Lost AT E Minor

WE'RE THINKING

San Fransisco-based artist Alexis MacKenzie must be patient. She has to be in order to create beautiful collages from the vintage books that she collects. There’s an amazing amount of detail in each piece. Elements are painstakingly transplanted from book to paper with scissors and glue. No Photoshop cut n’ pastes here.

WE'RE SUPPORTING

Erika Larsen’s cattle ranch photographs have a surreal yet timeless quality to them. I would never have guessed that they were commissioned by a business magazine. We caught up with the New York-based photographer recently to find out about her time on the ranch. Read more

WE'RE LISTENING TO

I usually steer clear of anything smelling of disco-breaks: the thought just bores me. But with Padded Cell’s new release, Night Must Fall, I see a bit of a U-turn on the horizon. There’s something really interesting going on here: it’s a cocktail of 80’s swank laced with woozy narcotic undertones and flecked with snappy drum loops: weird, undeniably dark and ominous, but nonetheless pretty damn satisfying. Read more

WE'RE WEARING

You’d be hard-pressed finding a designer with a more impressive background than Jessie Hill. While most of us were waiting to outgrow our awkward teenage years, she was already on her way to Los Angeles. Leaving her Sydney home at just seventeen to pursue her love of fashion, it wasn’t long before Jessie Hill made a name for herself, styling cool kids like No Doubt and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. 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.

History is the story of the winners, and western dominated culture recounts few triumphs from the east. Mongol is an effort to correct this balance, and the eastern influence is evident in much more than just the storyline. It is more like a fairy tale or legend handed down through generations, than based on fact, with mythical elements playing a major part, and the character’s motivations remaining simple. Read more

WE'RE TRAVELLING TO

The work of Australia’s Ben Frost is always interesting. He’s known for his controversial art juxtapositions that confront contemporary Western paradigms in our advertising obsessed society. Crapitalism is on display until November 3 at Opus Gallery in Newcastle, UK. I do hope any disgruntled viewers refrain themselves from slashing his work with a knife, unlike the infamous 2000 Australian episode.