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A fisherman slices through the dawn light on Lake Hallstatter in Austria, 2009.

PEOPLE ARE STRANGE

Inspired by Billy Joel and re-imagining Al Pacino as a space-travelling vampire, electro-pop wizard GRIMES became a ‘‘total f**king weirdo’‘ for her fourth album.

When Grimes recorded her breakthrough album Visions in 2011, she was going through a chapter of emotional turmoil. The LA-based singer.-songwriter, born Claire Boucher, had emerged from a period of drug addiction and two of her friends had recently died. She locked herself in a room with blacked-out windows, ‘‘tons’‘ of amphetamines and no food. Nine days without sleep resulted in an altered mind state, plus a dazzling portfolio of gurling electronica and pop synths that translated into huge critical acclaim and a Juno award in 2013 for Electronic Album Of The Year. Boucher’s as-yet-untitled follow-up, due in October, was made under less tumultuous circumstances, though her porcess still bordered on the eccentric. ‘‘I went to the woods’‘ she says, talking between mouthfuls of spaghetti in her LA home studio, where work on her fourth studio release has only just been completed. ‘‘I wanted to get away from Hollywood bullshit. So I moved to Squamish, a small town in British Colombia. There was a lot of ‘crazy’ going on, but it was organised ‘crazy’ - like lying in the dark and seeing if I could hallucinate. It felt good, letting myself be a total fucking weirdo. And I had cookies.’‘ Such are the extremities in which Boucher curently operates. When work started on her latest project in June 2014, she dispensed with the synthesized spine of Visions and learned how to play the driving guitars and New Order- style basslines that underpinned her latest batch of throbbing pop harmonies. Boucher also immersed herself in a concept she refers to as ‘‘bro-art’‘: albums by such artist as Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen, and gangster movies. ‘‘One song on the album, Kill V Maim, is written from the perspective of Al Pacino in The Godfather Pt 2,’‘ she says. ‘‘Except he’s a vampire who can switch gender and travel throught space.’‘ With a set of songs completed, Boucher relocated to Hollywood last September where the album was recorded and self-produced. Of the tracks played to Q Laughing And Not Being Normal most ties in with her earlier, more experimental material, while Flesh Without Blood treads poppier turf with pulsing basslines and Boucher’s soaring vocals. Meanwhile, her lyrics have been imbued with a renewed sense of strenght. ‘‘I was a much weaker person when I wrote Visions,’‘ she says. ‘‘It was a sad record- cathartic, but victim-y. During this album I’ve got control of my music. It feels more devoloped. On Visions I was still in school, mentally. Since then, I’ve wanted to make something strong and agressive because it’s more reflective of me’.‘ Emotionally honest, perennially bonkers and more harmonious, Grimes’ latest work has framed her in a brighter place. And with a healthier appetite, too.

In Rotterdam this week, the designer Daan Roosegaarde is showing off the result of three years of research and development: The largest air purifier ever built. It’s a tower that scrubs the pollution from more than 30,000 cubic meters of air per hour—and then condenses those fine particles of smog into tiny “gem stones” that can be embedded in rings, cufflinks, and more.

Each stone is roughly equivalent to cleaning 1,000 cubic meters of air—so you’re literally wearing the pollution that once hung in the air around Roosegaarde’s so-called Smog Free Tower. In the designer’s words, buying a ring means “you donate a thousand cubic meters of clean air to the city where the Smog Free Tower is.”

The project has been in the offing for a long time. We wrote about the idea more than two years ago when the Dutch designer first publicly announced the project, which was originally planned for Beijing after the city’s mayor endorsed the idea. Roosegaarde and his team have spent the past few years developing the first prototype in Rotterdam, where it was unveiled this month. “It’s really weird that we accept [pollution] as something normal, and take it for granted,” Roosegaarde explains.

To fund the travel, the studio launched a Kickstarter campaign where you can buy jewelry and cufflinks made with its tiny smog gems—which, theoretically, would eventually become diamonds if they were compressed with much more extreme pressure.

But for now, the tower sits on a patch of grass next to Roosegaarde’s studio in Rotterdam, whose mayor and local government supported the project with grant money.

The process taking place inside its walls is powered by 1,400 watts of sustainable energy, which is comparable to a water boiler, and the studio says it hopes to one day integrate solar PVs into the design to power the process—which works not so differently than some ionic air purifiers. Roosegaarde explains:

By charging the Smog Free Tower with a small positive current, an electrode will send positive ions into the air. These ions will attach themselves to fine dust particles. A negatively charged surface -the counter electrode- will then draw the positive ions in, together with the fine dust particles. The fine dust that would normally harm us, is collected together with the ions and stored inside of the tower. This technology manages to capture ultra-fine smog particles which regular filter systems fail to do.

Axel Ejsmont | Berlin Germany

A former hedge fund manager turned pharmaceutical businessman has purchased the rights to a 62-year-old drug used for treating life-threatening parasitic infections and raised the price overnight from $13.50 per tablet to $750.

According to the New York Times, Martin Shkreli, 32, the founder and chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, purchased the rights to Daraprim for $55 million on the same day that Turing announced it had raised $90 million from Shkreli and other investors in its first round of financing.

Daraprim is used for treating toxoplasmosis — an opportunistic parasitic infection that can cause serious or even life-threatening problems in babies and for people with compromised immune systems like AIDS patients and certain cancer patients — that sold for slightly over $1 a tablet several years ago.  Prices have increased as the rights to the drug have been passed from one pharmaceutical company to the next, but nothing like the almost 5,500 percent increase since Shkreli acquired it.

This is absolutely monstrous. He’s like a parody of a capitalist from a Marxist propaganda film. Jesus H. Christ what a piece of trash.