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Rahshaan Roland Kirk & John Cage in Dick Fontaine Film

Tadanori Yokoo

Tadanori Yokoo

The Olgamikks

From Inverted Audio, a discussion regarding Robag Wruhme new remix mix:

Not so long ago, Gabor Schablitzki, aka Robag Wruhme, was best known for his output as half of the now defunct Wighnomy Brothers. That changed in 2011, when Robag dropped two serene solo releases: a mix compilation, Wuppdeckmischmampflow, on Kompakt records, and an artist album, Thora Vukk, on DJ Koze’s Pampa imprint. Both albums captured the subtle melodies, murky basslines and crunchy percussion that are recurring motifs in Robag’s sonic palette, as well as showcasing the creative enterprise that ensures the German’s output is never predictable.

Robag’s latest release, The Olgamikks, offers a snapshot of his abilities from a third, overlapping standpoint: that of Robag the remixer. An album/mix compilation hybrid that marks the inaugural release on German festival Nachtdigital‘s new label, The Olgamikks is comprised entirely of Robag’s own remixes, along with two new original productions. It opens on a somewhat wistful note with Robag’s rework of Modeselektor’s ‘The White Flash’, as the inimitable vocals of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke hover over plangent strings, before the mix gradually nestles into something more evocative of a nightclub groove via cuts from Fenin and Mri. From there we go sublime, as Robag deftly moves through the soulful minimalism of his various refashionings.

Robag’s remix of Kollektiv Turmstrasse’s ‘Heimat’ is one of the many highlights that follow, absorbing the listener in its serene ascension into classical-music influenced arrangements that float atop the trademark ‘wonky’ bottom-end frequencies that populate Robag’s productions. The alchemy between wobbling bass, intricate melodies and distorted vocal snippets is a constant throughout Robag’s oeuvre, and is again on show in the manner by which he refines Gui Boratto’s ‘No Turning Back’ into something that journeys far beyond the ephemeral charms of the original track. Robag also takes up the invitation to contort Claude Vonstroke ‘The Greasy’ into a cut that is more restrained, but ultimately far more beguiling than its antecedent, as he splices it together with two other tracks, his own ‘Wolluwe’ and his refashioning of Luna City Express.

The final remix featured on the compilation, Robag’s remodeling of Audision’s ‘Yellow Sunset’, features layers of delicate harmonies that amount to a result befitting of the track’s name – it is a sunset you will return to many times over, but not before revisiting many of the other lush sonic contours collated on The Olgamikks.

Conversations with friendly spiders

Tandanori Yokoo

From TLS, a discussion of Oliver Sack's new book on hallucinations:

In the 1960s, Sacks extended his neurophenomenological explorations by taking a variety of recreational drugs; not only amphetamines but also pot and, of course, LSD. The results were occasionally ecstatic, sometimes merely strange and often terrifying. Conversations with a friendly spider – with whom, after an opening exchange of pleasantries, he discussed whether Bertrand Russell had irreversibly damaged Frege’s system of thought with his famous paradox – and studying key moments from the battle of Agincourt enacted on his dressing gown sleeve, were not atypical episodes in the pharmacological dramas unfolding in his head. He fought off panic by carefully transcribing the “craziness” inside himself, writing “for dear life” as “wave after wave of hallucination” rolled over him. These were not quite as crazy as the experience of the student Daniel Breslaw, a subject in a formal study of LSD, who, entering an elevator, passed “a floor every hundred years” and, when back in his room, swam “through the remaining centuries of the day. Every five eons or so a nurse arrives (in the aspect of a cougar, a differential equation, or a clock radio) and takes my blood pressure”. As if this were not enough, Breslaw experienced synaesthesia, or a fusion between the senses, reporting such gems as “the smell of a low B flat, the sound of green”.

The varieties of hallucinations are protean. While vision predominates, hearing, smell, taste, touch, memory, altered body image and strange emotions seeking an object, often figure. Phantosmia (hallucinations of smell), analogous to the Charles Bonnet syndrome, may occur in people who have lost this sense. Auditory hallucinations, in addition to those bothersome, frightening voices, take many forms. The unremitting mental junk of tinnitus is a huge source of suffering, but musical hallucinations following damage to the brain may be just as distressing. Imagine hearing Bing Crosby, friends and orchestra singing “White Christmas” for days on end: a thousand times worse than the musical phrases or “earworms” that stick like limpets to the normal mind. Tactile hallucinations can be compelling, as in the case of one of Sacks’s subjects on drug treatment for Parkinson’s disease. The surfaces of objects seemed to be covered by a film of peach fuzz, cotton candy, or spider’s webs, and the film sometimes became very “lush” as if the items were submerged under a pile of “stuff”. Hallucinations can sometimes be multisensory. When ninety-year-old Rosalie became ill and thought she was dying, she had visions of her mother and heard her welcoming her into heaven. These were completely different from her usual hallucinations: as well as being multisensory, “they were personal, addressed to her, and steeped in warmth and tenderness”. The most “respectable” hallucinations are those we are all prone to on a daily or more usually nightly basis – associated with sleep. They, too, however, are not without their terrors, as Sacks describes. Hypnagogic hallucinations, seen on the threshold of sleep, may take the form of faces or presences charged with malign intent. And hypnopompic hallucinations, which occur on waking, are often seen with open eyes, the terrified gaze populating the darkness with evil faces, spiders, snakes and devils. For some people, “night hags”, sometimes associated with abnormal propensity to dream sleep – narcolepsy – may interfere with their waking life. Occasionally they become a dark secret they dare not share with others.

In our past

Vallejo Nocturno 2013 - Frames

Maga Bo

From Post World Industries:

Quilombo do Futuro dives deep into afro-Brazilian rhythms and sound system culture. It’s the roots of the terreiro growing and overtaking the asfalto. Crumbling it bit by bit. Life that springs from urban decay. Coco, maculelê, samba, jongo and capoeira meet ragga and dub, hip hop and kuduro, grime and dubstep. Organic elements combined with electronic production to bring the punch and power for big sound systems, this is serious batucada and bass, mids, treble. TUDO.

Maga Bo has performed and worked in over 40 different countries – from Delhi to Sydney, Berlin to Addis Ababa, New York City to Brasília, all the while keeping his feet (and ears) firmly planted in the sonic axis RJ/SP/BA – Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Salvador. Inspired as much by his experiences touring internationally in the global beats and bass world as his time spent in the traditional Afro-Brazilian roots scene in Rio de Janeiro, Quilombo do Futuro offers a careful juxtaposition of raw, heavy bass with organic, instrumental and vocal subtlety.

Far from relying on pre-made loops of “Brazilian” drums or other shallow cultural signifiers, this album was recorded with some of the most original and brightest musicians in Brazil today.

Working with celebrated Brazilian musicians, BNegão, Gaspar, Lucas Santtana and Marcelo Yuka, the record also brings in new talents, Funkero, Biguli and one of the most innovative groups in Brazilian music today, BaianaSystem. Bo's mestre of capoeira angola, Mestre Camaleão, brings the berimbau while Rosângela Macedo's vocals hold down tradition. Guyanese Brooklynite, Jahdan Blakkamoore, and Panamanian Chicagoite, MC Zulu, bring the dancehall vibe to riddims that most don't even try to touch. All percussion was tracked and produced by Maga Bo and his long time partner in riddim, percussionist and fellow carioca, João Hermeto. A quilombo was an autonomous, fugitive settlement founded by ex-slaves and others in colonial Brazil.

The Quilombo do Futuro is more than a possible physical space. It is a potential worldwide agglomeration of cultural resistance. After centuries of wealth generated by an economy built on slavery (and the subsequent post-abolition adaptations), the Quilombo do Futuro is a break from this legacy. Fortified by an international community based on plurality, inclusive democracy and direct communication, cultural resistance is paramount in creating a sustainable, healthy existence in the face of worldwide corporate domination.

Born in the United States and based in Rio de Janeiro since 1999, Maga Bo has collaborated with Mulatu Astatke, Issa Bagayogo, Bollywood star Shilpa Rao, BaianaSystem as well as releasing critically acclaimed remixes for Poirier, Luisa Maita, Filastine, Blick Bassy and Bomba Estéreo. His music and remixes have also been released on Tru-Thoughts, Ninja Tune, Cumbancha, Dutty Artz, World Connection and many others. Among his manyinternational tours, he has performed at the Sydney Festival, WOMEX, Club Transmediale and Mundial.

Tierney Gearon

From Hypocritedesign.com:

The family snapshots of Tierney Gearon have only recently come to the attention of the artworld through her significant presence in the ‘I Am A Camera’ exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London in spring 2001, but her work has a strength and conviction that belies her newcomer status.

Born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1963, Gearon has led a predominantly mid-Atlantic life that was kick-started when she was spotted by a European modeling agency while studying ballet in Utah. It was during some five years of traveling the world through her modeling work that Gearon first became interested in life on the other side of the camera. An agent in Paris, impressed by a small scrap book of Polaroid photographs Gearon had taken of other models she worked with, encouraged her to extend her repertoire and she was launched into the world of fashion photography, earning respect from many of the most influential fashion houses and producing work for Times Square billboards and publications such as i-D.

After five years of jet-setting as a busy commercial photographer, Gearon not only felt the fashion world had taught her everything it could, but also met and married a Frenchman (whom she has since divorced), settled down for the first time and had a family – Emilee, who is seven years old, and Michael, now four. Following what proved to be an emotionally difficult time after the birth of her two children and the break-up of her marriage, Gearon began the highly personal project that launched her, unsuspecting, into an artistic career. The documenting of her extended family has acted as a personal journey for herself and for her family as well, both in a literal and emotional sense.

Structured around journeys with her children to and from the homes of distant and diverse relatives – predominantly across the United States – her images show lives comprised of both comfort and confusion. Little in Gearon’s pictures could be called out-of-the-ordinary: we see the generations of her family hanging out on the beach, going skiing, talking by the pool, and watching TV. There is no documentary grittiness in these bright Technicolor shots, whose backdrops range from sun-drenched beaches to the white ski slopes of the Alps, but there is an edginess at play that goes beyond the snap-happy impressions offered at first glance. Children stand naked on a beach against the backdrop of an azure sea: a family snap indeed, except that the children are wearing identical Disney masks and stare directly out towards the viewer, unexpectedly reflecting our quizzical glance back at us.

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Michael Wolf

Michael Wolf Life in Cities

Huidobro

by Picasso

Floor Plans

From The New Inquiry & Interiors:

Michael Haneke sets his film within a single location, a Parisian apartment, which was constructed in a soundstage. The filmmaker’s direction here is restrained; his static camera observes his characters from a distance, almost always in long shot, without ever investigating their internal state of mind – except for a sole dream sequence. This allows for an intimate relationship with his subjects to build over the course of the film…