When I heard that Volcano Choir had announced that September would see the release of the band’s second studio album, I thought I was in some beautiful Justin Vernon-based dream (which certainly aren’t a rarity for me) and it was just too good to be true. But alas, their second studio album entitled ‘Repave’ will be dropping under music label JagJaguwar in only a couple of months.

It is now evident that after Vernon announced Bon Iver would be “taking a break,” he has been putting his superhuman musical ability towards his side project band Volcano Choir, a collaboration with progressive-rock group Collections of Colonies of Bees. Volcano Choir released their first album entitled ‘Unmap’ in September 2011. Their hauntingly harmonic sound blends the symphonic strings, piano, voices in harmony and acoustic guitar that Bon Iver flaunted so famously with a more experimental production style. The result is beautiful compositions of sheer undeniable musical talent that completely relax and entice the listener.

‘Unmap’ flawlessly blends progressive rock, chill-wave, acoustic, ambient music together and seasons it with cleverly manipulated vocals that harmonise one another in an eerie and enchanting way. Needless to say, the announcement of a second album has been met with much excitement.

They’ve released a ‘teaser’ video for the album; a beautifully shot and edited piece of music-cinema masterpiece that gives a feel and to the album as well as featuring a brand new song entitled ‘Byegone.’

This video is such an incredible media piece that has a poetic experimental feel about it mixed with a effortless elegance. Each frame is carefully considered with soft focuses and harmonious compositions then smoothly edited together. It really shows how visuals are such a crucial part of the music industry, as a video like this really captures the uplifting and beautifully inspirational mood of the upcoming album. It has the creative and technical sophistication that is so rarely seen in music film clips these days. It really shows a considered and careful approach to the piece as an artwork; the result being an incredibly shot, beautifully constructed and perfectly edited piece that you can’t look away from if you tried.

I personally won’t be sleeping til September. This is going to be amazing.

Through my endless stalking across the vast World Wide Web, I found a number of blogs I found really interesting. My favourites were the personal blogs that wrote about matters, events or concepts not with facts and figures, not based on interviews with experts, not to conform to a certain ideological view but simply for the sake of writing their thoughts and opinions down.

One blog I found, entitled Beautiful Absurdity is an opinion blog ran by a journalist named Shan Jaff from Germany. This post was one that particularly sparked my interest and started many conversations this week.

What Will We Be Nostalgic About From The 00’s? is the post, definitely worth a read.

I also miss the days of MSN, where your screen name and the song you were currently listening to had to be perfect in order to get the attention of the boy who sometimes sat behind you in Music class. Or the use of emoticons that crucially summed up your social standing with someone. And the days where you couldn’t be on the phone and internet at the same time… (okay I don’t particular miss them, but it’s pretty weird thinking about it). Flip phones were so totally cool, although we only ever used them to play Snake and call mum to pick us up from school.

Now the whole ’90’s kid pride thing has always made me cringe, especially because I experienced the 90’s from ages zero to six, where I was pretty much incapable of soaking up the retro culture seeing as I couldn’t even tie my shoes, but my childhood Golden Years were spent in the Noughties (if that’s really what we’ve decided to call that decade…) so I give myself to be lame, nostalgic and proud all at the same time. They were the years of bad pop music, rapid technological advancements one Walkman and Gameboy at a time, the very origins of Social Networking (because you were a nobody if you didn’t have a cool Myspace), renting DVDs and secretly downloading mp3’s off Limewire. They make me think of my socially awkward childhood years and how excited we were by these technologies which are now considered redundant, ancient and trivial.

That begs the question, will the iPhone be redundant and trivial in a few years? It’s hard to imagine that being so as it feels like the be all and end all of human technology, but that’s what we all thought about the wheel at one point too.

The concept of ‘blogging’ still makes me feel so confused and still in the 1990’s. I know what a blog is, I know how to blog, I know why people blog, but it’s still quite a funny concept to me.

This online dictionary says that a blog is a “web site containing the writer’s or group of writers’ own experiences, observations, opinions, etc., and often having images and links to other Web sites.” I also learned that the word “blog” comes from a shortening of the word “Web blog.” Cool.

Anyone, definitions aside, I’m really excited to delve further into the world of blogs. There’s something about blogs that I find so futuristic and  cool. I feel like I’m almost not cool enough to blog, like everyone who owns and runs a blog is in some super secretive technological ‘club’ that I’m not invited to. Basically, this sums up my anxiety about blogging.

Mean girls style!

Ugh!

But, just like trying to fit into any super cool group, you have to fake it til you make it! SoOoOo.. let the blogging begin!