I’ll be playing a AV set at the after party for this event in Belgium this weekend in between McBess‘ group The Dead Pirates and a DJ set from Trevor Jackson.
Event
Salon des Refusés V opens today at 201 Portobello Rd, London, W11, a pop up gallery and shop of 30 artists curated by Scraffer. Including work from names like Remi/Rough, Luke Insect, Pure Evil, Kid Acne, Inkie and James Jessop it should be a pretty diverse selection.
The overriding theme of the show is artists that are pushing boundaries, with the work of established artists hanging next to that of ‘up and comers’; there is something for everyone, both stylistically and fiscally.
I have an original collage piece on show called ‘Think of a Space’, one of the first of a new series I’m doing at the moment. The Scraffer site will also have two new colour versions of my ‘Skullstronaut’ print on sale shortly after the show.
The show will be on between 22nd to 28th April only and doors open between 10am and 7pm each day.
Also this Thursday, the second showing of The Search Engine full dome show at Dome Club at the Think Tank Planetarium in Birmingham.
A quick selection of images sent to me my buyers over the Record Store Day weekend. Thanks to Cheeta Breaks, Ian Wilson, Mr Mumbles, RJ Sandford, SV Child, Tom Hamid and Trist Stephens.
It’s that time of year again, Record Store Day looms this Saturday and the Secret 7″ project is back for another year. Initiated by Universal Records, it presents artists and designers with the chance to create a one-off cover for one of seven different releases, both old and new.
This year’s artists are Public Enemy, Elton John, Laura Marling, Nas, Haim, Jessie Ware and Nick Drake. Over 700 sleeves have been created and each will be available on April 20th at Mother, 10 Redchurch St, London, E2 7DD at the price of £40 each with the money raised going to the charity Art Against Knives.
You won’t know who has designed which sleeve or what song you’re buying (although you can take an educated guess) until you buy it, when all will be revealed. I bought three last year and it was one of the most exciting purchases I made in recent memory.
The sleeves were on view to the public last weekend and I managed to catch the last few minutes and snap some favourites before they closed the doors, which reopen at 10am on Saturday. I spotted work by Pete Fowler, Jonathan Edwards and Felt Mistress among them but Gilbert & George have contributed this year somewhere too.
First rule of Dome Club? Everybody talks about Dome Club – go and check it out, an online video just doesn’t do this justice. I won’t be at the April shows but I might be at the May one (just eating popcorn probably).
Record Store Day is only 3 weeks away and, as usual, my local used record store, Rat Records in Camberwell, will be celebrating. I had great fun playing there last year and, as is traditional, my good friend David Vallade has out done himself this year with his poster for the event. They have six separate in stores this year, lord knows where they will fit everyone!
Rat doesn’t have any of the usual RSD releases as they are a used store but they have new stock every Saturday and will be stockpiling specials for April 20th I’m sure. If you’re South of the river and don’t fancy joining the scrum uptown but want to just rummage in the unknown and support a local business in the celebration of vinyl then this is a good place to start.
They are just off Camberwell Green, nearest tube is Oval, nearest overground is Denmark Hill and there are plenty of buses from Oval or Elephant that go straight there.
Starting next week at Dome Club, the UK’s first weekly place to see full dome content, is the first of four performances of ‘The Search Engine’. This is a 360 degree film for the full dome (or planetarium) environment.
It’s been seen before in London, Leicester and Montreal but this is a newer, revised version that lasts 50 minutes and presents an alternative version of the album with film, animation, photography and graphics.
The first show is April 4th, starting at 7pm at the Think Tank planetarium at Millennium Point, Birmingham. It will then be shown on the 25th, then May 16th and June 6th. Admission is £4 or £3 depending where you sit – the middle back half is usually the sweet spot for dome showings.
The club has weekly showings of all sorts of interesting, art-based full dome films and it’s really the sort of experience it’s hard to convey without actually going yourself. Here’s the little short about the Montreal version of this show that I did last summer.
Ticket available both online or at the door, go to: domeclub.co.uk > TICKETS > Dome Club -> 4th April (or whichever date you’re after).
The poster, designed by Luke Insect, for Salon des Refusés V – a pop up shop/gallery initiated by Scraffer, coming this April in West London. I’ll have prints for sale and work on display – more info soon…
No, that’s not a Roy Lichtenstein, it’s Dave ‘Watchmen’ Gibbons after Irv Novick and this is his entry for the Image Duplicator show that starts in May at the Orbital comics gallery in London. The aim of the show is to highlight the original artists that Lichtenstein copied and produce a new take on their images, much the same as he did. The difference in this case will be that the show will mainly consist of comic book artists and commercial illustrators and be held in a gallery in a comic shop rather than an art gallery. The exhibition is the brainchild of designer Rian Hughes who has long written about the contradictions between what is deemed high and lo art and is a champion of showcasing lost or forgotten artists’ work.
For those unfamiliar with the nuts and bolts of Lichtenstein’s aping of others’ work as his own, take a look at this amazing site by David Barsalou called DECONSTRUCTING ROY LICHTENSTEIN. He has painstakingly tracked as many of the sources that Lichtenstein copied and presents the two side by side, the results are quite shocking both in how exactly he copied and how bad or bland the results are.
There was a great documentary on about him on the BBC just two weeks ago called, ‘Whaam!’ It covered his career from both sides of the story as well as featuring a section with Dave Gibbons making his case for the originals over Lichtenstein’s copies. The Image Duplicator show runs for two weeks between May 16th-31st, centered around the same time that The Tate Modern end their Lichtenstein retrospective. There is still time to enter if you fancy it and any proceeds from sales of prints will be given to the Hero Initiative charity that looks after the welfare of senior comic creators.
In another nice piece of synchronicity, this week the story broke about the aging British artist Brian Sanders who was sought out by the producers of Mad Men to illustrate posters for the new series in his old style. They found his originals in a book called, ‘Lifestyle Illustration of the 60’s’ and asked their art department to draft something in the same fashion. Rather than copy the style they went and found Sanders and the results speak for themselves. Just by coincidence, the person who put the book together that they saw the work in was none other than Rian Hughes.
Hope all the fantastic Mothers out there have a great day today (and every day).
It’s been a little quiet on here of late due to illness, work and having builders pulling my house apart. Lots going on though, Record Store Day is coming up next month with some special Food treats dropping around the same time. I’ve also been working on a very special item for another Ninja artist that I can’t wait to reveal…
The Light Surgeons go out on tour this March for a brief stint around the UK before a London show on April 19th – they’ll be performing ‘SuperEverything*’ for the first time in the UK here:
09/03/2013 – WARWICK ARTS CENTRE – COVENTRY
10/03/2013 – COLSTON HALL – BRISTOL
11/03/2013 – STUDIO THEATRE – BRIGHTON DOME
12/03/2013 – THE SAGE – GATESHEAD
19/04/2013 – HACKNEY EMPIRE – LONDON
The ‘SuperEverything*’ performance is a mix of live music, visuals and performance, commissioned by the British Council and created by The Light Surgeons in collaboration with Malaysian artists. Filmed on location across Malaysia, it explores identity, ritual and place using documentary narratives to create an audio-visual portrait of the diverse cultural landscape of Malaysia and how our complex identities are connected.
This is live cinema performance exploded across multiple projections with an electronic score combining traditional South East Asian instruments, western classical compositions and field recordings. I’ve heard so much about this over the last year and finally it’s coming to London. Few do AV as beautifully and intelligently as The Light Surgeons, this will be something to experience and discuss later rather than the usual ‘ooh!, ahh!’ spectacles so many audio-visual shows seem to fall into these days.
By now, the word is out, there are limited ‘returns’ tickets on the door of the Tate and, if you’re prepared to stand in the cold for an hour or two and queue, you have a good chance of scoring one for the shows left. That’s all well and good if you live in London or can afford a trip on the off chance that you might be lucky. But it’s a poke in the eye for all who can’t and spent the best part of their day on the phone trying to get tickets last December. With this in mind two nights have sprung up so that fans can take matters into their own hands and dictate as if they were the group themselves – ‘tonight Matthew, I’m going to be in… Kraftwerk’.
The first one takes place on March 1st in Cardiff:
“Eight different live ensembles play the songs of Kraftwerk to ease the disappointment of being unable to get tickets to see them in London.
We couldn’t get tickets either. The touts and scalpers got there first. You could buy a ticket from some disgraceful profiteer, but here’s a more appealing way to enjoy some Kraftwerk.
Live bands of Cardiff musicians, both unknown and well-established, will celebrate Kraftwerk with a night to remember at Chapter Arts Centre.
Bring your own robots.”
The Rules / Application form: here
Tickets: £7/£5 concessions, now on sale at Chapter.
More information: contact us by email or telephone Cardiff 2031 1904.
Twitter: @kraftwerknight
and here’s another that’s sprung up in Glasgow two days later after seeing the Cardiff idea and deciding to do their own version:
Andy Votel presents: Kleksploitation – 17 March 2013
A homage to Pan Kleks, a Polish trilogy of films for children from the 1980s, loved by Poland’s children from that era. Electronic musician, DJ and music producer Andy Votel draws on images, music and sound from the original films, selecting and subverting, to coax their darker side to the surface and create something wholly original, unsettling and – at times – weirdly humorous.
The Pan Kleks trilogy was scored by Andrzej Korzyński, a Warsaw composer whose unearthed catalogue Votel is currently releasing on his Finders Keepers label, including music written for Andrzej Żuławski’s incredible Possesion.
Want to go to this, tickets available here
Starting this year at Birmingham’s Think Tank Science Museum is Dome Club, run by the Planetarium manager Mario Di Maggio. Named after a random remark I made to Mario after a 2 hour screening session (“the only rule of Dome Club is: Everyone must talk about Dome Club”) he’s gone ahead and set one up. His site has wisely used a different motto:
‘No-one can be told what Dome Club is. You have to see it for yourself’
This isn’t hyperbole as anyone who has been to a planetarium will tell you, you can’t put this on YouTube, it doesn’t work like that, instead of looking through the window you’re inside the room with a dome film.
Every Dome Club evening will begin with a variety of fulldome shorts, followed by one of three main performances:
• Chaos & Order – forty scientific visualisations set to superb original music in four movements
• Fractals! – the record-breaking fulldome spectacular by the Fractal Foundation (you may think fractals are old hat, you won’t think that once you’ve seen them shown on a dome)
• The Search Engine – the first fulldome music production by London’s DJ Food (*cough* – this won’t begin until April though)
They also have two special performances of Dark Side of the Moon scheduled for Thu 7th and Fri 8th March. Additionally, supporting the Birmingham Art Gallery exhibition Metropolis: Reflections on the Modern City (23 March – 23 June 2013), they will be screening tempus ruhr weekly at 5.30PM over that period. Dome Club ticket holders who arrive early can see tempus ruhr for free.
Tickets are now available for weekly Dome Club evenings – every Thursday – for all scheduled performances up to 20th June: They have allocated seating available with seats in the rear three rows (the sweet spot in any dome showing) costing £6.00 and the front three rows £5.00 (£1.50 and £1.00 for tempus ruhr).
It all happens at Thinktank Birmingham Science Museum, Millennium Point, Curzon St, B4 7XG, UK.
The flyer says it all, the legendary Savage Pencil aka Edwin Pouncey will be at Orbital on Jan 10th.
*In no particular order at all
Albums:
Pepe Deluxé – ‘Queen of the Wave’ (Deluxe Edition) (Catskills)
2econd Class Citizen – ‘The Small Minority’ (Equinox)
Tame Impala – ‘Lonerism’ (Modular Recordings)
The The – ‘Moonbug’ (Lazarus)
Gaz Coombes – ‘Here Come The Bombs’ (Hot Fruit)
Paul Weller – ‘Sonik Kicks’ (Universal/Island)
Robert Duncan & David Cain – ‘The Seasons’ (Trunk)
Frankensteez – ‘Son of Frankensteez’ (Fort Point Recordings)
Various (selected by Andy Votel) – ‘Music Minus Music’ (Fat City)
Air – Le Voyage Dans La Lune (Virgin)
Reso – ‘Tangram’ (Civil Music)
Kid Koala – ’12-Bit Blues’ (Ninja Tune)
Cults Percussion Ensemble – ‘Cults Percussion Ensemble’ (Trunk)
Belbury Poly – ‘The Belbury Tales’ (Ghost Box)
Mordy Laye & The Group Modular – ‘The Mystery of Mordy Laye’ (Audio Montage)
Gaslamp Killer – ‘Breakthrough’ (Brainfeeder)
Singles:
DJ Format – ‘Spaceship Earth/Terror’ (Slice of Spice)
Soundsci – ‘In A Flash’ (Crate Escape)
Cut Chemist – ‘Outro (Revisited)’ feat. Blackbird (A Stable Sound)
Noel Gallagher – ‘AKA…What A Life’ (Amorphous Androgynous remix) (Big Brother)
Lone – ‘Crystal Caverns 1991’ (R&S)
Tame Impala – Elephant (Modular Recordings)
Tomorrow’s World – ‘So Long My Love’ (Protoyp Recordings)
Comics:
Prophet – Brandon Graham and others (Image)
B.P.R.D. Hell On Earth / Hellboy – Mignola, Allie, Cudi and others (Dark Horse)
2000ad – a cast of thousands (Rebellion)
The Bulletproof Coffin Disinterred – David Hine & Shaky Kane (Image)
Multiple Warheads – Brandon Graham (Image)
Godland – Joe Casey and Tom Scioli (Image)
Films:
The Avengers
Beyond The Black Rainbow
Tron:Uprising
Dredd 3D
Sleeve design / packaging: (designer in brackets)
Tame Impala – ‘Elephant’ (Leif Podhajsky)
DJ Format – ‘Terror/Spaceship Earth’ (Mr Krum)
Fulgeance – Step-thru (Ease/madeofwood)
Demdike Stare – ‘Elemental’ (Andy Votel)
The Herbaliser – ‘There Were Seven’ (Snub 23 stencil edition) (Openmind / Snub 23)
Machine, Dear – ‘Killing Something That’s Already Dead’ (Klaus Matthiesen)
Various – ‘The Minimal Wave Tapes vol.2’ (unknown)
Bruce Haack – ‘Remixes’ (Alexandre Korobov)
Clark – ‘Iradelphic’ (Julian House)
Young Magic – ‘Melt’ (Leif Podhajsky)
Ital – ‘Hive Mind’ (Sam Chirnside)
Carter/Tutti/Void – Transverse (Chris & Cosey)
R.I.P.
Ewan Robertson
Moebius
MCA/Adam Yauch
Ralph McQuarrie
Pete Namlook
Maurice Sendak
Davy Jones
Looking forward to:
Pacific Rim
Kraftwerk live in Dusseldorf and London
Hellboy In Hell / Sledgehammer
Mike McMahon Dredd/Cursed Earth commission piece
Iron Man 3
Ed Piskor’s Hip Hop Family Tree Book
Appalled, saddened and depressed by the events in Connecticut yesterday I tweeted that if my performance in Brussels last night was lacking it was because it was the last place I wanted to be after hearing about such atrocities. Finding the enthusiasm to go and rock a club for 2 hours after hearing such news was hard but pales into insignificance next to what the friends and families of those caught up in the tragedy must be going through.
I went to sleep thinking about it and woke up with it immediately in mind. I was sent this message by Christoper Whipple early this morning and it helped to brighten up the day a little:
“i wasn’t in brussels, but i saw your tweet about it and felt inspired to share this:
i remember back in 2001, the shock of 9/11 was still pretty fresh for us in nyc, but late that november there was an amazing (dare i say, purifying?) show of tremendous energy and resolve. i remember waiting to get in, a bunch of us were mulling over what would take the place of vadim’s terrorist track – or if you’d keep it in the set. the get ur freak on mix was perfect – i remember it with such clarity. that was the first time i really felt alive again after that whole tragedy.
thanks for that.”
I’ve featured Stéphane Halleux’s work before and he has a new exhibition opening at the Galerie Ariel Sibony in Paris this week.
I was shocked to hear of the death of Ewan Robertson yesterday, one half of design duo Oscar & Ewan who created many iconic covers for Ninja Tune and Big Dada g others. Ewan also recorded as Offshore for Big Dada and had just released his first album only a month ago –‘Bake Haus’. Alongside Oscar Bauer, Ewan created some iconic sleeves for the labels including Roots Manuva, Wiley, Bonobo and the recent Amon Tobin set housed inside a ‘flower press’.
I only met him once or twice – first at the exhibition for the release of the Ninja Tune ’20 years of Beats & Pieces’ book – and he was friendly, humble and easy to talk to. We’d corresponded over email many times in order to get his and Oscar’s work well represented in the book and he graciously agreed to show the plaster cast of Roots Manuva’s head they’d made for the ‘Slime & Reason’ LP campaign at the opening.
He was always super helpful and supplied many exclusive images from behind the scenes which showed the processes they went through when designing. My thoughts go out to his family and friends, he left a small but striking caché of music and visuals behind that will ensure he isn’t forgotten.
