As we finalize Issue 03, we’re also starting to lay down the groundwork for subsequent issues of Coilhouse Magazine. To that end, we’ve decided it’s time to create a talent database of Coilhouse readers who are interested in working with us to create something new.

Last time, we asked to hear from illustrators and graphic designers. We were overwhelmed by the amount of talented respondents; more than 100 of you wrote in! We’re still sifting through all the amazing portfolios. Each of you should have heard back from us by now, but we just want to thank you again for sharing your work with us.

This time, we’re asking for all you writers out there to contact us if you’d like to write for a future issue of Coilhouse. Here are the specifics:

• Show us that you have a way with words! Link to or attach writing samples
• Your writing samples must be nonfiction. Please – no poetry or short stories. At least not at this time. Ideal would be: published articles, really wonderful blog posts.
• If you’re using blog posts as your writing samples, don’t just say “here’s my blog, check it out.” Link to specific, exceptional posts you’ve made. Take the time, in your email, to include a brief description of what each post is about.

The magazine article you end up writing could be based either on an idea that you approach us with, or based on an idea that we pitch to you. Maybe we’ll play matchmaker and team you up with an illustrator or photographer that we know. Right now those are all just ideas we’ve been toying with for future issues of Coilhouse. Nothing’s set in stone, but we want to see who’s out there.

If this post speaks to you, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Still from a promo for the song CryBaby

Early last year I wrote about Sow – what I thought to be spoken word artist Anna Wildsmith‘s long-gone project. “Sick”, Sow‘s skin-peeled-back, beautifully raw 1998 album affects me to this day and I’d been wondering what had happened to Anna since its release. As luck would have it, she came across the post and got in touch. Below, a new song and interview with Anna. She talks about her upcoming album, “Dog”, new collaborations, music that makes her tick and evolving.

You’ve been gone from the public eye for over 5 years now – how much of that is intentional, and why?
SOW has always been a part-time project of mine.  “Dog” took over three years in the making, simply because I live in France and the people I collaborated with on that album live in London. Finding time to work together that coincided with their schedules and mine was difficult.

What have you been up to during this break?
Living a nightmare, renovating a ruin that I should have demolished right from the start and writing and re-writing a never-ending, constantly mutating, increasingly irritating novel.

Listening to Sick for the first time was a thoroughly visceral experience. Every song on that album feels intensely personal – is there a specific experience or series of experiences that influenced you while writing?
I like to watch people, I like to watch myself and then use my imagination to do the rest and come up with lyrics that conjure up the type of atmosphere I wish to convey on any given track. Indeed, I have felt all the emotions I write about, but I have not necessarily experienced the lives of the characters I write about.

Your new album, Dog, takes SOW in a different direction. Sexy, angsty tracks like My House and Victim are sure to keep long-time fans happy, but now there are also catchy songs like Porno Star and More Candy, with a much lighter sound. Is this a natural part of your evolution as a musician, or did you specifically aim to make Dog more accessible?
I think it’s a bit of both really. After a while, you get bored with the same old sound of your words and voice ranting on. Tracks like The Kidnapping of Anna Wildsmith, Pornostar or More Candy were crucial in my attempt to becoming more light-hearted, having fun and being less psychotic in my approach to what I wanted to express with SOW. I didn’t specifically aim to make “Dog” more accessible; it just became so as it evolved in time, like me, I suppose.

Where did the album title come from?
My dog, Buster, was the love of my life. He died, last year, in my arms at the ripe old age of 15. I got him from a famous refuge in London called “Battersea dog’s home” and from the moment I saw him, he gave me much joy. He helped me get through some hard times in my life thanks to his un-adulterated loyalty towards me and without him, I would never have come to live in the middle of nowhere. Taking a walk just doesn’t feel right without him running around by my side, snuffling in the bushes and chasing after cats and rabbits. I wanted to pay hommage to him with this album by introducing some light-heartedness and humour to Sow, qualities, I believe he beheld. I miss you Buster: R.I.P. “Dogs are gods living out in space”.

Anna with her dogs, Buster in mid-air on the right

I love the acoustic elements in the song Blue Sheets. Could you talk about the history behind this dreamy piece?
Rob Henry and I met up in Paris to record in a studio but when we got there, the studio had supposedly never been booked by us but by another band who had settled in there nicely. There was no way of negotiating with the lying cunts and Rob only had three days to spare so it was too late to find another studio. I suggested sightseeing, but Rob got out his laptop and we recorded “Blue sheets” in a friend’s apartment with a lent microphone, a four track Mackie and a bewitching flamenco guitar sample.

What were you listening to while working on Dog? Is there any new music out there you find particularly inspiring?
All sorts of stuff.  I have never really been into any one type of music. I’m not very up to date with what’s going on in the music world at present. One of my heroes would be Brian Eno; a genius in my mind.  Including his own stuff, everything he has ever touched turns to gold (Devo, David Bowie, Roxy music, Talking Heads…). I listen to Iggy Pop and Patti Smith on Sundays and when I’m driving in my car, I play Big Black as loud as I can. A very, very important band in my  world is PULP. I love Jarvis Cocker, his lyrics, his sense of humour, he represents the ideal husband. I like Damon Albarn’s eclectic work and I can spend hours listening to Underworld whilst plastering a wall. Although it may sound crass to some of you out there, I am a fan of Depeche Mode (always was, always will be), and I love Dave Gahan’s latest album “Hourglass”. I get nostalgic when I listen to bands like Joy Division and Magazine, but I cheer up when I listen to The Clash or The Ramones. I love Wham and everything George Michael’s done since. I laugh to Ian Dury and I sneer with glee when I listen to The Stranglers. I like to dance to Motown and 70’s disco too. I enjoy reading to silence and relaxing with Arvo Part. Otherwise, there’s nothing better than a good Sex Pistols track to start off the day. I must sound so old-fashioned.

Are there any spoken word artists you admire?
I never listen to spoken word artists, I can barely bear listening to myself.

Listen to “My House” – a previously unreleased track from Dog, then click the jump for the rest of the interview.

I dedicate this dripping blood bar to the memory GeoCities, which was shut down by Yahoo last week:

GeoCities – or GeoShitties, as we all oh-so-cleverly called it – began in 1994 as a community of themed “virtual cities.” There’s a list of all the GeoCities neighborhood names that ever existed on this page, which also offers an illuminating explanation of how the whole process worked:

When GeoCities first started offering free web pages to the public, they decided to create themed neighborhoods. Each neighborhood was then divided into blocks (each block was numbered between 1000 up to 9999). A user would then adopt a block and thus create their own pages within that block. Thus, a user would then have their own web pages located at a URL in this format: http://www.geocities.com/neighborhood/XXXX (“XXXX” would be a four digit number). The whole management of each Neighborhood was run by volunteers – known as ‘Community Leaders’ (CL’s), which is what made the GeoCities experience so special.

This whole process was known as “homesteading”, and each user had their own  “homestead”. Community Leaders helped out each “homesteader”, and created a friendly atmosphere which contributed to the rapid explosion of personal web pages on the internet.

And though it’s probably been years since any of us have even looked at a GeoCities page (and that’s probably a good thing), to some of us, those pages, with “BourbonStreet” and “SoHo” in their URLs, represented a special time: the period in which audiovisual sharing first really took off on the web. Geocities, along with Angelfire and Tripod, were among the first wave of free personal self-expression sites for the masses. It was the first time that people who weren’t born-and-bred web geeks began to establish an earnest online presence, clumsily piecing together basic HTML (“hello! border = 0!” was the big insult to fling at someone whose page lacked a certain finesse). Sure, it contaminated the web with a lot of bad poetry, but it also brought us a plethora of wonder: band fan sites, zine reviews, scanned photos of interesting strangers from across the world.

GeoCities will completely cease to exist by the end of the year, and all its sites will be wiped from the face of the web forever. Feast your eyes on few of the relics that will be soon be gone [edit: But there’s hope! æon writes in the comments, “jason scott of bbs documentary fame and a team of volunteers are archiving the whole thing.” Click here to learn of their valiant efforts.]:

• Kristy’s Riot Grrrl Review
• Panpleasant Profederacy of Eris Proleteriat
• How to Dance Gothic (this and other sites like it are basically where Voltaire scraped all the jokes/lore for his “how to be goth” Hot Topic bestsellers from)

So… anyone here remember a beloved Geocities site that they’d like to share? Anyone here guilty of actually having ever made their own Geocities page? Let us take a moment to commiserate and recall our first memories of the web, our favorite haunts, the ways we discovered one another. Efnet. Dalnet. Undernet. Midgaard. Webrings. Guestbooks. X of the Y sites. ASCII-embellished sigs. BBSes. Alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die.

What was your first circle of friends on the web? Do you still keep in touch with them? Where did you get your first taste of this great series of tubes?

I am unwavering in my conviction that Auto-Tune will somehow bring about the destruction of civilization as we know it. And yet… I’ll always have a soft spot for early 80s talkbox/vocoder robot vocals. This morning I’m grinding my beans to Michael Jonzun and his band of space cowboy brothers, The Jonzun Crew.

Left: Michael Jonzun in Manhattan, 1983, photographed by Janette Beckman. Right: LP cover art for Jonzun Crew’s single, “Space is the Place”.

The Boston-based band’s sci-fi theatrics borrowed heavily from the likes of Sun Ra and Parliament, but their electro-funk/hip-hop sound was something quite different. Jonzun Crew had several releases on Tommy Boy between ’81 and ’85. For the most part, their over-the-top costumes kept them sidelined as a novelty act. Eventually, tragically, Michael and his brother Maurice embraced the dark side of the Force, ending their epic space adventure to become executive producers for the likes of New Edition and New Kids on the Block. (Actually, if you click below, you can watch a Jonzun Crew video that includes footage of baby Bobby Brown pop-and-locking for his lamé-clad uncles.)

Issue 01 contributor/photographer Taslimur and Ash

Last Thursday, Coilhouse staff photographer Allan Amato threw a crossdressing party at his studio/loft. For various reasons we ourselves couldn’t make it, and now that we’re seeing the party photos from that night, we’re twice as sad that we weren’t there. To me, these spontaneous, messy party photos are just as powerful as Allan’s most pristine, carefully-composed fashion masterpieces. This series, intended to be only a private gallery for the party attendees until I begged him to let me post it here, is honestly one of my favorite things that Allan’s ever done.

Click after the cut for lots and lots more photos. I identified people where I could, but wasn’t sure of everyone’s name. If you were there, identify yourself in the comments!

Two things immediately come to mind when looking at Douglas Walker‘s gorgeous oil paintings. One is blue and white china, the other is window frost, its infinite and fragile patterns. Walker paints strange fruit, snow maidens, crystalline architectural marvels and abstract designs that look, to me, like the mating rituals of otherworldly insects.

Walker’s work reminds me of a Russian children’s story called Snegurochka (“Girl of Snow”). In the version I remember, an old childless couple make a girl out of snow, and suddenly she comes alive. They are overjoyed, and take care of her all winter. When spring comes, she wants to play outside, but they don’t want to let her go out. Finally they give in, and she runs out to play in the sun. As the warm rays hit her skin she melts away, gone forever. Apparently there was also a longer version of this story with more sexual overtones. At any rate, there’s something ethereal about Walker’s work that gives me the same feeling as that story. (Bonus for the Russians in the ‘haüs: Walker’s work also recalls this poem, which I can’t find an English translation for.)

See them all on his site, with some favorites after the jump.

Marian Bantjes: Hallowe’en.

If you’re a typophile like me, you squealed with joy last week when the I Love Typography blog announced a new project, We Love Typography: a clean, elegant new groupblog that they call “a FFFFound for all things type, typography, lettering, & signage.”

I wouldn’t call some of the best stuff on this site “eye candy” – it’s more like a china cup of exotic, medicinal herbal tea for the eyes. Looking at refined graphic design really does elevate the soul.

Edit: oops! Video doesn’t allow embedding. Click here to watch.

This was a student film made by Sundance filmmaker Madeleine Olnek about Leni Riefenstahl’s 100th birthday. If you take it literally, it could be a little mean-spirited towards the old lady. I mean, Leni wasn’t that obviously smug in the interviews that served as reference. There’s a little more depth to her. I mean, she never said that shit about Helen Keller in real life. Poor little Leni. What an unfair portrayal.

But if you take this short film as satirical commentary on artists who contribute to certain regimes and then try to pull that “I didn’t know there were politics going on!” shit later, which is how I think this film is meant to be taken, it’s fucking hilarious. My favorite real-life moment on par with the absurdity in this clip comes from a famous 1979 interview with (utterly homoerotic) Nazi sculptor Arno Breker, whose work was hailed by Hitler as the antithesis to all so-called degenerate art. Journalist Andre Müller, considered one of the hardest interviewers of his generation, described the scene thus:

When he mentioned the tragic consequences of his professional activities under Hitler, his isolation and desperation, his wife trembled with laughter. When I asked her what she found so amusing, she replied that normally her husband spoke in a completely different way. During a stroll around the garden, where several sculptures dating from the National Socialist period were on display, she told me: “I don’t listen when he tries to discuss politics, it bores me.”

A macabre incident occurred when I asked the sculptor about his attitude toward the gassing of the Jews. Precisely at that moment, [Breker’s art dealer] inserted a new tape into his recorder and mistakenly pressed the play button, so that my words were accompanied by a few bars of dance music.

And no. I can’t read the words “Nazi” and “dance music” in such close proximity to each other without bopping my head to this song. It’s funny. It’s not funny.

Howdy! How about a lively morning cartoon to go with your fruity pebbles? Zoetica’s recent post on the lamentable declension of MTV’s programming reminded me of this little gem:

Created as a senior project by animator and RISD legend, Christy Karacas, “Space Wars” aired internationally on a charming, offbeat MTV show called Cartoon Sushi back in 1997. The content and mood of Cartoon Sushi was sort of a cross between Liquid Television and Spike & Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation. Sadly, it barely lasted a year on the air. Suprise, surprise.

A couple of years later, Karacas joined forces with Stephen Warbick to unleash BAR FIGHT upon an unsuspecting world. The film “was rejected from every festival it was ever entered in” and it’s a bit… well, let’s just say it’s more a Better Than Beer experience –or possibly Better Than Dimethyltryptamine– than anything else. Still, it’s under the cut if you think you’re feeling up to graphic, color-saturated gore and toilet humor this early in the morning.

Nowadays, we have no shortage of psychedelic, stream-of-consciousness mindbuggery from Karacas/Warbick; their show Superjail! premiered on Adult Swim last year. (Bless you, Cartoon Network, for picking up where Liquid Television left off.)

J. G. Ballard died today. He was 78 years old.

There’s not much I can say about Ballard that hasn’t already been said. He was definitely a Coilhouse patron saint. Because so much has been written about Ballard’s influence on everything from cyberpunk (check out this rich article, which buzzes with the excitement of the genre’s earliest memories of itself) to modern music (as this article asserts, Ballard could be credited for having “inspired the entire genre of industrial music”), I’m going to make this obituary very subjective and leave you with my favorite Ballard memories.

The first one was watching Empire of the Sun with my parents. I didn’t know at the time that this movie, starring a 13-year-old Christian Bale, was actually based on Ballard’s autobiography. But I remember that even then, watching that film, I wondered: how would this kid, with his confused Stockholm Syndrome identification with the Japanese who kept him prisoner, his fetishization of aircraft and explosions, turn out later in life? Later, a friend helped me put 2 & 2 together, and I found out exactly how he turned out. He wrote Crash. And it all made perfect sense. Here’s Young Ballard in Empire of the Sun; haunting to re-watch on this day:

My second favorite Ballard moment is actually a famous quote of his. This was his response to a question in Re/Search 8/9 on October 30, 1982:

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again… the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.

Suburb of the soul. It still makes me shudder.

Post your favorite Ballard memories/impressions/quotes in the comments. We honor his influence, and we will miss him.