This morning, I just found out about a new service called Wax.fm, which is described as a place to  “help you find your favorite albums on vinyl both online and in the real world.”  It’s actually a pretty simple concept – search for any record by artist name, album name, or catalog number.  After finding the album you are looking for, you are presented with details for that record, along with links to purchase on ebay and amazon.

While it may not be much better than just going to ebay and searching directly, in due time this seems like a service that could prove to be very useful to all the crate-diggers and dustmites out there.  I also decided to test the site out, and see how well it did for finding a semi-rare album:

Can – Tago Mago

After searching just “Can” on the main page, their “Tago Mago” album was actually the fourth result, after “Confrontation by Bob Marley and the Wailers” (not sure where “can” was found in that), “Things Can Only Get Better by D:Ream,” and “Soon Over Babaluma by Can.”

read the full article…

Incredibox is virtual beat-box flash app made by three French artists.

You basically drag different symbols onto a person’s (polo) shirt, and they begin to beatbox a certain instrument or melody.  Once you drag a symbol onto one of the beatboxers, a new one will appear next to it, ready for another sound.

Check it out at incredibox.fr

you can hear more from the beatbox artist, The Incredible Polo via his myspace page.

A little unrelated to hip-hop, but this should be interesting to any vinyl junkies and dustmites out there.  Chris Supranowitz from The Insitute of Optics at the University of Rochester has taken some pictures of vinyl record grooves under an electron microscope.  If you ever wanted to get a better idea of how the grooves on a record work, check out his final project.

Found via SynthGear