Photography by Daniel Silbert

How’s life in Cardiknox? Life is grand! After a lengthy Game Of Thrones-esque winter, it is finally springtime in NYC, and we actually remember why we live here. Can you tell us a little bit about the forming of Cardiknox? We were introduced through some mutual friends and actually started working on a musical (as in Broadway) together. I had been producing some different acts in a local studio, and brought Lonnie in to show her what it was like. We started messing around with some recordings and something sorta magical clicked. We started (patiently) sculpting songs, emailing lyrics back and forth to each other, and over the course of two years, we created Cardiknox. With many people describing your sound as ‘80’s inspired’, who has been a major influence for your music? We’ve been hugely inspired by some 80s greats like Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Prince, MJ, Madonna, and even more obscure stuff like Yazoo, Go West, and Difford & Tilbrook. But we also pull from a lot of modern sounds. Everything from Robyn, M83, and Santigold to Kanye, Drake, and Frank Ocean. I genuinely mean it when I say your songs have got stuck in my head, how do you do that!? There is MSG in all our songs. Listen responsibly.

I like the nod to Kate Bush – was this intentional and can we anticipate more snippets of homage? You certainly can! We love the way the hip hop industry and, more recently, the remix culture uses and borrows existing tracks to repurpose songs. We’ve long wondered why it never really existed in pop music. If there’s a great hook–obscure or not–that inspires us to repurpose it for one of our songs, we jump at the chance. We’ve already worked handfuls of other sampled snippets into other songs and don’t plan to slow. You’ve whet our appetite with ‘Where I’m Headed’ and ‘ Hold Me Down’, what can we expect from the rest of your album? We’ll be releasing another few songs over the coming weeks/months before starting work on an EP or full-length. Our next song, “Technicolor Dreaming,” will be out very shortly. You guys look so effortlessly cool (maybe it’s a Seattle thing…), how would you describe your style? Hmm … our style is certainly influenced by the massive canvas that IS New York City. It’s impossible to walk a block in this city without seeing, hearing, smelling (not always a good thing…) the pulsing veins of NYC. Though Seattle will forever be home, NYC has seeped into our souls and songs. But! …in practice, our style is more dictated by what laundry we can effectively lint roll to a wearable state (our puppy sheds a lot). Where can we see you this year? We plan to start playing some shows in the NYC area by the end of May, then hopefully branching out to other northeast markets like Boston, Jersey, D.C., and Philly. So if you’re in any of those areas this summer, keep an eye out!

Will you be visiting the UK? I’d love to review a show We would LOVE to tour the UK. Unfortunately, no plans to do so as of now. Though if lovely folks like yourself continue to like our tracks, I’d venture to say we’ll be there by next summer. You’re in my playlist, who’s in yours? Currently loving CHVRCHES, Kate boy, The Strokes, Youth Lagoon, Ghost Beach, Purity Ring, and Tegan & Sara. Finally, can you both tell me a secret? Lonnie weighed nearly 12 lbs when she was born. Not an exaggeration. Thomas earned a black belt in Tae Kwon Do at the age of twelve. — Find out more about Cardiknox on their website http://www.cardiknox.com/

Ithaca Audio have done it again with Game Theory. It’s a 19 track audio visual mashup performed live on re-wired video game controllers… Interested? We were, check out the video above.

…bonus points for Street Fighter

Musically ‘Forever, Instead’ displays a very consistent sound; if you enjoyed one song you are more than likely to enjoy the rest of the EP. Although due to its lack of musical variation and experimentation with different sounds the songs can start to feel slightly repetitive after a couple of plays. However, there is an undeniable and inescapable charm to this EP which comes as a result of singer Daniel’s talent for storytelling through his emotive and heartfelt lyrics. Indeed, ‘Forever, Instead’ certainly displays great musical potential.

If you want to have a listen for yourself head on over to Dropout Dan’s website.

What’s going on? Should I really be receding at 24? I keep asking myself this. Luckily I have a good relationship with my hairdresser. He understands my somewhat neurotic tendencies. I’ll ask him every month when I sit in the swingy chair ‘Josh, am I receding.’ He fafs around with my hair; moving it from side-to-side. When he does this I see him as the Gestapo of receding hair. I panic, if he says yes you’re going bald I’m afraid I’ll lose it there and then in the chair- yes, my hair is very important to me. To my relief, last month he said I’m OK. It’s the crown of my head I’m most worried about though. No one wants to be balding up in their twenties.

So what am I doing? Pestering friends to check my hair isn’t receding too much. Trying my best not to reveal my neurotic side to my girlfriend. She really doesn’t know how much I’ve been obsessing about this. I hit the internet hard.. ‘how to prevent hair loss’, ‘how to tell you’ll be bald in your 30s’, ‘can you go bald in your 20s.’ They’re a small selection of what I’ve been googling. I can tell you this because I’m looking at my internet history now. It’s dawning upon me that I might need help. Would the NHS provide CBT therapy over anxiety around hair loss? Joke.

The thing is, I’m not just worried about my hair loss. I’m generally worried about getting old. I’m lacking energy, my digestive system feels like it’s slowing down. I’ve stared to do brain work outs because I read an article about brain decay.

What I’ve come to realise is… there’s no point me even worrying. I’m going to give myself a heart attack way before I go bald due to stressing about it.

​On the whole, Dogs Eating Dogs is not a particularly bad record; it’s just not particularly great either. The weaving between fast and slow pace makes the record feel slightly disjointed and lacking in vibrancy, whilst the lyrics within a few of the tracks become irritatingly repetitive. Indeed the whole EP seems to become overly consumed with synthesisers and instrumental sections that, whilst they are melodic, fail to pack the punch. The guitars seem to be lost as a result leaving the EP distinctly lacking the vivacity of their exuberant glory days. Whilst Blink have produced a more mature record and are clearly experimenting with a new sound, the effect is less than satisfying resulting in an EP that is sadly more reminiscent of Angels & Airwaves album. Perhaps Blink are still trying to harness and fully establish their new sound, but this latest effort fails to stir excitement. It’s by no means terrible; it’s just a bit mediocre.

The brainchild of Sir Clive Sinclair, the ZX Spectrum, fondly nicknamed Speccy, presented itself as a chunky looking black keyboard, donned with the iconic logo featuring the colours of the spectrum. Throughout its lifecycle, the various models contained differing innards (insert technical wizardry) and ever changing, yet recognisable, design while maintaining its simplicity of use. Controlling the games was primarily achieved through use of the built-in keyboard, with joysticks available as add-ons or for multiplayer gaming.

While many of you may have difficulties recalling the mechanical sounds associated with the put out to pasture floppy disc drive, the spectrum was associated more for its use of the even more archaic cassette tape. Producing a memorable, frequency sweeping, range of audible ‘squeelage’ the Spectrum’s sounds remain unmatched by any invention of man or nature since. Like a crying robot baby, the Spectrum loaded the content over a timeframe that lasted longer than the life expectancy of some insects and finally, if you were lucky, gave you the game you were desperate to play.

Delivering gaming into the home, the Spectrum offered a variety of game types only previously available in the arcades. Some of gamings’ revered franchises including R-Type, Rainbow Islands, Gauntlet, Jet Set Willy found a home on Sinclair’s wonder box, no doubt a euphemism deployed by Sir Clive himself. Yet one, now redundant, genre perfectly suited the Spectrum’s interface, the text based adventure. Amongst the genre’s most loved titles was the much vaunted, The Hobbit (1983) that mixed lovingly rendered graphics with text to create a literary, visual treat of adventurous proportions. Commanding Bilbo to attempt various feats of skill or logic, the text adventure could indeed become a tedious and frustrating jaunt though various options in an attempt to find the correct command. If nothing else that genre allowed you to simultaneously hone you vocabulary and spelling skills, as well as your aptitude for puzzle solving; no wonder the youths of today seem poorly educated in comparison.

Whatever you think of the Spectrum, an entire generation of game players have fond memories of its style, sounds and software. It encouraged the British to welcome computers into their homes and took us a step closer to the high calibre, high budget games of the current systems; many of the developers responsible for these games, owing a debt to their youth spent jamming a cassette into a hulking black box and crossing their fingers in the hope that the game they’d waited eons to load was worth the wait.

This year I have a girlfriend (hooray! or perhaps not) I’ve started to overthink present shopping. We’ve been together since May. This is probably a defining point in the relationship; our first Christmas together. I know what she wants and what I think she needs. I mean honestly, who doesn’t have an iPod I keep asking myself. It’s the 21st century. Music is probably the greatest thing in the world. I listen to it at work, when I’m talking to people I’ll sometimes have one head phone plugged in and hope they don’t realise. When I’m on the airplane I’ll puroposely wear a hooded top so I can secretly listen to my music – it’s great. It’s like putting one finger up at the air hostess and refusing to listen to the safety demonstration for the 100th time. We all know if the plane goes down, we’re going down with it. I won’t brace for landing. I’ll put some 80s classics on and go down swinging. Or in reality screaming.

So, do I get her an iPod? What does that say about me as a boyfriend? The question has been rolling around my head for months now. In one way it’s great; I know her, I know she likes pink so that will add a more personal touch to the iPod, and I was thinking about getting it engraved with her name on the back. On the contrary it looks like I haven’t really given it much thought. What would her friends say. This is me classically overthinking something most people would probably find relatively straight forward.

Last week I went shopping with a friend who recently asked his girlfriend to marry him (she said yes). He was shopping for pearl earings and various gold carrot necklaces. It was quite boring and between a the boredom and pretentious jewllerer, I was ready to leave the shop within under a minute of walking in. She obviosly tried to take advantage of my friend. I mean, yes he’s a man and yes he’s getting married but an £800 pair of earings with a few shiny pearls on probably isn’t what he needs(?). And they were hideous, somethng which wouldn’t look out of place on your crazy aunt, eccentric aunt’s dog, if you have one of those.

The shopping experience made me start to question my choice of present. Is that what she would prefer, the earings? I found myself wondering. The truth is I’ve overthought this to such an extent that I genuinely don’t know what to do. For the first time in a long time I’m started to not fake-hate Christmas.

So, I think it’s abot time I made up my mind. I’m getting the iPod… and the earings.

Firstly, can you give us a bit of a background on the name Ithaca?
The name Ithaca comes from the small Greek island of the same name. More specifically it actually comes from the poem ‘Ithaca’ by Constantine P. Cavafy. I have always liked it’s message; the journey is often more important than the outcome.

What originally drew you to music production?
At the age of 15 I was loaned a 1984 Roland Juno-106. I spent hours creating sounds with it just for the fun of it. I’d played quite a few acoustic instruments for a number of years before that point but the idea of building and layering my own sounds was something that really appealed to me. I then started using some free modular software, Jeskola Buzz (www.buzzmachines.com). That and a portable 4 track recorder got me into sampling and started the learning process of putting audio together in creative ways.

Can you tell us a bit about your music making work flow? Do you find the creation of scores and music for advertising very different to putting mashups together?
They rely on the same underlying musical principals. With a mashup you are creating a track just as you do when you compose music. You still need a good structure that leads the listener through the piece, you need a balance of instrumentation that works harmonically and also within the context of an audio mix. The only difference really is the source material, when composing I might use a violin, when producing a mashup I might use Jay-Z. Contrary to what some people might think, creating mashups is much, much more time consuming and generally more difficult though. When you have built up a solid knowledge of composition you generally know which elements are missing from a track, you then reach for the keyboard and add them in. When a mashup is missing the same elements you have to go through a long process of searching through generations of musical history to find the perfect couple of bars to fit the specific circumstance.

Your score for ‘World of Sounds’ is very reminiscent of recent Amon Tobin work. Who would you say are your key influences?
Amon Tobin has always been someone that has been a big influence on both my work as a composer and also the progression into visual work and projection mapping. He and others such as Chris Cunningham, Jonathan Glazier, Bjork, OK Go and anyone else who is trying to push the limits of their creativity is always going to be hugely inspiring.

How do you decide on the songs that you use in the mashups?
The best way to look at a mashup is to treat it as a producer would mixing a band. You need to cover the sonic range from bass to treble, depending on the track you may need the driving elements of a bass line and a drum beat, a vocal and the additional harmonic and melodic elements to give these context. I like to break these elements down as much as possible so only one song is providing the drums, another the bass line, another the vocal etc. So usually we start by looking at intros, outros and breakdowns in songs. These are usually where a track is stripped down most to it bare elements. There are then technical considerations to consider such as tempo, key, and harmonic progression. You can change the tempo and key of a track to a certain degree but there are limits. We create a library of audio, where everything is categorised by tempo and key so that we can easily find things that might fit a current mashup.

You definitely take the ‘more the merrier’ approach when it comes to creating mashups like in your ‘The City Is London’ video. Have you ever come across a song that just can’t be mashed with any other no matter what you try?
Lot’s. When mashing so many tracks together, each new element that you add has to work perfectly with every other element in the mashup already. It gets progressively harder to find suitable songs to add to the mix the larger it gets. We generally go through about 500 tracks for a 25 track mashup. It’s a long old process, most stuff just doesn’t work.

There have been some great mashups over the years, have you got a personal favourite?
I wouldn’t say that I have one stand out favourite. I think you need to look back at some of the originators to really see some great stuff. Projects like ‘The lessons’ by Double Dee and Steinski really progressed what people realised you could do creatively by sampling records. Also when you listen to pure labours of love like The Avalanches ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’ and 2manyDJs ‘As Heard on Radio Soulwax’ series you really get the idea that these are people pouring creativity into their work.

Your showreel includes work for some big names, is this something you would like to focus more on in the future?
We are lucky enough to have worked for some great clients on some very interesting projects and have a lot more great stuff like this lined up for the future. It is always nice to work with other people in the creative industries, especially when you are given the flexibility to put your mark on a project as our clients have done with us so far.

What should we be looking out for? Does Ithaca Audio have any big plans in the pipeline for 2013?
Lot’s more. We are finishing a new mashup at the moment, where we will add another twist on the performance element. We are doing a lot of experiments with projection mapping and taking our live mashup installation and our live performances out around the UK. We also have several other creative projects on the go which should be ready during the end of 2012 and into 2013. On top of that we have some really exciting work with some big name clients at the moment to look out for over the coming few months.

For our more musically inquisitive readers can you share any secrets to a mashup masterpiece?
Patience and a love of music. It takes a long time but when you find that 2 second snippet of a track that works so perfectly in your mix it’s a great feeling.

If you want to find out more about Chris’ work at Ithaca Audio check out the links below, don’t forget to ‘Like’ them on Facebook too!

http://www.ithacaaudio.com/
http://soundcloud.com/ithaca-audio
http://www.facebook.com/ithacaaudio

John, a 35 year old underachiever, is inseparable from his teddy who he wished into life as a lonely child. Ted, voiced by Seth MacFarlane, sounds exactly like Family Guys Peter Griffin. He’s a pot smoking womanising menace …so you can see the attraction for a sad Billy No Mates.

Lori (Mila Kunis) the girlfriend, still seething from the lack of a marriage proposal decides that John may be better off with out his furry little friend. Just to make it clear we’re talking about his teddy. John try’s a new career in a supermarket but off course it doesn’t go smoothly.

I was surprised and delighted with Mark Wahlberg’s comedy acting, he’s on good form during the film and plays the perfect straight man to Ted. If he was bothered that the teddy gets all the best lines you would never guess it. I thought that the CGI would get a bit annoying but you do forget that Ted is an animation.

Kunis manages to make the film surprisingly moving and highlights the growing up theme of the movie. Unfortunately I still don’t get why Lori would stay with John. Where’s the chemistry? And if she wants a serious relationship with John, why didn’t she just burn Ted or at least put him on a hot wash and then a trip to a dryer.

I think the idea of a talking bad boy teddy eclipsed the fact that this is a rom com with very little rom. Sadly, some jokes are offensive for no reason. My gag meter was funny, but not laugh out loud funny. Overall definitely worth seeing.

4 Stars

Tetris, to this day, the bastion of on-the-go gaming, still delivers with its simplicity of design and compulsive replay value. Slot an oddly shaped block into another to make complete lines and earn points. Genius. As the speed increased, so too did the pressure of placement and woe betide you if you got one of those awkward shapes; you all know which ones I’m referring to. The game always seemed weighted unfairly against you. No, I am not paranoid! Regardless of the incredible difficulty there was always the desire to return to the magic of its alluring shapes and unforgettable melody, do, dah dah, dee dee: you can fill in the rest. While Tetris still finds success on every conceivable platform, countless other contemporary handheld games and designers owe a debt to its timeless playability.

Bomberman, by no means, strictly limited to handheld gaming was at its best, and worst, on the Gameboy Advance. Far too much of my time was dedicated to battles with friends in our sixth form common room, trying to best their quick reactions with perfect bomb placements. The inevitable humiliating defeats were plentiful. The few moments between the grim realisation and the fatal explosion seemed like a tormented lifetime. Simple, fast paced and highly addictive, Bomberman had all the qualities necessary to be a handheld blast … I know, I know.

An instant classic on every Nintendo platform, Mario Kart found a new height of glory on the GameBoy Advance. An unadulterated example of gaming goodness, you simply can’t fault its elegant karting brilliance, aided by the ability to wire (yes wire) four consoles together for epic friendship ending battles which made you late for lessons; obviously I’d never blame Mario for my lower than expected A Level mark, probably.

Lemming’s has had many outings, but non better than on the Atari Lynx, possibly the ugliest of all handheld gaming platforms, discounting the Nokia N Gage, which was just wrong, like a smurf in jeans. Depressed by eons of evolutionary mishaps (seriously, green hair?), the Lemmings have decided to find a path to their own destruction. Success came from gently nurturing the critters towards safety, taking the least possible amount of diminutive mammal casualties. The number of interventions was limited as was the battery life of the console, giving little time for Lemming loving. Nevertheless, Lemmings on the Lynx was a dream.

Handheld gaming is here to stay and by all accounts just keeps getting better. We’re likely to see eye-popping graphics, longer battery life and greater convergence with our other media. Although Angry Birds may have been this generation’s answer to Tetris, it’s not likely to be remembered in the annuls of gaming history with the same fondness as many of the handheld classics which preceded it.