Spellbinding songstress Alexa Wilding has released her very first music video: a completely mesmerizing three-minute 16mm film. Shot by frequent collaborator, fashion designer and Love Contemporary editor Paola Suhonen, the film features a simultaneously naïve and all-knowing Wilding as she sings Black Diamond Day, in a black-and-white world of pop-esque polka dots. The film is a dark, sweet and almost eerie reflection of the wonderland that exists in Wilding’s head, so who better to describe it than the singer herself?

“Black Diamond Day is a song exploring the theme ‘be careful what you wish for.’ A young girl is curious and has an object of her affection. She pursues him—ha, with her binoculars—gets him, and then is taken on a journey that is a disturbing mistake. Paola suggested polka dots instead of diamonds, since diamonds would be too obvious. I loved this, since polka dots hint back to ’60s pop art and cinema, and we both love the work of Yayoi Kusama, for whom the video is definitely an homage. My songs are innocent and sweet on the surface, but a dark current runs beneath them, so we were intrigued with using the polka dot—often a symbol of purity and girlhood—and having it take on a life of its own… Its like at the end of the “trip” our heroine—me—has been attacked by the very thing that got her in trouble, her innocent self in polka dots. ’60s pop art, Yayoi Kusama and a bit of Clockwork Orange, too, were our inspirations.”

Alexa will be performing with Mike Bones this evening, March 17th, at the closing of Paola Suhonen’s concept shop: the IVANAhelsinki and Love Contemporary Pop-Up Store at 9pm: 238 Mulberry (between Prince and Spring).

Alexa by Gustavo Marx for Dossier

Photo by Fran Kiko

With Tulsa performing their soundcheck in the background we had the chance to catch up with musical artist Christina Rosenvinge. Blonde, graceful, and approachable. After exchanging a few pleasantries with her we became instant fans; not just of the music, but of Christina herself.

Vanessa Ceia: Tell us a little about yourself.
Christina Rosenvinge: I had my first band when I was fifteen.

VC: Here in Spain?
CR: Yeah, here in Spain. It was sort of a new wave band back in the eighties when the movida was happening, but I was too young and couldn’t go out at night until late, so I.. I had this band, Ella y los neumáticos, and that’s when everything started. Years later, I had a different band with another guy, called Alex and Christina. That was kind of a commercial pop band very inspired by French music from the eighties, and after that I started a song-writing career.

VC: You’re Spanish but you have family from—
CR: Uh, I’m Danish but I was born in Madrid.

VC: Do you speak Danish?
CR: I don’t, no, but…actually, it’s a strange family story because my father was a very conservative guy, so he came to Spain because he was such a big fan of Franco’s politics.

VC: Is this the first time that you’ve worked with Tulsa?
CR: Yeah. They’re opening for the show and we have a few musicians in common so that’s why we are going to travel together. We have about four or five more shows.

VC: Will you be doing any traveling outside of Spain as well?
CR: Mostly in Spain, but yeah I’m going to Chile, Buenos Aires and South America soon. That trip I’m going to be doing with my New York drummer, which is Steve Shelley from Sonic Youth, he’s the one I make records with and he comes to play with me when he has the opportunity.

VC: Is that where you normally record? In New York?
CR: In Hoboken, yes (laughs); in the Sonic Youth space. I’ll be there in May recording with Steve Shelley and Jeremy Wilms, who’s a bass player from New York—well, really, he isn’t from New York, he’s from London, but he lives in New York now. And he’s like my partner too and we’ve been playing together for ten years or so.

VC: Is your this new album going to be a similar style to what you’ve been doing over the last while?
CR: Yeah, it’s the same style that I’ve done in the lat one. We kind of have an idea of doing a project in English where the three of us are going to write songs together, but that’s been delayed for months and years but I hope that we’ll start on it again.

VC: You started off with three records in English, and then your anglophone phase seemed to have ended. Do you have any intention of working in English again?
CR: Not now, you know I live here in Spain and naturally my songs come out in Spanish now. Actually, I’m trying to write a couple of songs in English for this one project that I have and it’s kind of difficult for me, it’s not all that natural.

VC: What’s your emotional state when you produce your best work?
CR: I’m not sure, you know. Work comes out when I have a really steady discipline, like when I work everyday for several hours and start getting results. I try to do that everyday and have been doing that for the past five months. Not that I come up with something good (laughs) but I try to.

VC: What kind of crowd turns up at your shows?
CR: I get a very diverse crowd. There are really young people and there are people that are around fifty. It depends… there are people that have been buying my records for years and those that just discovered the last record and are into that one. The records in English weren’t all that known here (in Spain). People didn’t listen to them..I guess they were too experimental or weird or whatever. It was a different style, I was living in New York back then and it was a little more adventurous (laughs).

VC: What do you think of the music scene back in New York?
CR: For me it was such a big….you know, it was like going to school again. Being around all those people, not only the guys from Sonic Youth, but all the musicians and creative people there. All those people that just put out a record and work as waiters or whatever and are incredibly talented and wonderful…and that sense of community that everyone’s a part of. I thought it was really brilliant and refreshing. I got to play with people that were really great and it was all just for the fun of it. At that time I did a couple of shows with Tim Foljahn, and he was in my band, on the guitar, and he put out records with our same label, and Steve Shelley was in that band too.. Then there was hanging out with Smokey Hormel and playing in a band that did covers of Brazilian music with Sean Lennon and… It was just a lot of fun.

VC: Is there anyone that you’d really like to collaborate and one day get to work with?
CR: Sooner or later you get to meet everybody and play with everybody. That’s what I’ve done for years and it’s easier than it looks.

VC: You’ve played at an ATP festival. How was that?
CR: It was a lot of fun, really great and I was playing in between Television and Eddie Vedder (laughs) and it was so amazing.

VC: If you were to define your style of music how would you do it?
CR: It’s a cross between European pop…sometimes I’m inspired by Italian pop, like one song that I just wrote that’s very inspired by Adriano Celentano from the seventies who I really like. French pop too, but particularly sound wise it’s very inspired by New York pop music. So when everything comes together for me it’s very organic, but every time I play with American musicians they always say, “oh, you’re so European or Spanish” or whatever. They say that I have a different mindset. The way that someone who has listened to a lot of latin music will write a song… they tend to be more into the rhythm thing, more into different and adventurous patterns and mixing… At least people from Spain get all these crazy mixes, a lot of flamenco and sevillanas, but also Brazilian music and south American folklore, and from descent I’ve got the Northern European roots… I’m such a bastard (laughs). There’s nothing pure in me. I can’t point to just one place. In a way I’m a foreigner everywhere. That’s why I felt at home in New York. It’s like you can only become a New Yorker when you don’t belong to any particular land.

“If you believe in peace, you gotta go to work. If you believe in the things you say, you gotta get to work.” GS-H

Revolutionaries, people dreaming, people dissatisfied and joyless–it’s time to get to work. Gil Scott-Heron is performing two nights at the Blue Note. You missed the first night but tonight he’ll be back on stage for two performances. Make it there. The scene between sets outside his first show, when people were pouring out of the club and masses of people were squeezed into lines on a small sidewalk in the West Village, had that exciting “end of winter, you have a beautiful reason to be out in the cold” electricity. Bringing together a diverse audience, Scott Heron intoxicated us with stories and songs. When he’s called a “storyteller” it’s not only a reference to the cliché artist/songwriter telling stories through songs, he literally weaves back and forth between telling a story and performing a song. The story he told before “Winter Time in America” started off with, “This is a story about when the world began. I heard it from a brother that was there.”

His one-way banter with the crowd had the appeal of a new friend telling you things you really want to know–he talked shit about critics, gave history lessons, called Tupac a genius, took a slight shot at Sarah Palin, and alluded to his drug use which has landed him in jail off-and-on through out his career. The night is about his voice though, a voice that feels rare and magical; he can sing about peace and I don’t feel like it’s trite and empty. Maybe it’s authenticated because he was down in the trenches during the civil rights movement working for the peace and equality he advocates. For one night Scott-Heron prescribed that we have joy, and being in the dark railroad club alone, and receiving his voice I left with a joy that had escaped me all day.

Gil Scott-Heron and Friends will play at the Blue Note in Manhattan Wednesday March 3rd at 8pm & 10:30 pm.

I was lucky enough to run into Annie Clark yesterday before she leaves to go on tour in China. Sadly, I leave China before the band gets there, so I’ll just have to keep watching videos and pretend. New Video after the jump so you can pretend too.

Glenn Branca and his new ensemble will perform Ascension: The Sequel tomorrow (Saturday February 27th) at Le Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village. Branca, the avant-garde king of the late 70’s/early 80’s No Wave movement, has a reputation for indulgence that nearly proceeds the primal, hypnotic and terrifying tsunami of drone that’s since become his signature. He has furnished a career out of applying the concept of rock music to classical structures, and the resulting conflict between the two genres has been an unrelenting source of inspiration for both the composer and his dedicated, cult-like following. Sonic Youth’s Lee Renaldo and Thurston Moore famously cut their teeth under Branca’s umbrella in the early 80s, and over the years his ensemble has swelled from two to over 100 members and back again. Depending on which side of the bed you happen to wake up on, hearing a movement like Symphony No. 1 (Tonal Plexus) could come off as either mildly meditative or wholly disturbing, but never both. Upon hearing his Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses at the New Music Festival in Chicago in 1982, John Cage is reported to have said that his “feelings were disturbed” and went on to characterize Branca’s composition as the musical equivalent of fascism. No doubt if you synced up 1981’s Symphony No. 1 (Tonal Plexus) to vintage footage of Hitler rallying the masses, the effect would be, er, disturbing to say the least. But odds are the experience left Cage feeling perhaps a bit too conventional. After all, Branca has never cared much for meddling in the realm of accessible, and his new album, marketed as the counterpoint to his 1981 masterpiece The Ascension, finds him exactly where he’s always been: On the fringe of tolerance, simultaneously intriguing his audience while testing their patience, obscenely loud and without apology.

Video after the jump.

More and more 1995 makes to make me want to play music again. Maybe if I start a band, Richard Kern will shoot OUR video. Video after the jump.

The following video is compiled from a conversation our friends at Babylon Falling had with Johnny Ace in his apartment in downtown San Francisco. Best known as a photographer for his images documenting what would become his friend, blues legend John Lee Hooker’s, last ever studio session, Ace is also a well-respected blues bassist. Their conversation covered many topics, but they’ve focused on a portion of it for this video in which Johnny talks about and shows us a collection of his photos that he envisions as a book called ‘Is This Man Jesus? – The Photography of Johnny Ace’. The photos span three decades and take us all over the United States, giving a glimpse into the lives of those people who his wife and fellow band member Cathy Lemons calls “the lost and forgotten, the belied and the beaten.” Video after the jump.

Or I may simply be a single drop of rain.