listen | beach house

+ alternate

look | witches

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watch | monarch butterflies

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look | smokebath

+ for the rest of your camping/outdoor needs, remember to visit cold splinters every day.

look | luis ricardo falero

watch | family band

i was up with the truckers and construction roughnecks february 20, buying coffee before the sun came out at a bagel shop with the pickup idling outside. after that we were strangers (and eventually friends) cramped three abreast in the extended cab, everybody with their necks cranked and their mouths open sleeping, and the blue morning running backwards and away from us out the window. it was four hours to bovina, just like that, only slightly oranger as the time passed.

when we got there the snow was thigh high. it was snowman snow and hard to walk through, but inside was lively with quiches and apple cider and everybody was in hand-sewn pilgrim clothes with their faces painted dirty. it was an incredible strangeness to walk into -- a seamless time warp -- and you could tell everybody's heart was going fast at the sight of each other and the thought of what was next. it was ice where we were headed, so much so that the leaf-stripped mountaintop trees had all gone white, but we fought it back with stews and steaming drinks and everybody huddled up together blowing on their hands.

what's up there in bovina, aside from hairy longhorn steer and open space, is the warmest and handsomest creative community you could ever want to find. and the new proof is family band's "children" video, a post-apocalyptic mini-epic about a lost daughter coming home to nothing. aside from the cost of food and a few rentals, "children" runs on little more than the cooperation and imagination of an incredibly talented and dedicated group of friends. the same crew that built the house where the last paragraph took place, right up from nothing.

it was an awe-inspiring thing to watch them all in action, pulling each other along smiling even when their arms were weighed down with axes, movie cameras, giant salads and crying babies. that video up there is a whole lot more than five minutes of narrative. that's important to know. watch it full screen and then have a look at a few of the 5,000 photos i couldn't help but take along the way.

hey also, come out to union pool tomorrow night for family band's record release show.

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look | rodney alcala

via gothamist:

be warned that this click is strictly for sickos as it contains more than two hundred photos of potential murder victims taken by serial killer rodney alcala. california death row's already got a lethal injection with alcala's name on it, but the nypd's gone public with the album anyway, in hopes that the subjects will be seen and identified by family members (how's that for some chokingly eerie peace of mind). here's a video of rodney alcala winning the dating game and earning his smarmy serial killer pseudonym. total creepout.

update.

+

listen | fleetwood mac

listen | moon duo

 
 
here's a raw, unedited moon duo profile i submitted for this month's issue of the fader. pick up the magazine anywhere (siouxsie sioux is on the cover) to see the sweet polished pete macia edit. while you're at it, don't miss the radical justin kay redesign.

There is a moon duo more famous than Ripley Johnson and Sanae (pronounced sun-eye) Yamada, called Phobos and Deimos, the bastard asteroid orbiters of Mars. Their names are Greek for panic and dread and they are the mythological twin sons of a bare teeth, animal breath love affair between Ares god of bloodlust and Aphrodite queen of sex. The gnarling human craving that sprung the young gods (and their sister, Harmonia) – that fucking and falling straight outside your brains in love mania – rides in on a disorienting surge of dopamine and norepinephrine. It is the chemical equivalent of somebody with obsessive-compulsive disorder getting super high.

This is no breakthrough. Love has been equated with drug use a million times. And, although they’ve only been a band since 2009, so have Moon Duo. “People associate the disorienting phasing and tremolo of psych music with acid trips,” says Johnson, who, nearly a decade after his Wooden Shjips sparked the most recent San Francisco space race, sounds plenty used to saying it. “But I’m more into meditation than drugs. We’re not a druggie band.” Vipassana, an insight-based Buddhist tradition, is Johnson’s meditation style of choice. He describes it almost exactly as he does his own music: as a tool intended to pierce the skin of everyday reality and open gateways to new sensation. Sounds like something Ares and Aphrodite could get behind.

And though it is an apt description of Johnson’s music, it’s not as if those endless muscular rhythms have their fuzz and fire spewing jaws aimed at convention’s forehead with the idea of biting out an eyehole. Not at all. “Making music is a compulsion,” he explains, not a protest. “I am constantly looking for a new sound to love. In a way, it’s a search for myself.” Hella Buddhist. But Moon Duo isn’t a meditation band or a Buddhist band any more than a druggie band.

Moon Duo is a straight up love band. Look at it. All of a sudden, after six years leading Wooden Shjips in their amorphous and phenomenally difficult charge, Johnson loses his job, recruits Yamada (an English teacher with no musical background) and starts playing pop songs. After all the Shjips’ droning, impenetrable noise, Moon Duo’s debut LP Escape sounds like goddamn dance music!

Johnson attributes the change to moving from a quartet to a duo, in effect removing two legs of a chair and attempting to go on sitting, but the double entendres persist. “When you have two people completely feeding off of each other, it's a different dynamic, especially live,” Johnson explains. And if you’re turned on to meditation, “You start to feel vibrations all over your body, your temperature and your heart rate rise and you can actually, physically feel the air being moved in the building.”

Neither party has confessed to any romance, but Moon Duo’s blistering motorcycle night noise, like cranked Suicide tapes outgrowling desperate sex noises in the dank skinny hallways of horny teenage house parties, reeks of new love’s ecstatic compromises. Johnson’s transformation on Escape has the unmistakable glow of Ares folding into Aphrodite, matching her rhythm and letting her perfume soften his stormy vision as she takes the reins. In the sound they make, panic, dread and harmony are indistinguishable siblings.

+ photo by ariel zambelich

look | eyjafjallajokull

look | when to say nothing

DOWNLOAD: HOODED FIGURES - COMES A TIME [MP3]

look | upstate

here's a striking japanese collaboration between nicholas ozgunay, kalen kaminski, astrid chastka and, in one way or another, justin kay, allie laporte, mackenzie davis, jeff thrope, victoria cho and myself. quite the undertaking.

what came of it is scarves of varying sizes that, by the use of ancient folding, binding and deep indigo dying techniques, give the look of sunlight on water. you'll buy one i bet. seems like your kinda thing.

they call it upstate.

DOWNLOAD: TED LUCAS - IT'S SO EASY WHEN YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING [MP3] +

look | tim barber

tim tiny vices barber's got a new set of photos he took of his creative friends who live in new york city. click on jason nocito up there to see them. you're gonna like it. hey, video!

watch | ocotillo

here's what you missed, sucko. photos on monday. +

happening | family band

with citay and this frontier needs heroes

happening | ocotillo

y'all, i don't gotta tell you anymore how bad you wanna see jeff do his ocotilla business on the stage tonight, do i? i already done it half to death a hundred many times in all the capital letter longwords hosanna glory i got. so this time let me put it to you straight. let me make it simple on you friend. ladies. jeff thrope and that deep ocotillo sidedish of his hit the glasslands stage around eight tonight. get there and look good if you want half a chance in holy hell of hooking up with justin kay before some sweet slice-a-sañorita puts a ring on that big money hunkaman. HEARD ME?? SEE YOU IN THEM EASTA NEW YORK ORGAN PIPES, POPS. [info]

ACTUAL GCHAT FAN TESTIMONIAL: i am listening to his LOVE SONG and i want to cry and laugh and hold hands / yes / holy crap / what's happening here / i feel complete RIGHT now / for a minute / or two / it's enough / i want to put windows down / get an iced tea / cruise through farm land / and maybe wear a hat of some kind / and BLAST THIS SONG / HARD / daniel / i know i sound dramatic / but seriously / i cant let this go / i feel things right now.

DOWNLOAD: OCOTILLO - OH MOMMA! [MP3]

+ TONS MORE OCOTILLO

look | clarence schmidt

crazed with unsung talent and vision from hair to tooth and toe, clarence schmidt built a leaning holy shitshow of a busted up window collage called the inner sanctum. built it right up around a great big tree and filled it with rooms that didn't connect to each other or to any kind of reality you or i would understand. he stayed in there scratching and scribbling away at more, expanding right up until the whole mess burned down. his story's hard to come by but not impossible. have a look around. have at his madness. you can just click all the pictures and see.

via ahtl