musique concrete make-do

heavy metal

In October 2009 Printed Matter will be publishing
a signed & numbered edition of 150 small booklets
containing approx. 50 loose, b&w, 35mm photos of
sculptures and gravestones Scott Treleaven took
in the Cimitero Monumentale, Milan.
Produced especially as a fundraiser for Printed Matter

the crazy cute-ness

picked up the
new anp quarterly
at FAMILY
it looks good

REE MORTON
at the DRAWING CENTER

Alistair Frost at Gavin Brown

GILLIAN WELCH

Gillian Welch's TIME THE REVELATOR,

i think will pretty much stay on my top ten list...

THE GHOSTLY ONES

How Gillian Welch and David Rawlings

rediscovered country music.

by Alec Wilkinson

Gillian Welch is a singer and songwriter whose music is not easily classified-it is at once innovative and reminiscent of past rural forms-and David Rawlings is her partner. They were in Asheville, North Carolina, making a brief tour from Nashville, where they live. The next day, the writer accompanied them to their next gig, in Carrboro, NC. He asked Rawlings about his childhood and background as they had breakfast at Denny’s. Rawlings grew up in Slatersville, Rhode Island, and began playing guitar when he was 15. He tends to brood, and there’s a mournful cast to his thinking. Welch is tall and slender. She has a long, narrow face, a sharp chin, and a toothy smile. She’s 36 and adopted. Onstage, she bends her head over her guitar, like a figure in a religious painting. Rawlings says almost nothing onstage and plays with his eyes closed. Their music is deceptively complex, despite its simple components of two voices, two guitars. The broadest category into which it fits is country music. Welch and Rawlings are portrayed as defenders of a faith-old-time string musicians. The music they play contains pronounced elements of old-time music, string-band music, bluegrass, and early country music, but they diverge from historical models by playing songs that are meticulously arranged and that include influences from R & B, rockabilly, rock and roll, gospel, folk, jazz, punk, and grunge. Welch’s narratives tend to be accounts of resignation, misfortune, or torment. Her characters include itinerant laborers, solitary wanderers, misfits, poor people, outlaws, criminals, love-wrecked women, etc. Her imagination is sympathetic to outcasts who appeal to God and a number of her songs are written from the male point of view. She admires the troubadour songwriters Bob Dylan and Hank Williams. She was born in New York in 1967. Mentions her adopted parents, Ken and Mitzie Welch, who were also musicians. Welch and Rawlings appear often at the Grand Ole Opry. They also perform in small clubs around the country. They play very quietly and audiences attend them closely. Welch’s range is not wide and her voice has a mournful, vernacular quality. She conveys emotions through dynamics and absorption with the narrative. At Carrboro, they played a club called Cat’s Cradle and, as on many occasions, they shared the bill with the Old Crow Medicine Show. Rawling recounted Welch’s experimental college days. Welch says that when she discovered bluegrass music, it was “like an electric shock…” When Welch and Rawlings sing together, their voices fit so tightly that they seem welded. Rawlings does not always match Welch’s phrasing-he’s a strikingly inventive guitarist. Welch began dating Rawlings at the Berklee College of Music, in Boston. After school, they both moved to Nashville and Welch began to make the weekly rounds of songwriters’ nights at the local clubs. In 1995, they were signed to a recording contract by Almo Sounds. Welch showed the writer some of the clubs where she and Rawlings had played Writer’s Nights in the early 1990s. Some critics claim that, as the daughter of L.A. musicians, Welch doesn’t have the right to play music reserved for poor people or laborers. In response, she has wondered whose blood runs through her veins. The writer accompanied Welch and Rawlings to an ice-cream place in Nashville. One of Welch’s former teachers said Welch didn’t “sing notes; she sang feelings and ideas.”

robert ryman

this is the one

GEORG HEROLD

at CFA

Keith Haring
Homemade Christmas Ornaments

"Since the 1960s, Niele Toroni has committed himself to investigating how his particular concept of painting--imprints of a paint-laden #50 brush made repeatedly at perpendicular 30 centimeter intervals--subtly evidences human touch in the same moment that it obliterates the brushstroke as emotive or psychological record. This physical and conceptual dichotomy creates many thoughtful contradictions within his work: the material existence of applied paint with its lack of status as a material object; the systematic sameness of his application with the uniqueness of each imprint; and the manner in which the architectural details and boundaries of a given space serve to both limit and support his work."
from the Renaissance Society

you can't read
in your car.
I miss NYC


first image from the Walker Evans subway photo series MANY ARE CALLED (1966)

PLEASE BROWSE

end of summer end-all mix
click the cassette

do your own sequence (aka shuffle) but here's mine...

1. Lust For Life - Girls
2. Puttin' On The Ritz - Judy Garland
3. Three - The Cure
4. People Get Ready - The Housemartins
5. 7/23 - Magik Markers
6. Todenhausen Blues - Lawrence
7. Stroke It Noel - Big Star
8. ain't no sunshine - horace andy
9. Eye in the Sky - Gary War
10. Stately, Yes. - Efdemin
11. Where's The Money? - holger czukay, jah wobble, jaki liebzeit
12. Time Warp - Atlas Sound
13. Chasm - Shit Robot
14. Out Of Reaches - Stephen Malkmus
15. Venutian Lady - Paul Pena
16. We Must Be In Love - Slim Smith
17. Blenhein Shots - Swell Maps
18. L.A. - The Fall
19. Voodoo Ray - A Guy Called Gerald
20. Sweat Me - John Roberts
21. For Baby Oh - Cymande
22. Red Sleeping Beauty - McCarthy
23. The Executioner's Song - Cass McCombs
24. Mirror’s Image - The Horrors
25. Daft Punk Rave - Zomby
26. Landebahn - Moebius & Plank
27. Most of All - Morgan Geist
28. The Process - Section 25
29. Candelighted - Serena-Maneesh
30. She's Leaving The Bank - Ry Cooder
31. Mezzo Forte - Burning Star Core

stanislaw lem

albert pinkham ryder

Terre Thaemlitz on

Terre Thaemlitz on “Dazzle Ships” by OMD

custom made

I have always coveted
my friend Ryan's handmade tote bags
and now he's made one for me!
(and can for you as well...)
check it here.

stoked!