This album by Viers has been on repeat, i’m always a sucker for dub techno, its the buried swells in the repetition and the right amount of change throughout the album. Give it a go on some headphones and dive into detailed design work, it won’t disappoint.
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New York City based artist Samantha Keely Smith is back with all new work. Samantha’s work has been on my radar for a few years now and I did a post on her gorgeous work about two years ago. I reached out to Samantha and asked her a few questions about her influences and what her creative process involves.
In 2012 your work progressed into painting abstract, oceanic waves and creating a sense of heavy movement. What inspired this?
All of my images come from dreams, but my dreams are influenced by the emotions I experience and the things I learn/hear about in my day to day life. I’ve been concerned with the effects of global warming and the melting ice caps for some time, and that showed up in my dreams as the images I produced in 2012/2013. I’m still influenced by these concerns, only now my images have expanded beyond “oceanic.”
Without revealing too much, what is a typical process from start to finish for one of your paintings and how long does that take?
It’s a case of narrowing down the images from the dreams and trying to focus on one in particular. The images in the paintings are what I call “inner worlds” because really they are the result of attempting to translate an internal existence driven by emotion/instinct into something that makes some sense of the reality we live in. Because these dream images are fleeting I spend a long time chasing them during the process of the painting. Unfortunately this also means there is no real way to plan them out. So they can often take a couple of months to complete, with many changes (sometimes drastic) taking places over the course of that time. I work in thin layers, often somewhat translucent. I find that accidents/mistakes are an important part of my process too. I’m also in love with color and oil paint in general so my interest in the process of painting is part of the end result.
What musician/band has been the most influential for your visual cues?
There isn’t one musician, but many. Music in general is an important part of my daily studio practice. The kind of music I listen to while painting is dictated by the painting itself. I can’t say that music influences my visual choices, but it does feed the intensity of the work.
Are there any other practices/mediums in the broad world of art that you would like to try?
I can’t imagine having the time to do anything else since I paint every day, but in another life I’d like to experiment with film/video and installation art.
If you could pack up and move to work on your craft anywhere, where would you move to?
I’m not sure because I love the energy of NYC. My only problem with living here is financial. Being an artist in New York is very hard, mainly because of the high cost of living and how expensive artist’s work spaces are. I think I’d like to live somewhere near the ocean if I could. But only part time. I feed off the creative energy of the city and I’d miss that.
For more of Samantha’s breathtaking work, visit her website:
Like a glittery rework of something from Koyaanisqatsi, Anenon is back with an almost 8 minute cut to announce his new EP on Friends of Friends.
As a solo artist, head of Non Projects and one of Los Angeles’ most talented contemporary jazz musicians, Brian Allen Simon aka Anenon has managed to meld disparate forms of electronic and classical music, bridging the gap between eras, technologies and sonic space. The ‘Camembert’ EP is Anenon’s first release on Friends of Friends and functions as a sort of introduction to ‘Petrol’, a full length set for a January 22 release date. ‘Camembert’ exudes the range in expression and breadth of talent that Simon represents, touching on jazz improvisation, techno and palatial ambient over its four tracks without ever seeming to lose focus. It’s not everyday that an EP traverses genre barriers and balances the experimental with the populist, but Anenon has the sheer musical ability and refined sensibilities to walk the line between all of it.
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A late night post usually ends up with late night vibes, some deep chord work from Californian duo Darnum Samp. Some line blurring between house and adult contemporary has been the sound of the blog lately.
By Alan Berner
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The man that was born in the wrong decade, hands down George Clanton effortlessly writes pop lyrics as a good as Tears For Fears. When I heard the some Bleed live for the first time I had goosebumps head to toe, it wasn’t because of the huge crashes or his way with the crowd, I just couldn’t believe a song like that was created by his generation. His uphill battles are trend and revival but that shouldn’t stop him, he just needs to be on the road and deliver a passionate condensed live show with a large audience and the hashtag genre dropping will fade away.
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Bewilderbeast is a producer that has continually blown me away with every single one of his releases since I first heard his track ‘Water Below’ several years ago (that’s a timeless jam, for sure). The South London producer has really honed in on a distinct sound, that blends and experiments with elements of lo-fi house, funk, and chillwave. His brilliant 2013 album, ‘Unreal_Estate‘ was, however, not the only music we would be hearing from that period in his life, as we have now been graced with “a selection of experiments made at the same time as Unreal_Estate” in the form of (En)tropical EP. It’s everything one could expect from him, and more. Grab it for ‘name your own price’ over at his Bandcamp.
Post by: Elaby Mackenzie.
I am a music blogger/enthusiast from Cape Town, South Africa.
Co-founder of Bluishvoid and contributor at Platform Magazine.
Don’t let go of summer yet, Bing & Ruth is here. I’ll just set this right here and I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you enjoy the video in full.
Before Bing & Ruth’s halcyonic opus Tomorrow Was the Golden Age, there was City Lake. Initially pressed in an unusually limited edition five years ago, the ensemble’s stunning full-length debut is now released in simultaneously refined and expanded form. With bonus tracks and new, visceral mastering, the album gleams all the more and signals a spree of live performances this fall revisiting the material.
As the principal leader of Bing & Ruth, David Moore assembles his orchestral roster according to the scope of each piece and recording setting. For City Lake, Bing & Ruth consisted of eleven members: two clarinetists (Jeremy Viner and Patrick Breiner), two cellists (Greg Heffernan and Leigh Stuart), two vocalists (Becca Stevens and Jean Rohe), a bassist (Jeff Ratner), a lap-steel player (Myk Freedman), a faithful tape-delay engineer (Mike Effenberger), a percussionist (Chris Berry), and Moore on piano.
City Lake is shepherded into concrete pastures by Moore’s weightless piano melodies, immersed as they are in grand shapes of breath-like horn, string and voice phrases. Augmented with more percussive proclivity than TWTGA, City Lake establishes Bing & Ruth’s ambient brand through a greater gamut of material mediums. If TWTGA opened its shutter to the imperceptible shifts of transitions between darkness and light, City Lake was composed to be less ethereal, instead embodying a group-oriented musicality and physicality.
On City Lake, there are instances of Reich-ian excitement with the hand clapped rhythms of “Rails” and a seance of sorts excorsized by the brush-tapped “Put Your Weight Into It.” Dual track “City Lake / Tu Sei Uwe” culminates the urbanized form of ambience with tonal elements in free-fall, piling-up in a harsh denouement of the album’s title piece. Further into the program David Moore’s intrigue with Gavin Bryars and Thomas Newman finds delicate voice in the hibernative “Here’s What Your Missin,” a track redolent of all the narcotic power of which Bing & Ruth are capable.
City Lake sets the standard met by Bing & Ruth’s sonorous sophomore journey Tomorrow Was The Golden Age. In this earlier portrait, the ensemble graces its listeners with gail-force movements from the wake of Bing & Ruth’s gliding wings leaving trails in the skyline. City Lake was RVNG’s chance introduction to Bing & Ruth, mistakenly handed off as unmarked test pressings by the vinyl manufacturer.
Bing & Ruth’s City Lake will be released on November 13, 2015 on RVNG Intl. as a limited edition double LP, CD and digital formats.
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