You might remember this post from a few weeks ago, titled “D4RT: Kickstarting art in Peru”, announcing a fundraising campaign for a mobile art workshop aimed at bringing classes and public art projects to impoverished communities worldwide. Thanks to a staggering outpour of support, this dream materialized and D4RT took its first flight three weeks ago.
Filter’s Culture Collide Festival is taking over Los Angeles this weekend and bringing bands from over 30 countries to perform in historic venues such as The Echo, Echoplex, 826 LA, The Church, Taix, Co-op, Origami, and ReForm Academy. The four-day festival kicked off on Wednesday night with a launch party that featured an array of DJs, dance competitions, and a gallery of music-oriented photography titled Composition: Visual Notes on Music.
5. How to Avoid an Atom Bomb: When the nuclear fireball hits, nothing’s quite as useful as ducking underneath a piece of wood. Yes, the PSA Duck and Cover is full of insightful tips for avoiding incineration — from the turtle who hides in his shell, to the lovely cartoon domestic setting that is torn apart Hanna Barbera-style by an explosion, few things could be as useless in knowing how to avoid being vaporized by a nuclear attack. Have we even come up with an alternative in the past 60 years? Sh*t.
Real rock ‘n’ roll is visceral. It can grab you by the throat or it can grab you by the balls. If you’re lucky, it’ll do both at the same time. It’s emotional, accessible and honest, and like Danny and the Juniors professed way back in 1958, rock ‘n’ roll is here to stay, especially if Dead Sara have anything to say about it.
Following in the great tradition of LA rock juggernauts, this four-piece is fronted by 25-year-old Emily Armstrong (singer, sometimes guitarist) and 23-year-old Siouxsie Medley (guitarist, sometimes singer), both of whom have the power to levy crushing cranial blows with their respective instruments. Their self-titled debut is full of massive numbers like “Weatherman” and “Lemon Scent” (available below), but also dips into catchy pop territory with “We Are What You Say.” It’s a bold body of work, and the band is just getting warmed up.
After opening for Bush on a select group of September dates, Dead Sara came home to blow the doors off LA’s Viper Room. (You can check out our photo gallery for evidence, or if you happen to see Grace Slick around, you can ask her about it. She was there, too.) Check out our interview with Emily Armstrong after the jump.
If you are considering throwing your boxers or bra on stage at the next Rapture concert, beware: Vito, Gabe, and Luke pay attention to exactly what lands up there. The New York City-based dance-punk band sat down with ChinaShop prior to their DJ set at the Filter Culture Collide Festival and gave us a rundown on the many undergarments that have graced their stage during the tour. We also discussed the band’s legit DJ skills and admiration for The Muppet Show’s “Animal.”
This past weekend, Seattle was host to the International Festival of Electronic Music, Performance, Visual Art and New Media; known to the slightly less eloquent as the Decibel Festival and #dBFest to your Twitter feed. A nine-year institution, Decibel always books a wide range of talent, pundits and educators for its highly immersive, four-day festival, and who better to snag a headlining spot than synth provocateurs Ladytron. The Liverpool quartet’s fifth and latest full-length, Gravity The Seducer, is yet another milestone in a career that’s spanned 12 years, and reinforces their position as a band that’s always put artistic integrity, design and musicianship far above any other endeavor.
We asked keyboardist and songwriter Reuben Wu, also an accomplished photographer and graphic designer, to document their weekend at Decibel with a few choice images. What inspires him behind the lens?
“Anything that I find interesting, really,” he says. “I took a trip to Borneo on a week off DJing and my host said to me, ‘You are a most unusual tourist.’ A lot of the time it is not just the subject which is interesting, but the context it is in, so you have to communicate that.”
You can keep up with Reuben’s work on his Flickr stream and his website. In the meantime, check out his Decibel Festival photos after the jump.
We might be rained in this gray October morning, but just last night I devoured my very first dragon fruit (a sweet, fuchsia bulb that looks like an egg from Alien and tastes like sorbet when chilled), giving me yet another reason to love life in Southern California. And dragon fruit in October is just one of the hundreds of treasures spotted at the Silverlake farmers market on Saturday.
In case you missed it, last week Blink 182 released a new CD called Neighborhoods. Cleverly you can stream parts of the entire album off their site on the interweb and connect to other people in YOUR neighborhood who are also listening at the same time. Its a bit like when you are in a hotel room on chat and one of your unseen neighbors hits you up for random chat sex. Come on, I know that doesn’t only happen to me?
This fall, Los Angeles dubstep producer 12th Planet kicks off 53 dates across North America, joining Skrillex’s The Mothership Tour, plus headlining San Bernardino’s Nocturnal Wonderland, Los Angeles’s Hard Haunted Mansion and Milwaukee’s Turner Hall Ballroom. Also on the bill for the three-month tour — which will see only 4,000-plus capacity venues — is live-production outfit Two Fresh, DC Moombahton practitioners Nadastrom, and UK rap/grime troupe Foreign Beggars showcasing their first-ever North American performances.
Among the work on display in Mike Ming’s aptly titled solo exhibition, “All Over the Road” — at Nepenthes, a high-end clothing boutique in Manhattan — are three mammoth-sized paintings with abstract brushwork, a few smaller paintings with tousled and intricate lines, a couple of surfboards, a carved-out skateboard and two motorcycle helmets with enamel pin stripes.
“I don’t have that signature, ‘Oh, that’s a Mike Ming work,’” the artist said at his Brooklyn studio one recent afternoon. “I think it just runs the whole gamut. The stuff I’m showing is all over the place.”
The same could be said for his influences, which seem to flow effortlessly from his many pursuits, including surfing, skating and motorcycles. For one painting in progress, it’s been dolphins. Ming saw a few off the coast of Queens (or the closest thing Queens has to a coast).