Pop Subversion

WE'RE SUPPORTING

Some friends and I serendipitously stumbled across the work the artist Hiro Kurata the other night and we have been jointly obsessing over it since. Kurata’s work is torrid, moody and fragmented like a restless dream. Bursting with texture and patterns, it’s simply brilliant. As my friend Andrew Degraff accurately put it, ‘It’s like Savador Dali thrown through a plate glass window’. Indeed. Read more

WE'RE TRAVELLING TO

This striking design — still in the planning stages — aims to covert a desolate, disused sand mine into a thriving environmental preserve and eco-resort. The development lists an impressive array of green designs, including living walls and a five-acre green roof, and effortlessly succeeds in that all important eco-feature of blending in with its surrounding environment. Read more

WE'RE WEARING

Colombian illustrator Catalina Estrada, whose work has recently adorned Zune players, has designed a t shirt for charity project Comparte Corazon, which benefits a group of women artisans in Ayacucho, Peru.

WE'RE THINKING

Very few band reunions get me excited, but I’ve consistently loved Faith No More since I was 13. I loved their pre-Mike Patton era, I loved King for a Day, and I even loved their track with Boo Yah Tribe on the Judgment Night soundtrack. Kerrang recently hinted that a FNM reformation is in the works for ‘09, and though bassist Billy Gould has emphatically denied the rumors, the general consensus is that the reunion is on.

WE'RE READING

We’re launching a new email newsletter in a few weeks time called My Secret Playlist in which a different guest musician each week will write about eight songs that they’re loving right now. Read more

Sufjan Stevens creates autistic music for introverts — soft, shy, naive, full of shadows, windows, and insecurities. Yet it all sounds slightly forced, his enigmatic songwriting as comforting as it is unsettling.

WE'RE LISTENING TO

Lindstrom, the man who single-handedly coined the term ‘minimal space-disco’ (well, perhaps nudged in the right direction by Orbital et al), recently released a new, rather ambitious, album, Where You Go I Go Too. Weaving between ambient trance and breakbeat-flecked disco, the producer responsible for the mesmerizing reworking of that tune we all secretly love, Roxy Music’s Avalon, has produced a worthy follow-up to his 2006 album, ‘It’s A Feedility Affair’. This time, however, there’s only three tracks, ranging between 10 and 29 minutes in length, and the Eno/Ferry influence is thankfully clear to all.