Garfield Weapon

Just two quick heads upzzz:



1) Cadence Weapon (from Canada, hoorah) has a new album coming out March 4th on Anti/Epitaph and Big Dada. It's called Afterparty Babies, and check out this quote related to the title from the Big Dada website:

“My dad said I was an afterparty baby; this goes out to all the accidents out there; keep on making mistakes” – from “Do I Miss My Friends?”

Word.

Anyway, the album is fantastic and you all (3) should buy it. I posted one of the tracks in the post below (possibly illegally).



2) This is everywhere at the moment, but in case you missed it: Garfield Minus Garfield. Hilarious.



Reposted from garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com Check it!

The tight shit that we on.

September Police's bangers of the day:

Shawty Lo - They Know (Mano Remix)
Cadence Weapon - In Search Of the Youth Crew
Stereotyp feat. Edu K & Joice Muniz - Jece Valado

Björk's Volta tour in Seoul

This weekend I saw Björk live in concert, and oh! what a relief it was.

So I first got into Björk in middle school, or perhaps in late elementary. Debut came out and I was completely taken with the music, and definitely in no small way by the visuals, which have always been so important to her 'thing'. The first video was Human Behaviour and I've been hooked ever since. I bought every album after that in the first week it came out, and I've loved every one of them. Even the soundtracks!

So on Saturday Sandr and I went to see Björk in Seoul at Olympic Park, the latest stop on her world tour in support of the new album Volta. The acoustics there were really good, and according to the Volta tour blog this allowed her to perform some quieter songs that they haven't played much, or in the case of the song Vertebrae by Vertebrae, at all. One of these songs was Desired Contellation, from Medulla, which is probably the saddest, starkest song she's ever written. It was heavy; visceral.

On the other end of the spectrum, she rocked the shit out of Pluto, probably her noisiest track, and the audience jumped along with the barely-audible-under-the-noise beat. Then, as a finale, they performed the new single Declare Independance, which is chin-scratchingly simple but very clear in its aims. Nothing more than a beat and some shouted lines, the song seems like unlikely single material, but the entire audience was singing along and jumping as high as they could as the whole room was blanketed in white confetti. Huge!

Other highlights were singing along to classics like Bachelorette, Hunter and Hyperballad, the latter being augmented by an extended danceparty ending. New tracks Hope and Wanderlust sounded great, and reminded us how unfuckwithable the new disc really is. Hope, especially, really knocked us on our asses, as it revealed itself to be a bit of a banger on such a huge sound system.

Confession time: Aurora had me misty, but when the next song was the video mix of All is Full of Love I couldn't take it and got all teary, and though it was completely embarrassing, I couldn't help it. Good songs + associated histor(ies)y = Christopher the baby.

The audience didn't know her music all that well generally, but they were very, very receptive and appreciative of the performance. Just as Korean audiences watching American movies seem to react in the exact opposite places to Western audiences, the Korean crowd at the show freaked out most when Björk would a) dance a little, b) make a cute face, or c) when she would say "thank you!" - rather than, say, when a song would come to a close and the band would stop playing. Curious!

Thanks Björk, thanks Seoul, thanks Sandr, that was beautiful.

Nakadate and Silva

Let's take a look at a few things today:

1) New background image = new mood. Thus, I will be changing the background image of this blog weekly (or more often) from now on. All original photos, or course.

2) My pal Bobby and I are on the verge of getting some major DJ hustle on in Seoul. We've become obsessed with everything booty/ghetto/bmore/808/bass/baile/rap and soon we'll be putting together a miXXXtape with dancefloor destruction in mind.

3) Here's a poster I designed a couple years ago for a DJ night I was doing:



and another:




4) I want to talk about two people that I find particularly interesting at the moment:

a) Laurel Nakadate



Laurel Nakadate is an American video artist from Iowa, based in NYC. She's famous and turbo-successful. She's been featured in the New York Times, The Believer and in Vice, but more significantly, major art critics are comparing her to the recent greats (who you've also never heard of).

Basically, her thing is this: She convinces lonely, desperate men to come to her (or their) apartment, hangs around with them in raunchy and ridiculous ways and videotapes the whole mess. Finger painting, posing, dancing to Britney Spears and so on. The men are bracingly sad and old, and she is beautiful, young, and hideously manipulative. The rub lies in a sort of blur between sadness and joy, between exploitation and the sincere. Watching one of her videos creates a feeling of simultaneous disgust/repulsion and attraction/intrigue. Like a mangled car on the side of the highway?

Lets watch a clip from VBS.TVs Art Talk!:


Why do I hate her yet I can't stop thinking about her?


b) Anderson "The Spider" Silva

This is the guy, right here.


Anderson Silva is a well accomplished fighter. He's had an illustrious career with strings of major wins in multiple realms of ass-kick, and he's only just beginning. So since when do I care about fighting sports? Since I watched UFC for five days straight in my former apartment (*cough*고시원). All of the fighters were good, of course, but Silva stood out for me for a number of reasons: a) his style. It's totally unlike everyone else fighting in MMA today - they call him the Spider because he uses his legs as much as his arms, as I would have assumed should be normal in mixed marshal-arts . b) he's Brazilian and everything about Brazil is balls-out awesome, duh. c) his hilarious disposition. He is known to dance around like a retard before fights and when he inevitably wins fights. His voice is high-pitched and his whole manner is gentler than a lamb made of clouds. This delicate lilting way is well contrasted in the ring, however, when he decimates anyone and everyone in his path.

Fan video? Why not?

There's an Arthur Russell movie coming out!

hear ye, hear ye!

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