The Lepanto League

Brandon Jan Blommaert

2010-11-11T18:52:00.012Z

Brandon Jan Blommaert is an artist currently living in Montreal, his work encompasses video work, still images and gif loops and is at times reminiscent of vector graphics and early 90's inspired net art, yet a closer look shows off his eye for sensous colour schemes and quality and fluid animation. His short films have been exhibited across Europe and North America and his recent film Black Moon is part of Onedotzero's Adventures in Motion Festival in London 10-14th of this month.

Arranging the time for an interview was a bit more tricky than it usually is, but I ended up talking to Brandon over gmail chat whilst he was on a coach going from Montreal to New York. He had a wi-fi on the bus. What an age we live in.

TLL: What do you do in montreal, do you exist on just your artwork?

No, sometimes, but not all the time. last time we spoke I was working full time as an animation assistant (at the National Film Board of Canada), which was no super creative, but it was still interesting.

Still better than a standard office job just to pay the bills

Yeah, no, it was super fun and I was working for 2 amazing directors. But, still an office job

Did you study art as well?

I studied print making in Calgary, which I wasn't super into. they expect you to buy lots of nice expensive paper which I wasn't into. I spent a lot of time searching for free stuff around the school to print on, backs of posters worked pretty well.

Do you think that's why a lot of your work is made on a computer now?

Not entirely, I think digital work is only half of what I do. I still enjoy working with hand made objects. I think of the computer as just another tool, I am not married to it. When I was in school I owned a real shit box of a computer so I barely made any digital art.

I use it a lot now but I rarely create %100 digital work, but I guess I am making more purely digital art lately, mostly because of lack of time.

So are you 100% happy with what you make? What would you be making if you had the time?

Well, I am fine with making whatever I can. I am ok with adapting to whatever situation I am in and I think that making quick digital things can be pretty enjoyable and stress free. If I had time and money I would like to make films.

I think a lot of people would say the same thing, you're on your way though, a few of your films have been screened across europe

Yeah, that was part of a touring screening package put together by Hooliganship, they show tons of nice stuff

As much as I want to make films I am in no rush, it is pretty draining. so one part of me wants to make a new movie and another part of me just wants to work a day job and relax.
and eat

Black Moon - Watch it on Vimeo as blogspot is helpfully covering up half of the video

Is there anything that you really want to convey in your work?

Brandon went offline after I asked this question, and I honestly thought I had just pissed him off. Fortuneatly though his internet had just cut off and I stayed online, and for the time inside, due to it being a ridiculously windy day outside. We reconviened a few hours later.

Hey, sorry about that, it might cut out again, bad timing

Yeah the question was do you feel like there's anything you want to get across with your work aesthetically or mood wise, perhaps

That is a tough one, I think I am still trying to figure that out. I think the things I make always have an other worldly feeling to them. I rarely approach anything with an exact idea as to what I am trying to convey. I have a fairly on the spot way of working. If I think to much about what I am trying to say I get super bogged down and clam up.

But I do think I am trying to capture some kind of psychological state that can not really be described with words.

I suppose the way you have all those gifs looping, the repitition, works well like that

Yeah, I think those can convey something completely different then any film I would make
they are more ethereal in some way

What sets off the creative process for you, inspiration wise,

Usually I start with a tiny nugget of an idea, it is hard to say exactly how something starts, often these things come from a long chain of tiny ideas that eventually turn into something. It is rare that I get a solid pre-conceived idea that I jump into, all of thee things evolve over time

I do a lot of random little things though and eventually they evolve and grow into something bigger, hey, we just pulled into a rest stop, I am going to go grab a sandwich, BRB

Okay I'll go get some food from the shop, also I'll leave you with a question, are there any particular artists or even just one off videos that inspired you?

Just got your question. Well, there are a lot of obvious pop cultural things that I reference in my work, like muppets and smurfs and various things that we all loved (or tolerated) as kids. But since I started animating I have been discovering works of more experimental animators or film makers that I find interesting, so I think I blend these two worlds. I like early digital animations by people like Larry Cuba (who worked on Star Wars) and John Whitney.

A lot of people bring up the Quay brothers when they watch my short films, they where not really much of an influence, but I appreciate them.

'Ecostation'

'An Electric U'

You say you want to make films, but what's your next step

Right now? no idea, I have no strategy planned out. It is impossible to get money to make the moves I want to make, so, I don't know exactly how that will actually work

Could you not fund it through commercial projects?

I could try, but I rarely get commercial gigs that pay that kind of money. I know there are a lot of animators who work that way but they have seriously huge clients, like Kleenex.

I don't think I am really at that point, but I would love to make a commercial for Kleenex.

Brandon can be found online at pandaclock.com/phantom_hand

Chelsey Hoff

2010-10-01T02:02:00.019+01:00

Chelsey Hoff is a visual artist, living and studying in Chicago. Hoff's videos act as a dreamlike synthesis of recurring visuals and sound, often recontexualising grainy footage from MTV-era VHS tapes whilst also drawing on the the laid back and nostaligic iconography of musical contemporaries. I interviewed her last night on gmail chat about her current location, projects, collaborations and time and space.

Are we just jumping into it, however you want to do it?

Not to do the whole tedious a/s/l thing but some background's always nice like location, did you study etc

Sure. I'm 20 years old. I was born and raised in Florida. I ended up in Brooklyn on a whim (aka my car broke down while visiting). I spent a year there, and recently moved to Chicago to study at SAIC.

So your course is arts based?

Definitely is - it's not all concentrated in film / video. SAIC is pretty open about which departments you work in. I'm starting to explore sound and new media.

SAIC aside, Chicago is a pretty groovy city with a tech noir vibe. A lot of creative vibes and energy going around. This week, there is a big glitch art event happening.

Like a live show?

Gallery openings, screenings, workshops, real-time video shows

Are you involved, do you do the real-time stuff as well?

Err performances rather. I'm not involved, some of my friends are. I like some of the glitch aesthetics, but as far as the whole movement goes, I'm not associated with it. I actually just did my first real-time video gig with my friend, Theo Darst, at a sky limo and teaadora show last week. Its something I'm going to keep pursuing.

How does it work, do you just project in a gallery? Is there music as well? Would ever use the term 'VJ'?

People have different ways of going about it. This event took place at a bar (beauty bar of chicago), and was specifically for a show put on by Acid Marshmallow. We used a simple, freeware real-time program, and ran it through a little analogue glitch-making device one of our friend's built, then ran that through an ancient digital effects processor. The term VJ sounds so cheesy !!!

It does, but it kinda suits the work I've seen of yours, i.e that whole 80's vibe and you know being a 'VJ' must have been so hot in the 80s - I realise that sounds like a facile connection

Haha yeah I bet, wasn't there, couldn't say, can only imagine through a lens of blurry/artificial nostalgia.

Is that it that disconnection, as it were, that inspires your style?

Definitely. There is something so enchanting about experiencing an era I was too young or non-existent to have experienced first hand, through outmoded media. Its like having a memory that was never formed placed in my brain. I also have an obsession with the ethereal and ephemeral. I love moments. At first, I was trying to capture and stretch ones that stuck out to me.

Yeah that idea of focusing in on something, well empheral, that comes across with the way there's loops of sounds, mixed with looped and recurring visuals

Its all about the feeling. Its about creating a third meaning while superseding a framework or larger context, extracting that meaning.

'recontextualise'

Yeah, recontextualised media appetizers

Yeah, I know this is gonna seem like another poor comparison but you work with similar grainy vhs style footage, that evokes or is taken from the same era that a lot of the music you use to soundtrack it with tries to emulate via samples/recording methods

Not a poor comparison! I experience some form of heavy synesthesia. I think of the sound and video as one, I experience them as one. The video feels like the music.

Do you create the video from the music and vice versa then?

Without the music, there would be no video. I'm just beginning my venture into sound. For blss, I had all the footage and textures ready to go, but couldn't complete it until there was music. I jammed on my friends synth for a day, and was able to complete it.

'bnc' above was a collaboration with my friend and noise-maker, Anthony Engelhardt. I asked him to make me a 15 min jam, and went from there.

When artists approach you to make videos, do they have anything specific in mind?

Most of the time not. I feel like the ones that do approach me do so because they know we share a mental, aesthetic link - they trust that I can articulate what they are trying to say.

Just back to the found footage/you, do you prefer working with that, rather than creating your own videos from scratch or is it more, different paths to the same goal?

Video is a pretty new thing to me. I started working with found VHS because it was the quickest way to achieve my goals. Obviously, there are limitations to what you can do - I am starting to branch off and film things myself. Now its about recreating those portals and zones I found in recycled footage through new footage.

I suppose that's why the internet has spawned so much of this type of work, because all these mediums are free to access whereas video cameras/setups are expensive, Does your uni help you out with that?

SAIC has a ton of resources, we even have a Sandin Image Processor!

Re: internets - the type of work I do is possible because of the interwebz. Its a trend of the 'post-modern condition' For me, its also about archiving this obsolete footage, making it more topical, showing people footage that might otherwise exist unseen.

In the case of weirdo, found VHS. Not many people would watch Diabetes: A Positive Approach or Mastering the Art of Carving with Merle Ellis all the way through

Travel videos are great too, they paint hyper-realities

Yeah in the same way that infomercials do, it's that cheesy, lack of irony that's quite attractive

Right, the 80's and 90's was a powerhouse for ridiculous, garbage media. Somebody has to go through and sort it all.

I'm seeing a lot of tumblrs that seem to just re-hash something that I had semi-forgotten about, from say 10/15 years ago. Does remoulding something contemporary not interest you?

Its the distance and time from these events that allow us to romanticize them, but the gaps between trends and eras do grow smaller.

How do you mean?

Our perception of time is tied into the speed and amount of information we take in. That speed and amount of information continues to quicken at an exponential rate. I think it naturally follows that our perception of time would change too.

Do you always see yourself creating visual/video art? Is that what you want to specialise in?

I really just started. I am going to continue doing the video thing, but I feel there will be a point when just a video is not enough. I'm starting my venture into sound. Video will always be my base, but its going to become more of how I incorporate and expand it into other interactive systems.

Yeah I feel similar, but from the opposite direction, a lot of my friends make videos and music, i'm tired of asking others to create them for me

Same with me for music, not tired of it, I love collaborating, but, for things I do on my own.
venturing off into new mediums can only widen your perspective.

Speaking of widening my perspective - I'm going to begin working on my first short soon! The short is a meta-tation on media, video, and industrial zones (I live next to a tortilla factory and down the street from a steel mill) permeating my hypnagogic and dreaming states. Sometimes, I have dreams where my mind turns into a monitor projecting pure, raw video. While its happening, I'm unable to tell if its something I've seen or something I've made, or a premonition of something I will see or make. Pairing that with the continuous, often abrasive, sounds of Pilsen - its going to be a journey into the realm suspended between video and reality, an attempt to find the true video-self. I plan on making the score, an ambient/drone/industrial noise soundscape, with my friend and fellow media-maker, Zahid Jiwa. I'm hoping to keep the music and video as one symbiotic being - shooting and jamming, allowing them to feed and inspire each other. Its going to be shot on VHS and the first camera I ever used as a child - a decaying, Olympus Movie 8. In some ways, it will be the extended, loosely narrative, darker version of 'blss'.

chelseyhoff.com
vimeo.com/chelseyhoff

Megazord

2010-07-08T03:23:00.012+01:00

Christian Oldham is an artist who exists on the internet as Megazord, a personal brand of meta like proportions. The design, music, tumblr and videos of this teenager from California all combine to create this incredibly of-the-now distorted visual aesthetic that has the same fascination with the unusual and plain as Joe Coleman and Nike7up, but with so much more of prolific output and psychedelic bent. We spoke to each over a e-mail providers instant messaging service, which was a lot less hassle free than Skype usually is.

So yeah Sacramento, you're 18?

Yeah

Studying?

I am going to college so right now on a vacation and I mean going to go to college. Just finished high school. Planning on studying business and art, media, and technology

At Sacramento?

No in Salem, OR at a school called Willamette Univ

Congrats, yeah okay that's enough, just for a bit of context to things

Rad

So what is 'Megazord'? Why the name?

It's strange because I was just asked this by a friend about an hour ago. And by definition a Megazord is some sort of mech in the Power Rangers universe that takes on a humanoid form and is created by several smaller mechs. All very child-like but then again Power Rangers was one of my favorite shows as a child As to why I chose it, I really can't remember, I think it was 2 or 3 years ago when I decided to use that alias, for a long time I was throwing names around but I think Megazord stuck because I had a strong connection to it and it was short and kind of had a strange feel to it Also not everyone knew what it was, it sounded kinda cool

I suppose it also ties with in how you operate, working with various mediums under the same alias

Yeah, for sure, It's nice to have all my media under one umbrella. And I thought having an alias would achieve that better than just using my name.

Do you feel like there is a certain aesthetic that you have to stick to with MZ?

No, definitely not, it could be anything and everything and that's what I love about it. No boundaries is such a freeing feeling and it's really hard for me to make something within a set of boundaries, I usually feel like it's not my best work and feels more forced.

---

(do the hyphens represent when you're finished? that would be really helpful)

(I was using that as a pause, I will use a . when I'm finished)

(wait I'm done).

With your music, there's a real feeling of sterility, not in a negative way, more focused on the beauty in the more placid, it also crops in your visual work, real simple shapes and patterns but used to good effect.

Yeah I mean, when it comes to music that's a whole other ballpark. Making the music is quite easy since most of it is one take but I usually plan things out in advance and then allow room for some improvisation here and there. Each song kind of rolls on with one idea and sticks to that, I sort of prefer long, repetitive pieces because repetition is something I'm really big on sonically speaking Also I wanted each "release" (if you could call them that) to be a sort of similar "zone" so to speak So from song to song there might be a recurring structure or sound that is used.

(wait hold on)
(wait no)

Where do ideas come from for you? I know you've had a few commissioned pieces (we'll touch on that later) but what inspires you to create?

That's a really tough question to answer due to the fact that I really don't know. The only "art" class I have ever taken was a beginning photography class I needed to take in order to graduate. But otherwise I've never really learned anything about art history or form or any of that. I think being a child of the internet I've always been influenced by technology but that can only account for so much. Having a Tumblr has definitely helped me out with ideas because I post what I'm looking for so in turn it's sort of like laying out what I have to work with and then using the images I post whenever I feel like they need to be included in something I make As to what inspires me to create, I've always been a fan of the arts whether it be music or visual or whatever and I've always felt like I've needed to give back to those mediums, and I think that's what really got me going creatively. The hope that I would please someones senses as someone else had pleased mine (as corny as that sounds).

No, I understand, funny that you brought up being a child of the internet, as I'm guessing it influences a lot of your life, it's strange that i can look back on your progression as an artist via flickr

Yeah I kind of love that idea though, It's like one of those baby diaries that shows all of your big moments

It's something that's only starting to become more prominent, with the dominance of facebook, to think that one day you might be able to look back at someones entire life on that site.

Oh yeah for sure, it's almost sickening, I've been slowly taking more and more information off of mine although I don't think I can entirely disconnect due to so many people who I have connections with only through that site.

Yeah that's the thing about facebook, and the internet in general. I mean can you ever see yourself 'disconnecting' as you put it?

Oh definitely not, although I've always had that dream of going to New Mexico or Texas and living in a cabin in the middle of the desert with no internet and all my gear, just creating weirdo stuff for a month or so, I'm not sure how feasible that is but I like to hope it happens one day.

The internet has definitely become more and more forgettable, sometimes I just roll through blogs and then forget what I saw within seconds. I think it's either that a lot of people are posting the same thing or that I am rejecting the net.

I was thinking the exact same thing, but I blamed my own poor memory rather than the internet, says a lot about our respective mindsets.

Age can only dismiss you of so much!

Haha, I'm 23! haven't got Alzheimer's

Yeah I mean you're still a part of the net

But I know, it's weird, you trawl through Flickr and it's easy to find so so much stuff that it all blends into the same and nothing stands out.

To be totally honest I don't like Flickr all that much! There isn't a huge sense of community and I feel like I never really get any comments on what I make. I always like to hear what people have to say about what I make. Because I'm really into introspection and although I might not want to change anything, I think it's always a good thing to recognize your flaws. But I guess I have to give my thanks to Flickr because that's the primary place where people can see what I make without all the text posts and random other things I put on my Tumblr.

Lets talk about some of your work, what was the process (thought and physical) behind the melted/furniture of the world series?

Well I like to go thrift store shopping a lot and I found a book simply called "Furniture of the World" that had all these really amazing photographs of furniture (from around the world of course) and I really wanted to scan them all just to have a permanent (relative term) picture of them. Deciding to melt them all was sort of just for fun, lots of the images had really great colors and shapes and in my mind that just screamed "Melt me".

(wait! change of wording)
(and in my mind the images just screamed "Melt me")
(that's all).

With your videos you shape a lot of found footage as well, do you create the videos in the same, the source material influencing you or did the music make you want to go out and find something to fit it? the same way*

Well, I think I'm really inspired by the music for the Stellar OM Source video it was pretty easy for me because I knew Christelle (Gualdi)'s music pretty well beforehand and I knew that it had a very feminine feel to all of it with the video I wanted it to be a complementing piece to the music, matching it thematically Same with the Oneohtrix Point Never videos I've been familiar with Daniel (Lopatin)'s music since 2008 so I've sort of seen his evolution and when I heard Returnal I was really amazed by how far he had transformed and what I heard was really inspiring Sometimes I look for material ahead of time but it sits in a folder for a while until I think it's the right time for it to be used, usually it will be something that pleases me visually and can reflect some sort of mood.

Yeah Lopatin's amazing, I'm really just enjoying his work with Games and some of his recent mixes such good taste, everything's executed so perfecetly

Oh yeah Daniel is a great tastemaker, he's really specific in everything he makes, very detail oriented, something needs to be 100% before it gets his seal of approval.

Design for Games 7" 'Everything Is Working'

I'm surprised he got you to make a video (right?) just because he makes his own stuff quite a lot

I actually made the videos myself without any asking of Daniel, we've been in contact ever since he released "A Pact Between Strangers. And we are both fans of each others work at the time the video worked two ways it gave me some of the experience I lacked and also it provided a video for some of my favorite parts of Returnal. (oh wait) I thought that Returnal was a really powerful album and needed a visual counterpart that would reflect the sounds. (oh wait again) Daniel's own video work is very static and repetitive (not a bad thing at all and something I'm a fan of) but since I felt Returnal was by far his most complex and "far-out" album, I felt like the visuals needed to reflect that and morph alongside the song.

What do you think you'll be working on over the summer?

Right now I'm working with Daniel and Joel on a lot of stuff for Games, I'm also curating a section in a publication called The Report, which is put out by Chocolate Bobka a sort of gallery pre-se (per-se_). I also just finished a video for Zach Hill and I'm also working a lot with Adam Forkner of White Rainbow on miscellaneous artwork for multiple projects. (Adam Forkner *of White Rainbow and Rob Walmart)

megazord.tumblr.com
flickr.com/photos/megazord
myspace.com/megazordlovesyou

Oneohtrix Point Never

2010-06-01T19:09:00.008+01:00

Daniel Lopatin is much more than 6ft tall, long hair, long beard, built like a block of flats, used to play in Noise bands and is totally silent and stern on stage. Yet despite this usually adding up to someone who hates talking, hates you and more specifically hates talking to you, he was completely lovely and easy going, with this infectious exuberance and passion for finding beauty in the simplest of things and how unforced art can pervade into everyday life. I spoke to him after his bank holiday Monday show at Cargo, the prince of Brixton Felix Lee also took an impromptu turn in the interview as well.

How’s the tour going?

It’s great, the UK is the best really, I enjoy playing here probably more than anywhere in the states at this point, people are more attentive, more receptive I guess. I don't know if they like it any more or less but it feels like people have invested more in the experience. In New York there's a lot of standing around and cynicism or whatever, but here it seems people are really into it.

When you initially started playing live what was your approach, do you feel like there's been a progression to where you are now?

Yeah, well I came up in the US Noise scene, so a lot of the time we were playing through shitty amps on the floor, we used to call it floorcore, it's still going on for sure, and at this point it's a little weird just because of the setup but I still think about structurally a set as an improvised noise performance although it's more progomatic now and samples are kinda used as buckets to improvise it in. it's sort of more thought out I guess, I used to be pretty sloppy and just a party zone. and now I feel I have to put on a good show, kinda of a proper show, and I don't think that's weird there's more people checking it out, I have a sound system that can actually handle detail and that makes me work harder, but it's still very new to me I still consider myself a veteran producer and playing live is really fun I never know what people expect or if they are ready for cause that kind of experience I’m used to playing with Noise kids.

Is fidelity important to you?

Not really, not compared to some nerds I know, I’m not like an audiophile really. I’m pretty simple guy I don't know that much; I just like sounds, I like textures.

I’ve got friends who are DJs and stuff and they refuse to touch anything that isn't either purest vinyl or flac files.

Yeah there's the DJ standard which is 256kbps or whatever, and I get it, I definitely get it. I sample from wav files and realise that I should be doing that, but at the end of the day I’m not a maniac about that stuff at all.

With your samples, the little vocal loops, taking them from pop songs, would you say you're influenced by that?

Totally, this is corny or whatever, but I’m just influenced by reality. What that means for me is that one vocal sample you're talking about is Paul van dyke and that's a trance anthem right, to me the interesting part is repurposing that and making it totally fucked pretty much. I think what's there, the providence of the track is this amazing amazing texture and beautiful vocal melody, divorced from the narrative of the whole song it's really interesting and it appeals to me. I don't think music has to be so horizontal all the time that it has to build and get more crazy. I don't even have really the attention span for pop music, I’m kinda like to slow it down I guess.

Felix Lee: Yeah just taking little phrases, slow it down and loop it.

Yeah and interesting things start emerging when you slow things down and really focus, it's like magic eye if you stare at one thing long enough it starts changing, so that's like a purely psychedelic experience for me.

I just feel like that with the internet, there's just so much music, you can take from any genre, any kind of music and do whatever you want with it, all these different bands and producers, like yourself, just working with the past and trying to redefine it.

Yeah totally, and it can be the immediate past or whatever, the whole argument about music is nostalgic, to me, is kinda bullshit. I’m not necessceserily nostalgic, I approach things kinda like an anthropologist, I’m not sitting in my room crying because I missed a fucking Paul Van Dyk hit from 1998.

It’s just history really.

Everything is though! Once you go to that level wouldn't you say everyone's nostalgic?

It's the same with your Sunsetcorp stuff as well, that's taking pop songs and putting them in a totally redefined state of mind and what I thought was interesting was the videos you put with them, and to me those are so associated with the music, was that your approach to have that visual side with it as well?

Yeah, it's a little riddle, I set up little riddles so for instance nobody here it worked out really well because I grabbed that Chris De Burg sample, divorcing it from the rest of that phrase suddenly it's a frightening concept. And I found this really amazing footage that made absolutely no sense.

It’s sort of like a video game, isn’t it?

It was just early vector graphics, it was just a test really, it wasn't really finished it doesn’t really do anything or resolve. It was just this rainbow road that's...

Kind of organic.

Yeah! Totally, you have the city on the horizon and you never really get there, and I made it and looked and it was a complete allegory, you know this is city life.

You would you call Sunset Corp a finished project I think for me what's there, it's in its purest form.

I think it's done, I feel like I’m participating in it just as much as everyone else, there's probably 14 year old kids that are slowing down footage that they think is worth staring at for 3 minutes in a row.

There’s a whole culture.

It’s pretty rad, when I setup the YouTube account, I didn’t associate it with anything at all. In fact I disassociated it completely because I thought it'd be fun to have this ubiquitous thing. Since then that's changed or whatever but I really just wanted to throw it out there.

That's the thing, me and Felix were discussing this last year and I was a bit wondering about the anonymity but then Felix said considering everything you've taken is essentially 'stolen', you can't put you're own name and call it your own.

I do and I don't I guess, I’m definitely not hiding anything I know exactly where I got all that stuff from and if they have a problem with it then that's cool. but generally speaking we live in a society where everything's up for grabs and I don't think there's anything wrong with jackin' stuff, I mean it gets a little sketchy if you don't credit people or try and make money from it, but it was never really about that. seriously I just was stuck in my parents house that summer and I was super bored and it just made sense to do it, I’m sure you guys you do the same thing.

When I’ve got a few hours spare I just download loads of stuff and just loop it

Lose a few hours on Ableton

Or Audacity

I use Audacity too, I don't use Protools or anything like that I just use whatever's free, I’m don't know whether you guys grew up with the PC, but the flying toaster screen saver, I think that was really influential actually, cause you're just staring a toasters going across the fucking screen for a while.

The repetition makes you more receptive.

Yeah those shitty games, the Atari games, or even Mario 2 where you go off on the left hand side of the screen and come back on the right, isn't that a really beautiful poetic thing, it like a ouroboros, it's Buddhist.

It’s same thing with those old driving games, it'd feel like you've been driving for ages, driving for miles when it's just the same looped screen.

Completely, everybody has that memory of driving around in cards for hours as a kid and you're just staring out the window and blocked everything else out and you've got this repetition of lines or power lines or the trees, I’m really fascinated by that stuff, way more fascinated than just having something really spelled out. And it's all around you, it's free! Free drugs!

Were you trying to get projections working earlier?

It didn't work out, it's odd because it was working, I was gonna do a bunch of Sunsetcorp style stuff.

So what did we miss out on then?

Mostly like Japanese car commercial footage, but you know, no cars just women touching surfaces.

Like that video of that Japanese Rush fan?

Yeah exactly, she's like this virtuosic pianist and she loves Rush so she just performed the whole of that.

Everyone loves Rush

It’s hit or miss

Pretty sure I’ve never made it through a song

Exactly right, but yeah that one hook, its Susanne Vega singing on it too or Amy Van, one of those late 80's early 90's folk, but that one hook from Time Stands Still, it's beautiful, sounds like Kate Bush or something. The rest of the songs are garbage.

Did you take a meaning from these little tiny phrases when isolated?

Yeah it's like anathemas to me, little bits of wisdom and if you really consider it, you'll get something out it.

You also made that video for oOoOO, I don't know how to pronounce, not sure if anyone knows how to pronounce it, but what was your inspiration behind that?

He's tricky, because he's super enigmatic, his label set it up, a Swedish label Emotion, but he didn’t give me any directives, usually it's an e-mail and I’ll be 'hi give me some vibes' and if they know what that means they just write down a bunch of random ideas and that didn’t happen with oOoOO at all.

It’s hard to be left cold with a video project, because they're just... want you do it and don't give you anything else

I totally just did it, I felt like there was a super dark vibe to his music that was clear and I found some 80's infomercial, a what's it called, a public service announcement, an Australian PSA about aids. It was like 'don't get aids or else grim reapers will bowl you down, literally humans were getting bowled down like candle pins at the end of the alley. and I was like this is too good, and there was this strange red line, this red right angle that happened just because I was using shit house video editing software, it was an overlay and it was slightly at different percentages are co-ordinates on the map. And then Emotion were like 'we really like the video, we think you should get rid of the red the line'... I was like either we're keeping the red line or say goodbye to the project; you don't have to pay me. The red line stays!

So just stuff like that chance, operations, indeterminacy and having an eye for stuff.

Do you feel like that's the same with improv?

Yeah! You opportune or get fucked. Whenever I’m not doing that much up there, you know it's good because I’m just listening and that's because everything just works out the engine's moving the turbines are working. And when I’m really struggling for an answer and working hard a lot it might be because it's not quite there yet. You know I think the expectation for a performer is to get up there and do a fucking jig, and I’ll never be like that, again I’m just kinda creating a situation for sound and if it works it works if it doesn’t then people can fuck off.

Do you have bad shows then?

Of course, I totally have bad shows, yeah of course, because there is that chance element because there is that chance element. If I didn't sleep that well or things are a little off with my brain, there's such a precision thing with loops that if it's not right on it could easily go super sour. it's commonly accepted in the sort of shows I’m used to playing that kinda shit happens, big shows like this it's probably a little weird if something goes wrong or whatever but so be it.

But with that TOMUTONTTU guy (support for tonights show, along with Faroe Island Thief Goodiepal), I was listening and some of it felt a little bit off, and I kinda liked that.

Yeah well that's why I like TOMUTONTTU so much, we have this asymmetrical melodycyism, it's clearly pitched, it can be beautiful because of the melody, but there's always that asymmetry to it. some of the more, pinpoint accuracy acts that use loopers don't really interest me, that kinda Ash Ra Tempel rehash or something, it's a like a lot of delay or fancy or whatever, I dunno what is it that?

With loops it's very temperamental, you just hit something and it rephrases itself and you're fucked, maybe before with improvised music you didn't put it into something it's just out there and it's there.

Yeah and I’ve never hit an undo button during a live set, there's a few rules and that's one of them! It’s sort of punishment for fucking up but there you go.

Speaking of Ash Ra Tempel are you excited about this week? (Oneohtrix Point Never support Manuel Göttsching in Paris on 02/06)

Yeah Wednesday, it should be cool, Göttsching's a guy I’ve only started getting my head round lately, because of the show. but honestly I’m not a huge 80's Krautrock fan or whatever, I like the sentiment more than I like the music or whatever, I think they were really brilliant in terms of breaking convention but a lot of the music seems redundant to me. But I love E2-E4.

Yeah, I have a similar kind of opinion, I saw a couple of guys, or just one, from Neu play Primavera and I was like wow, this is really cool, this music is 30/40 years old or whatever but then again E2-E4 is just so much more than any Krautrock band could offer me.

Super futuristic for it's time, when the guitar solo kicks in I can kinda abort mission but

I love that guitar solo

You really? It’s strange some people really love it, others don't

I’m into that whole Balearic vibe and the sinewy guitar lines

I think My Bloody valentine are the masters of the pitch bender though, they're the most lushest, melismatic, curved music I’ve ever heard in my life and that's more of an influence to me than some of the more jammy can kinda stuff. And super ambient, I don't know how they do it!

I guess that they've come back and stuff as well, the thing about Primavera and ATP, they have all these old bands coming back and reforming, it's a little bit like do I really want to see this or am I just going to tick a box, cause Wire played and they were shit.

Really? Matt from Wire's here, he's around.

I interviewed Mark McGuire a few months ago, he was so into your Skyramps project, and I thought it was quite interesting how two people half way across a country can have such a connection.

Oh yeah, we did everything with e-mails, with files, and there was absolutely no conversation ever. You hear stories about jazz guys doing that in the same room, but files? To me that blew me away, we didn’t ever have to talk about it in depth. So that's a really mysterious collab for me, I can't even remember how that happened to be honest, it was amazing mark and I are definitely kindred spirits for sure.

I was just looking at your Roland Juno earlier, where I work we have one of those in an exhibition in a glass case, and there you are with those stickers all over and I heard you're dad was an early Synth musician back in the day?

He wasn't really, he was a rocker, he was in a nuggets band from Leningrad they sound like a garage band basically, like The Doors. That keyboard that I play is his and he bought in 1982, 83 for his Russian restaurant band and at some point I just took the Synth and started wallowing out.

It was quite lucky that you had that basis as a child growing up with all this music around you.

I’m really lucky, it's totally evolution, its makes me cry when I think I about it, my parents are such a big part of this, they really are. And my mother taught me some basic piano, she taught me harmony and circle of fifths and I use that stuff all the time. It was hard at the beginning because this was totally alien to them as it is probably to most people, but they're really super supportive and my dad is really proud that he's been able to pass on this keyboard.

It’s interesting, because even though it's the same instrument he had, he must have played in a completely different way.

I know what you mean, because that's the beautiful part of the whole thing, my dad had all these beautiful accordion sounds, he did exactly what I do with it, he had a vision, he wanted to emulate an accordion, an organ and electronic piano all these things he needed, and then I wiped all the presets and made fucked up sounds of whatever, but the beauty of Synths is that it's a whiteboard, and it's all about what you want to get out of it I guess.

pointnever.com/
myspace.com/pointnever

Universalis

2010-05-26T03:29:00.009+01:00

It's all well and good to talk to an artist on top of their game, another thing entirely to talk to one who's on the verge of creating something truly amazing. An early contributor to Sweet and Sound's Best of Vimeo submissions group, Universalis is a one man project that spans media and genres all in that attempt to express creativity in it's purest form. Featuring videos, photography, dub tracks and droney future loops, the otherwise anonymous creator and sampler comes from the Forest of Dean.

What is the Universalis project, what does it mean to you? What was your basis for it?

Well I was making music for ages, under a different name it wasn't really a proper name, I never used to show it to anyone. But when I started the Universalis stuff it was supposed to be really kinda mysterious and space age, the name comes from Latin, Universalis Musica, the music of the spheres. I'm still not there with what I want it to sound like, I it want to just be like music that no one's ever heard.

Is that meant to be reflective in the other work that you do, your videos, or is it mainly music?

It's mainly an audio thing but yeah just the images is part of it, I just wanna start doing crazy things.

I know said you want to make music that doesn't sound like anyone else but are there any influences you could pinpoint?

Well round the time I came up with that name, the whole concept of what I wanted to do, I was into quite a lot of Techno, this guy Jeff Mills and he was in this group with his other guy, I can't remember their name, (X-102) The Rings of Saturn the album was called. Some of it's got no drums and it's just really pulsing and that's the kinda vibe I wanted to get. And the whole early Techno stuff of disregarding conventional music as in verse chorus verse style and having words, just making music, that's what inspired me.

What do you create music on?

All the stuff on Internet and all the stuff I've shown people so far is on an MPC 2000 and on a record player.

I've noticed you use a lot of found footage, are you trying to reinvent or reuse sounds, how do you approach using samples?

I've just always done that, from Hip Hop, that's where I started to want to make music that way. Because they just sample from older records and I was really interested in that because you could just get a piece like a drum break or something and keep looping it and looping it and looping it. And it's a similar thing to like if you say one word over and over again it completely loses its meaning and becomes something else, and that's what inspired me from that.

With your video work as well, you use found footage from other film projects, do you approach it in the same way?

Yeah I just get a piece of film I like, and cut it in a different way and try and make it become something else.

Like with that 10David guy?

Yeah, with his one, he just gave me a stack of Mp3's he'd made on his MPC, one of them was called Chin V, that's not the actual name for it but that was one of the records he sampled from maybe. And I just loved the track and it had that oriental vibe to it, it just made me think of this film that I've got on video called Ugetsu Monogatari, it's a Japanese film from the 50's. That was one of my favourite films and the way I did the video was just look it up on youtube and just download the bits that I could, but I was really limited with what I could use. But they had my favourite scenes in there, I had to cut around subtitles, I left a few in that I felt were pretty poignant.

I suppose that's quite interesting, that you only had that footage, it constricts you but you also work around that, do you try and work with the mistakes?

Yeah, it's the same way I make music, I like the limitations that are put on me. That's why I carried on using MPC, because a lot of times I'm listening to a track and think 'oh that would sound great with echo' or 'oh I could do something different with that' but because I can't it kinda makes me work harder.

One of your more striking tracks is Skylarks, what was the story behind that, where did you take that from?

That's actually taken from a 1952 recording of Under Milt Wood by Dylan Thomas, just the intro to it. I was making another track and just put records on and sampling them and I came across that and it's just the way the guy said Skylark is was just so raspy and it had this sort of click or something half way through it, and I just thought that sounded crazy and it just had a whole list of birds after it. I just started pressing buttons, the skylark, the skylark, the skylark and again I just thought with the saying the same word over and over again, it became something else. And when I came to sequence it, it became a sort of psycho acoustic thing where it's sort of hypnotic and you don't know what's going on after a while.

Are you a fan of Dylan Thomas?

I've never read any of Dylan Thomas' books or anything else he's done but I've had that record since I was like 17 and I really like the sleeve but listening to the record just doesn't make much sense to me.

With sample culture it's really interesting because even though sampling's been around for 30 years I feel with people like yourself and others you're still able to take something you love and try and make it your own rather than try and emulate it.

It's about putting your stamp on it, there's a thing William Burroughs said, like a concept, he used to take books and cut out page 100 and page 1 and cut them down the middle then slice them together, then retype it. It comes out like a loads of shit but he says something will crop up that'll refer to a future event or something like that. and that's another concept for Unversalis where you're creating all this stuff, pieces of time, that someone's recorded then put it in a new order. It becomes futuristic to me, music that hasn't been made yet.

Do you feel you ever might make something of your own?

I've done a lot of that, borrowing synthesizers and drum machines, but it's not what I'm feeling, it doesn't have the same grit to it, the same depth I suppose. I just really like sampling.

It's a very personal thing, it's something you do by yourself and it's really reflective of your tastes

When I started I only wanted to sample things I loved, if I like a track from start to finish. more recently I've been digging around for sounds that just flash out from a track and be like yeah I want that. And I'll manipulate more, I used to not time-stretch anything really, just have a loop from start to finish then find another loop to fit with it. I used to be a lot more purest.

That's one of the most interesting things you can do with it, even the phrase itself, time-stretch describes what you can do.

Stretching time, yeah I'm definitely into the time thing of it, like someone recording a Saxophone in the Sixties and that was just a section of that time recorded onto a tape. and now I'm sampling it, yeah definitely, making the future out the past is a big thing for me.

I've noticed that on SoundCloud your music has quite a different vibe to it, I'm not sure if you do that on purpose because it's more of a dance based website, and this might sound facile but it was a lot more dubby. Is that an influence?

Yeah definitely, well I'm always buying records, old records from anywhere I get. And I'm really into old music, but the new records that I get... I'm really into Future Garage sounds, and Bassline things. And with SoundCloud, I just put my new stuff up there and don't tend to put the wierd stuff on.

6 figure income by universalis

Even though it's still under the same name are you concerned about who's listening to what or does that not matter to you?

Not really, I've thought about doing stuff under different names but I couldn't see the point really. It's just the same person making music the same way, might as well call it the same thing.

You said the closest city to you is Bristol, do you go out there much?

No to be honest I don't really like Bristol, but that's generally from personal experience. I generally come to London to listen to music, or just buy the records. I think London's more of a central thing, but in my area in the early nineties there was a lot of ravin' going on. Especially in the Forest of Dean they still do it, now they do it with Gabba and stuff.

Oh man, Gabba's awful

Yeah? I like it, I like the speed and confusion.

Do you reckon you'll ever have a physical release to what you're doing?

I've been speaking to a guy on the Internet who's interested in getting unknown sort of producers with my sort of sound to get releases in future and there's a few friends of mine s in London who'll be starting a record label and they want to release my stuff. but i just want the tracks to be perfect and at the moment they're sketches.

I quite like that about it, even if you see them as sketches a lot of people like that whole rough around the edges if you try and perfect it too much it might take away from its original appeal.

Yeah well I've definitely done that with a lot of tracks, I've had an alright demo and then just gone too far with it and scrapped it. But I think some of my tunes are finished, maybe a bit of tweaking on EQs and things but I'm pretty raw and I haven't got a problem with it.

soundcloud.com/universalis
vimeo.com/user2073752
myspace.com/universalismusica
majoranticlimax.tumblr.com
flickr.com/photos/georgefielding
flickr.com/photos/50399662@N03/
youtube.com/majoranticlimax

Ferry Gouw

2010-05-25T19:47:00.014+01:00

Ferry Guow is an illustrator and visual artist from London famous for directing music videos and playing in good bands. I was fortunate enough to grab an interview with him in his adopted Kensington about tie ins with T-Shirt-Party, the state of the music industry and his recent (MTV video award nominated) work with Major Lazer that's now expanded into a television pilot for Cartoon Network.

You've just completed a tee for T-Shirt Party, how did you get involved in the project?

I have a feeling that Stan (Still creator of T-Shirt Party) is quite a stalker, laughs, I think if anyoneeven clicks like on the t-shirts, on Facebook, he's just immediately on them, like I said, I was already a fan from the get go, I thought it was a great idea, a great concept. You know surprisingly unpretentious and cheap I was really into that whole side of it. And I had been following it and following it, and finally cause I'd been watching all the t-shirts and all the designs. and finally they got they're website together and had that release party and jaguar shoes and I always thought that it was Daniel Freeman’s thing, a lot of people have been saying that so I turned up to the release party at Jaguar Shoes and Daniel was djing and I was like 'Oh man I’m a huge fan of your t-shirts' and I thought if I buy it hear straight from the guy then not only can I say hi personally but I'll save on postage and packaging. So I turned up and was like‘I love your t-shirts, can I get one?’ and he goes 'oh no this is not my thing' I'm like 'oh really, who's it?' he says 'actually I’ve never met him, I don't even know who this guy is'. In fact there was meant to be a projection today but the DVD broke and this morning I get a knock on my door and there's a DVD on the floor and some guy running down the street! So yeah from then I just said fuck it I’ll buy it online. And yeah I got it in the post and started wearing it, and a friend of mine took a photo of me wearing it on facebook and as soon as I did that...

He liked it?

Yeah! I think he got a sense that I was for real, and then out of the blue he just asked me if I wanted to do it, and you know I think I was telling my friend when I was taking the photo that it was my dream to design for this guy.

So it's a dream come true?

Yeah it's a dream come true, it's amazing. Literally the whole of last week, I gave up all these important deadlines and projects and actually did my t-shirt party design I stayed up till 5 in the morning, I was so excited.

Elgin Marbles Design for T-Shirt Party

So what was your inspiration behind the whole Elgin marbles thing?

I had an idea for a week, week and a half and was thinking about it. I dunno I was trying to get down with the whole urban wit and street whatever and I just had no authority over it, I just could carry it off as well as he could. I thought I shouldn't even try and compete with that world, I should try and see what London is to me. I was just looking up stuff online and I felt the Elgin marbles represented what 'London' is, especially for me coming abroad. it's part of the London history to go the British Museum and check it out, but this beautiful thing is also part of what you feel about London and Britain in general and there's this whole imperialism and this whole history of political rambling and all this darkness in its past.

It’s a little naughty

Yeah, and that is now embedded in what is actually beautiful and amazing about London, that fact that we can just go there and look at this thing but there's always that tinge of guilt and awkwardness and weirdness about it. But also that image in particular of this guy, almost kind of wrestling in a really sexual, gay kind of way with this half-horse, it’s also what is surreal about London as well. The whole thing just felt like a closer sentiment to what London is to me, rather than trying to compete with some kinda urban wit thing which I can't compete.

How did you get in art? How would you describe the art that you make?

I don't really have any agenda apart from what I’m interested in at that particular moment, like the Elgin marbles, that's just what I had in mind at that particular moment. I think that art is always an extension of who you are as a person, and where you are, your development as a person is reflective in what you do. So in that way I don't have an agenda or a concept outside of what I’m interested in at any particular moment of my life. I got into art also because that was a natural thing; I was going to go to business studies school or something, I didn’t want to stay in office and work every day.

I'd say one of the more striking influences with your work would be music, as you said before in that what you create is based on what's in front of you, are you quite inspired to create from the sounds around you?

Yeah, well I was always interested in music, but only started making music when I was at art school, started getting into bands and forming bands and making music that way. And then only recently I started recorded at home, so my grasp of that whole world has only slightly started becoming slightly more sophisticated in the past few years. But it's always an extension of some kind of bigger 'art', which is just another side of how I can express myself and express my interests, if I have interests that translate well to music I’ll do it that way or if it was a mixture of music and visuals I’d try to do it that way. It’s just a pocket of expression, you know what I mean? In the general spectrum of what I’m interested in. But it's in of itself, it's hard to explain but its part of the bigger thing. It also relates to other things, when I was doing this t-shirt, it was not just the t-shirt but also through the video. so in that way a lot of my projects relate to each other like with the Major Lazer stuff it has the print stuff, it has the cartoons, the whatever little toys. Some projects are more extended in that way, some are more just in of them self in that way.

Mazor Lazer - Hold The Line

It’s good how Mazor Lazer has kicked off, even though people do like Diplo, it's taken it to the next level, and part of the attraction of that is the visual aesthetic. Are you happy with what you did there, how did that come about?

Again it's almost as random as the TSP thing, I was hanging with my friends of mine at XL and Diplo was there recording the XX at that time and I was chatting to his manager and my friend was like 'oh yeah ferry is an illustrator' and I just did some drawings for them and they got it and they liked it. From the first few things I did for Major Lazer it seems like our relationship was working out really well, then they started trusting me with more Mad Decent projects, it kinda grew organically from there and now Cartoon Network has picked up Major Lazer as a TV show.

That’s amazing.

I’m working on the pilot now.

Cartoon Network in the USA or UK? That’s amazing.

Yeah USA! The Adult Swim side

Can you talk about the pilot?

Not in its details, I can talk about my role I’ll be creative director, I’m the main designer of all the characters and how it will look. thankfully I won't be sitting at home drawing it frame by frame the way I was doing before, I think they're going to give everything to an animation studio and then I’ll have minions of workers. It’s going to be so amazing, I cannot wait.

Is it going to be a full twenty minute show?

I think so, it's gonna be a series, it'll be a series, if it works out It'll be a series kinda like what I did with the video, a G.I. Joe type you know 80's. I can't wait for the toys, hopefully they'll be merch and all that side of things.

Mazor Lazer - Keep It Going Louder, collab between Gouw and Jason Miller

Are they gonna fly you out there?

No no, that would be more difficult it's actually easier they way it's work they set up this base camp thing, you can set up an online work flow thing, you can post designs and files and it get's e-mailed to everyone

Are you gonna do research for it?

I think it's gonna be mostly cartoons and comics based, just channel my inner 10 year old. Which is the most amazing thing about Major Lazer, I would draw this stuff when I was 12 on school notebooks and her I am getting paid for it.

Are you quite influenced by cartoons and comics then?

Yeah I was always a comic book fan ever since I was kid, never stopped reading comics. In fact, you know when people doodle and most people doodle nothing or penises, every time I doodle Spiderman or Wolverine or Venom.

That’s what comes out naturally?

Yeah, if I was to doodle and not think about anything it would just be dudes with muscles. and to do that and get paid and think of character designs and guns all that crap is so amazing. And Mad Decent and Diplo are the best people to do that stuff for because it's never crazy enough. If you started to draw, you know whatever a kid jumping off a cliff or something, it always end up with 'oh put that thing on a lion' or 'add a snake on it' shit like that. So the whole thing has been the most fun.

With your work for Major Lazer and with other bands, how are you influenced? Do you have an idea that you think would work well, you said Major Lazer give you ideas but how do you work that out?

That’s what's good about it, we seem to have an understanding on a very substantial level, where there can show me one thing and I’ll know exactly what they mean, and the missing element is just like a snake or something.

Is that the same for other bands and artist?

No, to varying degrees obviously; sometimes if things don't work out I’ll stop working with them. I don't want to do shit that I don't like or things that I’m not proud of. So things that don't work out, don't work out, things that do work out usually work out really well and I stay really close friends with them and I trust myself to do more with them, so In that way I've been really lucky.

Who else would you want to work with?, but you're working with Cartoon Network now, that would be enough for most people

It feels like working Roxy Music is pretty awesome, again that just feels totally out the of the blue, Bryan (Ferry)'s son just called me up when I was hanging out in the park, I didn’t know him he just found me and he was all 'do you want to come in and talk about the projections for Roxy Music' I was like 'err... okay!' and they trust me enough to slowly involved me in other things and hopefully it'll be a relationship that'll continue and I got a friend of mine involved and working on his album cover and layout. Everything just comes about organically, through relationships which always is the nicest way to go about it.

Might be a bit of dour note to end on but I feel for there's been a bit decline in the importance of music videos recently, have you been affected by that, do you feel that as well?

My relationship with music and the music industry is a weird one. I’m really happy that people trust me to do music videos and stuff, but with music especially the work I’m doing I have this weird idea that doing art and making money are two different and it's almost by miracle that people have been able to sell music. And in that way that with the advent of the internet is the true nature of music exposed which is, you know, if music is transference of ideas then ideas have no economic value. the economic value comes from withholding the ideas as opposed to the idea itself, but it's just that us as humans beings have to eat and that requires money and the withholding of ideas and become products and then the withholding of these products become currency. So I can see why the music industry is in trouble by trying to sell this product that has no inherent value, inherent economic value. It seems like with changes in anything you just adapt to it, if people don’t' have money to do big budget videos anymore there's always digital cameras. There’s all this technology to still do it on a much smaller scale and still achieve what previously needed tonnes of money to achieve. So in that way creatively I’m not that worried about that, because as long as there's creative people out there work will always be turned out. But whether or not people can eat or whether after the music videos made it'll make any money that's the real concern but that's not a concern for me. if you're actually interested in art or making anything that's artistic that should be just be a sideline thing, once your stomach starts grumbling, apart from that you just wanna be doing good shit. You can start worrying later.

ferrygouw.com

Fernando Sanchez

2010-05-16T17:54:00.024+01:00

The internet's an amazing place to explore, to hide in and to thrive on, due it's ease of use and lack of central authority it's become a place for hundreds of different subcultures, perverse or innocent, to spread in their own way devoid of the usual social boundries. Los Angeles artist Fernando Sanchez is an observer of these niche groups, drawing a lens towards hip hop culture, the Wapanese, sports fans and keggers of yore in inventive ways, presenting them using mixed media and interactive approachs including film montages, photography collages, fake profiles and vlogger-esque monologue videos.

Normally I'd ask people what their background is, but looking at your website your education's all up there (incl a M.F.A in Design and Media Arts from the University of California) what did your art degree teach you?

-Erm... I got very familiar with the internet, so you can see I came from Design Media Arts, which is an art specific field. While I took classes in the great art department, doing conceptual work with them, our department kinda pushed new media down our throats, and while I was there I didn’t really wanna do that kinda work, I rebelled a lot against that style of work. But once I graduated it stayed with me, I didn’t realise I was so involved in new media. Upon graduating I can see it more loosely, I see it more relevant to my life, not really attached to any kind of entities, not really attached to the agendas of the school. So it was just being present and being aware of what's happening in arts and colleagues and peers. That’s what I gained from art school, just being aware.

How would you describe your work?

-I always tend to tell people it's very interdisciplinary, my whole approach to art has always been I do what I want. And the actual execution of how I do things or what medium I go to has never really concerned me. I usually try to do work that's slightly immediate, meaning that I don't have to necessarily learn a specific skill, my own work I would just consider it a hybrid interdisciplinary between pop culture, low brow or high brow.

1 Minute of Ass, 2007-2008
Composed from user-generated dance video. 60 Glicee prints, one for each second broken down by 25 frames

Looking at your work a lot of it feeds off user-generated content, with youtube or flickr, would things work without the internet?

-It would be really difficult, obviously there's a history of found art, you would consider it, but it's such a different ball game now that it's so available and apparent, it's just so in your face. It's such a common thing that most people do is to carry the information that they encounter on the internet it's become a sensibility. So as an artist I’m just trying to follow that sensibility and just isolate certain things.

A lot of looking at people who lead double lives and you yourself creating fake personas (for example the Myspace dream girl in Looking For Michelle and even the name Fernando Sanchez seeming like a Pornstar Pseudonym) do you find it easy to delve into this other world, of a different version of you?

-Of course, it starts between where I am as a normal user and where I am as an artist. I’ve created a lot of fake identities for several reasons, it's actually through work that I began to really experiment with the idea, you guys can see a certain train of thought between certain marketing tactics and how I started experimenting with all my personas. I think most of us could say that it's really easy for us to put on a persona online, if it doesn’t involve actually visualizing yourself when it stays to the written word. I think that's why so people talk shit on the internet as well. That level of consequence isn’t there.

That ties in with another part of your work, looking at different subcultures and looking how they've managed to breed and exist totally on the internet, because there's that lack of consequence. Do you look at these different subcultures due to curiousity, are you trying to critique it, break it down, what are you trying to do when you observe these little niche groups?

-I think like most artists, we start off with a general curiosity towards something, an inclination perhaps, and it probably just stems from my personality. For example with Bob, I was looking at Yellow Fever, and I was trying to find that specific niche and how to visualize that, and I came across Bob and I thought he was an amazing character so I didn’t know exactly what I wanted from him. I even went to meet him, I still have a video that I've yet to publish and I have vidoes and tape recordings of our conversations and so with that specifically I tried to be careful, especially if it's a central subject and one person, I try not to criticise them. I try to present the subject with a little sense of sensitivity. I'm not gonna be completely objective of course.

Fernando and Bob

With the Niggas project, I guess you could see it as a subcultural thing but for me it was interest of language, and the comedy behind it when you see all the people that use the word and in the third person to describe themselves. So you know it tickled me, I started gathering them and then it made other people laughed and then you added something.

With 9 Fans, I was specifically looking for an event that happens at the same time, so with each project I might have an idea an interest in a certain culture to find how that idea is executed or how I can gather that idea and execute it in consequence of culture. You know whether it niche groups, cultures, a song... so that's kinda how I work.

9 Fans (Super Bowl XLI Kickoff)
Nine video tape recordings of the same American football game by different people in different context, collected via YouTube

Rap music and culture always seems to be there with your work, especially on your music and writing, has it always been an influence?

-Most definitely, I grew up with rap music when I was a younger teen, and then I navigated away into other music, we took a 10 year separation. I think when I was 23/4, I listened to a range of music, but rap kept my ambition going, that whole bravado that it carries, I just didn’t want to hear Bob Dylan, I didn’t wanna hear softness I wanted to hear just barks and rants. I burned a lot of bridges while at school, I had all this bulldog anger right after graduating. I think it kinda matched my personality that whole bravado, trying to see if that energy in itself could be useful in someways. I’m not into it so much anymore but I still have a place for it.

As one of his more meta projects that worked off Fernando's love of hip-hop, the LA ART SUCKS blog saw Fernando assuming the role of a Chinese artist Los Angeles called Song Kwai Li, who spent most of him time either 'attending' gallery openings or complaining about the art and people behind them online. Unsuprisingly the blog attracted considerable attention, notably due to Song's calling out of several contentious and inherent aspects of the Califronian art scene and his half texted half rhymed delivery described by one commentor as an 'Asian Bukowski'... though that was just Fernando talking about himself.

Fernando on Song Kwai Li

The blog, started in 2007 and ended in 2008, may have died a death since then (and is now available as a limited edition book) I asked him about the current state of the art scene in LA, had anything changed?

-It’s most likely not gonna be different, it's something you can tune into or tune out, like the news, you can be aware of it or not. I mean it was for complaining, it more just to make it aware, just to get it out there. I presented that project in front of a crowd in LA, and someone who had been reading the blog said 'you know you basically just say the things that we all think'.

And the writing style, it had to be effective in that kinda grunt-like broken English. It's funny because I almost write like that now. Because our thoughts and our attention spans are so short.

Is it strange for me to ask you about this work, considering it's sometimes 3/4 years old, do you still connect with what you did?

-To tell you the truth, the personas with the rap and Song Kwai Li, I was slightly... yeah I wasn't satisfied with my work. You know I started seeing a lot of people doing similar things, especially with the internet, collections and groupings and just kinda gathering moments. I kinda told myself ‘it's gonna be the same thing why don’t I do something different'. And every time I would see my work I didn’t have the balls, the heart that I have inside me. It was really prickly intellectual, I was still thinking too much. And so with the rap and the writing I started really developing organically and currently for the last year I’ve been pursuing video monologue work and acting.

Actual acting?

-Yeah I’m in an actors studio, and it's given me a lot of ideas for different performative works. I’m gonna be doing a commissioned piece for Bas Jan Ader, he's a Dutch conceptual performance artist, so I’m gonna be doing some works for an opening, as a retrospective of his work.

I wanna work more organically, and when I look at the past, I like the ideas and I'm proud of them but at the same time it's an intellectual me, I’m just not trying to be as much.

Me and My Girlfriend, 2007

A compilation of scenes when people turn and look at the camera during their homemade porn videos - narcissexuals

So with acting and with one of your new projects where you've been editing yourself in pirated movies, what other work are you doing in 2010?

-Yeah I have about three of those that I haven't uploaded or published, I've got a residency, and then I've been rapping or rap/singing. I have a few new songs that I’ve been coming out with and a couple of new music videos, so I’ve mainly been doing that. First it started out as a project, but now I just like it.

Do you make music as well?

-No I can't make music, I just like writing the lyrics, and doing my thing

And are the music videos just for yourself?

-Yeah, just for myself, it's actually a really cool process because I get to write, I get to perform and I get to come up with an idea for a video. And I do some intro acting scenes, I like the whole packaging. I’m writing a screenplay at the moment, eventually I wanna do a movie.

I guess in LA that's the best place to do it...

-You know I've been ignoring it for a long time, because I've been living in this space and I've always ignored the acting, you know oh 'acting’s just a bunch of douchebags'.

It is quite cliché in Los Angeles though

-Yeah it is quite cliche, I've been offered a couple of supporting roles, just in graduate MFA thesis films and really small indie, part of the whole mumble core movement, not sure If you’ve heard of that...

Yeah, I remember hearing quite a lot about it, isn't it quite old now mumblecore? Is it a turn of last decade kinda thing or am I making that up?

-It probably started last decade but it's still straggling, it's still alive I guess.

It's still mumblin’

-It’s still mumblin’.

Dumb Dick Danglas Directors Cut

Born in Ciduad Juarez, Mexico in 1980, Fernando doesn't shy away from his immigrant heritage, descrbring the 'illegal' in him as a motivation for most of his artistic methodology.

Am I right to say you're an illegal immigrant or is that wrong information?

-Illegal? No... I'm legal now, it's just something I like telling people. I'm not really sure, I have all the documents, but if they were to put me into a room, I wouldn't say I got smuggled into the states, there's no reason for them to know how I got into the United States the fact is now I have all the documents.

I thought it was interesting, because I heard in the news recently about Arizona and how they've had a curb on illegal immigrants, how does it feel having a person like yourself not being allowed into your country?

The thing with Arizona, I think it's just more blank out prejudice, which is just wrong. Just going after people that you suspect. It's good that I don't live in Arizona cause I dress like a cowboy sometimes, I look pretty authentic Mexican. It doesn't affect the way I feel, sometimes I worry for my Dad perhaps, I sympathise with people more I feel, but with myself I'm more stable. I feel like an American, so I don't really associate that much with it.

A lot of Mexican Americans have an interesting identity here in the states, like for myself the longest time I didn’t wanna speak Spanish when people spoke Spanish to me, I had this pride issue, like 'I'm American', but now I’m in charge of everything.

thankgodforconceptualart.com/

Mark Mcguire

2010-04-29T15:29:00.008+01:00

Whether making up a third of ambient psych band Emeralds, collaborating with Oneohtrix Point Never, recording under his own name or several other guises Mark Mcguire is a guitarist characterised by his prolific output and Krautrock inspired drones; creating music that can equally veer off into the shimmering and epic or the sedate and sublime. I caught up with the Cleveland, Ohio native over a series of e-mails to talk about instruments, the creative process and bromances.

You’ve always been pretty prolific with your output, like you’re always creating, what’s changed in the way you perform and record in the 5 years since you started with Emeralds?

-I play music either with Emeralds or by myself almost everyday and am constantly recording, playing, and practicing. There’s so many jams to be made and things to be done I feel like I just have to keep working constantly, there’s no time to waste! All that has really changed since we started is that I’m able to focus a lot more, and I feel like our recordings are a lot more relaxed and becoming more ambitious. I think we’re realizing our potential more and more each year and trying to go for it even harder. I still feel like we’re just getting started.

What equipment, guitars/effects do you use to record?

-For the past five years, I’ve been playing a Gibson Les Paul Studio. I recently bought a new Fender Lonestar Stratocaster, and I’ve really been digging it, such a different feel and sound than the Les Paul. I run it through a cheap distortion, a cheap phaser, an even cheaper chorus and a couple delay pedals. I also use two different guitar-synthesizers.

How much of your work is improvised? Do you spend a lot of time honing sounds and tones or do you work more on melodies?

-A lot of times I’ll just get a riff or a rhythm or a concept or something in my head, and then next time I play I try to get that idea out. It usually ends up sounding way different than planned because once I start going it’s about 90% improvised. Sometimes I’ll have an idea so deep in my head that it comes out just the way I thought, which is nice too! I like to try lots of different methods of writing and composing. Some of my new stuff is a lot more composed and put together than usual, and I’m definitely gonna keep trying out different styles and structures in the future.

Your music seems to lend itself towards the more Berlin side of things, who are some of your favourite Krautrock bands?

-I think more obviously some of my favourites are the early and mid-period Popol Vuh records, and all the Manuel Gottsching and Ash Ra Tempel records, and Kraftwerk is definitely one of the best bands of all time, and TD and Schulze and all the classic greats. That is a really important time and place for music that I respect and admire very much, but to be honest I don’t really sit around listening to that stuff all of the time or anything. Like if I’m driving and I’m listening to something really far-out I get way too zoned and that can get dark! I’m always looking for new music to get into from all different areas of the spectrum.

You collaborate with Daniel Lopatin from Oneohtrix Point Never for your Skyramps project, how do you two influence each other?

-Dan is one of the people we’ve met through our band that we had an immediate connection with as far as musical kinship, and just in general as a dude. We get along really well and I think that’s one of the most important things when collaborating with someone artistically. Being comfortable enough to create something as naturally as if you were doing it alone, and it’s definitely like that with him. Sometimes I think he’s the reincarnation of my estranged first best friend from childhood, it’s cool like that.

You’re from Cleveland Ohio, how has the city influenced you?

-Cleveland is a very unique place to grow up. The Midwest in general is a really specific vibe but Cleveland is totally its own world. There’s a lot to be inspired by here. There’s a really beautiful parks system in Ohio, were right on Lake Erie, and we get a full dose of each season. So in that way there’s a positive charge. Cleveland is also a really poor city, with a lot of people out of work. Major companies have moved out, the Ford plant is hanging on by a string, East Cleveland is really violent and scary. The Cleveland crime rates are double the national average in pretty much every category, and the winters are eternally harsh. People are really depressed here and most of them don’t even know it. They think it’s how everyone feels but it’s really just dark! That’s the negative charge, but it’s also inspiring to want to escape the bleak reality you grew up in. I love Cleveland and it’s always going to be where I call home. But with that said, I can’t wait to get out of here and see the whole world.

Mark can be found online at mcguiremusic.blogspot.com and clevelandwagon.blogspot.com

Disaro

2010-04-20T22:13:00.010+01:00

Disaro Records is a music label from Houston at the heart of the recent 'Witch House' movement. Acting as a Texan umbrella for the current batch of dark, electronic goth acts that mask themselves in pitch-shifted vocals and gloomy synths they've released CDRs, vinyl and cassettes by the likes of Salem, o0o00, White Ring, Modern Witch and Mater Suspiria Vision amongst others.

Interview with label founders Robert Disaro and Jim Owleyes

-What were you influenced by when starting Disaro, did other labels inspire you, or was it more about wanting to get music out there?

Robert Disaro did do some work with another Texas CDR label, only he started branching off into a sound that did not fit with the old label, and what he would eventually turn into Disaro.

-With Disaro, there's a certain visual aesthetic associated with the label, was this always the intention?

Of course, the image plays such an important part of how the music is initially catalogued in the cerebral cortex. We started off at first with Robert collecting the sound while I started creating images that we wanted associated with the label. A lot of the artsists on the label make their own art as well, which we like a lot.

-How was your SXSW this year, was it interesting seeing Disaro related acts play, did you discover any new music or is it not really like that?

Texas is the place! We both are from there so we get screwed and chopped. It was a family reunion of sorts. The gathering storm is in full swing there.

o0o00 - Seaww. Video by Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never)

-What new releases can we expect from Disaro for the rest of the year?

We are actually doing a lot of new projects in LA at the moment.

-What's your take on all the different buzz words that are thrown at some of your acts, genre names like Witchhouse and Drag?

Witchhouse is a great name, we love it. Only once a name comes about to define a vibration, it becomes a solid, the word takes form and shapes reality, for better or worse.

White Ring - Roses (Fan Video)

-Apart from Disaro, are they any other projects that you're involved in, you do artwork for the label but do you create outside of that context?

The owleyes is a working graphic artist in LA, also we have been working with the Showcave night gallery in LA, developing it as an alternative space to explore ritual in art and music:

http://immortalmortal.com
http://www.showcave.org

We are only agents for the unseen forces that carry the charge of the spirits of the air.

"Storm the Reality Studio. And retake the universe." -Burroughs

Disaro Records can be found online at myspace.com/ffdisaro

Bicep

2010-04-14T14:04:00.014+01:00

Feel My Bicep is one of the fastest emerging music blogs on the internet. Formed by 5 old school friends from Belfast last year as a way of sharing their love for anything with a danceable beat; their posts range from classic and obscure Disco and Detroit techno to yacht rock gems and current house sensations.

With a Diaspora spread across the globe, I met up with London based contributor Drew who along with fellow member Matt, currently in Dubai, makes up the musical wing of the outfit.

When asked about the origins of the Feel My Bicep (the name itself a playful homage to the continued influence of gay culture on Disco) Drew, 22, explained how he had been enamoured with the sounds of Detroit and Berlin from an early age, being conditioned by Tim Sweeney’s Beats In Space and years of weekend attendances at a small Belfast clubnight called The Shine.

-We’re five friends who all went to school in Belfast, and when we were 15 we went to this club called The Shine. We’d go see people Laurent Garnier, Richie Hawton, Green Velvet, Underground Resistance. The guys who run that club night have got a real Detroit influence, they loved the harder side of techno, I think we grew up with the harder side of Detroit techno . Like when Tiga was playing back there, he used to play pretty hard tunes, I used to love that back then.

It was a really good club night in a city that didn’t have much else. And they used to put on people like Josh Wink, we didn’t have a clue who he was at the time. I look back at some of the flyers and some of the line ups and you’ll see Richie Hawton in one room, then upstairs you’ve Green Velvet and Tiga back to back. It’s like shit, that kinda line up, you’ll never get that again. They kinda mixed up the fundamental guys, not a lot of clubs do that anymore. The Shine’s moved away from that, it’s a bit different now to get more of an audience inside. Back then it was really quit, they didn’t get big turnouts, but all my friends were really into it.

It’s really quite strange actually everyone in Bicep likes different music: there's Rory and James in Glascow, David in San Francisco at the minute and Matt who’s in Dubai, so we’re getting all this weird influenced music out there at the minute. With James he’s really into punk and post-punk and David he’s perhaps more band influenced and with me I like lots of proto-house and proto techno so it’s quite a good mix of things.

It is interesting, and it’s always being updated...

-Yeah it’s not a thing of just trying to update it, with other blogs the quality control wasn’t good, I don’t want to name names but it’s a couple that we know. But they don’t keep to it, and we listen to so much music, you know with a DJ, you’ll listen to this new set and pick out the songs you love, that essentially what we do constantly. If you look at my music and my influences it’s all singles.

Not a single album?

-I don’t download albums. I do have a few albums but not very many: Andres II, a couple of Moodyman albums, couple of Theo Parrish, couple of Stevie Wonder's. I don’t really listen to albums that much cause I get bored half way through. I can’t really remember the last album I enjoyed throughout. That album by Andres II is a pretty cool album, it’s very hip hop.

Do you spend a lot of money on Vinyl; do you use it to DJ with?

-I play on Serrato, but yeah I buy all the music I love on vinyl. I work just two minutes away from Phonica and BM in Soho that’s where I get most of my records from. Same with Piccadilly Records in Manchester I used to go there all the time, they‘ve got a really good selection. I got some really good Italo records quite cheaply the other day, it’s like Bicep’s guilty pleasure, Italo.

You say it's a guilty pleasure but it’s still a pleasure

-Oh no I love it, some songs are amazing, Italo’s hard to do well, and it’s really hard to replicate so that’s why you don’t here a lot of it now, but yeah I do love it, some people just can’t stand it.

It’s a really cool genre, we always say Minimal Techno is 99% shite, but that other 1% is amazing, and it’s true, same with Italo Disco. That 1% is outstanding.

313 by bicep

Now receiving over 70,000 hits a month, Bicep have attracted a considerable international audience, ranging from label attention from around the globe, having their records mastered in New York to DJ sets on the continent and a two week tour of China at the end of April

-Yeah that’s the coolest thing about it, we didn’t realise what it would do when we started it last October. It wasn’t a published thing and we built up the archives. We had a really slow start. It’s really amazing though I remember when it started, you’d get people commenting from Lisbon and Sweden. Now it’s got to a point where you can make a real connection with people.

With DJing, do you have to go see a DJ to be inspired by them or can you hear bits in mixes or is it a mixture of things?

-I keep thinking about that myself recently, because I don’t understand this whole culture, at the minute of, of booking producers to. Like they’ll book Aeroplane off the fact that they’re good producers, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to them being good live.

There’s some natural born DJs, like Erol Alkan is a natural born DJ, he was mixing House and Indie records when he was 18. There’s a big difference between a DJ and a good producer.

Who would you say are your favourite DJs?

Omar S definitely, I spent £40 on one of his records ‘Do Me Right’

Man, it’s not even a good cover

-I like it, that 90’s cheesy house style, I checked the record prices today and it’s going for £25.

In terms of producers Gavin Russom from Black Meteoric Star, Theo Parrish is a really cool DJ, cause he’s got amazing taste and again DJ wise it’s Moodyman, it’s odd I like songs by some guys but not all. Omar S is one that I like most of his stuff

Strawberry by bicep

The other component of Bicep is their original output as musicians and producers. With 12” releases on labels Ghost Town and Traveller, Andy and Matt make tracks as a creative output for their diverse influences, much like the blog they can come out with driving techno inspired tracks or take on a James Brown sample just as easily.

What’s your approach to making music, what do you use, what are you inspired by?

-Most of our stuff we want to edit to play live, we don’t necessarily want to release everything we edit, because the edit culture at the minute overwhelmed with people putting out shit edits. And there’s so much debate on it, I’m just open to any edit that takes a different turn on things. There’s so many good editors people Mark E, The Revenge, Floating Points. These people are good at twisting tunes and turning them into something completely different, almost like daft punk did back in the day. It’s a new wave of good stuff, but the other stuff is shit. So we’re at the stage where we wanna be doing something different, we’ve got 35 tunes that we edited, because we want to have our own take on it. But we’ve got this style, that’s really rigid, be want to make it more funky and stuff.

To explain our production first we’ll draw up an idea on things like Ableton, and then we’ll record everything live on analogue, we use analogue equipment for everything, we redo everything in analogue, most of the drums we’ll start off on MPC where we’ve got drum machines like Roland 909’s, just standard drum machines.

It’s a slow process because Matt, my main production partner is in Dubai. He’s really talented at making things blend and putting them together. He’s very meticulous; he’s a graphic designer by nature so the tiniest minutest parts are important to him.

It’s quite hard because we’re associated with the blog but we want to also create our own music, not specifically be taken serious for it but we want to makes tunes and spend time with them and think about the approach to them because we want everything on vinyl. We’ve got like 4 tunes for one EP (a vinyl Fine Art Records to be confirmed) and an edits EP (a commissioned vinyl by Untracked), it’s just such a slow process with Matt in Dubai, slight tweaks are just endless.

With the dance side of things covered, Drew mentioned he might have leave the Bicep name behind, a least for a while, for a more band influenced project

-In terms of influences it's pretty much Gavin Russom from the production side of things, kinda laid back, really simple. I'd love to get something going like that.

I think we’re gonna go under a different name for the Housier stuff we’re doing and keep Bicep more fun, because I think the last EP was a bit too serious. It was more to get the name out there I think, it’s gonna be more streamlined now. So we’ll have a name for the Housier stuff and edits, because we’ve got lots of Italo Disco and stuff that we want to put out and lots of really heavy arpeggiated stuff.

We’ve got so many tunes it's tough to know which ones are good, you’ll think you're good then you’ll listen to something like an amazing funk and think this is so weird and mine is just a straight up 4/4 Techno tune this is terrible. It’s trying to get that balance right

And that’s the thing about Feel My Bicep, and the impression I got from talking to Drew in general; the music they make and post isn’t done so in a pretentious way to impress or mark territory but for their love of dance music, any dance music and for others to discover and enjoy. Similarly to when DJing he says ‘it’s all about trying to educate and entertain... it’s more about getting their attention, I think that's the hardest thing about it’.

feelmybicep.com

Fluffy Lumbers

2010-04-14T00:20:00.001+01:00

It's wierd, think I e-mailed Sam Franklin from Fluffy Lumbers around last December asking about an interview. Though that never came about initially, we re-arranged things to fit in for February with Sweet and Sound magazine. I'd pretty much forgot about it until last night when an e-mail popped up in my inbox with all these lovely answers in them, pretty much been to listening to Todd Rundgren since.

-You always have a rifle to hand in your press shots, are you into all that kinda stuff or is it just a look you're going for?

That's actually a BB gun. I wouldn't say I'm "into" that kindof stuff per se, it just turned out that this set of photos are the only I have of myself which were taken with the intent of representing this music. Do they represent it well? Eh. The label (Weird Hug Records) that put out the first 7" was asking me for a cover photo so I decided to base it loosely on the backyard photos of Lee Harvey Oswald taken by his sister. I was living in Massachusetts at the time and couldn't get my hands on any gun, BB or otherwise, so my friend Travis and I drove to a Wal-Mart in Salem that was authorized to sell guns of all kinds. I bought the cheapest BB gun I could find and Travis bought a machete. On the way home we passed a huge carnival that I told myself I would attend the next weekend I had some free time. Unfortunately, it disassembled and moved on within the next few days so I never got to do that. Anyway, a week or so later I put on a collared shirt and my friend Katie took a bunch of photos where I was standing on the neighbor's roof with the gun and a newspaper. If I could do it all again, I wouldn't be on the cover and the photos of me that circulated would be a bit more straightforward but what can you do! One of the upcoming 7" covers features a drunk cameraphone picture of my friend Luka so you can tell that I take my image very seriously.

-Your music really has a happy and carefree feel to it - what songs do you listen to yourself when you're in a similarly energetic mood?

What's strange is that most people seem to be under the impression that these are happy songs written during happy times, which is never the case. All of the songs have almost exclusively been written during/about uncomfortable, nervous, confused or just plain unhappy emotional situations. The lyrics are usually buried or obscured in some way though so I guess it is my fault that everyone thinks they're happy and carefree. In truth, I am a bundle of nerves. As far as pop songs I've been listening to recently while feeling good, here's a few I'd recommend...

-"She's Just My Style" by Gary Lewis & The Playboys
-"Under The Light" by R. Stevie Moore
-"That's How Much I Love You" by The Manhattans
-"Two Steps" by Home Blitz
-"Move" by The Plugz
-"I Am Free" by The Kinks as well as the cover by Hospitals
-"Break The Ice" by The Scruffs
-"No More Tigers" by Martin Phillipps
-"Wild Weekend" by The German Measles
-"I'm In A Different World" by Dave Stewart & Barbara Gaskin

-You list Todd Rundgren as a influence; Unlike in the US he's relatively unknown in the UK, his songs and persona have always been pretty baffling to me - what do you like about him?

Todd Rundgren is relatively unknown in the UK? Wow! The UK is missing out! I should start by saying that I have only listened to his discography up to A Cappella (which is pretty unbelievable by the way). Reviews that I've read of the successive album (Nearly Human) make it sound pretty interesting but I'm just not there yet. I haven't really left my comfort zone of writing rock and roll songs yet but I hope to someday branch out to a musical palette as broad as Todd's. Whether through my Dad playing his records when I was growing up or actively listening to him on my own after getting into "Can We Still Be Friends" in middle school I've been a Todd Rundgren fan for a while now and am still consistently surprised by the versatility of his body of work. Compare, if you will, these two performances (both from the 80s, no less):

Unbelievable that one man can do such disparate styles so well! Nilsson is the same way. I've been really into his A Little Touch Of Schmilsson In The Night record recently and had a bit of a nerd heart attack upon finding out that Frank Sinatra downer-arranger Gordon Jenkins had arranged it. One day I'd love to have dabbled in half the genres they dabbled in.

-What equipment do you use to record?

So far I've used various Tascam 4 and 8 tracks (except for the "Cruisers" song which was recorded on my computer). For the eventual full-length record I plan to use some better equipment but we'll see if I can pull that together. Instrument wise, I use any number of guitars, drums, keyboards, etc.

-Pop Punk or Indie Rock?

I guess Indie Rock? Those are two very broad genre classifications but I would say that I listen to more '80s and '90s indie rock than '80s and '90s pop-punk so I suppose I'll lean towards the latter.

-How long has the F.L project been going, how does it fit into the grand scheme of things?

I've been making recordings under the Fluffy Lumbers name since my freshman year of collegiate education but only really settled on somewhat of a consistent sound in the winter of my sophomore year (December '08/January '09) after having learned to play guitar that summer. I'm in and involved with a handful of other bands but Fluffy Lumbers is the project which is most important to me.

-Are there plans for some further 7" releases?

Following the sorting-out of some unforeseen setbacks, the Harry Dolland's 7" should be released by Group Tightener relatively shortly and Transparent Records will be releasing a Fluffy Lumbers/Big Troubles split soon after that. There may be some more 7" releases in the works but I plan to dedicate my time to recording a full-length record once this semester is over.

http://www.myspace.com/fluffylumbers

Photo by Aubrey Stallard

Giulio Ghirardi

2010-03-15T02:36:00.011Z

Twenty something Giulio Ghirardi is a student at The University of Parma who currently divides his time between studying for a degree in Architecture and being an amateur photographer. Having been commissioned by magazines such as Pig, Magnificent, Italian Vice and Iris Giulio also documents his own life through an ongoing series of sun-drenched portraits of friends, buildings and the wonders of natural selection. Interview here and at Sweet and Sound.

-How were you introduced to photography, what kept you interested in it?

I was introduced by my father to photography. Since he was young he liked to take photos, in particular architectural photography and portraits. I like them very much! He left me a lot of cameras (best one is a full accessorized pentax lx that he re-bought after having lost the first one on the stepway of montmartre in paris and tought me the importance of having an artistic vein to feel lucky in my life and to appreciate its beauty. My first film I did was in 2002, I was 15 while I was travelling around the state of N.Y. with my family. I consider it my first approach to photography. I kept the camera with me all journey long and I shot a lot. One of those photos was taken in Niagara Falls photo and me and lot of people consider it my greatest pic.

-Do you have a background in fashion, what do you prefer about that style of photography?

I really like fashion but in particular the art connected with it. All the people surrounding fashion for me are more interesting than fashion itself.

I like that glamorous and hype atmosphere, the scenographic scenarios, that only a fashion shooting can create but for me is very important also that fashion "stories" seem very natural, like a personal project. I prefer natural light and poses, everyday situations mashed with a touch of nice styling instead of a studio shooting with calibrate lights and unnatural poses. I find it very repetitive and even if you can add some external element in the background and simulate something, the result for me is every time boring.

I like photographers like Nacho Alegre, Jonathan Leder and Skye Parrot and for extension Ryan McGinley and Teller. They can develop a fashion story or advertising very well but they don't suffocate the client of their picture with something too exaggerated and even if they use some escamotages, they seem to remain quite natural and they emanate this sense of tranquillity, beauty and ingenuity that I'm searching for in my projects.

-You often get commissions from magazines, are you given quite a lot of artistic freedom with these or is it more predetermined?

Yes, sometimes they pick me up for a fashion shoots like they did for Vice Italy and Pig Magazine. They inform me just about the general theme of the issue I have to work with, but I felt lucky cause they gave me liberty of expression without any predetermined scheme.

I like working with magazines ‘cause I don't have a lot of time to dedicate to photography. I'm studying architecture and it’s very useful when someone asks you to work, organizing all the logistics that waste a lot of time. I need just to work on an already chosen time and place and models. Then I put my personal interpretation of the situation with my choices of the camera, light and gestures.

-Female figures are a recurring theme of your work; would you say the human shape is an influence for you?

Yes, it is. I started my "photographic approach" shooting landscapes, buildings and little and particular things in everyday life but I suddenly recognized that they seem like dead photos. I started to appreciate the human figure while I was taking photos and I had the fortune to find very nice friends to portrait when I started to take that type of pic. I like to take portraits of female subjects ‘cause I find them more attractive then common people chosen "from the street". I think models or nice people in general can improve a photo very much.

-Your holiday pictures and commissioned pieces seem to go hand in hand, giving the impression that you're constantly taking photos - do you always have a camera with you?

It depends, there were weeks when I used to have my compact camera with me everyday and others when I don't. But now I want to plan my projects better so I feel having my camera with me everyday isn’t useful cause I risk to take an excess of unfocused and unthoughtful photos.

-You also experiment with collages and drawings as well, do you turn to these mediums when photography can't get across what you want or is it something that you go with when the mood takes you?

I make collages and drawing cause it's a way to create an imaginary world that in nature doesn't exist. Usually I create when my inspiration for taking photos comes less or when I'm at home and I'm inspired. It’s one of the two artistic expressions that I like and remain to me.

-What are you planning to do with rest of the year, is it easy to find work in Italy?

First of all I'd like to finish university ‘cause photography, for me, can be just a passionate hobby for the moment. When I finish university I'll have much more time to plan and concretize my projects that for the moment remain just virtual ideas. As a second step I'd like to enter in a photographic agency ‘cause I hate planning shoots and public relations. I need to candidate myself in every time: sending emails with my cv and portfolios and I'd like to have someone to do that. I live for the moment in a small city and it’s difficult for me to meet people interested in my work and real artists. I'd like to live in a big city and meet real artistic scenes, curious figures that can improve you with their knowledge and to give you the incentive to work more. I think an artistic surrounding can influence you very much and I hope to move one day in a big city for that reason.

Giulio Ghiradi can be found online at giuliorojerghirardi.blogspot.com, tumblr, carbonmade and flickr

Balam Acab

2010-03-03T15:48:00.009Z

Balam Acab is the moniker of Ithaca University Student and Pennsylvania resident Alec Koone. With BA he creates haunting and frozen downtempto drones that seem to almost cough up melodies onto a sludge of looped synths and echoed drums.

A recent signing to the XXFG affliate, Tri Angle Records (o0o00, Creep) - Alec granted me his first ever interview about Balam Acab for both here and UK Arts and Music Magazine Sweet & Sound.

-You started BA almost two years ago, has it undergone a kind of reboot lately?

Yeah Balam Acab started out two years ago when I was really into drone and back then I was making pretty noisy drone music under the name. I tried reviving it again once in between now and then as a less noisy and more spacey type of drone project but then that fell through too. Now I have "rebooted" the project, so to speak, after creating a few songs and needing to put the songs under some project. So I decided to use this one because I like the name.

-Were you in other bands before or is this your first?

I've been in all sorts of bands and I've made a bunch solo music before the reincarnated Balam Acab. Lots of ambient and post-rock music, some noise, some folk, some rock (in the vein of bands like Pavement). Currently I have another active project called Etherea that I'm pretty into as well. It's hip-hop.

-All your songs use pitchshifted vocals in a really hypnotic way, who does the vocal parts for BA?

My dream girl. She's quite the diva.

-How do you approach recording? Do you work with samples and computers or is it a mix between that & home recordings?

I work with samples and computers. Just cuttin' stuff up and whatnot.

-Do you have any intentions of ever playing live with BA?

I'd like playing live with Balam Acab, just as of right now I'm not really sure how I'd play a good set that was fun for me and the audience. If I can figure that out then I'd love to. But I don't wanna just play mp3's through a PA system, ya know?

-I'm always interested in the environment and surroundings that artists live in, how does Pennsylvania suit you?

My immediate response would be that the PA (more specifically Harrisburg area) music scene is awful, but being away from it (I go to school in Ithaca, NY) has made me realize that although it was small there was a pretty decent and tight-knit music scene from around the area. And this is because I feel like I haven't experienced or been made aware of anything similar in Ithaca. The music scene in Harrisburg is mostly centralized around a non-profit organization called Moviate that hosts killer shows, be it music, film, or whatever else. I feel like there are a lot of good people and bands involved with the Harrisburg-area scene that work diligently together to create a nice little music scene in an environment that, in general, isn't very receptive to arts and especially more experimental and independent art.

Now in regards to PA physically, I'd say its pretty nice in the area I live. Of course, the suburban sprawl and whatnot isn't, but once you can get outside that, there's lots of nice outdoor places that are good to be in.

-What are your plans for the rest of 2010? Any physical releases/other projects?

I've got some plans for 2010. The most important thing is getting a live set together, I think. I really want and need to start playing shows as soon as possible. I'm also planning to release an EP through Tri Angle Records sometime in 2010. I'm currently working on brand new songs for that release. I have another project called ETHEREA but that is sort of on the back burner now compared to Balam.

Balam Acab can be found online at myspace.com/thebalamacab

Tania Leshkina

2010-02-10T20:36:00.024Z

Artist Tania Leshkina was born into The Soviet Union in 1990 and was raised in its aftermath until moving to London. She's exhibited at group shows in Malaga, Groningen, London, Milan and Venice as well as solo exhibitions in Hermosillo and Paris.

Her photos have a minimalist, almost-improvised quality to them that show off a natural eye for capturing moments and letting subjects and colours blend into each other. I interviewed her recently about her work, projects and whereabouts.

-When did you first know you wanted to pursue being a photographer?

I don't consider myself a photographer. I make work and use photography as a medium now but it doesn't mean I will in future.

-What equipment do you use? Do find yourself using one camera predominately?

I don't own any cameras. When I'm working on a project or a job I borrow all the equipment from colleagues.

Voidentity

Take Courage Gallery Exhibition

-How has your move from Moscow to the UK changed your photography?

I've changed and keep changing which means my work changed as well. It's only partly because of geographiс location.

Self-Portraits

-I think on flickr someone compared your Voidentity series to Erwin Wurm's One Minute Sculptures, has he been influence on you is it more just a coincidence?

He was among others. Couple years ago there was a big show of his work in Moscow and I guess I was really impressed by it.

Balance

-You've started creating film and videos as well, is this a natural progression for you?

Absolutely. I actually went to a film school for three years and always wanted to create my own videos.

Stills from two separate video projects

-What are you doing with the rest of 2010, any more exhibitions/zines?

I just did a video for Maaike Mekking's AW10 show on LFW. More to come, check updates on my flickr or website.

Tania Leshkina can be found online on her website and flickr

Burrrghlin'

2010-01-26T03:04:00.005Z

Hunee is a DJ and songsmith from Berlin. He makes House tracks that end up in places that you don't expect and mixes that have you browsing rapidshare for hours to absolutely no avail. He also runs a great blog called Hunch Music that puts up loads of great jazz and disco records. I asked him some questions about music and life in the city; answers and tracks when you follow the link:

-What equipment do you use to make and play music?

my dj obsession is the electronic spectacle djr 400 rotary mixer (that i still have to pay off, haha). so this and my 2 old (painted white in a very short moment of questionable taste) technics mk2 decks. pretty simple.

the music making happens between my noisy pc equipped with ableton, some plugs and the juno106, super bass station, my friends' atc-1, a shitty guitar, a leaking shaker egg, plus some more borrowed things for drums and noises...

Hunee - Brother (Dub) by hunee

-Where does djing/recording sit on your scale of profession to hobby? what do you do with the rest of your time?

hmm, it's a quite dynamic relationship. it's seems to be a hobby that requires more time than everything else i do, but somehow i always maintained to work for my living, so, yeah i guess that makes it a hobby. rent, food and the rest gets paid by my tutor work at university. also, still a student - i stretched my university existence to the furthest limit, which put me in the situation to finish my studies now, if i dont want to leave without a degree.

Hunee - Cannonball (Demo) by hunee

-What recent purchases are you enjoying to spin?

some killer records in my bag come from miles sagnia with some deeeep basslines (aesthetic audio), big strick on fxhe (a label that i adore), the marcello napoletano stuff that's takin all the good things about the 90ies and makin it work in '10, the latest mathematics releases and aaaall the second hand records that kill my budget and keep my love alive.

Hunee - Babel (part 1) by hunee

-Everyone always tells me berlin's an amazing city, what are your favourite haunts?

first of all - berlin is a summer city - a lot of beauty is covered in the cold, but i always love my crib on top of nk, my bike on the streets and the best feeding is happening at the falafel king (the nutpaste!!!), the realest döner u can get - waits at imren to be cut, record shops are always fun (with money in ur pockets). the clubs in berlin - well there are lots, they go looong, u can have a magic and a horrible night pretty much in any of 'em, berlin really lives by the vibe, the open-ness, the possibility to experience and explore whatever u might look for...

Hunee - Mix for Jazzanova Radio Show by hunee

-Mixes are pretty good way djs can get across what dance music they enjoy, do you see your blog as an outlet for the rest of your musical tastes?

actually i never saw mixes as something exclusive to dance music, i enjoy making mixes with lots of other ideas away from the dance floor. in fact, to make dance music mixes is often even tougher for me, since i have to imagine being in a club situation to make it work for me, to generate a certain energy.

hunch music was in my mind for some time, maybe just as a box where i kept my ideas, dreams, criticisms, recepies and plans without any concrete definition what kind of materialization it might have one day. to put out the hunch record was a starting point to do more with the name. the hunch music blog came to life, because i wanted to create a place to share music and information, completely free of any restriction, maybe also to feel out where the hunch music box could go to... and well, deleting facebook and starting the blog the same day might be a bit more than pure coincedence, haha...

Hunee - Standin' High by hunee

Hunee can be found online at
Myspace
SoundCloud
and
Hunch Music

Li Hui

2010-01-09T14:22:00.014Z

Li Hui takes blurred pictures and clear photographs of herself and others. I recently asked her some questions about her work, filling in the gaps, personality traits and privacy. Follow the link below for words and pictures.

-One of the obvious traits about your pictures is how you never show peoples faces. Is this for the audience to make up the rest of the person or to take away that element of focus from the viewer?

My pictures never shows faces because I think this is a way of communicating with the viewer. The pictures remind us of our common feelings, secrets, past memories or magical dreams. The people in my pictures are not supposed to be unknown faces, but the viewer him- or herself.

-You said on your website that since 2009 you've started taking photography 'seriously' - what has that entailed so far?

In the past I spent too much time at home watching movies or listening to records or just sleeping all the time, so obviously I didn't really have enough time to go outside, take pictures and actually be serious about it. I think that changed in February 2009, as I started to really focus on photography.

-You've talked in interviews about how you're quite a shy/solitary person, do you feel this comes across in your photography?

I think shy people take pictures in a different way and approach subjects differently.

-Do other photographers influence your work or does inspiration come from closer to home?

I don't even know that many photographers, I'm pretty sure you know a whole lot more than I do. That's not really important to me, I draw most of my inspiration from movies. If I'm not taking pictures, I have to watch movies. This is a habit I've kept ever since I was a little girl. I lived with my grandfather and he was a big movie fan.

-You're pretty reserved about the information you give out to the internet, do you think that people give away too much online?

Yeah, I'm into photography because it's my hobby. I think that information is not necessary. Giving away such details doesn't help me in any way and it doesn't improve my photos.
Recently I got a mail from an ezine and they said they prefer people to focus on photographs instead of the person behind the camera. I totally agree with that.

Li can be found online at flickr and huiuh.com

Red Hot Entertainment

2009-11-23T23:51:00.014Z

Dan Hancox is a journalist currently living in London. He's published articles in Fact, Dazed And Confused, The New Statesman and The Guardian as well as being a contributor to several rather good blogs, like this one. Last year saw 'My Fellow Americans' released, a collaboration between Hancox and comic artist Tom Humberstone detailing their journey across the US following the presidential election of 2008. He's one of the good guys basically - interview after the jump.

-What's your background in the music industry - was it always intentional to become a writer?

I don’t have a background in music or the music industry, I can’t play any instruments or DJ – I’m just a fan. There was a guy at my university who only owned three CDs, because, he said, “I don’t really like music”. I always found that pretty extraordinary. That’s like saying “I don’t really like food”, isn’t it?

As for writing, I won a competition at school when I was 13 where we all had to write a 400-word review of Dragonheart, this god-awful kids film featuring a CGI dragon voiced by Sean Connery. I won a Down Periscope hat and a Nutty Professor long-sleeve t-shirt. So obviously with incentives like that I knew I was onto a winner.

-What journalists inspire the way you write?

So many of my friends and peers, too numerous to mention... most of them are linked on my blog. As for journalists I don’t actually know in person, people like Gary Younge and Barbara Ehrenreich I like a great deal in terms of their subject matter. Jason Burke and Jon Boone I find fascinating because they write about things I would know nothing about otherwise... but for style my main inspiration is PJ O’Rourke, whose libertarian politics I cannot stand, but he’s so brilliantly witty that I can’t help but read and re-read his stuff. I’ve just noticed that not one of those are music journalists. There might be a reason for that.

-As a music journalist do you still think bands see you in the old stereotype of the enemy?

They’re generally just a bit sceptical (understandably so, really), rather than oppositional or defensive. But then the people I interview have never been sitting in a hotel room all day doing 300 interviews in 15 minute slots – they’re musicians who are grateful for any sort of media interest, usually. So my job often means chasing grime MCs whose mobile numbers seem to change every week, waiting at Leytonstone tube station in the rain for two hours, going on wild-goose chases through the Isle of Dogs... but better that than dealing with handlers, minders, PRs and managers – and bored, boring ‘artists’ who’ve nothing to talk about but the quality of the room service.

-Your articles often focus on sometimes overlooked but nevertheless, important parts of urban youth, like food and music, are you trying to embrace the culture in London around you or is more tongue in cheek than that?

Er, there’s nothing arch or condescending about it – well, the Junior Spesh blog is very tongue-in-cheek (and also deadly serious, sort of), but that’s quite obvious – not least because it’s inspired by a brilliant novelty grime song. If you’re asking whether it’s patronising or condescending for me to write about ‘urban youth’ culture, well then no, it’s not. In census terms I’m a 28 year-old middle-class white male… but this is London. I’m not ‘road’, but – for example – I went to school with Neutrino from So Solid Crew, who among other achievements shot himself in the leg “cos I’m fucking crazy like that”, as he once spat. My point is that compared to most megalopolises, London doesn’t discriminate or segregate – it throws everyone together. Apart from the bits that voted for Boris Johnson – they can fuck off.

-What's the most exciting thing in British music right now?

First, the fuzzy, inchoate areas in the middle of the Venn diagrams of UK dance music. These grey areas between and beyond existing genres are larger and harder to define than ever before. We’re at a stage where grime, house, dubstep, and funky are bleeding into one another – what do we call it? I don’t know. But search for mixes and tracks by the likes of Bok Bok, Jam City, Untold, Roska, Scratcha, Mosca, Ikonika, Brackles, LVis1990, Cooly G and the Hessle Audio label.

Secondly, the much more clearly-defined world of funky bashment, which has been created, curated and nurtured by Gabriel Heatwave, with the help of a lot of great producers and MCs – it self-consciously connects the dots between Jamaican MCs and London electronic music culture – in this case, funky. There are a couple of great ‘primer’ mixes out there by Gabriel I’d really recommend downloading.

Tom Humberstone (left) and Dan Hancox by Humberstone

-In a recent blog post you mention how its very easy for the extraordinary to become normalized. Looking back at the US election it's pretty obvious why Obama won, but at the start did it feel like you were making a book about his journey to the Whitehouse?

Not at the beginning, not at all. His role in the story in January 2008 was clearly defined: he would be a noteworthy supporting cast member to the central narrative of Hillary Vs The Republicans. For the Democrats, he would motivate those few young Americans whose political spirit had not been entirely crushed by eight years of President Bush, revive the black vote a bit, teach the Washington mafia some new tricks in terms of online fundraising, and recede into the background like Howard Dean in 2004. Or possibly be Hillary’s VP candidate. Tom Humberstone (my illustrator/travel buddy/Ralph Steadman) and I bought this logic too – until the epiphanic moment when we saw him speak, in a snow-caked school gym outside Iowa City in early January. He was really that good.

-'My Fellow Americans' sold out of copies in UK, what do you think captures British peoples attention about the American political system?

Bigger fireworks, louder shouting, and shinier suits. This sounds glib – and it is – but it’s also true. Irrespective of your political views on the two of them, who would you rather watch a news item about: Sarah Palin, or Nick Clegg?

'The Cover'

-You released MFA last year and started it the year before that, do you ever think you'll be doing something like it again? What would be the next step from here?

Tempted though I was by the idea of writing My Fellow Kashmiris, I’m not really that kind of journalist. But the ideas that motivated My Fellow Americans are more pressing than ever: as the old media continues to die off, genuine grass-roots reportage is suffering. Time-challenged staff reporters are increasingly tethered to their desks, regurgitating press releases and doing phone interviews with official spokesmen – and editors half-heartedly temper this by sending their hacks on brief, surgical strikes to somewhere outside of Westminster for an afternoon. I’m not sure what the next step is exactly, except that I want to see more journalists doing genuine grass-roots reporting, and I’d like to be one of those journalists.

-I may have focused unfairly on you being a music journalist here, but you also write a lot for the New Statesman (amongst others) - are their any similarities in the types of people you meet and write about?

I suppose so. The musicians I interview very very rarely have publicists, agents, managers, or eyebrow technicians – and the people I talk to for political pieces in the New Statesman, Prospect, etc don’t either; in the sense that they’re not politicians, but normal people.

Dan Hancox can be found online via Twitter and Blogspot.

Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty

2009-11-23T01:11:00.009Z

Really really brilliant video of Girls meeting Lawrence Hayward in London last month. Highlights including but not limited to:

-Girls genuinely being massive fans of Felt/Denim
-Girls opening up about the difficulties of simply being in a band
-Lawrence explaining how he refused to give autographs for a small period of time
-Lawrence ripping on the guy from Red Krayola
-Lawrence loving the Iggy Pop Insurance ads
-Lawrence in general
-Lawrence still caring about getting popular and having fans above everything else

Parts 1,2 and 3 - with thanks to Magic RPM

Sterling Crispin

2009-11-02T02:29:00.024Z

Sterling Crispin is an artist living in Denver, Colorado. Using the Buddhist belief of the Sunyata as a common base for his output he creates installations, video loops and illustrations that focus on the infinite and unknown. Crispin also recently worked with musician Picture Plane to create the music video 'Gothic Star'. Interview after the jump

-Circles and symmetrical shapes seem to be key elements in you work, what fascinates you about these forms?

I'm interested in the ancient, primal and infinite feeling of geometry. It exists outside of time and space. It's an underlying invisible force making itself visible through interaction with matter.

I think that when you encounter a highly symmetrical form like a seashell or a crystal it can be a profound because it's this underlying force that's way beyond you suddenly saying "Hello". It's like pulling the wrapping paper off of a box that contains the infinite. You only get to see a very small slice of it, and you'll never unwrap it all, but what you do see allows you to infer what you cannot see.

And so I've been imagining a lot of the art that I've been making recently as tools for prodding into the void.

I also tend to imagine geometric forms as living entities or figures. When say "sphere" to someone they visualize a beach ball or spherical object, or they imagine just the idea of a sphere without any particular form. The thought of a shape just floating out in space somewhere that doesn't consist of anything is funny and interesting to me. That somewhere in some universe or dimension there is a realm of perfectly formed triangles or spheres sort of loitering about or doing whatever spheres do.

I like the idea that if a circle had a life / soul / consciousness, each time you drew a circle on a sheet of paper, you would be channelling the spirit of the ancient "one true circle" out there somewhere rather than creating a new life for each circle. And to clarify I'm more interested in the idea that a perfect shape could be a living or maybe conscious thing than in the idea of a perfect shape in general.

I'm also really interested in the idea of visible and invisible things, making the invisible visible and vice versa, perception really.

Crystal Field

-Digital images and videos seem to be another prominent medium that you work with, do you find yourself being able to do more on a computer or is it more aesthetic than that?

Well there's an appropriate time and place for everything, and I'm interested in all of it. Honestly If I had a bigger budget I know my work would look very different. I generally dream very big and then have to compromise. I consider all of the work I've done so far to be a maquette or sketch for something else I'm trying to get at.

So right now I'm driven to working digitally because I can execute my ideas quickly and its relatively cheap. There's an upfront cost obviously but pressing File > New is next to free.

Although that's not to say I'm not interested in computing. I'm very interested in emerging technology and theories of what the future will bring. Computers are really powerful tools, I think society as a whole is just slowly waking up to the potential of the technology we are developing. We are accelerating very quickly up the curve. I was born ten years after the release of the first home computer and I think that in another 50 years we may be faced with a computer based intelligence that surpasses every human mind on the planet combined. Or entirely synthetic or laboratory produced humans. How can anyone not be interested in that?

Prehistory Series

-Your illustrations, especially the Emergent Organic Form series (top of page) has some amazing detail to them, what are the processes like for creating such images and what influenced you in making them?

I draw them with fine point pens into a sketchbook, usually while traveling on the public transportation system in Denver. I've been using 005 Microns but I have been thinking of trying other pens, the tips are too fragile.

After they are drawn I photograph them and digitally edit them to become bilaterally symmetrical. I want to print them out in a limited series at a 16x20 inches with some high quality digital printer and mount them somehow but I'm too financially challenged to realize the series in any meaningful way right now.

Picture Plane Gothstar

-You've also directed a music video for Picture Plane, how did that collaboration come about and what do you think to the outcome?

Well Travis and I went to art school together and after graduating were both accepted into RedLine where we shared a studio in Denver for a while. We've been friends for a while and have a few shared interests and influences.

He asked me to produce a video for an album he was going to release, we threw a few ideas around and I put together a sort of video sketch. We had the video shoot afterward that was intentionally free form and sort of haphazard. I wanted it to feel like recovered footage from some sort of Stevie Nicks cult in the near past that had tried to capture or summon her spirit. Yet at the same time feel fun and light hearted and keep the ethereal and textural things going on in the song.

Overall it was a lot of fun and I think I'll probably be doing more projects like that in the future.

-Do you think you'll be doing more work with video?

It's hard for me to imagine losing an interest in video, maybe if I live long enough to see true virtual reality or the technological singularity I won't care much for video anymore. But its hard to say, who knows.

Water Particle

-I'm always in interested in different cities and the people who live in them, what's Denver like as hometown? I read an interview with Picture Plane and the interviewers perception of Denver seemed to be you spend all day Skiing, only stopping to watch The Denver Broncos occasionally, are things really that great?

I'm sure that there are people out there doing just that, but that's not the average lifestyle here. Actually I had to check and Coloradans mean income is among the highest in the country and the poverty rate isn't too bad, so maybe I'm wrong. There's a decent public transportation system here and there's a lot of good art in town. Denver is really supportive of the arts, I wish there was more support but it's pretty good. And of course the sky, mountains and land is just beautiful here. I just wish there wasn't so much suburban sprawl.

Gateway - 2009 Installation

What do people think of when they think of Denver? I think people perceive Denver as a cow town, they think of John Denver, the Denver Omelet, skiing and mountain men?

I actually grew up in Maui, then spent a few years in Pittsburgh and moved to Denver in 2005. I'm still acclimating to seasonal weather and I may never get used to it.

-You also do graphic design work as well, is it hard to make a living solely as an artist then?

Well I think graphic design is art, but yeah the term "starving artist" didn't come out of the blue, its tough.

Primordial Figure Series

-What projects do you have planned for the rest of the year and 2010?

I'm currently working with the Gates Planetarium here in Denver developing content for their full immersion dome as part of an arts and science collaboration between some local colleges and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. I'm really excited about that project right now.

I'd really like to get my hands on some rapid prototyping machines, or get into industrial fabrication, injection moulded plastics, large scale digital photographs and make a few more light boxes

Also I want to break into public art, and do whatever I can to avoid a 'day job'.

Sterling Crispin can be found online at sterlingcrispin.com

2009-10-29T21:15:00.002Z

I'm off to see Fleetwood Mac tomorrow night at Wembley, and it's gonna be amazing. Recent interview in the Independant with Mick Fleetwood here, talking about the European Tour and a possible new album.

Plus anyone heard the Cheryl Cole album?

1968

2009-10-18T23:48:00.005+01:00

198?

2009-10-18T23:45:00.007+01:00

Cringe Vision

...

2009-09-22T11:09:00.001+01:00

Not so intense

'With my art I just want to survive'

2009-09-22T00:26:00.002+01:00

Intense

The Mask

2009-08-27T22:39:00.001+01:00

Tommy Boy

2009-08-20T11:07:00.021+01:00

Since the advent of high speed internet connections an almost forgotten aural and visual landscape has slowly been unearthed by those willing to search for it; miners of lost disco gems and yuppie ores have found a past that looked to the future. A future of electric dreams and exploration of the unknown.

One such excavator is Tommy Boy - half of the seminal and consistenly enviable Arawa.fm he also pieces together films and music videos from the more esoteric and synthetic fragments of the past 35 years, creating soundtracks for the likes of CFCF, Telepathe and most recently Spectral Empire.

-When did you first start experimenting with video?

Well, I’ve always been enamoured with video, even as a kid. I vividly remember the moment I knew what I wanted to do as an artist. There was a show on MTV in the mid to late 90s called AMP. It was an hour block of mostly electronic and experimental videos. Most of the videos were generic and formulaic, however 2 artists really stood out. E.B.N. , and Coldcut's brilliant video work inspired me. Their video aesthetic consisted of sampled video, cut to the rhythm of the song, and rearranged to tell a story with syncopated imagery.

A few years later in Austin, Texas, I started to VJ with friends in a multimedia outfit called "Loose Id Studios" with the intention of emulating this style. It’s crazy remembering how much time went into making those productions. Video encoding took forever and our tools were so archaic. I was using one of the first multimedia apps at the time, VJAMM on my old IBM notebook. The output wasn't always the best, but I learned tons in that time. I definitely caught the bug for film then.

-You mentioned on Arawa that 20JFG asked you create a video for Spectral Empire's Black Shark - are you always commissioned in this way or do you find yourself starting something just through musical inspiration?

20JFG initially approached me to do a video for Telepathe based on my previous personal video work and my massive image dump on myspace the they often borrow from for posts. I think they just trusted my vision and decided to throw me a bone. From the Telepathe video, Patrik North from Acéphale contacted me privately to do the CFCF video. Soon after that, 20JFG referred two more jobs to me, Spectral Empire and Gatekeeper (TBR). So, yeah, 20JFG have really made my year! Love those people. Plus, I really like the work that’s been sent to me. Fortunately, all these artists resonate with my interests, so the projects have been a blast. I like client oriented work since it keeps me on task. However, I do like to strike a balance between work and play. I definitely take time to make videos for myself. I like making music videos for bands that never had the chance. I did videos for Phill & Friends Band and Casco because I love them so much.

CFCF - 'You Hear Colours' commissioned by Patrik North of Acephale records

-The video for CFCF's You Hear Colours is a really great synthesis of sound and visuals - what was the process of making the video like?

Most projects start with me getting very familiar with the song. If it’s something new to me, I’ll listen to it on repeat for days, everywhere I go. It might take me a couple weeks to really get the song and find the right imagery for a story. With CFCF, it was the middle of winter when I got the song. I remember driving my car in the barren early morning light on my way to work, watching joggers stride by as “You Hear Colours” played in perfect harmony. I knew almost from the start that I wanted to do something that would capture that feeling. With that in mind, I began researching source material. I remembered a movie my Dad had turned me onto as a child. It had been probably 20 years since I’d seen “Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”, but after revisiting it I knew it would be the perfect backbone for my story. I intended for the video to be vintage. I think black and white footage frees the mind to fill in the colours as you see fit. If you were hearing colours from CFCF's gorgeous song, I wanted you to see his sound. So for me, this song will always end up looking like those early morning drives felt like, which is great.

-Your videos seem to exclusively use sequences and sections of other films and pictures, do you think you'll ever pursue making original content or is that not how you work?

This is a constant source of contention for me. I recognize I’m abusing certain copyright laws; however I feel I utilize video clips the same way a DJ selects songs to tell a story through a carefully selected mix. I have no intention of taking credit for the original footage I use. I hope people can see the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. I’m always striving to tell my own story with borrowed footage. I would love to start using more of my own original footage, but with limited budgets and lack of equipment I’ll most likely rely on sampling for the near future. If someone wants to do an all expense paid shoot with me, I’m totally game. Seems like the only people who can afford that kind of work with me are corporations who want me to make a widget demonstration video for their website. God help me if I have to keep doing those. My career is totally upside down, as I’m sure it is with most artists. I get paid for shit I hate to make, and I do stuff for free because I love to do it. Besides, there’s a vast archive of video out there just ripe for the picking. I really enjoy researching film history. Dissecting and rearranging existing footage is still a thrill for me. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Telepathe - 'Devil's Trident' remix by Diamond Vampires commissioned by 20 Jazz Funk Greats

-Do you see a career in what you're doing at the moment with videos with or do you see it more as a past time?

I don’t really see a career in making music videos the way I’m making them now. I run the risk of being a one trick pony at best, at worst I could face litigation. So, yeah, the time for doing this stuff is finite. I experiment with video as a means to express myself as an artist. I'd like to make a career of it, because I have so much work I still want to do. I spend my time VJing when the video projects are slow. I recently enjoyed doing work for the Butthole Surfers fall ’08 tour, as well as the Maker Faire in Austin, TX, Crystal Castles/VEGA, and Nancy Fortune shows in ’09. I like taking video out of my house and on the road. So, maybe there’s a future in VJing. Who knows. It’s all still up in the air.

-Your music tastes seem to be centered on the dark and synthetic output of the 70's and 80's, what is about this sound and era that appeals to you?

My artistic interests incorporate a healthy respect for retro-futuristic ideals. I’m a child of the 80’s, that era of romantic futurism in the grip of the Cold War. Science Fiction has always been a major influence on my life. My first memories of sound were from a Fischer-Price plastic record player with my own 45” copy of Disney’s “The Black Hole”. I have a profound sense of nostalgia for all the sights and sounds from my childhood. I remember spending entire summer days at my neighbour’s house who had MTV. I sat mesmerized by the crazy “New Wave” videos that often mirrored the futuristic vision of my favourite movies. I spent my formative years in music education researching anything and everything electronic. My heart fell in love with the roots of electronic music and all which sprang forth from that creative force. I don’t necessarily feel I’m drawn to the darker side of electronics, but compared to my ARAWA.FM partner, Sean Donson, I can see why you drew that conclusion. Ok, sorry for this lame analogy, but the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle explosion is closely related to how I see music. It’s the promise of the future coupled with the tragic reality of the present. It’s the beauty in tragedy, the shortcomings of technology, the human will to break barriers and forge new territory. All of that. Music from the late 70’s and early 80’s embodies those ideals for me. Synths were just coming onto the scene, people were embracing the future, music was sublime, transcending time and place. Most of this music sounds more relevant to me today than I’m sure it sounded when it came out. Especially the left-field, obscure, bizarre tracks. Maybe my taste does lean to the darker sounds of synthdom. I guess I like my dystopian disco to sound like it was actually made in "1984".

'Repossesed' a submission for Moon Illusion

-Mixes are another interest of yours, do you DJ as well?

I have been DJing about as long as I have been doing video work, but with mixed results. For the moment, my biggest gratification is to release mixes on the web. I hope my mixes swim in the same circles as my mentors. The biggest influence on me right now is DJ JAZ aka John Zahl. As long as guys like him are killing the tables, it’s best for me to stay at home and work on video. DJing for me is like making mixtapes for high school crushes. I miss those days. I have always loved the art of a good mixtape. So, I guess I’m just making 21st century mixtapes for all my internet lovelies. But I digress.

-What's the story of how Arawa came into being? What inspired you and Sean Donson to collaborate?

ARAWA.FM is actually Sean Donson’s brainchild. Sean’s from San Francisco and we’ve actually never met face to face. I think he started blogging about a year before I did. This would’ve been around ‘06-’07. When I started my own blog, I noticed his name popping up in comments from time to time. And vice versa. We started talking and one thing led to another. I think the partnership came out of necessity and a mutual respect for each others work. We’re not the most consistent bloggers, so strength in numbers seemed to make sense. I officially became partner after an insane Halloween posting juggernaut we produced last year. It was as if stars were aligned and a cosmic force was unleashed once we teamed up. Besides, Sean is like the ying to my yang, I absolutely adore his style and direction. Sean has a real talent for graphic design, an area I’m sadly lacking in. I was more than happy to jump on his bandwagon. He had already made a strong foundation for ARAWA. His posts are always fresh to me, consistently supplying me with treasures I never knew existed. Sean and I have had a lot happen to us since we started to collaborate. We recently completed work for JAZ, Nancy Fortune, and Gatekeeper as a result of our blog endeavours. Things keep coming in too, which is a real amazing since this is a just result of us just doing what feels good. Sean added a quote to our blog which really drives home our mantra. It’s from one of my favorite works by David Lynch, from the epic series, “Twin Peaks”. It says “"... I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange." This is really the story of Sean and me. My brother from another mother, my cosmic twin, Demian to my Sinclair, the best friend a guy could ask for. Aw shucks, love me some Sean, love me some ARAWA.FM too.

Obligatory Fleetwood Mac reference - 'Gypsed'

-Lastly, do you have any current infatuations, be it videos/songs/links that you'd like to share with us?

I don’t know if these are current as much as they are things I have loved for a long, long time. For the video enthusiast in me, I consistently draw inspiration from these sources:

TV Carnage, Paperrad, Animal Charm , Church of the Subgenius , 5minutestolive , Totally Wreck Production Institute

And as far as music is concerned, anything these guys are up to usually rocks my world:

Lovefingers , Donnaslut , Dream Chimney , Bumrocks

And lastly, ARAWA.FM has a new sister site for all the things that just don't make it on the blog. Please bookmark http://youmakemefeel.tumblr.com for more ARAWA related fodder. Stay tuned, there's lots more to come

Tommyboy can ofcourse be found online at Arawa.fm (ofcourse) and also at Vimeo and Youtube.

Comus

2009-07-29T00:43:00.033+01:00

A few months ago my friend Chris Mapleston emailed some questions to legendary folk band Comus with the hope of using the answers for a zine he was setting up in his adopted home of Japan. Which in itself is just a bit ridiculous really. Considering the band, so unloved and discarded during their heyday should only exist in a world of their own - untraceable and unattainable to anyone born after 1973, remembered by few and fondly by less.

Yet somehow this isn't the case; since reforming in 2008 due to an overwhelming resurgence in popularity Comus have steadily become more and more prolific, almost as active as they were in their heyday - playing gigs and festivals at home and abroad, being featured on radio, in magazines, rehearsing and performing new material, and embracing such 21st century miracles as blogging and myspace. While my friend Chris gets his zine together he's very kindly let me upload the full interview here for now, for which I'm incredibly grateful for as this is a pretty big deal, you know?

-You’re headlining the Equinox festival in London this summer, playing the “First Utterance” album in its entirety. What are your feelings towards the album? Are you surprised that the album has developed such a dedicated fan base?

Roger Wootton (Vocalist/Guitarist): I was amazed at the steady resurgence of interest in First Utterance and to have picked up such a young following. I distanced myself from the album for some time after we split up, because it was so unpopular.

I have reappraised it and are now much more proud of it. I am still perplexed at the difference in reaction to it now. I think it is the complete originality of the whole band sound which we and everyone else find stimulating.

-The failure of First Utterance upon its initial release has been cited to be the result of “poor reviews” and “postal strikes.” At the time had you expected the album to be received better than it was?

RW: Yes, although I was disappointed in it and felt that we performed the material much better live, the negative reaction, even from Dawn, the record company was extremely frustrating. Fans would contact us, saying they could not find any record shop that stocked it and had to order it and Dawn were completely disinterested and seemed to want to bury it. I think at that time, 1970-71, that there was every indication that it would be successful due to audience reaction.

–It always surprises me how young the band were when First Utterance was recorded. Were you all prodigious musical talents?

RW: Not really. I think it was just luck how the particular members fell together. It seemed to be the chemistry amongst the members that made us aspire and be more inspired than playing with anyone else.

Comus circa First Utterance

-First Utterance is undoubtedly the album which the Comus cult has developed around. Do you feel its follow up “To Keep from Crying” has been somewhat neglected?

RW: No, I am ashamed of it. The material wasn’t originally intended for Comus and, because of the atmosphere at the time with glam rock, there was a need to find some way of commercialising ourselves. The problems were increased by the fact that only three of the original members wanted to do it. We regard To Keep from Crying as an artistic failure.

-You played with David Bowie back in the day; does he still keep in touch?

RW: No, we lost touch shortly after the Ziggy Stardust album took off. After he became a star he didn’t want anything to do with most of the people he had associated with before.

-Over the years Comus have been praised by many bands, most notably Opeth, but also groups such as Current 93 and Nurse with Wound. Are you familiar with their work, and if so do you feel any common ground?

RW: Yes, Current 93 got in touch with me in 2000 and David Tibet and I got together a couple of times. I am not familiar with Nurse with Wound, but it was Michael Ackerfeldt of Opeth who was largely responsible for Comus reforming. When Opeth were asked to play the Melloboat Festival in Stockholm in 2008, he stipulated that they would only do it if Comus could be persuaded to reform and play the festival as well. He came to London for the signing of the contract and we met for the first time. Since then he has been an important contact and friend to the band and we are in regular contact by Email. Opeth are constantly touring all over the world.

-Do you listen to any modern folk music? Many bands labeled with the “freak folk” tag from a few years ago seemed to have taken influence from Comus…

RW: I think the members of Comus all have varying tastes. I, myself, mainly listen to modern classical music and follow such composers as John Tavener, Osvaldo Golijov, Arvo Part and John Adams.

-Like Comus, many of the bands playing the Equinox Festival seem to take their influences from pagan and folkloric imagery and iconography. Is this still something you take an interest in?

RW: I have looked at many kinds of mysticism and philosophy throughout the world but am now reacquainting myself with paganism since Comus reformed. I am now immersing myself in all the subject matter and imagery of the original Comus in order to write new material.

The Reformed Comus Line Up L-R: Jon Seagrott, Roger Wootton, Andy Hellaby, Bobbie Watson, Glenn Goring, Photo taken from The Wire

-The Comus line-up contains a number of illustrators and designers. Can you tell us a bit more about your work?

RW: I did the drawing for the outside of the gatefold sleeve and a lot of the promotional illustrations and posters. Glenn (Goring, Guitarist/bongo player) did the painting for the inside of the sleeve. I have since begun to return to this style of drawing after many years. I had given up on it because of lack of interest in the UK. Even now I cannot get any illustration work in England outside of Comus. I have returned to the same technique and have so far designed the poster for Melloboat 2008, a Christmas card for the Melloclub in Stockholm, 2008 and the sleeve drawing for the shortly to be released DVD of Comus live at Melloboat. I am currently working on a new T shirt design (Which can now be found here).

-It was only after the release of the “Song to Comus” compilation that the band reunited. How did the decision to get back together come about. And had you ever considered reforming before?

RW: At first, at an emotional reunion at the old manager’s house in 2005 after the rerelease on Song to Comus, we decided that after 35 years it was out of the question – too much water under the bridge – even after Sanctuary had offered us a record deal; but the interest continued to build and we were almost pressurised into reforming in 2007. Until this point we had no idea how popular we had become and it still seems unbelievable considering the lack of interest and negativity we had experienced originally.

Melloboat Festival 2008

-You played the Melloboat Festival in Sweden recently, performing for the first time in 34 years on a boat in Sweden. How did it go?

RW: The gig went very well considering half of us had flu and Bobbie had broken her wrist. The audience were fantastic and very encouraging. Over a hundred had come over from the UK specially to see us and some even flew over from the USA. It was then that we experienced for the first time just how passionate a following we have and decided to stay together and carry on. We played pretty well but over the last 12 months we have got a lot tighter and we have all improved as musicians.

-Has it been hard to relearn Comus’ material, or did it all come flooding back?

RW: It was extremely hard. Trying to relearn the chords from the CD, as nothing was ever written down and trying to find my Comus voice again was a major effort. We all struggled at first finding the rhythms but gradually we got tighter. Most of us were rusty, having not played for a while but gradually it came back.

-My first experience of First Utterance was buying the “Song to Comus” compilation in 2005 and wandering round the caves of Nottingham pubs researching ghost tales for my degree. Every time I listen to the album images from that day spark through my mind. Do you get any similar trips to the past when listening to your work?

RW: Sometimes – we all have our memories – but one of the reasons we were so reluctant to reform was that we had a lot of bad memories of life on the road and did not want to go through it all again. I think though, that the years have created a kind of distance from the music and we are now reassociating with the songs in a new time and reality, knowing that we have a lot of fans.

-How much do the feel the internet has helped ignite the Comus fanbase?

RW: If it were not for the internet Comus would not have reformed. It is largely through file sharing that we now have a global fanbase. When we split up we were unheard of outside Europe.

-Your website tantalizingly reveals that you’re recording new material. Can you shed any light on how it’s shaping up? Will the Malgaard Suite finally see the light of day?

RW: No, the Malgaard Suite is largely forgotten. It was so complex and parts of it did not work very well. We only have one poor sounding recording of it from a gig and we feel it is best left behind. What we wanted to do was to kick back in as we were in the middle of 1971 and what should have been the second album – a continuation from First Utterance and that is what we are doing. The first finished song, ‘Out of the Coma’, will be performed at the Equinox Festival. We are intrigued to see how it will go down. It is very much in the same vain as the songs on First Utterance and we are all working on more.

-Bobbie, on the Colins of Paradise website, among the band’s friends you count artists such as Ital Tek, Venetian Snares and Vladislav Delay. Are you a big electronic music fan? Any chance of this filtering into the new Comus material?

Bobbie Watson (Vocals/Percussion): Jan Jelinek, Burial, and X.A.Cute featuring Mike Ladd, are some of my/our sure favourites (Jon Seagroatt is my husband) - a whole world away from Comus....

-And finally, any plans to take Comus over to Japan?

RW: There was a gig planned for Tokyo but it never came to anything. We look forward to an opportunity to play in Japan.

Comus can be found online at Comusmusic.co.uk.

Washed Out

2009-07-27T07:23:00.012+01:00

Sleep Deprivation can throw up some odd if unmemorable experiances - fortunatly my most recent bout with it has led to my introduction to Washed Out the musical persona of South Carolina native Ernest Weatherly Greene - whose bedroom excursions and online foraging has produced some of 2009's lushest somnambulisitic synthpop gems. Interview here.

-Is your name actually Ernest Weatherly Greene? If so then that's amazing

Yep... Ernest Weatherly Greene, Jr...

-As a person do you feel 'washed out'?

Can't say that I do...I'm too young to be washed out, right!?!

-Your music has been hyped by some respectable sources: gorilla vs bear, pitchfork to name a couple - do things like that mean much to you? Does it matter how many and how much people listen to your music?

I guess more than anything it gives me confidence to put things out there... In the past, I've been hyper-critical about releasing stuff-even with family and friends... so I guess it makes it a little easier...

It also makes it easier to ‘properly’ release something...currently, there is no way that I could afford to self-release, but I'm hoping to settle with a label in the next couple of weeks...so we'll see...

-Not sure if you're familiar with it - but the start of your song 'Feel It All Around' sounds a bit like the intro to I Want You by Gary Low - do you like italo disco?

Good call! Yeah, I love italo... I have a friend who really knows his stuff, so he turns me on to some good jams... I also scour the internet for gems...

-What do you use to create music?

I have a simple set-up in my bedroom with a few mics...I use Reason 4.0/Cubase SE to record, arrange and sequence everything... That's pretty much it besides a guitar and midi keyboard to play synths/trigger samples...

-Your songs are all pretty gorgeous and dreamy - do you have to be in a specific state of mind to write them?

Not really... I pretty much zone-out while recording, so it is all very natural...I've found that I work best when I have no distractions, so I'll basically just lock myself in my room while working on a track :)

-In terms of influences, what inspires you that may not be that obvious to listeners?

I pretty much have two different types of ‘listening styles’... I have the stuff that I really love that I will listen to over and over... and then I'll also listen to some pretty far-out/cheesy stuff just for inspiration or for sampling purposes... I can find something to love about pretty much any song (whether it be the production or the songwriting or even a two-second synth line...), so I can really annoy my girlfriend by listening to 80's r&b on the radio 24/7...

That being said, I really don't have that many dance songs that fit in that 'love' category... at the moment it’s basically lofi GvB type stuff or guys like Bullion and Samiyam...

-I had to Google South Carolina to just find out where abouts it was in America - what's it like to live in?

It's not bad... I used to live in Columbia (I currently live with my parents in rural Georgia)... which is a mid-sized college town...

There is a nice river that runs through the middle of town which is a lot of fun during the summer...the beach is also about an hour away...

-This isn’t a proper question by the way, but just out of curiosity is this shirt (above) from American Apparel?
Yes it is...Sadly, it is at the bottom of a huge lake in rural Georgia...Lost it during a recent trip :(

-What do you plan to do for the rest of the year with WO - do you have any other projects/commitments?

I'm trying to finish up a full-length that will include most of the songs up on my myspace profile as well as a few more I've been writing over the last couple of weeks... I'm currently talking with a few labels about putting it out ASAP...

The most immediate release, though, will be a tape with Mirror Universe... I used to record a lot of hip-hop-ish stuff, so I'm thinking I might incorporate some of it... It will definitely be pretty different than the full-length...

Washed Out can be found at myspace.com/thebabeinthewoods

And if you wanted some free mp3s - you can find them courtesy of No Pain in Pop and Gorilla vs Bear

No No No

2009-07-22T15:11:00.023+01:00

Inspired by 'a love of good illustration and good printing' Nobrow are a collective of film directors, artists amd illustrators formed in December of 2008. They have published prints by the likes of Bjorn Rune Lie and Paul Blow, a book from the mind of TLL endorsed Ben Newman and an oversized bi-annual collection of bespoke sumptuous illustrations from artists such as Stuart Kolakovic, Alex Spiro, Sarah King, Blex Bolex A Richard Allen, Alex Bland and McBess.

-No Brow No1 has been selling pretty well so far - you must be pretty chuffed with it's success. (Out of an initial run of 3000 - less than 500 remain)

We have to say, though we were hoping for this type of response, we certainly didn't count on it and we are really happy that people dig what we're trying to do. It's good to know the hard work and sacrifices have not been in vain....

Ltd Edition Prints from Bjorn Rune Lie (top) and Paul Blow (below)

-Why choose the theme of Gods and Monsters for your first issue, was it just something that you felt the artist's could run with?

Funny you should say that, because we were thinking about the artists when we came up with it- the convo went something like this:

a: what do you think they'll want to draw?

s: I dunno what do you want to draw?

a: monsters...

s: me too...

a: actually, most people I know, at the most fundamental level, want to draw monsters, but it is rare that anyone lets you.

s: cool

a: it does sound a bit vacuous on its own...

s: how about 'Gods and Monsters'....

...and there you go

Work in Progress

-You've just published The Bento Bestiary by Ben Newman - How did the project start? What is the publication about?

It's really awesome, printed by hand by us, bound by us, illustrated by the ever prolific genius of Ben Newman; buy one, its only 40 quid!

The publication is about Yokai monsters from Japanese legend; I think it grew from Ben's submission for the mag...

Detail from The Bento Bestiary

-Can you tell us anything about Nobrow No2 - when will it be out, who will it feature?

Nobrow 2 is coming out on the 14th of November and it is going to be a beaut! All we can tell you at this point is that it will be a fresh bag of tricks (colour wise and otherwise) and contain another set of new illustrators from around the world that will blow your socks off.

A Nobrow Exhibition at Jaguar Shoes, London

-Apart from publishing, do you plan to move into any other fields?

Well we'd love to make toys, but its a very tricky business, so we'll have to see, in the mean time we'll continue with the small press, producing lovely prints and cool limited edition book projects and also pushing the publishing into other fields - comix, collections, etc. keep your eyes peeled.

Nobrow can be found online at nobrow.net.

Outer Space

2009-07-15T22:23:00.004+01:00

Above's a clip from a Chicago Cable childrens program called Chic-A-Go-GO featuring Jazz musician Kelan Philip Cohran. In the video, Cohran talks about his invention of the frankiphone, recites a much longer than expected self-penned poem of his and at the end of it gets all the kids in the audience to dance along to one of his songs.

Though most famous for his work with Sun Ra's Arkestra Cohran, now 82, has a incredible back catalogue of his own - The Wire wrote a pretty comprehensive article on the man if you ever wanted to find out more.

Philip's eight (EIGHT!!) sons make up nine members of The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble who are pretty interesting in their own right. Many thanks to them for putting up so many videos. Including this ripper:

Pocahaunted

2009-06-21T11:17:00.013+01:00

Pocahaunted could have easily just have been another (albeit incredible) female-voiced drone band from the West Coast of America. Instead earlier this year they chose a different path, recruiting and regrouping as a five piece.

They’ve been showcasing their new material on a brief tour of Europe with fellow LA experimentalist (and now keyboardist with the band) Sun Araw. And I was fortunate enough to grab 10 minutes with Lead Singer Amanda (right) and Bassist/vocalist Diva (left) after their show in Nottingham.

-TLL: How has the tour been going, so far?

Amanda: It's been pretty good

Diva: Most of the shows that we've had there's been like dancing and stuff, they come up to us afterwards and they're like 'we didn’t expect to be like coming here, dancing and having an uplifting experience’ but they really got into that mode and everyone's just been like having fun I guess.

-TLL: I've noticed live, now don't take this in the wrong way or anything, but I'm not sure whether it's your guitarist's guitar lines or your drummer's beard but you've got a bit of a 70's feel to it - that whole 70's Californian feel to it, are you quite influenced by that?

Diva: I think we're influenced by a lot of music from then I guess you'd say we're influenced by a lot of jazz, afro beat and a lot of the afro funk is from around that era.
Amanda: Yeah absolutely, the time when like California Soul and funk were sort of for everyone, getting fairly mainstream - coming away from the roots and African American based music and it was even more of like a world phenomenon. And I think that's when like all styles converged and that's why it sound sort of psychedelic, but also a hybrid of dub and reggae beat to it.
Diva: We also really like dub, a lot of psychedelic influences too maybe not as much (70's) but early 60's stuff like with the other guys and stuff.

-TLL: I've noticed you guys seem to have a penchant for Fleetwood Mac as well.

Amanda: (Laughs)I like Fleetwood Mac, quite a bit.

TLL: I noticed the cover of your new record Passage, it's pretty much identikit to Rumours in like the font.

Amanda: It's hard not like them and I’m not really even into the genre that they come in, they just have a special soul to them and do think there's a funny balance between having two women and three men and having this play off like power structure in the band. Like the female voices being like lead voices.

TLL: A bit like Pocahaunted then?

A: Yeah (laughs) a bit like that!

-TLL: I read an interview with you guys on Alan McGee's website toocooltodie.com...

Amanda: It sounds familiar, did I say anything? (Laughs)

TLL: There were a lot of odd questions like 'What are the secret origins behind Pocahaunted?’ 'What are the secret origins of your name?' implying all these mysterious origins and I think the answers were a bit like 'ooo eerr, what? We’re just a band'.

Amanda: Diva and I talk about this constantly. When people ask a band where their name comes from, I think a lot of people put a lot of stock in their band name and they find that it really reflects them and I think sometimes it doesn’t reflect you, you grow into it, rather than it defining you. And the band name Pocahaunted', literally came to me in a dream (laughs), which is cheesy, but it's true. And I woke up and I went 'Pocahaunted!?' How funny' and then all of a sudden you start playing music and you SOUND like Pocahaunted almost like it was clothes that we had to grow up into and so when people say 'oh is it because you love native American imagery?', 'is it because you want play on that idea of ethnicity?' - it's not necessarily and if that happens it's a coincidence because we just play the music that we played and all of a sudden people were like '..! spooookeey, natiiiiive'.
Diva: It’s all coming from the same person so it makes sense. Yeah, asking a band where they got their name from it just takes the mystery away it's not usually that good of a story.
Amanda: it's makes you wonder if anyone ever asks The Beach Boys where they got their name or like The Beatles - what would they say? They would say 'I don't know'.

-TLL: Yeah you've pretty much touched on the question that I was gonna ask you next, I think with a name like Pocahaunted, it's just a good pun, most bands could like start and end with that where as with you, you seem to have taken it as far as it can go.

Amanda: Yeah, I mean they say you know a shark has to keep moving or it dies, I think the same is true with the band (laughs) if you stop like illuminating in your music then stop giving any of your soul to your music all of a sudden what do you have you know? You have a band with 13 of the same albums forever, and I think a lot of fans feel comforted by that, 'oh I know I like this, here's more of what I like' but as the person creating it, to keep loving it...
Diva: To grow as person and have it fulfil the purpose that it gives to you...
Amanda: Because it's hard, as you're growing as a person, you're touring hearing other bands play meeting other people, you're like 'oh I heard this amazing song by a Thai 60's rock group record that's crazy like sparsey jam' all of a sudden you're like 'I want that in my music, I wanna translate that'. So to be this sort of like mopey, steady thing that never pulls in these other influences it's just... it's not for us.
TLL: It's not so cool unless you're like Slayer.

-TLL: Again with the whole Native American thing, they're all these like your websites, and like videos, I've noticed with you guys... they're somewhat more of prominent thing.

Amanda: I think to Diva and I, our aesthetic is really important and if you represent your band then you kind of represent yourself, then you kinda want your art to be in everything and as like a full fledged artist it's not just we want to play you great music but we also want to present you something beautiful or interesting or unique. So if you see our record cover: it reflects us, if you see our video it reflects us and on and on and on. It's kinda sad when you love a band and then you see their art and it's just black with their names in white and they're kinda like 'what does it mean' you know?
Diva: I think a big part of music is taking your own personal world, like your own personal reality that isn't part of this one and giving that to other people, expressing that to other people. And you wanna do that completely and you wanna create an entire world, if music is the most prominent thing you wanna create a world for it to live in not you know.
Amanda: I think it's hard for bands to get lumped into genres and scenes and microcosms of microcosms and we're sort of genre-less and we're sort of aesthetic-full and we just pick colours and images that we connect with all the time then we're much more vibrant than just being rock set in the middle like 'Drone band!' you know, what fun is that?

-TLL: You could have easily been lumped in with that whole West Coast female drone thing with Grouper and Inca Ore, but now you're this full fledged band and it's just developed into this whole other story.

Amanda: It's an incredible blessing to be around people like Liz from Grouper and Eva from Inca Ore and the other women doing their own projects, but I think the vibe of that is a lot about beauty ceaseless and endless beauty and then there's depths to that. We may be more about rhythm and think that starting to be more prominent, our voices are beautiful and they are, but sometimes they're not beautiful but you push it and you're not obsessed with coming across as precious and it think it works for them and that's why it's a beautiful expression of them. And for us, with Bethany and I, we had to be less precious - cause we're not so precious (laughs).

-TLL: I'm not sure why she's not here tonight...
Amanda: She moved to New York to go to college, we had to split coasts. She's much younger than and I couldn't stand in the way of her dreams.
TLL: It seems rude to ask about whether you continue with her, but it seems like a really good friendship between you two, I guess you'd have to be, considering you spend so much time together.
Amanda: Yeah! That's the thing about this particular band, we're all really close and I was obviously incredibly close with Bethany when she lived in my city and Diva's one of my closest friends, and my husbands in the band and two of our really good friends finish up the back line.
TLL: Which one's your husband?
Amanda: My husband's the guitarist, one of the ones with facial hair (laughs), they all have facial- yeah you have to be really close, it's an endeavour.
Diva: We've been together for a week and I think we're just standing strong.
Amanda: (laughs) Yeah, we're standing strong!... No it's been good, you have to be strong and also I think about bands like The Rolling Stones and they go into their shows in five limos, they have five difference dressing rooms, they're like 'Don't talk to me, I've known you for 45 years. Don't even speak to me let's go play Satisfaction and go home'. And I think if you get that point then in the beginning then you have to be brothers and sisters, you have to be close because the creative process is really intense... you know in 45 years I might be like 'Diva, I'm taking a private jet, take your own damn private jet I'll see you when we get to the venue, dammit' - but for now together.

-TLL: How long of the tour have you got left?
Amanda: Two weeks, we've only done one week.
TLL: So it's kinda fresh so far.
Diva: It doesn't feel fresh! (laughs)
Amanda: (laughs)
TLL: Is it too much!?
Amanda: No!
Diva: I mean we're playing every single night on this tour, we haven’t had one day off on this tour, so that's a little intense.
Amanda: We were kinda like 'Hi Ireland... bye Ireland!’ 'Hi Scotland... bye Scotland!'
Diva: At home we're pretty used to staying at home and we've kinda developed our own lives at homes, I mean it's been really amazing, it's been really exciting to come out of that and have all these experiences... but we're not fresh.
A: (laughs) We’re not used to it. We’re doing well, we're eating good food.

-TLL: So do you reckon when you get back, you'll have a bit of a break or do you reckon you'll be going in and recording things?

Diva: We'll have a little, little, little break but we're definitely gonna try and start recording as soon as possible because we have 5 songs already that we need to record and we wanna get the record done, I say as soon as possible but not like rushed, we want it to sound good, as good as it's gonna be. We're gonna start working on that soon.
Amanda: Cause after the tour we'll be slamming at these songs. After 21 days of playing them, if we're not good by then, they’re not meant to be heard by the world (laughs)!

Pocahaunted can be found online at notnotfun.com/pocahaunted and at myspace.com/pocahaunted

CFCF

2009-06-15T12:08:00.030+01:00

You know that Police song 'Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic'? Well that was written about Mike Silver (aka CFCF). Even though Sting changed 'CFCF' to 'She' and travelled back in time to the 80's, just so he didn't seem to like too much of a fanboy, the song's still pretty much spot on.

Mike was in UK on the tail end of a month long semi-holiday playing shows around Europe (including Copenhagen's Distortion Festival) and seeing the sights where he could. This is a bit of a long one.

-TLL: You're djing tonight, what are you playing?

I think it depends on the crowd I guess, if it's a busy night, hopefully it will be, I'll play a lot of dance music like I tend to go in the direction of disco and house stuff, sort of like 90's house and disco and some oddities here and there.

-Will you be playing any of your own stuff at all?

Yeah I'm gonna try and work some in, it tends to not dominate sets usually but I try to work in a couple of songs.

-I guess if you did that you'd feel a bit self-conscious.

Yeah I think so, it doesn’t really make that much sense and besides you know there's so much more music, why would I limit myself?

-It's the same with Viva Radio (American Apparel Radio Station on which Mike has his own channel)

Yeah

-How did get approached with that anyway?

My girlfriend, Andrea, really helped me with that actually because she travelled to LA and sort of met some of the people who were involved with Viva Radio. I work at an American Apparel and on Viva Radio some of the contributors had put on a remix of mine, so she had to get in contact with some of the people involved like this girl Iris and they moved me along to this guy Matt who runs Viva Radio and asked if they were looking a new contributor and they were into it.

-In terms of the music you make yourself, how do you go about it - what do you use is it?

It's pretty much with my laptop I use Logic Pro, occasionally I’ll play some guitar and I have a key controller - but otherwise it's all through that and soft synths and samples and stuff like that.

-Yeah big time, its always kind of interesting to ask about the processes of these things especially cause it's not like...

It’s not like live music or something that comes organically, well it comes out organically but it's a different working process.

-So are there a lot of sleepless nights, just like fiddling around...

No no, well it's sort of if I get going on something, then I’ll probably just work on it. It's like composing you know? You’re working on it. You have the chance to listen to it over and over again and if something's not right you can kinda twiddle with it and you get things to where they're satisfactory. It's lot like editing a film or something like that, you can have the same control with things that you can add in and take out.

-What first influenced you to create music electronically rather than say joining a guitar band with your friends?

Yeah I started using the computer to play around with music when I was pretty young, probably like 12 or something like that. It was probably more something to do with that I started to get into music like that, nothing big but it was around the time of Big Beat and so like Chemical Brothers and stuff like that and I was also into DJ Shadow. So I was just playing around and also I didn’t know anybody who could play any instruments and I at the time couldn’t play any instruments so it was playing around on the computer - it was sort of a hobby and gradually I abandoned it for a while and started to actually play guitar and learn that, but went back to it in my spare time. This was all during high school and then gradually it became more and more something I was working on and kina trying to improve and confident in showing to other people.

-How long ago was that?

I guess the first time that I started to show other people was like three ago.

-And then its all just gone on from there.

Yeah, I’ve been pretty lucky with it, like obviously had some luck with it.

-Good pushes in the right directions

Yeah exactly - like the Crystal Castles remix - I think that was good.

-And the Health one as well?

I thought the Health one was good, that kinda came out of the Crystal Castles remix 'cause I think they're friends.

-I kinda prefer your original material really - would you ever play live?

I dunno, I mean when I'm composing I don't play live that much, I play guitar and I'll play the keyboard parts live, but like the actual composition of a song doesn’t really occur in real time. It would be almost like working backwards you know from the creation of the song so it'd be kind tough. I think I'd need somebody to help me out, it's not something that I’m really working towards.

I kinda like the idea - but I’ve always thought of the songs as the finished product and I don’t find its like necessary to bring it to that next level of being live - I can see it being interesting but if I don't do it right it would kinda just take away from it in the end.

-So it's a lot more thought out than just 'playing live'.

If I did wanna play live it would have to be an entirely different project and that would be an idea from the get go.

-I’ve noticed recently in the past year, with your songs, the beats have become a bit more slower and a lot more mellower - rather than something to hop around and dance to its something to sit back/down and nod your head to.?

I just don’t wanna limit what I’m trying to make as being dance floor music or whatever - some of the stuff that I listen to is kinda slower - especially around at a home. Like, 90% of the time I’m listening to music is at home or on my headphones, it doesn’t necessarily need to be like dance floor music. I’m not that interested in making...

-Party bangers.

Yeah exactly, but at the same time there is a lot of music that I like, that's like that - it's all in its proper place I guess. If I wanna make like a good dance song
I'd try it with that in mind - but most of the time I’m trying work on things that sound good or things that I think sound good.

-One of your recent singles, You Hear Colours, tommy boy from Arawa did a video for, how did that come about?

My manager Patrik (North, of Acephale Records) asked him basically and said that, he sent him the song and he was into it. We had seen some of his videos like he had done this remix of Telepathe by Diamond Vampires that was the one that was really good and made us think that it would be good, a good pairing.

-Arawa's a really good blog as well - it's a similar vibe to what you've going on.

It’s got a nice visual aspect to it.

-Another video is Crystal Mines, featuring that Red Guy in a mask, its pretty much like your mascot or your avatar.

Yeah it was the image that I wanted associated with the music at that point. I still like it, it’s not something that I’m trying to push anymore necessarily but at the same time it is a good image and I like the association.

-What I thought was different for You Hear Colours was that the cover didn’t really seem to fit with the whole sleek image as it's just a sandy grass isn’t it? It's not really like the dark dance floor image that I usually associate with you.

I liked the cover of that one, I think it fits really well with the a-side of that single, it's like certain sounds always evoke images and I thought the wind going through the grass on that one I thought was, that was the part that I liked.

-What music have you been enjoying recently?

Saint Etienne, a British band from 90's, I think a lot of that like Balearic style music takes them as an influence and Air France have said they're really influenced by them. Bands like Field Mice and Sarah Records bands, I’ve been enjoying that lately. There’s a German band called Popol Vuh, a Krautrock band sort of, they did soundtracks for Werner Herzog movies like Aguirre, that soundtrack is really good. And then Arthur Russell, a lot of that. All the time.

-He’s been quite a big influence recently, its weird how the resurgence has started with quite a lot of people that I know.

Well the bulk of his stuff has only been released in the last ten years, like you can see why people like it now as opposed to maybe ten years ago because it's sort of had a chance to sink in I guess as being something’s that really stands on its own, more than anything else.

-What I find really odd with CFCF that it's not as popular as it should be. Does that frustrate you at all, do you worry about how many people are listening to your songs or whether you should be getting your music out there more.

Not to a huge extent, only really to the extent that it would mean I would have more freedom to work on more stuff, you know? Because, obviously, I have a job and certain time constraints as far as working and stuff and that’s the main thing, otherwise I tend to sort of just be working on whatever I’m enjoying at the moment or whatever I feel like making. Like it's nice when people are saying they're into it buts it's not a prerequisite as far as my reasons for wanting to make music and its not a prerequisite for continuing to want to make music. If it did, then it'd be kind of silly, it would sort of defeat the purpose. The main thing is, I want to work on music as much as the music I’m listening to is inspiring me. If I’m listening to a lot of stuff that's getting me into that creative mood then that'd be the main thing that drives me.

-Do you think you'll always be at least tinkering about?

Yeah definitely, even if no one was listening or you know nothing had happened I’d still be working on stuff.

-With Montreal and Canada, in the UK it's more famous for something like The Arcade Fire - what’s it like for electronic music, is it quite receptive, are there good club nights and venues?

I’m not sure, I don’t actually put myself out there as far as playing in public in Montreal, I kinda like living there and enjoying my life there. I would never want to be at the point where I’m like 'the dude from The Arcade Fire' and the notoriety that comes from that, that's kinda the opposite of what I want. But luckily there's just not a big market, there’s not a big scene for that kinda music there anyways. There are people who are into it and those are the people I know anyway, so it doesn’t become a problem usually. The majority of people there are really into the Indie-Rock thing and there are always people who are into other stuff.

-Like any city

Yeah exactly.

CFCF can be found online at http://www.myspace.com/cfcf

Also if you wanted to listen to some of CFCF's more recent material (which you do) Discodust put up some mp3s earlier in the year - check it out

Joi oh Joi

2009-06-09T11:18:00.025+01:00

Johannes Kjartansson (above) is a photographer from Reykjavik. Interview and images here

-Can I ask what equipment you use?

I mainly use a Yashica T4/T5 but otherwise I just use any autofocus snapshot camera I can get my hands on. For professional assignments I use a Contax G2. I never use any lights, tripods or such equipments since I'm more into capturing the moment, in a flash, with a flash.

-What influences you to take photographs?

I studied graphic design and have a B.A. degree in that from the Iceland Academy of the Arts. I was always taking pictures alongside my studies. I started shooting film in my first year and gradually started to get much better response to my pictures than my design work. I have always been an avid reader of magazines such as i-D, Dazed & Confused and Purple to name a few. The style found there has always had a huge influence on me. I also really like to go to museums and galleries, which is one of the main reason I moved to New York. It's a melting pot of ideas and influences.

-You're connected with Landon Metz's Company of People - how did that come about?

Friends of mine, Jeremy Liebman and Victoria Hely-Hutchinson who are both great photographers introduced me to Landon and Hannah Metz on their Brooklyn rooftop the other day. The Company of People is a very nice concept. Sort of like tinyvices.com which I also like a lot.

-Your photos that were featured in Vice last December are pretty much all very gorgeous girls from Iceland - are Icelandic girls always like this?

I was a bit worried about that assignment, since it was supposed to supplement poetry by Eileen Myles about Iceland, and she's quite controversial. But the poetry was excellent and I really liked it. The girls are mostly my girlfriends having fun. When girls are having genuine fun they tend to look pretty gorgeous. There is a saying that the vikings used to steal all the beautiful girls from Ireland and Scandinavia and bring them back to Iceland. So Icelanders tend to think their women are the most beautiful in the world. I don't necessarily agree with that. I just think there is a wide variety of different looks in Iceland. What I find beautiful isn't always what the general public agrees on. But a smile is always beautiful and I guess that's what I was going for with these pictures. They are from a series I made called The Bank of Fun.

-In an interview with Prestigium-Studio you said Iceland was 'bankrupt country' - it's coming up to a year since it's economic collapse - how are people like yourself, artists, coping?

Most people think that artists flourish when times are really bad. Beethoven, Mozart and Paul Klee and all those guys made some of their best works when they had it pretty shitty. My favorite quote is from a song by Fleetwood Mac: "Thunder only happens when it's raining". Icelandic artists had a pretty luxurious time until October 2008. Bankers were sponsoring art exhibitions like madmen and everybody had 2-3 jobs to pay for the standard lifestyle. Now a lot of spaces are empty and people are losing their jobs. If that doesn't push people into doing something creative, I don't know what will. As for me, I'm just trying to live in New York with my hard earned Kronas (ISK) which is the Icelandic currency. It has lost 100% of it's value so what I'm striving for now is to earn some dollars instead. Fingers crossed.

-Your photos tend to have the focus on one object in centre of the picture, a car or a person for example, with little else going on around it - is this how you prefer photos to look like?

That's an interesting question. That is sort of my shooting style. I don't like to have to much clutter around my subjects. I tend to go up close and be in people's faces. I'm quite tall so I have to twist and turn myself to shoot people at eye-level. People have often made fun of my shooting style since I get myself into the most ridiculous poses and tend to be quite aggressive. Especially when I'm intoxicated. If not I'm more shy and it's harder for me to approach my subjects. That's something I'm working on.

-You feature a very social and inebriated side of Reykavik in your photographs - how is the city for its nightlife?

Reykjavík has a pretty small but crazy nightlife scene. We don't have any clubs, so coffee-shops turn into bars and clubs during weekends. People don't go out that much during weekdays so they tend to save up all their energy and blast it all out during friday and saturday. Usually people stay at home drinking until 1 o'clock and then go out, mostly because of the over-the-top drink prices. Bars are open until 5 o'clock in the night and during summer it's quite popular to go to after-parties that tend to last until dawn. But actually in the summertime there is no dawn. It's bright outside 24/7 so when you get out of bars it feels like it's daytime. We don't have a very good habit of dating like Americans do. People usually get wasted, go home together, have sex, and then decide if they want to meet again. I guess that has given us a pretty promiscuous reputation. The nightlife is crazy but fun.. if you think you've got what it takes. answer.

-What do you have planned for the rest of the year?

I'm planning on staying in New York for the summer, and hopefully get a Visa to stay for a couple of years. I really like living in Iceland but there's only so-and-so much you can do there. During winter it can be really depressing working in the constant darkness and mountains of snow. It's also pretty limiting for a photographer. I'd like to see the world and photograph as much as I can. And New York feels like a good starting point.

Joi can be found online at www.joi.is.com

25/100

2009-06-03T13:05:00.007+01:00

25 years ago this week Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris - to celebrate, The Guardian (heard of it?) featured a nice enough article and interview with Pajitnov about the game a quarter of a century since its inception - but it's probably just best to watch the classic 2004 documentary 'From Russia With Love' for a full rundown. Just look at that face, what a hero.

3/3

2009-05-26T13:36:00.006+01:00

For the final part in this trilogy on scrappy three pieces I had the pleasure of talking to Brighton superheroes and Sex Is Disgusting creators Teen Sheikhs.

The band were playing a gig at the Chameleon for Nottingham promoters New Weird Nottingham, as part of a bill with The Dissolutes , Spin Spin the Dogs and not-so-secret headliners Mika Miko (who completely killed it by the way)

To be honest, it was quite a lot to ask to get three people to stand still and talk coherently after such an inebriated and messy gig, but somehow at 3am I got Andy (guitar/vocals), James (drums) and Will (bass) together outside the venue. Though my alcohol consumption level was nowhere near close to anyone else's and my eyelids were just lead weights at that point in the night it was great to just to let them talk at will (and length) about anything they wanted.

TLL: Alright shall we start with the basics? like how you guys got together?

Andy: Yeah, I'll answer that. Basically, me and James run a label together called Sex Is Disgusting and we decided we wanted to start a band. We were a two piece, it was him on drums, me on guitar and vocals. It didn't really sound... it sounded really crap, so then Will lives with James and he's one of our best friends...
Will: I started to say no at the start though.
Andy: Yeah, he wasn't into it at first, we were like 'please play bass he was like 'naaaaaarghhhhh''
Will: Basically James said like 'we were going to ask someone else, but you're the only guy that understands how SHIT we are, will you come play bass for us?'

Andy: We did that, we asked him (Will) and it was...
Will: No no no, (to Andy) you fucked it over once I finally agreed to it was all 'oh no no no. No. Not if you're that shit'. Then I finally agreed to join, me and Andy got wasted, and he was just like 'I'm just not happy for you to be in a band with me'
Andy: Oh god, forgot about that
Will: ...and then there's this guy (points to james) 'fuck yeah, big brother... someone's telling fibbs, 'you said you wouldn't show' - 'you said you're not into it' what the fuck, come.on.man'.
Andy: It was me, I was too drunk to remember, but I said to Will 'I think we're better as a two piece, don't come to practise' ermm, but he did eventually come to A practise and since then, that's been it.

TLL: And how long ago was that?

Will: couple of months?
Andy: 6 months ago?
James: Noooo, no no no.
Andy: (to James) You and me started practising about 5 or 6 months ago.
Will: What was it March?
James: We started practising just after Christmas and then had about four practises so that was like one a week... so three months, pretty much.
Andy: that doesn't make any sense...
James: Three months. round it up,
Will: Round it down
Andy: Anyway basically, we started January, he joined in March,

TLL: How much of those months are spent practising, is it just once a week?

James: Once a week,
Will: Once a week
Andy: Pretty much
Will: Once a week, Wednesday afternoon 3-6
James: No no, actually, no, the only time we haven't done it once a week is when we've been playing - we've actually done like ONCE a week

TLL: Which makes gigs a bit of practise
James: A bit of a chore
Will: 'Hello, fuck this shit, why are we playing shows I'd rather be practising'

TLL: Gettin it really tight...
Andy: Yeah no, we generally practise our shows...
Will: TIGHT!? Tight has never been and never will be our shtick.
James: I do like that idea of hiding yourself away for, you know, six months and emerging as a fully formed band.
Will: Bullshit! Like we'll try so hard and still come out as just a bunch of sloppy bastards... there's nothing that can change that.
James: Will's been playing instruments for errr... since he was young. I've only been playing the drums for as long as I've been playing the drums, which is three years.
Andy and Will: 'I'VE ONLY BEEN PLAYING THE DRUMS FOR AS LONG AS I'VE BEEN PLAYING THE DRUMS!?'
Will: James' other band, some hot shit.
Andy: I've only been playing guitar for about a year, but I don't know the names of any chords or strings.
Will: I don't know what the fuck I'm doing with this sloppy racket, I used to be a piano teacher, this inane knowledge of technical music's all up here's gone out.

At this point the tape stopped, and conveniently enough Henry from Lovvers stepped in and reminds me that I've been using his dictaphone - had genuinely always assumed it was mine.

-TLL: Can we talk about Sex is Disgusting?
Andy: We can talk about whatever you want.
TLL: Why did you form it?
Andy: What the label?
TLL: Yeah
Andy: Erm, basically because they're not enough promoters in Brighton - who are putting on small punk shows, paying bands well, keeping things low, just generally without being sort of cliche, doing something fun and like being D.I.Y. We try to put records out by like bands that we really like. It's all the same things that ever other label says, but we were really exciting when we heard Human Hair and Graffiti Island and just thought like 'yeah maybe someone else will put them out, but lets just kinda go for it and ask them and do it'. I just wanna put records out that I wanna hear, and go to shows, put on shows rather, that I wanna to go to. And that's how this kind of happened.
James: student loans coming up kinda helped.
Will: at the start of each term 'Ooo! A 7 inch'!
James: Yeah you can tell the release schedule is based around student loan payments

TLL: Are all three of you students then?
Andy: James does illustration at Brighton, but I do media and cultural studies at Sussex
Will: ...Fisher Price Degree
Andy: That's not a fisher price degree!
Will: I did do music and visual art at Brighton, now I work for a fucking Nathan Barley Advertising company... it sucks. Everyday at work 'oh you brought your pig in, oh you bought your N64,

TLL: What have you got coming up with SID, is there anything in the pipeline at all - have you been asking any bands
Andy: Yeah, like erm, we put out the Human Hair 7" and we were going to put out the Graffiti Island 7" next but erm, they've just kinda of been tinkering around, experimenting and kina being really slow coming up with stuff. Every time that they think that they're like 'yeah yeah, like it's almost ready' - they kinda just change their mind again. Conan's one of my friends, so I just said to him, could we maybe... wait a bit?
So instead, we'll do Mazes next, a band from Manchester sort of musically rock influenced
TLL: It's just one guy isn't it?
James: It was one guy
Andy: The guy who wrote the songs was one guy, Jack wrote the songs. They're a full band now, like a constant line up

Andy: Then after that the Graffitti Island 7", then Thee Fair Ohs from London, they're like a garage band if they played like 10 times faster and liked I dunno.. Swing Kids. They're super fast
James: And Eddies' obsessed with Ornette Cole and John Coltrane, and Matt just really wants to play 60's garage and...
Andy: The drummer just wants to be in a hardcore band
James: He's just playing blast beats
Andy: It all coalesced into a really insanely fast garage band
James: Then after that I don't know. we don't have an order for set list
Andy: No we do! We've got... those are the first four, we set those, and the next two after that are
James: Mazes
Andy: The Bitters, a Band called The Bitter from Canada. who are the first band we've signed from outside the UK. We're generally gonna focus on UK bands, but we really like them and they're nice people. It's like Ben (guitarist/vocalist) that plays in Fucked Up and used to be in a Hardcore band called No Warning.
James: Yeah
Andy: After that, the Pens and Mazes split
James: Yeah
Andy: Everything else is up for grabs
James: We'll do something with Trash Kit, we'll do something with La La Vasquez, probably release something on our own blah blah blah. I dunno, there's just too much good UK stuff at the moment
Andy: SID are gonna like, just stop doing shows over the summer and just concentrate on records until like Septemeber/October - our last show till then is Finally Punk (link for the event). We're just gonna take a break to concentrate on putting records out, cause we've got a bit of a back log and it needs being done basically.

TLL; With the whole Lo fi/UK thing it always seems like all these bands seem to know each other, all really incestuous- do you feel connected to a scene - playing the same kinda music and putting out records...
James: it's wierd like, cause we knew all those people long before their 'current bands' existed. like i've known John from Male Bonding long before Male Bonding or PRE existed. Similarly we've known plenty of other bands like Conan from Graffiti Island and now it seems to be all these...
Will: It's this really amazing happy accident, like oh shit, all these guys I know are making music that I thinks fucking great
James: Some of them have been in really bad bands, we've been in bad bands that they don't like and they've been in bands that I don't like. but suddenly, you're in a band that I like, we're in a band that you like and we're... there's some kind... there is some kind of common thread but i don't think you can sum it up in some certain terms
Andy: I think you put it perfectly by saying 'happy accident'
Will and James: Yeah
Andy: Everyone's friends and knows each other
Will: It's not like a 'Lo-fi' scene, its just like a four tracks a quick way to get music out
Andy: We're all broke and young
James: 'ohhh we need to record really fucking shitty'
Will: That's obviously no one's point of view, but lets start a band

James: It was almost like, it was almost a matter of time, it was a ticking time bomb, people were playing in bands that weren't getting anything released and like, yeah it was just a matter of time. They took it into their own hands, labels like Paradise Vendors start up and House Anxiety - it was only a matter of time before they were like 'lets put these fucking bands out, someone's got to do it, we'll do it ourselves'.

Talking to Teen Sheikhs really was a refreshing a experience and revisiting the tapes over the next few days really highlighted how much energy and positivity the three of them are carrying about and giving to the UK. Mind blowing stuff.

P.S oh yeah, one of the promoters of the show and bassist/drummer of Human Hair James Smith, was going to take photos of the band but was too busy on the night - take a look a james' flickr though - it's very good.

Mi Ami

2009-05-17T15:01:00.019+01:00

Mi Ami are Daniel Martin-Mcormick, Jacob Long and Damon Palermo from San Fransico. Something about Black Eyes, something about African Rythmns, they've just finished a tour of the UK and Europe, perhaps you saw them? Interview here

-Mi Ami seem to be like a Jam band, fleshing out ideas in the live environment - is this how you come up with songs or is the process more traditional?

We write the songs through jamming and leave ourselves room to do what we need to live. I read an interview with Slayer, and Dave Lombardo says that he "wings it" every night, which I think is as good a description as any. We have our parts and we have the songs, but we still just go for it as much as possible. It keeps things fresh.

-Your sound seems to be about molding together abrasive noises and danceable rhythms - was this the intention from the start?

No, there was no intention. Well, actually, I have always had this abstract idea that I want the band to sound like a rainforest, which to me means a lot of unique sounds happening at the same time, in parallel and also in harmony, each with its own unique character, and the sound creating a sonic space that you can explore. But I think the rhythmic and harsher aspects have for to do with making music that we literally and figuratively feel. With some exceptions, I don't really feel much from skronky, start-stop rhythms, or from smooth guitar playing.

-Daniel, your vocal style seems to push your vocal cords to extremes - how much of a strain is it on your voice?

Not much. I've had some training and I've been doing this for a while. I wouldn't do something that would hurt every night. It's more about expression.

-You've been touring Europe now for weeks, playing shows every other day it seems, can places and gigs sometimes blur into one? What cities have been memorable?

Well, first of all, we play shows every day, not every other day. But yes, it can be easy to forget where you were a night or two ago. At the same time, each place is unique and special, so being spaced out has more to do with a constant stream of new information coming your way, and dealing with the routine of change that is travel. All the cities are memorable in their ways, but I am especially fond of brutal cities, like New Orleans and Belfast, or very old cities like Rome.

Echononecho The Hideout in Chicago, IL - Video by Ben Chandler

-Live, Daniel, seems to try to kick start the audience - pushing, pulling and running into them to incite some movement - do people usually respond well to this stimulation?

Yeah they usually get excited. Sometimes I'm a little harsher; the other night in Copenhagen, there were about twelve people in the audience and I look out and this one tall guy is standing right in the middle, texting. So I ran out and tried to take his phone, but then he did the idiotic "Yeah Yeah!! I'm rocking out with you!" move and tried to bear-hug me so I grabbed him by the neck and got him off me. At least he wasn't texting anymore. But that's a special occasion. Usually it's more of a loving gesture, to get people out of their own world and into the psychic space of the show.

-You guys Dj quite a lot, don't you? What new tracks are Mi Ami enjoying?

There's this young guy from Detroit named Kyle Hall. I think he's only seventeen or eighteen years old, but he is incredible, especially his (corny and amazingly-named) song 'I Love Dr. Girlfriend.' I also really like this Black Cock edit called 'Give It Up'. Otherwise, just classic junk... In the van on this tour, we played some classic Crazy Horse era Neil Young, Pharoah Sanders 'Blind Deaf and Dumb', Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works 1....

-Apart from Metallica, what other great bands are from San Francisco?

Right now, all the good bands are really small and that's exciting. I think in the next year, you will be hearing from J.A.W.S., Psychic Reality, 0th, Inca Ore (well from Oakland) and a few other newly-formed combos that I don't yet know the names of. People seems psyched on Sic Alps and Thee Oh Sees and stuff like that.

-What do the three of you do when not playing music together?

Work, love, live, learn.

Mi Ami can be found online via their Myspace and Record Label

Suburban bliss

2009-05-03T16:15:00.012+01:00

Suburban Bliss is a London-based clothing line that specializes in intricately detailed, screen printed t-shirts. All of the items are made independantly and environmentally friendly with designs that take elements from African motifs to Black Metal theatrics whilst seemingly rejecting the urban landscape about them. I interviewed founder, Toby Shaull, about the company and it's output.

-You've been operating since 2007, how did the company begin? Is Suburban Bliss just yourself or a team of people?

Suburban Bliss has actually existed since 2000 but the first full line of designs came out in Summer 2006. Suburban Bliss is run by me, no one else does anything to do with SB, just me. My girlfriend and other friends help me a lot but I do everything myself.

-What does a typical day for you entail, is Suburban Bliss the only current project of yours?

It depends what is going on and how empty the bank account is. I do a lot of different shit every day some days are 100% dedicated to SB other days I work doing carpentry. Some days carpentry, art, SB, drinking, riding around, running away. Every day is different if every day were the same I would not be able to deal with life.

-The designs seem to be mostly done by yourself, but with additions from other artists here and there. Do you approach people to participate or are the artists friends of yours?

The collection's change every season but I only work with my friends. A lot of designs are not done by me actually it will always say somewhere who did what on the archive blog http://www.suburbanblissarchive.blogspot.com

-Some of the designs of Suburban Bliss mirror contemporaries such as Aurel Schmidt and the illustrations of Alexander Tucker, but where do you take your inspiration from?

I like art, raw art. That is the main inspiration behind the label. Music, art and the earth are the main things behind the imagery. Everyone who contributes makes art firstly and some are illustrators for a living. I make art that is what I am aiming to end up doing with my life I think. My art is very limited I would not describe myself as an illustrator my designs come from head my mind and my surroundings. The things I draw came to me when I was younger spending a lot of time on the tube and thinking. I have ideas that I cannot illustrate so a lot of time I suggest something to one of the people I work with. Not a brief as such but, for example I told Izzie that I would like her to do a graphic with a skull made from flowers so she went off and did and the end results were one of the best t-shirts I have run. I actually used to work for the same guy as Alexander Tucker doing Polish Plastering and he did specialist paint finishes I have never met him myself he left just as I started when he got signed to ATP.

-There are strong visual themes running through your t-shirts, turning away from the built environment around you embracing the natural one, for example the heavy use of animals and faces as well as the outdoor fashion shoots. Is this intentional? Why focus on this particular idea for your designs?

The untouched Earth is the real world - we live in the Human world, the fake world. We are animals who have forgotten what we are we have made a world we control or so we think I just don't like it that much. The Lostalots, the woods it's where I like it is true and beautiful. I am haunted by Nature, I am followed by my past, I live in the city I don't know why anymore one day I will flee. I will escape the entrapment that we have created for ourselves.

-It's entertaining here to see you talk about the processes of t-shirt making, something that I've never really given a moments thought - how hard can it be to get the designs you want onto a shirt?

Most people that make clothing especially printed clothing such as t-shirts make what ever art work and slap it it on a t-shirt. Most of the prints out there are screened in Plasticol which is a plastic based ink it is totally chemical/synthetic and sits on top of the fabric. You know when you get a t-shirt and feels like it has a piece of sand paper stuck on it, I hate this, so 90% of what I make now is using discharged water based ink. This is not to harmful to the environment when washed off the screen and it embedded into the fabric so you can't feel the print. Screen printing is an art like any creative method it can become as complicated as you you want it to become. We print everything in London by hand, every print is inspected and tested, Stuart who prints my stuff is in a place where other screen printers all work in the same premises they rent the space from an artist called Rob Ryan all of them have been screening for many years. So they are the dons of screening no one can touch them.

-DoBeDo.co.uk, seems like an incredibly help/useful website, how did your association with it come about?

DO BE DO is my friends Tyrone Lebon's web site, we have an arrangement, so he is my online shop he helps me out - he is an amazing human I love him. DO BE DO is trying to put creative stuff out there, helping creative people who are making/doing stuff show it. Ever since I met Tyrone he has always helped me and everyone around him, he is a good dude I am stoked we are both doing are own thing and trying to survive.

-Was your background in skateboarding a way of leading you into the work you do now: how you met contacts and creative people etc?

I used to be a professional skateboarder I was involved with the industry side of skateboarding since quite a young age so yeah definitely. I helped launch 2 skateboard companies. I grew up skating at Harrow Skate Park where this distributor used to be based. I remember doing work experience there when I was 15 and folding t-shirts.

-What are your plans for the rest of the year, are you working on a new collection already?

I have been working really hard finishing of summer 2010 line I am making shirts 100% inside the M25 everything has been made inside London's perimeters printed, sewn together and all components have been purchased inside the M25. Keep on going stay alive and I am going to Italy on a long planned Art sabbatical. I am so excited about that I am gonna work on my own art one day i will do show just need to finish all the work.

Suburban Bliss have a brand new website launched this week, of course it's incredible

And for all you London tykes out there's a sale on this weekend, with prices going from just £2.50