Pitchfork   The Dissolve   Festivals: Chicago | Paris
:

The sisterly trio Haim just released its debut album Days Are Gone (Pitchfork finds it winning). In contrast to the album's overall hygenic-sound, the "Desert Days" video directed by Tabitha Denholm for the album track "Honey & I" has a bit of grit in it—and even electric guitar. The clip finds the ladies holed up at a cinder-block house found by the director on Air B&B and striking poses in pick-up trucks. 

Dinosaur Jr. by Dinosaur Jr., Rocket 88 Books

No one would have predicted that a scruffy post-hardcore band from Northampton, MA would be together and touring after three decades, reconvene with its original line-up, or issue a deluxe coffee table book. Dinosaur Jr. by Dinosaur Jr., due in November from Rocket 88 Books, features an oral history of the band as told by the musicians themselves J, Lou, Murph, and ex-members such as Mike Johnson, friends, family, and others. It will be backed with unseen photos, rare flyers, and Dino Jr. swag—reaching back to the Deep Wound days. The book will be available in two editions: the full-color, hardback “Classic Edition” on heavyweight paper with art by Marq Spusta and a limited signed “Signature Edition” which includes a detailed tour diary from 1987-1988 with photos and a clamshell box with three art prints.

 

The book is available for preorder on dinosaurjrbook.com.

Dinosaur Jr. official book trailer from Rocket 88 on Vimeo.

Electronic R&B slinger Autre Ne Veut's latest video from the much-gushed-about album Anxiety is just out—and it should also bring a bit more attention to BANGS's director Allie Avital Tsypin. Upon initial viewing, the movements of the formally-dressed partygoers seem very odd—but near as we can tell, they're synched up pretty tightly with the musical elements in the song. The tuxedoed men appear to lock with the kick drum, for example. The arty video is a production of MOCAtv—and also pumps us up for a live October tour from the Hampshire College grad otherwise known as Arthur Ashin.

Taiyo Kimura's video for Superchunk's hardcore-inspired tune "Staying Home" is a bizarre, low-tech, and kind of gross (as in the eating curry and rice from the toilet in a Mac mask bit) clip, but a perfect fit. Mac McCaughan encountered Kimura's work at a gallery show in Durham, NC, hung out with him in Tokyo, and eventually approached him about doing a video for a tune from the new I Hate Music. In an ART INFO post, McCaughan says of Kimura, “He always manages to do this thing in videos where you kind of think you know what you’re looking at, then you realize you’re not sure what you’re looking at.”

Read more at ART INFO.

To mark the release of Coming Apart, the debut LP from Kim Gordon and Bill Nace's Body/Head, the band collaborated with pioneering filmmaker and photographer Richard Kern for a series of 10 videos. The clips resemble a portrait series, with each one focusing on a single, and sometimes glitchy, movement from one male and one female character, or an interaction between the two. As Ad Hoc points out, Gordon also collaborated with the photographer for Sonic Youth's "Death Valley 69" video in 1985. The complete series is available on Matador's YouTube channel, and two videos are below. 

Revisit our feature interview with Kern by one of his former subjects, and check out Marc Masters's Body/Head interview published this week at Pitchfork.



Photo by: Jeremy Farmer

Photos by Jeremy Farmer

There are similarities between artist Doug Aitken's brainchild, the Station to Station art/music tour crossing the States right now, and the art happenings of the '60s. 

The filmic interludes, the choreographed surprises, the repurposing of space, the combination/juxtaposition of musical acts from wildly different genres, the artist-centered programming—all made for the right ingredients to shake us up in our audiovisual realms.

But there are just as many details that make it unique and uniquely 2013—the traveling-by-train show, the use of a magnificent public space rather than a squatted building or old theater, a corporate sponsor in Levi's, and the relative sobriety of the multigenerational crowd. Also, there's a bit about the train Aitken has designed and its on-board studios.

Happenings were once deliberately bizarre in-crowd events for hardcore bohemians. Aitken's are open to the public and not particularly hard to understand for the everyman. Still, one couldn't help but recall the sonic backdrops laid by improvising Pink Floyd Sound at the London happenings when one walked in to an ambient noise set from L.A.'s No Age. Welcome to a contemporary freak-out, it seemed to say.

In our day and age, despite the availability of 24/7 everything music, we still have a hard time placing live music in the background. It's hard not notice a band performing in front of you. So No Age, Caught on Tape (Thurston Moore's duo), the jazzy Theaster Gates/Black Monks of Mississippi, and others took center stage at the event and commanded attention as in a concert format. But Moore, in particular, took the art angle to heart—delivering a spoken "song" for Kurt Cobain that shook up the concert formula. A headliner of sorts, Mavis Staples, was surely a revelation to those unfamiliar, but most Chicagoans who would hit this kind of event were probably well versed. 

Yurts for artist installations, crafts (bagmakers, rug weavers), and a Levi's capsule collection provided interesting and interactive diversion, but didn't have the requisite weird factor to be come across as transformative art. Printed matter, posters from Aitken and others, were rather nonchalantly on display in a central area of the party—a hard place to get attention for a poster.

The big winner in the competition for the art crowd gaze was video. The video sets projected on three screens between live acts were sometimes jarring, sometimes hypnotic, arousing curiosity—almost improbably in our YouTube/Instagram overloaded world—from historic bits from Raymond Pettibon or re-edited "Wonder Woman" episodes to a short film shot on Vieques. The video element dazzled and wowed—and that's the bit that felt like art.

Station to Station visits St. Paul, MN tonight.

The latest issue of Huck Magazine has the NoMa-approved title, "The Cat Power Issue" and what's more it is guest edited by Chan Marshall herself. Marshall and the Huck editors feature stories on Tame Impala, No Age, and U-God, as well as a new piece from music critic extraordinaire Greil Marcus on "the sweet spot where Cat Power and Bob Dylan connect." The issue concludes with a section of work curated by Marshall, with contributions from William T. Vollmann and Bob Dylan.

Back in June we wrote about Curious Iconic Craft, a book project from the people behind Huck Magazine exploring the history of magazine design. 

The Cat Power Issue is for sale from the Huck Shop.

Lisa Gunning directed this short film for "Annabel," a track from Goldfrapp's forthcoming Tales of Us album. Sonically, it finds the duo delving deeper into a folk sound with continental influences. Visually, it sees Gunning (known for her editing work, she's also dating Alison Goldfrapp) using a silvery black and white at first and a simple, magical storyline beautifully told—a boy discovering his feminine side in a treasure trove of objects—to connect.

See Gunning's reel at Whitehouse Post.

Read a Q&A with Goldfrapp at the Nowness.

Goldfrapp: Annabel on Nowness.com

"Destitute Time"

The last we heard from the Barcelona filmmaking collective CANADA, it was helping Phoenix navigate through a treacherous sound stage. The group's new clip for Delorean, another Barcelona institution, opts for the equally treacherous story of a couple whose relationship involves shooting arrows through human hearts, and some symbolic literature choices. The band makes an appearence performing on an illuminated element of its album art, a double cross design from the Basque artist Jorge Oteiza.

Check out "Destitute Time" below, directed by Roger Guàrdia.



Chicago's Disappears drone and rock with somewhat less haze and echo than ever before on new album Era. Suitably, the band has issued a video for "Power" from the album featuring great minimalist animation from Alexander Stewart, who has drawn the whole film with a Sharpie.

Read more about Stewart's inspiration at Spin.  

Disappears - Power from Alexander Stewart on Vimeo.