Perhaps you have seen that in addition to the T-shirts, hoodies, posters, and brass boat necklaces (?) found in their online merch section, Sigur Ros has introduced their "Vardeldur candle" for the princely sum of $23.50. The site describes its scent thusly:

The smoky, slightly briny smell of a flotsam campfire on a distant black beach under a wan midnight sun. And, most recently, the smell of Sigur Ros's studio, while they go about the quasi-mystical business of making the magic happen. Specially developed to the band's olfactory specifications, this candle burns for 35 evocative hours of "instant Iceland, or something like that.

Much to our delight, upon perusing the merch sections of a few other artists' websites we discovered that they, too, had candles for sale.

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MichaelOlsen/ZorkMagazine

Tequila, anyone?

By Katie Bain
Recently I found myself, along with a bag of bike tubes, coconut water and some of the more flamboyant items of clothing that I own, out in Norco, California covering every interior surface of a Fleetwood Jamboree with protective plastic wrap. But on my Burning Man adventure I otherwise had a magnificently epic time; here's the run-down of my trip by the numbers. Well, approximate numbers, really, because some of the details are fuzzy.

Approximate Number of Hours it Took To Drive the 552 Miles From Norco to Black Rock City: 24

Approximate Number of Hours I Spent Sleeping During Said Trip: 12 probably more

Approximate Number of Times I Hit My Head on Various Cupboards in the RV: So many fucking times

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Danny Brown is down with the clown

The highlights of Danny Brown's 2012 summer performance schedule are fairly predictable bookings for the sort of skinny-jeans Fool's Gold rapper who's a part of what SPIN's taken to calling Rap's New Underground: Berlin's street-fashion orgy Bread & Butter, Chicago's indie party Pitchfork Festival, this past weekend's nu-rave grind Hard Summer. But then this Thursday, the Detroit lifer will play Insane Clown Posse's Gathering of the Juggalos, a five-day psycho-porn amusement park that Tom Green once compared to the cinematic disease-apocalypse 28 Days Later.

"It's kind of cool to me," Brown admitted to us last week over the phone. "I was like, 'Damn, you know, that's kind of crazy.'"

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2012: The Year Of More Sleigh Bells.

In this week's Voice I outline my music-related resolutions for the coming year, most of which involve getting away from the Internet in some fashion—avoiding toxic comment sections, realizing that the cloud's completeness is completely illusory, being better about listening to music that was released in 2012 instead of falling down the always-tempting retro rabbit holes that pucker the online-music world like a particularly persistent acne outbreak. (Also, I pledge to be nice to Katy Perry.) After reading the headlines this morning I might add caring about what overly self-important musicians have to say about "uncool" members of their field, thus turning the music-news world into a professional-wrestling scrum where all the promos are varying levels of excruciating, to that list. But I want to know: What are your own listening-related resolutions for the coming 361 and a half-ish days? Comment away; below are a few tracks from 2012 releases of note to accompany your forward-thinkingness.

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The mysterious case of Soula Coaster's disappearance

This isn't a surprising development, but it's an unfortunate one. There seems to be some unexplained drama with the R. Kelly life-changer Soula Coaster: Diary of Me, the cover of which made the rounds this morning. Online bookseller Indigo has the title listed for pre-sale, along with the release date of next Tuesday, November 15. But Soula Coaster has been pulled off Amazon with the ominous "We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock" disclaimer. And the project's co-author David Ritz, a celebrity biographer who not only released books with Grandmaster Flash, Ray Charles, and Tavis Smiley (plus Snoop from The Wire!), but famously co-wrote "Sexual Healing" with Marvin Gaye, confirmed via email that the title wouldn't be released next week.

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It probably shouldn't have come as too much of a surprise that the attention-seeking girl-kisser Katy Perry drew inspiration from the Russian pop duo t.A.T.u.; her recent creepy chart-topper "E.T." sounds as good as it does in large part because it's heavily inspired by the pair's still-dizzying 2002 Trevor Horn-produced single "All The Things She Said" (above). But now Lil Wayne and Swizz Beatz are getting in on the act as well; yesterday Weezy released the Swizz-produced song "Dear Anne," a ruminative epistolary track that's supposed to serve as a sequel of sorts to Eminem's letter-to-a-disturbed-fan smash "Stan" and that samples "30 Minutes," which appeared on the same album as "Things." Clips of the new song and the source material after the jump.

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