There’s a big connection between this new wave of hip young rappers based in New York City and London. Angel Haze credits the UK city with being the first to embrace her and Le1f, the likes of M.I.A. and grime with opening up the sound of hip hop. As for Mykki Blanco, if it isn’t ‘Haze. Boogie. Life‘ being shot in what looks suspiciously like Dalston’s Ridley Road Market, this new video, dropped from Mykki’s recent EP, Betty Rubble: The Initiation, out on UNOlast month, looks like it’s been shot pretty close by for MOCAtv.
But rather than a beaded, braided hairstyle, it’s his body that’s literally being waved around via the magic of special effects, while he crawls around the grim streets of London with an extra face on his head. It’s oddly appropriate to the weird and alien vibes of his track ‘The Initiation’ and testament to the talent of British director Ninian Doff. If you already thought that Mykki Blanco was weird, things just got a bit more so. **
As Chris Kraus said at a recent panel discussion at the RCA, “The suburbs are the last ethnographic frontier.” Arguably at the vanguard exploring that borderline is Ryan Trecartin, one of the most influential contemporary artists working, who introduced his audience to the brilliantly dark and vapid landscapes of Pasta and friends years ago.
Since then, his approach and aesthetic has had an update, presenting his as yet unnamed new film at the Massimiliano Gioni-curated The Encyclopedic Palace of the Arsenale pavilion, open to the public since Saturday, June 1. DIS Magazine published some behind the scenes images to celebrate and it’s looking like the coloured contacts and virtual vistas of the future dominate his New World dystopia. You can see the images on the DIS Magazine website. **
From South London’s vibrant art community in Peckham to the global art world of Venice’s 55th Biennale, Palazzo Peckham will be launching American Medium Network from their current location in the Italian island’s Castello district, May 28.
Featuring artists from across the globe, including Jon Rafman, Andrew Norman Wilson, Ed Fornieles and Jasper Spicero, the event will launch in physical space with a performance by MSHR and DJ set from Hannah Perry, while the network will feature new episodes and programs throughout the year. That includes transdisciplinary art and talk show Clump TV, hosted by NYC performer and artist Colin Self, KK/OK, created by Jake Dibeler and Mia Ardito and I, Decay, hosted by Ann Hirsch. See the American Medium Network website for more details.**
Jonathan Fox has released a video under his Aches musical moniker (one of many). Recorded in Bratislava and featuring the artist and producer in some beautiful landscapes indeed, the scenery of ‘Rain’ plays ideal accompaniment to the immersive, slightly eerie electronica, while taking his earlier soundscapes towards weirder, though more structured, musical territory. Glitchy synth elements, pitched down vocals and dark lyrics reflect the weirdness of neotranscendentalism as a Pagan symbol transposes, plays with and manipulates its surroundings. **
The ICA in London will be hosting a salon on our favourite buzzword on the afternoon of Friday, May 24. Examining issues of hacker culture, twitter Maoism and weird twitter, the discussion ‘On Digital Culture’ will look at the radical left, with groups like the Situationist International and “their intersection with the online practices of digital natives, who have grown up in a digital world”.
Image courtesy Sophie Carapetian.
The event will feature author of The Spectacle of Disintegration: Situationist Passages out of the Twentieth Century, McKenzie Wark and the person responsible for one third of the organisational work behind Auto Italia’s exhibition Immaterial Labour isn’t Working. See the ICA websitefor more details.**
What do you get when you combine a coarsely computer-generated aesthetic, Jennifer Aniston and a male striptease? We couldn’t tell you but we can show this brilliant video, by elusive online art project URRRGH, ‘$WIMMIN-IN-MONEY’. The most recent of uploads to the vimeo account, the witch house and #seapunk labels linger in the pitched down vocals and gaudy psychedelic artwork. But as we all know the two subgenres apparently don’t actually exist, which makes it all the more apt in comparing them to this mind-fucking non-music that manages to evade commodification by the very fact of its unapproachability.
Nothing much is known about URRRGH except that his/her/their tumblr is great, the videos are weird and the music is stranger. Combining the glitch elements of a fragmented sounds, a chopped, screwed and perverted voice and skittering syncopated beats, that do more than just bounce over near-nauseating bass drops, one could ask, ‘is this art, music or a practical joke?’ but they wouldn’t get an answer. **
The live chat girl is not only the light of every lonely misfit’s life but skilled in the art of seduction. It makes sense, then, that Paris-Berlin duo Dorcelsius should utilise the talent of their Russian friend ‘Isis’, to announce their forthcoming tour dates and Isis Nile seven-inch out on Steak AU Zoo, May 29.
The record will also be getting a release on other labels across Europe, including Stellar Kinematics, Neh-Owh and 51 Beats, and, as a group that has been and will be touring the region heavily, it makes a lot of sense. They’ve also just released Climax Air Climax on Aural Sects, which features a cameo by Low Sea‘s Billie and a remix by Profligate, while in Isis’ words, they’d like you to “come, come, come” to their upcoming shows. Who are you to refuse, really? See their remaining tour dates below, including a performance a Paris’ Vilette Sonique Festival, below.**
08.05.13 The Student -Brussels
09.05.13 Audio Plant – Antwerp
10.05.13 Koffie5Euro – Rotterdam
25.05.13 Vilette Sonique Festival 2013 – Paris
“Patriarchy is over” says CocoRosie‘s Bianca Casady, in a short Q&A for NOWNESS, who premiered their new video for ‘After the Afterlife’. The single will feature on the forthcoming Tales of a Grasswidow, out on Berlin-based label City Slang, May 26 and, while the freak folk sisters haven’t been mincing their words in press, their haunting vocals that linger between childlike and angelically feminine remain for this video shot by Michael Basich in Hawaii.
Carrying on the prematurely abandoned principles of surreal photography, where transposition and fantastical imagery abounds, the video adds to the rising feminist offensive led by The Knife’s Shaking the Habitual and Planningtorock‘s recent ‘Patriarchy Over & Out’ and ‘Misogyny Drop Dead‘. Less explicit and more alluring, CocoRosie’s contribution is just another face from the many that surround gender equality. **
People look shocked in Eva and Franco Mattes latest work ‘Emily’s Video’. Some hang their heads in shame; others cover their eyes. It’s unclear they’re watching but the artists assure us it’s “the worst video ever”. The original clip these volunteers are watching is never actually shown. In fact, it’s said to have been destroyed, along with anonymous P2P network ‘darknet’, which the blurb for Carroll / Fletcher’s Brand Innovations for Ubiquitous Authorship -running Saturday, April 23 to Thursday, May 11 -claims is “the internet’s disturbing alter ego”. It must be something terrible.
Then again, some people are looking through the gaps of their fingers, others laugh off what they see. Very few ignore the footage completely. It must, then, be an ‘intolerable image’, close to the one philosopher Jacques Ranciere describes as unwatchable “without pain or indignation”. Yet, oddly, it also seems optimistic. We’re not shown anyone masturbating, for example, which by the way, did happen when Franco Mattes staged a suicide in ‘No Fun’ (2012) on random access, peer-to-peer web-cam site Chatroulette.
You might argue the volunteers knew what they were up for. “NOTE: Emily’s Video is extremely graphic and extremely violent. EXTREMELY. We don’t recommend it to anybody”, runs the artist disclaimer. The viewers are primed for what they’re about to watch, and, in a sense, made to feel they should be guilty before they record themselves. And that’s just it. Afterfall editor Melissa Grunland notes that their skill lies, not just in the fact they work online but that they know how to tell stories and manipulate emotions. Arguably one of their cheekiest works, ‘NikePlatz’, saw the two Mattes’ install a fake headquarters in Karlsplatz, Vienna, claiming that the company had bought and re-named the square, causing an uproar and provoking an unsuspecting audience.
‘Emily’s Video’ questions trust to an even greater degree and that includes our very own reactions. Artinfo’s Ben Davies argued that, essentially, the Mattes’ “hijack the ‘Two Girls One Cup’ reaction-video craze of a few years ago”, where two fetish stars eat each others excrement, and add a bit of mystery by deleting the original video. But their artwork is not a ready-made and the point is not so focused on our shock towards the darkest parts of the internet but that we rely on users’ expressions to make judgments on what they see, and how they behave.
Fact and fiction, reproduction and authenticity, this is how we, as voyeurs, come to understand a subject and how we gauge our opinions in relation to another audiences’ reaction. The idea of an original ‘Emily’s Video’ points to a deeper Internet and a deeper truth. ‘Darknet’ is a real area of cyberspace that only users with software such as Freenet currently have access to. Whether these software programmes have a potential to unlock a Web 2.0 version of Pandora’s Box is yet to be seen. **
After ten years of releasing, producing and performing music, SSION will be embarking on their very first UK & European tour. Famous for their lives shows, supporting the likes of Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Gossip, as well as producing videos for Peaches and Santigold, they self-released Bent in 2012 and will be at Paris’ La Machine du Moulin Rouge and London’s Birthdays on the weekend of June 29 to 30.
SSION is led by Kentucky-born Critcheloe, who is also known around NYC for applying a Ryan Trecartin video aesthetic to the collective’s dreamy pop dance numbers of an 80s Madonna vibe and Prince-like sensuality. He’s also been on the songwriting team for post-ironic poster girl Lauren Devine’s track ‘Just A Little Ready‘ with Laurel Halo. See full tour dates below. **
Mon 10th June – Stockholm, Under Bron
Tues 11th June – Verona, SS Festival
Wed 12th June – Malmo, Moriska Paviljongen
Thurs 13th June – Vienna, Pratersauna
Fri 14th June – Milan, Plastic Club
Sat 15th June – Athens, Pixi
Sun 16th June – Palermo, Pride
Mon 17th June – Munich, Strom
Tues 18th June – Cologne, Bahnhof Ehrenfeld
Wed 19th June – Leipzig, Ut Connewitz
Thurs 20th June – Berlin, Festsaal Kreuzberg
Fri 21st June – Amsterdam, MC Theater
Sat 22nd June – Brussels, Bruxelles Congres
Sun 23rd June – London, XOYO
Wed 26th June – Manchester, Islington Mill
Thurs 27th June – Bristol, Start the Bus
Fri 28th June – Barcelona, Razzmatazz
Sat 29th June – Paris, La Machine du Moulin Rouge
Sun 30th June – London Birthdays
There’s an incredible texture and tangibility to offbeat Baltimore producer Co La (aka Matt Papich’s) unique sound and this latest creation for ‘Deaf Christian’, directed by Andrew Strasser, captures that sense completely. Following February’s ‘Melter’s Delight‘, this is the second video to be released in anticipation of the follow up to 2011’s Daydream Repeater on NNA Tapes, Moody Coup, due for release on Daniel Lopatin’s Brooklyn-based label, Software, May 6.
Featuring what appears to be the man himself in monstrous distortion eating, crushing and accessorising with some very supple looking fruit, the video plays apt sidekick to the scattered, though strangely thrilling soundtrack of cut-up vocal scatting and unruly rhythms. The fourth wall comes crashing down midway, when you hear Papich being directed from behind the camera, addling another level to Co La’s creative mode of lucid self-awareness. **
Aurora Halal‘s video work featured during the performance by Hieroglyphic Being and Ital collaboration, Interplanetary Prophets, at last year’s Unsound Festivaland, for lack of a programme of visual artists showing that night, her aesthetic was still conspicuously her own. Featuring the blown out, hyper-coloured psychedelia of a still proudly lo-fi tradition, she’s also made the video for Standish/Carlyon‘s cosmic dub croon ‘Nono/Yoyo’, out on their upcoming album debut Deleted Scenes, through felte May 13.
With Halal being the mind behind the gaudy VHS ware of artists like Ital, Maxmillion Dunbar and even indie-soul outfit Friends, and the two members of Standish/Carlyon from now-defunct Australian band The Devastations, there’s little doubt director and music makers alike are well worth attention. **
Berlin and LA-based artist Warren Neidichhas added his part to the Great Internet Chatter with notable Italian political philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi playing mouth-piece, literally. A highly conceptual artist currently focussed on cognitive capitalism, this recent work uses a split screen to zoom in on Berardi reciting a random poem of HTML code.
With one side filmed at a distance, the other close up, Neidich explores the very animalistic reality of man in cyberspace that no amount of coding and programming can hide. Its asynchronous cadence making things disjointed and feel not quite right. How’s that for an opinion?**
Visual artist, producer and programmer, Slava has a record, Raw Solutions,coming out on OPN’s Brooklyn-based label Software next month, Monday April 22, and has dropped a tech-conscious video to match his music and his lifestyle. Featuring the artist himself doing his drunken duty on a keyboard, interspersed with all other types of sporty actions in the hyperreality of his imaginings, ‘Werk’ follows last month’s ‘On It‘ with an equally unreal exploration into cyberspace and our physical role within it.
The Russian-born, New York-based DJ started in Chicago around footwork and now explores music across genres and within its rawest potential. Raw Solutions was largely recorded on hardware, while his fascination with Britney Spears and the perversions of popular culture come through in the reconfigured, repeated and manipulated sounds of some ever resilient human vocal folds. See the Software website for more information.**
Net nihilists Death Grips love to cause a commotion. If it isn’t splitting from their label in a most spectacular fashion by dropping an album before its official release date, then its providing raw aural assault with the message that ‘no, it’s not going to be alright’. Now their latest video drop for ‘Lock Your Doors (No Hands 6)’ from last year’s No Love Deep Web, is again based around their No Hands series, which is in turn based on hands-free devices, which in this particular case come in the shape of head-mounted cameras filming their recent performance at SXSW.
In an interview with aqnb, drummer and public mouthpiece, Zach Hill, said their last album “would be if someone came and ripped this [curtain] down and behind it there was this whole other dimension that went on infinitely. It’s definitely not an ending. It’s more like discovering a tunnel behind.” Perhaps, after five cryptic forerunners, ‘Lock Your Doors (No Hands 6)’ is that very (loud and painful) tunnel. You can watch the earlier videos on their YouTube account here.**
“It’s been so intense, so I thought you could kick back and not think too much.” An optimistic idea from the lofty mind of artist and writer Chris Kraus. It’s the second day of Aliens & Anorexia: A Chris Kraus Symposium at the Royal College of the Arts and, following a day of new interpretations of her work by other artists, this one is reserved for Kraus herself.
The author of I Love Dick, Torpor and Where Art Belongs, and founder of theNative Agents series of semiotext(e) –the iconic independent publisher credited with introducing French theorists like Jean Baudrillard and Felix Guattari to the US –the focus for the moment is on her 1996 film Gravity & Grace, a rarely screened feature-length fraught with difficulties during and after production. Struggling to get a release for the work, based across New Zealand and New York, Kraus eventually gave up on finding a distributor, instead penning Aliens & Anorexia, a non-linear narrative following its protagonist’s struggle to produce the film and named after self-abnegating philosopher Simone Weil’s book of the same title.
Gravity & Grace, then, offers fresh perspective for readers of Aliens & Anorexia, while highlighting the follies of those human interactions Kraus details in print; the clumsy mating ritual of a one-night-stand procured in a bar, the absurd curator, played by Kraus herself, brow-beating artist Gravity with feminist theory before ending, “frankly, your work just isn’t shitty enough.” As promised, the film is less concentrated than her writing, while still delivering elevated ideas with a warmth and wit, much like the artist herself. Hard of hearing, Kraus walks across the auditorium to her audience when answering questions, while explaining that Gravity & Grace exists in two parts (one with funding, the other without). Respectively, they’re based on flying saucer classic When Prophecy Fails by social psychologists Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter and a candid portrait of the artist as a young woman, following the “great disappointment” of a doomsday prediction unfulfilled.
Chris Kraus, Gravity and Grace (1996). Film Still.
Kraus’ strength lies in bringing together superficially disparate elements to her work; be it in I Love Dick’s bold self-revelation of an infatuated polyamorist alongside the gender politics of Downtown New York in the 70s or her credence of writing as performance. It’s in this way that Kraus reveals herself as prefiguring contemporary modes of interdisciplinarity in art, and its something that Gravity & Grace –a film made on a budget of $500,000, using film, at the threshold of the video revolution –represents. That’s not least for the fragmented visual aesthetic, utilising text, surreal imagery and privileging music in a way that resembles that of modern video art, spurred on by YouTube culture and home software. It’s here that Kraus’ role as artist, writer, critic, filmmaker and performer becomes indistinguishable and an emblem of what she calls the “expanding art world” pervading contemporary culture.**
Not content to quarry the eerie depths of rap and RnB, Drag producer oOoOO (aka Christopher Dexter Greenspan) is moving in on the mega machismo of reggae and dub. This characteristically slowed-down and distorted track, drolly titled ‘FoRLorN DuB’, recently dropped on the San Francisco producers’ YouTube account, not long after French associate, Butterclock released ‘Don’t‘, which he co-produced.
Having released hisEP Our Loving is Hurting Us on Tri Angle about this time last year, things have gone somewhat quiet on the oOoOO front but, with that, a crackling record and a faintly harrowing melody fades out to nothing. A bowel dropping bass rhythm heralding the return of this Drag artist’s own private dystopia.**
