We’re happy to bring you the August 2016 edition of our monthly mixtape series and, with it, a significant change in form.

Up to this point, we’ve always made use of SoundCloud to post our mixes. We’re longtime users and fans of the online audio platform and, for some things, remain so to this day. It’s always been a great way for independent musicians to get their music out there in front of a huge audience in an easy manner and we’ve discovered countless bands with it. A little while back, SoundCloud started dropping ads in-between songs when streaming which, while annoying, I totally get. They remain a relatively small company, based in Germany with only about 200 employees from what I understand and those employees need to get paid.

Back at the end of March though, Soundcloud debuted their Soundcloud Pro service, a pay streaming service seemingly created in an effort to compete with Spotify, Apple Music, and the like. And, you know, continue to pay their employees. Part of that fee vs. free bifurcation meant that some songs—usually more popular ones—were only partially available to the free SoundCloud users as 30 second “previews,” many long after having been posted by the artists themselves, much to most artists’ surprise and with none of the profits for this pay service going to the artists. You can read various articles and reddit posts that go into more detail on the subject, but suffice to say that SoundCloud went from something that was great for everyone to…well, the opposite.

Again, we get it—it’s a business; businesses need to have employees; employees need to be paid; businesses need to make money so they can give some of that money to employees. But, with those changes that restricted access to songs for both us and all other listeners and the questionable-at-best relationship to artists,  who’ve not-so-arguably fueled the popularity of SoundCloud, we decided to step away from using the platform for our regular mixtapes. Plus, we’ve had a few minor but consistent gripes with this service not quite matching the needs of what we want to do (for one, if a song hasn’t been posted by an artist, we can’t share it and, for another, songs that are taken down after we post a mix obviously disappear from the mix forever, meaning many of our old 15-song playlists have far fewer than 15 songs these days).

So we’re giving something new a try this month—Mixcloud, a crowd-sourced streaming service used largely by podcasters, DJs, and Barack Obama. We first took note of the service when David Byrne sent a recent mix through using it. We figure, if it’s good enough for David Byrne, it’s good enough for us. We’re only testing the waters here, but we’re hoping this will really open things up for us, allowing us to post anything we have an audio file for (including any pre-release promos we’re given the go-ahead to share) and ideally giving the mixes a bit more longevity.

As a listener, your experience is going to differ depending on your country and their respective copyright laws. In the US, for instance, we can’t rewind because rewinding is somehow unfair, I guess, to artists? Point being, let us know what you think—if you like it, drop us a line; if you don’t like it, also drop us a line; if there’s something that you think would work even better for us—you guessed it—drop us a line.

In the meantime, enjoy this new batch of new sounds from France’s Faker featuring Rae Morris (a lovely track that we’ve wanted to bring you for months but remains unavailable in the US via SoundCloud); Brooklyn-by-way-of-Ecuador’s Maria Usbeck, who gives us the beautifully blissful song “Moai Y Yo”; the ESG-esque, radio-friendly project from Troop Beverly Hill’s own Jenny Lewis, Au Revoir Simone‘s Erika Forster, and the Like‘s Tennessee Thomas  Nice as Fuck; Blood Orange who gives us an addictive new track featuring Empress Of; new (to us) Brooklyn band Bella Mare; Flock of Dimes, the solo project from Wye Oak‘s Jenn Wasner, who gives us a poppy number reminiscent of Everything But the Girl at its height; Brooklyn’s Sidney Royel Selby III (AKA Desiigner) who totally loves Pokémon Go; Los Angeles harpist Risa Rubin; DC electro R+B trio SHAED; longtime favorite Icelandic artist Sin Fang (who interviewed a few years back), who returns with a bizarrely beautiful new track featuring Sigur Rós‘ Jónsi; Melbourne’s Kllo; Júníus Meyvant (another Icelandic import—you can tell by all the accents); a bedroom recording project from Brooklyn’s Oliver Kalb (AKA Bellows), who’s part of the creative collective The Epoch (which you can read more about in our November interview with Eskimeaux); Oxford’s newemo trio TTNG (FKA This Town Needs Guns), who gives us some of today’s most intricate, hyper-melodic guitar work; and ending with a tranquil track from Sweden’s modestly named The Amazing.

Enjoy.

Something significant for us happened this week.

More accurately, something significant didn’t happen for us this week—after nearly a year-and-a-half of continuous, uninterrupted week-daily posting to our studio’s web journal, we made the conscious decision to break from that daily schedule.

The initial move to daily posting came in February of 2014 and coincided with a massive overhaul of our studio’s web site wherein we pulled our journal into the fabric of the site in an effort to merge two established online personas. Before that, via Google’s Blogger, we’d started the blog that became this journal (formerly and separately branded as Kindness of Ravens) way back in 2008. Those four or five years, we ran it much more as a personal, more casual portal for our creative output when Blogging was more at its height, thus the separation from our professional persona. We also only posted every now and then, not on any sort of schedule. The move to daily posts in 2014 was an experiment to see how it affected our output—sticking to a scheduling and folding the writing and coverage more into raven + crow as a professional design studio, we wanted to see how it would change and hopefully improve what we did and how we did it.

Taking this more measured approach to the journal definitely affected things in a positive aspect—we feel the writing refined and, more importantly, the focus on what we wrote about, why, and how grew more sharpened. We reigned in our focus to coverage of design, art, music, culture, and the vegan food scene and, as a result, felt more motivated and engaged both with our subjects and our audience. What’s more, making this move gave us a kind of excuse to reach out and open up communication with groups and individuals in and outside of our field, which, likewise, opened up our lives professionally and socially. Very much like that picture of a salad in early 2013 that very much led to both longterm clients and professional partnerships, we can draw direct lines from work we’ve done on these pages and outreach behind the writing to real-world relationships we’ve developed. Which is clearly awesome.

Now, after stepping back and seeing the results of this deliberate shift, we’re making yet another move for greater focus by not holding ourselves to a daily schedule. It was a successful experiment and one we’re glad we embarked upon, but we feel we can both further curate the content that appears here by posting less and, honestly, devote more time to other, non-online things in the real world, be them professional, personal, or something in-between.

Below, an outtake from our 2014 shoot for the new site + about page where we look way too much like your new favorite band.

Here’s hoping this weekend will be a safer one with no more wildfires in southern or central California…and while we’re wishing, let’s make it a miraculously, unexpectedly rainy one.

Shot from our neighborhood as the smoke from the Sand fire swept over Los Angeles this past weekend. Thoughts and best possible wishes to those fighting and dealing directly with both that fire and the Soberness fire near beautiful, magical Big Sur.

I have no idea where we got this book—likely from my mother’s extensive collection of old books I peruse through every time we visit her.

Though the illustrations for this are totally uncredited (and seem to be from various artists if the style of them is any indication), the cover and many of the page headers are truly beautiful and inspiring.

Originally published in 1885 and penned by Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) the content of the writing itself for this may not have aged so well. Take a look at his poem “Foreign Children” to see what I mean (you can click on that image to see a larger version).

Macro shot of our sweet potato doing its best to start a sweet potato garden and giving us a nice color palette in the process.

Longtime friend + collaborator David Goldman recently debuted a compelling new project he’s dubbed The Birth Lottery.

The project was born from another, earlier documentary photo project he did on migrant sugarcane workers (more on that in a 2014 interview we did with him) that got him thinking about what it means to have more or less stacked against you from the start in life. As he admits, whether or not one is born with privilege or hindrances is somewhat open to interpretation, but few would deny that many of us are born with an advantage over others.

As he puts it personally: “There is no question that I won #thebirthlottery. I am the son of middle class parents born in Toronto, Canada. I didn’t get everything I wanted but I was never in need of anything. As a student, I was not the best, but when I found photography, I worked hard to ‘make it.’ I still work hard. In my travels for work, I’ve met people that have worked way harder than I have yet they seem destined to struggle with barriers beyond my comprehension. I have also met those who have not really had to work too hard for anything and seem destined to succeed in spite of themselves.”

His new ongoing photo project works to examine that concept, telling stories with image and words of individuals working to change the results of their birth lottery.

Visit #thebirthlottery web page to find out more about the project and David’s work.

Photo by David Goldman.

We’re continuing to develop the partnership we’ve been working on with Chef Minh Phan of porridge + puffs that we talked about a few months back.

In our research + development phase, we’d been perfecting the design and brand of PINCH—Minh’s line of savory jams + sauces—while she perfected the recipe and variations in flavor. Our first iterations on labeling followed the visual theme we’d established—ingredients-based patterns within a grid system that plays off of porridge + puffs’ graph paper imagery—with brightly-colored, hand-printed and -cut labels.

Leading up to Minh’s final summer appearance at Smorgasburg LA this past weekend, we worked with her to have a series of glass containers screen printed at a nearby glass printing specialist using a new pattern that celebrates the local ingredients the products rely on and the state they’re from. Minh sold the savory jams in their new jars publicly for the first time this weekend and we’re hoping to line up some permanent selling points in Los Angeles that we should be able to announce in the fall.

Stay tuned.

Below, a shot Minh took using the jars at a colorful pickling session for the Tehachapi Heritage Grain Project.

the result: #pickles in jars designed by @ravenandcrow for #PINCHbyporridgeandpuffs #silkscreened #collectorsitem #californiasun #madeinLA

A photo posted by minh phan (@mignardisesla) on Jul 5, 2016 at 10:00pm PDT

The new video for Jamie xx’s “GOSH”—the first track off of his 2015, totally misspelled debut, In Colour—is nothing short of mesmerizing.

Shot in a Chinese town that’s a semi-abandoned replica of Paris, the whole thing gives off a eerily cool, post-apocalyptic feel that’s the perfect accompaniment for the song, especially when the massive extra choreography kicks in. What makes it even more impressive—the Romain Gavras-directed mini-film was evidently shot free of any special effects.

Way to make us care about a song that’s over a year old again, Mr. xx (but, really, Gavras).

PS—As of writing, In Colour‘s on sale for the random low price of $3.54 over at iTunes; if you don’t have it already, you really should.

Get creeped out below.

Jamie xx photo by Emma Swann.

We’re starting this week off with some positivity, creative inspiration, and a little escapism all via our July monthly mixtape entry for this year.

The mix opens with a beautiful track that we’ve spoken about on these pages rather recently—Maggie Rogers‘ now-mastered and released “Alaska,” the song that took the words away from both us and (more internet-buzz-worthily) Pharrell.

Following that impressive intro, we’ve got a wealth of tracks that range from skitteringly glitchy to soaringly anthemic to cooly contemplative from the likes of Brooklyn electro pop mistress Psychic Twin; experimental electronic solo artist Nick Leng; masters of the pop hook, London’s Honne (featuring Izzy Bizu); Montreal + Björk’s One Little Indian‘s FOXTROTT; some exciting returns from songstress Bat for Lashes and Australian duo Big Scary, and a lot more really great music from some really great artists.

Sit back and enjoy.

Since last spring, we’ve been hard at work creating a new identity for new non-profit client.

Winrock International works in social, environmental, and agricultural issue areas with the goal of combining scientific and technical expertise with entrepreneurial innovation to improve lives around the world.

Winrock approached us with the primary goal of redesigning their then-out-of-date and far from user-friendly site. Working closely with them, we took some well-planned steps back from the overall project to realize the scope was far larger than first thought. The result was a total restructuring of the way Winrock thought about itself as an organization and a complete re-telling of their story to their audience.

We walked them through a rebranding, focusing first on the group’s overall presentation, logo, and brand so that we could then take that work, develop it, and grow it to apply not only to a fully rebuilt site, but also print and digital collateral, including field reports, educational handouts, email newsletters, event presentations, iconography, business card and letterhead suites, and much more.

You can see more in our portfolio entries for Winrock’s site + logo and visit the organization’s site.