s marker pen illustrations of all things food-related

Who doesn’t enjoy beautifully drawn illustrations of foods and its crisp packaging? Here at It’s Nice That, we certainly do and have been oggling the work of the Berlin and Seoul-based illustrator Sein Koo. With her confident line and delicate colour work, Sein brings all manner of goods to life (but the food-related ones are our favourite). Whether it’s a bag of bread with unusually satisfying slices that make you go “oooo”, or a packet of Mi Goreng drawn with such gentleness you can almost hear its creases rustling in the background; Sein has a knack for boldly asserting the beauty of food.

Jyni Ong — 17 May 2019
Work / Publication Albert magazine's analytical yet colourful design proves how “knowledge can also have sex appeal”

Albert magazine is a publication released by the Einstein Foundation Berlin. Dedicated to, as you’d imagine, science, it aims to humanise the seemingly complicated and elite branch of knowledge, giving a face to those who work within it. Designer Fons Hickmann and art director Raúl Kokott (both of Fons Hickmann M23) collaborated on the conception and the design of the magazine, of which there are now four issues.

Ruby Boddington — 17 May 2019
Work / Graphic Design Typeface Ciao communicates auditive intonations of the spoken word

“Reading and writing text, whether on screen or in print, has never been as widespread as it is now,” says Massimiliano Audretsch. The German-Italian graphic and type designer has recently completed a postgraduate degree from Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. In his graduate project Ciao, he explores the formulaic compositions behind a letterform and the societal roles it consequently shapes. Designing a publication, a typeface and some installations to expand on the matter, Massimiliano talks us through the ins and outs of Ciao and the phonetic language code he’s devised as a result.

Jyni Ong — 17 May 2019
Work / Photography Photography duo Luke & Nik talk us through the inspirations for their analogue manipulation

Luke Norman and Nik Adam first met while studying photography at University for the Creative Arts, Farnham back in 2007. Under the guidance of a tutor, the pair began collaborating and producing work together on the course. Now, ten years later, they continue to do so under the moniker Luke & Nik, resulting in a portfolio full of colour and vitality.

Ruby Boddington — 17 May 2019
Work / Art Filmmaker and writer Pedro Neves Marques merges biopolitics with sexual politics

New-York based artist, writer and filmmaker Pedro Neves Marques, in his first UK solo exhibition at Gasworks, is interrogating the biopolitics at play in a nation battling the threat of mosquito-transmitted diseases. Speaking of his politically engaged practice, Pedro tells us, “I try to be very aware of the potentials of each art and medium, and choose what’s best for what I want to say. With a background in visual arts, as well as political critical theory, I’ve come to use exhibition spaces for the environmental and curatorial freedom they allow.” Entitled It Bites Back, the Gasworks exhibition brings together a series of works made in the context of Brazil’s ongoing war against the Zika and dengue virus-transmitting Aedes aegypti female mosquito.

Rebecca Irvin — 17 May 2019
Regulars / Nicer Tuesdays Dinamo's Fabian Hard on exploring new technology with typography

Our final speaker at April’s Nicer Tuesdays was Fabian Hard, one half of Swiss design duo Dinamo. Fabian stressed the importance of acknowledging the many people who make Dinamo’s practice possible, from those working with the permanent team in Berlin and Basel to those who completed internships with them. He then took us on a tour of the team’s current studio spaces in Barcel and Berlin, and gave us an overview of how the design agency was founded.

It's Nice That — 17 May 2019

Work / Animation Daria Kashcheeva combines stop motion, documentary-style filmmaking and painterly techniques

To evoke the complexity of human emotion via the manipulation of non-human objects is one of the great challenges in animation. In her BA graduate film, FAMU animation student Daria Kashcheeva manages not only to immerse her audience in the fraught relationships that make up her family drama, Daughter, but also to ground the perspective from which the film is shot firmly in the immediacy of human experience by mimicking the viewpoint of a hand-held camera.

Rebecca Irvin — 16 May 2019
Work / Events Hackable minds, the power of empathy, and boredom: what we learned at Adobe's 99U

Last week, we were at the Adobe 99U Conference in New York. Tackling the theme of “The Future of Creativity”, we heard talks from a varied line up of designers, scientists, storytellers and musicians who shared some of the (scary) realities of the era of design we are living in. Yet, rather than just concern the audience about the future, speakers offered design-led coping mechanisms to deal with future mishaps, inspiring attendees to stay human and creative throughout.

Ellen Turnill Montoya — 16 May 2019
Work / Illustration Illustrator Janice Chang uses humour and bendy limbs to tell personal stories

Illustrator Janice Chang is a master of using composition to tell a story. Born and raised in LA, her work sees bodies and limbs intertwined with each other, honing in on gestural details which express so much with so little. Taking inspiration from the people around her – friends, family and “random strangers I see dancing in their cars” – Janice uses illustration to “[reveal] things that may be foreign to others and [allow] them to empathise with different types of people.”

Ruby Boddington — 16 May 2019
Work / Photography When Hollie Fernando forgot her age, she decided to take her first self-portraits

Here at It’s Nice That, we’ve covered photographer Hollie Fernando a staggering seven times and counting (this is the eighth). From a series on her younger brother’s pre-teen years, to capturing Es Devlin for last summer’s issue of Printed Pages, Hollie really needs no introduction on this platform. Despite this, in all the times we’ve written about the Instagram blue-ticked photographer we’ve never seen a series of self-portraits from the London-based artist, until now.

Jyni Ong — 16 May 2019
Regulars / Nicer Tuesdays Yushi Li on photographing men she met through Tinder

A self-described “Chinese woman who takes photographs of naked Western men”, photographer and PhD student at the RCA Yushi Li had April’s Nicer Tuesdays audience laughing as she discussed her recent series, My Tinder Boys. During her talk, Yushi gave a frank account of what the project entailed – “I photographed different men I met through Tinder eating naked in their own kitchens”.

It's Nice That — 16 May 2019
Work / Graphic Design “The future of design is in the creation of tools”: Meet the Space Type Generator

Space Type Generator is not only anyone’s gateway into the mind-boggling world of motion type design, it is also an extremely fun tool to play around with. For anyone that is a complete novice to motion graphics (myself included) simply opening this tool in your web browser makes you feel more technology-fluent, as what unfolds before our very eyes once that webpage loads, is a reservoir of hypnotically moving type.

Jyni Ong — 16 May 2019

Work / Art John Wonnacott paints the changing face and wide-open skies of the Essex coast

John Wonnacott has spent the best part of sixty years with his eye firmly fixed on life’s ebbs and flows. His subject is the great British seaside, and more specifically, the Essex town of Southend-on-Sea.

Josh Baines — 16 May 2019
Work / Publication Questions? by the students of HfG Karlsruhe provides insight into contemporary design paradigms

Besides forming one half of design studio Hammer, Sereina Rothenberger teaches at HfG Karlsruhe in Germany alongside fellow tutor David Bennewith of Colophon studio. (Sereina also teaches at VCFA Vermont College of Fine Arts and David at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy.) “When we invited graphic designers to give lectures at the university, we noticed that there was a certain hesitation amongst our students to ask questions,” she tells It’s Nice That of the pair’s most recent project with their students. “We were convinced that this was not out of a lack of curiosity, but more because they felt they might ask the ‘wrong’ questions.”

Ruby Boddington — 16 May 2019
Work / Graphic Design Hey Joe studio's founder Youl Joe uses ambiguity in his graphic design portfolio

For Seoul-based graphic designer Youl Joe, his love of the medium is rooted in materiality and analogue techniques. After studying at Dankook University in Seoul, Youl Joe went on to gain his MFA from Yale before establishing his own studio Hey Joe in 2009 which he now runs alongside Taeyong Jo.

Ruby Boddington — 15 May 2019
Work / Publication “Impartial, independent and impractical at all times”: meet the South London Review of Hand Dryers

As a magazine that often writes about magazines, we see a lot of print. But, thankfully, we’re never sick of it. From zines to tomes, we’re actually a bit desperate for the kick that a new mag hitting the shelves gives us, that feeling of discovering something we never thought we needed and now can’t live without. On that note, let us introduce you to South London Review of Hand Dryers.

Lucy Bourton — 15 May 2019
Work / Publication Kentaro Okawara on how he is “always thinking about making art and books”

It’s been a busy year so far for the artist Kentaro Okawara. Born and raised in Tokyo, Kentaro has already released two publications this year. The first is a Risograph-printed zine titled I’m fuckin great and the second is a beautiful compendium of the paintings, ceramics and drawings exhibited in his latest solo show Just Your Smile.

Jyni Ong — 15 May 2019
Regulars / Nicer Tuesdays Ben Ditto on art directing Dazed Beauty to be “uncomfortable and new and different”

Art director, designer and creative consultant Ben Ditto joined us at April’s Nicer Tuesdays to take us through his art direction that led to the launch of publishing powerhouse Dazed Media’s new digital and print platform, Dazed Beauty.

It's Nice That — 15 May 2019

Work / Photography Cultural identity is high on the agenda for this year’s Palm* Photo Prize finalists

For the second year since its inauguration in 2018, independent photographic publisher Palm* Studios is running its Palm* Photo Prize, the official satellite event to Photo London Fair. Last year, the prize received over 2500 submissions, with awards going to some of our own favourites, Max Miechowski (People’s Choice Award) and Garrett Grove (Judge’s Panel 2nd Place). The judges of this year’s prize are senior curator at The Photographers’ Gallery Karen McQuaid, Tate Modern assistant curator Sarah Allen, writer and artist David Campany, and photo editor at Polaroid Originals Jessica Lopez.

Rebecca Irvin — 15 May 2019
Regulars / Bookshelf Martina Paukova's Bookshelf features childrens' illustrations of Japan's most-wanted criminals and more

Today, our regular Bookshelf segment plays host to illustrator Martina Paukova. Featured on the site many a time, we’ve followed Martina’s career from her MA graduation in 2015, to her first solo show at the Book Club last June. Racking up clients including The Guardian, Converse and illustrating a great many number of editorials since we first wrote about her back in 2015, Martina’s satisfyingly ordered illustrations continue to go down a treat.

Jyni Ong — 15 May 2019
Sponsored / Graphic Design Professional network Indorse is disrupting the hiring process by valuing skills above all

Indorse is the first professional network where only skills matter. Often, subjective factors such as looks and gender affect hiring decisions whereas Indorse focuses on the actual skills. The Singapore-based company has found a way to validate skills in a way that benefits both employer and candidate: simple and highly objective.

By combining the latest innovative technologies with a strong brand identity, Indorse presents a well-designed and effective way to visually communicate skills, free from discrimination and unconscious bias.

It's Nice That — 15 May 2019
Work / Photography Three creatives explore their own experiences of migration through new photo series Home

“As an immigrant, you’re always being tested outside of your comfort zone,” says photographer Olgaç Bozalp when we catch up about a new photo series he’s working on with filmmaker and photographer Osman Özel and stylist Raphael Hirsch, Home: Leaving One For Another. Before Olgaç moved to London from Turkey a decade ago, he’d only been to one country outside of his homeland – Cyprus. He came to the UK without the language or anyone to welcome him, and immediately had to deal with being away from family and trying to assimilate. “But the biggest struggle is how to support yourself to stay here,” Olgaç tells It’s Nice That. “The hardest part about migration is not leaving, the hardest part is staying.”

Laura Snoad — 15 May 2019
Regulars / Nicer Tuesdays Illustrative painter Alice Tye on capturing the natural beauty of Japan

Joining us as the first speaker at April’s Nicer Tuesdays was London-based painter, Alice Tye. With her signature illustrative style, Alice recasts photographs as paintings, creating compositions which linger on single, transient moments captured on her camera. Her talk focused on a recent series of paintings exhibited earlier this year at Mother’s Redchurch Street offices titled Mono No Aware, a project which came out of a three-week trip to Japan in spring of 2017.

It's Nice That — 14 May 2019
Work / Animation We catch up with Saiman Chow about his latest adventures in psychedelic animation

Since we last checked in with illustrator and animator Saiman Chow two years ago, he’s been quite the busy bee. Racking up some big jobs for Nike, Apple and Adult Swim, the expert in humorous, psychedelic scenes is stretching his legs into ever-more surreal pastures. As well as stylistic growth, for Saiman the past two years have spelled some other adventures into “being old as heck”. He’s switched from Mac to PC and set up some constructive boundaries to keep him on track with work. “For better or worse, staying focused has always been something I’ve wrestled with,” Saiman tells It’s Nice That. “This development has helped me gain more freedom to work independently and creatively, which has always been my goal… everything else is just icing on the cake.”

Laura Snoad — 14 May 2019