If you’re a certain breed of nerd of a certain age—let’s say the D+D-playing variety who came of age in the eighties—you know what Zork is.

For those who aren’t either of those two things, Zork, was one of the first interactive adventure computer games and one that was totally text-based. Think that computer game that Tom Hanks plays as a kid in Big, minus the video part. The game was developed in the late 70s by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling—members of the MIT Dynamic Modelling Group—and was noted for its recognition of more advanced sentence syntax than its forerunner, Colossal Cave Adventure, the first computer adventure game but one that only accepted simple two word commands (“hit troll” vs “hit troll with sword”).

If all of that sounds pretty mundane in this day and age, it definitely is, given where we are technologically 40-some years later, but, at this time, this was high art in computing and gaming. In 1981, computing magazine BYTE wrote of Zork “”No single advance in the science of Adventure has been as bold and exciting,” continuing—”That the program is entertaining, eloquent, witty, and precisely written is almost beside the point…Zork can be felt and touched—experienced, if you will—through the care and attention to detail the authors have rendered.”

As a computer-less kid in the early 80s, I remember heading after school to the classroom of my mom, who was a teacher, so I could play Zork on their Macintosh after school hours and, likewise, inviting myself over to friends’ houses with computers so we could try to puzzle the game out together. Much as with D+D—another childhood love of mine—the game forced your imagination into overtime, sitting, staring at a blinking green or amber cursor on the black computer screen trying of so hard to figure out how to advance the game. Among other things, it helped to awaken in me an adolescent hunger for exploration—both real-world and theoretical—that I truly believe to have been key in my personal development.

Now, decades later, those of us who remember the game can revisit the experience via the web, through a number of online emulators. Of them, I like the version of Zork hosted by IPlayIF—a site that acts as a library for text-based interactive fiction. So what are you waiting for—your greatest challenge lies ahead!

Happy ICRAD 2016, everyone. That’s International Crow and Raven Appreciation Day, for anyone not in the know.

As put by the Facebook page for ICRAD and primary source of information on this—we think—very deserved holiday:

“International Crow and Raven Appreciation Day was started by a small group of corvid enthusiasts on a road trip. These marvelous birds are often the target of rednecks and hillbillies as they try out their newest line of pistols. But we see these birds, not for their value as a target, but rather for their intelligence and grace. They have a curious nature, and have the ability to make you laugh as they tumble down a hill, sliding in the snow on their back. Yes, we appreciate the crows and ravens of the world. To celebrate ICRAD, all we ask is that you wear black on April 27th. If you want to tell people about the holiday, feel free, at first they may question your motives, but after a little convincing i am sure they will hop on board!”

Hear hear!

We’ve always loved corvids, both for their real world smarts and the striking grace they present visually, the main reason behind chasing them for our namesake in the first place. We’re glad we’re not the only ones who appreciate the birds.

And, as reported by CNET, a recent study has found that raven intelligence is on par with that of chimps. How’s that for a bird brain, monkey‽

And now, ravens playing in the snow.

via GIPHY

If the season premiere of Game of Thrones was the only HBO event that dominated your weekend, may we be so bold as to say that you missed out.

As you’ve likely heard by now, pop queen Beyoncé debuted her new album, Lemonade, over the weekend along with the first of its kind—a ‘visual album’ to accompany the new record.

Less a series of 12 videos to accompany the 12 tracks of the album and more a continuous narrative, the visual Lemonade presents the songs as related stories, stringing them all together with poetry, spoken word, sound, and stunning visuals and telling one cohesive story of pain, heartache, loss, anger, and restoration, both personal and in a larger more societal sense. It’s 57 minutes of gifted, heart-laid-bare storytelling from the artist and a bold move to employ a new, innovative format to do so, positioning her solidly as a cultural icon.

Over the weekend, HBO debuted the limited release of the visual album, pairing it with a free preview weekend—both of which have now ended—skillfully stepping out of the cultural white noise and grabbing our oh-so scattered attention in this attention deficit disorder digital age.

In the wake of the loss of Prince, Beyoncé + Lemonade give us hope for the future of pop culture if its in such skilled, thoughtful hands as these.

You can view a trailer for Lemonade below and buy the album—visual and aural—via iTunes + Tidal. And check out Kiana Fitzgerald’s review of Lemonade for NPR, if you get a chance.

As we said yesterday on IG, boo to the fur used in the primary imagery/film; yay to all else.

We’re liking some new postcard sets from local artist and raven + crow studio mate Stacy Michelson. The two sets—Castles + Totems and MAN-imal—are hand screen printed and characteristically quirky.

You can snag both sets (and a ton of awesome pins, shirts, pillows, pouches, and other goodies) over at Stacy’s site.

More on her soon. Bon weekend.

British band yndi halda does not do the three-minute pop song. They do the sprawling, epic, cinematic song full of symphonic instrumentation and massive builds and dive in dynamics. And their shit is awesome.

We were recently sent Under Summer, the band’s recently released, long-awaited follow-up their 2006 debut, Enjoy Eternal Bliss, and had to find out more about them. We talked with founder, multi-instrumentalist, and singer James Vella (hooded, attacking above) about how the band arrived at their sound, what got the members back in the studio and out on tour after so many years, and how the hell to say their name. Listen below and read on.

raven + crow: I apologize as I imagine this you’re usual out the gate question, but where does the band name come from and how on earth do I pronounce it?

James Vella: The name comes from an ancient Norse poem entitled Odin’s Raven Magic. We found it as teenagers and loved the line (it translates to “Enjoy Eternal Bliss”) so much that we felt it perfect for the name of the band.

We pronounce it “yin-dee hal-dar”, but I have no doubt that we pronounce it wrong. A real modern-day Icelander would probably take exception to our voicing of it.

Good enough for me. Also, raven magic. Nice. How did the band originally form?

Most of us met in school. Jack, Daniel, Olly, and I met as boys and grew up together, scattered across a few small towns in one local area. We developed our musicality together, and I think that characterises the nature of the band and our music a great deal. We started playing covers together—graduating from The Smashing Pumpkins to Jeff Buckley to Radiohead over our school years, and formed yndi halda when we were 15-16.

I’m not usually a player of the comparison game, but I hear a lot in your music—Explosions in the Sky, Rachel’s, other early Touch and Go/Quarterstick Records—but it’s definitely distinct too. I also feel like there’s just not a ton of good music in this vein being made these days—what other bands do you guys listen to that you feel like might inform your sound? Or at least be on par with it?

We all listen to a huge amount of music. So much so, in fact, that I don’t think any of us listen to anything similar to our own. I am a fan of Rachel’s, for sure, but among a much bigger record collection they only provide so much influence to my songwriting. Something I like to do is reduce the number of records on my iPod to a bare minimum so I have to listen very closely to a small pool of albums. For example, I currently have: Fugazi, Julia Holter, Majical Cloudz, Omar Khorshid, Rully Shabara, Shellac, Sun Ra and a few of the Habibi Funk mixtapes on there. I think it’s really important to expand the palette. Not just to listen to music like your own.

Man. It is safe to say that is a very eclectic list of music-makers. I like your anti-single approach though. I sometimes feel that I listen to way too much music from way too many people, to the point of not really getting to know many of the artists like I used to when music existed without the internet.

Many of your songs have run pretty long compared to most contemporary pop out there and the new work’s no exception. Is that by design or more just an effect of the music itself?

That’s a good question. A few of us in our solo projects—mine is A Lily, Olly does The Lunchtime Sardine Club, Alex has Vincent Vocoder Voice—write much shorter, more pop-orientated pieces. So I guess we could do that if it fit for yh, but it seems evident that the sum of the yh songwriters’ influence is long-form structures. There’s no design to it, just the natural result of the compositional process. We always like multiple moods and movements in a song, and we also like very patiently-paced tempos, so I guess it is inevitable that we require some time to include everything we want in a single piece.

What brought the shift to more vocals in the music? …or maybe a better question is why the absence of vocals in earlier work?

I think a similar answer to my last one, honestly. I think we can only ever write the music that naturally comes out of us, and in this case that includes wishing to express something that could only come out in real lyrics. Much of us are big fans of vocal music—we’re all big Beach Boys listeners, for example—and so it wouldn’t have taken us long to have arrived there in any case. I think we work to the instrumentation or timbres that best express what we intend to express. It just happened that the first record came out almost entirely instrumental and the second record a lot more vocal.

I heard you guys did handmade covers for the self-release of Enjoy Eternal Bliss—you don’t have any photographs of those you can share do you?

Not personally, but I bet if we did a social network shout-out we could unearth a few!

Let’s do it! I’m super-curious. Besides the vocals, how else do you see the new work differing from what you did some ten years back?

I see it differing a great deal. I said in another interview somewhere that it feels less like a memory and more like a past-life revival in some cases. Unearthing lots of old feelings that I couldn’t have accessed without playing those older pieces again. That became especially true on our UK tour last week, performing Enjoy Eternal Bliss material for the first time in years. I think, for one, we’re better musicians this time around. We can all play a lot more comfortably. I feel that that represents a significant difference on this record.

I can hear that, as a listener. Obviously, the whole music scene and how we consume music has changed a lot since then. Do you have any opinion on whether it’s for the better or the worse?

I couldn’t say whether it has become better or worse, truthfully. In fact—in a wider sense—I don’t believe that anything actually becomes much better or much worse over time, just that the world and its people change. With that in mind, I can see positives and negatives in equal measure across the music industry. There has been a huge, huge influx of bands and labels and platforms over the past couple of years. This is great for plurality and creativity, but it of course becomes very difficult to be heard as one, competing against all of the others. Likewise, income and sales have reduced—a bad thing by anyone’s reckoning—but distribution has expanded. I’ve received emails from India, Malaysia, Peru, and other countries miles and miles away from home. This must have become possible only recently.

On that note, where have you guys been for the past decade? I assume pursuing the non-band part of your lives.

You assume correctly. We finished Enjoy Eternal Bliss while we were studying at our respective universities, and by then had all moved away from home to various cities and had lives to get on with. Day-jobs, relationships, other obligations. It was difficult for the band—meeting only on odd weekends when our calendars could match up—but we always knew we wanted to make it work, however slowly.

What brought the move to get everyone back in the studio now?

Honestly, just the realisation that we could do it. The material for the record felt ready and though we still had some loose ends to tie up—additional instrumentation, some arrangements etc.—by the time we went into the studio, we did so with more or less completed pieces. And that was the first time that that had felt the case, even after the years of songwriting. We can be very hard on ourselves and each other with our internal criticism and though it was tough at times, I definitely feel it made the record stronger.

That’s excellent. Again, I feel like it comes through in the sound of the record. So is everyone still based in Canterbury?

None of us, actually. Phil from the touring band is nearby, but most of us have long left our hometown. We’re fairly scattered across the UK now.

Are you touring more to support the new album?

We have just finished our first UK tour with the new record. It felt great to be back on the road. Just a week of shows, but really rewarding, fulfilling, exciting. And playing a sold out show in London—our first there for two years—was genuinely moving for all of us.

That’s great to hear! Think you’ll make it over to the states again any time soon?

Definitely!

Well heads up when you do.

Stay tuned to yndi halda’s tour and/or Facebook page to find out if they’re playing a town near you. You can buy their album digitally via iTunes and get the CD and 2xLP vinyl from Burnt Toast.

Wait for it.

Planned Parenthood Los Angeles Young Professionals  asked us to do the branding and invite for their fundraiser again this year (we did their more conservation, pattern-themed invite last year too) and we happily complied.

Planned Parenthood Young Professionals (PPYP) is a membership group that invests their time + money in the mission of Planned Parenthood Los Angeles. Part of that time goes into their yearly event, Bingo for Choice, a drag-themed fundraiser that—we can attest—is a lot of fun. This year—the event’s 13th—PPYP wanted to up the fun factor even more, with both the branding and location, moving the event from refined downtown digs to the Arts District’s Angel City Brewery.

You can find out more about the event and RSVP via their Facebook event page.

Hawaii, early aughts.

“Totally best mixtape yet.”

Is what I said to myself after finalizing this month’s mixtape last night. I mean, what does this Troy guy, know, right? But this is a pretty great one. Between combing through the wealth of “new” bands that played SXSW and the others coming out of the woodwork as festival season gears up, I’m really into these songs and excited to hear more from all of these bands.

Starting off with an awesome pop song from the adorably named Australian duo Oh Pep!, who begins a North American tour in June (they play LA’s Bootleg in July) and then go straight to what’s likely the catchiest tune of the mic, “Forever, Never” by un-Google-able Bay Area band YOURS. We’ve also got an awesome song from Boxed In + Formation, both out of London, that’s the product of a collaborative project from producer Dan Carey requiring bands to write and record tracks in a single day at his studio; a beautifully droning, rhythmic song from Tokyo’s Kikagaku Moyo (translation: “geometric patterns”), a quintet that incorporates elements of classical Indian music, Krautrock, Traditional Folk, and 70s Rock; a soulful electronic track from Los Angeles’ Soayla (with accompanying art [right] from Tallulah Fontaine, who we dig); chilled out island pop from Holy ’57; glitchy beautifulness from the much-hyped NYC producer/musician The Range (AKA James Hinton); and we end with Paris’ Joon Moon and Brooklyn’s Arthur Moon (no relation). And more in-between.

Put the mix on, open a bottle of wine, and chill with a friend. And, as always, support any artist you like on here by buying their music and seeing them live.

Today is both National Grilled Cheese Day (I guess I capitalize that?) and Equal Pay Day.

One side of the day—safe to call it the party side—recognizes all that is holy in the culinary meetings of crispy, seared bread and creamy, plant-based cheese (obviously, we only consider vegan cheeses to be consumable by us humans; the rest if a cruel, commercialized by-prodcut of milk literally only produced for the babies of cows, goats, et cetera). Our contribution to that side of the day and our tastebuds—a Caprese-style grilled cheese using grilled Kenter Canyon red fife bread, farmers market tomato + basil, and vegan coconut-cashew mozzarella from Miyoko’s Creamery, up the coast.

The other side of the day—the serious documentary side, let’s say—is meant to recognize the massive, pervasive, longstanding gap in wages for men and women. As is pretty common knowledge at this point, un the US, women typically earn $0.79 for every dollar men earn. Still. To this day. See the image below, created by the White House.

The reason Equal Pay Day is today is because April 12 marks the day that said typical woman catches up to the earnings said typical man earned in all of last year. That’s straight-up depressing. More depressing? That gap’s even larger when said woman is not white. Again, graphic courtesy of the White House (click if it’s too tiny for you).

What are we doing about it? Well, for one, there are a ton of acts and laws, like the Lilly Ledbetter Act—the first piece of legislation signed into law as president in 2009—which essentially makes it easier for women to bring legal challenges to unequal pay. But that’s been law for over 7 years, and we’re still at roughly the same place. We can sign acts and pass laws and we should continue to do that, but almost as important is the act of keeping the lines of dialogue open on this; reminding all of this that this problem continues to exist and has broader implications and causes than those missing $0.21 can really speak to.

Thus the importance of having a day like National Grilled Cheese Day. Sorry. Equally Pay Day. So very similar, it’s hard to keep track.

This fucking guy.

We’d mentioned how blown away by the design and technology behind the web site for DJ, producer, and musician j.viewz back in January, when we included a track of his on our mixtape for that month. Now, he’s teamed up again with site designers and digital creative agency Hello Monday to once again blow our minds.

The mobile, app-based video for his new song, “Almost Forgot” is tempo-driven and affected by your heartbeat. As you watch and listen, by placing your finger over your mobile device’s camera, the rhythm and video itself pair themselves with your heart rate, reading it by perceiving subtle changes in your finger’s skin color along with each beat of the heart.

Totally beautiful and innovative.

See the tutorial for the video/app below and download it for free via iTunes.