Lost AT E Minor

Illustration / Close to greatness

June 29, 2006 | Illustration | by Zolton |

I was in Melbourne last week and was struck once again by the striking contrasts between Sydney - where I live - and our southern neighbour. Read more

Illustration / Piano objective three

June 29, 2006 | Illustration | by Zolton |

Issue seven of online publication, Ruby, is up and looking good. It includes the work of nine talented artists including Fumi Nakamura, Juho Kuva, Gastón Caba, Cole Rise, Dana Carlson, Sean + Emmanuelle, Rachell Sumpter, Wendy Walgate and Ian Francis. Check it out at the Ruby magazine website. Also worth a look is a new hand-drawn skull on Brooklyn’s Blog. It’s pretty cool, and Brooklyn has assured that no computers were harmed in the process of creating it. Sigh. Speaking of which, there’s some awesome tunes and comments up on Australian singer/songwriter, Wons Phreely’s blog. He comes from the DIY school of recording, and his music sounds unhurried and richly textured as a result. He has an EP out soon. Keep an ear out for it. Meanwhile, Morgan from Ghosthouse emailed me during the week with news about some new stuff up on their site. The work is great. Well worth a ten-minute browse.

Susan Belle has some interesting work up on her website and the Pew Pew Pew blog (hmmm. And who said names had to have a meaning?) is full of random bits of ramblin’. Tis good. I’m also a big fan of that perennial source of fun things - Tokyo Plastic - which is a bizarre mix of the cool, the kitsch, and all things in between. The animation rocks. Who would’ve thought a tiny puppy could be so damn lazy!

Music / The Sleepy Jackson

June 29, 2006 | Music | by Zolton |

‘Spaced-out pop maestro or Australia’s answer to Brian Wilson?’ Whatever. Luke Steele - aka The Sleepy Jackson - is a mythically talented songwriter with a stack of charisma and a headful of awkward, skewered melodies that latch ferociously onto the most basic of chord progressions and simply refuse to relent. ‘I like the peace and quiet which comes with living in Perth’, he says of his isolated surrounds. ‘I can walk down the main road and feel like I’m a professor. Then I can go back to my laboratory and conjure up some more potions’. All of which has resulted in the band’s second album - Personality - an album steeped in traditionalism and which shows off the country/pop chops of Australia’s most enigmatic frontman. It’s upbeat and cheery, and thanks to EMI we have ten copies to give away to random emailers with their favourite sleep-inducing tonic in the body of the message. And, yes, we like bribes. Things that go ‘ahhh’.

Products / Start your own

June 29, 2006 | Products | by Zolton |

The latest issue of the hard-copy publication that I edit, Riot magazine, is out now and features a whole stack of pop culture titbits including an interview with Merri Cyr, Jeff Buckley’s photographer, looking back at her association with him. Her photos are beautiful, capturing the essence of a performer who never quite knew when to stop. There’s also a good slice of Flameboy’s Nirvana comic - Godspeed - looking at the early years of Kurt Cobain’s life. There’s a 3d clay and paint fashion spread, put together by Japanese artist, Kacchi; interviews with rock bands The Long Winters, My Latest Novel, White Rose Movement, and Five O’Clock Heroes; profiles on artist Marco Cibola, Melbourne’s Is Not Magazine, Japanese producer Susumu Yokota, furniture designer Pascal Anson, and a feature on the New York figurine and plush toy craze. It’s on sale throughout Australia, but if anyone’s interested elsewhere, shoot me an email and I can give you some more info.

Photography / Jason Nocito

June 29, 2006 | Photography | by Zolton |

New York-based photographer, Jason Nocito, is one of the hottest young talents around right now. Nerve.com has this to say about him: ‘Jason Nocito’s playful and dreamy images of urban culture are often seen in the pages of Nylon and GQ. Jason’s intimate rapport with his subjects manifests as raw and often humorous portraits’. While Hurricane.com said that: ‘he’s a little old school Rolling Stone. He reminds me of my aunt’s ex-ex-boyfriend, who used to help babysit my lil’ bro and me, who used to kick our scrawny asses in any NES game we rented for the weekend with casual authority. We’d watch him watch hard rock videos on MTV in awe, learning a lot about the essence of badass cool before mom pulled into the drive-way past midnight’.

Illustration / Fear of heights

June 22, 2006 | Illustration | by Zac |

Interview with young Melbourne artist, Eleanor Voterakis. ‘My drawings are quite stark and delicate - generally drawn with a 2B mechanical pencil [Pacer]. The drawn objects tend to be situated in a blank space, and I play around with form by leaving parts of objects unfinished or filled in as silhouettes. Something that has become a defining feature of my work is the image of the pile. Drawing piles of things appeals to me because there is something interesting about seeing an object in a group of other like objects — there are the formal elements of pattern and repetition, but I think there is also something poetic and maybe melancholy about these piles. I keep drawing piles as a way of finding out for myself what this poetic element is. I like Melbourne because it is not restricted by particular styles or trends, or defined by a narrow group of people. That makes it very dynamic, because I think creative people in Melbourne feel relatively free with the forms and styles they experiment with. There is a sense of fun. It’s inspiring for me because I believe creative people end up being truer to themselves and producing a higher quality of work if they are not continually trying to keep up’. [see also Jenny Mortsell]

Art / My little smile

June 22, 2006 | Art | by Zolton |

The Wall Spankers project has had more than fifty international artists submit black & white work for the first issue. The submission deadline for the first issue is June 30th, so there’s still time to show them what you’re made of. It will be available as a free online PDF zine. Check it all out at the Wall Spankers website. Meanwhile, the Zaishu Project is an ‘international collaborative event, recording patterns, designs and cultural texture from around the world on sheets of plantation grown veneer. This visual information ‘artwork’ is then cut by laser into smaller components that slot together without nails, screws or glue to create a small portable seat, table, or box called a Zaishu’. Treated like a project and not a product, the Zaishu was first launched - with stencilled street artwork - at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in July 2004. Having since travelled to Japan, Seoul, Milan, Sydney, and Stockholm, the Zaishu project in 2006 will work with artists in India, Stockholm and Berlin. Check out their website for more information. And Enfant Terrible is an all girl art show by ‘those who’ve left, stayed and arrived in Australia’. It’s on now at the Monster Children Gallery in Sydney and features the work of Deanne Cheuk, Lilly Piri, and Ainslie Fletcher amongst others.

Music / Laub

June 22, 2006 | Music | by Zolton |

Laub suggest that their 2002 album, Filesharing, was inspired by: ‘Reunification after three years of abstinence. Everybody needed on its own. A new beginning inspired by personal experiences. A solo record. Birth of a baby. Kitty-yo and travelling’. I think it’s simply one of the best downbeat, glitchy, electro albums I’ve heard in a long time. It is sophisticated German minimalism, barely crawling at some points, only to rear violently in bursts of staccato drumbeats and confrontational synth lines before once again descending back into the realm of the beautiful, the introspective and the subtle. Discogs had this to say about it: ‘Passing chunks of material to each other via the Internet, Antye Greie-Fuchs and Von Jotka assembled Filesharing in their respective remote European locations; the result, however, is anything but remote. Delicate and abstract, Filesharing will quietly be one of the best of 2002′. And so it was. Check it out.

Fashion / We got t-shirts

June 22, 2006 | Fashion | by Zac |

Lade Clothing are a very cool duo of designers out of Canada doing nice graphicy things with t-shirts. Their philosophy is simple: ‘Lade’s style and energy is a link between the two most prominent forces of our lives - nature and technology. We’ll create an interspace between freezing and melting, between solid and liquid thoughts, between machine and spirit. From the speckled glass towers of a rain-soaked city to the sun-sparkling paradise of fresh tracks on a glacier, Lade is there’. We love the shirts and we’ve got a few of them to give away to random emailers with your home country in the body of the message. Btw, we’ve still got some Lost At E Minor t-shirts left for anyone who wants to buy one. The shirts have been designed by our friends at Jeremyville and come with a handful of ultra-special badges to adorn it with. Orders can be made through the Jeremyville website.

Photography / Rokas Pralgauskas

June 22, 2006 | Photography | by Zolton |

Rokas Pralgauskas is a young photographer from Lithuania. His work centres on its own created tales — ’stories about longing for love where everyone is in a hurry, where everything is beautiful, fragile and temporary. Where no one is sure about anything’. It captures those moments of quiet isolation, ‘maybe waiting for a plane to fly from New York to somewhere peaceful and calm. Or maybe someone has purchased a luxurious watch and is now waiting for the fragile seconds and moments to count down’.

Photography / People on the beat

June 15, 2006 | Photography | by Zolton |

I was lucky to see the mighty New Zealand band, Split Enz play a reunion concert in Sydney the other night and it was simply amazing. Read more

Illustration / Nameless song

June 15, 2006 | Illustration | by Zolton |

We want to say a few thankyous to some people who have really helped us to get Lost At E Minor going and who have contributed in a big way to our growth over the past year or so. A big heads up to Yuri Bacas, who designed this template for the newsletter, Urchin Associates, who created our logo, the guys from Design Is Kinky for their encouragement and support, Jennifer Wilson from HWW for her words of wisdom, web designer Andrew Boddy for his expertise, Jeremy and his team at Jeremyville who have designed some Lost At E Minor t-shirts for us, trendspotting website, coolhunting.com, who we are media partners with, and everyone out there who has emailed us with feedback and samples of their work. We’ve got some exciting things to announce over the next few weeks, so watch this space.

Ok, onto other things and one of my favourite Sydney bands, The Paper Scissors, have their debut EP coming out in the next few weeks. It’s already getting solid airplay on Triple J and FBi. Check their myspace site for information on the big launch for it. And, yes, they rock (paper scissors). Oh, and the Dickerson Gallery in Sydney, always has interesting exhibitions on. Their website holds clues as to what lies ahead.

Music / Heady melody

June 15, 2006 | Music | by Zolton |

Boomkat describes it as ’soaring indie-pop, coated in a lambent film of laptop filaments, resulting in a sound which straddles the dEUS, American Analog Set and The Go Find border regions’; while Pitchfork says, ‘Beck on valium, a lo-fi garden of delight. It starts slow and meandering and then gradually it builds to a sunny state. Electric President’s debut is brilliant’. Electric President is a project featuring the ample talents of Ben Cooper and Alex Kane, who mesh elements of electro and low-fi slacker rock with sublime pop melodies and subtle arrangements. It’s a wonderful album which flits dramatically in musical direction, but never lacks cohesion. Thanks to Inertia, we have eight copies of the album to give away to random emailers with their secret musical obsession in the body of the message.

Music / Don’t cross the water

June 15, 2006 | Music | by Zolton |

Islands formed in Canada last year, rising from the ashes of seminal pop group The Unicorns. The band is very much in the ethos of the collective with a constantly changing line-up that has recently seen the addition of two string players, Alex and Sebastian Chow. Their album, Return To The Sea, is a mesmerising assortment of beats and pieces, incorporating everything from hip hop and freestyle rapping to majestic pop interludes and electro-styled sonic mish mashes. It sounds like the sort of music created by transient souls — those unwilling to remain tied down to just the one genre, sound or concept. It’s hyperactive and irascible, the punchy production giving a crispy top end to a mix that allows plenty of room for experimentation. The track, ‘Where There’s A Will There’s A Whalebone’, is the standout — shifting intent midway through — but this is really one of the best albums in some time.

Art / Patricia Fernandez

June 15, 2006 | Art | by Zac |

Patricia Fernandez is an LA based artist, born in Spain, who went to Saint Martins School of Art in London and UCLA. She is currently travelling throughout Europe to complete a series of works based on the re-presentation of landscapes from memory. ‘My paintings explore the memory of experience when in a natural landscape’, she says. ‘ I seek to paint the symbiotic relationships existing in a Darwinian world. Contradictory and magical, sometimes dark and theatrical, the work brings a moment from time into focus, presenting and dissecting an ephemeral construct of place’. And so it does.