Monthly Archives: October 2009
The Clientele: Bonfires on the Heath
London dreampop quartet The Clientele’s new LP Bonfires on the Heath is a soft focus, slow shutter patchwork of autumn-hued dreamscapes and wood-scented October sunsets. Their first LP since 2007’s Suburban Light, Bonfires on the Heath is teeming with spectres, phantom choirs, disconnected voices in fields, haunted nights, and psychedelic sonic flourishes. According to lead [...]
Italian rock ‘n’ roll chanteuse Mina
Italian sex pot Mina Mazzini performing the molto sensuale song “L’Importante e Finire” in 1975.
Museum of Everything
Placing themselves amongst the myriad of art-events surrounding the Frieze Art Fair, the Museum of Everything opened their doors to the general public on Wednesday last week. While Frieze is certainly all about being ‘in’, the Museum of Everything displays more than 200 works by those most commonly referred to as outsider-artists. Situated just a [...]
Where The Wild Thing Is
Frequent collaborators Spike Jonze and Kanye West released a new short film today entitled We Were Once a Fairytale, and it’s easily their most accomplished work together to date. While the film is far from apologetic, it nevertheless finds Kanye taking on his recent public image to the point of brutal self-satire. Culling from references as [...]
Flying with M83
There is a striking and balanced simplicity at work in this video. As a small airplane descends from the sky onto a rural airstrip, the cinematic tones of M83’s “Coloring the Void” builds into a harmonious crescendo of layered sonic textures. The aural pathos builds with each downward tick of the altimeter, bringing the passenger [...]
Dear Andy
Mick Jagger wrote Andy Warhol a letter in 1969 regarding the artwork for their new album, Sticky Fingers. Andy Warhol read the brief. The Rolling Stones: Sticky Fingers (1971) Probably Warhol’s most problematic album cover, in that 1) Each copy contained an actual zipper attached to the front that basically killed any other record that touched [...]
No Age @ (Le) Poisson Rouge
No Age have come to represent a certain lo-fi, DIY aesthetic that draws a lot of parallels with the Sonic Youth-led art-punk community of the 1980’s. Like that band, No Age are more punk in spirit than sound – behind that wall of fuzz and feedback are solid power-pop tunes a la The Thermals or, [...]
Cave Painting at Gresham’s Ghost
Alice’s descent down the rabbit hole came to mind as I stepped onto the basement stairs and a gold emblem caught my eye, like a promising flash of tail. Spray painted on the wall above me was the image of a grasshopper, the moniker of Gresham’s Ghost, the nomadic gallery that is hiding for the [...]
