Wheels & Doll Baby was founded in Perth, Australia, in 1987. The label, with its quirky yet upscale retro vibe, quickly became a celebrity favourite, being seen on the backs (& fronts!) of the likes of Dita Von Teese, Christina Aguilera, Kylie Minogue & Elle Macpherson. It’s utterly unlike anything else in Australia — or, for that matter, the rest of the world. Wheels & Doll Baby do sex-kitten vintage like no other.

So it makes perfect sense, then, that the illustrious label teamed up with famed fashion photographer, Ellen Von Unwerth, on their latest campaign. Von Unwerth started as a model, working the other side of the lens for 10 years before making the switch. Her provocative photographs celebrate the power & mystery of femininity, as well as the potential of the perfect pout!

Cast your eyeballs over the video & pictures below if you don’t believe me! I absolutely love this collaboration: it makes me want to wear red lipstick every day for the rest of my life!

Words by Gala Darling (@GalaDarling)

Cam partnered up with Stateless songwriter and vocalist Chris James for three of Seven’s tracks, including the first single, “Swim.” If you’re a frequent visitor to the ChinaShop, you know how highly we praised the latest Stateless LP, and James’ contributions on here elevate the songs to a blissful level. Same with vocalists Inlove and Nicolette, the latter of whom collaborated with Massive Attack during their Protection era. You can definitely hear a throwback sound on tracks like “California Dreamin’,” and there’s no shortage of melancholy (especially when James is doing his thing), but this is contemporary stuff for sure. Now that the thinking man’s downtempo is making a comeback, Cam should be back in the spotlight again.

I was interviewing Fin Greenall (Fink) not too long ago and we were halfheartedly joking about the return of trip-hop in 2011. Specifically, how there’s been such a great crop of albums lately that embody those classic trip-hop sentiments, yet no one is really talking it up, which was fine by us. The more underground and undisturbed the better. But do you agree? Do you think there’s been a healthy burgeoning of downtempo music these days?

DJ Cam: The downtempo is back, you are right. I think it’s a response to the very hardcore and uptempo electronic music of the last ten years. We need both of the styles; downtempo and uptempo, soft and hardcore. I think people are in demand for the kind of “soft” music. We need to chill and dream again.

You’ve got three excellent tracks with Chris James on the new record. That Stateless album is easily one of my favorites this year. How did that collaboration come about and what does he bring to a song?

DJ Cam: I was such a big fan of the first Stateless album, so I decided to do one track with Chris, which was “Swim.” I was so amazed by the result, so we did “Ghost” and “Uncomfortable” five month ago. I love Chris. He brings so much emotion, as well as a pop/folk side to my music. It’s a great collaboration.

I read in the press release that you dedicated this album to Massive Attack. I can definitely hear a bit of “Teardrop” and Ian Flemming in “California Dreamin’.”

DJ Cam: Massive Attack is my favorite group. I love the music and the visual side of the band. Since Blue Lines in 1992, I’ve always (been) surprised and amazed by their sound. They started as DJs like me, and I did a couple of DJ sets and live shows with them. It will be an honor to do a remix for them!

You’re releasing Seven through your label, Inflamable. I know it’s mostly a home for your material, but there are a handful of other artists (like Inlove) that you’re working with.

DJ Cam: Now Inflamable is more of a new art platform than a label. It’s Inflamable.com, (and) I’m trying to show my sound art and also all the visual sides of my work. I’m working on my first exhibition called “Landscape Architecture,” a collection of pictures. A book will follow with a special soundtrack.

Revisited By is one of my favorite remix albums of the 2000′s, right up there with Brazilification (by Fila Brazillia) and The K&D Sessions (by Kruder & Dorfmeister). It seems these days that the art of the downtempo remix—and the remix album, for that matter—has been a bit buried and lost. Do you agree?

DJ Cam: Thank you so much! It goes straight to my heart. I think (in the last) ten years, there is no budget for the remix. In the past, the A&R used to have a budget for the remix. It was always a new track and some different remixes for the DJs. Now they don’t care about that. Now (the remix) is coming back, but there is still no more money, so you’ve got a lot of new artists that wants to do remixes for free. It’s great promotion for them, and it’s for the love of the music. I love remixing. I will always do them and ask for them.

Words by Rich Thomas (@TheLandfill).

Anyway, its rad, boss, killer, juicy, OSM, crazeballs! You can’t deny the appeal of Tom, Mark and Travis, even after all these years. They own their sound and they sound pretty effing good. Don’t hate. Connect to your neighbors now!

Europeans have been feasting on Bliss Release, Cloud Control’s debut album, for over a year now, but the exceptional LP will finally get a US release thanks to Infectious Music. The album art—for this and all of Cloud Control’s various EPs and singles—comes courtesy of design group Greedy Hen, and jibes perfectly with the band’s future/pastoral aesthetic. Check the video for “Gold Canary” after the jump, or search for “Meditation Song #2” online. You might as well go buy a fifth of bourbon and invest in a rocking chair now, because both are required accoutrements with which to amplify your listening experience. Then pour a glass and check out our interview with the band after the jump.

The first thing that grabs me is the artwork. There’s such a cool cut-n-paste pastiche thing going on; vivid colors, almost a psychedelic undertone. What’s your connection with the Greedy Hen and how did you guys conspire on the art?

Cloud Control: Five years ago, when we were fresh on the Sydney band scene, we discovered someone had posted one of our demos as their Myspace profile song. Her name was Katherine Brickman, and her Myspace page was a veritable wonderland of her creative work. Kooky, fantastical, cheeky and often strikingly beautiful. We fell mutually in love with each other’s art and became great friends. She is half of the duo Greedy Hen, and they are responsible for all the visuals on our releases, poster art and merch, We wanted to allow the art to be an extension of our music, rather than some kind of awkward reflection, so we’ve been careful never to give Greedy Hen any artistic direction. They just work off our music and friendship for inspiration, so it’s always an exciting inbox delivery when a new piece of art gets sent around for approval. Needless to say, we’ve never sent anything back. They’re incredible and they totally get what we’re about.

You’re really active responding to fan posts on Facebook. What’s the craziest comment, exchange or bit of info you’ve gleaned from Cloud Control’s various social media spots?

Cloud Control: It’s funny, on Facebook there are only two ways that people will respond: either they’ll engage specifically with the content of our post, or they’ll put on caps lock and write “COME TO ADELAIDE!!!!!!”…insert random town or country name. Never fails to amuse. We’ve got some good tip offs for some great HBO TV series, as well as recommended local delicacies. One time this girl baked us a traditional German cherry cake. We put her on the door. The way to our heart is very straightforward.

How much of the album is recorded live off the floor versus overdubs? It’s got a really luscious, live feel to it.

Cloud Control: For most of the songs, the drum ‘n’ bass rhythm section is recorded live and organs, guitar and vocals are overdubbed. The layering of additional parts happened over a series of months; a very reflective and experimental process. “Hollow Drums” is completely live, and “Nothing In The Water” was recorded with the full band live with only vocals overdubbed. “Rolling Stones” has double drums. Ulrich is very proud of that. (It) sounds awesome.

There are a bunch of mad titles on the album: “Death Cloud,” “Ghost Story,” “Gold Canary,” which makes me think of mining, “My Fear #1”…yet there’s that uplifting feeling in the melody and music. Such a radical dichotomy. What is it about your band dynamic that creates that balance?

Cloud Control: We thought a lot about light and shade in the arrangement process, and the lyrics are built on a lot of uneven territory with unsettling content. When we’re jamming out the musical arrangements, it’s important that we find something inspiring or the tune gets shelved. Maybe the fact that this process happens in depressingly sparse rehearsal rooms means that we are more likely to gravitate towards the inspiring and uplifting stuff. I don’t know. I think other people, like our friends, would be better at reflecting on this point.

Can you tell me a bit about the song “Ghost Story?” It has almost a mythological or allegorical feel to it. What’s it about?

Cloud Control: This is a song about the telling of a ghost story and the moment that the fear takes hold. Being scared is a very primal form of generating a natural high. It’s all in the mind.

“Meditation Song #2” is probably by favorite drinking song of the summer. Not sure why, but there’s something that really appeals to the Appalachian Kentucky country boy in me. Not too familiar with the Blue Mountain area, but I’m wondering how much of your music is inspired by that more rural vibe?

Cloud Control: Appalachian Kentucky is drawing a complete blank, reference-wise. Nothing I can correlate with the Blue Mountains experience or rural lifestyle, for that matter. The mountains are quite urbanized actually, but the community is stretched over the ridgetops of mountain plateaus that drop away to valleys with waterholes down the bottom. A great place to spend a childhood, or return to in your twilight years. The four of us each had backyards that ran into bushland with no boundaries except the occasional cliff face and call to dinner. This context of natural space has surely left an imprint, but in ways that’s hard to put a finger on.

Words by Rich Thomas.

Picture the motley imagination of Where The Wild Things Are mixed with the quixotic, avant garde world of Fischerspooner. Throw in the patience and immersion of a method actor. Then strip it all down and build it back up using a boutique, DIY aesthetic. This, in a nutshell, is how NewVillager have approached their craft. Are they artists? Yes, and not just in the musical sense. Ben Bromley and Ross Simonini—along with a cast of characters spread between San Francisco, Brooklyn, and all points in between—are just as keen on creating elaborate art installations as they are three-minute tunes. Are they musicians? Totally, yet their record is chock-a-block with big hooks and indie pop melody. Nothing is over your head, yet the band talks, almost reverentially, about a “mythology” they adhere to; something intrinsically connected to the way in which they form new creative ideas.

Heavy stuff, man, but dig this. It’s really amazing to watch. Their shows involve “integrated events” that break down that fourth wall, then build it back up again, often with the audience’s help. At a nine-day art installation at the Human Resources Gallery in Los Angeles—an album pre-release party on steroids, one of three events planned in conjunction with their self-titled debut on IAMSOUND—they constructed their own shantytown, then lived and performed in it. They even invited their friends down to hang. They called it Temporary Culture.

To get a behind-the-scenes glimpse into Temporary Culture, we gave the band our Flip cam on Day One of the build and had them document the process through to the end. Then we pasted all the bits and bobs together, capping off with their closing night performance of “Say The Code,” set to the album version of the song. (Extra thanks to Zack Wojcik for the GoPro footage.) Check the video after the jump and read an interview with Ben Bromley and Ross Simonini about how they concepted the project.

There was a very strict rhyme and reason as to how these nine days were supposed to go down, yes?

Ben Bromley: There’s always things that pop up, and that’s part of the joy of this creating within a structure, that structure being the ten-stage mythology. The first three days were the Cocoon Phase, where we built the wireframe for it. We had a limited crew during those days. The next phase, the following three days, was the collaborative construction phase called the Forest. A bunch of artists came from San Francisco and New York and they lived with us. The most people we had in this space was about 12 people over the weekend. During that time, the art was really fleshed out. The sculptures in each of the corners were built, Sonya Genel did a big yarn sculpture over three pieces, Conor Buckley did a piece in the far corner in the Shot Big Horizon room. That was the period when we had DJs that came in and performed, and we had people coming through as we were building. That was really exciting, to have the public coming through the space, asking us questions about it as we were doing it. Then the final three days were more of the performative days, and that was called the Lighthouse. Matt Kivel from the band Princeton played an improv set with Noah and David from the band Bodies Of Water. They played an hour and 45 minutes of just really hypnotic music and we were still building and hanging out and relaxing and just living. It kinda became this thing where we were living this creative phase. Eric and I one night, I think on the eighth night, stayed up until about three in the morning making t-shirts and stencils and making a map of the gallery space. It became this process, over the course of the days, where we learned what people needed to be able to understand the space. Then we would just build it. You know, providing things that allowed more engagement. Shifting the spaces. The idea of a temporary culture, or shanty towns, is that they’re these malleable ways of living that change according to the people, as opposed to more rigid infrastructures of cities where you have buildings designed to last for 50 to 250 years.

Were you exposed to a particular environment that inspired the desire to create this?

Ben Bromley: Part of that desire was a lot of the stories popping up about tent cities across the country; people being forced from their homes as the result of inflation or the housing collapse. There is a certain degree of response to that. In the immediate neighborhood here, we are very close to Skid Row. Passing through there, you couldn’t help but feel a deep empathy for the people. Here we are, artists having a certain degree of privilege to be able to come and go as we please from an actual building in which we can model that way of living and try it on. These people are forced into it. One gentleman who came through grew up in Tijuana in the 1970s and he said that some of the spaces in the gallery reminded him of what was then known as Cartolandia; these temporary cardboard structures that people lived in, very much like the Cocoon Room that Ross built and the Black Rain room that Eric Lister built. Those two represent the first two rooms in the mythology. We had an Overpass Room, which was the final room of the cycle, and we had information about these tent cities, Tuareg lifestyles and all these different cultures that have these temporary ways of living. It’s hard for me not to be a little bit of a doomsday sayer to say that it’s gonna be a much more common thing over the next period of time as we go through a shift in our energy consumption.

How does what you did here connect with the album? Obviously certain tracks match up with certain rooms and phases, but is there a deeper connection that you want people to take away?

Ben Bromley: In each of the rooms, there was a printed page from the CD booklet, and in that image was one of the characters from the “Lighthouse” video. Each one of those characters corresponds to a song on the record, or a stage in the mythology, or a room from the installation. We’re stacking layers upon layers on this structure. Additionally, the songs themselves played with all these themes. “Lighthouse,” the song, is the Lighthouse room and the character is the Builder; it’s the moment of creating the structure and releasing the idea into the world. The subsequent stage is “Bad Past Gone Away,” which is the second to the last song on the record, and that’s the stage of letting go and releasing what you’ve created. For us, that’s today. We’re tearing it down. We created this thing and now it’s come to an end.

Do you feel the term “artist” gets thrown around too loosely these days?

Ross Simonini: I wouldn’t say the term artist gets thrown around too much. To say only certain people deserve the term would be a form of elitism, which would be bad news for art. I really like modest art with modest means. Or amateur art. Or art with the minimal possible amount of effort. Or art that is narrow in its focus. NewVillager certainly puts a lot of time into our art, and we come at it from a lot of different angles and mediums. We do that because we want to get at an idea—the mythology, we call it—and we hope that, by using all sorts of ways of conveying it, that eventually all the mediums will becomes windows into a single idea.

To create—and adhere to—a mythology is not for the fainthearted. Take Lady Gaga. She’s created a persona and way of living that is inextricably linked to her music. She’s not just Gaga on stage or in the press. She’s Gaga all the time. How far are you prepared to take the mythos of NewVillager? I’m assuming it’ll extend far past this album.

Ross Simonini: As NewVillager, we definitely try to bring the mythology into everything we do together: the process, the marketing, the lyrics, the website, the interviews, the songwriting, the scheduling. That’s important to us, and there’s rarely an interaction between us in which we don’t use the mythology to make choices. But the mythology doesn’t continue outside of NewVillager. It’s not about us as individuals or self-expression. Its purpose is as a form of communication to use with each other (collaboration) and audiences (interaction). It’s a way for us to focus.

Words by Rich Thomas. Photo by Asger Carlsen.

Way to start the weekend Vanessa! After watching this video I’m both jealous and thirsty. Join Cole and Vanessa as they head to downtown Los Angeles to a hidden gem of a bar called La Descarga. They stop and visit with Janet Varney and Samm Levine along the way.

Check out Episode 1 here: http://www.chinashopmag.com/2011/06/welcome-to-the-chinashop-vanessa-and-cole/

It’s Mad Lib Monday at ChinaShop, where they fill in the blanks and we make up the rest. Check out our exclusive portraits and listen to some brand new music.

NAME: Scott Bartenhagen
LOCATION: Lathrop, California
RECORD LABEL: Unsigned

That’s Scott on the left in the back. The giant fellow. The troubadour. The dude with a knack for jazzy folk phrasing that’ll have you reaching for your Jackson Browne and Geoff Keezer albums. He’d like you to check out a track of his called “Beacons,” which you can listen to and download here. Two years ago, he released an album called Ten Songs Ten Men, which he dedicated to “a bunch of dudes I have not met,” and which you can check out here. You can also watch out a video of him performing a tune called “Roll The Dice” at a cafe in Modesto, California. I guess what we’re trying to say is, Scott is way talented, and you should really get to know him.

Words by Rich Thomas. Photo by Dustin Downing.

]]> http://www.chinashopmag.com/2011/06/mad-lib-monday-scott-bartenhagen/feed/ 0 http://www.chinashopmag.com/2011/06/welcome-to-the-chinashop-vanessa-and-cole/ http://www.chinashopmag.com/2011/06/welcome-to-the-chinashop-vanessa-and-cole/#comments Fri, 17 Jun 2011 22:02:45 +0000 Shop Keeper http://chinashop.designenginela.com/?p=60933 Continue reading →]]>

ChinaShop partnered with Pop My Culture’s Cole Stratton and Vanessa Ragland to create a new series of webisodes called Culture Pops. Join them in Hollywood at the legendary Roxy Theater. They get the inside scoop on the world of rock directly from Nic Adler, Owner of the Roxy. They also pop over to Montreal to see what TV’s Deanna Russo has to say. Watch it! It’s funny!

If you find Cole and Vanessa as charming as we do, check out their podcast here at popmyculturepodcast.com After all they were just voted the #2 Best Comedy Podcast by Rolling Stone.  Join us next time for Culture Pops, you never know what you’re gonna get.

¡MAYDAY! Here’s a little friday fun. “Let me see if I could touch the God level- can you pass me that Red Bull.” Get ready for the weekend ya’ll!