Afropunk Fest | Day 2 August 24th Commodore Barry Park, Brooklyn n the second and final day of the Afropunk Festival, the sun over Brooklyn was at full power. Upon my arrival I was able to catch the last few songs of The Tontons, a sea-breeze psych-pop group from Texas. Their new album, Make Out King and Other Stories …
Remembering Afropunk. | Day 1.
Afropunk Fest | Day 1 August 23rd Commodore Barry Park, Brooklyn etween August 23 and 24, the colors of every nation’s flag flooded Commodore Barry Park in Brooklyn for the tenth Afropunk Fest. The lineup was a perfect blend of Punk, R&B, Hip-Hop, Neo-Soul, and everything that permeates and runs between. Every act held some hint of each style …
Black Bananas |x| Shockwave Riderz at South Street Seaport.
t the Black Bananas’ set on August 8 at South Street Seaport in Manhattan, the damn kids scampered about like damn kids often will. When the unabashed rock group eventually collected on stage, the children fell in line. The Seaport stage, set nearby, but not directly on the seafront, is built on a flap of fake grass and surrounded by …
Temples. |x| Here We Go Magic. |x| Spires.
n Thursday, August 7, the UK band, Temples, released their day-tripping psychedelia over the calming night waters of the Hudson River at Pier 84 in Manhattan. Temples started in “a little town called Kettering, in England,” singer-guitarist James Bagshaw said, and were playing New York City for only their second time. The young band have been traveling the globe in …
The Annihilated Decibel. | Boris Plays “Drumless Drone Set” at Saint Vitus Bar.
o one can hear you scream at a Boris concert. Shrieks of terror, elation, and concern all go unheard, lost in the din. Last Monday, August 4th, the Japanese drone metal group melded Saint Vitus bar in Brooklyn down to a tiny piece of flashing tin. The performance, billed as a “drumless drone set,” was added after the announcement of …
Strand of Oaks |x| Phosphorescent at Tammany Hall.
“hese songs are emotional,” Timothy Showalter, leader of Strand Of Oaks, said during his band’s opening set on the night of Wednesday, July 23rd at Tammany Hall. The smirk cut through his long, matted beard. “We’re living in an emotional time.” Emotional tunes, turns out, are a perfect soundtrack for a new line of backpacks. The event, which also featured a …
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds at Prospect Park.
“Some people say it’s just rock and roll / Ah, but it gets ya right down in your soul” — from “Push the Sky Away” e’s that bad motherfucker called Nick Cave and last Saturday night he and his renegades in The Bad Seeds played Prospect Park in Brooklyn, potentially waking up God from a deep, deep sleep. They kept …
Walking Through a Musical History of The Walkmen.
he first song I heard from The Walkmen was “The Rat” off 2004’s Bows + Arrows. It starts with this nerve-wrecking guitar chop and instantly puts the mind on high alert. Drummer Matt Barrick spits out tightening rounds on the hi-hat, bombing across the set again and again. Hamilton Leithauser’s vocals swarm with frightening toughness and a scorched throat spitting …
This Time Last Year. | Lisa Golightly.
ays of summer, how they suddenly appear. In Lisa Golightly‘s collection of acrylic paintings from 2013 she captures the firstborn light of the summer sun and the joy it brings. Golightly has a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a focus on photography. She works with globs of paint, but her time before the camera is never far from her work. …
Out of Sight.
n photographer Vittorio Ciccarelli‘s series, Invisible, one looks upward into the summer sky and sees all of that blue, blue, blue. The squares succumb to the purest shades of sky. It becomes two-dimensional, all perspective falling away, and brings absolute comfort. Ciccarelli, from Naples, Italy, “conducts experimental research in the field of photography.” In much of his work there is …
Liars Bring Rainbow Napalm to Le Poisson Rouge in Manhattan.
iars thrashed and burned in psychedelic jolts during one explosion of a set at Le Poisson Rouge in Manhattan this past Thursday, May 8–the first of their two shows in New York. Their performance was quick, to-the-point, no fussing, no fawning, and now, in retrospect, nothing but a complete blur of colored yarn. The blur is a testament to the …
The Jostling of Classic Art at an Arizona Gallery.
Justin Bieber may the slickest pop star today, but what if he were a painter from the Renaissance era? What if his greatest subject was himself? Artist Mike Reynolds paints the singer decked out in centuries-old attire with classic sunglasses and a look of pure self-worth in his “Untitled 18 from JB throughout the Ages.” It’s a mash of the …
Sam Spratt. | American Royalty.
America’s most beloved painter, Norman Rockwell, graced the front pages of The Saturday Evening Post for many years with cherubic, early 20th-century images of everyday life. As our country churned politically, Rockwell’s work reflected the cultural bursting-at-the-seams in pieces like “The Four Freedoms” which was featured in 1943 and “The Problem We All Live With” in 1964. Rockwell’s work, influenced …
Path Finder.
Photographer Mark Dorf, from Louisville, KY, manipulates his images in a little white box in Bushwick, Brooklyn. He focuses on the wide-open spaces of nature and how they shift in an increasingly tech-first world. The environments he creates are bound with a sheen of lucidity. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from The Savannah College of Art …
Album Review | Professor Divebomb Cuts and Pastes Together HAG.
HAG, the new album from psychedelic, lo-fi artist, Professor Divebomb, is a swallowing cave of loose and disgruntled sound. It’s noisy and harsh, but also hypnotizing and druggy. The 16-track album is 44-minutes of swelling sonic carnage and curving tunnels of dark noise. It’s unpredictable and experimental in the most far-fetched meaning of the word–a weird record of doomed psychedelia. …
Album Review | Native Bells’ Four-Sided Masterpiece.
Sean Smither, using the moniker Native Bells, extends multiple arms with each hand scooping sounds from a different instrument. His newest self-titled release is a block of musical mass spanning across thirty-nine songs and four sides: Side A, Side B, Side C and Side D. Smither, a percussionist at heart, studied jazz at the New School in New York City, …
Gender Infinity x Viking Moses x Roses at The Silent Barn.
Appropriately for a band called Gender Infinity, lead dude, Redding Hunter, traipsed around in the darkness of The Silent Barn in various states of drag. First came the wigs, then the fishnets, followed by mascara crayoned on thick. The necks of the boys in the room kept craning mistakenly, but it’s alright because it was Hunter’s birthday and he’ll scream, …
Mercy Mercy Me.
TV On The Radio, the kingly art rock band of the past decade returns with a sudden single, “Mercy.” It kicks in right away. No hesitation. Vocalist Tunde Adebimpe is right there with the spitting hi-hats and grinding guitars. “I fell in love with professional evil on the day you left my side,” he sings. There is a driving restlessness running through …
Revisiting the RE-BLOG.
Walking into Brooklyn’s SIGNAL Gallery last Friday night turned every human face into a dark silhouette with a fuzzy lining of white light. The light splashed from two door frame-sized projections of revolving photographs. Photographs from the work of 200 artists make up the current show titled, BLOG RE-BLOG. Copy and pasted together by Max Marshall and Paul Paper, the …
Closer to Nothing Than “Something”.
Photographer Alexis Vasilikos spends his summers on a little tear of land, the Greek island Leros, tucked away in the Aegean Sea. It’s a pinprick on the world map; an obscured place, not easily found. In his images the viewer sees little corners of everyday life, things right outside the line of sight and easily forgotten. “I’m not seeking to …