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"Wire contributor, semi-mythical pop svengali, erstwhile thespian, sampler troubadour and untidy kitchen user" - Owen Hatherley of Sit Down Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy

"Your songs are pretty little paths - take us somewhere nice." - Elodie Amandine Roy, Applejack Zine

This is a little jingle I made for Dandelion Radio I can’t even remember how many years ago. I think they had put out some sort of open call on Myspace or whatever and I sent them three or four of which this is the only one that I can still find on my hard drive. Made using a dictaphone and a Casio keyboard by the sound of it. I have no idea if they ever used it.

5 years ago
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gallowhill:
“ A collection of the plaster casts from Apollo astronaut’s hands
”

gallowhill:

A collection of the plaster casts from Apollo astronaut’s hands

(via thespectraldimension)

5 years ago
2,549 notes
First on your left as you enter is a drawing,
 no more than a half-metre square, offering a window onto a strange kind of Eden. Giant flowers, twined like musical clefs, shade tiny trees through which goat-thighed imps frolic and drink toasts. A...

First on your left as you enter is a drawing,
 no more than a half-metre square, offering a window onto a strange kind of Eden. Giant flowers, twined like musical clefs, shade tiny trees through which goat-thighed imps frolic and drink toasts. A microcosmic Cockayne rendered in a spidery greyscale, it’s seemingly hellbent on leaving as little white space unfilled by fairytale whimsy as possible. But this is not an illustration from Tolkien nor a preparatory sketch for some phantasmagoria of Bosch or Enki Bilal. The signature identifies it as a product of the spirit world, by ‘Victorien Sardou, medium’.

There is something of the night about Purkinje Effect. Curated by artist Laurent Grasso for the Palais de Tokyo’s Nouvelles Vagues seasonof new curating talent, its title derives from the nocturnal distortion in colour contrast first noticed by Czech anatomist Jan Purkyne. Grasso cheerfully admits that he is no curator. Nonetheless, the selection testifies to a strain of research and adept juxtaposition that has long characterised his endeavours – in particular, perhaps, last year’s solo show Uraniborg, at the Jeu de Paume across town. 

Working on that, Grasso became fascinated by a grotto built by Huguenot craftsman Bernard Palissy in the surrounding Tuileries gardens. So he was immediately struck, upon delving into Galerie 1900–2000’s collection, by a sketch (Quartier des Animaux chez Zoroastre, Bernard Palissy, c. 1860)
 by the aforementioned Sardou, a dramatist, apparently under psychic dictation from Palissy himself, now resident on Jupiter and living next door to Zoroaster (whose home, in florid curlicues, the drawing depicts).

Palissy’s ghost is not the only spirit haunting this exhibition. The death mask of Paul Éluard hangs austere and impassive, marred by bullet holes received during the liberation of Paris when it hung in André Breton’s studio. The two surrealists had been fascinated by death masks since their discovery, in the late 1920s, of a book by Ernst Benkard. Éluard confessed to Breton he had dreamt about an anonymous girl whose mask he’d seen in that book, and consequently took the unusual step of posing for his own cast. Hence Éluard’s death mask was shot while its model still lived.

Read the rest of my review of Galerie 1900–2000’s exhibition Purkinje Effect at Art Review.

5 years ago
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Immediately upon entering Saâdane Afif’s exhibition at the Institut d’Art Contemporain, the visitor was presented with a mystery. After first passing through a hall of posters that seemed to promote various rock concerts but proved on closer...

Immediately upon entering Saâdane Afif’s exhibition at the Institut d’Art Contemporain, the visitor was presented with a mystery. After first passing through a hall of posters that seemed to promote various rock concerts but proved on closer inspection to derive from the artist’s previous exhibitions, I found myself in a square white room, empty but for a small black radio transmitter with a steel aerial measuring several feet and housed in Perspex. An inscription on the transmitter’s surface indicated it was ‘microprocessor controlled’ and ‘quartz-lock synthesized’, but this offered few indications of its meaning or purpose. The first clue, as so often in this exhibition, came via our ears.

The next room contained the receiver to that transmitter: a Tivoli Audio ‘Songbook’ portable radio. But before I could tune my auditory nerves to the songs it played, another sound caught my attention: an insistent ticking from a fourth room interceded, a reminder of the clock’s tyranny over recorded music; the music industry’s cult of youth, and the threat of extinction that hangs over the whole industry today. So, like a detective, I proceeded to piece together the puzzle; or, perhaps more aptly, like a psychoanalyst, scouring symptoms in search of a syndrome. The works in Afif’s exhibition, from sculptures and painted canvases to wall texts and found objects, could be the fragments dreamt by a frustrated musician, into which we plunge slowly deeper.

Read the rest of my review of Saâdane Afif’s show at Villeurbanne’s Institut d'Art Contemporain in Frieze.

5 years ago
1 note
In 2010, the octogenarian kinetic artist Julio Le Parc found himself in Venice, wandering about the different levels of the Palazzo Grassi. ‘Keep your ticket,’ said the Argentinian-born artist to his companion. ‘Why?’ asked his friend. ‘You’ll see,’...

In 2010, the octogenarian kinetic artist Julio Le Parc found himself in Venice, wandering about the different levels of the Palazzo Grassi. ‘Keep your ticket,’ said the Argentinian-born artist to his companion. ‘Why?’ asked his friend. ‘You’ll see,’ Le Parc replied. Then he proposed a deal to the gallery attendant: if he and his friend did not like the exhibition they should be given a full refund; if they liked only half the works on show, they would ask for just half their entrance fee back. After all, reasoned Le Parc, ‘this collector is a millionaire. Such an amount of money is nothing to him. And, as an intelligent man, he will no doubt want to know what the public thinks of his taste and his arrangement of the show.’ Upon arriving back at the ground floor of the Palazzo, however, they could no longer find the attendant. ‘This collector has no need of the public,’ Le Parc concluded. ‘We pay and we leave and that is all.’1

Le Parc himself could scarcely be accused of having such a cavalier attitude towards his audience. Ever since the earliest exhibitions of the collective he convened in the early 1960s, the Groupe de recherche d’art visuel (GRAV), he has been in the habit of providing brief questionnaires for the public, soliciting their opinions and preferences. His large solo show earlier this year at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris – the first survey of the artist’s career in France, which began with his arrival in Paris from Argentina in the late 1950s – was no exception. At the exit of the salle de jeux(Games Room), which displayed Le Parc’s interactive ‘game’ works such as Faites tomber les mythes (Knock Down the Myths, 1969), Choissisez vos enemis (Choose Your Enemies, 1970) andFrappez les gradés (Strike the Officers, 1971), Le Parc left a stack of A4 sheets pertaining to the latter piece, asking us to indicate which of the various authority figures the artist had illustrated on punching bags we would strike first: the policeman, the priest, the MP? Or, perhaps, the artist?

Sitting with Le Parc three days before the show’s opening, amidst all the noise and bustle of a major exhibition under construction, the artist described to me what he perceives as a significant shift in power in the art world between the conception of this work and the present. The power of the critic, he says, ‘has diminished. Back then, nobody knew the names of curators and museum directors, but little by little they grew in importance,’ and the balance swung increasingly in favour of star curators and collectors. In recent times, however, Le Parc has noted a further change. The public, who he says were once no more than ‘spectators’, now exert ‘a much greater influence’ over the exhibitions they see. This role for the audience – less passive, more active – was anticipated in no small degree by Le Parc himself, in works he made nearly half a century ago.

Read the rest of my interview with Julio Le Parc in Frieze.

5 years ago
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The Chess-Playing Alien

image
“Boards are rarely set up around his home, he adds, because he doesn’t need them to train. Nor does he rely on computers as much as other leading players. “I use them to analyse my openings, but in tournaments my assumption is that I am the best player there. That is why I seek positions where computer analysis can’t play that much of a role, or where I can analyse it better than a computer."” 
“Carlsen has already been invited to take the role of a chess-playing alien from the future in the forthcoming new edition of the Star Trek movie franchise – an offer he turned down.” 


Between these two statements there is something like the beginning of a syllogism. From Charles Babbage to Alan Turing, chess has long been the paradigm of machine intelligence. When the hottest player on the planet talks about plotting moves that are beyond the understanding of a computer, he is thought of as an alien. We have been thinking of human intelligence through the lens of computers for so long now that to think unlike a machine is to be immediately suspected of inhumanity.
5 years ago
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“Deep in space, a derelict rocket from the year 1987 – centuries in the past – explodes into splinters of radioactive dust, destroyed by its own nuclear weapons. The pulsing electronic noise that had built-up towards the detonation abruptly stops,...

“Deep in space, a derelict rocket from the year 1987 – centuries in the past – explodes into splinters of radioactive dust, destroyed by its own nuclear weapons. The pulsing electronic noise that had built-up towards the detonation abruptly stops, and for the first time in a long while we are left with total silence. Back on board the Ikarie, the modern spaceship that discovered this old ruin lost millions of miles from Earth, we see the stunned faces of the crew. In one cabin, two astronauts discuss the crimes of the twentieth century, its wars and its holocausts. One of them begins absentmindedly picking out a few chords on a grand piano, which has a peculiar wing-like double lid. ‘Honegger,’ he says, by way of explanation. ‘Also twentieth century.’

Those piano chords are from the introduction to Arthur Honegger’s dramatic psalm, ‘Le roi David’, from 1921. Composed by one of ‘Les Six’, the group of dynamic young composers who gathered around Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie, in its day ‘Le roi David’ was strikingly modern in its wild eclecticism, borrowing freely from jazz and gregorian chant, Bach and Stravinsky. But for all its lyrical beauty, amid the future sounds of Zdenĕk Liška’s score for Ikarie XB-1 (1963), directed by Jindrich Polák, it sounds positively antediluvian, like the dim ghost of a distant age.”

Read the rest of my column fort Electric Sheep Magazine on the soundtrack for Ikarie XB–1

5 years ago
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For many contemporary artists who either do or did play in a band (from Mike Kelley to Martin Creed), the temptation on the part of curators tends towards marking a clean separation between the artists’ musical activities and those art works presumed...

For many contemporary artists who either do or did play in a band (from Mike Kelley to Martin Creed), the temptation on the part of curators tends towards marking a clean separation between the artists’ musical activities and those art works presumed less frivolous. With Linder, no such separation is possible. It is not just that many of her early collages were produced specifically to promote or accompany her music, or that many of the same themes of grotesquery and exploitation pervade both – nor even that the violent collision of seeming opposites that characterizes her collages might serve as an equally apt description of Ludus’s music. What may prove to be one of Linder’s more enduring and influential artistic statements, recognised in this exhibition as a work of performance art whose filmed documentation was exhibited as such, was the stage act for a particular Ludus gig.

On 5 November 1982, the band appeared on stage at The Hacienda in Manchester, with Sterling wearing a bodice made of raw meat. A similar image of a woman clothed in meat appeared on The Undertones’ singles collection of the following year, All Wrapped Up. Canadian sculptor Jana Sterbak’s sewn beef dress,Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic, was exhibited at Montreal’s Galerie Rene Boulin in 1987. More recently, Lady Gaga sported a dress made of flank steak designed by Franc Fernandez at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards. But there is a significant difference between the later outfits and the original: whereas Lady Gaga used only the choicest cuts of prime beef, sourced from some artisanal butcher and chosen for their longevity, Linder merely rummaged in the bins of a local Chinese restaurant and stitched together chicken brains and other even less savoury selections.

For three and a half decades now, Linder has been cutting and sticking images of flesh and other comestibles, pushing the speculative identity of pornographic and commercial images to their gruesome limits. While her methods may have become more refined over the years (working increasingly with negatives bought from vintage shoots), the basic ingredients of her work have remained remarkably consistent: the cakes, flowers and outsized lips which variously adorn and deform her nudes can be found from her earliest pieces to her most recent. What perhaps has changed is pornography itself, becoming ever more the abject parody of itself presented in Linder’s collages. What, for instance, in a work like Sehnsucht (Longing, 2011) – for which the artist returned to her old modus operandi of working directly on contemporary store-bought jazz magazines – is the more surreal, the more horrifying: the lipstick and the car imposed by the artist or the bizarre suction device applied to the model’s breasts in the original image? Do we somehow need the former in order to see the sickness of the latter?

Read the full review of Linder’s show at the Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris, at Frieze.

5 years ago
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onevisiblefuture:

Vehicle-Mounted Active Denial System (V-MADS) (by jaglavaksoldier)

“Designed for use against enemy combatants” - who apparently look a lot like anti-war protestors.

(Source: youtube.com, via new-aesthetic)

5 years ago
51 notes
A curious thing happens about an hour into Rudolph Maté’s early 1950s Armageddon flick When Worlds Collide. We’re coming to the end of an emotional scene. As the character Tony (played by Peter Hansen) walks away from the camera, the strings rise up...

A curious thing happens about an hour into Rudolph Maté’s early 1950s Armageddon flick When Worlds Collide. We’re coming to the end of an emotional scene. As the character Tony (played by Peter Hansen) walks away from the camera, the strings rise up out of the soundtrack and a whistled counter melody enters. Tony turns back to face the camera – almost cheekily, as if winking to the audience – and in doing so confirms he was the whistler responsible for the tune.

It’s an odd moment because we are used to entering into a sort of silent contract with film-makers. We don’t tend to think that the music we hear comes from an orchestra just out of view, which the characters are aware of and listening along to as they engage in whatever action confronts them - although during the silent era some Hollywood studios actually did employ orchestras to play on set during shooting. We accept – without really thinking about it – that the score is somehow concerned with the film’s narrative without being a part of it. It’s outside the action, commenting on it, subtly guiding our emotional responses, like the narrator’s voice in a novel or the stage directions in a play. So when one of the characters starts whistling along it creates a slightly jarring effect.

A similar thing happens a little earlier in the same film. We hear a siren going off and, although we don’t actually see any emergency vehicles, there is a sense of panic: people running, explosions going off. So we have no problem connecting the sound with the action we see. But then the music comes in and seems to sweep the siren up with it. It’s not just that the music is in time with the siren’s beating: the strings are playing a sort of whirling melody; there are wailing slides in the brass. The sound becomes part of the musical score, indistinguishable from it. Finally, the music subsides and we hear the siren alone. Someone’s been injured and people are running to help. Again, though we see no ambulance arriving, we associate the sound with part of the action again. But for a moment it hovered in a strange realm of undecidability between the film’s inside and outside; between the locatable events and objects of the narrative and a musical score which colours and enhances them.

There are no sirens in Roger Corman's Day The World Ended, a similarly apocalyptic film from just a few years later. But a series of musical effects are clearly intended to be reminiscent of their sound: the wail of a theremin over the mushroom cloud images that open the film; the howling trumpet glissando that kicks off Pete Candoli’s ’S.F. Blues’, heard playing on a home hi-fi system somewhat later on. We hear sirens even when they’re not there. And once more there’s that confusion between the inside and outside of the narrative diegesis; between music and noise.

Just short of three minutes into a hit single from 2011 by American pop singer-songwriter, Jason Derulo, the same panic signal rises up out of the mix. ‘Don’t Wanna Go Home’ was the lead single from Derulo’s second album, Future History. It debuted at number one in the UK charts and reached the top ten in five other countries. With an infectious riff sampled from 'Show Me Love’, the early 90s dance-pop hit by Robin S., and a catchy chorus lifted from the popular Caribbean tune, 'Day-O’, the final ingredient necessary to make it a surefire hit would seem to be the wailing siren that takes us from the breakdown after the second chorus into the middle-eight. With its auto-tuned injunction to “Turn the lights low 'cos we about to get blown”, the greatest emergency faced by Derulo is not so much the end of the world as the end of the party. More than half a century after When Worlds Collide, the siren would seem to have definitively left behind any link to the semiotics of disaster in favour of a purely visceral power to surge and rise up in a wave of sheer intensity.

Read the rest of my piece on musical sirens for the Quietus.

5 years ago
1 note
writingcapital:
“ The Finance and Fossil Fuel Web – Transnational Institute
“ Banks and Oil not only make up the most wealthy corporations, they sit on each other’s boards and their executives include some of the world’s most powerful political and...

writingcapital:

The Finance and Fossil Fuel Web Transnational Institute

Banks and Oil not only make up the most wealthy corporations, they sit on each other’s boards and their executives include some of the world’s most powerful political and social institutions. This infographic aims to provide an insight into one dimension of the state of corporate power in 2013.

“We’re more likely to see other companies as collaborators rather than adversaries… We aren’t so much competing with each other as we are competing with the earth. And maybe that’s a healthy way to look at it.”

George Kirkland, managing director of Chevron Nigeria Ltd.

5 years ago
16 notes
As far back as he can remember, Marlon Silva always wanted to be a DJ.
As a child, growing up in the high-rise estates of Bairro da Portela on the outskirts of Lisbon, he would watch his father and older cousin set up for the neighbourhood parties....

As far back as he can remember, Marlon Silva always wanted to be a DJ.

As a child, growing up in the high-rise estates of Bairro da Portela on the outskirts of Lisbon, he would watch his father and older cousin set up for the neighbourhood parties. His cousin was the DJ, mixing Luso-African genres like semba and kizomba with The Beatles and whatever else would prove popular with the ever-demanding crowds of dancers. His father owned the sound system. Today, Marlon can walk around the projects and everyone knows who he is. “Hey!” the kids shout as they see him pass, “DJ Marfox!”

At 25, Marfox is already seen as an elder statesman of the burgeoning Lisbon scene. His name comes from a Nintendo game – Star Fox, a blocky 3D outer space shoot-em-up for the SNES – that he was addicted to as a teenager. By way of tribute, many of the younger producers on the scene have similar names: Karfox, Liofox, Dadifox, Nigga Fox. Marfox calls his music “free”, unbeholden to any style, be it African, European, or American. But its origins lie in the hothouse atmosphere of Lisbon’s noites africanas on the edges of the city, where West African zouk rubs up against Brazilian pagode and commercial r’n'b, and “DJs have to be very attentive to what the crowd might be into at any given moment. They’re very demanding crowds,” Marlon tells me, “they know what they’re into and they know what they expect from a club. They expect to dance.”

I met up with Marfox and his younger protégé, Rogério Brandão aka DJ Nigga Fox, at a coffee shop near the container port on the east side of Lisbon. On a block of converted warehouses by the waterfront, the cafe sits next to a record shop called Flur where José Moura and Márcio Matos work. José and Márcio make up half of the team behind Principe Discos (with Pedro Gomes and Nelson Gomes), the label that’s been releasing Marlon and Rogério’s records over the last couple of years. They’re also here, nursing cups of espresso, to translate for us.

Since the release of Principe and Marfox’s debut 12” last year, Eu Sel Quem Sou, their frenzied polyrhythmic hybrid of Angolan kuduro, batida, and kizomba with western house and techno, has been moving out of ad-hoc parties in abandoned buildings in the peripheries into the hip clubs in the city centre and beyond. Recently, Philip Sherburne, writing in Spin, called it “the waist-windingest music I’ve ever heard…like an ultra-vivid hybrid of grime and trance.” This weekend, Marfox and Nigga Fox take the stage at the Unsound Festival in Kraków. I’m here to find out how the scene came together in the first place.

Read the rest of my interview with DJ Marfox and DJ Nigga Fox at FACT Magazine.

5 years ago
0 notes