When I first came across the music of Dylan Ettinger, he was what you could call a New Age Outlaw. His compositions often possessed a rich, textured ambiance, that was often more tense than meditative. Ettinger’s pop potential first made itself know on last year’s 7″, “The Lion Of Judah.” “Wintermute”, the lead single from Ettinger’s upcoming LP Lifetime of Romance, continues to build on the dark wave ambiance, this time with a rhythm that is ripe for the goth dance club, and a Robert Smith-esque vocal line. The video itself is intriguing and nightmarish. While the images border on titillating and pleasurable, their surreal nature places them subtly into the space of sexual anxiety. This is certainly a testament to the directorial skills of Melissa Cha. While the overall sound might be more accessible than Ettinger’s past output, its power is undeniable, and with this video as a visual representation, we can gather that Ettinger is the type of artist who will always keep us on our toes.
Words: Samantha Cornwell
Lifetime of Romance will be out in March on Not Not Fun
A few months ago we posted Psychic Handbook’s unabashedly New Age track “Dolphina.” Now Alejandro Archuleta (the man behind the handbook) has added some visuals to the pure moods, and dolphin calls of the song. The video is successful in capturing the playfulness of the music. It centers around a group of dancers, including Archuleta himself, journeying through a magic landscape. This landscape includes swimming with dolphins, surfing, and in a particularly exuberant moment, singing on stage with the women of ABBA. The imagery here is both a valentine and a parody of the New Age aesthetic, and it captures a joviality that we don’t see quite enough of.
Words: Samantha Cornwell
Psychic Handbook’s debut album will be out later this Fall on Not Not Fun
Vermont’s ambitiously prolific weirdo pop enchanter Zach Phillips, aka one half of Blanche Blanche Blanche, is also known for themed releases under alter-ego monikers GDC, Horse Boys, Sord, and Nals Goring. Music for Drawing, out now on Not Not Fun, introduces Phillips’ latest false prototype in the form of Bruce Hart– a “hard-edged lab rat renegade who’s engaged in an ongoing socio-psychological mind-war with nefarious invisible chemical-industro corporations.” Music For Drawing’s superhero path of saving the world from its self-imposed dystopian nightmare isn’t always clear. With “Hartwork,” we travel through the steel-trapped doors of his laboratory and witness the scientist-gone-mad at work. Arpeggios bubble from beakers and high frequency organ notes mark the endless pistoning of a cyber-synth-fueled machine.
Wherever it comes from, “Hartwork”’s energy is infectious. Perhaps the electro-industrial Atari-style synths of Bruce Hart’s minimal wave manifesto will inspire even the most elite gamers to hang up their controllers, pop the cassette into a boombox, and enter an alternate form of crime-fighting virtual reality against the atrocities of human/chemical waste.
Bruce Hart, “Hartwork”
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“Lion of Judah,” the A-side of Dyan Ettinger’s new 7″, sees the Bloomington, IN artist going in for some deep, terrestrial blues after the arpeggiated beam-scapes of his New Age Outlaws LP. Never thought I’d enjoy watching “action shots” of a dude playing a synthesizer, but this video by Nathan Vollmar and William Winchester Claytor makes every moment count, from the turn of a head to the opening of an eye and the choreography of a body lunging forward for a kiss. If the slant of the light and the group compositions remind you of clicking through slides in Art History 101, it’s because the artists were taking some pretty serious cues from Caravaggio.
Words: Emilie Friedlander
“Lion of Judah” 7″ is available from Not Not Fun, along with Dylan’s New Age Outlaws LP
Amanda Brown (Not Not Fun, LA Vampires) has certainly been making strides with her new 100% Silk imprint. The young label has put out long-playing neo-techno releases from The Deeep, Maria Minerva, and Ital to name a few. This new track from Gillette is as smooth as your lover’s face after a clean shave. Although we are only given a snippet here, I am excited by Gillette’s enchantingly spacey minimal techno. The video, which was directed by Amanda Brown and Ben Shearn, takes you into a video feedback wonderland. We move from analog video imagery to outer space and into a realm inhabited by a curiously tentacled sea creature. Gillette’s music is an appropriate guide through this fantastical realm.
Another red-eyed Studio One revery from Madison, WI’s Peaking Lights, the husband-wife duo of Aaron Coyes and Indra Dunis, formerly of San Francisco’s Rahdunes. “Key Sparrow” opens with the squish of a record player booting up to 33, as though its base synth motif were playing directly from a raspy dub LP. In come some minor-key fingerpicking, a few screaching guitar flyaways, and Indra’s minimal sing-song vocals, midway between double-dutch chant and teutonic battle cry. Their new 936 LP on Not Not Fun, which also includes “Tiger Eyes” and “All the Sun That Shines”, just might be the most deadpan psychedelia to grow up on your playroom floor.
Peaking Lights: “Key Sparrow”
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Sometimes we have to cut the crap and just play around. This new clip from Madison, Wisconsin’s Peaking Lights, directed by Ben Shearn and LA Vampires‘ Amanda Brown, invites us to that whimsical place. Brown describes the video’s aesthetic as “Warhol dub.” Certainly the playful side of pop art is invoked here. When we’re taken to Rasta nation it’s through pastiches of album cover images. While the track’s drum machine and keyboard dub recalls the titans of Jamaican music like The Congos and Sister Nancy, David Bowie and Lloyd Dobbler also have a seat at the table. Rather than using dub for darkness, the track’s frantic drum machine taps and soft, mechanical organ tones take us to a light-hearted fan-space, where playtime and creativity go hand in hand. (Altered Zones co-premiere)
Peaking Lights’ new full length, 936 comes out February 2nd on vinyl, tape and CD from Not Not Fun
Words: Samantha Cornwell
Video: Amanda Brown and Ben Shearn
Peaking Lights’ new full length, 936 comes out February 2nd on vinyl, tape and CD from Not Not Fun
Everyone from Edie Sedgwick to Britney Spears will tell you that the life of luxury can be a trap. Sometimes having it all means nothing; in this new video for New York’s Psychic Reality, artists Ben Shearn and Amanda Brown (LA Vampires) find inspiration in this truth. The central figure is a glamorous woman of antiquity. She is part Cleopatra, part Kenneth Anger glamazon. Although her every whim is catered to, she is alone in her menagerie, and transfixed by the native fruits. The song, a half-cover of Abel Meeropol’s condemnation of American racism, takes on a new life when filtered through Leyna Noel’s Bjork-like croon over a haunting house beat. According to Leyna, the band selected this “loaded quote to frame a discussion about gender, desire, organic/inorganic sensuality, and ways of living on the earth.” It certainly takes guts to use a song about lynching in such a way, but in this glamorous setting, dramatic irony runs amok. (Altered Zones co-premiere)
Vibrant New Age LP is out this month on Not Not Fun
Sam Meringue’s Matrix Metals project has been the extra cheese for pizza-sticky blogger fingers everywhere since Not Not Fun dropped it as a tape last spring, and pretty much everybody who writes about it has been singing the same tune: if all the artists in David Keenan’s h-pop pantheon got together and threw a party in a Malibu Hilton Hotel lobby circa 1985, Flamingo Breeze is what that party would sound like — plastic Piña Colada glasses, lopsided Monet posters, hallucinated DJ “take-overs” and all. And I used to agree entirely, until this new video by Luke Wyatt made me realize that the album’s closing track kind of pulls that swirling neon vision right out from under you. “Tanning Salon” is the killer hangover that comes with the dawn: we are still at the Hilton, but the ice sculptures have collapsed into puddles, the guests have all come and gone, and the hallucinated 45-year-old trophy wife who glided through the ballroom like an extra in a David Lynch film is lying inside the sensory deprivation chamber of a tanning booth, alone with her darkest thoughts as her 97-year-old husband takes a dip in the pool. Memories can really be quite horrific, when the last five years of your life get jammed in the VCR. And I’m afraid, Lady in Red, that you only looked real with your make-up on. (more…)
Jeremy Earl is one busy guy. Not only is he the leader of Woods, but he also runs the associated labels Woodsist and Fuck it Tapes. You may have noticed that these labels have an instantly identifiable aesthetic, and that is due in large part to Earl’s artwork, which graces many a cassette and LP release. From the distinctive ink-drawn Woodsist logo to the elaborate collage work on the cover of Robedoor’s Endlessly Blazing, Earl’s artistic output is as identifiable as his lovely falsetto. It is therefore a cause for celebration that his art work is now available in a condensed and portable form — inside his new book Skull, that is, the first non-musical release on Los Angeles’ esteemed Not Not Fun label. (more…)
