Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Friday, February 17, 2012
Ital - Hive Mind (Planet Mu 2012)
Preview Buy "If you’ve heard Daniel Martin-McCormick's name recently, it would probably have been either in association with his disco/punk/echo band 'Mi Ami', or as 'Sex Worker' on the Not Not Fun label, or finally as 'Ital' on NNF’s sister label 100% Silk, recording quite different sounding house music to this album. Raised in Washington DC, Daniel has a history in the city's hardcore scene, he was in the Dischord records signed 'Black Eyes', but was also making dance inspired tracks at the same period, but coming from a very different angle from your average guy with a copy of Logic and a working knowledge of dance music’s history.
Daniel's music is a stranger thing. Working best at high volume, it uses house’s easy going 4/4 structure as a kind of camouflage for more out-there sonic explorations; subverting expectations, seeking out the links between the space and the sound-bending of dub & industrial’s unsettling sonics with the grooves of classic house and the effects and black holes of minimal at it’s weirdest. The album has a sculptured feel; sounds twist in space, feeling almost three dimensional and melodies pitch-shift in an unsettling way; voices dissolve in and out of these frameworks and the whole album has a unique, haunted feel; nothing is ever allowed to settle totally comfortably, everything vibrates. 'Hive Mind's' titles also hint at such themes as how culture insinuates itself on you and the meaning of pleasure, it’s ironies and forms, drawing in creeping fears of the internet age.
Opener 'Doesn't Matter (If You Love Him)' sounds a bit like Tackhead if they had made house music, using a flickering and confidently repeated phrase over a lumbering drum and bassline, introducing swirling and bombing synths into the mix – once the secret comes out. 'Floridian Void's' strange marrying of treated voices and swelling, pitch-bent chords and effects draws the listener into its strange atmosphere; it’s an ambient house track of sorts, but the ambience here is a swirling, confusing, watery vortex rather than being fuzzy and new age. 'Privacy Settings' builds creepy wolf howls over a slow bassline and cold faraway banging drums, estranged from their usual disco setting. Next, 'Israel' picks things up again, with weird, pitch-shifting edited bells over dubby toms, all the while cold chords rushing in and out over this unsettling backing track. The closer 'Final Wave' restores the album back to something resembling normality, with a disco-like swing that recalls Moodymann’s beat down productions but slid through brutal dub-like FXs that bring out a shade of strangeness in an otherwise happy groove." - Planet Mu
Outside In Documentary
OUTSIDE IN: The Story of Art in the Streets from Patrick Simpson on Vimeo.
"OUTSIDE IN is a celebratory and historical look at street art through the lens of the Museum of Contemporary Art's groundbreaking exhibition Art in the Streets. The film features renowned artists Shepard Fairey, Lee Quiñones, Swoon, Futura, Mister Cartoon, Revok, Martha Cooper, Invader to name a few. Director Alex Stapleton (Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel) documents the artist's creative process, their pitfalls with the law, the poetic impermanence of their craft and the artists' evolution from the back seat of a cop car to the walls of a well-respected institution."-Nuart
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Dead Luke - Meanwhile... In the Midwest (Moon Glyph 2011)
Preview Buy I know I am a little late on this one but it is too good to be ignored.
"Amidst pilfering of collective bargaining rights, the storming of public buildings in union protests, and subsequent recalls of elected officials, a bubbling of proletariat discontent in Madison, WI has shed light on a region of the country often overlooked. Emerging from this unrest comes Dead Luke’s second full length and first Moon Glyph release, "Meanwhile… In The Midwest", which takes the portentously hazy half-songs contained within his debut LP and solidifies them into a raw, lysergic-crystalline acid cocoon. In the album’s final moments we are greeted to the triumphant drifting of “Endless High,” a fuzzed-out call to arms for the No Coast. On “God Of Nothing” Luke conjures a hymnal drone of weaving elements peaking into a self-contained nihilist jam. While harkening back to the nebulous "American Haircut", Luke now unleashes his vexed voice in parallel with a movement currently percolating to a once apathetic surface." - Moon Glyph
Expo '70 - Hovering Resonance (Sound OF Cobra 2012)
Preview Buy "Expo ’70 is the Kansas City, Missouri based multi-instrumentalist Justin Wright and “HOVERING RESONANCE” is his new 12″onesided released by Sound of Cobra.
We consider Expo ’70 one of the most interesting musician of the North America’s new kosmische music scene and with this album he continues his travel into a sound made of hypnotic vibes, ecstasy and cosmic oneness.
The two tracks of the album are played with synth, guitar, analogue electronics and percussions and trough a wise use of repetitons and loops they are able to conduce into altered states of psychedelic listening and space rock meditations."- Sound of Cobra
We consider Expo ’70 one of the most interesting musician of the North America’s new kosmische music scene and with this album he continues his travel into a sound made of hypnotic vibes, ecstasy and cosmic oneness.
The two tracks of the album are played with synth, guitar, analogue electronics and percussions and trough a wise use of repetitons and loops they are able to conduce into altered states of psychedelic listening and space rock meditations."- Sound of Cobra
Cuticle - Mother Rhythm Earth Memory (Not Not Fun 2012)
Preview Buy "When Cuticle CEO Brendan O’Keefe said he wanted his most recent 12 inch to be titled in honor of other 4-word acronym-ready masterpieces (like RHCP’sBlood Sugar Sex Magik, what’s her name’s Love Angel Music Baby, etc) we were obviously on board. So now we can add Mother Rhythm Earth Memory to this illustrious list, and it’s a suitably lofty robo rubik’s cube of electric glide, daft crunk, and digital riddling. Right from the start it’s clear this is a new Cuticle creature – gone is the compressed, post-noise overdrive production of last year’s Confectioner’s BeatsEP, replaced by a gleaming, fiber optic resonance. “Liquid Crystal Drink (Pour My Dream)” sets the mood: a synthetic funk shuffle decorated with echo keys and computer-smeared vocoder vox that slowly submerges into a gurgling pool of malfunctioning circuits before resurrecting like a Herbie Hancock jam teleported into the Tron mainframe. That’s not the only strangeway stacked in this deck; there’s also cyber-jungle dub excursions (“Document Leak”), waterfall temple healing music (“Trickle”), and even a fucking Baronic Wall cover (“Night Of Romance”). A mesmerizing window into everyday sonic life on one of the weirder colonies in the hidden confederation of alien electronics. Black vinyl LPs in jackets with hypercolor emulsion artwork by Andreas Ervik"-Not Not Fun
Friday, February 10, 2012
Decoder Magazine Kickstarter Project
Kickstarter Decoder Magazine is foremost an attempt to interpret a world of culture and media in which the preeminent players have been the newly liberated human and the ambitious constellation of niche communities that new resources have given us digital beings unparalleled access to. Never before have so many human beings had so great a will to curate the universes around themselves or been as well equipped for it. Discussions of good and bad art have, after a long unfashionability, been replaced by tension over the means of popular access, new systems of personal art advocacy, and a growing sense of what exactly drives successful creative communities. We believe that society's new emphasis on personal curation will grow as more gain access... to the internet, to resources, and to new behaviors. Through selected essays and prose, poetry and interviews, and a variety of multimedia features, Decoder hopes to follow the vein of humans who transcend momentary fashions, creating timeless novelties and monuments to the menagerie of human perception.
Decoder is an outgrowth of Get Off the Coast, a North Carolina music blog that expanded its cast of writers over 2010 and 2011, becoming only one part of a larger, homespun arts collective that also runs tape and vinyl label Crash Symbols and participated in Pitchfork Media's ensemble music blog projectAltered Zones, before it's dissolution late in 2011. In 2011, the editors and writers at Get Off the Coast concluded that it was important to reconceptualize - the name "get off the coast" was itself a moniker that mostly referenced entirely temporary conditions - and Decoder is the result.
Having said that, thanks so much for reading this far and thanks for your support! Your contribution will go towards offsetting the costs of printing, with the remaining financial support being set aside as seed capital for a much hoped for expansion and a host of other projects we hope to pursue after publication. We've set our financial goal a little higher than we wanted to, but we feel like it's really important that the quality of printing reflect the quality of the magazine's content, so we want to make sure we can afford to display new artwork and comics in full color.
Thanks again!
The Editors: Dwight / Jheri / Liz
Contributors
Interview with African Apparel / Daniel Dodecahedron (Editor, Gucci Goth) /Dylan Ettinger (Writer, Musician) / Jheri Evans (Co-Editor of Decoder and Founder of Get Off the Coast) / Christian Michael Filardo (Artist, founder ofHoly Page Records) / Forty Ounce Clothing / Joey Ganter (Artist, Publisher) / Glenn Jackson (Contributor at XLR8R) / Noah Klein (Co-Founder of the FMLY) / Henning Lahmann (Editor, No Fear of Pop) / Hunter Mack (Artist, Founder ofGold Robot Records) / Peter Marrack interviews DJ Quik / Michael McGregor (Former Editor, Chocolate Bobka) / Claire Pestaille (Artist) / Ric Leichtung (Editor, Altered Zones) / NewVillager (Free-Form Music + Arts Collective) / Dwight Pavlovic (Co-Editor of Decoder and myself!) / Matthew Sage (Founder of Patient Sounds, Intl.) / Travis Street (Editor, [^]LAND Magazine / Liz Pavlovic(Contributing Editor of Decoder and my wife!) / Malachi Ward (Cartoonist)
Friday, February 3, 2012
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
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