I used to collect tube maps. A whole wall covered in criss-crossing primary-coloured lines in my bedroom.
Fairly shoddy video cobbled together in a bit of a hurry from bits of the original in order to accompany my Paloma Faith remix. You can still vote for my remix – until November 6th 2012 – at http://awe.sm/i8hgS . I would be enormously grateful if you were to do so.
On the 20th of August 1519, the great Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan set sail from Sanlúcar de Barrameda in search of a westward route to the fabled Spice Islands. A generation younger than Columbus, Magellan’s was an age of exploration, of voyages of discovery, whose wondrous tales would soon feed into a dawning proto-science fiction of trips to the moon and far flung utopias. Magellan’s journey would make him the first to cross the Pacific, and ultimately became the first expedition to circumnavigate the globe (though Magellan himself would be dead before his fleet returned to Spain). This year, just a little short of half a millennium later, producer, label boss and superstar DJ, Michael Mayer sets sail upon waves of sound for his own far-flung desert shore, an island he has named ‘Mantasy’.
Google the word and you will find references to an old Stephen Colbert routine about mundane male fantasies. Mayer has other things in mind. “I didn’t choose the word,” he insists. “It chose me. It was suddenly on my tongue. I didn’t know where it came from. I didn’t know what it means. And I still don’t exactly know what it means. But, while working on the album, Mantasy became this point of escape for me.” And what an escape. From the rich, wave-like swells of album opener ‘Sully’, to the hedonistic, neon cityscape of closer ‘Good Times’ via ‘Baumhaus’’s filtered birdsong and the oriental-sounding sample which kicks off ‘Roses’, Mantasy is a journey of a record, a veritable voyage of discovery in sound.
“Mantasy stands for an island or a continent that has been undiscovered so far which I would discover doing my work on the album,” claims Mayer. “The making of the album was a journey to that.” So it may come as less of a surprise than it might have done that Mayer claims the two main influences behind the album were not classic tracks from Detroit or recent club smashes fresh out of Ibiza; not musical at all in fact, but literary. “Two books definitely had a big impact on the album,” he admits. One was David Toop’s ambient odyssey, Ocean of Sound, and the other was Stefan Zweig’s Conqueror of the Seas, a biography of Ferdinand Magellan.
[read the full interview at The Line of Best Fit]
Tweet“Maison tournante aérienne” (aerial rotating house) by Albert Robida. The drawing is reminiscent of the film Howl’s Moving Castle, was my first thought. And indeed, googling for “Hayao Miyazaki” “Albert Robida” brought up three blog posts[1][2][3] confirming that others share my hypothesis.
One of the cuts from the soundtrack would later be arranged for strings to be played by the Kronos Quartet.
TweetMaison des gardes agricoles (Claude Nicolas Ledoux)
Maison des gardes agricoles[1][2] is a plan for a spherical house by Claude Nicolas Ledoux, designed for the Mauperthuis-project.
Charles Jencks in The Story of Post-Modernism: Five Decades of the Ironic, Iconic and Critical in Architecture describes it as a “utopian house for rural caretakers.”
Others have described it as a “refus du mouton,” a sheepcote.
See also
The great hall of the Chapelle des Petits Augustins is dominated by the larger than life figure of the Colleone; a plaster mold copy based upon an original by Verrocchio which still stands in a Venetian square. A proud figure on horseback; erect, dynamic, for all the world as if were about to charge down the aisle toward the exit and make a break for it.
From a small anteroom to the side, the distinctively haughty French of the 16th arrondissement can be heard. “How old is this artist? Is he still alive?” she enquires. “Good, good. A perfect time to buy then.” When the attendant idly mentions that the artist in question produces work that is already going for quite a sum this causes a minor eruption. “Who are you to tell me what’s expensive? You know nothing about how much money I have. What is expensive to you may not be expensive to me, you know.” And with that she charges out, as proud and erect as Verrocchio’s rider.
The artist in question is Urs Fischer, who will be forty next year and is already selling for millions. But the work besides which this spat took place, a piece of what Gustav Metzger would call “auto-destructive art” could scarcely be more difficult to sell. It was only installed a month ago and already it is close to evanescence; seeping away into the ground upon which it sits like so many bath suds down a drain. But amongst all the grand old replicas which surround it, monuments to permanence and stolidity all; Fischer’s fugacious statue is a true original.
[read the full review at Bonjour Paris]
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