Happy Mother's Day, hitRECord! Consider my present to all the moms out there my re-REC album, which I'd do regardless of if it was Mother's Day or not. It's kind of a crappy gift, actually.

I should note that I have a policy against re-RECing stuff that's been featured, as it's esentially already been re-REC'd by the Powers That Be. If the whole point of a re-REC album is to be like "hey, everyone! Look at this awesome stuff you may not have noticed! It's awesome!" (which I think it is), recomending something that's aready been featured is hella superfluous. And two of my favorite pieces this week (the Wanderer animation and the Fake History of the Re-REC) were featured already, which means I kind of got cockblocked by Joe/Marke/Jared/whomever a little. Ah, well. There's still plenty of stuff to see (or hear, for that matter)!

Audio

Santa Fe by sjcrain - SJCrain is a fabulous addition to the hitRECord family. She's a  professional musician and it shows. Her sound is kind of like some delightfu Neko Case/Feist/Jenny Lewis/Marina & the Diamonds/a female Ryan Adams mashup, and I happen to like all those artists, so I'm totally on board. Some of her stuff even got featured, but my favorite track she uploaded (and I think the one fewest people liked, which makes me sad) is this one. Maybe it's because no one else shares my love of country-inspired stuff with banjos, but I eat that up with a spoon, and this is sweet and wistful and achey and gorgeous. And it makes me remember that I need to make a volume 2 of my hitRECord mix sometime this summer. And this needs to be, like, the first track.

Images

SHADOW CIRCLES wallpaper by fractaldust - I feel like we should all just cut the crap and crown Dusty the photoshop queen of hitRECord right here and now. She has this amazing ability to take already good images and turn them into clean, professional-looking remixes that make you go "oh holy crap, how did I never think of that before?" This is the perfect example. You could do so much with this pattern she made - print it on a t-shirt, or a tote, heck, you could make wrapping paper out of it and it would be adorable. I know Dusty all wants to be a mathematician and that's great and I'm sure she'll change the world, blah blah math whatever, but my highly biased opinion is that the world would be losing out on one hell of a graphic designer.

Temple by Soupy - Confession time; I kinda hate Soupy. She's just too goddamn talented. It's unfair, okay. I don't understand how she is so good at what she does. I don't understand how she creates stuff like this and is like "whatever this was in my scrap pile." In your scrap pile? If I had the ability to create something like that, I'd show it to everyone and be like "LOOK HOW AWESOME THIS THING I MADE IS" and then maybe tattoo it somewhere strategic on my body. Like my face.

Plus, you know, endlessly re-mixable, multi-purpose, blah blah blah all that good stuff. But ugh. Why are you so talented, Soupy. You give me a complex.

Videos (It was a really good week for videos, can I just butt in and say)

Country Living by Spot - There are three kinds of stock footage in this world. The first is crappy stock footage. No one likes that. Then there's the good stock footage you save because it'll come in handy one day and it's very nice. Then there's stuff like this, where you watch it and are like "holy crap, I have no idea what I want to use this for, but I want to use it right now". I'm guessing the effect that makes this so good has something to do with the type of camera that is mentioned being used, but I don't know enough about cameras to say for certain. All I know is whatever caused that effect turned some nice stock footage into something that I'd just stick on a flat screen in a museum somewhere and watch on repeat for a while.

The Making of a Remix by bsmith - I have a feeling this is going to be featured, so I'm re-RECing it now so I can say that I liked it before it was cool. (This is what Dusty and I refer to as "hipsterRECord", this urge to like a RECord before it goes "mainstream".) Anyway, I love this for several reasons. One, it's beautiful. Well-shot, well-edited, great color balance. (I'm really nerdy about color in video, it's a thing.) The second reason is that I have this sort of sick kid-sister glee that someone got amferraro on camera, because he's so notoriously secretive I was beginning to think he had, like, a third hand growing out of his face he was super self-conscious about. And I happen to like seeing musicians sing and make music, I think it adds something to it. Plus I'm really relieved he has the normal number of hands. And the third reason I love this is because it makes me feel kind of better about the shitty quality of my audio RECords, seeing this setup. Well, better and both highly covetous, because my "set up" is a falling apart microphone plugged into the microphone jack of my laptop, and amferrao's got this bitchin' studio which I really, really want to go play in right the hell now.

knitting hitrecord dot org logo and button by kittypimms (And it's cousin, the crocheted version) - So one night Kitty and I were in tinychat and I saw she was knitting something. Now, this isn't that weird, as Kitty is ALWAYS knitting something, but I noticed, as she was knitting, that it was a certain shade of red. And it was a certain circular shape. And I immediately went "oh my god, please tell me that's a hitRECord button you're going to stop-motion animate for a bumper, and if it's not, I need you to at some point do that, because it would be awesome". And she was like "...that is exactly what it is." And then two days later, what should appear on the site but not one, but two versions of this, being exactly as magnificent as I knew it would be? Because really, I love this stuff. Not just stop-motion animation, but when people take other crafty or nerdy interests that aren't traditionally thought of as being hitRECord-relevant, and bring them into what they do. I think it's kind of what makes hitRECord such a fascinating place, that people don't just think inside the box of what would make good art, they go way, way outside it to their most esoteric interests and say "why the hell not?" And this video is an example of why, in fact, that is exactly what you should always do when you make something - follow what you love. It'll turn out awesome.

TOTE BAG INFOMERCIAL!!! by cacheth - This is easily my favorite of the spring merchandise RECords. It's hilarious, adorable, and almost painfully accurate to what these commercials are really like. If I had my way, this would play the second you tried to go into the store, except that would probably annoy people and actually be a terrible idea. But at least I would enjoy it.