Lost AT E Minor

WE'RE SUPPORTING

I’ve known the New York-based artist Jordan Awan for quite a long time now. Since he was in high school in fact. So I have had the privilege of watching his art truly evolve into something amazing. Read more

WE'RE LISTENING TO

The first album released by the Malian duo Amadou & Mariam, Dimanche a Bamako, bordered on exceptional, if not for its songwriting then for its sheer diversity. You’d be forgiven for approaching cautiously an album that draws its influences from Syria, Cuba, Egypt, India, and Colombia, as well as its own country – much like a restaurant that offers every cuisine on the planet: choose one and do it well, you’d argue. But the album is fantastic: so full of life, so catchy and so accessible. Read more

WE'RE THINKING

I was rulking (half-run; half-walk) through the inner city a little while back, killing time and thoughts with mindless banter (yes, one way conversations have their benefits) when I noticed a grown man crying hysterically on the opposite side of the road to me. Read more

WE'RE WEARING

Clara Kraetsch and Doreen Schulz are the designers behind the hot Berlin design label C-Neeon, which hit hard onto the fashion radar after winning the Young Designers competition at the Hyeres Festival. Read more

WE'RE TRAVELLING TO

Monet and The Impressionists is on display at Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales until January 26, 2009. Alive with bold brushstrokes and dappled colours, the exhibit features 58 masterpieces by Cezanne, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro and Monet himself, among many others that have never been shown in Australia. It was amazing to view some of the finest quality works that revolutionised modern painting and the way natural light is portrayed on canvas. Go Monetise yourself and see Rough Weather, and all those serial haystack paintings.

I spent the formative first six years of my life in Wellington, New Zealand, a beautiful windswept city framed by a magnificent harbour in one direction and a stunning collection of green, rolling hills in the other. It was here, on a return visit many years later and deep amongst the clipped accents and ruddy faces of the weather-beaten locals, that I stumbled upon the vast catalogue of the then Dunedin based record label Flying Nun. And what a roster of acts they housed — The Chills, The Bats, The Clean, Tall Dwarfs, The Verlaines, and my favourite guitar-pop band, Straitjacket Fits. Read more

WE'RE READING

DJ Spooky — That Subliminal Kid — is just about the deepest crate digger around, trawling the barrels of long-lost record stores for choice vinyl to spin in his wickedly dubby sets. He gave us the inside word last week on his eight favourite songs right now via our sister website, My Secret Playlist. This is what he had to say about Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s Panic in Babylon: ‘If there’s anything that the twenty-first century has told us, it’s that dub is the real original hip-hop. Lee Scratch even had to make it clear in 1965 by adding “Scratch” to his middle name. Take that, Grandmaster Flash!’ Read the rest of DJ Spooky’s Secret Playlist.