The holidays can be a trying time. Maybe you’re feeling frazzled after being bombarded for months by holiday advertising, holiday music, and various wars on holidays. Or maybe you don’t give two shits for these supposedly special days and are just feeling kicked around lately. Maybe you just want to chill out. If you find yourself in such a situation let me suggest sitting down and zoning out for two and a half minutes with the new song from Eskmo, a.k.a. Brendan Angelides, entitled “We Got More” which features a hypnotizing video by one Cyriak who has made a career of hypnotic animation. It may be the most relaxing two and a half minutes you have today.
Happy Solstice! Whether the sun is coming back to you today, or moving further away, now is an opportune time to dance in honor of the polarity of light and darkness, death and life, joy and strife, asperity and mildness.
Here’s a helpful Monday morning mantra/boogie to help you manifest positive change in your life: “I want a raise. I want to go home. I want sex. I want a cookie. WAAAHHH. WAAAAOOW.”
The insubordinate music group known as The Evolution Control Committee “began in 1986 and continues to risk millions in copyright violation fines for what the ECC calls music'”. Founded by Mark Gunderson in Columbus, Ohio and now based out of SF, the ECC, along with John Oswald and The Tape-beatles, are progenitors of mashup who have long been using scads of unauthorized samples to cheekily protest against copyright law.
Their instant dance club hit, “I Want a Cookie” hails from the album Plagiarhythm Nation v2.0, released in 2003 on Seeland Records (Negativland’s label). Remember “Rocked by Rape“? Hee hee… that’s on there, too. These guys are sharp, funny, and free for downloading. (Although donations are always welcome.)
Fellow admirers of the late Pina Bausch may get a little emotional, watching this trailer for the upcoming film Pina– Dance, Dance… Otherwise We Are Lost, made “For Pina Bausch, by Wim Wenders.”
Via Gabrielle Zucker, thanks.
Coming soon. In 3D, no less! In the wake of that first wave of 3D schlockbusters and huge budget family movies, it’s going to be interesting to watch and see if this oncoming wave of arguably more “arthouse friendly” 3D films (Wenders’ film, Herzog’sCave of Forgotten Dreams, and Scorcese’sInvention of Hugo Cabret being chief among them) will change more critical viewers’ perceptions and expectations of the medium.
From Bryan Boyce (the same twisted genius responsible for that Teletubbies/BushState of the Union meme and the Karaoke Hellhounds, not to mention a bunch of other craziness) comes this ridiculously beautiful/beautifully ridiculous “belly dance horror movie” made using footage from the 1932 public domain classic White Zombie and starring Bela Lugosi, along with, well… a whole gaggle of Coilhouse regulars!
Featuring hypnotic music by Dan Cantrell and the Toids. To see the entire original film, visit good ol’ archive.org. To revisit the oft-mentioned splendiferousness that is Rachel Brice, Mardi Love and Zoe Jakes, click here or here or here or here or here or here.
He was one of the most singularly strange, goading, galvanizing musicians of the 20th century. We were very lucky to have him. From AllMusic:
…Captain Beefheart was one of modern music’s true innovators. The owner of a remarkable four-and-one-half octave vocal range, he employed idiosyncratic rhythms, absurdist lyrics and an unholy alliance of free jazz, Delta blues, latter-day classical music and rock & roll to create a singular body of work virtually unrivaled in its daring and fluid creativity. While he never came even remotely close to mainstream success, Beefheart’s impact was incalculable, and his fingerprints were all over punk, new wave and post-rock.
The management would like to apologize for the spotty nature of the Friday Afternoon Movie over the past few weeks. Rest assured that the worthless hack responsible for the content of this feature is currently being flogged with rabid badgers. The management would like to assure our readers that, should the aforementioned hack survive the aforementioned flogging, the FAM will return next week with actual content. In lieu of this week’s FAM, please accept this video of a parrot singing Drowning Pool’s “Bodies”. We thank you for your patience and hope you have a pleasant weekend.
Hypnotic auditory chaos: ethereal and majestic, vast and layered, reshaped and looped, and wound throughout with intertwining melodic passages – Eric Quach’s transcendent soundscapes are the “kind of sound that droneheads and ambient fans dream about”.
Guitarist and founding member of the Montreal-based instrumental shoegaze & post-rock band Destroyalldreamers, the self-taught auditory/visual experimentalist is also known for his work as thisquietarmy, a solo effort which started as a side-project of Destroyalldreamers in 2005, and became his main project in 2008. On various labels in Europe and North America, Eric has released several albums, a handful of EPs and several collaborations with artists such as Aidan Baker (Nadja), Scott Cortez (lovesliescrushing) & Yellow6.
Mains de Givre is a recent side-project of thisquietarmy that began in 2009, with violinist Émilie Livernois-Desroches (formerly of Profugus Mortis). The dark fruit of this union, Esther Marie, released in 2010 , was reviewed by Silent Ballet as a “… beautiful, haunting journey through swirling textures and moods…” ; an eerie snippet from the opening track can be heard in the short promotional video below, created by Meryem Yildiz. Coilhouse readers with long memories may remember Meryem from a previous feature.
Quach is also involved in a number of other projects, to include Parallel Lines, a ‘krautgaze’ trio where he’s joined by Ryan Ferguson on synths and Pascal Asselin on drums , and Ghidrah, a noise trio featuring thisquietarmy alongside Aun and Maggot Breeder.
On collaborative efforts, Eric shares:
“…the resulting chemistry and musical surprises of collaborations are often completely unmatched as they can exceed my artistic vision and expectations, and that’s what I thrive for when it comes to collaborating with one or several other artists. It usually either works really well, or it doesn’t at all.
“The more there are people involved in my projects, the more my artistic vision becomes impaired, and the more I lose control of the entity. I am a control freak, but I don’t possess the leadership ability to impose dictatorship upon others. The best way to remedy this issue was to have a project of my own and work strictly alone. Naturally, thisquietarmy became the project that has the most leeway in every aspect, and that I’ve put the most miles on so far.”
The Impossible Girl is the glorious solo debut of Kim Boekbinder (previously of the duo, Vermillion Lies). Kim’s a quirky, funny, bravely vulnerable, electrifying lightning rod of a woman. Her music tends to reflect these traits in a most endearing fashion.
She recorded the 18 tracks of her record in increments earlier this year at studios in Maine and Boston with Sean Slade (Radiohead, Dresden Dolls) and Benny Grotto (Aerosmith) and an assortment of talented session players. She’s also been traveling internationally on a shoestring budget, bringing her songs of love, loss, self-discovery, sex, drugs, and nuclear physics to audiences in Berlin, Melbourne, and New York City.
Photo by Heike Schneider-Matzigkeit.
The Impossible Girl is yet another wonderful example of how crowdsourcing hubs like Kickstarter are enabling creative people to self-produce art that would otherwise be very difficult for them to afford. It’s a brave new world full of, ya know… POSSIBILITY. And community. And rainbows. And unicorns. Yay!
Kim’s album drops today. You can buy a copy in MP3 or CD format (the packaging for which features an exquisite portrait of The Impossible Girl by longtime Coilhouse fave, Travis Louie), and she’s offering all kinds of fancy package deals that include posters, limited edition eye makeup kits by Sweet Libertine, and an Impossible Girl paper doll by (yet another beloved Coilhouse comrade) Molly Crabapple.
From Italian Saturday evening television program Al Paradise circa 1984 comes Sara Carlson singing and dancing to “Fly To Paradise”, a choreography enthusiast’s wet dream. I cannot be entirely sure just what is going on with this leotard-clad nymph and her frolicking menagerie of break-dancing contortionists but nevertheless I am mesmerized by their sequined glory — a glory only outshone by Carlson’s fantastic chicken dance.
