A Shimkovitz In Africa

In 2006 Brian Shimkovitz started a simple blog to collect and share all the awesome cassette tapes he had brought back from Ghana.
He called it, Awesome Tapes From Africa



-How did you start collecting African tapes?
I went to Ghana for the first time as an ethnomusicology student when I was in college and then a second time doing a Fulbright research grant project on the hip-hop movement there. I spent a total of a year and a half there mostly living on the coast in Accra, the capital. But I also spent time further inland living and doing research a couple other cities. I found myself constantly looking in music shops and in the open-air markets all over town where the cassette sellers would be cool and play tapes for me before I bought them so I learned a lot. And then there was the Radio. The radio in Ghana is so great, they do long mixes and mashups and there’s a lot of interjections by the DJ, mixing so many genres. Radio was my guide for pop music.



I often asked my friends and neighbors about different stuff I was hearing. Sometimes I really questioned people hard to find out about stuff that wasn’t obvious or mainstream, to find out what even existed. I would go to smaller towns and ask a lot of questions to random people about traditional music and regional styles until I was lead in the right direction. I could end up listening to some small band play a few tunes on the fly or hear obscure dubbed cassettes in a stranger’s house. People are always super welcoming in Ghana, it’s a lovely place.



-When did you decide to start the site?
Shortly after I moved to Brooklyn I decided to start Awesome Tapes from Africa as a way to share the insane collection of fascinating music I brought back. It seemed like the best way to do was in this simple format and it caught on pretty quickly. It’s been fun for me to see people get excited about music fro Africa that’s a bit off the beaten path. Some readers are total experts and others are just beginning to check it out but it seems like everyone is getting something out of it.



-How do you do you keep getting new music?
It’s been a while since I’ve had the chance to visit Africa but I’ve had zero trouble growing the collection and keeping the blog interesting. Readers and friends send me tapes or people I know who go on trips will bring some back for me or give me hidden caches from past trips. I also look around shops in Brooklyn or Paris or wherever I can find them.



-What was your favorite personal discovery?
My all time favorite discovery is still Ata Kak, the weirdest, most jamming yet mysterious tapes in my collection. Also the very first recording I posted and the srongest reason for starting in the first place.



-Anything you want to add?
I think it’s cool that some musicians have been contacting me to say they are inspired by the music they’ve heard on the blog. I love that some of the excellent musicians from Africa are having some kind of affect on dudes from Bushwick to Sydney.

“Now is evidently the time to buy African kingdoms, and the French are busily improving the opportunity. Good kingdoms can be bought in the Congo region for two gallons of rum each, and navigable rivers can be had, when bought by the quantity, at the rate of an ounce of gunpowder per mile.”-NY Times 1882

THITH ZINE FEATURES

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Tame Impala’s Innerspeaker


This Tame Impala record that came out a few months ago is fairly righteous. Lush, gigantic and hooky Pop-Psych. It has me thinking of the whole lineage of Nuggets and after running from early Who or Meddle era Pink Floyd through SST era Screaming Trees, Ride and sprawling 90’s rockers Doves and Verve etc. But it’s certainly not all retro and there’s more than enough contemporary references to make it all feel new and exciting. Mostly this is because for a record so awash in weighty and wooly textures it feels remarkably light, airy and concise.

High long vocal phrases swimming over fat fuzzed guitars, bubbling basslines and tomahawk drums with the tracks dodging in and out one another and rising into sing along choruses.

Plus, the video for ‘Solitude is Bliss’ is one of our favorites of the year.

A few Nuggets:





Running the line:





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The Dark Of The Matinee #1.
5 favorites.


We were talking with a good friend the other night about movies and it got us remembering some favorites of the art film variety. With tour just ending and the next one still a few weeks away, might be a good time for a movie marathon.





“Badlands” by Terrence Malick.
It’s total genius. The soundtrack, the natural light. Genius. And so simple a story, done 100 times before and since but somehow, never even as close.





the films of Claire Denis
Claire Denis is one of the best living directors. Her eye is amazing and the different types of stories she tells really wide. Actually, there is something in the languid pacing of her films that reminds me of Terrence Malick. They’re subtle and rich in texture while still managing to sometimes get into some really sensational subjects.




“Satantango” by Belá Tarr
Okay. it’s long. Really long. Really, really, really long. And I wouldn’t watch it at home because It would just be too much and slow and everything else would be far too distracting, but I did see the 7.5 hour picture 3 times in the theater and I loved it every time. You disappear into the black and white world for a day. It’s more like looking at paintings than watching a movie. Long shots of people walking in the rain and slowly losing their minds in an impossibly bleak Hungarian landscape following the collapse of their collective farm at the end of soviet rule. If you like the art films, and the length isn’t too terrifying, look for it playing at museum or something somewhere.


“Dead Man” by Jim Jarmusch
Jim Jarmusch is obviously a hero of the underground and someone who just seems like he’d make a fantastic dinner guest. All his movies offer complex examinations of culture clashes but Dead Man always seemed a totally different beast. You can play Pynchon like games of spot the Blake reference and the singularity of narrative makes it feel more novelistic than his other films. One of my favorite things about it is the way it inverts the tradition of the Western by replacing the panoramic with tight and highly contrasted close-ups. In a sense, it looks more like contemporary portraits of the old west by photographers like Edward Curtis than it does a ‘Western’.





“Spirit Of The Beehive” by Victor Erice
One of our favorite beginnings to a film with children running through town shouting, “the movies are coming, the movies are coming” as a mobile projection van arrives to screen Frankenstein. This spanish film from the 70’s is all atmosphere and although very realistic still feels like a dream. It’s all about Anna Torrent. The movie follows the 6 year old actress as she tries to make sense of the world around her following the Spanish civil war. The scene when the two sisters whisper back and forth about Frankenstein… oh brother, it kills me.

Dark Of The Matinee
SHOW & TELL

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Radio THITH
30 mins of Maximum Mutant Rn’B and House Gaze
MIX #2


The Hundred In The Hands – 30 Min Mixtape by thehundredinthehands
1. POM POM: #4
2. Holy Ghost!: I WIll come Back
3. Eddie Kendricks: Keep On Truckin’
4. Ike & TIna: I Wanna Jump
5. Jackson 5: Hum Along and Dance
6. Sam The Sham: Wooly Bully
7. Small Faces: C’mon Children
8. Taleb Kweli: Just To Get By
9. Soul Position: Things Go Better


1. POM POM: #4
Pom Pom is an anonymous minimal techno project presumed to be out of Berlin… ?… we think. We don’t know but we first wrote about them here: http://thehundredinthehands.com/pom-pom-32/
We were listening to this a lot when we wrote the record. And you can kind of here the influence on some of the more dark and sparse moments in Young Aren’t Young and Killing It.

2. Holy Ghost!: I WIll come Back
Holy Ghost are our neighbors and by strange twists of fate we were in and out of two studios just before and after them while making our record. Everything we heard from them got us going and we stalked them into doing an “In The Studio” feature for us.


3. Eddie Kendricks: Keep On Truckin’
Tom Moulton is the godfather of the remix. His production pushed simple songs well beyond the pop into absolute floor stompers. Avant pop for sure. Love the xylophone/bells/whatever that is on this. Massive track, just seems to grow fiercer as it goes. And… are you going to argue with a man with a buckle like that? No. No, you’re not.

4. Ike & TIna: I Wanna Jump
Yeah, Tina rules. End of story. And if you don’t know, now you know. And okay, Ike… Ike was a ginormous asshole, but he also played on arguably the first proper rock’nroll songs ever and his guitar here kills it… but, no, really it’s Tina, let’s be honest.

5. Jackson 5: Hum Along and Dance
It’s the Jacksons at their most insane and one of the legendary break beats. Title says it all.

6. Sam The Sham: Wooly Bully
Sam is more punk than you. All there is to it.

7. Small Faces: C’mon Children
Small Faces were vicious and this track their most vicious. The guitar is so huge, no wave a decade and ½ early and just nutso. It’s from ’65 and you can just about see the parents running from the room. For a generation that still had memories of the war, this sound must have been horrific. C’mon children indeed.

8. Taleb Kweli: Just To Get By
Impeccable flow and lyrics. “I let them know we missin you, the love is unconditional/Even when the condition is critical/when the livin’ is miserable/Your position is pivotal, I ain’t bullshittin you/Now, why would I lie? Just to get by?”

9. Soul Position: Things Go Better
This record was kind of slept on but every time we play it out someone asks about it. That orchestra sample is so intense and the way it builds to the end with the old soul style harmony is amazing. Plus it seems like one of the most genuine descriptions of making music for all the right reasons I can think of. Plus, what an awesome record cover.

RADIO THITH

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THEM THANGS IN PRINT
Zine of the ‘week’ #3

Them Thangs is one of our favorite sites and we eagerly await their posts. Each page is a highly curated thematic collection of found images. Sometimes risque, always cool, the pages are filled with pictures juxtaposed like a good set of impressionistic lyrics. So, when we heard that Justin Blyth, the dude behind the site, was putting together a print magazine well, of course it just had to be ‘zine of the week’




Get the magazine here: www.them-thangs.com/the-new-dark-age

-How long have you been publishing and how did you start?
I started the blog about 1.5 years ago, essentially out of boredom. I was working at an advertising agency and found myself with a lot of down time so I started collecting all my favorite design/ photography and fashion related images from the web. This is the first edition of the printed magazine so I really just started publishing a month ago. I liked the idea of having a more permanent document that you can hold in your hands, and that only a certain amount of people will be able to fully experience, unlike a blog page. I also had a chance to think more about the relationships of the contributions from various artists and how they would all fit together in a way that felt similar to the blog experience.

-How do you fund it and how do you distribute it?
The content of the first issue is from myself and 13 contributing artists, mostly friends… but the funding, design, printing and distribution is all out of pocket. I took pre-orders and have been talking with some book stores and distribution houses, but as of now I’m selling them through the blog.

-Is it a labour of love?
Total labour of love.. it has really been a full-time job for about a month. It makes you realize that you could have different people in charge of printing, distribution, press, orders, shipping etc, and you would STILL be super busy. Doing it all yourself can be rough. On the flip-side, it’s a dream job. I’m curating and designing something to fit my vision and there is nobody second-guessing my choices or suggesting changes. In the “real world” I may have had a few days to design something like this, but I was able to really take my time and think about things, waiting until I truly thought it was ready.

-What else are you working on?
Im living in Amsterdam right now and I work with agencies on campaigns for Coke, Nike etc, so that’s what pays the bills. Aside from that I have been in a couple group shows recently, I’m doing some work for Stussy, and I do design work for boutique design houses in LA and NY from time to time.

-What are some other art books/magazines you love?
Some current favorites…

Pie #02 with Beni Bischof

Adios #3 is a collection of young finnish artists:

Thomas Traum // Most Beautiful Swiss Books “The Future Issue” 2009:


Field Trip Magazine #1:

The Reading of Time in the Text of Nature, Klaus Merkel:

Quompendium Volume 1:


Smoke bath#1:

Them Rag #02:

Zine Of The Week

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“She is still, is not still, still is not still”
the Photographs of Bill Henson & DANIELS’ Pigeons

When we’re writing songs or working on ideas for things we often keep a lot of reference material most of which is images we find on-line and such. While we were writing ‘Pigeons’ we had kept these photographs from Bill Henson.
More than a few of the tracks on the LP deal with ideas of youth, transience and ambiguity and these amazingly open and suggestive pictures just looked so much like the movie playing in our head.
Funny thing is, we had kind of forgotten about them by the time we made the Pigeons video and although we talked a lot with DANIELS about who the girl in the song was we never mentioned or sent them the images.
But somehow they nailed it.
see for yourself




Radical.


more Bill Henson:







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THITH NEWS

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Big Jams not Hammocks
Jamaica (the band) debut LP
“No Problem”


Feel like extending summer? Feel like it’s just too soon for sweaters and the fall? Well here’s a big giant slice of transistor radio AM pop to help. The compression is slamming, the tunes aiming for big blasts capital J Jams with nearly no pauses between. It’s just one song and then the next. An obliterated Cars alternate soundtrack to Dazed And Confused/Over The Edge.

It’s out next week, grab it: here.
More here.

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RADIO THITH
Maximum Mutant Rn’B
& Avant Pop mixtape #1

Here’s a summertime mixtape we made.
The Hundred In The Hands – Power Hour Mix by thehundredinthehands

Tracklist:

Depeche Mode – New Life
Suicide – Ghost Rider
The Comix – Touche Pas Mon Sexe
Giorgio Moroder – Utopia Me Giorgio
Madonna – Get Into The Groove
The Crystals – Then He Kissed Me
The Stooges – 1969
The Animals – Bright Lights , Big City
Beat Happening – Angel Gone
Smokey Robinson & The Miracles – The Tracks Of My Tears
J Dilla – Two Can Win
De La Soul – 3 The Magic Number
Ultramagnetic Mcs – Funky
Highlighters Band – The Funky 16 Corners
Mfsb – Love Is The Message
X Ray Spex – Identity
The Misfits – Skulls
Warren Smith – Red Cadillac And A Black Mustache
Majestic Arrows – If I Had A Little Love ( Rehearsal Tape)


DEPECHE MODE – NEW LIFE This might be a plastic advert for a brave new world, but Depeche Mode and a lot of the first wave of synth pop bands still remind us of a Blade Runner dystopia. The songs are skeletal and anemic, it’s the end of the world and the machines have run riot. New life, new life.


SUICIDE – GHOST RIDER Oh, yeah, M.I.A. used this didn’t she? I guess if you’re going to steal, steal from the best? We’re stealing it back.


THE COMIX – TOUCHE PAS MON SEXE …It might be a dystopia but it’s a spastic and sexy one.


GIORGIO MORODER – UTOPIA ME GIORGIO The name of this Dystopia will be Gorgio. First there was Kraftwerk and then came Moroder and everything was different.


MADONNA – GET INTO THE GROOVE Guilty pleasure maybe, but it’s good. admit it. And she’s another who learned (and stole) from the best.


THE CRYSTALS – THEN HE KISSED ME Romance, tears, and a wall of sound.


THE STOOGES – 1969 Broken glass, sex and a wall of sound.


THE ANIMALS – BRIGHT LIGHTS , BIG CITY Eric Burdon had one of those voices that could stop traffic. Gets us every time.


BEAT HAPPENING – ANGEL GONE the original DIY post punk bedroom pop. Simultaneously dysfunctional and proactive, Calvin Johnson and Beat Happening founded K records and defined the sound of the indie troubadour


SMOKEY ROBINSON + THE MIRACLES – THE TRACKS OF MY TEARS If this song doesn’t melt you, there’s something wrong with you.


J DILLA – TWO CAN WIN when the Donuts LP came out you could feel a shift. the story of it’s making is tragic and the sound is redemptive and nostalgic. Like lying in the living room listening to 45’s in a patch of sun on a Saturday morning.


DE LA SOUL – 3 THE MAGIC NUMBER We just love this record. the skits, the vibe, 1989 was a high water mark for the fun side of hip hop. On the other side of the year money and posturing would have their way and hip hop would never be the same,


Sample of field recording of girls in Washington D.C. playing double dutch. Off this old folk LP called, ‘Old Mother Hippletoe: Rural and Urban Children’s songs’


ULTRAMAGNETIC MCS – FUNKY Ultramagnetic never seems to get their due. They were mighty and their sound both tough and fun. It’s also from that bit of hip hop from the late 80’s, like golden oldies. Someone should really start a golden oldies hip hop radio station.


HIGHLIGHTERS BAND – THE FUNKY 16 CORNERS This song is so banging it’s criminal. That’s funky four to the right, funky four to the left, funky four to the back and funky for to the front. 16.


MFSB – LOVE IS THE MESSAGE It would be nice if we could just burn down the memory of Studio 54 and all the tacky pop culture references to disco and just get into it.


X RAY SPEX – IDENTITY No one ever screamed it quite so well.


THE MISFITS – SKULLS Okay, the lyrics are extremely ugly and more than a bit misogynistic but the man had a way with a hook. Combining the best of 50’s B movies with an adrenaline kick of 50’s pop. It’s always Halloween.


WARREN SMITH – RED CADILLAC AND A BLACK MUSTACHE Recorded at Sun around 1956 this is perfect, simple, 4 chords proto-punk. Jonathan Richmond in a ducktail.


MAJESTIC ARROWS – IF I HAD A LITTLE LOVE ( REHEARSAL TAPE)Closing it down with a final slow dance. This comes on a Numero Label soul comp. Excellent.

RADIO THITH

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Zine Of The ‘week’ #2
The World Of Jesse Hlebo

we met Jesse through a pal in L.A. when we were looking for someone to write a piece for us about the punk scene in there.. We were immediately blown away and asked him to do a few more things for us (see here, here & here). Jesse is an amazing photographer but he’s also just an incredible facilitator and creator of things. Since we first met him, Jesse moved to NY, started a record label, published high quality art zines, got involved in organizing a ton of art and rock shows, graduated art school and turned 21. He’s high on our list of people we expect to change the world.

-How long have you been publishing and how did you start?
The first thing I published was an online zine called Commonism, in 2006. The goal of the project was to facilitate community through association in the DIY scenes throughout Orange County, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. I had felt there was a disparity in those communities and wanted to create a sense of belonging and overall connection between them. The zine was published three times and then I moved to NY.
I did a number of short run zines between Commonism and my next major project, _ Quarterly, which was started during a phone conversation with Justin Sloane. He lives in LA and we went to Art Center together, he’s one of the best designer’s I know so I’m totally honored to be working on _ Quarterly with him.
In 2009 my friend Alec Dartley, who runs the record label Aagoo, offered to help me start my own label, that’s how Swill Children got started. I wanted to do a project that connected many things at once rather than being solely a label or publisher or whatever, which is why I refer to it as an umbrella; it encompasses many different projects under one heading but in the end it’s all just one big project.

-How do you fund it and how do you distribute it?
Alec’s helped me out with some of the musical releases and I’ve just put my own money into the other projects. I bought a Risograph machine that I use to print most of the printed releases, record covers and whatever else fits into the machine. I sell mostly through the site and at book/zine fairs but also have a number of relationships with stores throughout the US. I’m working on getting distribution soon though because that side of things is a whole other job in itself…



-Is it a labour of love?
Totally. I try and make everything as cohesive on a whole and as well made as possible and the most I could ever hope for is people to be psyched on it and break even on costs! It’s beginning to pick up a bit more so that’s becoming a reality, totally amazing.

What else are you working on?
I’m working on curating this series of four Showpaper’s, a free bi-weekly publication that has a work of art on one side and a listing of all the all ages shows here in NY, they’ll all be releasing throughout the next couple months. The series coincides with an exhibition Showpaper is having at EFA (the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts) in Manhattan. Once all the issues are out, 500 will be repackaged and include an accompanying booklet of text that’ll count as the fifth issue of _ Quarterly, the print series acting as the sixth issue.
I just got done designing a t-shirt for my friends band Hunters that I’m pretty psyched on and I’ve been helping my friend Hisham out with his new sunglasses project called Phosphorescence. When I’m not doing that stuff and freelance work I’ve been making art, writing, reading, and attempting to watch every Robert Altman film by the end of the month!




-Who are your collaborators?
I work a lot with Justin Sloane, he’s the designer of _ Quarterly and any time I can, I integrate him into other projects too. My good friend Grant Willing and I work on a number of projects together and he helps a lot with Swill Children. I’m in the process of finishing an edition with my friend Milano Chow that’s suffered some logistical issues. Hisham Bharoocha and I have been working on a number of projects together as well, he’s going to contribute something to Swill Children soon too once he has time. There’s so many other people that I’ve been working and collaborating with though: Alec Dartley, Chelsea Hodson, Anne Lai, Diwa Tamrong, Sebastian Mlynarski, Cory Hanson, Aliya Naumoff, Joe Ahearn, Erik Carter, Sarina Dailey, Todd P, David Potes, Michael Ray-Von, and there’s always more!!

-Anything you would like to add?
When I was younger I felt like I could never do anything that other people would value and was so inspired by the Hardcore, DIY, skateboarding and associated contemporary art scene because of its empowerment to anyone willing. It really pushed me to pursue the things I wanted to do without feeling like I was incapable. I’d love to tell kids who are struggling to do something with themselves that you can totally go after the things you want to do, you just have to be positive and resist the temptation of constant cynicism, it doesn’t benefit anyone/thing and can prevent you from doing something rad with your life.


see more Jesse here here here and here

Zine Of The Week

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PVT
“Church With No Magic”


Loving this new LP from our label mates PVT. It’s incredibly lush and dreamy but in an almost violently jerky way. Little by little album pulls you in further and deeper and by tracks 4 – 6 it feels as if it’s describing a really unified and unique picture of the world. “The Quick Mile” “Window” and ‘Crimson Swan’ feeling almost like a garage band doing IDM Arvo Pärt.

It comes out next week.
Grab it here:
More here:

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MNDR E.P.E


We played a show in London a couple of weeks ago with MNDR. and in addition to bonding a little over our mutual California roots, we really dug her set.
Finally had a chance to listen to the EP “E.P.E.” and it’s fairly banging. Big vocals, big beats, big synths. But it’s the less banging of all the tracks “I Go Away” that’s our current favorite. It’s all melancholic and heart broken. A torch song of the sort that demands a blustery autumn day, a corvette and a long coast line. Both it and “Fade To Black” work best because they seem less interested in calling the kids out on the floor and seem more tuned into something introspective. Plus her blog is fairly awesome: mndrmndr.com/blog

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PIGEONS video!
“Laughing like a right loon
/slavering at the silvery moon
/waiting for the room to fall in.”

<
The first single off the new LP. Directed by DANIELS.

When we started making the video the two Daniels asked about the main character in the lyrics and we said,
“She’s drifting between weekends with her friends in the city center. There’s dirty pigeons wandering around. In the city, even the birds are ugly and filthy. She sneaks out the house. She’s got a crush and they hook-up but she’s doing it more out of boredom and he’s doing it because he’s a teenage boy. It’s like a looped narrative, every weekend, the same thing. She makes mistakes, possibly very, very bad mistakes but she’s always in control. She’s smarter than most of the people she meets. Up on the roof she looks at the city and the pigeons flying in circles above and wonders why don’t they just fly away?”

What we liked most was how they took our story and went in their own direction so the video almost becomes like a new verse to the song… a totally insane magic realist verse.

The single is out as a 12″ and digitally Worldwide on 13 September (6 September North America), backed with remixes by Blawan and Walls. The full album comes out a week later!
More here
Pre-order the single here
Pre-order the LP here


and here’s the full lyrics.

PIGEONS

Saturday comes,
Sunday comes, we go…
We go…
Saturday comes,
Sunday comes, we go…
We go…

Kicking on the edge of town
Counting all the pigeons down
Walking in the steps of men.
I have the feeling they’re not breathing.

She’s shaking like a rattle
Sneaking out, the hour’s still
Waiting for the room to fall in
Watching the time unwind.

Saturday, Saturday
Saturday comes,
Sunday comes, we go…
We go…
Saturday, Saturday
We go…

Kicking on the edge of town
Counting all the pigeons down
Walking in the steps of men.
I have the feeling they’re not bleeding.

Laughing like a right-loon
Slavering at the silvery moon
Waiting for the room to fall in
Waiting for him to come.

Saturday, Saturday
Saturday comes,
Sunday comes, we go…
We go…
Saturday, Saturday
We go…

She is still not still is not still.
He is here and not here at all.

Cold grey morning,
Waking in his room she goes
Crawling out the window,
Climbing up the crooked stairs.
Above the ceiling leaning tracing pigeons
Turning circles in the morning sky.
“I don’t know why, you don’t just fly away,
Fly away!
Fly away!”

Saturday comes,
Sunday comes, we go…
Saturday comes,
Sunday comes, we go…
Saturday comes,
Sunday comes, we go…
I don’t know why, you don’t just fly away,
Away, away, away
Saturday comes,
Sunday comes, we go…
I don’t know why, you don’t just fly away,
Away, away, away
We go…

THITH NEWS

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Hard Times on the Factory Floor


Just picked this up and it’s a flippin’ killer. Track one, ‘Lying’ is all taught, evil, deep basslines revolving around psych vocals while ‘Wooden Box’ shakes violently forward with metallic synth pulses and stabs. Between the both there’s more than a taste of Suicide and Silver Apples making the Factory Floor name remind equally of a Warhol/Joy Division. Clearly they’re not afraid of negative space as both songs build off simple, skeletal beginnings to kind of obliterate everything around them. Clear vinyl too. Nice.



get it here
Myspace them here

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Zine Of The Week #1
Sheffield’s ‘Article’

One of our favorite things to do on tour is look out for local DIY publications. In this new column we reach out to some of the best we’ve found. This week is the magazine ‘Article’. We picked it up while paying the Tramlines Festival in Sheffield last week.

THITH: How long have you been publishing and how did you start?

ARTICLE: We started the magazine a bit over two years ago while we were in our second year of university. There are two of us that do it. We were both doing subjects, philosophy and architecture, that gave us plenty of free time. Working on Article became a sort of creative outlet and a way to do something that felt useful.

THITH: How do you fund it and how do you distribute it?

ARTICLE: We paid for the first two issues by throwing two gigs and charging people on the door. Now on our fourteenth issue, it’s largely paid for by advertising, the sale of t-shirts and some really really generous sponsors. When we started out and were getting 400 printed we would pick them up from the printer behind the train station and then walk up the hill to our house leaving the mags in bars and shops that were open along the way. Since the mag has grown in size and quantity we’ve had to draft in a friend and his car. This last issue was the first one we distributed all over the country. I became intimately familiar with the passenger seat of my mate’s vintage Scirocco.

THITH: Is it a labour of love? What else are you working on?

ARTICLE: Absolutely! We usually get enough cash to pay for printing, but as to the time it takes putting it together, which is a hell of a lot, that is free. Off the back of the mag we’ve started getting graphic design work. Its really fun and quite gratifying too, considering neither of us are technically trained. We’ll see how it goes. I’d love to put off getting a real job for as long as possible. If it doesn’t pick up, I’ll have to keep my job working the bar at a nightclub.





“BETWEEN FAKE AND FICTION: Darko Maver and Elmyr De Hory”
Written by Lucy Dunn From the pages of ‘ARTICLE’ issue 0

The fine lines between the copy, the fake, the reproduction and the homage have become the obsession of countless artists in the 20th and 21st centuries. At a basic level, themes and motifs have been used over and over again in art since antiquity: no one for instance can claim to be the creator of the Madonna and Child motif. Forgery too has been around a long time, and in the highest spheres. Michelangelo faked several archaeological ‘discoveries’ which he claimed were remnants from ancient Rome but which he had in fact made himself. Rubens was known to alter works by other Old Masters in his collection.

I will look at two of the greatest art hoaxes of the twentieth century: the master forger Elmyr de Hory, and the controversial Serbian artist Darko Maver.
The best hoaxes participate in the machinations of the art world to the fullest extent, while at the same time mocking the legitimacy of the self appointed experts and connoisseurs. Hoaxers themselves are intriguing figures, who often seem to feel a real anguish about what they are doing and why they think they are doing it, caught between a belief their skill is a great as the masters they copy, and a cynicism towards those who claim to be able to judge the good from the bad.

Elmyr de Hory became notorious in the 1970s, when he admitted to forging a great number of works of modern masters, including Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Derain, Renoir, Chagall, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Degas. He had an astonishing skill for forgery, and ran off many of his finest works in under an hour. Despite his talent, de Hory aspired to be a genuine artist, and many times throughout his life would attempt to make a living from his own work, but found himself unable to sell it and would inevitably return, often reluctantly, to forgery. He disliked dealing with galleries, and on several occasions entered into partnerships with other fraudsters who would sell the work for him. These partnerships however inevitably led to de Hory being paid a relative pittance for his work, compared to the sums the dealers and galleries were selling them for. After many years on the run from Interpol, he was arrested in 1968 and served several months in a Spanish jail. Ultimately, his activities came to a tragic end. De Hory attempted suicide more than once, and finally took his own life in 1976. At this point, he knew he was due to be extradited to France and sent back to prison, he could no longer make a living from his forgeries which were increasingly recognisable as he got older, he had no money and even the house he lived in was being claimed by one of his exploitative partners who was threatening to evict him.

Darko Maver was a Serbian artist who came to attention of the art world in 1998, when photographs of his wax sculptures began appearing on the internet. These sculptures depicted grotesquely deformed bodies, and were noted for their brutal, unflinching realism. As Maver’s work became known, mystique around the artist grew. He was living and working through the death throws of Yugoslavia, when political dissidents faced heavy punishment including imprisonment. Then there was the nature of his art: as well as the sculptures he would make disturbing public performances, leaving what appeared to be maimed corpses in public spaces for unwitting members of the public to find, and alert the police. Maver was arrested in 1999 and imprisoned in Podgorica, where he later died. A statement announcing his death and a photograph of his body were distributed on the internet. By this time, his work had had gained notoriety and serious appraisal. The Italian pavilion of the 1999 Venice Biennale was given over to a retrospective of Maver.

The life of a hoaxer is naturally a shadowy and dangerous one, and in both cases the level of fakery and deception get much more complex.

What we know about de Hory and his work is complicated by his entanglement with his biographer Clifford Irving, who was subsequently discovered to be a forger himself, faking the ‘authorised’ biography of Howard Hughes. In his biography, de Hory claims authorship of over a thousand works commonly attributed to modern masters. It is not known to what extent this claim is accurate or myth-building. In Orson Welles’ final film F for Fake the final tragedy that de Hory’s life became is explored poignantly by the magisterial Welles. At the beginning of the film Welles promises that for the next hour, everything he says will be absolutely true. But several years later he claimed that everything in the film was fake. Who can be certain whether Welles, who plays the role of both narrator and magician, was trying to build up myths around de Hory, or his own film?

The story of Darko Maver goes far deeper as well. Due to the many hoaxes he had created in his art practice, many people questioned the suspicious nature of his demise, and wondered if it could be a final performance. Had he faked his own death? In fact, shortly after the Biennale retrospective, Eva and Franco Mattes of the art group 0100101110101101.org admitted that they had invented the character of Darko Maver entirely. To prove this, they released a photograph taken in the same cell where Maver was reported to have died, of the actor playing Maver alive and well, holding a magazine reporting his death.

The truth is that Darko Maver never existed; he was not a hoaxer, but a hoax. The photographs of his ‘sculptures’ were actually images of genuine aborted foetuses scanned from medical textbooks. The ‘hoax body’ performances were actually terrifying photographs of genuine corpses which 0100101110101101.org had found online.

Both the creation of Maver and the forgeries of Elmyr de Hory challenge common assumptions of authenticity. The Matteses’ work prompted a lot of soul-searching about the nature of the internet and how much we know or think we know about digital information, drawing attention to how easily we can think we have checked, researched, and reassured ourselves of the truth. The deception reveals the gap that is created when an artwork is translated into different media. At the Venice exhibition, visitors thought they were looking at photographs of wax sculptures, while in fact they were seeing reproduced photographs of unborn babies and human remains.
The lifespan of Darko Maver, from invention to death and Biennale retrospective was less than a year, which showed up the casual way in which media sources repeat what they have heard, authorised by collective wisdom. Afterwards, Antonio Caronia said, ‘If someone in whom I trust doesn’t certificate the existence and the value of an artist, the artist doesn’t exist’

But who to trust? De Hory’s forgeries throw doubt on those figures we would presume we can turn to for verification. With a project like Darko Maver, it is easy to blame our ‘digitised world’ which removes people so far from the ‘genuine article’ that they do not know what they are experiencing. Elmyr de Hory, however, created genuine articles, physical paintings which delighted viewers and fooled the experts. Apparently, he sometimes even fooled the artists themselves: Van Dongen was said to have been shown a de Hory imitation of his style and swear that he had painted it himself. De Hory did more than create skilful reproductions: he created entirely new works in uncanny renditions of the artists’ signature styles. The physical object, as both de Hory and Orson Welles stress in F for Fake, is the test of the so-called expert. Experts, we hope, have proven their knowledge in the chosen subject, and we should expect to be able to treat them as a trusted authority. In the film, Welles says ‘this is not the century of the hoax. We fakers have always been practicing our art. What is new is the expert, who speak with the absolute authority of the computer, and we bow down before them. They are god’s own gift to the faker.’

Well, perhaps.

Forgers often argue that what they do shows up the pomposity of the self-proclaimed expert, and perhaps to some extent they can, but the argument is so often made from the perspective of the egotistic forger who feels himself underappreciated by the critics. It is an attitude encountered time and again from de Hory, filmed casually saying ‘bye bye Picasso!’ as he burns one of his perfect fakes, in Clifford Irving, in Wells himself, dressed as a magician.

Eva and Franco Mattes’ hoax goes so much further, pointing blame at anybody who is in some way interested in either arts or the media. As a joke, the work of Darko Maver is clever, but is very cruel to the casual visitors to the Venice Biennale, for instance, who try to come to terms with the supposedly brilliant sculptures, only to later discover that they had been peering at horrific photographs of real murder victims, real aborted foetuses. The justification for using such images because they were already ‘freely available on the web’ is shaky at best, and damns everyone who uses shared media of any kind, which is to say everybody.

One last story, which shows that once you start delving into the art of fraud and fraud as art, you can find that the labyrinth is far deeper than expected.
The duo behind Darko Maver have recently exhibited a work called Stolen Pieces: fragments which they have chipped away or snapped off from great modern masterpieces in museums all over the world. They even have a fragment of Duchamp’s Fountain. Except that they don’t because in a sense Fountain never existed either. As with Maver, the piece was first brought to the world’s attention via a photograph, this one taken by Alfred Steiglitz, then in an editorial by Beatrice Wood called The Case of R. Mutt (the name signed on Fountain). At this point – or perhaps earlier – the ‘real’ object was lost. Every subsequent object known as ‘Fountain’ in a museum has been a reproduction which has come, via the artist’s authorisation, to stand in for Fountain. Though even if we accept there was such a thing as an ‘original’ Fountain, it may not even have been Duchamp’s at all: he did not claim authorship of the work for several years after it first became famous, and some historians believe that it was actually the work of the eccentric Dada artist Baroness Else Freyberg-Loringhoven. Oh, and there are also critics who claim that Stolen Pieces is itself a faked performance, which in the last analysis would make the fragment a piece of enamel which falsely claims to be a fragment of a copy of a possibly non-existent urinal which Duchamp may have lied about inventing.

Art forgery, whether it done openly, or as a hoax, or as a hoax of an entirely different hoax, has been around for a long time, and the layers just keep getting deeper. Ultimately though, the hoaxers tend to find themselves isolated. There are numerous fake and inferior ‘de Horys’ on the market today, which both add to his myth and discredit his reputation. The master himself was swindled many times over in his lifetime. Eva and Franco Mattes live continually on the move, at risk of arrest. It is a practice which, once started, can all too swiftly suffocate the faker under the layers of his own deception.


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“The Ruins of Detroit” photos by Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre
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“Virgo”
Re-Issue of this classic House LP

This August, super cool art publisher Steidl is putting out a really beautiful collection of pictures of abandoned spaces in Detroit by artists Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.


Since the 1960’s, American cities had been going bad. Robert Moses and scores of modernist urban planners experimented on the organism and their failures led to fiscal crisis and the collapse of social infrastructures.
Cities are living organisms. They’re fragile and their relations symbiotic; relying on the people that live inside to keep it whole and growing strong. We live in cities and depend on them not just for our beds but for our inspiration and creative health. If left malnourished the city gets sick or injured.


By the mid to late eighties, decline was in it’s final stages. The golden age of soul, of Motown, of funk and disco was over and an entire generation of kids had already come up afterwards to go popping, locking and inventing new styles that were already dominating the U.S. charts. But some of the kids in places like Detroit and Chicago were growing inspired in absence and they were beginning to make another language. Using recently affordable synths and drums machines to rebuild a new approximation of soul and funk and they did it in gutted warehouses and industrial spaces left rusting. The roots of House and Techno are dug in that rotting of American cities.

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Originally released in 1989 and already somewhat late to the Trax party, Vertigo’s self-titled debut is Parliament meets Kraftwerk and still as startling, orginal and alien as it must have been when it first came out.

Eric Lewis and Merwyn Sanders grew up in isolation from the scenes in Detroit and New York. Insular to their scene in Chicago they were little kids playing in funk and soul cover bands before they were even teenagers. The Chicago scene was growing, simple explosive venues stripped of everything but the music pumped to body rattling volume and fuelled on a need to connect and let go. Lewis & Sanders began hanging out in the clubs, at ‘The Warehouse’, ‘The Music Box’, ‘The Power Plant’, where they would listen to legendary dj’s like Ron Hardy or Frankie Knuckles. When they started producing their own music they did it by building out from sketches inspired by their love for the House Music they were hearing on the South Side. “Song ideas, somewhat unfinished in a sense,” says Merwyn on the liner notes. But these are ideas you dissolve into. Lushly romantic layers of synths building atop lean beats and icy hi-hats. It’s intoxicating, the colors vibrant and seductive. It’s also music made before computers, with simple triggers and synths being played by hand and because of it, there’s a certain looseness and a character that kind of went missing in a lot of the dance music that came after. Above all else, you can feel it. It’s physical music stoking the soul.

Ron Hardy at the Music Box in the mid-80’s

The first 12” is dominated by the powerful instrumentals. “Do You Know Who You Are”, “Vision”, “Take Me Higher” This is music from a future church. Gospel chords, inspirational titles; these are good boys hell-bent on defining their own spirit and sound. Airy synths rising higher, the hi-hat cutting against this smoke, while faster hooks play out poly-rhythmically and pads play out like a choir.

By contrast, the second 12 is strict and sinister. “Ride” is a dark cycle of pulsing and swelling hooks swinging around the words, “It’s time to ride the wave, ride with me.” They’re spoken softly and smoothly over and over and the track is simply incredible. As is “All The Time” with it’s sly slapped bass and menacing deep chords.


This is an empty husk of a city. A future space removed of all but brief reminders of the world that was.

“Ruins are the visible symbols and landmarks of our societies and their changes, small pieces of history in suspension. The state of ruin is temporary by nature, the volatile result of the end of an era and the fall of empires. This fragility, the time elapsed but even so running fast, lead us to watch them one very last time: being dismayed, or admiring, wondering about the permanence of things.”
-Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre

Check out more of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s work here
Grab “Virgo” here
and see more of the abandoned building of Detroit here

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