Archive for the ‘Horizons’ Category
Sunday, October 11th, 2009
Still from A Serious Man, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, 2009.
An Open-Ended Question From An Open-Ended Film:
Imagine, for a moment, that you are Larry Gopnick, the “Serious Man” in the Coen Brothers’ new film by the same name. The time is the 1960’s, and you are a family man and tenure-track physics professor living in an affluent Jewish neighborhood in the suburbs of Minneapolis. You, the Serious Man, believe that you are doing everything right until pretty much everything in your life starts going egregiously wrong: your wife decides to leave you for a family friend, your brother runs into trouble with the law, your 13-year-old son starts stealing from you to buy weed, and a student offers you an exorbitant amount of money for a passing grade (while threatening to sue you) the same week you are up for tenure.
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Tags: A Serious Man, Jefferson Airplane, The Coen Brothers
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Thursday, October 8th, 2009
When I emailed Jan Rew Midelfort and Etienne Pierre Duguay asking for an interview about the weekly Yoga party they started this summer on the roof of the Market Hotel in Bushwick, I realized pretty quickly that I wasn’t going to get away with just sending over a list of questions. Duguay–one of the venue’s resident promoters, as well as the drummer for Real Estate and Predator Vision–responded demanding that I arrive at 7:00 pm sharp the following Wednesday to participate in the Yoga class myself. Midelfort–also a musician, and one of the most talented psychedelic music DJ’s I know–added that I should bring my violin along, because it would be “awesome” if I could perform a continuous drone during the New Age music component of the event, which happens after the sun goes down. I did not have the chance to get in touch with Aurora Halal, the event’s third core organizer, but I’m pretty sure she would have responded with yet another suggestion encouraging me nix the habit of passive spectatorship that journalists tend to fall back on.
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Tags: Aurora Halal, Body Actualized Control, Cosmic Yoga, Etienne Duguay, Hypnagogic Pop, Jan Rew Midelfort, Market Hotel, New Age, Predator Vision, Real Estate
Posted in Horizons, Portraits, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, September 28th, 2009
The first thing I did when David Keenan’s hotly debated “Hypnagogic Pop” article came out in The Wire last June was log on to the Terminal Boredom message board–not because I read it all the time, but because it was the site where that debate began, as far as I could glean from a preliminary Google search. And the first thing I saw when I logged onto Terminal Boredom was a question that would make a really big imprint on my subsequent readings of the piece, partly because it was written in all capital letters and tickering from right to left across the screen:
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Tags: autonomous art, Capitalism, Daniel Lopatin, David Keenan, Gary War, Hypnagogic Pop, Infinity Window, James Ferraro, lo-fi, Marxism, New Weird America, noise, Oneohtrix Point Never, psychedelic, Terminal Boredom, The Wire
Posted in ENGLISH, Horizons, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
![PB140480[1]](http://www.visitation-rites.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/PB14048011.JPG "PB140480[1]")
Brian Chippendale at Redrum, Providence, November 2004. Photo by Simon Hegarty.
In a recent podcast, Stand-up comedian Patton Oswalt and ESPN columnist Bill Simmons went into detail about how superstardom can often be the death knell of a comedian’s ability to develop strong material. The problem is that once a comedian has already won over the audience, almost any joke that comes out of his or her mouth will be met with a rapturous response–regardless of its quality. If the audience approaches a performance expecting the funniest night of their lives, they’ll always do their best to ensure that this expectation is met; they are paying good money for it, after all.
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Tags: Brian Chippendale, Brian Gibson, Earthly Delights, Fire Marshall, Fuck Yeah Fest, FYF, Halloween 2003, Hypermagic Mountain, Krallice, Lightning Bolt, Providence, Safari Lounge, Todd P
Posted in ENGLISH, Horizons, Sightings, Uncategorized | 6 Comments »
Saturday, May 30th, 2009
Still, Makino Takashi and Jim O’Rourke, The Seasons, 2009.
If a three-bar, bouncer-peppered, profit-centric venue like Music Hall of Williamsburg seems somewhat of stretch for a “show case” of what is ostensibly the most fiercely anti-commercial and anti-hegemonic music today, try a major metropolitan museum. Those of us who relied solely on the No Fun website for information on the lineup this year will be surprised to learn that the festival had not only one new home this year, but two — along with a brand new “Infinite Sound and Image” component, which is longhand for “film screening.” Recognizing that many of the artists on the bill this year are active outside the purely musical sphere — and, perhaps, that the noise experience in general is not only about what we hear, but, almost always also what we see and feel — Carlos Giffoni teamed with Rhizome’s ongoing “New Silent Series” for an afternoon of moving image work at the New Museum on the Bowery.
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Tags: Carlos Giffroni, Horizons, Infinite Sound and Image, New Museum, No Fun Fest
Posted in ENGLISH, Horizons, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
Mattin is a musician and performance artist from the Basque Country. He has produced a slew of releases under the names of Deflag Haemorrahge/Haien Kontra, Sakada, Billy Bao, and No More Music. He has also collaborated with many artists, including Drunkdriver, Margarita Garcia, Tim Goldie, Taku Unami and Tony Conrad, to name a few. His work mixes laptop electronics with politics and, in the case of Billy Bao, some harsh, deconstructed rock and roll. In the live setting, Mattin is subversive, sometimes abrasive, and always finding ways to undermind audience expectations and break the boundaries inherent to performance.
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Tags: Alessandro Keegan, Billy Bao, Deflag/Haemmorahge, Drunkdriver, Haien Kontra, Margarida Garcia, Mattin, No Fun Fest, No More Music, Sakada, Taku Unami, Tim Goldie, Tony Conrad
Posted in ENGLISH, Horizons, Portraits, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Friday, May 1st, 2009
If you have ever heard or seen the Reactable in action, it was probably during Bjork’s 2007 tour. Largely influenced by the Moog synthesizers of the ’60s and ’70s, this new instrument is a translucent table with movable colored blocks that produces a range of rhythms, melodies, and sequences. If the Reactable has not received the mainstream recognition it warrants, this may be because it is not its tonal qualities that make it revolutionary for live performance, but its components. While its sound is unlikely to break the mold, the Reactable is a dramatic innovation in both interactive performance and music technology.
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Tags: Bjork, design, Günter Geiger, Marcus Alonso, Martin Kaltenbrunner, Moog, Nicholas Wells, Reactable, Sergi Jordà, Volta
Posted in ENGLISH, Horizons, Portraits, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, March 30th, 2009
People who view the New York No Wave scene as one of the last truly exciting chapters in the city’s cultural history can buy as many compilations and artist’s monographs as they like, but nothing beats an opportunity to time-travel. Earlier this month at The Kitchen, New Yorkers jumped at a chance to spend two hours back in the early ’80s — a time when drive-by shootings and burning cars were daily staples of downtown life, but also when a late-night walk down 19th street just might land you in the middle of a dialogue between a professional ballet dancer and an army of electric guitars. Think Punk!, an evening of music and physical performance by choreographer Karole Armitage, cast a younger generation of New York Noise-makers in a recreation of Drastic Classicism, an explosive collision of classical ballet and No Wave punk…
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Tags: Drastic Classicism, John King, Karole Armitage, Kevin Shea, Matthew Mottel, Paul Duncan, Rhys Chatham, Sarah Lipstate, Steve Gunn, Talibam, The Kitchen, Tom Gerke
Posted in ENGLISH, Horizons, Portraits, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 18th, 2008
Thursday, October 30, 2008. Coup d’envoi for the sixth edition of Nantes’ SOY Festival. Outside the Barakason, the impatience of the Yamoy crew and the festival’s annual supporters is at fever pitch. The Yamoy association has cooked up a storm for us this year: more artists than ever before (twenty), more venues (a dozen, disseminated throughout Nantes and its outskirts), and headliners fit for the biggest independent music festivals on this side of the Atlantic. On the bill for this first installment, Son Lux, Volcano and Why?, three groups sharing an affinity for beard growth and an ambitious take on pop music.
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Tags: Soy Festival, Sun Lux, Volcano, Why?, Yamoy
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Friday, November 14th, 2008
Those of us with enough chutzpah to hold out to the end of Yamoy’s 4-day new music marathon last week, through rain and through more rain, through the good, the great, and the just plain so-so, were in for a farewell that would somehow manage leave us hungry for even more: Soy Festival 2009, anyone? On the heels of Chris Corsano and Mick Flower’s raga-style free-for-all just a few blocks away, the final chapter of this year’s Soy Festival at the Pannonica typified the association’s penchant for providing a little something for everyone—provided, of course, that that something is not what the people of Nantes might ordinarily hope to hear on a Sunday night…or any other night, for that matter.
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Tags: Acid Mothers Temple, No Age, Soy Festival, Stearica, Yamoy
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