As you may know by now, sometimes wildly awesome things that have been around for a long time fly completely over my head for months (sometimes years) before I discover them. Barbican Centre might be one of those things. It's an arts complex in London that features visual art, music, dance, theatre, film, and education events. One part of the complex is called The Curve, for very apparent reasons:
The Curve is home to Curve Art, which is "A series of new site-specific commissions created for The Curve by contemporary artists." The one up right now looks awesome. It's by a French artist named Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, and features a bunch of musical instruments arranged throughout the space (mostly electric guitars, it seems). Also in the space: a bunch of little zebra finches!
Boursier-Mougenot’s installation for The Curve, his first solo exhibition in the UK, takes the form of a walk-though aviary for a flock of zebra finches, furnished with electric guitars and other musical instruments. As the birds go about their routine activities, perching on or feeding from the various pieces of equipment, they create a random and captivating soundscape.
If that sounds a little confusing, this video should help:
I love that! I like the concept alone, but the way that bright green and flecks of orange are brought together amongst muted grays and butter creams – with distortion and tiny tweets as a background – makes me smile throughout the entire thing.
Are any of you guys in a band? You'll want to read this then...
Green Man is an annual, three-day music festival in Wales, happening in late August. It has a really great-sounding lineup (more on this later), and you could be on the bill too, maybe.
Last week, I got a note from one of the Green Man guys, Rob, about a band contest they're having called Green Poll. All you have to do is register your band, upload a video, and wait for people to vote for you. The winner gets to not just play at the festival, but open the whole thing as the first band to play on the main stage. You would also get 6 free tickets for friends and family to see the whole thing, too. And you'd definitely be in good company, sharing the bill with Animal Collective, British Sea Power, Beach House, Four Tet, Grizzly Bear, Camera Obscura, and Gang Gang Dance, among many others. wow!
Hurry up - you have a week left. Just go to the Green Poll 2009 site and upload a video of your band (signed or unsigned) playing a song. That's it. Your peers will vote through two rounds, and the top 6 bands will get to compete in a Battle of the Bands competition at the end of July. A panel of music industry guys will then pick the winner to open Green Man 2009.
Here is a quick recap from their site:
Round 1 - Voting closes at midnight on June 28 and the top 20 bands with the most votes go through to…
Round 2 - Voting closes at midnight on July 12 and the top 6 bands with the most votes go through to…
Grand Final - A live Battle Of The Bands contest in London on July 23rd to find one lucky winner to open Green Man 2009 judged by a panel of music industry boffins
If any of you win, maybe I'll make the trip to watch it myself also :) good luck!
One bulletin post on MySpace this morning sent me into an explosion of emailing and yelling at friends for their opinions (I am counting on your input, Heron). This is something I don't know a lot about and really want to hear other people's views on. When Arthur asked, I said "San Francisco, the UK, hip hop bleeding into other music genres' fashion, sort of."
So here goes. The bulletin was from Calvin Harris (one of my favorites from the UK of the neon electro variety), promoting this fantastic song (fantasticker video. so good that I made up a word.) by Mitchell Brothers:
Isn't that contagious? Anyway, an electronic artist promoting the hell out of a mostly hip hop song (he produced it). This is not dissimilar to the merging of hip hop and rock that I quoted in the Hadouken! entry, except this time it's less garage and more sparkle.
It made me think of when I visited San Francisco six months ago. My friend Jay was commenting on the culture there and how hip hop seems to have seeped into every other genre. Indie and skater kids wearing Dunks, shopping at Upper Playground, etc. I wonder if there is a parallel of sorts between this merging in San Francisco and what I was seeing come from the UK. I really want to understand this whole thing better. Maybe I'm imagining all of it. I e-mailed my friend Jess, who is from the West Coast and generally very up on things.
She responded with this.
i'd imagine that the hip hop influence on the fashion of other subcultures of the SF-microcosm (and LA, too!) is artsiness begetting (or beshoeing/behoodieing) more artsiness. i think in the indie rock circles, dressing with undertones of hip hop flare is done with a tad bit of irony in most cases. with companies like UP, i think the design aspect and creativity speak to these subcultures that value the aesthetic.
and maybe colors. hipsters/skaters/indie rock scenesters like getting away with wearing garish colors and loud prints.
...i think you might have something, comparing SF and the UK. another interesting comparison might be LA and SF and their interpretations of the same three-way clash between hip-hop, hipster, and indie rock fashion scene. down in LA, i've seen rappers dressed like old school weezer, and hipsters wearing dunks and XXXL hoodies. go figure.
Now, L.A. I really know nothing about. I browsed around The Cobra Snake a bit (he's a West Coast nightlife photographer) and found tons of stuff like this, which seems to confirm it all:
So what do you think? I would love to hear from people from San Francisco, L.A., the UK or anywhere else who could shed some more light on things. All of this reminds me of this entry Noah wrote in September about music lines blurring.
When I came of age musically I listened to nothing but hip hop because it was so huge in the late 80s and early 90's. I wore Air Jordans every day until I had to wear adult sizes and they started costing way too much. Nike sneakers are just something I'm getting back to... and those hoodies and stuff have huge cross over appeal with people, like Pharell putting them out. I was real punk rock for a long time, but even punk mixed with hip hop a lot in the 80s. Look at the photography of Glen E Friedman; he was shooting punk bands and hip hop bands at the same time. Look at the movie Breakin... Ice T is rapping in it and he is wearing track suits with punk rock spiked belts and stuff... but this Friedman picture says it all; Public Enemy rocking Minor Threat.
I am still going nuts over here, so here is some visual and audio stimulation to hold you over. I have been watching this video since mid-May and have no clue why I haven't written about it before. It's a band called Hadouken! from Leeds. I guess they fall under grime (their MySpace page says indie/metal/garage. Get ready for low fi paper cutouts on a neon background.
GBH put it well with "Leave it to the fucking Europeans to finally get the rock and hip hop cross-over to work." I'm going to have to agree. In any case, I've got to love a band that named themselves after a Street Fighter move.
