Audiopleasures: Let's Lounge , Squarepusher , Andrew Rose , Arthur Russell , Faces of Evil

Monday, 17 November 2008

Let's Lounge , Squarepusher , Andrew Rose , Arthur Russell , Faces of Evil

Watch | Squarepusher - Planet Gear

Andrew Rose , Liminal aims to communicate the sense we all often feel of being on the indistinct edge of greater understanding through an allegorically layered visual vocabulary Rose developed while he hiked distant deserts and dense rainforests and surfed lonely coasts and crowded breaks. Rose's subject matter of oceans, shores, clouds, and rain are relative to his water-based materials including gouache, acrylic, and water-color inasmuch as the content is manifested by itself to talk about itself: the subject of water is rendered in water-based media and manipulated to look beautifully fluid, wet, submerged, and misty.

Coinciding with the release of a new collection of Arthur Russell country, folk, and pop songs, Love Is Overtaking Me, comes a Plexifilm documentary on the classical cellist-cum-disco/pop innovator, Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell.

The seventy-minute film by Matt Wolf brings a cohesive narrative to the active, inspired, and somewhat spacey life of the Oskaloosa, Iowa native. Many articles have been written on the man and his genius and many posthumous albums have been released, but up until this point, we've never been delivered the full story of Russell's exceptional life that was unfortunately cut off when he died of AIDS in 1992 at the age of 40.

A crash course in Russell would run something like this: After leaving Oskaloosa, cello in hand, Russell ventured out west to San Francisco where he lived in a Buddhist commune and studied North Indian music at Ali Akbar College of Music. He met the great beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, and began accompanying his readings with cello. In the early 1970s, Russell moved to N.Y.C. to study at the Manhattan School of Music, and that's when thing got really exciting. The young man formed the Flying Hearts, a disco-leaning group that featured ex-Modern Lovers member Ernie Brooks and sometimes guest collaborator, David Byrne.

Watch | Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell

FACES OF EVIL – GESICHTER DES BÖSEN

Between November, 2007 and March, 2008, we took photographs of over 350 people in Hamburg, Munich, Vienna, Dresden, Frankfurt, Berlin, Amsterdam, Moscow, Belgrade, London, Barcelona, Paris and Milan. From them emerged the thirteen FACES OF EVIL, assembled from faces of people of the same ethnic origin as the according dictators. For example, the portrait of Hitler consists of 37 people. His nose belongs to an estate agent from Berlin, his upper lip to a locksmith in Dresden. His hair is put together from the hair of an artist in Weiden and a painter in Bamberg. The chin stems from a Hamburg restaurant owner, the eyes are those of a bank advisor in Frankfurt, the lachrymal sacks are from a precision mechanic in Bautzen, the throat is that of a Viennese banker, the beard belongs to a chef from Wuppertal… Every wrinkle, eyebrow and mole has been replicated true to the original so that it is possible to get a direct and close impression of every scar, nose hair, wide pore and other fine details.