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The East Coast multimedia enclave of smart young things known as Doplar descend on the excellently named House Of Yes in Brookyln later this month for Doplar Sensebox.
Doplar is an evolving art form and Sensebox is their plaything – running from 9pm to 4am each area of the House Of Yes will be designated to one of the five sensations experienced by sentient beings with perhaps the pleasant sensation your ears operate for the most relevant to these here pages.
Both Wolf + Lamb and the boy Jaar’s Clown N Sunset imprint are well represented with Voices of Black and Pavla & Noura on the bill and there’s some transatlantic DJ backing in the form of Gallic spinette Clara3000 and NYC fixture DJ Ecks.
Further reason to attend comes in the shape of a free custom made popsicle for the first 200 arrivals as well as food from Funkism’s Sindy! Further details can be found at the Doplar facebook page.
In what is a must attend event for all lookbook account holders seeking the next step towards personal enlightenment, Street fashion guru and anthroplogist Ted Polhemus returns to East London this week to discuss the themes and concepts behind The Supermarket Of Style, an addendum chapter to his hugely popular Streetstyle book at Leonard St venue The Book Club.
Taking place on Wednesday evening, the event which is organised by PYMCA will see Tedward discussing his theory that modern fashion relies on “sampling & mixing diverse, eclectic, often contradictory elements into a unique, personal statement.”
Questions will be fielded and books will be signed and drinks will be drunk.
Musical genius comes in many forms, both the sublime and the ridiculous. Sometimes, maybe once in a generation we’re lucky enough to witness an artist who can straddle this divide. One such artist is Arturino Talamonti.
A man possessed of a truly unique voice, a man able to breathe life into the cold sterile works of lesser talents, a real man with real feelings, Arturino Talamonti is almost certainly a man.
Here for your pleasure are two britpop standards given the Talamonti treatment, quite simply unforgettable, the final section of his Manics cover possibly the most emotional piece of music you’ll have ever heard.
For more classic Talamonti interpretations including his tear inducing version of ‘Without You’ head to his MySpace page now.
If you go down to Dalston this Friday do pop into the Superstore where I will playing some second hand disco gems along with Sir Andy Blake, One Pound Vinyl and the Off Modern lot.
You know it’s the ‘festive season’ when the entire female half of the office leaves to queue outside a dodgy ‘art space’ in Hackney for a leftover piece of Christopher Kane chow mein. (Today at 5pm)
To avoid ending up hobbling to the Whitechapel walk-in centre, it is highly advised you bring one of each of the following:
1. A knife
2. A cycling hockey helmet
3. A map of the sale locations (some of them are weird, Cooperative Designs at Darnley Rd? Emma Cook at Shacklewell?)
4. A dummy Chanel 2.55 – to throw across the room as a distraction to those hungry, hungry dogs
5. Your elbows (in case you decided to leave them at home today)
As part of their ongoing 20th Birthday pat on the back Warp have temporarily re-opened their old Sheffield shop. Which is a rather nice touch.
This weekend you can catch Maximo Park and Harmonic 313 doing instore DJ sets, whilst Nightmares on Waxand Hudson Mohawke will be stuck behind the counter.
All of which just gives me an excuse to plug the forthcoming Hudmo album again, which now i’ve listened to it a few times i can confidently say sounds like Rick James slipping you a date rape drug.
I missed the first wave of acid house, my descent into the strange labyrinthian world of clubs, warehouse parties and raves starting around 1992 (which horrifically may still be before some of you were born), but there was still a lingering sense that all the old rules had been swept away and we were working with a clean sheet.
Of course in retrospect we were in many ways retreading a well worn groove laid out by previous generations, but at the time trapped in the eye of the psychedelic hurricane it was easy to believe we were generally pioneering something dangerously new and exciting.
From jungle to electronica every party, frequently in venues which if you managed to clear your head and look through the smoke you realised were quite possibly someone’s office during the week, seemed to throw up strange new sounds which though today might play in the background of a Tampax advert seemed so utterly alien at the time.
Of course nowadays with every piece of music recorded at our virtual fingertips it’s easy to deduce the subtle evolution of music from one form to another, one slight mutation in every generation inexorably leading us forward, but at the time it was easy to assume the mantle of sonic creationists believing that in the blink of an eye we’d somehow conjured up these delirious new sounds.
What did and to some extent does still seem so revolutionary though was how club culture, the good and unfortunately the bad, swept the nation through the mid to late nineties. From underground cult to mainstream hegemony, the rise of dance music and its avatar the DJ was as astonishing as it was unstoppable.
In the short space of a few years I remember going from screaming rows with my parents over the weird druggy music I was listening to, to waking up to the sound of my mother hoovering the house soundtracked by Fatboy Slim’s ‘You’ve Come A Long Way Baby’ album, a remarkably apt title.
One of the best books to make sense of this strange time was Matthew Collin’s Altered State. Published in 1997 it charted the rise of acid house and club culture in loving detail, from the orbital raves to the impact of the Criminal Justice Bill and the pirate radio stations that at one point seemed to be transmitting from every tower block (shout out to Don FM!).
This month sees the release of a new updated version, with Collin charting club culture’s trajectory past ’97 as it rose and rose and then spectacularly collapsed under it’s own weight around the turn of the century. If you were around at the time you’ll want to buy this to remember exactly what on earth you were up to, if you weren’t well buy it and learn from history, so much of what is sometimes missing from today’s commodified club experience can be found within these pages.
Carrying on the theme another book published later this month is Raving ’89, aimed squarely at the coffee tables of those who once wore knocked off smiley t-shirts but now actually own coffee tables. A beautiful collection of Gavin Watson’s photographs from the year acid house exploded, it’s a perfect document of a time before camera phones had become ubiquitous in clubs.
Published by the esteemed chaps over at DJhistory.com, this really is an essential document for anyone interested in seeing the early raw days of rave and has brought back some awful memories of my own sartorial mistakes (the drugs were very strong then, ok!).
For a sneak peak check out this sampler of the book.
Luckily for you we have 2 copies of Altered State and a copy of Raving ’89 to give away, simply email the answer to the question below before Friday 17th July and we will pick a couple of winners at random.
Q. Where was Danny Rampling’s Shoom originally held?
Anyway all this reminiscing calls for some music so what better than a brand new mix of old tunes courtesy of the always quality Placid
You know it’s the ‘festive season’ when the entire female half of the office leaves to queue outside a dodgy ‘art space’ in Hackney for a leftover piece of Christopher Kane chow mein. (Today at 5pm)
