Vengeance Rhythm

ISAM live in Graz

Marsen Jules & Anders Weberg

Life in the Overgrowth

Music by Urban Exploration

Arrangement and Video by Conflux

Björk’s Moon

More reasons to love the Icelandic 😉

Laurel Halo – Embassy

Buxton’s BUG

“I tell people that BUG is like going round to a friend’s house and having him open up his laptop and show you interesting and amusing things he’s found or made, except not as tedious and shit as that sounds.” Adam Buxton

We went to see Adam Buxton present BUG last night at the Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds, with no real preconceptions whatsoever.

Well, maybe one. That it would be something akin to watching Rude Tube live, but with more interesting beats and without that curly-haired twat.  Thankfully it was nothing of the sort.

Sitting in an art-house cinema to watch cutting-edge music videos was a novel enough experience in itself, but the focus of the evening was definitely the host, Adam Buxton, who was in fine comedic form, making the whole experience much more like live stand-up comedy than anything else I can think of.

He would be the first to admit he has been off the public radar for a few years – in “TV Jail” as he puts it! But he has still been very active in the digital realm, carving out his own surreal style via his Youtube channel. While incarcerated in obscurity, Buxton has embraced the viral and assimilated this culture into his comedy vignettes, which seem just as playful (but a lot less infantine) than his seminal work with former partner-in-crime, Joe Cornish. As a childhood fan of The Adam and Joe Show it’s really nice to see his comedy mature and develop as I do.

The whole evening had a really relaxed and intimate atmosphere – like you really were round his house, peering over his shoulder while he showed you his favourite online clips. My only criticism of the event was that it didn’t last quite long enough. I could easily have stayed into the small hours watching music videos with him. It felt like I was hanging out with an old mate of mine that I hadn’t seen for a few years, and it seemed like the rest of the audience felt the same.

The music videos he showed us were also of high quality. Alongside more obvious (but still great) choices like Roots Manuva’s Witness The Fitness and contributions by the legendary Cyriak, there were also some great videos that had passed me by, and I enjoyed this aspect as much as the comedy. If you get chance to go see one of these shows, do so!

Some of Adam Buxton’s new material:

Adam Buxton’s website

BUG website

Urban Expo 1

Urban Exposition 1

Improvised music by Urban Exploration with Live visuals.

 

Autechre – Gantz Graf

This is one of my favourite videos of all time and the best syncing of visuals to music I have ever seen. This track is taken from the 3 track EP of the same name and was directed by Alex Rutterford. It appears on the Warp Vision DVD release containing music videos from 1989-2004, by various artists on the label.

http://warp.net/records/releases/various-artists/warp-dvd-compilation

Autechre are an electronica duo, who have released on Warp Records and Skam and are consistently pushing the boat out when it comes to experimental, cutting edge music and sound design. Anyone who likes electronic music and has not yet delved into their back catalogue should immediately do so. They are at the top of their game and have been instrumental in the cultivation of experimental music across the world.

http://warp.net/records/autechre

Make sure you play the HD version and in full screen mode for the best experience.

Raoul Sinier – Guilty Cloaks

Captivating, complex and genre-defying; Guilty Cloaks feels like the most genuine piece electronic music I’ve heard in a long time. This masterpiece is the fifth full length album by the multi-talented artist, illustrator, animator and musician Raoul Sinier, and it really is something to write home about.

Intense human emotion runs through the entire album – this has a great deal to do with Sinier’s subtle vocals (think Thom Yorke or Martin Grech) which form the focal point of many of the tracks, but it is much more than the vocals alone. The precise and imaginative composition of every track creates a mood which is fluctuating: unsettling at times, serene and brooding at others; even silly (take the lyric from Over The Table for example:  “If you are a monkey, jump from tree to tree. If you are a pork, jump on my fork.”)

Guilty Cloaks takes many unexpected twists and turns, creating an album full of excitement. She Is Lord pummels away with an Amon Tobin-esque grittiness; Green Lights is meandering and broody with sharp crisp beats offsetting Boards of Canada undertones; Winter Days balances a delicate piano riff with detailed glitched-out beats which takes it some way down the dark path of breakcore; Summer Days contains desolate and desperate lyrics – “Everyone is dead. Bright light, dark sunshine… Sunshine’s in my mind, and darkness lives on my skin”; Walk features Raoul’s distinctive voice over pounding rhythms and orchestral melodies, and is an epic end to a monumental album.

Winter Days:

She Is Lord:

A few weeks back I caught up with Raoul himself, and he spared me a few minutes to answer some of my questions:

You’re a painter, musician, animator, illustrator… Are you ever bored?

I’m easily bored, yes. You might think I’m into my music and my image all the time but I have huge gaps of emptiness and inactivity, especially with music, sometimes for months. But when I’m into it, I like to try a lot of different things, as long as I get some fun or good results.

Did you work in a different way or set out to achieve something different with this album?

No I always work in the same way, I don’t think too much about what I do and I let myself go with the flow. New directions always come out on their own. The only thing a bit different on this record (and this year’s EPs) is the singing. Over the years I have been more and more interested in adding vocals, but I had to work on that for a while (and still do).

“Guilty Cloaks” sounds very genuine and personal. It makes me think you set yourself no boundaries when it came to writing this album – did you have any rules?

I don’t have any rules. Again, I don’t really put thoughts into my music, I hate concept in art, I’m just looking for emotions. I think the key about this is that as an artist but also as a listener, I don’t pay attention to genres, it’s not relevant to me. For me, music goes from happy to sad, from slow to fast, from complex to minimal, and so on. I can find something that I love or hate in any given musical genre, because emotions in music are always the same, and that’s probably why I don’t enjoy some electronic music only based on technique and producers’ gimmicks. For me the composition is the real point of music, I work a lot on the sound itself, but it’s only to serve the composition.

To me it seems like a narrative – is Guilty Cloaks about anything as a whole, or is it just the individual songs that carry their own meaning?

To me it is a whole thing, like any album should be in my opinion. But of course every track has its own little story, obviously each of the songs with lyrics have something to say.

I don’t really know if the album says something precise. I guess it turns around ideas of self-conditioning – when people force themselves to think they are this or that. This is what I tried to express with the artwork, not in an obvious way because I don’t really care about having a “real” message of some sort. And the title “Guilty Cloaks” is a personal illustration of the idea of someone not happy with his life and blaming it on his disguise. Not happy with the core, blaming the shell.

Let’s talk about your art. I can tell Francis Bacon must be a huge influence on you, but who or what else influences you?

Francis Bacon is of course my biggest influence, maybe not biggest but most noticeable. But I’m influenced by anything, I could speak about artists like J-P Witkin for example, I love his work, but i’m really feeding on everything I see. Even stuff I find awful can trigger some ideas or mental images.

Estimating A Leg: 2009

Your paintings are dark and unsettling and yet beautiful – they also have a very strong narrative quality again, like Guilty Cloaks in fact, as if they are illustrations to an untold story…

I’m glad to hear that, sometimes people only see the dark side of my work, and of course it’s very dark, but it cannot be reduced to just that, it has a lot of weird humour, silliness, even poetry sometimes… I don’t really care about dark aesthetic if there is nothing beneath.

What I try to do is exactly what you said: set up untold stories, or pieces from something larger. I like to show a situation without any explanation, not because I want the viewer to understand an obscure meaning by himself or something… I just want to show something nice and unusual – almost like abstract art.

Could you recommend a film for me to watch?

To keep on this conversation’s tone, I would say “Taxidermia”, just because I felt very close to this aesthetic when I saw it.

Finally, what are you up to next?

Well the only think really planned is the new video (to be released in September) this one is animated, with a post apocalyptic/run for your life theme… very harsh. I just finished the whole thing and I have plenty of time to polish it, I like to be ready early.

Concerning music I won’t do anything new for quite some time now – usually when I finish an album I don’t write new stuff for a while, a long while. Especially here with the album and the 2 EPs earlier this year (Cymbal Rush/Strange Teeth & Black Nails on Oeuvre and The Melting Man on Tigerbeat6). I let ideas build up and grow in my head, and one day, for no apparent reason I start again, and if it’s the right time, then I become very productive again. So, stay tuned…

Raoul Sinier’s Guilty Cloaks is out on Ad Noiseam now.
Raoul Sinier official website
Guilty Cloaks lyrics
Raoul Sinier’s art
Raoul Sinier on YouTube

“Robots of Brixton” by Kibwe Tavares

Amazing anime depicting the future for the downtrodden area of Brixton, London. This truly is a masterpiece and something which people should really try to take a message from. “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” – Karl Marx

Kibwe Tavares – Direction, animation, modeling, lighting, texturingetc…
David Hoffman – Photographer Brixton riots archive.hoffmanphotos.com/​
Mourad Bennacer – Sound Designer designsonore.tumblr.com/​
DJ Hiatus “The Great Insurrection” hiatusmusic.net

Moth

Burial & Fourtet

Three of the North’s finest….

I want to introduce you to three artists whom I consider to be extremely talented. They were all living in the West Yorkshire area at time of publishing.

First in the list is Andrew Reynolds; a self proclaimed stress head and master of the stream of conciousness, these traits appear thick and fast within many of his works. I love the flow of these pieces and the way you could imagine seeing a glimpse of something like this in water, smoke or clouds. It is almost as if he captures a snap shot of natural imagery, only existing because of the layers of other things around it. Whilst at Staffordshire University, he undertook a monster of a project, drawing lines on A4 paper and taping them together to form a behemoth of a piece. Much of this was done whilst listening to Venetian Snares and at the time he told me that it aided his creativity, allowing himself to adopt a ‘breakcore mindset’. Some shows in which he has exhibited include: HALLelujah, Princes, Glasgow April 17th Reception, Plan 9, Bristol, 13th March 2009 – Sale-Royal Standard Liverpool Jan – late Feb 2009 The PaperMarket @ Jibbering Records May – July 2008, Live performance drawing @ Soul Monkey for Airspace @ LRV – Light box gallery shop, Jewellery quarter, Birmingham – current Studio 4 commercial gallery, Custard Factory – current Airtrade auction viewing, for Airspace – 11th – 13th December 2007 Airspace, Cultural quarter, Stoke-on-Trent – 22nd September – 20th October 2007 Future Shorts, The Underground, Stoke on Trent – 21st September 2007 Nog Gallery, Brick Lane, Whitechapel, London – 16th July – 13th August 2007 Brick House, Brick Lane, Whitechapel, London – 12th July – 16th July 2007 Graduate show, Staffordshire University, Stoke – 8th June – 16th June 2007

For more information or to contact him please visit this address: http://www.myspace.com/spastiserendipitous

Secondly we have the unbelievably skilled filmmaker and animator, Ben Daure. If you like twisted visions of the future, apocalyptic goings on, dark, intense comedy and a sprinkle of nonsense, he is the man to watch. Combining awesome digital manipulation techniques with simple yet effective ideas, Ben consistently pushes his art to extremes and still regularly manages to get a message in there too! Nothing short of awesome.

Here is one of my personal favourites:

For more videos including the absolute masterpiece music video, for Mishkin’s “Good Day To Die” please visit: http://www.grape-productions.com/

Last, but by no means least, is the best sketch and character artist that I have ever met, Dan Barritt. If this guy doesn’t work in comics or computer games at some point, then the world will have missed out! He recently exhibited a large, highly detailed piece at the Leeds Art Gallery, of a very recognisable part of Leeds, being invaded and terrorised by giant robots. I expect that in Dan’s mind, this is the image he sees every Friday night when walking past the Dry Dock at closing time. There are definite messages within these pictures, but you have to look long and hard to really know what is going on. This is what I particularly love though, as anything with this level of detail immediately catches my attention and is an ongoing inspiration to me. There is also a consistent feeling of impending doom throughout his work, but if you, like me also hate many elements of the world, I guarantee you will enjoy!

Self Portrait:

For more information and artwork please visit: http://www.ragadabah.co.uk/portal.html

To add his page on Facebook please click the following link: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ragadabah/26753390995?sk=wall

Peace.

Vote Meow on May 5th

The Shape Journal

Interesting, strange and alternative views on Science and Philosophy from writer Jim Schofield.

It’s all up there for free. It’ll warp your mind and challenge your assumptions. What’s not to like!

http://www.e-journal.org.uk/shape/