[Friday Playlist] Tracking Radiohead's Influences, Album by Album

May 20, 2016

text by Adam Lehrer

Sometimes it’s hard what to make of Radiohead. I’ve been a fan of them since my 10th birthday in October of 1997 when my parents gifted me with OK Computer (along with records by The Smashing Pumpkins and Wu Tang Clan, I was a hip little kid!). At the time, they were the most far out band I had ever heard. Kid A blew my mind equally. But later on, when I started getting acquainted with Free Jazz, Krautrock, electronic music, and 20th Century composers that inspire Radiohead, it was sometimes hard to maintain headspace for the band. For a long time I would think, “What’s the point of listening to Radiohead when I can get the real thing?”

But eventually I had to realize that I was just posturing. What makes Radiohead outstanding is the band’s ability to draw upon the most difficult and experimental forms of music while still maintaining their status as, more or less, a pop group. Radiohead’s new record, A Moon Shaped Pool, reveals itself after a few listens. In contrast with previous records, the songs can feel quick and not fully fleshed out (considering some of these tracks were written 10-years-ago, that’s not a ringing endorsement). But then it all makes sense, and A Moon Shaped Pools has an addictive quality that is essential Radiohead. There is a lot going on in these songs, and sometimes there is very little going on in these songs, but the varied textures echoed by Thom Yorke’s legendary haunting falsetto reveal an album strange and beautiful.

Radiohead’s greatest strength is its channeling of the avant-garde through the form of a pop song, something they do better than any contemporary musical act. They are champions of music, first and foremost. I’d wager that hundreds of thousands of people heard Aphex Twin for the first time due to Thom Yorke singing the producer’s praises around the time of Kid A’s release. I’d wager that less people might have even heard Penderecki on the advice of Johnny Greenwood. The following is an estimated but thoroughly researched overview of the musical influences that have inspired Radiohead throughout their career, album by album.

Pablo Honey

Pablo Honey doesn’t even seem like a Radiohead album at this point. Far from the grandeur of the records that follows, it is the culmination of a bunch of Indie Rock-obsessed Brits working out their obsessions before they could go on to make something new and modern. It’s a rock album disguised as a Brit Pop album. You can hear the band’s early rock influences; Thom Yorke has cited Pink Floyd and Queen as some of his favorites as a youngster. But it primarily acts as a watered down take on numerous ‘80s College and Indie Rock bands: R.E.M., the underrated Connecticut-based Rock band Miracle Legion, goth-y hints of Joy Division and Siouxsie and The Banshees, and the acerbic worldview of Elvis Costello.

The Bends

The Bends is Radiohead’s most powerful guitar-driven album, and also the band’s first example of being an album-centered musical act. To create such a powerful rock album statement, they looked to some of the progenitors of Rock n’ Roll’s mutation into a genre primarily focused on the full-length record, particularly The Beatles. Radiohead’s production also grew more expansive on The Bends with the band building instrumental parts on top of one another much in the way of Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound” But it was also, like I said, a guitar album. The album does seem to fashion itself after the groundbreaking guitar bands of the ‘80s and ‘90s. From the very beginning with track ‘Planet Telax,’ the swirling guitars recall those orchestrated by Kevin Shields on My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and the lovelier parts of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation. And like The Pixies, The Bends has some seriously catchy choruses.

OK Computer

OK Computer was Radiohead’s first bonafide masterpiece, and is often cited along with Nevermind, Loveless, and Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted as one of the best records of the ‘90s. While the previous influences mentioned in this article run strong, OK Computer was the first Radiohead record that embraced the avant-garde by mutating the sounds and stretching the parameters of what is possible within a rock n’ roll song. The album’s themes of alienation in the face of rampant consumerism needed a sonic undercurrent of dread to fester in the mind of the listener. Yorke cited ‘Bitches Brew,’ Miles Davis’ 1970 experimental fusion album, as an important influence on Radiohead’s songwriting process for OK Computer. It makes sense in that on Bitches Brew, Miles channeled terrifyingly beautiful sounds to weave a narrative of New York street life in the ‘70s, and OK Computer relies on its sound for its dark thematic content similarly, accentuated by Yorke’s obtuse lyrics. This was also the record when Johnny Greenwood, Radiohead’s lead guitar player and keyboardist who has gone on to compose music for the last three PT Anderson films, would raise his artistic voice to an equal decibel in the songwriting process as Yorke. Greenwood often cites Polish 20th Century composer Krzystof Penderecki as an influence, and no doubt OK Computer has a lush an orchestral flow to its sound. The band also started adding effects to Yorke’s voice, much in the way of Krautrock icons Can. There are samples on OK Computer as well, perhaps influenced by Yorke and his interest in DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing.

Kid A and Amnesiac

Kid A was released in 2000, with its companion piece Amnesiac coming out shortly thereafter. To me, those two records are the most inspired and important of Radiohead’s career inalterably shifting what types of Indie Rock bands would get famous. No more frumpy guys doing lite Nirvana, Radiohead ushered in an era in which the labtop was often just as important as the guitars with Kid A. But really, has there ever been a platinum band that has ever released an album this ambitiously strange? No surprise then that new influences were all over these two records.

These two records are Radiohead’s most open flirtation with electronic music; at the time Yorke was bored of rock music but deeply obsessed by the IDM acts on Warp records such as Aphex Twin and Autechre as well as Bjork’s Homogenic. The electronica on the album is moody and contemplative, but there are some sounds on the record that one could even dance to. But less we forget the screechy horn interludes on tracks like The National Anthem, a result of the band weaving in the free jazz sounds of Charles Mingus, Alice Coltrane, and Miles Davis’ farther out records such as Sketches of Spain and On the Corner. Motorik rhythms drive the more rock-driven tracks, reminiscent of Krautrock acts Neu!, Can, and Faust. Has there ever been a successful rock band to make an experimental record at the peak of its career? Yes, Talk Talk did with Laughing Stock, another record that seems to have made an impact on Radiohead. You could fill a book with all the music, literary, political, and art influences of Kid A and Amnesiac, but in short, these records absolutely mystified fans and critics alike by utterly doing away with conventional pop song formats. But they are pop songs, all the same. That’s what Radiohead does at its best.

Hail to the Thief

Hail to the Thief has always felt like a bit of a misstep in Radiohead’s discography, but nonetheless carries some interesting tracks. The album feels like a bit of a survey of contemporary music (of the year it was released, 2004) and how Radiohead falls into it. Yorke expressed admiration for the band Liars who had just recorded their swan song, Drum’s Not Dead, in Berlin. Maybe due to this, Hail to the Thief expresses a renewed interest in rock music for Radiohead and an acknowledgement that rock music can be strange and outré. The album didn’t completely rebel against its forebears however, and the electronic influence of Modeslektor proves formative on the album. Yorke has cited the basslines of New Order as an influence, as well.

In Rainbows

In Rainbows was a marketing game changer, with Radiohead allowing fans to pay at their own discretion to hear the record. The buzz around the promotion decision often saw the actual music overlooked. And the music was rather majestic. It’s ultimately more accessible, even when embracing the avant-garde sounds of composers like Olivier Messiaen. But In Rainbows in many ways feels like a distillation of the abstract sounds of Kid and OK Computer into a more palatable, arena-ready sound. In some parts, such as the beautiful Reckoner, there is even a hippy-dippy anthemic sing-along quality. Free of the constraints of the record industry, In Rainbows sounds like Radiohead indulging its every whim.

The King of Limbs

“Rhythm is the king of limbs,” said Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien in an interview on 2011 record The King of Limbs. People seemed to hate this record when it came out, but I appreciated it as soon as I saw Thom doing his Ayahuascua convulsion dance in the music video for ‘Lotus Flower.’ It is certainly Radiohead’s weirdest album, making strong use of samples, loops, and ambient sounds. Some have cited the band’s interest in dubstep acts such as Burial on the witch-y beats that haunt the album. But really, this album is a showcase for drummer Phil Selway and bassist Colin Greenwood’s rhythm section; the members of the band that anchored Radiohead’s entire sound but in many ways lived in the shadow of Yorke and Greenwood. To me, it’s a Dub album, with the band citing influences such as Jamaican dub acts like Scientist, King Tubby, and Augustus Pablo. It is, without question, the best Radiohead album to get stoned and dance in your room along to. And it sounds better live than on record.

A Moon Shaped Pool

Much of a Moon Shaped Pool consists of songs written a decade ago, so just refer to this list for its various infliuences. But in this article the band cited Marvin Gaye as a sound forebear. So that’s in there too.

10 Magical Objects From The Enigmatic Mind of Architect and Designer François Dallegret

May 19, 2016

Text by Keely Shinners

Design is important because it reinvigorates our everyday objects with new life. A good designer does not just make a bed; he makes a bed into a crucifix made out of sot polyurethane. A good architect does not just redesign a basement; he turns the basement into a drugstore/nightclub. We are speaking of the multi-talented architect and artist François Dallegret. The French-born, Montreal-based designer studied architecture at the famous Beaux-Arts in Paris before he tired of their strict, conformist imaginations of what spaces and objects might look like. Since the 60s, Dallegret has been experimenting with futuristic and imaginative concepts and materials, creating multifunctional furniture, strange machines, walking cakes, jumping spheres, electrical and inflated garments, and more. On the occasion of the architect's latest exhibition in Los Angeles, here are ten of his most whimsical and fantastic creations:

1. LIT CROIX

Dallegret made the "Cross Bed" in 1977 out of soft polyurethane plastic material as part of a series for his creative company God & Co.

2. LE DRUG, A PHARMACY/NIGHTCLUB

After becoming bored of the conformist Parisian architecture scene of the early sixties, Dallegret left for New York and then onto Montreal. There, the owners of a chain of pharmacies commissioned a young Dallegret to design and build a café-bar underneath one of their stores. For Le Drug, Dallegret enveloped the harsh solidity of the basement walls with a surreal, white plastic overcoat, creating the illusion of a single, continuous surface throughout. The project was dismantled after two years for the expense of its maintenance; one can only wash the black scuffs off an all-white plastic dance floor for so long.

3. LE CHAISSE RESSORT

Despite its rigid and static visage, the Chaise Ressort is immaculately designed to react and adjust to the sitter's weight and posture. To lie in the Ressort ("spring" en français) is to feel weightless, "like an astronaut in a lunar module."

4. COSTUMES FOR A TV WESTERN

Dallegret served as the art director and designer for the short-lived "2020 West," a comedy-adventure about a man who roams a futuristic American West. Dallegret, in charge of set design, costumes, and presentation photography, created a strange, half-nostalgic, half-science fiction world, "rich, alive, and animated." Production for the television program was never finished.

5. LA CHAISE ENCEINTE

The "Pregnant Chair" was made in Montreal in 1965, and was recently exhibited for its whimsy and innovation at the Architectural Association Gallery in London.

6. COURBE FRANÇAISE

The "French Curve" reflects the shape and design of the Stade de Taillibert, as well as le Mât, constructed just before the Olympics in 1976, and is perhaps a commentary on the exponential costs of those architectural feats.

7. PLOOK

Out of a chromed plastic helmet, metal pipes, corks, and a motor, a 27-year-old Dallgret created this strange machine/toy to walk in slow, turtle-like fashion across the room, simply by a twist of the button on its back.

8. THIS COMMUNICATION DEVICE

The Atomiseur is a mold for a flag mast cap in solidified glass powder, becoming a simulation device for idealizing communication

9. KIIK, A STRESS REDUCTION HAND PILL

The advertisement for "Kiik" reads, "KiiK is a unique, functional product to help cure body discomforts and mind obsessions. This hand pill is recommended for breaking all habits ‘bad or good.' Use it to stop smoking or start drinking." KiiK was a prototype by Dallegret for one of three 17 foot long elements in a project for a children’s playground at the University of Chicago for architect Walter Netsch.

10. TUBULA, A RACECAR MADE OF AIR DUCTS

Tubula is an "Automobile Immobile" made from aluminum tubing found in air ducts, slipped together. The "automobiles" came in blue, silver, and gold.

François Dallegret's "The World Upside Down" will be on view from May 19th-June 26th at WUHO (Woodbury University Architecture) at 6518 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles. Text by Keely Shinners. Follow @AUTREMAGAZINE on Instagram.

[Friday Playlist] In Celebration of Skepta

May 13, 2016

Text by Adam Lehrer

Skepta’s ‘Konnichiwa’ has finally seen release not less than five years after his previous full-length ‘Blacklisted.’ I’ll just say here: it’s a scorcher. But even more important is that after over a decade of the industry trying to break grime acts into the US pop and hip-hop market, Skepta looks to finally be the Grime artist who might make international cultural dent. Even more important is the fact that he is doing so by being a true Grime artist. Unlike past contenders to the throne of cross-continental Grime superstardom, Skepta will not collaborate with Robbie Williams (like Dizzee Rascal did) or give into Hip-hop’s obsession with luxury (like Wiley did with track “Wearing my Rolex”). Writer Josh Gray described the album well in his review for The Quietus: “To critically appraise [Konnichiwa] is to take the pulse of an entire genre; a genre that’s tentative but unstoppable ascent has provided a Ranieri-worthy spectacle of underdog triumph for both diehard fans and casual observers alike.”

With co-signs by the A$AP Mob and Drake, Skepta looks poised to take over the universe. And he will do so making Grime music and Grime along, perhaps finally getting American fans to consider British hip-hop music alongside its American counterpart. With this, I thought it wise to look back on the tracks that brought Skepta here. He’s been doing this since 2004, and a genre-defining breakout swan song like ‘Konnichiwa’ doesn’t come over night.

Jeffrey Deitch On Artist Tom Sachs

May 11, 2016

text by Jeffrey Deitch

“How did these get here!?” I was shocked to see a pile of stickers on my gallery reception desk in the Spring of 1996 with the outrageously provocative phrase “Nuke the Swiss” printed above a red cross. “They were left there by that funny guy who comes in here all the time,” my staff explained. A few weeks later, I was there when the culprit walked in, smirking as he handed me a fresh stack of Nuke the Swiss stickers. His engaging manner somehow neutralized the egregious content of his free art. This was my first introduction to Tom Sachs, who twenty years later, still visits during his walks around the neighborhood, and who continues to perfect his fusion of radical conceptual performance, Modernist idealism, bricolage and provocation.

Tom and I have discussed presenting his work in my gallery since 1996, but it took twenty years to realize an exhibition. There were several false starts. In the late 1990s, Tom amused himself by setting up a contest between three art dealers who were keen to show his work, Angela Westwater, Mary Boone, and myself. He even published a zine about the “competition.” He decided that Mary Boone was the winner and rewarded her with a solo show. I opened my copy of The New York Times on September 30, 1999 to see the astonishing headline, “Art Dealer Arrested for Exhibition of Live Ammunition.” Tom had placed a vase full of live 9-millimeter cartridges on Mary Boone’s reception desk for visitors to take home as souvenirs. Mary was hauled off to jail for unlawful distribution of ammunition and resisting arrest. She was also charged with possession of unlawful weapons and possession of stolen property for another piece in the show, which featured homemade guns. I was lucky to have dodged a bullet. There was much more water under the bridge, but I will save those stories for my memoirs.

Last year Tom called to invite me for a tea ceremony. He had transformed a section of his wunderkammer studio into a subversion of a Japanese tea house, constructed with Con Edison excavation barriers and Blue Foam instead of rice paper and bamboo. I was deeply entranced in Tom’s remix of the tea ceremony when he stunned me by lifting the lid of a lacquer box that I assumed would contain an exquisite tea biscuit. Instead of a biscuit, it was a perfectly measured line of cocaine. The ceremony was confounding, but the taste of the carefully sourced matcha was transporting.

Some months later Tom told me the good news that his entire tea house along with its extensive Japanese garden and his bronze bonsai tree (made from 3,500 casts of Q-tips, tampon cases, tooth brushes, and enema nozzles) would be the focus of a major exhibition at the Noguchi Museum. In addition, his Boom Box retrospective, which had been enthusiastically received in Austin, would be coming to the Brooklyn Museum. Tom suggested that maybe now was the time to present the gallery show that we had been discussing for twenty years.

Tom’s proposal for our gallery show was Nuggets, a presentation of his Sachsified versions of Modernist masterpieces. The doorbell to Tom’s Center Street studio is marked “Brancusi.” Appropriately, the major work in the exhibition is Tom’s response to Brancusi’s Le Coq, perfectly crafted from plywood, resin and sheet metal screws, rather than marble. In Michel Gondry’s film Be Kind Rewind, the protagonists, video store clerks played by Jack Black and Mos Def, remake their favorite movies in the vacant lot behind the shop after they have inadvertently erased the store’s inventory. Their “sweeded” versions of movies become more popular with their customers than the originals. In his way, Tom has been “sweeding” the icons of modern art and consumer culture his whole career. We will find out whether the audience prefers Tom’s reboot of Brancusi to the real thing.

There is an aesthetic equivalence in Tom’s world between icons of modern art and icons of contemporary consumer culture. Tom’s sculpture of a laundry basket, meticulously crafted out of plywood and resin is mounted on a museum pedestal with the same reverence as his Brancusi. He worships the brilliantly efficient design of the lowly cinder block as much as he admires a stacked sculpture by Donald Judd. My favorite “Nugget” is Tom’s astonishing and functioning exact size reconstruction of a photocopy machine, perhaps the true icon of Post Modernism. Tom’s work embodies a contradiction at the core of his unique aesthetic: his veneration of the purity of modern art and industrial design and his love of bricolage and handicraft. His works are fabricated with the combination of industrial rigor and hand made artistry that have become his trademark.

The works in Nuggets span the spectrum of Tom’s artistic, cultural and sociological interests, from Brancusi to McDonald’s. Among the resonant works are his Kelly Bag in plywood, canvas, steel, resin, latex and nylon and his plywood, latex, and epoxy milk crate, with steel hardware, his homage to a masterpiece of modern design. There is also Nutritional Facts, a giant wood burned chart of the nutritional content of the full McDonald’s menu. The works are presented on pedestals like rare tribal sculpture in the Metropolitan’s Michael Rockefeller Wing.

Tom Sachs is one of the rare artists who does not just create works of art, he has constructed an entire aesthetic world. His studio is a bricoleur’s dream factory, itself one of his greatest art works. From his distinctive handwriting, to his influential films, Tom is always making art. Tom Sachs’ official biography articulates his unique approach to his work:

Sachs is a sculptor, probably best known for his elaborate subversions of various Modern icons, all of them masterpieces of engineering and design of one kind or another. A lot has been made of the conceptual underpinnings of these sculptures: how Sachs samples capitalist culture: remixing, dubbing and spitting it back out again, so that the results are transformed and transforming. Equally, if not more important, is his total embrace of "showing his work." All the steps that led up to the end result are always on display. This means that nothing Sachs makes is ever finished. Like any good engineering project, everything can always be stripped down, stripped out, redesigned and improved. The reward for work is more work.

Tom Sachs "Nuggets" will be on view until June 4, 2016 at Deitch Projects, 76 Grand Street, New York. Text by Jeffrey Deitch. Photograph by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

[Friday Playlist] Best Music of April 2016

April 29, 2016

By Adam Lehrer

As of today, Autre will be rounding up our favorite new music at the end of every month. This isn’t only because coming up with obscure scenes and sub-genres on a weekly basis is getting difficult (it is), but also because Autre strives to be contemporary. Daily, we try and inform our readers of the creative ideas festering inside the brains of artists, designers, photographers, writers, and filmmakers. Music, being the most joyous of mediums, deserves to have its story told at the moment the story is unfolding. These are the sounds driving us wild, today.

Note: The only reason Beyoncé’s Lemonade is not at the top of this list is that Tidal has the rights to her tunes, hence: not available on Spotify. But I’ll add that that record is every bit worth its praise capturing the world’s most talented and adventurous pop singer at the top of her career. So few artists have their souls ripped out every time they sing, opting for Instagram posts for direct communication to their fans. What Beyonce gives us she gives us in songs, and Lemonade is the best album of her career. The most staunch experimental music nerds would all be defeated by the record’s breathtaking scope and cohesion.

1. PJ Harvey, The Hope Six Demolition Project, Track: The Orange Monkey

The always-progressing PJ Harvey released The Hope Six Demolition Project this month, her first since her Mercury Prize-earning 2011 LP Let England Shake. The LP’s title refers to the HOPE VI projects in the US, where down run neighborhoods were revitalized and wiped of crime, leading of course to gentrification and social cleansing. PJ is extremely political here, leading to some of her most vivacious lyrics of her career, with a few missteps. But with PJ, even the lyrics that don’t hit add to her mystique. Her fearlessness makes her compelling, allowing to move through styles ranging from subdued folky tracks to alt-rock ragers.

2. Ihsahn, Arktis, Track: Disassembled

I was quite the metalhead in my youth, but I listened to a lot of the cheesy stuff (Korn, Spineshank). Luckily, that all led me to Terrorizers magazine where I read a glowing review of black metal band Emperor’s Prometheus. An extraordinary concept album matched in its brutality by its progressive textures and rhythms, I became an obsessive. Emperor leader Ihsahn has recorded solo for years now, but new record Arktis feels like the career statement he’s been working towards. Ihsahn’s music is unwavering its brutality, but peppers the thuds with shimmering acoustic guitar lines, moody synths, and here, even a saxophone. There are weaker tracks, but on the strongest ones, Ihsahn proves himself an artist unbound to the stylistic traits that define the genre he has chosen for himself. It’s music, before it’s metal, if you catch my drift.

3. Parquet Courts, Human Performance, Track: Two Dead Cops

New York’s best rock band of now, as anointed by new album Human Performance. No band captures the anxiety of living in the 5 Boroughs better than Parquet Courts, even at the band’s catchiest there is an undercurrent of fear and paranoia lurking beneath the melodies. The band captures a world when even its greatest city is still a shrine to monotony: the daily grind is a grind no matter the locale. Andrew Savage has become one of indie rock’s most literary of songwriters and scathing of cultural critics. But the best part of Parquet Courts, even at their most bummed out “I don’t get out, I don’t have fun” sings Savage} they still sound like their having a blast, like rock is the only thing keeping them through. I went to the album release party in Gowanus earlier this month, and very few indie rock bands are putting on shows as raucous as Parquet Courts.

4. Deftones, Gore, Track: Prayers/Triangles

Back in the early ‘00s, Deftones got unfairly lumped in with the nu-metal craze. After all, the band’s label marketed them as such to cash in on their association with Korn and the like. And while it made Deftones rich, it also made it impossible for them to get the artistic cred they deserve. Really, nothing sounds like Deftones. No band is able to capture the intensity of thrash and the dreamy haze of Cocteau Twins without sounding , well, dumb. All the better, Deftones makes their experimentation accessible, as best evidenced on the now rightly referred to as masterpiece White Pony. Recently released Gore is the band’s best since White Pony. The band’s leader, Chino Moreno, once against juxtaposes his ethereal whispery howl with murder and sex fantasizing lyrics. Stephen Carpenter’s riffs are meaty but muted, letting the atmospheric production dance around them. Now that the critics who have grown up with Deftones are of age, the band finally is getting their place in the culture they deserve.

5. LA timpa, Animals, Track: Animal

OVO is great and everything, but we can’t ignore all the other amazing music coming out of Toronto. LA timpa, an experimental producer straddling the lines of Portishead-esque dream-pop and the aural hijinx of Onehontronix Point Never with a culturally aware satirical voice, released an exciting set of five songs, Animals. This kid names Junya Watanabe and Harmony Korine amongst his influences, and I can already hear this music soundtracking the lives of cool kids everywhere.

6. Youth Code, Commitment to Complications, Track: Anagnorisis

Ryan George and Sara Taylor are Youth Code, the latest band to straddle the line between dance music and all out warfare heavy metal and hardcore. In an article for self-titledmag.com, George discusses his wish that Ministry were able to make a record that was as heavy as The Land of Rape and Honey without ever having to pick up guitars. The guitars that Youth Code does use on Commitment to Complications sound like call to arms sirens, weaving in and out of breakneck paced beats and glorious hate screams.

7. Kweku Collins, Nat Love, Track: Stupid Roses

19-year-old, Chicago-based rapper, singer, and producer Kweku Collins released his debut full-length this month, Nat Love. Though in-line with his more introspective hometown contemporaries like Vic Mensa and Chance the Rapper, Collins is far more of a sonic outlier. His father was an African and Latin percussionist, and that fluid rhythm sense manifests in Collins’ music, along with influences like D’angelo and Tame Impala. There is a remarkable sense of musicality on this record, especially considering Collins’ age. His more obvious forebear is Andre 3000; he constantly seems to be questioning the ideals of what it means to be a hip-hop star. He can find two hip-hop clichés, as with weed and woman like on ‘Stupid Roses,’ and use both clichés to subvert his lyrics into new meaning.

8. Beak, Couple in a Hole OST, Track: Battery Point

The world is better when Geoff Barrow is making music. Though Portishead is long gone, Barrow has been making Krautrock-recalling experimental music under the Beak> moniker for about a decade. Beak>’s newest record is a soundtrack to Tom Greens’ new film Couple in a Hole that depicts a couple living in the remains of their burned home that took the life of their child. Beak> beautifully captures the isolation-induced psychosis of the film. The record is ambient but suffocating. It reminds me of Popul Vuh’s work with Werner Herzog, in that the record provides Barrow with motifs to work with and expand on, letting the music stand on its own.

9. A$AP Ferg, ALWAYS STRIVE AND PROSPER, Track: Strive (featuring Missy Elliot)

Ferg is back and he is obliterating any sense of genre. ALWAYS STRIVE AND PROSPER, while not all together perfect, is an exhilarating listen. With vivacious production from Clams Casino, Skrillex, DJ Khalil, and more, Ferg proves himself the Mob’s most extraterrestrial weirdo. While Rocky in some ways has brought mad mid’90s Bones Thugs N’ Harmony rap-sing, Ferg is a pure futurist. His lyrics have also greatly improved.

10. Wire, Noctural Koreans, Track: Dead Weight

Jesus Christ. Wire literally invented post-punk with Pink Flag in 1977, and here they are 39 years later still making relevant and experimental rock music. That makes them the longest-running actually good band in history. While last year’s self-titled album seemed like an ode to the band’s history in rock music, Noctural Koreans is emblematic of the band’s fondness for experimental electronic music and Krautrock swirl. While last year’s LP was mostly recorded live, these eight leftover (but certainly not inferior) songs allowed for greater studio trickery.

11. Dalek, Asphalt for Eden, Track: Shattered

Experimental hip-hop group Dalek have been on hiatus since 2010, and lord knows there has been much to be disgusted over in the six years since. Dalek comes back on Asphalt for Eden with a revolutionary plomp, joining the ranks of Killer Mike and Kendrick Lamar as the rappers that really care. But of course, they do that while utilizing shoegaze feedback and noise-drenched beats, making their politicizing sharper and more jarring to the apathetic amongst us.

12. Elzhi, Lead Poison, Track: Alienated (featuring Smitty)

Detroit-based rapper Elzhi, formerly of Slum Village, released Elmatic in 2011 as a remake and a tribute to Nas’ Illmatic. It was a breathtakingly lyrical record, and yet outside of hip-hop circles it sort of fell under the radar. I hope that doesn’t happen with Lead Poison, Elzhi’s new album. The album almost didn’t happen, and a Kickstarter fund started in 2013 almost resulted in Elzhi being sued in January when he failed to deliver. Perhaps that angst brought out the best in Elzhi, as he viscerally details the woes of betrayal and loss with one of the fiercest flows on the planet.

13. Primitive Weapons, The Future of Death, Track: Ashes of Paradise

There is something comforting I find in Brooklyn quartet Primitive Weapons, a band that seems to recall the best of every band I loved at age 14; from the mathematic chaos of Converge to the abrasive melodiousness of Glassjaw. Members of the band actually own Brooklyn’s legendary metal bar Saint Vitus, and it seems the influence of the vast array of bands they see regularly has had its positive effects.

14. Bleached, Welcome the Worms, Track: Keep On Keepin On

This band is impossible to not like. From the ashes of all-girl noise punk band Mika Miko, Bleached was formed by sisters Jessica and Jennifer Clavin in Los Angeles. There is no noise here and only a little bit of punk. It’s straight ahead and melodic rock n’ roll, emblematic of the joyous creativity defining the city the band lives in.

15. Susanna, Triangle, Track: Texture Within

Norwegian singer-songwriter Susanna’s music has had many vehicles: as lead singer for art-pop band The Magical Orchestra, Cat Power covers, and in collaborations with Scandinavian artist Jenny Hval. But her one most consistent draw is her voice. It’s a fascinatingly beautiful voice, one that can evoke a span of emotions in the same note. Her first solo album, Triangle, is 70 minutes long, but the voice holds it together. Meditating on religion and morality, Susanna brings in numerous musical styles. It is hard to listen to in one go, but it’s a record with much room to explore.

[Friday Playlist] A Celebration of Minnesota, The State That Gave Us the Late, Great Prince

April 22, 2016

*Photo by Robert Whitman, outside the Schmitt Music Mural in Downtown Minneapolis*

by Adam Lehrer

NOTE: THIS PLAYLIST IS A CELEBRATION OF THE LATE AND ETERNAL PRINCE. The only reason this playlist isn’t solely made up of Prince songs is that there are only five Prince tracks available on Spotify. Why? Because Prince was infamously protective of his creative output. A shining beacon of musical dignity in the era where music had no value, Prince always had value. When funk had lost its swagger with the losses of your Sly Stone’s and the diminishing qualities of records by your James Brown’s, Prince still recognized that the musical style was the purest form of both art and entertainment, and to him entertainment was art. This was a musician who could play any instrument (and on guitar he was really only second to Hendrix), who could write any note, who could arrange music with the best of them. Yet he still had the fortitude and the ambition to create a spectacle. Prince was its own musical world, sounding completely contemporary and totally alien all at once.

And where did this funk alien god come from? Minnesota. Seems kind of strange doesn’t it? Even though it shouldn’t. In some ways, it feels like Prince could only come from a place like Minnesota, a place out of phase with contemporary ideals of music, art, and fashion. It allowed him the headspace for pure creation, to pull his ideas deep from the depths of his own imagination and spew them onto an unsuspecting world.

And Prince wasn’t the only musician to benefit from Minnesota’s isolation (and sub-zero winters). I mean, Bob Dylan came up here for christ’s sakes. This was the city where Husker Du stripped punk rock of its leanings towards machismo to imbue their music with a sense of sexual isolation and social despair to write the beginnings of what would eventually become alternative rock. Could they have done that trying to fit in with the tough guy punk bands in D.C., New York, and LA? Probably not.

The same could be said about The Replacements, a rock band who didn’t care about art or culture one iota. They just wanted to get drunk and make great rock n’ roll songs. Minnesota was probably helpful in developing that laid back attitude.

Some artists need to be surrounded by other artists to create. Some need to be unencumbered by scene politics and competitive glad-handing. Whether it’s Prince, or shoegaze band Low, or hip-hop collective Doomtree, or grunge girls Babes in Toyland, Minneapolis, Minnesota has always been a city that has amazing music on the low. Sometimes cold and isolation can be great creative elixir’s.

[FRIDAY PLAYLIST] A Celebration Of PJ Harvey On The Occasion of The Release Of Her New Album

April 14, 2016

text by Adam Lehrer

Today, PJ Harvey releases her ninth full-length record The Hope Six Demolition Project. At the time of writing this article, I haven’t been able to fully listen to the record. But if the album’s first three singles are any indication, she is still one of the most important artists working in rock n’ roll: The Orange Monkey, The Community of Hope, and The Wheel juxtapose the dark but sublime beauty and evocative imagery that PJ Harvey has used to influence two generations of rock fans. PJ Harvey is the best kind of rock star: she’s an amazing songwriter, her sound is malleable and singular, she understands the power of image and aesthetic, and she’s absolutely fascinating as a human being.

And if you look at the very beginning of Harvey’s career, it’s almost hard to fathom the fact that she’s still here and still relevant. After her debut record (still recording under the moniker The PJ Harvey Trio) Dry was released in 1992, Harvey had a bit of a breakdown crushed under the weight of new found fame, a stressful move to London, and her first awful breakup. In interviews, she evaded questions about the meanings of her lyrics and refused to discuss her conceptual processes. But it worked for her. In many ways, Harvey is a callback to the rock star as an artist. You certainly don’t hear a lot of, “I just do this for the fans, bro” type statements from her. Like Dylan, Hendrix, Patti, and Lennon, it seems like Harvey doesn’t always know the reasons that her music comes out the way it does. It just comes out: pure creation. That being said, she sometimes seems to be as aware of the importance of visuals, almost as much as even Bowie was. When Dry came out, a dark but bluesy punk record, she was all black tights and Doc Maarten’s, almost like an Ann Demeulemeester ad come to life. When her music was amplified in production and grandiosity on the record To Bring You My Love, so was Harvey’s look: ball gowns and smeared makeup defined her new stage presence. For the recording of the new record, Harvey and her band recorded behind a glass wall and allowed paying spectators to watch, ever aware of the fact that people don’t just love listening to their favorite musicians; they want to see them and know them. Harvey is at once enigmatic and welcoming, like she is giving you your own personal access to her.

Where she differs from her classic rock predecessors however, is her gleeful abandon of genre trappings. When Harvey says that comparing her to Patti Smith is “lazy journalism,” she’s absolutely right. While Smith has always remain rooted in classic rock, Harvey has elevated her sound eons beyond the blues, Hendrix, and Captain Beefheart influences that she initially rooted them in. By the time Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea came out in 2000, Harvey had no problem incorporating synthesizers and computer into her sound. Her sound can be aggressive and bombastic, and minimalist and chillingly vulnerable. Sometimes her sound can be so varied on one record that the only sound that can tie tracks together is her preternaturally gorgeous contralto voice. That voice is the anchor that the entire spectacle is built around.

There is nothing else like PJ Harvey on Earth. She is one of the last artists in music to accrue wealth by subverting expectations, and that alone is something to celebrate.

[BOOK REVIEW] Susan Grace Reviews Harold Jaffe's New Book, Death Café

April 14, 2016

text by Susan Grace

Harold Jaffe, progressive, social activist, and author of 24 innovative books, including Othello Blues, Revolutionary Brain, Anti-Twitter, and Induced Coma, has planted another mine in the minds of readers worldwide with his latest work, Death Café.

The title alone, Death Café, is compelling, and perhaps, in a sense, satiric. For the unfamiliar, a death café is an actual thing, an experience, but Jaffe’s version goes far beyond to become in effect the sine qua non for exploring the 21st century human condition.

The online-defined death café experience, better known in continental Europe, has, over the last decade, been introduced into other countries, including the US. But be aware that Jaffe’s concept of a death café is not a small eclectic group gathered together over tea and cakes in someone’s living room or in a conveniently-located coffeehouse to discuss the taboo of all taboos—death—and leave an hour later feeling purged.

For Jaffe, the venue is the dying planet and the participants are the suicided, the martyred, the murdered, the murderers, the victims and perpetrators, those who love them, the known and unknown, past and present. From Africa to China, India to Europe, the US to the Middle East, Jaffe’s Death Café opens wound after festering wound, challenging a technopiated culture that seems to have erupted like a pustule on the backside of a capitalistic globalized corporatocracy to let go of its scripted thoughts and do something better: Feel. Not purged like a lowercased death café, but pent. How else does a revolution, if one is still possible, begin?

In his opening text “Orfeo,” an allusion to the mythic Orpheus, Jaffe weaves a first-person narrative in which the events take place underground, starting in the basement of a hospital complex filled with “discarded old people” and continuing to an underground train station men’s room where 20 men stand at urinals masturbating “while peering at the masturbating male to his left.” The multiple layers in Jaffe’s work leave considerable space for interpretive debate, but the symbolism is fairly clear between Orfeo’s underground and Orpheus’s underworld. After he finally manages to pee, Orfeo boards his train heading north. Symbolically, there is a sense that each story thereafter might function as an underground stop as he makes his way to the surface.

Along the stops, a particularly impactful passage, and not without political currency, happens near the end of “Auschwitz Crumbling,” a narrative about the difficulties faced by those charged with preserving not only the eroding Nazi death camp but doing so in the face of aging/dying witnesses, fading memories, and Holocaust deniers. The current director sums up the situation: “If we do not change that, this exhibition will say always less to the next generation until it will say nothing at all.” The narrator closes the piece by pointing out that even as Holocaust deniers are spreading rapidly around the world, “newer, sanitized genocides are occurring on every continent.” This insight seems to conjure an image of past genocided victims dropping off one end of a conveyor belt as a steady influx of new genocided victims enters on the other. The reader is left to ruminate on what difference it might make if there were space in our memories for all.

Nineteen provocative fictions and docufictions comprise Death Café. Each narrative is independent of the other yet connected thematically by what perhaps can be described as “daring not to avert one’s eyes from the unjustified pain and sorrow that populate the globe.” Jaffe’s work examines, through different eyes, eyes of the other—the oppressed, the marginalized, the mad, the inevitable—until the examining seamlessly gives way to inhabiting. This ideality is underscored in “Inhabit,” a multiple-discourse docufiction that explores the deeper aspects of suffering as the narrator seeks to inhabit crucial moments during the lives and deaths of individuals who have made artistic, loving, even ugly impacts on the world. In one section, the narrator inhabits the nearly failed suicide of the “Maladroit when not masterful” Vincent Van Gogh and recalls Artaud’s words, “Suicided by society.” He dwells in the deathbed moments of the Aldous Huxley and later Blake with his beloved Catherine. When interrogated as to whether he wishes to inhabit Theo Van Gogh—the great-great grandson of Vincent’s brother—filmmaker, racist xenophobe, who is murdered and martyred, the narrator replies simply, “No.” Later he concedes that while Vincent would not wish for a descendant like Theo, he would understand. “The world moves forward and back. Proceeds by oppositions.” It is the opening discourse, that of a young virgin who leaves her village in Yugoslavia to join the order of Loreto—nuns who tend to the poor and dying in India—where the lyricism of the “unsituated dialogue” and the narrator’s self-interrogation set the tone for this text.

I’d like, respectfully, to gain entrance to the range of feelings she was experiencing when she made her arduous journey from Skoplje to Dublin.

When she was admitted to the order of Loreto.

When she slept that first night among the sisters of Loreto.

You want to gain entrance to the range of feelings she experienced?

Yes.

And do what with it?

Inhabit it.

If this last line is not a roadmap, perhaps it should be. What better way to approach the dimensions of this book; what better way to approach human interaction in general? Certainly it affords one the potential for feeling, for compassion—integral components for navigating below the surface of a dying world.

The literary genre, docufiction, has been created and deftly utilized by Jaffe in Death Café and other works. It includes the art of taking historical, news, or other media-based accounts and teasing out the hidden assumptions, essentially by deconstructing, re-imagining, and often, though not always, satirizing, to obtain an alternative point of view that exposes a higher level of socio-cultural awareness.

In the docufiction “Stockholm Syndrome,” Jaffe draws on the reported account of Wolfgang Priklopil who kidnapped a 10-year-old girl in Austria, held her captive for eight years, and eventually committed suicide when at age 18 she escaped. Afterward, the girl says of her captor that he “was a part of her life and ‘in a certain way’ she mourned his suicide.” Further, we learn that she wept inconsolably when she was informed he had killed himself. As the narrator interrogates the story, the girl expresses that she does not feel that Priklopil robbed her of her childhood, “I don’t have the feeling I missed something important. As far as I can see, children are robbed of their childhood one way or another.” Later, alone, she pays her respects at the morgue before his burial and lights a candle for him.

With just a subtle massaging of emphasis, Jaffe manages to expose the hidden assumption in the original reporting—the girl is better off back with her society. But with her conflicted thoughts carefully articulated in Jaffe’s treated text, along with the egocentricity of the so-called authorities, the barrage of media attention, her dysfunctional family and the pointed reminders of the historical complexity of her society, the reader cannot help but wonder to what degree that assumption is valid.

The crystallizing moment comes in the end section, subtitled “The Movie.” The narrative jumps ahead five years; the girl is 23. She has finally “decided to reveal the sordid truth because the movie producers had already seized the file, which was not to be released until 20 years after her death.” It is no surprise that the movie capitalizes on repeated rape scenes and depictions of brutality. What does give pause is her attending the premier in a low-cut, Lagerfeld evening dress displaying “what appeared to be fresh implants,” posing for photos, but declining interviews. By carving out the core and dispensing with the noise, Jaffe raises the question, how shall we define subjugation?

With rapier-sharp wit, Jaffe misses no opportunity to strip the fairytale out of the plight of the aging, endangered species, artists, war, consumerism, capitalism, corporatism and politics. In one particularly jarring narrative, “Butcher Love,” Jaffe juxtaposes a “maso” scene from a Disney-affiliate-owned SM club named after Jean Genet and the torture and pain endured by stock animals, notably in kosher slaughterhouses. The end? A smooth shift into parody with corporations taking a sharp uppercut—nobody is intended to leave the text unscathed, least of all the reader.

The signal question is, how does a writer weave the theme of pain in its myriad facets through 19 such narratives and still manage to avoid any hint of repetition and, in fact, achieve a uniqueness that surpasses expectation. One thing is certain: Jaffe has an uncanny ability to shape his ideas through the use of multiple discourse, unsituated dialogue, and argumentative and dreamlike interrogation, to prune them with tonality and rhythm, to sharpen them with satire and juxtaposition. Technique aside, Jaffe is exquisitely attuned to each character in his narratives; in other words, he inhabits them. The synthesis here is an originative mode of storytelling that facilitates a visceral understanding of the complexities of, and ultimately the dark humor that emerges from, an expiring world utterly incapable of comprehending its own death.

How will you die?

That is the question that underpins everything. It is one that once bore the obligation of being answered or, at the very least, contemplated. Today, for the all-that-glitters consciousness of a consumerist, techno-fed populace the question is almost too painful to articulate. As the narratives unfold in Death Café, it becomes obvious that the pain resides in the not answering. How will you die? is the other half of How will you live? For any society unwilling to answer these questions, Death Café is an illuminating depiction of the human stress response when an uncaring power structure answers it for them.

From “Inhabit”:

You, then.

Will you die like Blake singing songs to Catherine?

Like Vincent with his head turned to the wall?

Like Theo, dissident film-maker, hate-monger, violently set upon, murdered, martyred?

Like Huxley, his thin legs in tweeds, sideways mover, ingesting sight?

Like the teenage virgin from Yugoslavia en route to Dublin then India on a prayer?

In the final, titular narrative, “Death Café,” Jaffe parodies a San Diego living room death café event. If the original symbolic supposition holds, that is, Orfeo’s ascent through the underworld, this might be considered his arrival at the surface. Interspersed with attendee dialogue that volleys from the absurd to the very absurd are sobering scientific commentaries on the plight of the planet in a sort of post-modern Greek chorus fashion. The final commentary: “Scientists attribute the sixth mass extinction to man and his institutions.” This, just before the attendees stroke their smart phones and “savage the key lime pie.”

You can purchase Death Café here. Follow Autre Magazine on Instagram @autremagazine.

[Friday Playlist] Proto Metal Oddities

April 8, 2016

Text by Adam Lehrer

It’s funny how in music, maybe more so than other mediums, if not all out complete musical ineptitude then a general lack of self-awareness is what pushes the art form into new and interesting realms. Lou Reed inspired legions of harsh noise acts by releasing five tracks of atonal skree on Metal Machine Music. Why? Though Reed argued that it was because he liked it, many have said the record was a ruse to get released by his label.

And then you have Black Sabbath, a band that sets the precedent for every doom, stoner, and sludge band that ever followed. But Black Sabbath (initially called Earth, which I’m sure was what Dylan Carlson was thinking of when he named his doom drone project Earth the same name) was a blues band with a Pink Floyd-inspired penchant for gobbling oodles of psychedelic drugs when they started. It was Tony Iommi’s loss of his middle and index finger on his fretting hand that resulted in his simplistic, rumbling, down-tuned, and low E chord-favoring guitar style that resulted in the pervasive feeling of evil that lurked in the band’s sound. The band’s viewing of Boris Karloff’s 1963 occult film Black Sabbath inspired the name change, and they had found a magnificent synergy in their sound and aesthetic. Would they know that they’d become one of the 5 or 6 most influential rock n’ roll bands ever Doubtful, they just played the way that they could.

And yet Black Sabbath didn’t emerge onto the scene without a precedent already being set by forebears and contemporaries. As long as the hippie scene was in motion there were bands that negated the ideas of free love and psychedelic visions of bliss. One out of every two trips is, let’s face it, fucking awful. So perhaps it was this, or just a lesser control over their instruments, that resulted in all these awesome proto-metal oddball records that came out in the late ‘60s and the late ‘70s. These bands, like their more famous psych contemporaries, were essentially blues bands, but freewheeling hippie-dom was replaced by growled and screamed vocals, feedback, and volume. These bands, most of which were shunned by rock press when they were around, have influenced hoards of music both good (doom metal, grunge, noise rock) and (depending on your taste of course) bad (hair metal, hair metal, and hair metal).

San Francisco-based late ‘60s Blue Cheer are often credited as the original heavy metal band and whether you think that’s true or not they really prove that heavy metal, unlike punk which stripped rock n’ roll of its basic form, is really just playing blues licks and amplifying them until your ears hurt. The band’s first two LPs, Vincebus Eruptum and Outsideinside, really hold up. They are the perfect band to play at a summer barbecue at like 6 pm, when everyone starts realizing they are really wasted and things are on the edge of getting out of control. There’s a recklessness to their sound. Aesthetically, the band was really conscious of their look, and their graphics are sort of a grittier version of the San Francisco psychedelia popular at the time (I had a Blue Cheer t-shirt at one point that I was wearing daily for a good while in college).

London-based The Groundhogs were attempting blues, but failing. But that failure is generally what made them interesting. The band sounded like they were falling apart much of the time, but making some interesting use of volume. Though most would align them with proto-metal, the band’s chaotic structure is more akin to the thrills of noise rock. I would listen to Groundhogs in a similar mood to when I want to listen to something like Sightings (a weird mood, to say the least).

Before you were able to throw a rock down some block in Bushwick and hit a black metal guitarist in the head, there was but one “heavy metal” band. They were Sir Lord Baltimore. Though the band had a drumming lead singer (I hate that, personally) their down-tuned but up-tempo feedback-heavy approach to psychedelic music is very audibly the precursor to stoner rock. The bands that are very clearly high and listened to Black Sabbath but don’t want to play as slow as your Electric Wizard’s and your Boris’s. There is a party vibe to Sir Lord Baltimore that I find attractive, a quality I also find attractive in the stoner rock bands of the ‘90s like Kyuss, Queens of the Stone Age, Monster Magnet, and the massively misunderstood Clutch. Sir Lord Baltimore is the godfather.

I am also going to include Mott the Hoople here; because I believe Ian Hunter and his band were misbranded as “glam rock.” I feel like Mott is often thought of as the lesser version of T. Rex. But unlike T. Rex who were a band that filtered rock through funk and dance music, you can’t really dance to Mott the Hoople at all. But you can certainly thrash to it. Need proof? Watch Leo Romero’s skateboarding part in the Emerica Made in Emerica video. He is absolutely ripping in that video, skating scary fast and defying death in every sequence. He is doing it to scorcher Mott the Hoople track ‘Thunderbuck Ram.’ To me, Mott the Hoople was less Bowie and more Guns n’ Roses, but recording in the wrong era.

[Friday Playlist] An Ode to Touch and Go Records

April 1, 2016

text by Adam Lehrer

Not sure if all of our readers read the UK-based music site, The Quietus, but if you have any passing interest in music then you have to head to their URL immediately. It is one of the last music publications around that will review the new Zayn Malik album amidst articles about artists populating the deepest depths of the underground: abstract electronic music, noise, minimal synth, whatever. This week they have dedicated a slew of articles to noise rock; that hard to define punk sun-genre that makes use of dissonance, noise, atonal skrees, occasional odd time signatures, and a sometimes aggressive, if often arty, approach to a standard rock n’ roll sound. Naturally, I’ve been listening to a lot of Melt Banana, Pussy Galore, Lightning Bolt, and the many and sonically far-ranging bands that fall under the noise rock umbrella.

One such article discusses the year 1986, a formative year for rock n’ roll experimentation: psychedelic drone rock bands like Spacemen 3, metallic hardcore bands like Cro-Mags, grindcore like Napalm Death, arty post-punk bands like The Membranes, and Black Metal bands like Mayhem all released records that year. There was also a lot of early noise rock happening, with Sonic Youth and Swans both releasing swan songs. A lot of this noise rock happened to be released by iconic underground rock label, Touch & Go. Naturally, I found it was time we celebrate this brilliant label.

The title Touch & Go was originally applied to an East Lansing, Michigan punk zine written by Tesco Vee and Dave Stimson (of which you can read every issue and great memorial essays in a book, it’s rad). By 1981, Vee teamed up with Corey Rusk, singer of hardcore band The Necros (no tracks available on Spotify) Touch & Go was a label. From the get, the label was releasing hardcore that leaned towards the extreme, with the two label founders bored with early ‘80s punk. These early releases included records by The Necros, The Fix, Negative Approach, and Vee’s band The Meatmen.

But let’s face it, past 1982 hardcore got boring. It became more about macho posturing than leftist politics and extreme self-expressions of discontent. So, punk rock got weird. Touch & Go linked up with the man probably more linked to the sound that noise rock would encompass than any other: Steve Albini. Albini’s first band, Big Black, released all its albums via the label. Eschewing drums for a Roland drum machine, Albini utilized the crushing rhythms of industrial to create a rock sound that was as jarring as its lyrics were offensive. Albini’s next band, the infamously named Rapeman (after a Japanese Manga comic of the same name) also found its single record released on the label.

While Albini defined the Chicago noise rock sound, a punk band from San Antonio was dropping acid, embracing the psychedelic rock of the ’60s and early ‘70s, and making a glorious noise racket with a performance art approach to live shows. They were The Butthole Surfers. On all their releases for Touch & Go in the ‘80s, the band made a point to show that art, traditional rock n’ roll, punk ethos, noise, and copious drugs could co-exist in one collective.

Touch & Go wouldn’t subsist in relevance one bit for 15 years. Die Kreuzen approached hardcore with a contrarian nature, applying angular rhythm and far out riffs to the thud and band three-chord structure. The Laughing Hyenas leaned towards garage, but did it with the loudest possible volumes and most dissonance imaginable. And finally, David Yow was unleashed upon the universe. Influenced by Nick Cave and Iggy, Yow’s guttural moon howl, free-form poetic lyrics, and sweaty visceral live performances would come to define what a noise rock vocalist should be (and influenced Kurt Cobain). Touch & Go knew it before anyone else did, releasing all the massively influential records of Yow’s first and second bands: Scratch Acid and later The Jesus Lizard.

Touch & Go was part of a few more key moments in noisy rock, especially math rock (or post-rock)(worst genre names ever). These bands approached rock n’ roll with a composed albeit sprawling and progressive sound. The defining band and record was of course Louisville band Slint’s Spiderland, that Touch & Go put out in 1991. Still thought of as one of the great rock records of the ‘90s, Slint was as influential to arty music school types starting rock bands as The Ramones was to zitty downtown kids. The album holds up too, I still find myself giving it a few spins a year. Polvo, from Chapel Hill, NC, walked the lines between noise rock and the shifting time signatures of math rock better than any band around, and their Touch & Go release Today’s Active Lifestyles was a formative album for me. Don Caballero eschewed vocals and expressed through colliding riffs and near incomprehensible rhythms. Touch & Go signed them, too.

It’s arguable that Touch & Go is the most important label in the history of rock n’ roll. Why?Perhaps unlike other labels, it evolved with time. Rusk and Stinson remained open to new sounds throughout their careers. With Dischord, you think of hardcore and emotional post-hardcore. With SST, you tend to think Black Flag (despite the fact that they released Husker Du, Sonic Youth, Saccharine Trust, and all sorts of weird bands). But with Touch & Go, you merely think of interesting, creative, and kicking rock bands.

Imaginary Pen Pals: Alex Kazemi On Why He Started The Advisor, A Hub of Handwritten Letters by Male Icons

April 1, 2016

text by Alex Kazemi

Most of my life I felt ashamed by the creative impulses I had. And yet something forced me to follow them. I didn't think writing made me cool or different, and I never took pride in it. I felt like a freak. I felt embarrassed. I was horrified by anyone who identified as an “artist” or “creative”. I spent hours doing drugs to high away but I still came back down hearing the same old song. Every time I tried to slash the beast, he just grew another head. Every night before bed, I used to pray someone would cut off my fingers so I could never write again. I wanted to trap this demon in a mason jar, drop him in the ocean and watch him sink to the bottom, but the more I resisted, the more angels would come by to drop presents into my brain tied off with a feeling that is like seeing a new color for the first time every time my fingers hit skin, paper, or keyboard. I wrote all the time. Everywhere.

One of the scariest moments of my life was the morning I woke up and walked to my bathroom mirror only to see writing all over my legs and arms. I thought, “If this is the life of a writer - I do not want this. I do not want life at all.” I never tried suicide, but I talked about it obsessively on chatrooms and message boards from ages 13 to 20. Mostly with other dudes who were dealing with their own neurosis but as I spoke to more and more depressed people, I learned that we all had one thing in common: Fear. Fear of accepting our own individual truths. There were days I was so exhausted by my own brain to the point I wouldn’t talk at all. Total Mute. If everything I look at is causing a new idea, if every conversation I hear is creating dialogue, if everything I see needs to be preserved, what is the point? Was I put on this world to be a servant to detail and novelty? “How am I supposed to relax? How does one get to the other side of the glass? I need to be on the other side of the glass.” I couldn’t talk about what was going on with me without sounding like a delusional grandiose OCD teen that just discovered Kurt Cobain - so I felt isolated. Who was there to reach out to? Other artists, my imaginary pen pals. I spent hours and hours reading and watching interviews of iconic male artists discussing their processes. Even if they didn't know it, these people saved my life, they let me know I wasn’t crazy, they let me know that they deal with the exact same bullshit I do but all in a different and individual way. They hate it, they love it, they want it to end, they want it to start again.

I wanted to start The Advisor, a monthly digital gallery of handwritten letters dedicated to young men out there, so they can have a place to see creative men side by side and read their uplifting letters of inspiration that let you know that every artist has their own path, and no path is the right or wrong path. There is no set way to doing things, and you shouldn’t be ashamed for being the only one who can understand your language.

Officially launching today, The Advisor is a new digital platform that features handwritten open letters penned by contemporary male icons to young men, curated by Alex Kazemi. Published once a week, the site debuts with letters from Richard Kern and Bruce LaBruce. Later contributions will original writings by a bevy of pioneering heroes such as Marcel Castenmiller (04.08), Rad Hourani (04.15), Justin Tranter (04.22), and NABIL (04.29). Visit The Advisor here.

[Friday Playlist] Late '60s Peruvian Rock n' Roll

March 25, 2016

text by Adam Lehrer

Sometimes the circumstances in which music was made amplifies the effect of the music itself. Case in point: the rock n' roll coming out of Peru in the late '60s and through the early '70s. Rock n' roll hit Peru like a thunderbolt in 1957 with the country's youth finding themselves captivated by the music of Elvis Presley. Buddy Holly, and Bill Haley. Peru's indisputable first rock band, Los Millinarios de Jazz, formed that same year and birthed a movement.

It was in the late '60s however, psychedelia's peak years, that the rock bands of Peru found their most scorching sounds. The Peruvian rock bands of that time still sound utterly fresh. This could be for a couple reasons. For one, rock music's interest in mysticism was at an all time high with psychedelic rock, but Peruvian bands by virtue of geography already had a more direct connection to mind expansion and spirituality. Traffic Sound, a Peruvian rock band that used a flute way better than Jethro Tull ever would, found a fan in Mick Jagger who invited the band to open for The Stones in 1969. Meanwhile, Black Sugar employed big band swing, salsa-inflected rhythm patterns, wah-wah heavy guitars, and a blissfully communal sound that created a political funk most in line with American bands like Sly & The Family Stone.

But also, rock music at its best is supposed to be anti-establishment, and the Peruvian bands had much to rage against. Juan Francisco Velasco Alvarao, a communist military general, took control of the country in 1968. Though his ideals were in many ways idealistic, as he hoped to restore the power to the working power, he also completely obliterated personal expression. At first, Peruvian rock bands could not be silenced. For testament to that notion, listen to Los Saicos. Los Saicos took elements of garage rock, psych, and surf and created an aggressively political rock assault that is often considered to be a forebear of punk rock, similar in sound to The Sonics. Eventually rock music would find itself smothered out of popular culture in Peru, but by the '80s a fertile underground of punk rock and later death metal bands would re-emerge, bringing attention back to the country.

Side note: I would like to thank the excellent Spanish record label Munster Records for introducing me to Los Saicos and as a result, Peruvian rock n' roll all together.

Sweetness and Other Conflicting Attributes of A Domme

March 22, 2016

text by Audra Wist

I never thought I would think twice about being sweet, too sweet, nice, expressive. I’ve been thinking about sweetness the last few weeks and my complications with the term, the idea, and the enactment of a certain kind of feminine softness. “You’re sweet,” he says.

This issue first came to a head for me when I started out as a professional dominant - I thought to myself, oh, am I not bitchy enough for this? Should I start being mean to people just ‘cause? I realized how silly that thought was and saw my kind demeanor as an ally, not something to distance myself from. Certainly, men see me for cruel and extreme encounters, but these encounters rely heavily on fantasy and developing the fantasy relies on an origin of vulnerability and love, respect, and in a lot of ways, sweetness.

I remember a woman, an artist I looked up to at the time, met me and told me I was “too nice” to be a domme. That really irked me and I seriously questioned (again) my legitimacy as someone practicing domination. Can you be a sweet person and impeccably cruel at the same time? I thought, well, what are the characteristics of a good domme? I made a list: self-aware, intelligent, alpha, controlling, managerial, caring, thoughtful, stern, empathetic, passionate, etc. To be mean, bossy, tyrannical, perhaps more “negative” items on the list - I thought these things all came from a delicate spot, too. Never once was “ultra bitch” or “psycho cunt” mentioned. Sure, those are roles, but to practice domination it requires a wheelhouse of generally positive and sane attributes. I determined her read to be bogus and her perception of me limited. My sweetness actually feeds into all these descriptions and it is a place where I like to be - in contradiction. It is an asset to my sexuality to be a chameleon, not something I have to hide.

And really, my sweetness comes out in strange ways. Because I want you to be better for me and I care for your betterment, you must take 40 lashes. That’s an element of sweetness in my mind. I’m being generous to that person who needs it. I press my ass up against you when we’re in bed together and grab your hand, showing you how to feel me up that right way. You acknowledge my kindness with a delicate sigh. I will make you a flower arrangement for your birthday, slapping and spitting on you later in bed. I show my sensitivity in all kinds of ways and in varying degrees. It’s what makes a good lover.

Whitman famously exclaims in Leaves of Grass “I contain multitudes” and I subscribe to that fully. I have permission because I am a human being. Something I forget frequently, but remember in times of desperation or sadness at my divided self. Another famous busting passage is in James Joyce’s Ulysses where Molly Bloom exclaims:

“I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

I use this as a cornerstone to describe sexuality: distracted, zipping, direct, sweet, biting - it contains multitudes and that’s what makes it so accurate, all frayed at the edges and a bit urgent. We identify with the fluttering from one thing to another and feeling moments as they come. Sweetness or rage or bliss is never a permanent state. They live and they die but were true for the moment. Perhaps sweetness isn’t a trait inherent or needed in a D/s context, but being able to draw from sweetness in a moment of passionate boundary pushing dominance can amplify one’s read and dismantle their expectations in a pleasant and memorable way.

[FRIDAY PLAYLIST] Primal Scream Alternative Dance

March 18, 2016

Text by Adam Lehrer

Primal Scream just released its 10th album, Chaosmosis, this week. The band has always flirted with mainstream pop and dance rhythms, but on this record the band is fully embracing indie pop, collaborating with Sky Ferreira on the excellent Where the Light Gets In and Haim on the less good Trippin' On Your Love. The band has evolved past the alternative dance sound they helped define. I won't comment on the quality of the album, but let's ust say Bobby Gillepsie has not let the past define him.

Alternative dance more or less set the pace for what pop music would become in the decades to follow. It was the first time when indie rock kids would dance at raves and DJs would open for rock bands. In the Information Age, peoples' tastes have grown even further outward, and no one blinks twice when you see the lead singer of your favorite rock band dancing on Molly at Output.

Alternative pop was basically broken down into three eras. The first came out of England in the early and mid-80s, starting with the Madchester (but that's for another playlist) scene based around Factory Records honcho Tony Wilson (immortalized by Steeve Coogan in 24 Hour Party People) and his club The Hacienda. New Order, formed in the ashes of Joy Division after Ian Curtis' suicide, was arguably the first band to approach dance music from a traditional rock attack. Later,The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays would own the club with their own riffs and dance rhythms. Primal Scream, formed by Gillepsie after his tenure in The Jesus and Mary Chain, was an amalgam of a love for LSD-worshipping psych rock, amphetamine-driven punk, and MDMA-laced acid house. Scream's debut Screamdelica is the landmark album of alternative dance music.

The second wave, in the mid-'90s, had more in line with techno and dance music that it did rock music. Groups like The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers, and to a lesser extent The Crystal Method, had the anthemic bombast of punk and rock but used all electronic sounds. These groups did however predate mainstream EDM with their ability to take the sounds of the acid house and make it work within a stadium context.

In the early '00s, the rock sound came back into the onslaught of Alt-Dance bands. For a while, it was the sound of New York, with The Rapture's House of Jealous Lovers blaring out of every speakersystem south of 14th street. Kathleen Hanna followed up her legendary riot grrl punk band Bikini Kill with a decidedly dance-leaning trio, Le Tigre. And perhaps the most successful of all of these bands proved to be James Murphy and LCD Soundsystem, who used Alternative Dance as a conceptual art project and had massive effect on popular music at large.

What To See and Do, and Where To Stay, In Dubai During Art Dubai 2016

March 15, 2016

When most people think Dubai, they think money, flash, grandeur and excess. In fact, there is a theory that the word Dubai literally means “money” – from an old Arabic proverb, "Daba Dubai,” which translates to, “They came with a lot of money.” So it makes perfect sense that Dubai has become a major force in the art world with galleries, such as our friends at Carbon 12, that are popping up in the industrial region of Dubai known as Al Quoz. This is a mirroring of the art scene that is currently growing in the industrial regions of Los Angeles, London, New York and even Miami. In Dubai, much of this growth is thanks to Alserkal Avenue, an arts hub that fosters and provides architect designed warehouses to galleries and creative institutions. And this week marks the start of Art Week in Dubai, with the central focus being on the Art Dubai, the foremost art fair in the region that is currently in its tenth year. We asked Nadine Knotzer and Kourosh Nouri of Carbon 12 to provide a list of things to do and see, and where to stay, in Dubai during Art Week.

1. Place To Stay: The Mina A'Salam Boutique Hotel

Located next to the Arabian Gulf, this gorgeous boutique hotel has a more intimate vibe than many of the other hotels in the Dubai region. Click here to book a room.

2. Get Energized for the Fairs and Galleries at Urban Yoga

Art Week can be stressful, so we recommend Urban Yoga, a loft style yoga studio overlooking Dubai, to get energized and inspired. Click here to for classes and schedule.

3. Go See Ghazel’s Show Mea Culpa @ Carbon 12 Gallery

Ghazel is back at Dubai’s Carbon 12 from March 14th to May 1st, 2016, and so is her tongue-in-cheek, vehemently insightful work commenting on the state of the world and pushing the boundaries of art. The solo exhibition, Mea Culpa, revolves around the map motif used in diverse, sometimes derisive, ways. Click here to for more info.

4. Take A Stroll Through the Gallery District @ Alserkal Avenue

After visiting Carbon 12, take a stroll through Aserkal Avenue to visit many of the other galleries and project spaces. Must see: Zahra Al-Ghamdi's 'An Inanimate Village' installation, pictured above. Learn more here.

5. Cocktails On The Beach at Jetty Lounge at One & Only Royal Mirage

Sit down for a cocktail by the beach at the Jetty Bar at the One&Only Royal Mirage, Dubai. You can make reservations here.

7. Lunch @ The Concept Store and Healthy Cafe Comptoir 102 For Organic Bites

If it's lunch you are after, visit Comptoir 102, a healthy cafe and concept store that has organic bites and brilliant design selections.

8. Visit The Main Art Dubai Fair

Art Dubai is the leading international art fair in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. The tenth edition of the fair takes place March 16-19, 2016 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Visit Carbon 12's booth, B1, where they will be exhibiting 6 artists from their roster, including a new video by Anahita Razmi. Click here to learn more about Art Dubai.

9. Visit The Elyx Bar During Art Dubai

Inspired by Elyx House New York, Elyx Bar has now come to Art Dubai 2016. From March 15th to 17th, Fort Island will play host to the pure raw aesthetic known as Elyx. Art, luxury & flavor have a new temporary address. Experience quality cocktails, great tunes and immerse yourself in the world of raw luxe that is Elyx. Open from March 15th - March 17th, 9:30PM onwards.

10. Locals Favorite: Eat Dinner At Flooka, A Lebanese Fish Restaurant

Make reservations at Flooka, a Lebanese fish restaurant that is a local's favorite. Click here for reservations.

[FRIDAY PLAYLIST] A Siltbreeze Records Retrospective

March 11, 2016

text by Adam Lehrer

“I can’t say why I’ve always been drawn more to the lo-fi stuff,” said Philadelphia-based avant-rock record label head Tom Lax in an interview with VICE from 2008. “You could blame it on The Fall and Pere Ubu. As much as I dug The Buzzcocks and The Ramones, those bands helped set a course of no return for my head.”

Such is the philosophy of Siltbreeze, that since its inception in 1992 (started by Lax so that he could release the first 7” by Minneapolis noise rock band Halo of Flies) has released music from a plethora of bottom-dwelling underground rock bands from a spectrum of little-heard genres: the guitar and drums blistering punk noise of Miami-based Harry Pussy, the abstract guitar rumblings of Alan Licht, the lo-fi sound art of Graham Lambkin and his ‘90s project The Shadow Ring, the feedback-drenched ‘00s garage rock of Times New Viking and Psychedelic Horseshit, and a whole lot of music from New Zealand that Americans would have never heard without Mr. Lax’s extra-developed ear for sound.

Siltbreeze was at first a zine published from 1987 (my birth year!) to 1992 and featured as many photos of ‘70s porn (particularly black women) as it did reviews of avant psych, noise, punk, and rock bands, according to Magnet Magazine. The Halo of Flies release came with a copy of the magazine, but Siltbreeze really started taking off when Lax started learning about the music that was coming out of New Zealand, which was amazing but utterly obscure in the United States.

Much of these bands were being released in New Zealand on seminal Christchurch-based label that gained fame for pioneering the “Dunedin sound.” Bands like The Clean, The Renderers, The Verlaines, and The Chills started playing in shimmery power pop with a twist of avant sound experimentation. Lax started releasing much of this music in the U.S. on Siltbreeze, most notably with musician Alastair Galbraith who balanced his sound between jangly melodies and atonal skree.

Perhaps the most notable New Zealand discovery of Lax was experimental rock trio The Dead C (Bruce Russell, Michael Morley, and Robbie Yeats). The Dead C used a rock approach to free improvisation and noise, proving massively influential on U.S. bands like Harry Pussy, Mouthus, and even Sonic Youth. The band’s 1992 Siltbreeze double album, Harsh 70s Reality, is a noise rock landmark and one of the best albums of the ‘90s.

Siltbreeze went through its most prosperous years in the mid-‘90s, when they were able to attract the attention of popular indie rock bands drawn to Lax’s unique taste and approach to releasing music: Lou Barlow’s Sebadoh project, Guided by Voices, and psych rock band Bardo Pond among them. At the same time, the label was releasing super obscure avant punk and rock bands like Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, The Strapping Fieldhands, and Charalambides.

Around 2000, a Siltbreeze partnership with indie titan Matadaoe didn’t work to plan, and the release schedule slowed. But, Lax took the opportunity to reissue bands from the fringes of punk rock of yesteryears and introducing them to whole new audiences. Due to Lax’s taste, ‘80s Aussie avant punks Venom P. Stinger (due yourself a favor and stream the band’s amazing Tearbucketer album now), late ‘70s British DIY art unit Desperate Bicycles, and ‘70s Aussie proto-punks Slugfuckers all have music out in the United States.

But a renewed interest in weird rock music (maybe due to The Strokes, probably not) brought attention back to the underground rock (and noise) scenes in the mid ‘00s. In 2005, producer and musician Mike Rep (of The Quotas) introduced Lax to an Ohio-based lo-fi garage rock trio called Times New Viking (Jared Phillips, Beth Murphy, and Adam Elliot). Times New Viking had a serious energy, but also potential for Pitchfork-approved popularity, Lax released the band’s debut Dig Yourself in 2005 to acclaim and popularity.

Though Times New Viking quickly blew up and moved onto Matador, the media took note of this lo-fi noisy pop punk sound and quickly dubbed it “shitgaze.” Though the name left much to be desired, Siltbreeze experienced a resurgence as the premier home of this movement. Lax released music by psych pop unit Psychedelic Horseshit, garage punk band Sic Alps, no-wave revivalists Naked on the Vague, and so much more.

In my opinion, the one record that best exemplified Lax’s uncanny knack for hearing something special is the 2007 release by Aussie one-man-band Pink Reason entitled Cleaning the Mirror. Using guitars, banjos, feedback, droning, and a deep gravelly baritone, Kevin Debroux took the post-punk of Bauhaus and the slowest songs of Joy Division and stripped them down to a beautiful skronk of despair. Pink Reason used the medium of punk rock to express the deepest of feeling and create capital A Art, as Lax seems to admire in most of his bands. But Cleaning the Mirror was the most important record to me that I owned when I was a softmore in college (when I was discovering this whole dearth of underground rock) and struggling with some substance abuse issues and homesickness. It was one of those records that seemed to sound how I felt. Sadly, Debroux has never followed Cleaning the Mirror with another full-length. I should know. I’ve been longing for one ever since.

The influence of Siltbreeze is still felt throughout the indie rock world. It’s hard to imagine the success of garage rock superstars like Ty Segall and The Oh Sees had Lax not been able to prove that this type of music could be popular in the first place. Record labels like Burger, Goner, and SS all recall the spirit of artistic freedom and sonic palette that Lax set forth. But garage rock was never his sole vocation. The only common theme that runs through the Siltbreeze catalog is that all of its releases have a 100 percent commitment to never compromising their sounds. These bands make music because no one else is making the music they want to hear.

[FASHION REVIEW] Paris Ready-To-Wear Collections 2016

March 10, 2016

Text by Adam Lehrer

Demna Gvasalia is the newly minted king of Paris. Showing FW 2016 collections for both Vetements and his first ever for Balenciaga, Gvasalia proved that he has a concrete vision for how he thinks people should dress. At Balenciaga, he has already impressed his vision upon the house in a manner that Alexander Wang never was able to. Why is that? Most likely this is because Demna understands desirability of products, turning something as standard as a denim jacket into a contorted silhouette that looks totally unique. Wang is a marketer and a brand builder, but seldom do people hunger for his products the way that the fashion crowds have been hungering for the designs of Demna. Kering deserves wild applause for the hiring of the Vetements chief; it was a truly inspired and modern decision for a brand that saw its visibility wane under its previous creative director.

Other big stories were Dior and Lanvin that had to show their FW 2016 collections sans creative directors after the departures of Raf Simons and Alber Elbaz, respectively. Dior did ok, with its atelier coming through with a collection that at least looked like a Dior collection, though without the distinct ideas of Raf. Still though, I think I prefer it like this, considering Raf’s Raf Simons FW 2016 menswear collection was his best in seasons and I need cash flow so I can buy all of it. Elbaz was sorely missed from the schedule, and Lanvin fell absolutely flat without the man’s subtly poetic designs. If Lanvin doesn’t want him though, they should really start courting Haider Ackermann. His vision of fashion and his ideal customer is perfectly in line with the house.

Elsewhere, it was Paris as usual. The good stuff was great, the boring stuff was boring, there were Kardashians and Kanye, and Faith Connexion proved itself to be the newly buzzed about design team with a line of vintage grungewear taken to the highest degree of luxury (personally, I have no desire to buy my huge flannel shirts anywhere other than my local thrift, but I can see the appeal).

Balenciaga

I already knew that Demna Gvasalia was a perfect choice for Balenciaga for no other reason than that he is the most talked-about designer in Paris right now. But I could not have anticipated how well Demna was able to bend Balenciaga to his will. The avant-garde shaped denim, the gigantic double-breasted trench coats, and other Vetements favorites all were jacked up to Balenciaga quality for the magnificent FW 2016 Balenciaga. With Demna asking, “How do you persuade a woman to wear a two-piece suit who is not the German chancellor?” He answered by exaggerating proportion and silhouette thereby infusing luxury with a simultaneously more relaxed and striking visual appeal. Demna clearly had fun with the variety of fabrics now available to him as head of the house, making abstract sculptures out of puffer jackets, slicing shearling coats in half and reattaching them at odd angles, doing the same with a biker jacket (the best leather jacket of this season), and then allowing floral boho dresses to wave their freak flags. Best collection of the week; modernity incarnate.

Undercover

Jun Takahashi is probably still thought of as a menswear designer first, and Undercover a menswear brand. But the past few Undercover womenswear collections have been excellent, and this was a pinnacle. Setting the FW 2016 shows to Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day,’ Takahashi sought to make “relaxed wear for all ages.” To Takahashi, relaxed wear meant the obvious in print sweatshirts and relaxed trousers to the completely fucking bonkers in a gold printed dress with a wide-as-fuck skirt. Indulging his avant-garde whimsy, Takahashi also sent much of his models down the runways with headpieces that looked like the set design of Carcosa in True Detective’s first season (i.e. good season). I love how Takahashi is able to delineate between spectacle and products. He certainly has a flair for showmanship, but the indulgent demonstration never distracts from the desirability of the clothes. He’s the rare designer who is equal parts artist and product manager, trés Japanese indeed.

Vetements

I wasn’t as into this Vetements show as much as I was the Balenciaga show, but Demna Gvasalia’s design collective is at peak undeniability at this point. The brand’s superbly shaped oversized print hoodies were the most recognizable pieces on the streets this season, and the brand has certainly won over the fashion crowd in a way that seems more genuine than in past cases when something like the HBA logo was all over the place. Why is that? I’m not sure, but I think it’s because Vetements speaks to the modern fashion buyer more than other buzzy labels. You aren’t just buying into a logo; you’re buying a piece of creativity. Fashion is in a weird place now because everyone is making less money these days than they were 15 years ago. So, the women and men who get good paying jobs are probably too responsible and rational thinking to even consider buying a $700 hoodie. The fashion obsessives are mostly young artists and creative types; kids that can’t afford to buy everything but are style-obsessed enough to buy a product that they believe will make them look cool as fuck. Let’s face it: Vetements products do indeed look cool as fuck. Though I didn’t love FW 2016 as much as the previous two seasons, this stuff was still mostly amazing. Especially exciting was the menswear actually cut for men, such as the oversized western rodeo shirt and matching pants (I want one), the gold velvet unstructured suit, and a belted trench coat in camel. Demna incorporated some bondage looks into the womenswear, with a fantastic skin tight black leather jumpsuit and bombers with attached hanging chains that sort of collided into one another. There were riffs on Hot Topic outfits that looked awesome: punk, metal, rave, goth, and more. Demna is a connoisseur of all the disaffected youth cultures. The collection was shown in a church, because Demna said he was in a “dark place” designing this collection (maybe the prints reading “Sexual Fantasies were the reason for this, but I imagine the newly minted creative director of Balenciaga can’t be having much trouble getting laid regardless of preference). If that’s true, is it awful that I hope Demna stays in this dark place?

Side note: Veronique Hyland of The Cut pointed out the casting problems of the Vetements show. She is right; a brand that prides itself on being revolutionary should be casting diverse models. I don’t buy the excuse that they are casting friends of the label; surely they could find some non-white people to join their army. That is the same excuse Raf Simons used in his earlier collections, that he was casting the street-punk Antwerp youths that inspired him. But in his wiser age, his shows have grown more diverse and they have only made his brand more desirable. Kanye West and Rihanna are partly responsible for putting Vetements on the map. Diversify the cast and Vetements will undeniably be the coolest high fashion brand on the planet.

Noir Kei Ninomiya

I’ve been trying to limit my roundups to one Comme des Garcons-affiliated brand. And though Rei Kawakubo’s acid warped Victorian gowns were some fascinating art works and Chitose Abe’s Sacai collection had some decadent ornamentation, it was Kawakubo disciple Kei Ninomiya that I felt best exemplified his particular fashion philosophy with his Noir FW 2016 collection. Using all black of course, he had six models change outfits numerous times in an open space utterly devoid of any noise. Ninomiya is an expert at using details to convert wardrobe staples into avant-garde rebel statements: biker jackets, summer dresses, jacket and trousers, and Macintosh coats were all prominently featured in the collection, but appeared brutal, sharp, and unignorable. Ninomiya left his studies at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts to be a patternmaker for Kawakubo, and Kawakubo’s influence is undeniable. However, Ninomiya is still concerned with building a brand and innovating products that customers still want to wear. Now that Kawakubo has more or less made Comme des Garcons womenswear shows a display for pure creation while selling more conventional products to build revenue, it is Ninomiya that is best balancing concept and retail. He is constantly shifting form and structure, but these clothes would also look undeniably great day-to-day.

Givenchy

Of the big luxury houses, I think Givenchy is definitely my favorite. I loved Lanvin, but they are without a creative director. Hedi Slimane’s Saint Laurent Paris has been fun to watch him re-brand the label, but I am still irked by the idea of Saint Laurent selling cut-off denim skirts. Raf left Dior and Kris Van Assche has never really cut it for me on the menswear side of things. So there’s Givenchy, a label that is now as much the brainchild of creative director Ricardo Tisci as it is the brand’s founder Hubert de Givenchy. Yes, I’m arguing that Tisci is as important to Givenchy’s history as Givenchy himself.

At the time of Tisci’s appointment in 2005, the label was floundering. Alexander McQueen’s tenure as creative director didn’t work and Julien Macdonald’s was poorly received. Tisci made Givenchy culture-relevant again, noting the brand’s importance to a multi-cultural audience. He has a specific taste, and that taste has resonated with everyone from Park Avenue women to hypebeasts (those Air Force Ones he did were fucking uggo though, no? doesn’t matter).

Though it will be hard to forget the dark but soft romantic flourishes of Givenchy’s SS 2016 show that took place in New York last summer, the FW 2016 show back in Paris gave it a run for its money. Tisci’s last show was extremely tasteful, with soft fabrics, minimal details, and utter commitment to craftsmanship and quality of materials. FW 2016 feels more opulent, but was actually expressing Tisci’s newfound interest in Egyptian mysticism. The curiosity resulted in wild psychedelic prints, like mandala-decorated blouses and dresses that were not all that unlike Anne Spalter’s recent exhibit at Spring Break Art Show. There were the usual streetwear looks, but also extreme experiments in military tailoring with coats that outlined every sinew in the models’ bodies. Tisci doesn’t shy away from opulence, but he also doesn’t exploit it. What can I say? I’m a fan.

Ann Demeulemeester

Few designers have stayed as committed to their truest design visions as Ann Demeulemeester. So when Ann retired two years ago, it was hard to imagine her brand remaining relevant, and yet her protégé Sebastien Meunier has been so good as her successor that it doesn’t even feel like she ever left. Some would say that Meunier doesn’t have a vision of his own, but I tend to believe that Meunier is just a kindred spirit. Romanticism was the key word for his FW 2016 collection. But as opposed to the elation of romance, Meunier focused on the pain of love, emphasized by a raucous soundtrack of Swans’ ‘Screen Shot’ (is it just me or does it seem like Swans is becoming a fashion show staple? Yang Li and Siki Im have used the apocalyptic boogie of Michael Gira in recent shows as well) and a cover of Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ as well as a reminder of the brand’s unique relationship to rare fabrics. The clothes were mostly black, and largely devoid of skirting, instead opting for Meunier’s singular approach to trousers. The best look in the collection was a three-piece suit, patterned in black and white with the sleeves of the jacket running well past fingertips and the trousers sitting up at the calves. For some reason I thought of the buzzy but decidedly excellent UK-based post-punk band Savages while looking at this collection, or perhaps just thought it would be amazing to see the band dress in these clothes.

Rick Owens

We might as well just give Rick his own column because the man never ever disappoints. FW 2016 was different than his last three years or so of collections. There were no grandiose displays of showmanship. There were no black sorority line dancers, European metal bands, models wearing models, or cocks. There were structure, lines, silhouette, and virtuosic displays of draping. We all know that Rick is a master pattern cutter, but his products have more or less stayed the same for years. He has created so many garments that he could live off them for centuries. But Rick has been thinking about wastefulness. How can he infuse a product with enough of himself that people would never want to let it go? He did so by draping every garment until they were contorted into wonderful pieces or architecture. So even though the garments are going to be recreated, they will be done so with the exact lines cut by Rick himself. Who would ever throw away a piece of clothing that Rick had his hands on? Exactly.

Chanel

It must be weird for fashion editors that have been doing this thing for decades. That means they have been writing about Karl Lagerfeld’s Chanel collections since 1982. It’s hard to find new ways to write about the brand, let alone for the 82-year-old Lagerfeld to come up with new ideas. And yet new ideas he comes up with indeed: airports, casinos, supermarkets, art fairs, Zen gardens and more are all recent Lagerfeld dreams made Chanel realities. Perhaps a little exhausted by the pressure to consistently come up with the world’s biggest fashion show, Lagerfeld focused on the clothes for Chanel FW 2016, 93 looks worth of clothes. Classic Chanel going on here, with feminine elegance as in the selection of pink dresses and delicate masculinity with Lagerfeld’s eternal takes on Coco Chanel’s power suits.

Dries Van Noten

Dries Van Notes has one of the most vibrant imaginations in fashion. He always has a specific story in mind, and fiction or non-fiction, he vividly bring those stories to life in garments. For FW 2016, his imagination swayed towards the love affair between early 20th Century poet, journalist, playwright, and World War 1 soldier Gabriele D’Annunzio and Italian heiress, muse, and patroness of the arts Luisa Casati. And despite this very succinct explanation, Dries still manages to never over-indulge his ideas in any way that would result in his collections coming off as kitsch. Casati’s pet leapords were exemplified by leapord prints scarves, trousers, and over-coats, but they looked smart and clean. As did the rest of the collection, with pin-striped jump suits, brown polka dot blazers clinging to the hips military-style, and a dragon-printed black dress. Dries is an artist, but he isn’t Leigh Bowery. He manages to find the art in fashion design while not allowing the art to rule over the need to make beautiful products that will be worn by his worldly and sophisticated customers. Between this and his FW 2016 menswear collection, it appears that Dries is back at the top of his game. God Bless Belgium.

Louis Vuitton

Unlike Ricardo Tisci who has utterly re-defined Givenchy, Nicolas Ghesquire works within a Louis Vuitton code but has re-interpreted it into his forward-leaning futurist vision. Ghesquiere’s Lou V collections keep getting better too. His SS 2016 collection was my favorite that he had done at the house so far, but FW 2016 is even better. His penchant for futurism was indulged here to the max with Louis Vuitton quality sportswear defining the collection. The mesh color-blocked jumpsuit and dress were the most adventurous pieces of this collection, and possibly of Ghesquiere’s tenure at Louis Vuitton. They absolutely worked too, and it was hard not to imagine Ghesquiere muses like Grimes and K-Pop star (and undeniable smoking hot beauty) CL wearing them. Ghesquiere has not steered Louis Vuitton away from luxury, he has modernized conceptions of luxury. Instead of just designing clothes for massively wealthy French women, he seems to very much revere the success of millennial artists. Bjork could totally wear this.

Also Good:

Virgil Abloh is nothing if not self-aware of the prejudices that define the fashion industry and the people carrying those prejudices trying to hold him back. And yet, he has emerged as an undeniably fresh talent with a voice that the fashion industry desperately needs. His Off-White FW 2016 collection used a custom-made neon sign quoting the rude salesclerk in ‘Pretty Woman:’ “You’re obviously in the wrong place.” As a result, Abloh makes his own place, mixing streetwear and conceptual garments into a definable whole. Iris Van Herpen proved that fashion can be surreal by staging a truly remarkable show with models performing in front of optical light screens that acted as both mirror and window. Utilizing choreography by filmmaker and dancer Blanca Li, the models’ experimental movements emphasized the experimental nature of the garments: two dresses were made with 3D printing and some were made in collaboration with architect Phillip Beesley. Van Herpen seems to be the only designer around solely driven by a need to push the medium of fashion beyond expectations. Saint Lauren Paris FW 2016, possibly Hedi Slimane’s last for the label, did what the label did best: ultra luxurious clothes for rocker girls. But, the shows are starting to feel ever more predictable season-by-season. Maybe it is time for a change. JW Anderson’s work for Loewe is starting to make much more sense, as evidenced by FW 2016. As opposed to creating theatre pieces that merely draw attention to accessories, the clothes were extremely luxurious, such as an all tan leather look. Bernard Wilhelm continues to be underrated, and his FW 2016 presentation showing off menswear and womenswear looks drew upon African garb but made it palatable to a fashion-savvy audience. And the gods of Japanese fashion design, Yohji Yammamoto and Rei Kawakubo, didn’t disappoint (as if they could). Yohji indulged his love of goth, shaping dresses and jumpsuits as coffins, and the black lip-gloss emphasized the “death beauty” appeal. Rei Kawakubo imagined “punks in the 18th century” at Comme des Garcons and disregarded all worries about selling. Her designs reached peak decadence with abstract royal gowns that towered over their models like pillars.

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A Feminist Argument For Wet T-Shirt Contests

March 9, 2016

text by Jill Di Donato

For a moment, as the water hits her skin, she becomes sex.

She shimmies. She sways.

She’s fantasy.

Like bamboo, strong yet flexible.

And then the moment is passed.

Exit stage left.

A blank canvas—an item to be styled or worn alone, the white tee is lazy or elegant, sexy or grungy. When wet, however, the white tee becomes something else entirely.

It’s a complicated cultural symbol. Like most garments, its significance is defined largely by its wearer and the style in which it’s worn. When you factor in ideas about class and the friction of hedonist concupiscence rubbing against American Puritan ethos, the white t-shirt contest opens a dialog of sociological intrigue.

But can the wet t-shirt contest be feminist?

At one time, I used to think that as an object, a woman was unable to gaze astutely at the world herself. But people slip in and out of dominance and submission all the time. What appeals to me about the wet t-shirt contest is the ease with which a woman can shift states of modesty at will. That’s a powerful feat, especially because historically, women have struggled to move freely within trappings of modesty. Or rather, expectations of feminine modesty have been historically limiting to women.

For detractors who point out that wet t-shirt contests are judged and winners pronounced, isn’t that the American way? But before the first playhouses opened in the Colonies, across the pond, Shakespeare’s Jacques says to Duke Senior, “All the world’s a stage/And all the men and women merely players. ” This pronouncement couldn’t be more relevant today, when personal exhibitionism is de rigeur.

Human obsession with spectacle is not new; what’s new lies in the aggregation of images—the sheer multitude of them, the myriad ways they can be manipulated, and the rapid speed with which all this can happen. The diversity in the types of images that people put out into the world is a choice opportunity, especially for marginalized groups to reclaim power by getting on stage and showing their breasts: big breasts, small breasts, augmented breasts, natural breasts, brown breasts, large-nippled-breasts, pierced breasts, lactating breasts, post-sex-reassignment op breasts.

Welcome to the democratization of tits.

But even though potential to find a sundry of images exists, are people taking the time to seek them out? Or do they go for the easy definitions of what’s sexy/sophisticated/crass/erotic/tasteful/raunchy?

The infinite aggregation of images on platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr—media forums that allow viewers to post, rather than simply consume images, say looming from Hollywood billboards or from inside fashion glossies. However, has this new access actually changed social attitudes about female sexuality?

New media platforms do take some power away from the male gaze. A shift is happening, and even if change doesn’t occur immediately, the camera is now in the hands of more people: women, especially, who can turn the camera onto themselves. Whether millennial media habits can chip away at some of the ingrained images of hegemonic sex appeal remains to be seen, but the way people consume media these days helps make an argument for why sartorial events like the wet t-shirt contest can indeed be feminist.

The wet t-shirt contest predates sexy selfies and Snapchat videos: it’s a living photograph, a tableaux vivant.

But what about its history?

The first iconic image of a wet t-shirt is credited to Jacqueline Bisset. Swimming underwater, the English actress surfaces wearing a white tee and bikini bottoms in the 1977 pulp film, The Deep. Goggle-faced and sun-kissed, the underwater swimming scene opens the film. As she comes up for air, Bisset appears elegant, her near-nudity referencing Aphrodite.

Two years later, Frank Zappa’s 1979 track “Fembot In A Wet T Shirt” gives props to the gals on stage. “Well the girls are excited/Because in a minute/They’re gonna get wet/‘N’ the boys are delighted/Because all the titties/Will get ’em upset.” These lyrics underscore an exciting view of female sexuality and its power over male spectators—a reclaiming, if you will, of the male gaze.

The 1980s saw the rise of wet t-shirt contests, where models like Stacey Owen and Debbie Quorell used their coronations at these types of international events to lead to successful careers in porn. And so, the evolution to Girls Gone Wild, who, today, are likely to be what people think of when they think of a woman in a wet t-shirt contest.

Because the women in these videos seem so interchangeable to me, I picture “her” face wearing a somewhat quizzical look, as the director of photography is more interested in catching the gaze of cheering frat bros in the background, to whom the franchise is marketing the show. The woman in the wet tee is secondary, more of an object than actor, like Bisset in The Deep.

Or is that distinction indicative of my tastes—my desires…my choice: Bisset (urbane—old Hollywood) over a Girls Gone Wild (tawdry—Hollywood Boulevard). What can I say: I’m a snob.

While I don’t love the idea of women competing with one another in a wet t-shirt contest, people engage in contests in everyday life all the time. I choose favorites, handpick who and what I want in all kinds of situations, casual or intimate, and doing so is a freedom I wouldn’t want to give up.

A FOMO Sufferer's Highlights During Armory Week In New York

March 7, 2016

text by Keely Shinners

Art Fair weekend in New York is a dream for the travelling collector, but a thorn in the side of the press. How does one feel like she has seen all the best work without running around to galleries and exhibitions like a mindless consumer? The feeling only elevates when you’re a girl like me, stuck in Los Angeles, living vicariously through Instagram feeds. New York art fair weekend FOMO is real and poignant. To organize and categorize, I make lists. I make a folder on my desktop labeled “new york art grrrl shit” and dream about “being there.” If you’ve got FOMO too, check out this list of seven amazing pieces from this year's art fair weekend:

1. Tony Gum “Twiggy” presented Christopher Moller Gallery at PULSE Art Fair.

In these portraits, Tony Gum, hailing from Cape Town, reimagines herself as Twiggy, Frida Kahlo, and the Virgin Mary. Her work is innovative, questioning the politics of visibility and reproducibility (which proves especially poignant, as she is the only African artist to exhibit at PULSE this year) but not devoid of humor and humanness. Her Instagram from the other day reads, “If you’re at the @pulseartfair, come through so that we can do humane things like chatting, hugging, and dancing.”

2. Namsa Leuba “Sarah, from the series NGL” at Echo Art’s booth at the Armory Show.

Leuba’s work explores African identity through Western eyes. She has her finger on the pulse of the innovation and vibrancy of Africa’s art and fashion worlds. The series “NGL” focuses on a collaboration with Art Twenty One in Lagos. Leuba does an amazing job of capturing and translating the vibrations of the Lagos fashion and art world to New York.

3. Macon Reed “Eulogy for the Dyke Bar” installation (and real bar!) presented by Mackin Projects at PULSE Art Fair.

Despite so-called “victories” for lesbian, femme, and bisexual women this year, traditional strongholds for queer-girl culture are closing down. As the lesbian bar is threatened with extinction, Macon Reed recreates an empowering, generative, and reformative space. With real drinks!

4. Adriana Marmorek “Brasier Girasoles F (Triple D)," made of glass, on view with Nora Haime Gallery at PULSE Art Fair.

With a glass Triple D bra, Marmorek channels both the beauty and the fragility of the feminine. That which supports the woman, that which makes her beautiful, is also that which might break her. Her work is not all forlorn; the glass is also easily broken.

5. Wallpaper by Michel Auder and paintings by Alex Chaves at Martos Gallery booth at the Independent Art Fair.

Chaves’s watery, impressionistic still lives paired with Auder’s wallpaper gives one the comforting feeling of being at home, or at the very least, a home once dreamt of. But there is also something defamiliarizing about their work – the cinder block on the table, the acute intricacy of the wallpaper pattern. Here, we are once at home and somewhere strange.

6. Chris Johanson and Johanna Jackson, “Untitled” at Fleisher/Ollman booth at the Independent Art Fair.

Johanson and Jackson’s painting looks like 2016 invited us into her medicine cabinet. Aesthetically, there is order, form, complementary colors. But a closer look between the apothecary bottles reveals a hot dog, an impressionistic lightbulb, and an 8-track. Once again, we are confronted with the colorful absurdities of our time!

7. Patti Smith “18 Stations” at Robert Miller Gallery

Though not part of a fair, Patti Smith’s third solo show opened this weekend at Robert Miller Gallery. Smith exhibits emotional, black and white photographs from her familiar haunts: the Greenwich café where she starts her day, Rockaway Beach, where she seeks repose. Like her music and her prose, Patti Smith’s photographs have an emotive tactility, like the memory of a place you have loved for a long time, a place you’ve never been before.

8. Genevieve Gaignard “Muscle Beach” at the SPRING/BREAK Art Show

In the middle of the New York minute, we get a smoggy breath of LA. Genevieve Gaignard’s installation feels like stepping into the kitschy apartment of your washed-up television star aunt’s Pasadena apartment – living room beauty parlor and all. Her self-portraits, which dot the walls of the installation, explores the LA alter ego, with our narcissism, our nostalgia, our desire to be “looked at” but also to be hidden. If anything, go for the cat knick-knacks.

Friday Playlist: When Visual Artists Make Tunes

March 4, 2016

People are justifiably skeptical about artists that decide to step outside their known mediums and experiment with something else. Musicians painting, or painters making records, or Kanye West designing fashion, are all often written off as "vanity projects." The reason for this is simple. The idea that someone can be exceptional at more than one discipline seems to strike at the heart of one's inferiority complex: how can one person be blessed with so much talent, and I be left with nothing? It's a near impossible pill to swallow. If you can look outside yourself, however, you should be able to see that true artists get bored working in the same discipline for the entirety of their careers. By their very natures, they feel compelled to experiment, even if that means failure. The refusal to be frightened of failure is the essence of an artist, and by that notion we should celebrate those willing to take a step outside their comfort zones. I forget who said it, but some famous artist of one discipline or another said that all forms of art wish they could be music. Music has the power to physically connects its listeners, which makes it an attractive form to any artist. That is most likely why so many visual artists have decided to make records in one capacity or another, to varying degrees of success.

In many cases, artists that worked in visuals to begin with actually gained notoriety with music before their art. Kim Gordon, now a rock n' roll icon, was actually an aspiring artist and working in the art world when she joined Sonic Youth. Though she is enjoying a newfound interest in her fine art, she is also still making punishing noise rock as one part of duo Body/Head. Performance artist Lydia Lunch found the first avenue for her extreme expression as a member of the no wave band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Robin Crutchfield, who has showed his art at MoMA and other venues, was first a musician as a member of no wave band DNA and also as the leader of synth punk act Dark Day. Perhaps most notable is Destroy all Monsters, a Detroit noise rock band from the 1970s that took the garage fury of The Stooges and melted the sound down to its noise essence. The leaders of that band were art icons Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw.

Filmmakers, in particular, seem to have a modern day fascination with making music. Perhaps that is because sound is such an essential part of the cinematic experience, that these artists just want to explore this aspect of their processes further. Sometimes it works wonders, especially when the records are made by filmmakers who already have a deep connection to music. David Lynch for instance is extremely involved in the music composition in his films and in Twin Peaks and his collaboration with composer Angelo Badalamenti is legendary. Perhaps that is why his first solo record, Crazy Clown Time was such an unexpected delight. Jim Jarmusch also has a well-documented fascination with music, and his soundtracks for films like Dead Man, recorded by Neil Young at his most sparsely experimental, and Ghost Dog, recorded by RZA at his headiest, are as iconic as the films they were made for. Jarmusch's musical collaboations with Josef Van Wissem sound like great avant rock, not like a filmmaker just mucking about (Jarmusch also played in no wave band Del-Byzanteens and in Crutchfield's Dark Day as a young man).

There are of course a million other examples of this, but Spotify is coming up short on quite a bit of the tracks I'd like to include. The point is, we shouldn't immediately write off a project because it is made by an artist that is known for making different things, because the most talented artists can express their ideas in myriad ways. That we should celebrate.

CATEGORIES: ART / CULTURE / MUSIC / FILM PROSE / DESIGN / FASHION

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AUTRE CITIZEN. November 5th, 2024, will be remembered as a turning point in global history. One way or the other, we fight on. In our FW24 Citizen Issue @janellezara explores the prescient work of @joshklinejoshkline whose practice is focused on the “21st century as an era of massive transformation.” Order Autre 19 FW24 The Citizen Issue (🔗 in bio), an over 500 page compendium of democratic ideas and dreams. Credit: Josh Kline, Freedom, 2015. Installed at Modern Art, Oxford, 2015. Image courtesy of the artist, 47 Canal, New York, and Modern Art, Oxford. Photo: Ben Westoby. #joshkline #vote #november5 #democracy

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