Today has been filled with musical surprises: firstly, everyone was parsing the Billboard Music Awards for things to GIF and things to grumble about. The event naturally represents music on the more accessible end of the spectrum, and while Britney and Iggy were being Pretty and Taylor’s Blood was being Bad, somewhere far away, a more experimental musical genius was deconstructing his, er, evanescent backend expulsions to show that there’s a classical symphony to just about everything. Meanwhile, Björk straddles the line of those who make off-puttingly corporeal symphonies (she did, after all, once collaborate with Matmos, whose song “California Rhinoplasty” wears its title quite literally) and the more Billboard-friendly mainstream. Last Friday, she did a DJ set at Tri-Angle’s fifth anniversary party in New York, where she played everything from Kate Bush to Death Grips to The Haxan Cloak. She uploaded her whole set earlier, and you can check it out at The Quietus.
If you’re in the mood for something a bit less jarring, revisit the morose twanging of the Sufjan Stevens track that made you think banjo and lyrics about terminally ill lovers with imposing fathers were just the best in high school. And just as Sufjan uses the Bible, a cardinal, the navy yard and dads as symbols, Mad Men‘s last episode, Paper points out, primarily used coke, Coke, and a cactus.
Last night’s episode of Game of Thrones is also being discussed because of yet another rape scene; some, however, are actively not discussing it, henceforth, for this reason. The Mary Sue has declared they “will no longer be promoting” HBO’s Game of Thrones. “There will no longer be recaps, photo galleries, trailers, or otherwise promotional items about Game of Thrones on The Mary Sue,” reads their post. That being said, the episode hasn’t had that impact on everyone. Slate wrote that, with this episode, GOT “for once…treats rape with the gravity it deserves.” And, examining the episode beyond this controversial plot point, The Creators Project just posted an inside-look at the set design of the very unsettling Hall of Faces. The set, which includes shelves of hundreds of bodiless faces, looked spectacularly horrific, but probably would have been easier to make using L’Oreal and Organvo’s pioneering technology in 3-D printing human skin.