Also, this Saturday (February 18th) at Cheer Up Charlie’s, we’ll be teaming up with Leisure Tourniquet for a special post-valentines day variety show of music, dance and et ceteras. We’ll be DJing, Little Stolen Moments will be performing, Willow House (some members of My Education and friends) will be playing covers of the best break up love songs, plus much much more. Click the image below to go to the event and for more information.

Recspec loves you long time. Don’t ever forget that.

Xoxo,
Lau and Dave

I don’t think we’ve ever written about it here, but one of the best and most fun events in Austin right now is Exquisite Corpse, a monthly party for witches, held on the First Thursday of every month at the Swan Dive. The inner goths in all of us get to come out and be spooky and I know there is a great many of us who needed that sort of thing here in Austin. Recspec handles the video projections, DJ Pasht is the amazing DJ, and its all brought together by the divine Angeliska. If you live in Austin, you should come sometime — even if you aren’t darkly-inclined, there’s great people watching, delicious drinks, and delightful dancing to be had!

Here’s some photos that Angel took at the last one with our camera. The theme was Vote for The Goat — a celebration for the Capricorns out there + Angel’s own birthday.

Be sure to also check out the amazing photos by Devaki Knowles (Recspec’s photographer bad-ass of choice) for the photobooth, here! She does the photobooth every month and its always perfect.

Angel + Frannie, Horned Beauties

Gorgeous Amelia

Our stunning gate-keeper, Norah

 

Make sure not to miss the next Exquisite Corpse on Thursday, February 2nd – the theme is AS THE WORLD FALLS DOWN: A Labyrinthine Masquerade Ball and its definitely going to be full of gorgeously costumed beauties and decadent sights. Hope to see you there!

Exciting stuff! We’ve got some new things for your walls + wears for sale in our shop. First, we’ve decided to print and sell some of our most popular posters from the last year (and some older than that), and will hopefully continue to make these series for sale each year. You can buy them individually, or the whole series at a discounted rate. This is what we’re really excited about, though…

It’s our first Recspec shirt! After being in business for 5 years, we’ve finally designed and made a shirt for ourselves. We’ve got one left after giving them out to our Recspec crew, but we more made them for promotion and just for the sake of having them. Yay! So if you’re an XL, snatch the last one up before its gone!

And that’s not all…

We also received a small stock of shirts of the shirts that we designed for Ume now for sale as well. They used a gold ink that is just beautiful and we couldn’t be happier with how they turned out. So yes, exciting stuff!

Happy 2012, everyone! We followed our yearly tradition and stocked up over the holidays on fireworks for the rest of the year (or at least until the 4th of July!). One of the main things I love about fireworks are the classic packages, the weird typography and illustrations, and the bright colored cardboard sleeves. Here’s a few of our favorites from the last batch, part of our collection of the inspiring designs of Every Day Things.

The design of this one isn’t that cool (haha, get it?), but my goodness is that tag line hilarious. How could you not buy it?!

Let’s start the New Year off with a bang, shall we? Keep an eye out over the next couple days as we’ll be updating our website with our first (!!) t-shirt design, and some other treats. Thanks for reading!

Merry Happy Holiday Christmases, everyone! We’re about to depart on a journey to East Texas (also known as the land of no internet) for a few days, but wanted to share these AWESOME photos by Devaki of Fun Loving Photos from our Christmas Sweater Champagne Jam last week. Here they are! The above polaroid was taken by her as well, and is our impromptu sort of Christmas card this year.

Here’s a few of our favorites from the night:

Xander and Jackie

Yearly Eagle Claw photo!

The beautiful Devaki

JT and Diamond

Zorch + Lindsay, our awesome Improv Experimental Karaoke Masters

And our wonderful (and handsome!) hosts, Lee Roi and Kon Karne

Be safe and have fun this holiday season, everyone. We’ve got some exciting stuff to share with you in the new year, but until then, have a cookie, won’t you?

Click above to go to the release page, which where you can download many different resolutions custom built for your different desktop sizes, phones, tablets, etc. And be sure to check out the other releases and even submit one of your own!

Thanks for featuring us, Jason!

(Click to go to Facebook Event)

When: Friday, December 16th.
Where: Beauty Bar Austin
How much: 2$ for Party People in Christmas Attire / 5$ for Bah-Humbugs

This year our friends from Zorch are going to do some Live Improve Holiday Karaoke, so come ready to sing your favorite holiday  jams with them. Our very own DJs: Kon Karne, Lee Roi, and Butcher Bear will be playing the smooth hits and hot jams before and after karaoke, there will be champagne, and a FREE photobooth from the lovely Devaki at Fun Loving Photos. She’ll also be taking and selling beautiful black and white polaroids for only 5$ each so you can immortalize your ugly sweaters forever!

Here’s a few of our favorite photos from the past four years. Hope to see all of you local Austin folks there!

Just adorable. Photo by Devaki Knowles.

Eagle Claw! Photo by Devaki Knowles.

‘Tis the Season, after all. Photo by Alison Narro.

Its a Recspec Snowstorm! Photo by Alison Narro.

Luther lovin’ some Milk + Cookies! Photo by Alison Narro.

Our good friends Zorch (who we’ve blogged about before) have a tendency to (sometimes drunkenly) make up fake bands with various friends and musicians in the Austin area. These fake bands, it seemed, all just existed as jokes, nothing that would ever amount to anything — until they started actually making them all become reality. Thus, Raw as Fuck was born, a website dedicated to their side projects and experimentations (like, for example, their Rod Stewart cover band: Raw Stewart).

One of the many band of lore is called Edgar Allan Slow, comprising of a near super-group set of musicians. Recspec’s own David Milner as the front man, R. Lee Dockery plays bass, Henna Chou on guitar and gong and soundscapes, Zac Traeger on keys and soundscapes, and Sam Chown on drums. The concept is simple, yet brilliant: Doom metal with set to Edgar Allan Poe lyrics.

The band was actually formed once the Austin HQ of The Onion asked Zorch to play their Halloween Party at Club de Ville. Zorch suggested Edgar Allan Slow to play instead, and so it came to be!

Here’s some photos from the night, and a video that you can’t see much in, but can hear at least a bit of the performance. The whole set was recorded, so hopefully we’ll be able to post it soon as well. My favourite part was the Tell-Tale Heart, which was ferocious and awesome in its epicness. More to come soon! And you never know, this fake band could end up being a real band after all (or at least every Halloween, or perhaps even, once upon a fortnight)…

“‎It was night, and the rain fell; and falling, it was rain, but, having fallen, it was blood.”
Happy Halloween to all you ghosts and ghoulies out there.

This past Sunday was the Fall seasonal KSE show, Melting into The Movement with ST 37, Unmoor, R. Lee Dockery and Bill Shute, Smokey Emery and Book of Shadows. It was an amazing evening of experimental and psychedelic music, that we were so pleased that we could be a part of. We did projections throughout the night for all of the acts, ranging from scenes from Judex to classic psychedelic oil footage.

Doing projections for experimental and abstract nights like this is always a treat because we can use strange and odd footage that wouldn’t work for anything else. Some photos from the night are below (more can be seen here):

Thanks so much to Bill Shute, all of the performers, ND, and Kendra Steiner Editions for such a wonderful event.

For over 3 years, we have worked with the fine folks at one of Austin’s premier music venues, ND Austin, to create all of their branding – from their logo and website to signage and event posters. Recently, we’ve even opened our first food venture, Tamale Molly, within their doors and in partnership with them. So it came as no surprise that when they decided to open their new, sister bar to ND, that they approached us to do the branding and design for it as well. This project went further than just pixels on the computer, however. We built furniture, picked paint colors, and generally massaged every inch of the space into a cohesive entity. It was, without a doubt, our biggest undertaking yet!

Welcome to The North Door.

It was also incredibly fun to work with the owners of the space to take their ideas and make them a reality. The objective was this: make the sort of bar that undercover spies would stop to have a cocktail at while plotting their next feat of espionage. The bar itself is off the beaten path, down an alley on the side of a building, so we starting coming up with ideas based on the need to make our presence and location obvious while also subconscious, the kind of thing that sticks with you over time, without even realizing it. This is where the big red X comes into play, and the tagline of “x marks the spot”. Secret maps passed between agents, the red X always leading the way…

The inside is nothing but slate gray, deep blacks, and reds. Spy ephemera and posters are on the walls — all pulling the viewer in with little bits of information and details: we wanted to let the patrons the bar leave with a little more information than they had when they came in. Spy intel, for the taking, if its wanted.

As mentioned above, we even helped construct some of the furniture in the space, the bench below being one of the main pieces, and tables with spy plans inlaid in them.

One of the most fun parts of the project, however, laid in the details. Secret messages left for people to find, if they want to. The image directly below is of a Dukane Fliptop Filmstrip Projector that our good friend and Recspec ally Seth found for free on the street, which we cleaned up and made a custom transparency for. It is definitely one of our favorite parts of the space.

The space is still evolving and changing, which makes it even more exciting. The spy posters will change often with new spies and information, a mural is about to go up, and we’re constantly on the look out for as much intriguing spy paraphernalia as we can find (which, you’ve got to admit, is a pretty great job requirement). We’ll continue to post updates on the space as we continue working on it, so keep an eye out.

A few more shots can be seen over at our flickr, and you can visit The North Door online at TheNorthDoor.com. Thanks for reading! And don’t forget, if you ever lose your way – X marks the spot.