The enigmatic Fever Ray have released a brand-new video for their third single, Triangle Walks. A new remix of the song by Rex the Dog was also released last week – click here to listen. Fever Ray is the first solo project of Karin Dreijer Andersson, known previously for her work as part of electronic brother-sister duo The Knife. If you haven’t heard the band yet, check out the video for their first single, If I Had a Heart – an atmospheric clip inspired by Jim Jarmusch’s film Dead Man. Below is their other great video, titled When I Grow Up:
Do you like blinky-lights and alien androgynes? Then I suspect that this clip from 1981 cult classic Urgh! A Music War will haunt you indefinitely. Prepare to be hilarified by Gary Numan in all his made-up and awkwardly-turned-on glory, performing Down In The Park – a dystopian single about robots and violence. The king of Synthpop slowly emerges from a flood of light and smoke on a joystick-operated mobile throne, casts a malcontent gaze into the audience and does his red leather suit justice with a surprisingly saucy performance. Far past the “suggestive” mark, Numan expresses love for his machine in a manner that may have you feeling a little dirty next time you pick up a game controller.
Take me away on your big, bad bumper car, Mister Numan! This mixture of resentment, admiration and laughter is too much to bear alone. I’ll wipe your furrowed waxy brow and you can have as much alone time with the chair as you require. Let your headlights guide us as we drive at a reasonable speed straight into the future, where we’ll start a mobile chair racing club.
I usually do not deal in the trafficking of memery. It is an unsavory business, rife with dirty dealings and nonsense; a labyrinth of obtuse, Dadaist humor and Surrealist reasoning understood only by the hive-mind. The dank corners and fetid intricacies of such a world are no place for the upstanding lady or gentleman. No, this is the habitat of the unwashed; a city whose denizens walk the streets stinking and hunched.
Still, on occasion I have allowed myself to glimpse into this dreary plane of existence. Unable to contain my curiosity I have fallen prey to weakness of mind and spirit, like a common voyeur, hoping to glimpse the pale, smooth topography of a woman’s bare ankle.
One of the more recent memes to emerge has been that of Keyboard Cat, the now deceased feline Fatso, who appears appended to clips in order to accentuate the misfortunes of the individuals therein. It is, at the moment, a fairly popular meme, spawning dozens of videos, clogging the Intertubes like so much exuviated pubic hair.
With that in mind, I present the above clip to you as it offers a unique glimpse into the demise of such a meme. This is the ultimate, the crowning achievement in the brief career of Keyboard Cat. The day has been won, this particular contest is now over. With the help of Helen Hunt, a small dose of cocaine PCP, and the musical stylings of Hall & Oates a crescendo has been reached. The curtain can now close and the participants may now take their final bow. This show is over.
I met Larkin Grimm in the springtime: she and her band came over to my house for tea and stir-fry one sleepy afternoon during SXSW last March, after playing the Leafy Green showcase at Emo’s with Vetiver, Sleepy Sun and Kid Congo Powers. The next day, we bravely explored the chaotic, throng-clogged streets of downtown Austin, in search of late night Thai food and transcendent musical experiences. Luckily, we found both, and got to know each other during the hunt.
Photo by Ports Bishop.
Larkin Grimm is an elegant warrior, strong and tall and crowned with unruly ringlets. Her eyes change color, and her calm gaze penetrates even the most fortified defenses with a chthonic wisdom far beyond her 26 years.
Her legendary upbringing tends to precede her: she was raised in Memphis, Tennessee by devotees of the religious cult The Holy Order Of MANS. When she was six years old, her family moved to the Blue Ridge region of Georgia, where, as one of five children of folk musicians, she found herself largely left to her own devices. She was a wild mountain witch child who dropped out of public school at age ten, yet went on to attend Yale to study painting and sculpture. Nomadic by nature, she has rambled all over the world, learning healing arts in Thailand and engaging with entheogens with a shaman in the Alaskan wilderness. She taught herself how to sing and play music during these mind-expanding journeys, locked in dark rooms and deep in the woods, possessed by spirits. She recorded two experimental albums, Harpoon and The Last Tree, both of which were improvisational and intensely cathartic works.
The enchanting LarkinGrimm sings by the side of a lake. Shot and edited by Bow Jones.
After corresponding for years, Michael Gira (of Swans and Angels of Light) signed Larkin to his own Young God label, and was instrumental in the birth of her latest album, Parplar. In her own words regarding their time working together, “…he has this great ability to make me feel comfortable being my flamboyantly perverse Mary Poppins self, and the songs I’ve written under his whip are probably the best I’ve ever come up with, so I am super grateful for this time in my life.” Gira’s appraisal of Larkin captures her aptly:
Larkin is a magic woman. She lives in the mountains in north Georgia. She collects bones, smooth stones, and she casts spells. She worships the moon. She is very beautiful, and her voice is like the passionate cry of a beast heard echoing across the mountains just after a tremendous thunder storm, when the air is alive with electricity. I don’t consider her folk though — she is pre-folk, even pre-music. She is the sound of the eternal mother and the wrath of all women. She goes barefoot everywhere, and her feet are leathery and filthy. She wears jewels, glitter, and glistening insects in her hair. She’s great!
In a time when our culture seems to openly scorn –but secretly craves– magic, Larkin Grimm is an unashamed and forthright power to be reckoned with.
Photographer unknown.
Coilhouse: Listening to your first two albums (Harpoon and The Last Tree), I get the impression that there was something of a strange sea-change in both your music, and your mode of self-expression, kicking off with Parplar. It’s an incredibly powerful album, and it’s clear that you ventured to some fantastic other-worlds while making it. What was that process like? I’ve read that you recorded the album in a haunted mansion: did the ghosts put their two cents in?
Larkin: Well, my first album was incredibly strange. I was still thinking of myself as a visual artist and a noise musician at the time. I had no interest in songwriting back then. There were some elements of folk that came through, though, and on the second album I tried to explore my folk roots a bit, but still avoided song structure. The big change came when I met Michael Gira and we blew each other’s minds and there was a lot of excitement in our exchange of musical ideas. Michael would force me to sit down and listen to these tunes by Bob Dylan and Neil Young and The Beatles, all bands I avoided like the plague before.
Nick Cave & Blixa Bargeld announce 120 Minutes for MTV, recorded early 1994.
If anyone here can decipher Blixa‘s sinister whisper divulging the 4th circle of MTV hell (“sea of burning lead of … hippie …” something?) please leave it in comments.
*For those of you just tuning in, we three Coilhouse editors share a breathless, bone-deep predilection for all things Nixa. The depth, power and futility of our combined/confused longing easily eclipses the paltry obsessions of even the most twitterpated Twilight tween. (Say that three times fast.) Fear us. Pity us. We are lost.
It should be pointed out that I never claimed any great love for humanity. Cloistered as I am deep in the warrens of the Catacombs I do not profess to be my brother’s keeper. Here, shuttered in nigh total darkness, chained to the floor in front of a rickety desk and computer, no human contact save for when my editors send down one of their smooth, mahogany-skinned eunuchs to push a bowl of thin, watery gruel through the slot in my door, I have nothing but the internet and my own disdain for the outside world to warm me. I can replay the events leading up to my current imprisonment a hundred times over and I will never fully understand just how I came to be here. All I know is that I am here and you, you dear readers are up there. Up there, free and traipsing in the sun and eating anything but thin, watery gruel and I loathe you.
Oh you vicious creatures and your traipsing! How many nights have I tortured myself with these thoughts? No matter, for today I have my revenge. Today I have been given the power to break minds and make men weep like children, to make women crush their babes to their breasts in lamentation. Today I have been given a clip of a tour of the It’s a Small World ride at Disneyland, circa 1964, narrated by hell’s own ringleader Walt Disney. May the endless, infectious repetition of the Sherman Brothers’s insipid song burrow deep into your minds! May the wooden shoe children of Holland crush your souls and may the wee bagpiper of Scotland haunt your dreams!
Now if you’ll excuse me, I must go. It is coming on midnight and that’s when the…ah, it doesn’t matter. It’s just time to go.
Everyone say hello to Angeliska Polacheck from Austin, Texas! Angel attended SXSW earlier this year to cover some of the festival’s more enchanting performers for Coilhouse. First up, an interview with Au Revoir Simone. ~Mer
A.R.S. in Austin, TX for SXSW, 2009. Photo by Angeliska Polacheck.
The keyboard-playing trio Au Revoir Simone makes dreamy, lo-fi electro-pop music with wistful lyrics and dulcet harmonies that Spin Magazine aptly describes as “make-out music for your inner android”. The band’s name is a line from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, which makes them even more lovable! Heather D’Angelo, Erika Forster and Annie Hart have been together since 2003, recorded three albums, and recently completed tours with Air, We Are Scientists and Peter, Bjorn and John. Their latest album, Still Night, Still Bright, is the perfect late night/early morning soundtrack, filled with introspective melodies guaranteed to soothe a buzzing brain or keep one company at sunrise.
Chatting with the girls during SXSW last March, I was utterly charmed by their sweetness. Despite having played a whirlwind of shows over a handful of days during the festival (the Moshi Moshi Records showcase, the Brooklyn Vegan & Agency Group showcase and to a packed rooftop at Maggie Mae’s) they were remarkably serene. Peaceful respite from the hubbub was found in a hedge-maze on the haunted grounds of the French Legation, where we discussed kindred spirits, darkness, haircuts, and David Lynch.
A.R.S. press packet photo. Photographer unknown.
Coilhouse: I’ve been listening to your new album Still Night, Still Light a lot lately, and have fallen in love with it. What’s the title about?
Erika: We just came up with it in our practice space. We were asking ourselves, “What are these songs to us?” and we thought about the feeling of 5am, and the sort of clarity that happens when everything is quiet around you, and the stillness. It was free association, and just yelling out words in the practice space. Pretty much everything happens that way for us –our band name, our song titles– everything always happens that way, where we just kind of throw stuff out. We look around at each other and as soon as we’re all smiling, we know we’ve found the winner!
Heather: It’s hard enough to get two people to agree on something, so getting three people to agree… it’s never a fight, but if somebody’s like “hmmm” then you don’t feel as good about it.
California-born dancer/singer Heather Parisi isn’t a household name in the US, but some of our Mediterranean readers might recognize her. Back in the late 70s, an Italian producer discovered the flexible 19-year-old sunning on a beach in Rimini. Parisi was set up with the best thrustiest jazz choreographer liras could buy, pimped out in one seriously bedazzlicious wardrobe, and became an Italian TV pop sensation overnight.
There are so many transcendentally Stupid/Awesome aspects to this video for her song “Crilù”, it’s hard to know where to start. Just… enjoy.
Gyrations atop a giant Rubik’s cube? Check. Uber groiny, hardbodied ballet dancers in metallic bowler shoes? Check. Intimated BJ three-way with male Moschino models? Check. Glittering Mickey Mouse butt cleavage? OKAY NOW THAT’S JUST GOING TOO FAR.
Clip via DJ Dead Billy, thanks. More Parisi videos after the jump. Additionally, if you appreciate this level of Stupid/Awesome 80s kitsch, you may also like:
Murder Rock (Italian horror director Lucio Fulci’s answer to Flashdance)
I heard “Boom Boom Pow” by the Black Eyed Peas while switching between radio stations in my car. The words “I got the that rock and roll, that future flow, that digital spit, next level visual shit” piqued my curiosity so I decided to listen to the rest. As the beat kicked in, I remembered sort of liking the Peas’ first album and dreamily wondered whether T-Pain and Kanye West have inspired an amazing new genre: cyber rap. Just as I was starting to smile at the prospect of a Funkadelic generation for the 21st century, Fergie’s brute battle screech crushed all my hopes of space-hop grandeur with just one verse: “I like that boom boom pow, them chickinz jackin’ my style, they try copy my swagger I’m on that next shit now”.
Still, I looked up the video when I got home – wanted to see what boom-boom-pow looked like. Observe:
Alright, I’ll admit that, with the exception of the cheesy gas masks and biohazard symbols, there is a lot to like about the visuals thanks to art director Norm Myers but… I can’t help but weep for the future if it is to be filled with My Little Ponies headphones and slang from the 80s. I like a little supersonic boom as much as the next guy, but until one of these Peas can be a little more specific about their zooming space shit I’m afraid I just don’t buy it. What exactly makes this song futuristic? Help me out. Until then I’ll try to avoid saying “You’re SOO two thousand and LATE” in my lexicon and look to the cosmos for answers.
Enjoy the uncensored lyrics, below the supersonic space-jump. Try not to get shat on.
Manhattan-based 1stAveMachine produces lush, hyperreal short videos that glisten with bleeding-edge CGI. The clip above, a music video for Alias made in 2006, is considered their breakout masterpiece: a succulent garden of bio-electronic cyberflora. Describing the clip, director Arvind Palep told CGISociety, “we were looking at a merge between synthetic biology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and what could spawn from them.”
Since that clip, 1stAveMachine, helmed by Palep and Serge Patzak (the former turned down a job from Industrial Light & Magic to join the startup), has produced short commercials for the likes of MTV Japan, Samsung and HP. But no matter how corporate their clients roster becomes, 1stAvenue keeps it weird, inviting comparisons to Chris Cunningham and Patricia Piccinini. Consider the below ad for Saturn, which 1stAveMachine describes as “a haunting hyper-sexual and stylized vision for the future”:
Shown above is the director’s cut, which features a naked lady. NSFW!
There are many more clips to be seen on 1stAveMachine’s site. Some favorites clips and image stills, after the cut. [via Paul Komoda]
