Lost AT E Minor

Illustration / Making a fire

May 25, 2006 | Illustration | by Zolton |

I have a question. Who the hell invented the English language? Which sick and sordid minds were responsible for the litany of double-meanings that make any sort of conversation — innocent or otherwise — a veritable minefield of verbal innuendo. Read more

Illustration / Roses in the snow

May 25, 2006 | Illustration | by Zolton |

Local design studio, Anyhow, are one of the guest speakers at this year’s Semi-Permanent conference. I spoke to designer, Kristian Pechotsch, about what sets Anyhow apart from other Australian studios. ‘I think the difference is the whole ethos of the studio — laidback, sun (or lack of it in Victoria!) and surf-loving but ultimately committed to a high level of finish and audience acceptance’.

Do you feel there’s such a thing as an Australian design aesthetic? ‘No. I do, however, feel that the broadness and multicultural design community within our shores creates just that — a broad and multicultural mix of amazing art and design, at and above the world standard. Though you do often get a feel of the Australian spirit — call it the Anzac spirit of mateship and tomfoolery coming out in some of the works. We don’t seem take ourselves quite as seriously as the rest of the world, and while our work is of world standard, it often lacks the level of pretentiousness and this is something to be very proud of!’

Anyone out there whose work you particularly love? ‘It is very hard to pick only one piece because every day I see somebody’s work that blows me away and completely humbles me. Cecilla Carlstedt’s work you featured a few weeks back inspired me to get out and get painting. Her work is stunning’.

Music / Hot lava

May 25, 2006 | Music | by Zolton |

The Most Serene Republic not only have an awesome name, they really are a red-hot band out of Canada. Yup, another one! There must be something in the water there, or the air, or the drugs … whatever. Anyway, the indie pop collective are releasing their debut album on June 24 and I got a sneak preview of it this week. It is simply one of the must have releases of the year - very diverse and eminently hummable. The band name is based on a term that refers to Venice during the Renaissance, when the city was highly focused on the arts and creativity. And the album is just as adventurous. Thanks to the good folk at Shiny Records, we have five copies of the Most Serene Republic album and five mixed Arts and Crafts titles (which encompasses acts such as Stars, Broken Social Scene, and Apostle of Hustle) to give away to random emailers with their address and a piece of bizarre Canadian trivia in the message. Heck, we’ll even throw an Arts and Crafts sampler in as well. Deal?

Photography / Mia Mala McDonald

May 25, 2006 | Photography | by Zolton |

Mia Mala McDonald is a Melbourne-based photographer who has a solid portfolio of live music-related work, but is also moving towards thematic photo essays, which capture people in moments of genuine expression. She believes the secret to taking a good photo lies in ‘patience, spontaneity and taking a hell of a lot of photos. Although I do shoot both digital and film, I much prefer film as it makes a much better picture than digital, film offers endless possibilities and control. I love the nervous anticipation I get every time I pick up my film from the lab’.

Art / Time is honey

May 18, 2006 | Art | by Zolton |

I have a dream. Admittedly not one quite as profound as that of Martin Luther King, but a recurring dream all the same. Read more

Illustration / Heroic little sisters

May 18, 2006 | Illustration | by Zolton |

Paul Pope is a legend. As one of the leading comic book artists, he has worked across the Batman title as well as his own cult series, Liquid, injecting them with his quirky and dynamic illustrative style. He’s coming out to Australia to speak at this year’s Semi-Permanent Conference, which is taking place in Sydney on July 7 and 8. ‘The design community at large is a widely diversed, stimulating group of loosely-fraternal creative people’, he says. ‘And I am happy to be welcomed in. For SP, I will be showing a lot of my work from comics to rock tour posters and cd design. I am interested in highlighting the links between expressionism and pop art as it is seen in comics and by extension, 2D design. Designers can make anything look however they want. The crisis I see is in knowing what you want to say with your work. My entry into all this is through the narrative visual medium of comics and it is an area of interest to designers for different reasons. The talk I gave at Semi-Permanent NYC was along this line and it went over well. I also hope to have some brand new test animations based on my character designs and comics to be showing for this film. I find I have more in common with most designers than I do with a lot of cartoonists’. How did the Batman: Year 100 project go down? ‘It was fun at times, but I’d say it has been more like a protracted game of chess. It is hard taking such a familiar character as Batman and warping him to your particular vision. I found it to be much harder work than I expected’.

Music / Slow moves

May 18, 2006 | Music | by Zolton |

UK-CL has this to say about it: ‘Being asked to complete a Choice mix is becoming something of a benchmark against which success and status is measured. Kenny Dope does not disappoint and steps up to offer us a heady, disco ensemble fuelled with rare Chicago classics and hard to find grooves. One for the heads, Kenny Dope’s release is full of warm nostalgia and is a nod to Kenny’s rich musical past which covers everything from house, hip hop, soul, Jazz, broken beats and more’. And so it does. This latest in the Choice series is a rousing collection of tunes featuring artists as diverse as James Brown (I’m Satisfied’), Manhattan Transfer (’Twilight Zone’), Level 42 (’Starchild’), and Cameo. And thanks to IMD we have five CDs to give away to random emailers with their address and a short, sharp musical treat in the body of the message.

Music / Oh la la

May 18, 2006 | Music | by Zac |

French dub group, Zenzile, were one the stars of the recent South By South West music festival held in Austin, Texas — their irrascible hybrid of beats and upbeat, funky basslines a pleasant relief from the plethora of indie-guitar bands that seem to dominate the radio airwaves these days. The SXSW website describes them as a musically adventurous band suggesting that they ‘perpetually renovate their music by refining and always looking for new sounds. They explore the dub universe without rest, offering the freedom of original dub, revealing its real nature of its origine. But Zenzile is still a rock band … child of Clash and Ruts, of course, but maybe also little brother of Sonic Youth and Fugazy’. And having heard their debut album - Modus Vivendi - that’s probably a fair description. Thanks to the good folk at Shock Records we have ten CDs to give away to random emailers with their address and their favourite French treat in the body of the message. Croissants are out of the equation. Too damn flakey

Photography / Maile Lani

May 18, 2006 | Photography | by Zolton |

Maile Lani is a 21-year-old musician (pianist), poetess, diary writer, and budding photographer who currently resides in the frozen north of Canada somewhere between the Eskimos and the maple syrup farms. She spends most of her free time composing music for the poetry she writes with the ambition of one day writing music for films. When it comes to photography, she is obsessed with trying to capture the idea of the subject rather than simply the subject itself, believing that ‘implied thoughts are infinitely better than direct ones’. She says of herself, ‘I can’t draw. I can however doodle, scribble, scratch, and splatter paint on my nails. so due to my lack of drawing talent I take pictures instead’.

Illustration / King of noone

May 11, 2006 | Illustration | by Zolton |

Cecilia Carlstedt

I plugged this a while back, but it’s worth mentioning again. The Ok Go! video to their song, A Million Ways to be Free, is surely the coolest damn clip ever made. How they got four musicians to remember the routine is beyond me. And how they danced it all so well is even more impressive. Check it out. Candy is a new film starring Heath Ledger, Abbie Cornish and Geoffery Rush amongst others. It opens nationally on May 25th. According to the press release, ‘Cornish delivers a fearless portrayal of a young artist whose lust for life takes her to the edge of sanity’. It all sounds very cool and we have ten double passes to give away to random emailers nationwide to attend the sneak previews at participating cinemas on the weekend of 19-21 May. Ok, there are some wickedly bizarre figurines up on the Funkbuilders website amongst other equally twisted and creative work. The Iron Giants - Battle for Ultimate Supremacy, which opens at Revolver Upstairs on Melbourne’s bustling Chapel Street this Friday night, looks great as well. Some of the city’s finest aerosol artists have been given two canvasses and six coloured Molotow Premium spraycans with which to create a masterpiece. Meanwhile, AM Eyewear, Material Boy and Scwppe - three of the hottest fashion brands around - are having a sale this Saturday on the rooftop of 94 Oxford Street, Darlinghurst. Btw, check out this online music creator. Who said Neural Semantics was a dirty term?

Music / Proposition yes

May 11, 2006 | Music | by Zolton |

The last Silent Poets album was an epic, sprawling collection of ambient electronica, all produced with that imitable attention to detail and pseudo-classical overtures that many Japanese producers are renowned for. The new album - Sun - was recorded during the previous summer in London and is wonderful down tempo, abstract hip-hop release that sits somewhere between the slick beats and pieces of Massive Attack and the dark melodic tones of Portishead, all wrapped up in complex string arrangements (conducted by Everton Nelson) which add splashes of colour to an otherwise bare sonic template. Guest vocals by Shawn Lee (Talking Loud) and the beautiful production of Shimoda (the one and only Silent Poet) and Alain Ho make this a very special and unique recording. Thanks to Stomp we have five copies of Sun to give away to random emailers with a ’silent’ treat in the body of the message. We like things that rhyme with black.

Music / Epilogue

May 11, 2006 | Music | by Zac |

In their own rights, David Byrne and Brian Eno stand as two of the great musical visionaries of our time. Their progressive approach to songwriting and production has helped define the sound of bands as disparate as Talking Heads, U2 and David Bowie. Twenty-five years ago the two banged heads together on a collaborative project that spawned the pop masterpiece, My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. Says Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things: ‘the masterpiece has been remastered and two of the songs are now being distributed as multitracks under a Creative Commons license for your remixing pleasure’. Says Pitchfork: ‘this is an album that’s built on serendipity - on Brian Eno fooling around with a new type of drum machine, on syncing the hook in a tape loop to a chorus, on finding the right horrors on the radio’. We have five copies to give away to random emailers with their fantasy collaboration in the body of the message.

Illustration / James Alley

May 11, 2006 | Illustration | by Zolton |

James Alley is a 28 year-old artist based on Australia’s Gold Coast. His work is primarily oil based paintings which explore figurative, character based situations. In an attempt to explore elements of paradox and differing emotional states within society, Alley isolates and depicts a sample of his daily observations onto paper and canvas in order to record them. And so he does

Art / Saviours of jazz ballet

May 4, 2006 | Art | by Zolton |

The latest series of Big Brother has just kicked off here and from what I’ve been told, it’s full of the usual hedonistic suspects - dolled up fame seekers with good heads (and boobs) for television. D’oh! We live in such voyeuristic times. Is there any escape from the prying eyes of the masses? And do we really want to escape anyway. Life would be kinda boring if we didn’t feel like we were being watched 24/7. Heck, how could we justify the amount of money we spend on jeans? And would we bother dressing at all? Anyway, from the brief snippets I’ve heard about the current household, they’re pretty much up for anything. It’s all a little weird. I feel like I know them already. And I haven’t even seen an episode yet. Yes, thankyou tabloid newspapers for taking my hard-earned dollar and filling it with columns of miscellanous grime. If I had something better to do I would never read you at all. But alas, I do. Which probably says more about me than about the folk who put them together. But enough of that. [art by Elbereth Moore]

Illustration / Fox cub

May 4, 2006 | Illustration | by Zolton |

Javier Gonzalez Burgos

First off, there’s some very creative work up on German designer, Marcel Weisheit’s website. He covers a lot of ground - everything from straight illustration to photography, web design and typography. Check it out. Also worth exploring are the distinctive black and white illustrations of American artist, Toyin Odutola. The style is intricate and organic whilst retaining a sense of visual continuity across the entire series of works. It’s all very striking stuff. Speaking of which, anyone up for a quick game? A battle to the death. Or ten frames. Whichever comes first. Ok, well I came across some interesting work out of Spain this week. María Monferrer’s own portfolio is impressive enough, but the creative exploits of her collaborative group - Design People Studio - are really inspiring. I also really like the paintings of Ant Keogh. It’s all very quirky and colourful, with a smattering of pop art and a healthy serving of the surreal. Music addicts should go to this online resource which will steer you in the direction of the hottest blogs out there, all dedicated to exposing good tunes for what they really are - a damn fine excuse to forget about everything for four wonderful minutes. Which reminds me, this is a BPM counter. It is vaguely entertaining. No more, no less. Though I’d rather create a full track and sell it to the Veronicas. I’m sure they’re looking for more disposable material right now.