A quick Forkast for Pitchforkmedia.com:
Seventeen Evergreen
Ensoniq (Bi-Polar Men Refix)
Lucky Number
While San Fransisco based two piece Seventeen Evergreen peddle robust, melody-infused indie as in debt to the dreamier moments of the 4AD roster or Mercury Rev as the Malkmus references that seem to be bandied around so readily whenever the band come up this track offers something else entirely. Although little information is available as to the identity or past work of the Bi-Polar Men they have transformed the bands original into a haunted, buzzing, skipping, swung 2-step indebted workout. Currently being played out by Skream on his Rinse FM show and championed by Prancehall in Grime circles this little piece would not have been out of place on Kode9’s sharply dextrous Dubstep Allstars Vol.3 in which cut-up, quick mixing and diverse selection demonstrated that the barrier between grime and Dubstep was not the chasm many imagined. This track is tucked away on the ‘Music Is Wine’ EP between a pair of Joakim remixes but shines far beyond its confines.
Tuesday 8 January 2008
November i-D Reviews
A couple of reviews I did for i-D no idea if they will run. Maybe. Maybe not.
i-D November Reviews
Numbers
You Are This
Upset The Rhythm
Former agit post-punk party-starters Numbers appear to have achieved a higher state of grace and enlightenment on this, their fourth outing which this time around finds them on pristine London-based indie Upset The Rhythm. Gone are the San Franciscans raucous build ‘em up and fall apart late night party jams and instead 13 woozy, layered, rhythmic pieces serenely seep out of the speakers like a continuous perfect, painless hangover.
Burial
Untrue
Hyperdub
Haunted by the ghosts of early 90’s rave, Reinforced-era jungle and pre-millenial dread swung 2 step, Burial’s second builds on his astounding debut. While much is made of Dubstep being an aural reflection of the dislocated urban experience it is in Burial’s whispered hiss, fuzz and crackle and between his El-B indebted snares that any claim to lasting significance can be made. Who cares who the guy is if the record sounds this good?
i-D November Reviews
Numbers
You Are This
Upset The Rhythm
Former agit post-punk party-starters Numbers appear to have achieved a higher state of grace and enlightenment on this, their fourth outing which this time around finds them on pristine London-based indie Upset The Rhythm. Gone are the San Franciscans raucous build ‘em up and fall apart late night party jams and instead 13 woozy, layered, rhythmic pieces serenely seep out of the speakers like a continuous perfect, painless hangover.
Burial
Untrue
Hyperdub
Haunted by the ghosts of early 90’s rave, Reinforced-era jungle and pre-millenial dread swung 2 step, Burial’s second builds on his astounding debut. While much is made of Dubstep being an aural reflection of the dislocated urban experience it is in Burial’s whispered hiss, fuzz and crackle and between his El-B indebted snares that any claim to lasting significance can be made. Who cares who the guy is if the record sounds this good?
Vice December Reviews
None last month so loads this month:
Vice December Reviews
Geriatric Unit
Life Half Over EP
Boss Tunage
9 Jesus, these guys are so old, fat and miserable that you almost feel sorry for them. Except that they just made the UK hardcore record of the year by about a gazillion miles. So you just end up being jealous of them instead.
House Of Brothers
Deadman EP
Big Scary Monsters
7 How did someone who used to play in a really scary screamo band end up making something that sounds so quietly fragile that it might snap at any minute under the sheer weight of sleepy eyed, world weary wonder? I have no idea. Maybe it was a girl. That usually does the trick.
Dimension X
Dimension X
KML
8 Does Chris Corsano ever sleep? One minute he’s banging on saucepans in your living room, then he’s improvising with Paul Flaherty, next he’s making concept CDR’s about cricket and before you know it he’s up onstage at Glastonbury playing drums for Bjork. On this one it all comes across like Sunburned with a Space Invaders obsession.
Neutral Milk Hotel
On Avery Island
Fire
10 When ‘In The Aeroplane Over The Sea’ got re-released last year a cartload of indier than thou guys like, erm, the fat one from Franz Ferdinand all clambered over each other to get on the cover-sticker to pretend that they had all been listening to Jeff Mangum for ages but had all been doing so on illicit bootleg tapes. Total crap. ‘In The Aeroplane’ had been widely available for years. It is this gem of a blueprint for that masterpiece that was hard to get hold of. My buddy Sal gave me a copy of it. He is a great guy. I wish I saw him more often.
Dead Kids
Fear & Flouride
Salvia
7 We covered these guys a while back and their live shows continue to either make people fall in love with them or hate them right off the bat. At last here comes a record. It does sound a lot like PIL with a really angry guy up front but that is no bad thing. Nice sleeve to boot.
Charlottefield
What Are Friends For
Fat Cat
8 In a just world this little band from Brighton who do a more than passable impression of Shudder To Think would be clutched close to the hearts of every lonely boy who sees themselves in a Nick Hornby novel. Instead they all cry themselves to sleep with Bat For Lashes. Sucks to be young in oh eight.
Malcolm Middleton
Sleight Of Heart
Full Time Hobby
8 Imagine if you were in a band like the Blue Nile and only put a record out every 5 years. The guys from Arab Strap would make you feel super lazy. Moffat’s everywhere and as well as doing a bunch of compilations and knocking out a genuinely funny Christmas single this is Middleton’s second solo LP of the year. Phew, just writing it all down makes me feel inadequate.
Dead Meadow
Old Growth
Matador
8 You know the cover of ‘Déjà Vu’ where its all sepia shots of the four them like they are hanging out with Jesse James and drinking moonshine out of the barrel of a shotgun while they ride horses around backwards on the run from a pack of Redskins? This is would make a great soundtrack to that imaginary film I just made up in my head. Someone should make that movie.
Ulver
Shadows Of The Sun
Plastichead
666 Wow, the Wolves In The Throneroom Album was looking like a shoe-in for black metal album of the year but then this turned up. Everything about it is perfect: foggy, mystic organs, ghostly melodies and the fact that it sounds absolutely nothing like black metal. The purists will hate it but people who like music purely on the whether it is good or not basis will love it. It even sounds more like Current 93 than Current 93 do right now. Amazing.
The Helio Sequence
Keep Your Eyes Ahead
Sub Pop
3 I liked it when Sub Pop released the Wolf Eyes record a while back. Not because it was a good record (they’ve done far better stuff, check out the ‘Egypt Skull’ CDR if you can find it) but because I liked the idea of someone buying it purely because it was on Sub Pop and then being totally bummed that they had just spent a tenner on screed noise. It’s kind of depressing that the label that released Earth 2 has become a bit like Eastenders: you really do know what you are gonna get and it’s gonna sound a lot like this.
Atlas Sound
Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel
Kranky
2 Skeleton guy from Deerhunter who photoblogs his own turds releases solo record. World fails to turn on axis. The title is pretty Godspeed eh? Whatever happened to those guys? Maybe they heard the new Stars Of The Lid and gave up.
Growing
Lateral
The Social Registry
9 You know how in Jurrasic Park they make the dinosaurs out of ancient mosquitos crystalised in amber? If Richard Attenborough was ever going to do a ‘Planet: Bugs’ or whatever this would totally be the soundtrack to the crystalisation process.
Saviours
Into Abaddon
Kemado
10 I am not sure where Abaddon is but the Abaddon that Saviours are hanging out in sounds like a waaay different place to the Abaddon that Pinback were singing about in that ‘Summers In Abaddon’ record. The Pinback one was full of girls called Penelope, this one sounds like it is full of demons and splayed virgins and stuff. I prefer this one.
Earth
The Bees Made Honey In The Lions Skull
Southern Lord
4 While everyone else was too busy watching how low Sunn could go Earth only did gone and become proper band. Ok so they are a bit of a slower version of a normal band but it’s a shame that it isn’t really all that interesting. Also: what’s with the hyper-literal cover at?
Danava
Unonou
Kemado
8 Someone told me that Comets On Fire have split up. I’m not sure if that’s true or not but if it is: no drama! Here comes Comets mark 2 with Ozzy on vocals to pick up psyche-sludge riffing baton.
Cutting Pink With Knives
Popluxxe
Isomorph Records
8 I saw Cutting Pink With Knives years ago supporting Trencher in some sweaty pit somewhere. They were awful. The bass player had a wireless setup and was running around the crowd, semi-naked knocking people on the head while the rest of the guys on stage played pretty unnecessary synth-screamo. As a lesson to all bands out there (and like a big recorded two fingers up at me) Cutting Pink have somehow managed to get pretty great in the intervening period. Oh, and the cover is the best thing we’ve seen all month. Mainly ‘cos it was made by our pal Kate Moross who seems to be able to turn anything she touches in 27million carat gold. This the first release on her new record label, where does she find the time?
Vice December Reviews
Geriatric Unit
Life Half Over EP
Boss Tunage
9 Jesus, these guys are so old, fat and miserable that you almost feel sorry for them. Except that they just made the UK hardcore record of the year by about a gazillion miles. So you just end up being jealous of them instead.
House Of Brothers
Deadman EP
Big Scary Monsters
7 How did someone who used to play in a really scary screamo band end up making something that sounds so quietly fragile that it might snap at any minute under the sheer weight of sleepy eyed, world weary wonder? I have no idea. Maybe it was a girl. That usually does the trick.
Dimension X
Dimension X
KML
8 Does Chris Corsano ever sleep? One minute he’s banging on saucepans in your living room, then he’s improvising with Paul Flaherty, next he’s making concept CDR’s about cricket and before you know it he’s up onstage at Glastonbury playing drums for Bjork. On this one it all comes across like Sunburned with a Space Invaders obsession.
Neutral Milk Hotel
On Avery Island
Fire
10 When ‘In The Aeroplane Over The Sea’ got re-released last year a cartload of indier than thou guys like, erm, the fat one from Franz Ferdinand all clambered over each other to get on the cover-sticker to pretend that they had all been listening to Jeff Mangum for ages but had all been doing so on illicit bootleg tapes. Total crap. ‘In The Aeroplane’ had been widely available for years. It is this gem of a blueprint for that masterpiece that was hard to get hold of. My buddy Sal gave me a copy of it. He is a great guy. I wish I saw him more often.
Dead Kids
Fear & Flouride
Salvia
7 We covered these guys a while back and their live shows continue to either make people fall in love with them or hate them right off the bat. At last here comes a record. It does sound a lot like PIL with a really angry guy up front but that is no bad thing. Nice sleeve to boot.
Charlottefield
What Are Friends For
Fat Cat
8 In a just world this little band from Brighton who do a more than passable impression of Shudder To Think would be clutched close to the hearts of every lonely boy who sees themselves in a Nick Hornby novel. Instead they all cry themselves to sleep with Bat For Lashes. Sucks to be young in oh eight.
Malcolm Middleton
Sleight Of Heart
Full Time Hobby
8 Imagine if you were in a band like the Blue Nile and only put a record out every 5 years. The guys from Arab Strap would make you feel super lazy. Moffat’s everywhere and as well as doing a bunch of compilations and knocking out a genuinely funny Christmas single this is Middleton’s second solo LP of the year. Phew, just writing it all down makes me feel inadequate.
Dead Meadow
Old Growth
Matador
8 You know the cover of ‘Déjà Vu’ where its all sepia shots of the four them like they are hanging out with Jesse James and drinking moonshine out of the barrel of a shotgun while they ride horses around backwards on the run from a pack of Redskins? This is would make a great soundtrack to that imaginary film I just made up in my head. Someone should make that movie.
Ulver
Shadows Of The Sun
Plastichead
666 Wow, the Wolves In The Throneroom Album was looking like a shoe-in for black metal album of the year but then this turned up. Everything about it is perfect: foggy, mystic organs, ghostly melodies and the fact that it sounds absolutely nothing like black metal. The purists will hate it but people who like music purely on the whether it is good or not basis will love it. It even sounds more like Current 93 than Current 93 do right now. Amazing.
The Helio Sequence
Keep Your Eyes Ahead
Sub Pop
3 I liked it when Sub Pop released the Wolf Eyes record a while back. Not because it was a good record (they’ve done far better stuff, check out the ‘Egypt Skull’ CDR if you can find it) but because I liked the idea of someone buying it purely because it was on Sub Pop and then being totally bummed that they had just spent a tenner on screed noise. It’s kind of depressing that the label that released Earth 2 has become a bit like Eastenders: you really do know what you are gonna get and it’s gonna sound a lot like this.
Atlas Sound
Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel
Kranky
2 Skeleton guy from Deerhunter who photoblogs his own turds releases solo record. World fails to turn on axis. The title is pretty Godspeed eh? Whatever happened to those guys? Maybe they heard the new Stars Of The Lid and gave up.
Growing
Lateral
The Social Registry
9 You know how in Jurrasic Park they make the dinosaurs out of ancient mosquitos crystalised in amber? If Richard Attenborough was ever going to do a ‘Planet: Bugs’ or whatever this would totally be the soundtrack to the crystalisation process.
Saviours
Into Abaddon
Kemado
10 I am not sure where Abaddon is but the Abaddon that Saviours are hanging out in sounds like a waaay different place to the Abaddon that Pinback were singing about in that ‘Summers In Abaddon’ record. The Pinback one was full of girls called Penelope, this one sounds like it is full of demons and splayed virgins and stuff. I prefer this one.
Earth
The Bees Made Honey In The Lions Skull
Southern Lord
4 While everyone else was too busy watching how low Sunn could go Earth only did gone and become proper band. Ok so they are a bit of a slower version of a normal band but it’s a shame that it isn’t really all that interesting. Also: what’s with the hyper-literal cover at?
Danava
Unonou
Kemado
8 Someone told me that Comets On Fire have split up. I’m not sure if that’s true or not but if it is: no drama! Here comes Comets mark 2 with Ozzy on vocals to pick up psyche-sludge riffing baton.
Cutting Pink With Knives
Popluxxe
Isomorph Records
8 I saw Cutting Pink With Knives years ago supporting Trencher in some sweaty pit somewhere. They were awful. The bass player had a wireless setup and was running around the crowd, semi-naked knocking people on the head while the rest of the guys on stage played pretty unnecessary synth-screamo. As a lesson to all bands out there (and like a big recorded two fingers up at me) Cutting Pink have somehow managed to get pretty great in the intervening period. Oh, and the cover is the best thing we’ve seen all month. Mainly ‘cos it was made by our pal Kate Moross who seems to be able to turn anything she touches in 27million carat gold. This the first release on her new record label, where does she find the time?
Yeasayer Interview
Interview with the band responsible for my single of 2007:
Yeasayer
You know sometimes, once in a never, you can get one of those beautiful hangovers? Not one of those earth shattering-shit-your-bowls-out-of-a-ringpiece-that-feels-like-its-been-soaked-in-stinging-nettles-for-a-week-every-five-minutes-accompanied-by-waves-of-nausea-that-make-you-feel-like-you-are-somewhere-lost-at-sea-with-involuntary-sweating-saline-fear-from-unwashed-pores hangovers. Nope, not one of them. Think more the day after a long session when you wake up with nothing to do and the sun is shining and you feel all dulled and fuzzy and everything is exciting and you end up having a hyper active day where everything falls into place despite not having planned a thing. Yeasayer sound like that. Effortless, blissful and ecstatic without a hint of contrivance or po-faced, over-wrought workmanship. Lazy people have compared them to the Beach Boys just because all four of them sing. They are in fact far closer to 4-Way Street-era CSNY with delicate vocal melodies all swaddled in intricate guitar figures and fretless sliding bass riffs. They may look like a bunch of hippies but sometimes that’s OK ‘cos you know what? If you don’t like If I Could I Only Remember My Own Name I don’t like you. Somehow Yeasyer have managed to recreate a lost Laurel Canyon inside New York and coupled with the fact that Jason Foster from Monitor thought they were so good he started a whole new label just to release their record and that ‘2080’ is by at least one million light ages the single of the year you have a pretty special band.
Guys, love the record but what is going on? You all look like you’ve walked backwards through a charity shop during some outtake from a C Movie version of a Cheech and Chong film.
Ira Wolf Tunon (bass, vocals): We get that lot. We just wear whatever and mix stuff I guess people don’t expect. Like hip-hop overcoats and these Eskimo style shoes.
Luke Fasano (keys, vocals): We really aren’t hippies though. I am not going to name names here but I find the whole new-folk thing pretty disgusting. I just don’t get it. Why bother trying to do something that has already been done so brilliantly before? It’s like trying to rip off Joy Division, what’s the point?
Chris Keating (drums, vocals): That worked out ok for Interpol.
Luke: True.
Where did all the vocal melodies come from? Were you all in the shower together one day and just happened to pipe up in unison?
Ira: It was always pretty integral to the sound. We listen to a lot of choral music and Anand listens to a bunch of world stuff. There were no showers involved.
Arnand: I have never understood the concept of instrumental rock music. If I want to hear just instruments I’ll listen to a film score. If you’re playing a guitar you’ve got to sing you know?
Why are so many of your songs about chasing the sun and winter and summer and stuff? Do you all suffer from Seasonal Affected Disorder or something?
Luke: Totally man. You are bound to be influenced by something that affects you everyday. Even if only by abstraction.
Anand Wilder (guitar, vocals): Who wouldn’t be? You wake up in the morning and the sun is shining and you know it’s going to be a good day.
See, you are a bunch of hippies really.
Cosby, Trill, Gash & Lungs
Yeasayer have album entitled “All Hour Cymbals” available now on We Are Free records.
http://www.myspace.com/yeasayer
Yeasayer
You know sometimes, once in a never, you can get one of those beautiful hangovers? Not one of those earth shattering-shit-your-bowls-out-of-a-ringpiece-that-feels-like-its-been-soaked-in-stinging-nettles-for-a-week-every-five-minutes-accompanied-by-waves-of-nausea-that-make-you-feel-like-you-are-somewhere-lost-at-sea-with-involuntary-sweating-saline-fear-from-unwashed-pores hangovers. Nope, not one of them. Think more the day after a long session when you wake up with nothing to do and the sun is shining and you feel all dulled and fuzzy and everything is exciting and you end up having a hyper active day where everything falls into place despite not having planned a thing. Yeasayer sound like that. Effortless, blissful and ecstatic without a hint of contrivance or po-faced, over-wrought workmanship. Lazy people have compared them to the Beach Boys just because all four of them sing. They are in fact far closer to 4-Way Street-era CSNY with delicate vocal melodies all swaddled in intricate guitar figures and fretless sliding bass riffs. They may look like a bunch of hippies but sometimes that’s OK ‘cos you know what? If you don’t like If I Could I Only Remember My Own Name I don’t like you. Somehow Yeasyer have managed to recreate a lost Laurel Canyon inside New York and coupled with the fact that Jason Foster from Monitor thought they were so good he started a whole new label just to release their record and that ‘2080’ is by at least one million light ages the single of the year you have a pretty special band.
Guys, love the record but what is going on? You all look like you’ve walked backwards through a charity shop during some outtake from a C Movie version of a Cheech and Chong film.
Ira Wolf Tunon (bass, vocals): We get that lot. We just wear whatever and mix stuff I guess people don’t expect. Like hip-hop overcoats and these Eskimo style shoes.
Luke Fasano (keys, vocals): We really aren’t hippies though. I am not going to name names here but I find the whole new-folk thing pretty disgusting. I just don’t get it. Why bother trying to do something that has already been done so brilliantly before? It’s like trying to rip off Joy Division, what’s the point?
Chris Keating (drums, vocals): That worked out ok for Interpol.
Luke: True.
Where did all the vocal melodies come from? Were you all in the shower together one day and just happened to pipe up in unison?
Ira: It was always pretty integral to the sound. We listen to a lot of choral music and Anand listens to a bunch of world stuff. There were no showers involved.
Arnand: I have never understood the concept of instrumental rock music. If I want to hear just instruments I’ll listen to a film score. If you’re playing a guitar you’ve got to sing you know?
Why are so many of your songs about chasing the sun and winter and summer and stuff? Do you all suffer from Seasonal Affected Disorder or something?
Luke: Totally man. You are bound to be influenced by something that affects you everyday. Even if only by abstraction.
Anand Wilder (guitar, vocals): Who wouldn’t be? You wake up in the morning and the sun is shining and you know it’s going to be a good day.
See, you are a bunch of hippies really.
Cosby, Trill, Gash & Lungs
Yeasayer have album entitled “All Hour Cymbals” available now on We Are Free records.
http://www.myspace.com/yeasayer
Talibam! Interview
Interview with avant-jazz dudes Talibam!
Talibam!
Jazz is pretty scary. Unless you are some freak child-prodigy in a Richard Powers novel or the son of that guy from the Fast Show who used to say ‘nice’ a lot it is unlikely that you will experience that much jazz in your quotidian existence as you evolve through the elementary pre-pubescent guitar music phase, the ensuing weed-induced dalliances with hip hop, the ecstasy and cocaine fuelled love affair with dance music and then some big post-20’s mess of all that stuff rolled together and soaked in booze while you try to have as much fun as you did when you were you were younger and then failing and getting depressed about it all week as your body struggles to bounce back and recover like it once did. All of these things kind of prod jazz into a corner where it gets forgotten about. Maybe someone somewhere along the line gave you a copy of Kind Of Blue or A Love Supreme but when they are racked up on the shelf next to Peep Show you are, let’s face it, going to go for Captain Corrigan every time. All of this waylaying and forestalling builds jazz up to be a big scary unknown mass of complex, unintelligible music involving guys wailing in darkened basements and collapsing with cheeks like water bombs from exhaustion and heroin abuse. This is a shame because there is plenty of jazz around that is a million miles away from either the basement boogaloos or the yawnathon cataloguers in roll necks, sipping brandy on Radio 3. Try Sun Ra, Albert Ayler or Ornette Coleman for a start or even better just try Talibam! who are basically jazz musicians playing rock music that sounds like really loud unhinged jazz. Or maybe they are nothing like that at all. Either way it makes you feel like you are in the eye of a storm that you could happily stand in forever.
Listening to your music makes me feel like I am attached to the blades of a really loud helicopter that is going really fast until it goes through a sonic boom. And then it carries on going while I’m still spinning endlessly up above. How would you describe it?
Mat Mottel (synths): It is not so much a sound rather more an adherence to a principle of the Harmoniacal.
It sounds like you just made that up.
Kev Shea (drums): We did.
Mat: It is a combination of Harmelodics and the maniacal. We just have little snippets, little moments, and crazed epiphanies. All of these are malleable and could go this way or that. We have never played the same set twice, elements of it may be the same but no two shows are alike.
Kev: This doesn’t mean we totally improvise though. It isn’t total chaos. We have songs and even the elements that are improvised have parameters within which we operate to an extent.
Mat: It is not a giant game of search and seek.
Erm, ok. Are you staunchly anti-Al Qaeda?
Mat: The name was just the headline of the New York Post the day they began bombing Afghanistan.
Kev: We just look for good environments, compassionate people, good wine and enjoy questioning why people might make a statement or choose not to make a statement, why one thing represents three and the other represents four, just a questioning of cliché and recycled phrase.
Right.
Avant Jams
Talibam! Have released something like 7 records in the last 12 months. You are probably best going here: http://www.myspace.com/talibam according to them “this just kind of happened”.
Talibam!
Jazz is pretty scary. Unless you are some freak child-prodigy in a Richard Powers novel or the son of that guy from the Fast Show who used to say ‘nice’ a lot it is unlikely that you will experience that much jazz in your quotidian existence as you evolve through the elementary pre-pubescent guitar music phase, the ensuing weed-induced dalliances with hip hop, the ecstasy and cocaine fuelled love affair with dance music and then some big post-20’s mess of all that stuff rolled together and soaked in booze while you try to have as much fun as you did when you were you were younger and then failing and getting depressed about it all week as your body struggles to bounce back and recover like it once did. All of these things kind of prod jazz into a corner where it gets forgotten about. Maybe someone somewhere along the line gave you a copy of Kind Of Blue or A Love Supreme but when they are racked up on the shelf next to Peep Show you are, let’s face it, going to go for Captain Corrigan every time. All of this waylaying and forestalling builds jazz up to be a big scary unknown mass of complex, unintelligible music involving guys wailing in darkened basements and collapsing with cheeks like water bombs from exhaustion and heroin abuse. This is a shame because there is plenty of jazz around that is a million miles away from either the basement boogaloos or the yawnathon cataloguers in roll necks, sipping brandy on Radio 3. Try Sun Ra, Albert Ayler or Ornette Coleman for a start or even better just try Talibam! who are basically jazz musicians playing rock music that sounds like really loud unhinged jazz. Or maybe they are nothing like that at all. Either way it makes you feel like you are in the eye of a storm that you could happily stand in forever.
Listening to your music makes me feel like I am attached to the blades of a really loud helicopter that is going really fast until it goes through a sonic boom. And then it carries on going while I’m still spinning endlessly up above. How would you describe it?
Mat Mottel (synths): It is not so much a sound rather more an adherence to a principle of the Harmoniacal.
It sounds like you just made that up.
Kev Shea (drums): We did.
Mat: It is a combination of Harmelodics and the maniacal. We just have little snippets, little moments, and crazed epiphanies. All of these are malleable and could go this way or that. We have never played the same set twice, elements of it may be the same but no two shows are alike.
Kev: This doesn’t mean we totally improvise though. It isn’t total chaos. We have songs and even the elements that are improvised have parameters within which we operate to an extent.
Mat: It is not a giant game of search and seek.
Erm, ok. Are you staunchly anti-Al Qaeda?
Mat: The name was just the headline of the New York Post the day they began bombing Afghanistan.
Kev: We just look for good environments, compassionate people, good wine and enjoy questioning why people might make a statement or choose not to make a statement, why one thing represents three and the other represents four, just a questioning of cliché and recycled phrase.
Right.
Avant Jams
Talibam! Have released something like 7 records in the last 12 months. You are probably best going here: http://www.myspace.com/talibam according to them “this just kind of happened”.
Girl Talk Interview
Interview with mash up guy Girl Talk:
Girl Talk
Samples. Hmm. Tricky one. On the one hand: hip hop and pretty much all dance music wouldn’t really exist without sampling and that would kind of suck for a minute or two there. But, if you go too far down the grab and paste road you just end up becoming DJ Yoda or Junior Senior and no one ever wants that. Those guys dress up in samples like the Emperor’s new clothes, applying them as liberally as possible without realising everyone can see straight through their horribly stuck together musical golems to their tiny, inverted, shrivel-dicked, barren, soulless cores. Those guys are the bad guys. Every once in a while though someone comes along who knits a whole load of little samples together to make a big cloak of amazingness which hides the disjointed nature of the music’s bloody birth. As Akufen did with millions of tiny edits in micro-house so Greg Gillis has done in the realm of sheer unabated, crystalline pop. His Girl Talk project began as a fairly experimental noise outfit utilising stolen bits from other people’s songs to add to the general manipulated effect but three albums, well over three hundred samples and not a single clearance later he has produced the record that displays his perfect pop vision. Except that it’s lots of other people’s visions stuck together.
So, how good are you at talking to girls? Do you make like one of your songs and try on a load of different angles in a row and then just hope for the best?
Greg Gillis: Erm, well, I used to be pretty mediocre. Below average I’d say. Then I quit my job and that meant I could grow my hair, get a beard together and now things seem to be working out a load better.
What kind of job did you have where you had to have short hair and be clean shaven? Was it a boot camp?
No no. I am actually a trained biochemical engineer and I was working in a lab carrying out theoretical sleep research. It was pretty interesting actually. Basically, no one knows why the cradling or rocking motion causes the body to fall asleep. So we did loads and loads of tests on people. It was pretty Blade Runner in there at times. That was a nine to five, five days a week job though and in the US you get ten days off a year max, so I was basically working, then disappearing every weekend to play in different cities. I took my whole years holiday off in like the first two months I was there.
Did the people you worked with know that you were going off on the weekends to get butt-naked onstage in front of strangers and press buttons that make Nirvana go accapella over the Boredoms?
Nah, it was a Superman vibe. There with the short hair in the week and then just some lies and evasion and off I go on the weekends.
You have never cleared a sample and record for a label called Illegal Art but on this album you swiped the most famously sued song to sample another song ever: The Verve’s ‘Bittersweet Symphony’. Were you not scared that The Verve would find out and take out all the pain and anguish from the loss of millions of pounds at the hands of wrinkly Mick and walking skeleton guy Keith on poor little old you in Pittsburgh?
Nah. We have something called Fair Use over here. Shame you guys don’t.
The Jza
Girl Talk have album called “Night Ripper” out on Illegal Art in February.
http://www.myspace.com/girltalkmusic
Girl Talk
Samples. Hmm. Tricky one. On the one hand: hip hop and pretty much all dance music wouldn’t really exist without sampling and that would kind of suck for a minute or two there. But, if you go too far down the grab and paste road you just end up becoming DJ Yoda or Junior Senior and no one ever wants that. Those guys dress up in samples like the Emperor’s new clothes, applying them as liberally as possible without realising everyone can see straight through their horribly stuck together musical golems to their tiny, inverted, shrivel-dicked, barren, soulless cores. Those guys are the bad guys. Every once in a while though someone comes along who knits a whole load of little samples together to make a big cloak of amazingness which hides the disjointed nature of the music’s bloody birth. As Akufen did with millions of tiny edits in micro-house so Greg Gillis has done in the realm of sheer unabated, crystalline pop. His Girl Talk project began as a fairly experimental noise outfit utilising stolen bits from other people’s songs to add to the general manipulated effect but three albums, well over three hundred samples and not a single clearance later he has produced the record that displays his perfect pop vision. Except that it’s lots of other people’s visions stuck together.
So, how good are you at talking to girls? Do you make like one of your songs and try on a load of different angles in a row and then just hope for the best?
Greg Gillis: Erm, well, I used to be pretty mediocre. Below average I’d say. Then I quit my job and that meant I could grow my hair, get a beard together and now things seem to be working out a load better.
What kind of job did you have where you had to have short hair and be clean shaven? Was it a boot camp?
No no. I am actually a trained biochemical engineer and I was working in a lab carrying out theoretical sleep research. It was pretty interesting actually. Basically, no one knows why the cradling or rocking motion causes the body to fall asleep. So we did loads and loads of tests on people. It was pretty Blade Runner in there at times. That was a nine to five, five days a week job though and in the US you get ten days off a year max, so I was basically working, then disappearing every weekend to play in different cities. I took my whole years holiday off in like the first two months I was there.
Did the people you worked with know that you were going off on the weekends to get butt-naked onstage in front of strangers and press buttons that make Nirvana go accapella over the Boredoms?
Nah, it was a Superman vibe. There with the short hair in the week and then just some lies and evasion and off I go on the weekends.
You have never cleared a sample and record for a label called Illegal Art but on this album you swiped the most famously sued song to sample another song ever: The Verve’s ‘Bittersweet Symphony’. Were you not scared that The Verve would find out and take out all the pain and anguish from the loss of millions of pounds at the hands of wrinkly Mick and walking skeleton guy Keith on poor little old you in Pittsburgh?
Nah. We have something called Fair Use over here. Shame you guys don’t.
The Jza
Girl Talk have album called “Night Ripper” out on Illegal Art in February.
http://www.myspace.com/girltalkmusic
David Gillanders Interview
Interview with the Glaswegian photojournalist David Gillanders:
David Gillanders
David Gillanders grew up in Glasgow and like most Glaswegians he was into tearing chunks out of other kids as much as he was into quaffing gallon drums of Irn Bru so soon found himself boxing regularly instead of hanging out on the street waiting to get stabbed or glassed. He was forced to quit boxing at 16 after being smashed in the head too often by bigger kids. However, he needed an excuse to hang around in the gyms as there really isn’t much else to do in Glasgow if you aren’t into eating battered Mars Bars. Inspired by the early black and white boxing posters that covered the gym walls, David began taking photos of fighters. This soon grew into a general interest in the fighters outside of the ring and his stark, black and white documentary style began to emerge. Since, David has shot projects in Russia, Odessa, Malawi and Egypt documenting the lives of the overlooked and marginalised because he says can’t help but do anything else. This project saw David photographing Ukranian street orphans many of whom will never get within spitting distance of 20.
VICE: Did taking photos replace the hole quitting fighting left in your life?
David Gillanders: Not really, I still fight. And I still take photos. They are both addictive though.
How did your early work documenting streetlife in Glasgow translate into you later work in Russia and here in the Ukraine.
Without sounding like a wanker it’s a fascination in humanity. Anyone who makes documentary photography has to have a sense of that otherwise they are liars or not in the right fucking job.
How did you come across the children who you documented in the Ukraine?
By accident to an extent. I was shooting a group of children under similar circumstances in Russia that they refer to over there as eesprizorniki. While I was there the Russians kept telling me about the kids that were literraly living and dying in caves with dead dogs in their own shit, piss and vomit whacked out on drugs twenty four hours a day. Turns out they were right.
Was it as bad as you imagined?
Worse. The most common drug they use is the core of a nasal inhaler which they mix with vinegar and then pull through a cigarette filter. The resulting compound is injected and opiates the kid but is extremely addictive. I have no idea how they worked out this would have any effect but within weeks of use it can bend bones and call massive nervous and immune system breakdown. None of these kids have much chance of making past 20 and they know that so destroying yourself isn’t such a big deal
Was there a single image that resonates from your time there?
There are too many but there was one kid who all of the times I have been out there I could see was getting progressively worse but wouldn’t let me take his photo. The last time I was there he beckoned me over and it was clear he didn’t have long. He couldn’t even talk but motioned that I could photograph him. He died later that week.
Do the government give these kids any aid?
There are Catholic priests who help them with a soup kitchen and minor medication but in the eyes of the government they don’t really exist.
How do you desnsitise yourself from the experience of witnessing that on a daily basis?
You can’t
David Gillanders
David Gillanders grew up in Glasgow and like most Glaswegians he was into tearing chunks out of other kids as much as he was into quaffing gallon drums of Irn Bru so soon found himself boxing regularly instead of hanging out on the street waiting to get stabbed or glassed. He was forced to quit boxing at 16 after being smashed in the head too often by bigger kids. However, he needed an excuse to hang around in the gyms as there really isn’t much else to do in Glasgow if you aren’t into eating battered Mars Bars. Inspired by the early black and white boxing posters that covered the gym walls, David began taking photos of fighters. This soon grew into a general interest in the fighters outside of the ring and his stark, black and white documentary style began to emerge. Since, David has shot projects in Russia, Odessa, Malawi and Egypt documenting the lives of the overlooked and marginalised because he says can’t help but do anything else. This project saw David photographing Ukranian street orphans many of whom will never get within spitting distance of 20.
VICE: Did taking photos replace the hole quitting fighting left in your life?
David Gillanders: Not really, I still fight. And I still take photos. They are both addictive though.
How did your early work documenting streetlife in Glasgow translate into you later work in Russia and here in the Ukraine.
Without sounding like a wanker it’s a fascination in humanity. Anyone who makes documentary photography has to have a sense of that otherwise they are liars or not in the right fucking job.
How did you come across the children who you documented in the Ukraine?
By accident to an extent. I was shooting a group of children under similar circumstances in Russia that they refer to over there as eesprizorniki. While I was there the Russians kept telling me about the kids that were literraly living and dying in caves with dead dogs in their own shit, piss and vomit whacked out on drugs twenty four hours a day. Turns out they were right.
Was it as bad as you imagined?
Worse. The most common drug they use is the core of a nasal inhaler which they mix with vinegar and then pull through a cigarette filter. The resulting compound is injected and opiates the kid but is extremely addictive. I have no idea how they worked out this would have any effect but within weeks of use it can bend bones and call massive nervous and immune system breakdown. None of these kids have much chance of making past 20 and they know that so destroying yourself isn’t such a big deal
Was there a single image that resonates from your time there?
There are too many but there was one kid who all of the times I have been out there I could see was getting progressively worse but wouldn’t let me take his photo. The last time I was there he beckoned me over and it was clear he didn’t have long. He couldn’t even talk but motioned that I could photograph him. He died later that week.
Do the government give these kids any aid?
There are Catholic priests who help them with a soup kitchen and minor medication but in the eyes of the government they don’t really exist.
How do you desnsitise yourself from the experience of witnessing that on a daily basis?
You can’t
Vice December Literary
Book Reviews for the December issue of Vice:
I Want to Remember You Like This Forever
Ever sat in a toilet at the bar half cut with your jeans around your ankles hovering just over the gross piss, shit and semen soaked ivory letting lunch go and in the middle of it all had your eye caught by something scrawled on the wall that is so good that you loose all concentration and end up plonking right down in the bowl and almost ass-printing turd-pile central? Yeah me too. Thanks to this little zine though that will never happen again. Just take this out with you and have a read before you go then shut your eyes, concentrate and every amazing toilet wall scribbling ever will be imprinted on your retinas. It also comes with a piece of medium weight bog roll so if you were too gone to check that was all set before commencing operations it is handy for the clean up too.
www.space1026.com
1-800-Mice Issue 1
Mathew Thurber
I remember picking up ‘Carrot For Girls’ a while back, which was my first encounter with Mathew Thurber. That was a great, big inky tabloid thing that was surreal with an innocence that allowed it to endear rather than heckle bile in your stomach like a Mighty Boosh re-run on BBC3. Anyway, 1-800-Mice is, I guess, Thurbers new regular outlet for things like twisted, weird, talking horses called Mr Colostomy and a kamikaze vampire called Distinguished Death as well as mock-profound statements like: “a tree is an explosion in slow motion”. Reading for too long can be perilous because you begin to loose touch and think that you are an extra in Thurber’s imaginary world of melting Itchy & Scratchy faces. I wonder if he stole the name from Megamix’s night at the Old Blue Last?
www.pictureboxinc.com
Abandon Ship
Dave Schubert
As well as being the name of a great punk band from Brighton ‘Abandon Ship’ is the title of this neat and subtly moving collection of photos taken by Dave Schubert over the course of a week in New York City. It has all the stuff you’d expect: some tramps begging in squalor, a bunch of people loosing it in a bar, some kids bombing a wall, Dash Snow (who also provides an introduction) smoking Marlboro Reds in a bath full of Polaroid’s. You know how it goes. Next to these expecteds though are stark images of squirrels on empty sidewalks and lonely stars and stripes drooping at half-mast. It might all means something. Like a representation of the loneliness that lies at the heart of a thriving social conurbation. Or they might just be good photos. Either way it is cheap, well presented zine with great stuff inside. These things can’t cost a tonne to print up. Come on photo guys, why aren’t you all on this kind of thing?
www.seemsrightcollections.com
Cute Dolls
Aranzi Aronzo
Initially I was so into this but now I am totally creeped out. At first glance it basically appears to be a little arts and crafts book that if you gave it to your 7 year old step-sister would cause her to drop the latest Nintendogs or whatever and commence gluing herself together with Copydex attempting to make cute little cats and monkeys out of loo roll and old socks. Amazing! Christmas present dialled, now you can spend the rest of the day drinking cut-price ‘festive’ double shots of Red Bull & vodka in Weatherspoons instead of braving Oxford Street again. However. On closer inspection the book takes on seriously sinister overtones. Whichever ‘cute doll’ you are making gives you instructions from the page like: “The face is the life of a doll, so be serious when you make it!!!”. It’s almost like they are willing you to create more of them and their blank, staring faces are straight out of Children Of The Corn. The last page is a massive army of the fuckers lined up eyeballing you ready for world domination after having been bought to life by innocent seven year olds ignorant of the apocalypses they have wrought. Christ, thinking about it is giving me shivers.
www.vertical-inc.com
Buck Shots
Peter Sutherland
I have never properly encountered or engaged with Peter Sutherland’s work before despite being aware of him. Does this make me an idiot? On this showing: yes. A massive, ignorant, know-nothing idiot who needs to get back to the whole paying-attention-to-shit game. This book is INCERDIBLE. If you only buy one photo book in 2008 get this. It is worth it for the centrepiece doubletruck alone. The premise is simple: Sutherland shoots and follows some deer around where they hang out. He shoots them in the forest, he shoots them in the stream, he shoots them nosing around in the human world and looking cute and confused and he shoots them in packs at night so all you can see are loads of pairs of eyes gleaming in the darkness at you like a Le Mans grid coming to rape your village and murder your wife. He also takes pictures of what the deer can see every day: beautiful, sparkling sunrises, dewy, virginal spiders webs and mighty, soaring ferns. The portrait of a dead, skinned deer near the end made me choke worse than the first time I saw E.T. Deer are my new favourite animals. I want to be a deer. Thank you Peter Sutherland.
www.powerHouseBooks.com
The Park
Kohei Yoshiyuki
Woah. Now this is something really different. If you thought Clapham Common was a bit fruity on a Friday night even a mini-bus load of Gary Glitters would fail to elevate it to even within a solar system of the same league as the Shinjuku, Yoyogi and Ayoama parks in Tokyo in the early 70’s. Yoshiyuki captures in unsettlingly soft-focus duotone the furtive groping of both hetero and homosexual strangers as they get down on a Friday night. The bite your bottom lip in weirded outness part is not so much the exhibitionist fucking but the phalanx of voyeurs that surround each encounter. Add to that the fact that there is a guy snapping with film the people mentally snapping the people cavorting in the middle of a public park and it all just seems too much to be true. But it is. Wow.
www.hatjekantz.com
Recording The Truth In Iran
Kaveh Golestan
Hatje Cantz
More war, more death, more death, more plague, more famine. It must seem like we are overly obsessed with the photojournalism of war. Well, we are. Not only because the images rendered are often mind-blowingly getthefuckouttahere in terms of making you stop and think “woah, humans actually do this shit to other humans?” but also because of our intense and deep respect for photographers who continually place their lives and safety at risk telling the stories they believe must be told. In those terms Kaveh Golestan is a hero amongst heroes. His entire life and career was dedicated to documenting life in his homeland of Iran until it was cut short by a landmine. Golestan’s stark black and white images leave him a legacy worthy of his life hard lived.
www.hatjecantz.com
Substantials No.3
CCA
How can a book that is just transcriptions of a series of lectures that took place in the sound workshop of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Kitakyushu be one of the funniest, most interesting and insightful things we’ve read in a million months of Sundays? Well its mainly down to a lineup that would make anyone who has an even vaguely passing interest in dudes who hide behind lots of machines and make weird noises grow a massive stiff one on sight. You get Russell Haswell jumping from discussions about the nature of creating music using Xenakis’s UPIC machine (which makes sonic representations of drawings) to anecdotes about playing in support of Societal Death Slaughter in London squats as well as William Bennet confessing an obsessive typo-compulsion. Oh, and there is a free CD of unreleased work which you will not find anywhere else. Buy.
www.cca-kitakyushu.org/
Made In The UK: The Music Of Attitude 1977-1983
Janette Beckman
PowerHouse
Yawn. Another book about the British punk movement. 1977, year zero, kill all hippies, Mick Jones’s funny teeth blah, blah, blah. Seriously, has any single period in music that produced so few genuinely great bands ever been so obsessed over? Anyone who thinks that the Sex Pistols are a better band than P.I.L. is an idiot and you should probably stop being friends with them right now. However, the Pistols are of course a more important band. And therein lies the worth of this collection of handsome portraits and shots by Janette Beckman who was so there that she must have had one of those little machines that allowed her to flip flop back and forth through the space/time continuum like the guy from Quantum Leap. Beckman captures more than the sweaty, drooling, idiot-Vicious glares and stares and by immersing her work in the dances and days that people actually lived in England all those decades ago places you in a moment in time that makes all the huffing puffing rhetoric of importance finally begin to make sense.
www.powerhousebooks.com/
Enter Exit
Pierre Crocquet De Rosemand
Hatje Cantz
Sometimes it’s nice to be shocked into action by a demonstration of you own ignorance. Like when you are sitting in the pub and everyone starts talking about some old film that is obviously a standard reference-point and you cluelessly nod your head along and hope that no one calls you with your faker-pants on. Then you run home, Google every living fact you can find and panic buy the remastered, directors cut, 4-disc special edition and hide your shame forever beneath purchased pride. Well, until this book came along I was totally unaware of what life was like in a rural South Africa. Turns out is pretty out there and mostly filled with super wrinkly, limbless old people who drink their morning tea next to severed pigs heads on the kitchen table and now I want to go and check it out.
I Want to Remember You Like This Forever
Ever sat in a toilet at the bar half cut with your jeans around your ankles hovering just over the gross piss, shit and semen soaked ivory letting lunch go and in the middle of it all had your eye caught by something scrawled on the wall that is so good that you loose all concentration and end up plonking right down in the bowl and almost ass-printing turd-pile central? Yeah me too. Thanks to this little zine though that will never happen again. Just take this out with you and have a read before you go then shut your eyes, concentrate and every amazing toilet wall scribbling ever will be imprinted on your retinas. It also comes with a piece of medium weight bog roll so if you were too gone to check that was all set before commencing operations it is handy for the clean up too.
www.space1026.com
1-800-Mice Issue 1
Mathew Thurber
I remember picking up ‘Carrot For Girls’ a while back, which was my first encounter with Mathew Thurber. That was a great, big inky tabloid thing that was surreal with an innocence that allowed it to endear rather than heckle bile in your stomach like a Mighty Boosh re-run on BBC3. Anyway, 1-800-Mice is, I guess, Thurbers new regular outlet for things like twisted, weird, talking horses called Mr Colostomy and a kamikaze vampire called Distinguished Death as well as mock-profound statements like: “a tree is an explosion in slow motion”. Reading for too long can be perilous because you begin to loose touch and think that you are an extra in Thurber’s imaginary world of melting Itchy & Scratchy faces. I wonder if he stole the name from Megamix’s night at the Old Blue Last?
www.pictureboxinc.com
Abandon Ship
Dave Schubert
As well as being the name of a great punk band from Brighton ‘Abandon Ship’ is the title of this neat and subtly moving collection of photos taken by Dave Schubert over the course of a week in New York City. It has all the stuff you’d expect: some tramps begging in squalor, a bunch of people loosing it in a bar, some kids bombing a wall, Dash Snow (who also provides an introduction) smoking Marlboro Reds in a bath full of Polaroid’s. You know how it goes. Next to these expecteds though are stark images of squirrels on empty sidewalks and lonely stars and stripes drooping at half-mast. It might all means something. Like a representation of the loneliness that lies at the heart of a thriving social conurbation. Or they might just be good photos. Either way it is cheap, well presented zine with great stuff inside. These things can’t cost a tonne to print up. Come on photo guys, why aren’t you all on this kind of thing?
www.seemsrightcollections.com
Cute Dolls
Aranzi Aronzo
Initially I was so into this but now I am totally creeped out. At first glance it basically appears to be a little arts and crafts book that if you gave it to your 7 year old step-sister would cause her to drop the latest Nintendogs or whatever and commence gluing herself together with Copydex attempting to make cute little cats and monkeys out of loo roll and old socks. Amazing! Christmas present dialled, now you can spend the rest of the day drinking cut-price ‘festive’ double shots of Red Bull & vodka in Weatherspoons instead of braving Oxford Street again. However. On closer inspection the book takes on seriously sinister overtones. Whichever ‘cute doll’ you are making gives you instructions from the page like: “The face is the life of a doll, so be serious when you make it!!!”. It’s almost like they are willing you to create more of them and their blank, staring faces are straight out of Children Of The Corn. The last page is a massive army of the fuckers lined up eyeballing you ready for world domination after having been bought to life by innocent seven year olds ignorant of the apocalypses they have wrought. Christ, thinking about it is giving me shivers.
www.vertical-inc.com
Buck Shots
Peter Sutherland
I have never properly encountered or engaged with Peter Sutherland’s work before despite being aware of him. Does this make me an idiot? On this showing: yes. A massive, ignorant, know-nothing idiot who needs to get back to the whole paying-attention-to-shit game. This book is INCERDIBLE. If you only buy one photo book in 2008 get this. It is worth it for the centrepiece doubletruck alone. The premise is simple: Sutherland shoots and follows some deer around where they hang out. He shoots them in the forest, he shoots them in the stream, he shoots them nosing around in the human world and looking cute and confused and he shoots them in packs at night so all you can see are loads of pairs of eyes gleaming in the darkness at you like a Le Mans grid coming to rape your village and murder your wife. He also takes pictures of what the deer can see every day: beautiful, sparkling sunrises, dewy, virginal spiders webs and mighty, soaring ferns. The portrait of a dead, skinned deer near the end made me choke worse than the first time I saw E.T. Deer are my new favourite animals. I want to be a deer. Thank you Peter Sutherland.
www.powerHouseBooks.com
The Park
Kohei Yoshiyuki
Woah. Now this is something really different. If you thought Clapham Common was a bit fruity on a Friday night even a mini-bus load of Gary Glitters would fail to elevate it to even within a solar system of the same league as the Shinjuku, Yoyogi and Ayoama parks in Tokyo in the early 70’s. Yoshiyuki captures in unsettlingly soft-focus duotone the furtive groping of both hetero and homosexual strangers as they get down on a Friday night. The bite your bottom lip in weirded outness part is not so much the exhibitionist fucking but the phalanx of voyeurs that surround each encounter. Add to that the fact that there is a guy snapping with film the people mentally snapping the people cavorting in the middle of a public park and it all just seems too much to be true. But it is. Wow.
www.hatjekantz.com
Recording The Truth In Iran
Kaveh Golestan
Hatje Cantz
More war, more death, more death, more plague, more famine. It must seem like we are overly obsessed with the photojournalism of war. Well, we are. Not only because the images rendered are often mind-blowingly getthefuckouttahere in terms of making you stop and think “woah, humans actually do this shit to other humans?” but also because of our intense and deep respect for photographers who continually place their lives and safety at risk telling the stories they believe must be told. In those terms Kaveh Golestan is a hero amongst heroes. His entire life and career was dedicated to documenting life in his homeland of Iran until it was cut short by a landmine. Golestan’s stark black and white images leave him a legacy worthy of his life hard lived.
www.hatjecantz.com
Substantials No.3
CCA
How can a book that is just transcriptions of a series of lectures that took place in the sound workshop of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Kitakyushu be one of the funniest, most interesting and insightful things we’ve read in a million months of Sundays? Well its mainly down to a lineup that would make anyone who has an even vaguely passing interest in dudes who hide behind lots of machines and make weird noises grow a massive stiff one on sight. You get Russell Haswell jumping from discussions about the nature of creating music using Xenakis’s UPIC machine (which makes sonic representations of drawings) to anecdotes about playing in support of Societal Death Slaughter in London squats as well as William Bennet confessing an obsessive typo-compulsion. Oh, and there is a free CD of unreleased work which you will not find anywhere else. Buy.
www.cca-kitakyushu.org/
Made In The UK: The Music Of Attitude 1977-1983
Janette Beckman
PowerHouse
Yawn. Another book about the British punk movement. 1977, year zero, kill all hippies, Mick Jones’s funny teeth blah, blah, blah. Seriously, has any single period in music that produced so few genuinely great bands ever been so obsessed over? Anyone who thinks that the Sex Pistols are a better band than P.I.L. is an idiot and you should probably stop being friends with them right now. However, the Pistols are of course a more important band. And therein lies the worth of this collection of handsome portraits and shots by Janette Beckman who was so there that she must have had one of those little machines that allowed her to flip flop back and forth through the space/time continuum like the guy from Quantum Leap. Beckman captures more than the sweaty, drooling, idiot-Vicious glares and stares and by immersing her work in the dances and days that people actually lived in England all those decades ago places you in a moment in time that makes all the huffing puffing rhetoric of importance finally begin to make sense.
www.powerhousebooks.com/
Enter Exit
Pierre Crocquet De Rosemand
Hatje Cantz
Sometimes it’s nice to be shocked into action by a demonstration of you own ignorance. Like when you are sitting in the pub and everyone starts talking about some old film that is obviously a standard reference-point and you cluelessly nod your head along and hope that no one calls you with your faker-pants on. Then you run home, Google every living fact you can find and panic buy the remastered, directors cut, 4-disc special edition and hide your shame forever beneath purchased pride. Well, until this book came along I was totally unaware of what life was like in a rural South Africa. Turns out is pretty out there and mostly filled with super wrinkly, limbless old people who drink their morning tea next to severed pigs heads on the kitchen table and now I want to go and check it out.
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