Hasta La Ideas

Internet radio’s first legal mixtape library

Far from the days when it was just Pandora and Last.fm competing for internet radio space, today there seem to be as many music streaming sites as there are mashups that helped drive the phenomenon. Whether you regard the remix as a modern artform or scourge of the entertainment industry, hour-plus-long club mixtapes, musical performances like Girl Talk and many other copyright-flaunting forms are here to stay. Enter Dubset, a new online venture not concerned with just promoting the art of the mix, but being the first legal site to feature the work of DJs.

Dubset uses their own digital tool, MixScan, to pick out all the songs in every DJ’s mixtape. When someone listens to a mix in the Dubset library, Dubset logs that play so that artists within the mix can be compensated. Constantly updated by DJs, the free library is available from the website or from an iPhone with an app.

Browse through Dubset’s site and you’ll find the expected DJ profiles, as well as options to follow your favorites and browse through all the mixtapes by “venue” and “genre.” If you’re the type to bootleg favorite club soundtracks on your phone or dig up the obscure file posted in the cloud the next day, you can now legally relive your favorite nights, right from your computer.

Five elite homes in unexpected places and an exclusive offer for CH readers

Even the most opulent hotels can’t replace the comforts of home, where decor and amenities truly speak to your interests. While plenty of alternatives exist in the form of apartment swapping and rental sites, few tailor their offerings to the style-minded and are as affordable as the membership-based Luxe Home Swap.

The site allows users to browse thousands of homes from around the world to find a retreat specific to their holiday desires. Fans of mid-century Danish design can choose a contemporary flat in NYC or a historical apartment in Copenhagen, with quality assured by the membership-based model. The concept also means that you don’t have to do a direct swap, but can visit any home that’s available.

Even more tempting, Luxe Home Swap lists several options in locations so far-flung that there’s no hotel for miles even if you wanted one. Below are our some of our favorites, each the perfect place—from houses in nature preserves to cliffside pools—to really get away from it all.

And if all that’s not enough for you, Cool Hunting readers now get a Luxe Home Swap membership for $125—that’s 20% off the annual fee.

Contemporary living a world away in Waikato, New Zealand

Nestled deep in the forests, this beauty has won awards for both sustainability and design. Achieving complete isolation is no chore here.

The house itself is as carefully put together as you could imagine, offering the ultimate wilderness retreat without losing any comforts of home.

Thoughtful design between land and sea in Brittany, France

With 26,000 square feet of open property to explore, a gorgeous indoor pool and a manicured Japanese garden, this architect-designed house is a perfect rural refuge.

The house is also located close to the Bay of Saint-Brieuc nature reserve, which has two rivers flowing through it and is known as “a paradise for bird watchers.”

A modern house on the prairie in Kerry, Ireland

A modern holiday home only minutes from town and local entertainment. Surrounded by rolling hills and overlooking the Beara Peninsula, it’s an ideal place for the family to discover Ireland’s natural beauty and rich history.

The house is also great for the adventurist. It comes equipped with four bicycles, is located near two 18-hole golf courses—one of which is the century-old world class Kenmare Golf Club. For more rustic activities, the house is also near the sea, which offers great trout and salmon fishing.

A home as stunning as its view in Cape Town, South Africa

Four stories of pure luxury and 180° breathtaking views put this home in a class of its own. Swim in one of two pools, relax in the jacuzzi or walk to Clifton Beach—a laid-back riviera with beachside cafes perfect for sipping cocktails while the sun sets.

The house also comes with a manager on call to handle all of your requests, such as transportation to the heart of Cape Town or further out to the beautiful wine country.

A floating flat on the river in Vecht, Netherlands

This quaint houseboat has a contemporary feel. Collect yourself in the serenity of the garden or cruise the canals in the 21-foot motorboat that’s also at your disposal.

The historic village of Loenen aan de Vecht is only a half-mile away, and both Amsterdam and the bohemian town of Utrecht are just 20 minutes away.

.

South Africa’s subversive new publication takes on the country’s contemporary creative culture

Founded to “really assault the dominant narratives in our own unique way,” the South African magazine Mahala goes against the typically glossy grain with an “un-designed” style that allows its similarly raw content to shine. The publication launched in August 2010 and, now on its second issue, supplements a daily website—both the brainchild of Andy Davis.

Stories like “Surfing is Wanking,” “Racist Dogs” and “The Colonialism of Small Things”—to name just a few—shed light on topics that affect South Africans, but with its Vice magazine-style journalism, anyone interested in leading-edge culture will appreciate this unconventional upstart.

We recently probed Davis to find out more about Mahala’s beginnings, its future, and the overall state-of-mind in South Africa.

What do you most hope to accomplish with Mahala?

I want to create a platform for a racially-integrated South African youth culture that can interrogate our experience, our culture and really just provide an impetus for people to make good, relevant stuff. South Africa is still a radically segmented place. And we’ve got a whole backlog of shit that’s been swept under the carpet and kept out of view. I want Mahala to pick at those edges, to go where the art, music, literature, etc. intersects with politics, society and weird-ass South African dynamics like race relations and socio-economic disparities.

The online site tries to crunch through what’s happening in South Africa on a daily basis. We aim to publish three to four stories a day. The debates we get going in the comments show that our audience really gives a shit about what we say, and they have a stake in the culture so they all pile in and make their voice heard, which is a good thing. But it can be quite rough on the comment boards. We have a non-intervention policy. We don’t delete anything. If people want to hang themselves kak vibes, so be it.

We hold the print magazine to a higher standard. We want people to read everything twice. It’s supposed to be a real collector’s item. But it also gives us the latitude to publish photo features, fashion, fiction and investigative journalism that isn’t always suited to online attention spans.

What is the most challenging part of creating each Mahala edition?

Getting the right mix of words and images, without being too gratuitous or going too hardcore, but still being able to interrogate the culture and experience. I think with our first issue we were sitting on so much unreleased content that we didn’t temper it properly. So it was a bit relentless. With the second issue we got the mix a bit better varying between depth and levity. There were some almost academic style articles, hard-hitting investigative journalism, some great narrative non-fiction, fiction and some nice humor.

Another thing we really struggle to do is find good, black writers, photographers and illustrators. That’s not to say they don’t exist, it’s just that South Africa is so systemically fucked up thanks to apartheid that massive segments of the population were actively uneducated by the apartheid schooling system. So, generally speaking, anyone who is black, creative, talented and competent gets employed very quickly. And there just isn’t a plethora of young black talent beating down our doors, desperate to get published. And the last thing we want to be is a group of whiteys sitting around writing about black culture. We want to push this relationship into a “post-racial” space. Things are changing though, and it’s picking up pace. And we certainly don’t want to be those sad guys who do head counts based on skin color. But we’re still a long way off from the ideal of an equitable, meritocratic society.

Does each edition have an underlying theme?

Not yet, but we may be heading that way. I think at the moment, we don’t need to introduce over-arching themes because the culture is happening all around us and having a theme would necessarily occlude some of the most relevant and exciting stuff. Besides, I quite like the way the magazine jump cuts from narrative to narrative. I want them to stand alone and not have too much editorial unity. We always said Mahala would support a plurality of views, so it’s cool for each piece to stand alone and not be perceived as coming from central editorial authority.

What can we look forward to seeing in Mahala 3?

I think it’ll be bigger and better than Mahala 2. I thought there were some little failings in the last issue, that I’m glad to have the opportunity to rectify in the next issue. But those are mainly little publishing minutiae and insecurities. Generally the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. At this stage a lot of the content is still in the air. We’re also working on a site redesign and, for our international readers, we’ll be making all the print mags available online as PDFs, from the next issue.

To subscribe to the print publication or receive their daily updates, visit the Mahala website.

An interview with Italy’s top tour operator on her new website dedicated to alternative travel

Founder of the successful architecture tourism site Viaggi di Architettura, South African-born Mikaela Bandini recently expanded her scope with Urban Italy—a new website devoted to travel, design and the discovery of an alternative Italy in all forms. With a clear goal to help people discover something new and surprising, Bandini tells CH the story of the project in an exclusive interview.

How did the idea of Urban Italy come about?

My day job over the past 12 years has been creating contemporary architecture tours around the world for Italian professionals and architecture lovers for Viaggi di Architettura.

It’s what I do. It’s what I love doing. Scouting for information, contacts and spaces that you don’t get in a cheesy guide book off the shelf. After putting together over 50-plus itineraries worldwide I decided to create a guide-blog for foreign archinauts and design-aholics who want an alternative approach to Italian cities.

The project is based on your personal experience or on a team?

I like to consider Urban Italy a kind of 2.0 version of my Moleskines—basically Italy the way that I’d like to see it (after having lived here for 20-odd years).

The project started as a personal collection of contemporary addresses and insider information from the tip to the toe (literally!) that I gathered while traveling around for architecture, food, interiors and pathological modernist furniture-collecting. Then I asked a handful of foreign friends around the country to give me their ‘best of’ to have a wider coverage of things to do and places to go. There are currently five of us working on the project, all foreigners living in Italy.

We begin the second phase of the project in spring with young Dutch film maker Caspar Diederik, who’ll be doing 2.0 storytelling about people and places around the country.

Are the Italian contemporary cities very different from the postcard-like Italy that many people expect?

We’re looking at a rather more contemporary Italy, which appeals to the kind of traveler who doesn’t collect Hard Rock t-shirts. Stuff like ex-industrial sites that have been transformed into something new, exciting spaces for arts and theater, the latest hot spots for an aperitivo, urban eateries, events, products and people. Not exactly the stuff you get on a postcard.

Then again our readers send Tweets, not postcards.

What do people you take around Italy appreciate the most?

I think it’s our b-side approach, and the fact that our people guiding are mostly journalists, designers, architects, art lovers that know Italian cities from a different point of view. We don’t include spaces just because they have been labeled “cultural,” so we do bar-hopping, shop interiors, contemporary architecture, factory design shopping tours and a whole series of other itineraries that are not easily found elsewhere.

Also the fact that we are traveling around the whole country, not just Milan, Rome or Florence, which get enough coverage as is. We’re going south. Deep south. To places where it’s often difficult to find information for events and spaces in English.

Our offices are in Matera, more or less where you’d find the genuine leather sign on the boot, so we’re looking at the whole country from a novel perspective. The general feedback that I’m getting (keeping in mind that the blog has only been on line for a couple of weeks now) is really positive.

One of the most esteemed purveyors of classic eyewear gets an online store

To score a sunglasses fitting with the exclusive Vintage Frames Company, it wouldn’t hurt to be a hip-hop mogul or Russian princess. But now the largest distributor of its kind is offering hundreds of choice styles each month—from legendary labels like Alpina, Carrera and Silhouette—to the masses through its just-launched webshop. “The point [is] to offer a selection of frames to the public who have been dying to purchase them for the past years,” says owner Corey Shapiro.

Based in Montreal, Shapiro and his team of fashion historians search the world for deadstock designer eyewear. His warehouse has more than 150,000 mint-condition frames, spanning the 1950s to the 1980s. “Old eyewear manufacturers took time and love to produce eyewear,” explains Shapiro. “Any of the handcrafted details put into eyewear cannot be added to today’s eyewear, as those factories have long been closed.”

Nostalgia and manufacturing techniques aside, Vintage Frames has become a leader in shaping optical trends, as their reputation as a highly sought source of long-lost classic and original models has grown. “We also run a rather large division aiding today’s new eyewear designers through a historical look of eyewear, renting them all kinds of frames as production samples,” adds Shapiro.

Such tight relationships with brands makes for a pretty amazing commemorative reissue as the label celebrates its fifth anniversary this month and online grand opening with a collaboration. “We have made a very special Cazal 951, which is the first frame I ever owned in my collection,” he says. “The status of a man in a certain crowd could be judged by how deep he went into accessorizing his 951. Diamonds, snakeskin, leather, gold—all that!”

Visit the Vintage Frames Company’s webshop for this month’s selection before it’s gone.