Dead Formats T-shirt Series No.3: Compact Audio Cassette by Michael C Place / Build 2003
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The Moebius exhibition in Paris ends this weekend at the Foundation Cartier. I sadly didn’t make it back there but hope it will come to the UK some day. Here are a selection of the films featured on the exhibition site.
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As subtle as a brick, no one’s pretending they don’t know what the ‘M’ stands for, debuts April.
Jim Mahfood and Ziggy Marley with writer, Joe Casey.
[youtube width=”636″ height=”384″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsbNtm8M9j8[/youtube]
New Jersey-based radio station WFMU is completely run by donations, each year they have a week long Marathon to raise money to keep the station operational. Their approach to music and breadth of programming is one of the best in the world. As they are paid for by the listeners they are not accountable to advertisers and the usual daytime radio playlists so many stations are. You can make a pledge and pick up some decent items in the process, I just got this Tim Biskup T-shirt for my troubles but over $75 gets you a handmade ‘DJ Premium‘, an artifact made specially for the marathon, usually a mix compilation of rareties or oddites.
Their Beware of the Blog pages are also crammed with so many audio treats it’s ridiculous. If you don’t know the station then now’s a good time to dive in, I mean, these guys let people like Steinski and Noah Uman have shows!
[vimeo width=”640″ height=”480″]http://www.vimeo.com/20765024[/vimeo]
From the Dangerous Minds site: Melody, a film based on Histoire de Melody Nelson made for French TV, was directed by Jean Christophe Averty with Gainsbourg and his lover Jane Birkin in the lead roles. Amazing.
The Six Ton Armour site hosts ‘Psychcasts’ – psychedelic podcasts – alongside artwork by Rimrimrim. They’ve recently started putting out mixes on CD too and I got a couple of them in the post last week. Beautiful they are too, with screen printed covers that recall some of the Twisted Nerve / Finders Keepers sleeves or Canada’s now defunct Bully label. The mixes are very good, sprawling across the psych realm and digging deep. Definitely worth keeping and eye and ear on for future releases and mixes. Buy these two CDs here… but you can also download the Black Olsun ‘Spells’ mix for free from here…
Two upcoming events for your diary, both on the same weekend, featuring two friends of mine in similar settings. First up on, Friday March 18th, is The Vinyl Veterans at the Black Dove in Brighton with Jonny Cuba (ex-Dynamic Syncopation / Soundsci).
The day after it’s the turn of Classic Material at C.A.M.P. in Hoxton, London with Ollie Teeba (The Herbaliser / Soundsci).
Both events share a similar theme: a love of Old School Hip Hop, funk and breakbeats and a fondness for vinyl as the preferred medium to DJ with (Vinyl Veterans is Vinyl ONLY!). Readers of this blog with be familiar with Classic Material’s monthly theme of a different year as the basis for each session and this month it’s the turn of 1991.
Also check out their excellent themed mix, shirt and stickers sets in their store, there’s a new one each month featuring a re-rendering of a classic Hip Hop label logo – Classic Material store.
Also, both events are FREE so there’s no excuse about door prices, if you love what Rap used to be about and not what its sadly become, then these nights are for you. There seem to be more and more cropping up too, Rap History in Berlin and the Boom Bap in London, which I played at last night and is a weekly concern!
The opening of ‘Subduction Zones’ at the Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ is on Thursday 17th March from 17:00 – 19:00 www.Deltainc.nl
The opening will also be the warm up to the World Minimal Music Festival. Viral radio, Future Vintage, Subbacultcha and 22 tracks will take care of the music.
Some pictures from the show over at the Graffuturism blog
Brendan McCarthy – ‘Dream Tree’ illustration, 2008
(41.5 x 29.5 mm, pen and whiteout on paper).
Unpublished illustration for a story concept by Brendan McCarthy – ‘The Fabulous Dreamtrees’.
“The Dreamtree (is) a phantasmagorical tree whose fruit is the source of all dreams. Eat the fruit and experience the dream of yourself. It is the precious thing you will carry back to the waking world.”
– Swimini Purpose, 2005.
Amon Tobin‘s 2005 Splinter Cell game soundtrack has been remixed to coincide with the release of a new 3D version of the game. Various Ninja Tune artists such as Daedelus, Kid Koala, King Cannibal, The Qemists, Eskmo and Lorn have worked their magic on the tracks alongside a couple of new pieces by Amon himself.
For the artwork I was required to update the original and decided to experiment a little with the 3D analyph technique you can achieve in print. If you have a pair of red and blue 3D glasses to hand, have a look at this from the inner sleeve of the vinyl. The physical LP and CD versions are released in April but you can buy the download version right now from the Ninjashop.
A couple of friends of mine, Remi/Rough and Augustine Kofie, are involved in a huge mural and gallery show in Vancouver right now, alongside artists Jerry ‘Joker’ Inscoe and Scott Sueme. They’ve just spent the past week painting two huge murals on the Moda Hotel and their four man show opened at the weekend at Becker Galleries for the rest of March.
Here are a few examples of work from the show (sorry but I’m a big Kofie fan).
Photos from the mural painting here, Remi’s photos of the gallery show here, official show website here (where they used a piece of a Kofie piece I own to illustrate him).
I saw about 90 minutes of this last night at the Hayward Gallery on the Southbank. They were screening the entire 24 hour film for free but for one day only so, by the time you read this, it will be over I’m afraid. Marclay’s piece is made from hundreds of snippets of films with the constant being a clock, or time keeping device, present in each scene. The piece starts at 6pm and every clip corresponds to the actual time you are watching it which creates a vortex in which you are hyper aware of each passing minute.
It is hypnotic, fascinating and frequently funny, even though there is no plot, central character or conclusion in sight. The soundtrack creates amazing tension and release moments too, as you can imagine. If a clock is featured in a film it’s usually signaling someone waiting or something about to happen, a race against time or some sort of horror about to awaken. The approach to the hour becomes the equivalent of a major plot event and something that you’re willing to happen faster than it ever will. I saw the section before midnight and on the hour there was a large montage of clocks striking terror into the heart accompanied by suitably demonic music, all ended by a hilarious clip of a grandfather clock opening to reveal a zombie woman which was so perfectly timed the whole audience burst out laughing.
Most people won’t be able to sit through the whole thing and you don’t need to to ‘get’ it but there’s much more to the piece than the basic premise. Certain images become a recurring motif ; lighting candles or ringing phones for instance, and footage from several films repeatedly crops up giving it a certain continuity. I was surprised at how watchable it was, despite having no ending in sight. Waiting for a bus on Waterloo Bridge sometime after 1am, I looked across the river to the see the giant clock near Enbankment Station, as if starring in my own personal version of the film. Recommended viewing even if you can only catch a small portion of it.
‘Earthside 8’ comic issue No. 1, finished copy of an aborted UK comic from the makers of 2000ad, 1992. Includes stories and artwork by Dave Gibbons, Carlos Ezquerra, Colin MacNeil, Jamie Hewlett, John Wagner, Pat Mills and Clint Langley. Never officially published, most were pulped.
Lots of great stuff floating around at the moment…[vimeo width=”636″ height=”478″]http://vimeo.com/20122120[/vimeo]
I designed this last week for a club night in the US called See You Next Thursday (SYNTH), here you can see a rough progression through to the final forms.
Recently spotted in NYC by my friend Sarah Coleman aka Inkymole.
These appeared on the web recently, no one seems to know whether they are original 80’s posters or more recent versions. Fascinating nevertheless.
This little piece of history has been going viral over the last few weeks after being put up on Soundcloud by a user called mjs538.
*UPDATE: Another user: DJMOOG1 has put up a better quality version which I’ve embedded above.
Although not actually by mjs538, the pieces have a strange and convoluted history in themselves as well as portraying the history of pop music based on all the #1 hits in the US charts since 1958. Both mixes use up to 5 seconds of each and every #1 since the mid fifties, in order, up until 1981 in Part 1 and into the early nineties in Part 2. Whilst a herculean effort, even in this day and age of digital editing and online stores to source the material, it’s all the more impressive that the bulk of Part 1 was made in the late seventies using reel to reel tape and a razor blade.
The piece – known as ‘Time Sweep’ – was part of an extensive radio show called ‘The History of Rock n Roll’, made by Drake – Chenault Enterprises for radio in the US which utilized 52 hours to bring the first comprehensive history of rock music to the airwaves. Each year was prefaced with a medley of that year’s #1 hit singles (a ‘Chart Sweep’) and the whole was compiled into a ‘Time Sweep’ to end the mammoth series. The engineer responsible was Mark Ford (above), a veteran of radio jingles and production. He compiled and edited all the selections up until 1977, not only cutting and splicing but also EQing and time stretching sections to make them fit together sonically and selecting and pairing little couplets of lyrics at certain points – Roy Orbison‘s “Pretty woman, walking down the street”, segues into “there she was, just a walking down the street”.
For a little ‘behind the scenes’ info, check out this link on the making of the special
But the story doesn’t end there. For those paying attention, just after the Meco version of ‘Star Wars’ in Part 1, the sound quality noticeably changes in both the stereo field, quality and editing. The reason for this is that a teacher from Maryland University called Hugo Keesing extended and updated the concept of the Chart / Time Sweep for his classes as each year finished up until 1991. With all due respect to Keesing, he isn’t a sound engineer and it shows in the application of edits and production. This is where the piece stops being art and turns to documentation and, as such, loses the essence of its greatness. Keesing was using a Wollensack tape recorder to edit with and had no way to clean up or EQ the tracks. So, the majority of Part 1 is Mark Ford’s original (up until 1977) and then Keesing’s extension, which runs the entirety of Part 2.
Five Seconds Of Every #1 Pop Single Part 2 by mjs538
How this piece came into circulation on the web was via a tape with Keesing’s name on it that was passed to the Evolution Control Committee‘s Mark Gunderson in the 90’s and the piece was widely believed to have been by him in it’s entirety by the cut and paste fraternity unfamiliar with the History of Rock n Roll programme. Eventually Keesing was tracked down and you can read an interview with him over at Jon Nelson‘s ‘Some Assembly Required’ blog.
For a comprehensive overview of the whole story check here, there is also an update of the whole concept from 1993 to 2010 if you can’t get enough of this kind of thing.
A match made in heaven, not sure exactly what he’s doing with them yet but an official announcement was made last week that Ashley Wood has partnered with Bandai, the makers of Gundam figures, to do something. Here’s a first look at a painting he did earlier this week – beautiful
