Who here likes pronk* music? Who here even knows what pronk means? I didn’t, until Cardiacs blew my feeble mind.

Pronk = progressive + punk. Formed in 1977, the UK-based band (led by gibbering genius Tim Smith) is one of those “what the holy fucking shitballs is going on here” bands that 99.3% of humanity will have no idea what to do with, and the remaining .7% will want to kiss with tongue and worship and marry and make little psychedelic math rock babies with forever and ever, amen.

*To be fair, Smith dislikes his music being pigeonholed as Pronk, preferring a label of “Psychedelic” or “Pop”. Forgive me, good sir, Pronk’s just so fun to say! Pronkity, pronk, pronk, pronk.

Click on one of those grimacing visages above to watch the official “Tarred and Feathered” music video… if you dare. Read more about Cardiacs here.

Issue 01 contributor Eugenio Recuenco recently updated his portfolio with a striking series of 12 images that span very different eras and cultures, all of which are united by one main character: the violin. The larger images can be seen on Recuenco’s site, and the full series can be seen here, after the cut.

In this series, the violin travels from the plains of Africa to an Indian bazaar, from an Elizabethan parlor to a pirate ship, from the hands of a white-clad nun to the laps of two conjoined Geisha twins. While it’s certainly a tribute to the universality of music, many of the images also seem to contain messages about culture, gender and inequality. In the image of Africa, the violins are represented as crops barely growing out of the parched soil. In the image depicting the Islamic world, one burqa-clad woman wearing black gloves points her violin bow accusingly at her fellow player, whose bare hands are exposed – a reference to the modesty police found in many countries in the Middle East, including Israel.  The American image seems to represent a two-party system orchestrating a rigid conformity. Interestingly, many of the images feature a visibly artificial background. In the Eskimo image, the sky is merely a cheap-looking painted sheet. The wallpaper in the Elizabethan image is stitched out of old rags. In fact, the images that appear to look the most “real” are the ones rooted in fantasy, such like the pirate, modern primitive, and fiddler on the factory roof.

Just a funky dinosaur puppet dance party on a lackadaisical Saturday afternoon. Frank’s got the moves:

Via Dr. Hypercube.

The Black Key’s new album, Brothers, drops May 18th.

Ah, the legendary 14th episode of Nu Pogodi (“You Just Wait!”), a ’70s/’80s children’s cartoon outlining the tormented, love-hate, co-dependent relationship of Zayatz and Volk (bunny and wolf), the Wile E. Coyote & Road Runner of the USSR.  Their relationship spanned 16 “classic” episodes (from 1969 to 1986) and included plenty of substance abuse, violence, “bad touches,” and one very awkward romantic dinner.

The 14th episode – with its murderous rabbit simulacrum, metrosexual hair-cutting/pants-pressing robots, junky schteeempunk Volkswagon (YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE?!), and zero-G flight simulators that play Space Race-inspired Soviet pop music. Episode 14 – my first exposure to electronic music of any sort. The techno kicks in at 2:57, when the main Space/Technology portion of the episode begins. In this episode, the wolf chases the rabbit around the “Dom Yunogo Technika,” which translates roughly to “House/Society of Young Tech-heads.” (That’s my best 5 AM translation, at least).  Before 2:57, there’s a short mini-episode in which Rabbit & Wolf share a dinner together – the aforementioned date, which ended in hilarious tragedy and made the show go down in Russian gay animation/film history, as both Rabbit & Wolf are male.

As with all episodes of Nu Pogodi, which can be found on YouTube, the wide-ranging music is one of the best parts. This episode is one of the best examples of that. The tracklist of Episode 14, which includes some appearances by Western artists, is this:

1. Alla Pugachova – Million Alyh Roz
2. Digital Emotion — Get Up, Action
3. Digital Emotion — Go Go Yellow Screen
4. Bonnie and Clyde – Leroy Holmes
5. Methusalem (Empire) – Black Hole (Bavarian Affair)
6. Digital Emotion — The Beauty & The Beast
7. Zemlyane – Trava u Doma
8. VIA Leisya Pesnya – Kachaetsya Vagon

In 1993 a movie titled CB4 starring Chris Rock was released. A parody of the “gangsta rap” phenomenon of the 90s it was met with mediocre reviews and went on to gross 17 million dollars domestically. A little over one year later another movie in the same vein appeared. Written, directed, and co-starring one Rusty Cundieff it was released to critical acclaim and went on to make a total of $238,000.00. In other words, like many good movies, no one saw it.

If you, dear reader, are one of the many who have not seen Fear of a Black Hat the FAM is giving you an opportunity right now to remedy this situation. Filmed in the mockumentary style popularized by Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap, Fear of a Black Hat treats its subject as a real entity; and the members of N.W.H. (Niggaz With Hats) — Ice Cold, Tasty Taste, and Tone Def — go about the business of being a headwear-centric rap trio as they normally would under the gaze of sociologist Nina Blackburn’s camera.

What ensues is an almost pitch-perfect satirical time capsule of early 90s hip-hop. References abound from the internal feuding of N.W.A., to the ubiquitous “Ice” moniker and the hippy weirdness of P.M Dawn. Cundieff manages to tick off an entire checklist of well-worn rap tropes with hilarious consistency. It’s a movie that never fails to make me laugh, no matter how many times I see it. Rather than running the risk of talking this film up too much, I will simply leave you with one of my favorite exchanges, in which the boys explain just what N.W.H. is all about:

Nina Blackburn: So, guys, what’s the deal with the hats?

Ice Cold: That’s what NWH is all about. We got a whole hat philosophy, you know what I’m saying? I mean, see, back in the days when there was slaves and stuff, they would work in the hot sun all day, you know, with the sun beating down them. Hatless. I mean, not even a babushka.

Tone Def: Word. Heads totally exposed to the sun.

Ice Cold: You know, so by the time they got back to the plantation from being in all the heat, they was too tired to rebel against their masters, right? So what we saying with Niggaz With Hats is, “Yo, we got some hats now, muh-fuckers.”