April 8th, - April 22nd

If you love Bjork and you want to express it: Make a Tribute to her for a chance to win a limited edition Bjork package! The contest started today and runs until April 8th, 2008.

How to enter:
1. Make a tribute to Bjork.
Your tribute must be uploaded to this group page in the form of photo. You can make your tribute almost anyway you'd like; painting, collage, photoshop etc.
2. Check back to this page and see if you're a finalist.
On April 22nd, 2008 at 5:00 EDT Lost at E Minor will feature the 12 finalists on their website (http://lostateminor.com).
3. Write a blurb
If your tribute is one of the finalists on Lost at E Minor, you will need to sign up for Lost at E Minor and write a comment under the posting telling Lost at E Minor and the judging public what your tribute is about and why you love Bjork.
4. Get votes
The finalists will be voted on by the Lost at E Minor and imeem communities. These votes will contribute to your chances of winning, so make sure that your blurb about Bjork is a good one!
5. See if you won!
On April 25th, at 5:00 Eastern Time, Lost at E Minor will post the winner on their website. The winner will receive a limited edition Bjork prize.


For official Rules and Regulations: http://winatlaem.imeem.com/forums/xdIUO_mO/Rh9iQ96-/rules_and_regulations/

Lykke Li is Swedish, 21 years-old, and has 2008 written all over her. There's a huge bidding war underway for her now, not surprising given that her sound is a cross between Concretes, Robyn, Royksopp and a dash of M.I.A — all done with a lo-fi girly pop electronic twist. Her debut album — Youth Novels — will be released at the end of this month.

Yes, we've featured him a lot on Lost At E Minor, but how could we not? New York-based artist Sam Weber's work is amazing, tapping into dreams, visions, and fantasies from every wayward mind. [read an interview with Sam Weber and see which artists he recommends checking out]

A perennial favourite on Lost At E Minor, Autumn Whitehurst creates seamless vector pieces that shimmer with lustful beauty. We asked her how reflective her illustration aesthetic is of her lifestyle aesthetic: 'My illustrations are much more streamlined than my lifestyle aesthetic. I grew up in a family of magpies and must be genetically predisposed to collecting things I don’t need. I’ll need to move into a bigger space soon or I’ll have to start throwing things out because the visual stimulation in my house is nearly suffocating. If you’ve seen the movie Max, and remember Max Earnst’s house, that would be quite close to my ideal. But I would love to remix that with the aesthetic of those old French colonial homes in Vietnam and then I’d be quite content. How it would be possible, I have no idea'. Have you seen any creative work lately that's really inspired you? 'I’ve really only been looking at old movements like art deco and the work that came out Vienna towards the end of the 19th century, but I’ve not heavily delved into it just yet. I like the idea of revisiting modern technology with a new aesthetic and calling it Tech Deco, but I think it’s already happening. Lots of soft curves and silent spaces, we don’t really see what makes things tick anymore and everything alludes to the idea of comfort'.

Oh wow. The illustration work of Brooklyn based James Blagden is amazing. The colours leap out like flouro socks in a mid-80s Wham clip.

Munk One — aka Jose A. Mercado — is an American illustrator and fine artist noted for creating artwork for bands such as Korn, Avenged Sevenfold, and My Chemical Romance, amongst others. More recently, he's been producing art for clothing companies such as Upper Playground, Tribal Gear and True love & False Idols.

London-based illustrator Ian Stevenson claims that he’s got 'ideas crammed into his head like toys in a popular middle-class boy's bedroom'. I don’t suggest you try to get though the wordy biography on his website, but I do encourage you to take a look at the work and watch the documentary. Stevenson uses humor in his naive linework to create an eco-statement. If that’s not enough, his work has been exhibited alongside the likes of Banksy, David Shrigley and Jamie Hewlett. [see also the illustrations of Heiko Windisch]

With their improvisational, pyschedelic sound, San Francisco band Wooden Shjips are putting the proverbial finger to the formulaic output of much of the current chart toppers. We interviewed guitarist Erik “Ripley” Johnson recently: The album sounds analog - authentically low-fi in parts, nicely devoid of excessive pro tools frills. On what was it recorded and how long did the process take? ‘The album was recorded on a Tascam 80-8 recorder, with a Teac Model 5 board. It is an 8-track, 1/2–inch reel-to-reel machine from the 70’s or 80’s. We tried to keep the recording fairly straightforward. A lot of our gear is vintage, our amps are tube, so that contributes to the sound also. It probably took a few weeks from start to mix down. We didn’t have a continuous chunk of time to devote solely to this project, but we recorded it ourselves in our practice studio, so we were able to stagger the sessions’. Is the San Fran music scene still as vibrant and vital as it was back in the day? ‘Hard to say what it was really like back then. But it certainly doesn’t match up to the romantic idea of the 60s scene. Obviously, times are different. Personally, I think it’s too expensive in San Francisco now to support that kind of full-on scene. However, there always seems to be interesting bands in the Bay Area. We’ve played with some great bands in the last year — Sic Alps, Howlin Rain, Ascended Master, Rahdunes — but I don’t have the sense of a cohesive scene. I think that may contribute to the diversity of the sounds. There’s no one San Fran sound’. Great to hear the wah wah pedal in use in a contemporary recording. I thought it had gone out with the rise of the indie-shoegazers. Are the guitar effects used on the album old school pedals? ‘It’s a mix of old and new. There a number of great boutique pedal companies nowadays. It used to be you’d have to pay exorbitant prices for vintage pedals, which may or may not work or sound good. Now you can pay exorbitant prices for pedals that are new and work really well! On the album I use a Real McCoy Custom 3 wah, a new Electro Harmonix Deluxe Memory Man, and the “vintage” effects are an MXR Distortion Plus and Phase 100,and a Maestro Echoplex. There might also be some Big Muff on the guitar. Nash uses a bunch of stuff on the keys also: a Moogerfooger, and old flanger and analog delay, some other things. It’s a big soup of effects’. There was a lot of improvisation in early Shjips gigs. Does the necessity to tighten that for an album recording change the musical outlook of the group at all? ‘Actually, we didn’t feel the necessity to tighten up for the album. That just happens naturally during the recording process. Mostly, I think, because there are so many technical chores to attend to while recording. If anything, we want to loosen up more for the recordings. We’re hoping to record more of a live sound for the next album’.

Formed in San Francisco in the late-1970s, Negativland have defied trends and a lack of radio love to release twelve albums of experimental, sound collage music. With the recent release of their compilation DVD, Our Favorite Things, we spoke with Negativland stalwart, Don Joyce: Listening to your music is never a dull experience. My ears are still ringing from listening to A Big 10-8 Place. When recording, is there any discernible structure to the songs or is it more about creating challenging sound collages that have a loose musical thread running through them? ‘It turns out to be an answer you've heard before. Sometimes it's the music that comes first and dialog or lyrics are added to it, and sometimes the "lyrics" come first and we need to add music or sound to them. In both we usually take a collage approach to structuring it, as many of these aspects are actually found sound elements, though, with a few notable exceptions, most of our actual music is original and is composed and performed by the group. Also, starting with our third release — A Big 10-8 Place — in 1983, and continuing on with every single thing we have made since then, we always have had a very strong and very intentional conceptual thread running through each of our projects. It's all highly structured. Nothing random about it at all, so with A Big 10-8 Place you may have to listen more than a few times before the picture becomes clear. But it's there'. How different is the cultural scene in California now compared to when you got Negativland started back in the late 1970s? ‘I hardly know. I never leave my house. I think it is less radically inclined but still relatively innovative’. You've put out false press releases over the years, confused America with experimental recordings, and pissed off the biggest band in the world [U2]. Any cunning plans lined up that we should be warned about? ‘We wouldn't tell you if we did’. Our Favorite Things is a remarkable collection of material. Thank god for parody! Do you feel like your contemporaries are taking their creative pursuits a little too seriously these days? ‘Hell, I thought we were the only ones taking things a little too seriously these days! It took many, many years to make that darn DVD, so you have to be pretty serious about being funny to keep at something like that for that long when no one is paying you to do it. And, no, we don't think any of what we do is parody’. [watch the video clip to the Negativland song, Fetch My Cigarettes]

Wanna escape to a world peppered with blue, pink, and yellow, wherein spaceships chill out with trees and pandas reign supreme? A bespectacled German fellow named Heiko Windisch offers your several afternoons' worth of illustrations to wander through, half smiling. While you're there, watch out for the flowering zombie, and don't be afraid of the volcanoes — they emit coloured puffs of hearts.