Today we are implementing two new weekly features here on the old Synthesis blog, to complement our already fucking radical badass Synthesis Band You’ve Never Heard Of…Of the Day!!!111: The Next, which will highlight shit that we think is coming up real BIG, and New This Week, which will preview each Monday one new release set to drop in a given week. While Ryan Prado is busy formulating the latter, I will be bringing you the former…in…about….RIGHT FUCKING NOW!!!

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What It Is: What It Is is  a collaboration by former Militia Group publicist / Canadian tuxedo aficionado Paul Maziar and Cold War Kids bassist / Visual Artist Maust. I’d try to explain it, but as it’s getting to be almost 5 PM and I’m getting thirsty for booze, I’ll let the press release do the talking:

Experimental, sincere and “mercurial” prose and poetry—married with equally sincere, gorgeous, deconstructed yet meticulous, typography and photo-driven design. Each facet drawing inspiration from the absurd as much as the divine, with a radical and keenly self-conscious sense of itself—aiming to surpass and uphold the mid-twentieth century and modern luminaries which inspired it, with concerted disregard for the conventions that structure perceptions about design and writing. Unable to recognize the differences between poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction, the refined and the coarse, in both creation and living. Continually seeking to shift the pathways between unaffectedness and vivacious existence.

Images and Metrical nods to unassailable romantic life. The beauty and oddities, which we cannot ignore—what we must somehow capture, or go mad completely.

Themes including, leisure and the revolt against mechanized living (or non-living), love, derangement of the senses, homelessness, metaphysical mysteries: life, death and transcendence. Inspired by Coffee, The Letterists, Thelonious Monk, Bill Cosby, Jackson Pollock, Bob Dylan, Abraham Lincoln, Tom Waits, Rancid, Dennis Hopper, The Old Testament, The Beats, Warhol and (equally) The Velvets, Doc Brown, Sylvia Plath, Derrick Brown, The Clash, Fozzie Bear, Billy Bragg, Dracula, Bugs Bunny, Kurt Vonnegut, Leadbelly, and all our friends and lovers.

If you don’t think this sounds fucking rad, you’re seriously not doing nearly enough drugs. The book sees the light of day next month, at which time you can expect some more elaborate coverage courtesy of yours truly. But for now, satiate yourself by checking out the book’s Myspace page here.