The Daily Swarm

Guardian:

Amy Winehouse sang on stage at the V festival this weekend, marking her first UK performance in almost a year. Winehouse appeared alongside the Specials as a surprise guest, backing singing on a medley of classic tunes.

Specials frontman Terry Hall introduced Winehouse at the end of the reunited ska band’s set. She entered to loud cheering and joined the band for a medley of You’re Wondering Now and Ghost Town.

Grown Up Thinking:

Perhaps the coolest thing I’ve seen all week, yellowBird is utilizing a variant on Google Street View technology to provide a true 360º view in video. (Video!!!) By using six divided lenses, it essentially collects data of every possible viewing direction. I won’t get into all the gloriously geeky details on exactly how it works, but it is definitely pretty flippin’ cool. Nothin’ like soaring high as a bird…from the comfort of my cozy cubical.

Via All Things D.

Read a live blog here.

New York Times:

From the stage Mr. Chatham used hand signals and gestures to guide four section leaders — David Daniell, John King, Seth Olinsky and Ned Sublette — stationed at the corners of the seating area. Each leader conveyed those cues to a portion of a guitar phalanx — including indie-rock notables, relative amateurs and a handful of moonlighting journalists — that surrounded the audience on three sides.

Nothing they played was intrinsically complex; Mr. Chatham’s piece dealt in massed sonorities and mingling overtones rather than manual calisthenics. An E major triad rose from nothingness, rumbling and sighing; around eight minutes in, Ryan Sawyer, a drummer onstage with Mr. Chatham, tapped out a steady beat on high-hat cymbals while glistening high notes pealed over a thumping bass line. The music dissolved into feathery whispers, then built to a jet-engine density before bursting at the 35-minute mark, giving way to a gentle coda.

In the work’s second part Mr. Chatham shifted iridescent waves of tremolo from corner to corner and side to side within the ensemble. During the final section treble strings maintained a tingly sitarlike drone over a mellow countermelody and Mr. Sawyer’s tick-tock pulse, inducing a bucolic Krautrock-style hypnosis. The roaring finale transformed a simple ascending diatonic scale into a vehicle for visceral catharsis, eliciting an approving roar from the audience.

Prefix has great photos here.

Michael Arthur’s illustrated gallery here.

An interview with Rhys Chatham in Impose Magazine here.