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.

See more and get back-issues of ARTICLE here.

]]> http://thehundredinthehands.com/zine-of-the-week-1-sheffields-article/feed/ 0 http://thehundredinthehands.com/detroitvirgo/ http://thehundredinthehands.com/detroitvirgo/#comments Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:29:33 +0000 Jason http://thehundredinthehands.com/?p=2991 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.

///////


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

]]> http://thehundredinthehands.com/detroitvirgo/feed/ 0 http://thehundredinthehands.com/live-clips-2-new-tracks/ http://thehundredinthehands.com/live-clips-2-new-tracks/#comments Fri, 25 Jun 2010 13:29:52 +0000 Jason http://thehundredinthehands.com/?p=2949
See all 4 clips here:

]]> http://thehundredinthehands.com/live-clips-2-new-tracks/feed/ 1 http://thehundredinthehands.com/rules-the-waves-moving-to-the-uk-for-the-summer/ http://thehundredinthehands.com/rules-the-waves-moving-to-the-uk-for-the-summer/#comments Thu, 03 Jun 2010 18:32:45 +0000 Eleanore http://thehundredinthehands.com/?p=2936 After this US tour, we’re going to shift to London while we play a bunch of festivals. We’ll be gone all of July & August. Out of the Brooklyn humidity!
The Warp folks were asking us what we thought about it all, you know, Britan as such and we said…

Jason “We both grew up with anglophile dads well steeped in British music. Beatles in the crib, wot wot. Mine subscribed to Q and in those pre-Nirvana ‘Nevermind’ days, UK mags were about the only place you could find out about the good bands. Bands like the Smiths were not making it on national television in America while, ‘our’ bands like Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. were all but invisible. First place I used to go when I walked in a record shop was the NME and The Face to start flipping through reading reviews before heading over to the ‘Alternative/Import’ section. I can still remember clearly staring at picture in Melody Maker of kids in ridiculously baggy jeans and floppy hats milling outside a Happy Mondays show and thinking it was about the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Manchester, so much to answer for. Seriously, I still get psyched when we end up in some of these places. And the first time I got reviewed in Q and NME, it was a real milestone.”

Eleanore “Last fall, we came over to work on the LP with Richard X for two weeks. He took us around to some of his DJ nights and we were really excited to be seeing a bit more of London than we usually do on tour. It was awesome to just walk around go to the Tate Modern and be able to hangout in these shops like Rough Trade and Pure Groove. England just seems to get so much more excited about music than they do in the states. And what Jason’s talking about really hasn’t changed too much, it seems like we almost always have one eye clued toward the UK. Habitual Guardian readers. The fact that we’re going to be over and playing these festivals with some of our favorite bands and getting a chance to get out of London and see even more is amazing.”

Jason “And then there’s the Roast. We’re coming over for about 9 weeks in July/August, which means at least 9 Sunday Roasts. Seriously. This is a big deal to us. It might be the single greatest cultural achievement the British have given the world.”

Here some of our favorite all time British bands and a playlist of 101 bands from Ingerland, Ireland & Scotland!












see all 101 here

]]> http://thehundredinthehands.com/rules-the-waves-moving-to-the-uk-for-the-summer/feed/ 2 http://thehundredinthehands.com/new-dates-ep-out-next-week/ http://thehundredinthehands.com/new-dates-ep-out-next-week/#comments Wed, 12 May 2010 15:25:43 +0000 Eleanore http://thehundredinthehands.com/?p=2891
With the new EP out we’re announcing a run of June dates in the U.S.


Thursday, June 3
San Francisco
Popscene
more

Friday, June 4
L.A. w/ The Golden Filter
Spaceland
more

Thursday, June 09
Chicago w/The Golden Filter
The Empty Bottle
more

Friday June 10
Cleveland w/The Golden Filter
The Grog Shop
more

Saturday, June 11
Detroit w/The Golden Filter
The Majestic Cafe
more

Sunday, June 12
Toronto w/The Golden Filter
Wrongbar


Thursday, June 17
Boston
The Middle East
w/The Golden Filter
http://www.mideastclub.com/

Saturday, June 19
Philadelphia
Kung Fu Necktie
w/Golden Filter
http://kungfunecktie.com/contact.php

Thursday, June 24
Brooklyn
Warsaw
Au Revoir Simone
The Hundred In The Hands
CALLmeKAT
Runaway

http://www.warsawconcerts.com/

Friday, June 25
D.C.
Liberation Dance Party
DC9
open bar 9pm-10:30pm (rail cocktails only)
http://www.dcnine.com/event/the-hundred-in-the-hands/


And then…
Saturday July 3
Wireless Festival in Hyde park, London
LCD Soundsystem
2manydjs
DJ Shadow
UNKLE
Missy Elliott
Magnetic Man
Sub Focus
Jamie Lidell
Hurts
The Big Pink
New Young Pony Club
Darwin Deez
Phenomenal Handclap Band
Beatbullyz
The Hundred In The Hands
Kids On Bridges
Pretty Lights
plus special guest:
Snoop Dogg

holy moly! http://www.wirelessfestival.co.uk/home/

Saturday July 17
Latitude Festival, Sunrise Stage,
Henham Park, southwold
Sunrise Coast, Suffolk
http://www.latitudefestival.co.uk/lineup/index.aspx


More soon.

]]> http://thehundredinthehands.com/new-dates-ep-out-next-week/feed/ 0 http://thehundredinthehands.com/dressed-in-dresden-back-in-printall-new-12/ http://thehundredinthehands.com/dressed-in-dresden-back-in-printall-new-12/#comments Tue, 30 Mar 2010 12:04:06 +0000 Eleanore http://thehundredinthehands.com/?p=2534
Dressed In Dresden along with awesome new mixes from Max Pask, Various Productions and Kyle Hall.
Order the new Dressed In Dresden single here

]]> http://thehundredinthehands.com/dressed-in-dresden-back-in-printall-new-12/feed/ 0 http://thehundredinthehands.com/keep-it-easy-minkisi-minkisi-and-nkondi-from-the-congo-basin/ http://thehundredinthehands.com/keep-it-easy-minkisi-minkisi-and-nkondi-from-the-congo-basin/#comments Sun, 28 Mar 2010 14:32:45 +0000 Jason http://thehundredinthehands.com/?p=2702 The image on the cover of our ‘This Desert’ EP is of an African sculpture from the Congo Basin. This sculpture is a type of Minkisi known as Nkondi. Here are some more and a brief description of what it’s all about.

Minkisi (Nkisi singular) is a term for a wide range of religious objects that originate in the middle region of Africa extending through the Republic Of Congo, The Democratic Republic Of Congo and Angola that act as a communication between the worlds of the living and the dead. These are sculptures and objects which it is said ghosts and sprits live inside of and use to affect the living world. They are made from various and specific objects like ceramic vessels, leaves, cloth, shells or wooden sculptures into which different ‘medicines’ are bound and enclosed. The combination of the object, the medicine and the ritual acts of enclosing allows a spirit or ancestor to inhabit the vessel and to guide and empower him or her with healing and spiritual properties or antagonistic and retributive events on behalf of the owner.

Often made as figures that hold spears, musical instruments or other objects in their hands, Nkondi are specific Minkisi intended to act for the good of the community by protecting and defeating criminals, enemies and other evil forces. Typically ritual medicines and objects are placed in a cavity in the figure’s belly which is closed off behind a mirror. Mirrors allow the spirit to look out and are often placed on the eyes. Other Minkisi are also attached in small sacks around the neck or limbs of the figure and collectively they shape the power of Nkondi.
Most Nkondi are covered in nails or sharp pieces of metal which are hammered into the scuplture to awake the spirit within and get him to act.
Despite this seemingly violent act toward the Nkondi, Nkondi are thought to be volatile and temperamental representing the more aggressive tendencies of the dead and as such they are treated with reverence and respect.

Describing the above figure known as Nkisi Lunkanka, Wyatt Macgaffey qoutes Matunta at length.
“Lunkanka is an Nkisi in a statute and it is extremely fierce and strong. It came from Mongo, where many of our forebears used to go to compose it, but now it’s banganga have all died out. When it had nganga it was very strong, and so it destroyed whole villages. It’s strength lay in seizing [it's victims], crushing their chests, making them bleed from the nose, excrete pus; driving knives into their chests, twisting necks, breaking arms and legs, knotting their intestines, giving them nightmares, discovering witches in the village, stifling a man’s breathing, and so on. When it was known that Lunkanka was exceedingly powerful, a great many people trusted in it for healing, placing oaths and cursing witches and magicians, and so on.”
Lunkanka’s hands cup his ears so he can listen for slights and other insults which act as nails might to awaken the Nkisi to retaliate.

“The invocations addressed to Nkondi are extraordinary hymns to violence, transferring into the realm of the imagination the real violence of a harsh existence amidst disease, enslavement, tropical storms, and, since the mid-1880’s, the overwhelming violence of the European invasion.”- Wyatt MacGaffey, ‘Complexity, Astonishment and Power’.

A wide range of complex symbols, colors and ritual events shape and guide the spirit allowing the human world to communicate with the dead. Nonetheless, Minkisi are said to have their own will and exist on a plain separate from human events but affect all manner of special human powers. “The Nkisi has life; if it had not, how could it heal and help people? But the life of an Nkisi is different from the life of people. It is such that one can damage it’s flesh, burn it, break it, or throw it away, but it will not bleed or cry out… Nkisi has an inextinguishable life coming from it’s source.”-Nsemi Iskai quoted in ‘Flash Of The Spirit’ by Robert Farris Thompson.

The making of a Minkisi is a very specific act. The figures are composed in strict fashions by certain people within the community who have the specialized knowledge needed to bridge the divide between the worlds.
“The construction of an Nkisi—the ingredients and the songs—must follow the orginal model. If you put the ingredients together helter-skelter you injure the Nkisi and he will become angry over your failure to arrange the ingredients in the proper order.”-Nsemi, quoted in ‘Complexity, Astonishment and Power’ by Wyatt Macgaffey.
Likewise, only people with the unique knowledge of how to communicate with an Nkisi will act as diviner and make attempts to provoke the ghosts within.

Despite the intense image of the Nkondi, neither the figure nor the nail are essential and in some cases Nkondi are housed in seemingly docile vessels like pots or tied cloth. “To look at, all minikondi have feet on which to go about when they wish to wreck a village, but Mukwanga flies to the attack. It has tied around it the feathers of hawks and owls to show that these birds are the servants of the Mukwanga, who fly off whenever it wishes to seize someone to shed his blood. The Master who sends them is the ghost of a man who was violent in his lifetime in the village; this ghost is taken by the nganga to be the soul of Mukwanga when he composes it” (Kwamba, Cahier 141)

In this cosmology, nature is viewed as cyclical. Events of the past exist simultaneously within the present, the living and the dead sharing parallel realms despite neither being able to fully see or understand each other. Because Minkisi operate in a place between the living and the dead, they are said to have special knowledge. A Nkisi will know things beyond the owner or maker’s knowledge. Their activation is an act of communication between the worlds but is a translated dialogue because there are certain things and events in and of themselves that can only be known by the spirit itself. Likewise, the maker of a Nkisi and the diviner who will speak with Nkisi will each be aware of certain traits and powers the other does not understand and that it’s owner will not be aware of.

Minkisi are often made in pairs; Husbands and wives. This is the wife to the male figure above. Like a sitcom, it’s the wife who soften the husband and keeps him out of trouble. “If there were two males, many houses would be burned by the storm,” says Makundu Tito quoted in ‘Complexity, Astonishment and Power’. This is another kind of secret knowledge; a private language exchanged between husband and wife and spirit to spirit, impossible to be understood entirely from the outside.
Years ago, I actually owned a pair of male Nkondi. I came home late one night to discover the basement had exploded burning the bodega which was directly beneath my apartment. Burn marks were visible all the way up the walls and in attempt to save the building, the firemen had completely destroyed my apartment pulling down walls and ceilings and smashing all the windows. I managed to salvage a good deal of my things, but somehow, those menacing figures just didn’t seem quite so benign anymore and made me a little uneasy. I gave them away to friends who were helping me out.
Nothing happened to their apartment.

In a historical sense, Minkisi also posses multiple identities that can be thought of as secret histories each with contradictory and unique meanings beyond those originally intended.

Nikisi like objects exist throughout the Americas. The example above is of two cuban Lucero Mundo, (’star of the world’), terra-cotta pots ‘charged’ with specific earth and spiritual objects that work in much the same way as Minkisi in a lineage that extends all the way back to the Congo Basin. The perseverance of their belief throughout the slave trade tell unique stories in themselves that are in a sense like a communication with ancestors and the dead. These American Minkisi possess their own secret knowledge of the African Diaspora and the influence and inclusion of traditions incorporated from other African regions and the West. “Kongo-Cubans of the nineteenth century made minkisi-figurines to mystically attack slaveholders and other enemies, and for spiritial reconnaissance.”-Robert Farris Thompson in ‘Flash Of The Spirit’.

Throughout the colonial period, Europeans called Minkisi Fetishes which they themselves fetishised and valued for their mystery and what they suggested of a ‘primitive’ culture and the ‘dark continent’. This western worshiping of the Nkondi and other Minkisi creates another secret-history which tells of European exploitation and observation. Indeed, many of the great Nkondi and Minkisi from the 19th century now live in art museums throughout America and Europe. Within Africa today a vibrant business of creating new, ‘soul-less’, Minkisi-like objects complete with faux rusted nails and aged cloth exists to supply tourist curio shops.

Staring out from under glass in the bright museum light would seem a rather lonely way to spend an ‘inextinguishable life’.

]]> http://thehundredinthehands.com/keep-it-easy-minkisi-minkisi-and-nkondi-from-the-congo-basin/feed/ 0 http://thehundredinthehands.com/the-rapture-make-a-recordin-the-studio-with-vito-roccoforte/ http://thehundredinthehands.com/the-rapture-make-a-recordin-the-studio-with-vito-roccoforte/#comments Fri, 19 Mar 2010 23:41:26 +0000 Eleanore http://thehundredinthehands.com/?p=2628 Vito is one of the greatest dudes in the world. When we were getting our thing together, Vito was a huge help showing us the ropes on the MPC and tracking some live drums for our record. We’ve been playing each other demos over the last year and we are totally psyched to hear how their album comes out! A couple weeks ago he sent us this update from Paris.

We’ve been at Zdar’s studio, Motorbass, in Paris for almost 3 weeks now and we’re getting pretty close to done and ready to mix. It’s all been great so far. We’ve finished 3 songs with rough mixes and I think they sound amazing. It’s been super cold in Paris and snowing some but really pretty. We’re staying in a nice area called Montmarte. I’ve also eaten a lot of cheese, it’s insane. Hopefully we’ll be done in a couple more weeks.

Last summer we really opened up with writing and things just started coming together. We were all excited and happy. Within a month we had written loads of new demos. And the songs were all very different. Everything just seemed open, we were freer than we had been and trying lots of things we hadn’t in a long while. It’s more like when we were kids and you just wanted to get into everything that was exciting. On ‘People’ we tried to focus in on a definitive sound from one end of the album to the other to create a unified record in that way. But ‘Echoes’ had been something else it was more all over the place and it’s unity was in the connections it made. I feel like we’re going back to that place.

Usually these things take a long time for us. It takes a while before we really click in to knowing how the record should be made. But once we know where we are, things happen quickly. We spoke with Zdar on the phone and right away it seemed like he had the right feel. We wanted someone who was going to preserve the rough edges and some of the live-ness of the demos. He got it and so in December, not long after we first spoke, he flew over to Brooklyn and we tracked for a week at Kemado studios. We tracked 15 songs there. Most of my drums were done then. So, for me the studio now is a lot more relaxed. I have been doing a lot of percussion and cymbal overdubs but I get to mostly hang back and try and get a better perspective on how things are coming together… and eat cheese. It’s insane.

But, I’m still not sure about what the album as a whole is. It’s really hard to tell looking from the inside out. Haven’t been able to step far enough away yet to see the whole thing if you know what I mean. It still seems closer to Echoes to me because we are working with a broader base of songs and ideas again. And it does feel a lot more like us as a band playing together than in the records we made in the past. To try and get the right vibe, we have purposefully tried not to edit as much and have also not done a crazy amount of takes.

I’m always concentrating on whatever track we are working on but in the back of my head there is always the thought about how it will work on the album. On Echoes I spent a long time really trying to figure out how to sequence the record and trying to get all the different ideas to feed into one another. Some people really gave us a hard time about it but other people thought it was great. On this album though we have left most of the responsibility of how the songs will work together as an album in the capable hands of Zdar.

]]> http://thehundredinthehands.com/the-rapture-make-a-recordin-the-studio-with-vito-roccoforte/feed/ 0 http://thehundredinthehands.com/that-holy-ghost-living-in-the-studio/ http://thehundredinthehands.com/that-holy-ghost-living-in-the-studio/#comments Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:09:10 +0000 Eleanore http://thehundredinthehands.com/?p=2284 Our Brooklyn neighbors, Holy Ghost! have been working on their debut album. With 4 finished mixes and 8 to go, they expect to finish up in time for New Years. We can’t wait for it! In the meantime, Alex and Nick give us a peek at how it’s going.

Alex-We’ve been working on our album for roughly 2 years but, it’s hard to define because we’ve been making music together in one way or another for a long, long time. Nick and I were in a band in High School together that eventually became Automato, a short lived outfit through which we met  James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy. When Automato disbanded, Nick and I just kept working on music together and occasionally with James, Tim, and Juan Maclean. Somewhere along the line Holy Ghost was born. But…. I like to use “Hold On” in October of 2007 as a marker for beginning this album. So like 2 years. ( Defensive disclaimer:  we did 13 remixes in this time period and toured as dj’s extensively so that contributed to the delays!)


We  joke that the copy on our record is going to set a record for length and number of names. The first real sessions were in Woodstock in the summer of 2007 at a studio called Flymax (r.i.p). We had written a bunch of songs and recorded a lot of it but needed a real studio to record drums and vocals the way we wanted to. Juan came with us and he basically engineered the sessions. He worked really hard and taught us a lot. He also played an awesome guitar solo on a song called “Static On The Wire.”
The following summer we went into Metrosonic studios in Brooklyn with Tim Goldsworthy for a few days. The centerpiece of those sessions was a song called “Say My Name,” which has my favorite piano sound on the record: an upright recorded through contact mics placed on the interior of the harp. Then in September of this year we went in for our first really extended sessions with Chris Zane at Gigantic studios in Manhattan. We’re sill in there now, mixing the record. Chris basically tied together all the little sessions we had done and helped solidify the various recordings as one piece of work. We also re-tracked almost all of my vocals with him.  Working with Chris has been the most pleasant and relaxed and creative process I’ve experienced.

Oh, we also worked with Eric Broucek at his studio in Brooklyn for the mix of ” I Will Come Back” and with James Murphy on the mix to “Hold On” at Plantain, the DFA Headquarters and studio in the West Village, And of course we work at home all the time, and of course I’m forgetting a lot…
Nick-…And Matt Thornley also helped us mix “I Will Come Back” when it needed some fixing and also helped with the mix of the song we did with Michael McDonald.  All this said though, the majority of the work for the record has really been done at our home studio.  We’ve really only gone to work elsewhere when we needed to do something that we don’t have the means to do at home – like drums or a children’s choir – or when we’re looking for guidance, as has been the case with working with Chris at Gigantic.



Alex-Chris has been tremendous. Having someone there in the role of producer has allowed both of us to take the producer hat off to some extent and focus more on playing, writing, arranging. Having someone edit your vocals, adjust the mic, switch the compressor, etc, removes a lot of the technical focus we usually have and allows us to indulge ourselves a bit as “artists.” That sounds corny, but it’s true, for me at least.
Nick-Yeah, it took some getting used to for me, but it’s really nice having someone else – and someone who’s far more skilled than us – handling the engineering side of things.  Likewise, we both just really enjoy being in a nice, big studio. There was a time when I found it kind of intimidating – like, not knowing my way around, not being able to articulate what I wanted or demonstrate something I’m after.  But having spent so much time in studios over the years, now whenever we have the chance to get out of our own space we’re like kids in a candy store as far as taking advantage of all the things we don’t have at home like specific pieces of gear, or a nice big live room or whatever.



Alex-With remixes and a single like ” I Will Come Back” we approach things from the position of making a 12″ dance single that, ideally, people will dance to, but with an LP you have a larger format to work within so we started thinking about variation in tempo, arrangement, mood, length, etc. And we can also do something that’s maybe not a “single” and that’s ok. But at the same time, I think we’ve also found that we do love singles and we do love pop music and we’re not that interested in making something “weird” or “intelligent” just for the sake of doing it. So hopefully our album will have songs that go nicely into each other but can also be extracted from that context and stand on their own. 


Nick-The general process for writing each song is pretty similar from song to song as far as what each one goes through before it’s finished but, like Alex said, with the LP we’ve allowed ourselves to write songs that don’t have to work on the dancefloor.  I was talking to a friend about writing and recording dance music the other night and we were both saying that there’s something really fun and comforting about working within the constraints of making a 12″ – of course the song has to be okay, and in our case we have to excited about the individual sounds, but at the end of the day it has to “work” when people play it out.  To do that it needs to follow a basic framework of sorts – drums have to be tough, getting slower than 115 BPM or faster than 130 BPM is risky, etc. As fun as it is to work with those constraints, it’s been nice to work without them on some of the songs on the LP.
Alex-There’s a song on the album at 97bpm. It will never be played out in a dance club, but it sounds good in a jeep. That sort of thing.  

More Holy Ghost!:
holyghostnyc.blogspot.com
www.myspace.com/holyghostnyc

Holy Ghost! recommend:
“The new Still Going remix of “Caught Up” by Crazy P, the Terje remix of Shit Robot’s “Simple Things” and the Cut Copy remix of the new Munk single. New Aeroplane vs. Lindstrom, Still Going’s new 12″ on DFA “Spaghetti Circus”, alot of edits by The Revenge,  all the new jams coming out on Wurst, edits by Jacques Renault, Runnaway, Linkwood 10″, new Mr. Chin record “American Standard,”  and generally alot of stuff our friends our making.”  

xox Jerry Fuchs.

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