One week of the year, music lovers from all over the world descend upon Miami for the largest music industry gathering of its kind, the Winter Music Conference. Frequented by those in the dance & electronic community, the WMC is host to a myriad of artists, DJs, record label representatives (A&R), producers, promoters, radio and media professionals.
Beyond the conference, surrounding Miami is home to an array of events across the city, including the Ultra Music Festival. Whether you’re sitting down for some authentic Cuban food, or enjoying a nice cohiba poolside, it’s nearly impossible this week to avoid the infectious sound that is the house beat.
KSCR’s own DJ Ahmar aka VFN recently returned from “The Magic City” with a grab bag of promos and new music.
Click Here to view the photos through our friends at Club Soda. Photos taken the weekend of March 26th at the Winter Music Conference, as well as Ultra Music Festival in Miami, Florida.
Big thanks to Paradax Records, Beatport, RVNG Intl, The Opium Group, X-MiX Productions and countless others that make Miami as legendary as its reputation has earned.
The View From Nowhere” airs Tuesday nights from 10PM to Midnight, right here on KSCR.
When In Rome – Movie Premiere (1/27)
Often times, the expression “When In Rome” is misused by powerful celebrities like Ron Burgundy.
Well, we here at KSCR are not in the business of misinforming. Instead, we have Red Carpet Tickets for the Disney movie, “When in Rome” starring Kristen Bell (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Veronica Mars) and Josh Duhamel (Transformers) that we’re looking to give away!Trailer:
The Premiere is on Wednesday, January 27th at 7:00pm. If anyone is interested, please respond via the blog or the KSCR Twitter with your name and e-mail address no later than Monday morning (1/25). 2 pairs of tickets to the red carpet premiere (actors will be there) await for the first listeners to respond. But it doesn’t end there, there are also another 5 pairs of tickets for runner-ups for an advanced screening so hit us up!
Drew Carey Benefit Show at The Hollywood Improv (1/24) Movies not your thing? Well then, how about a comedy show at the legendary Hollywood Improv this Sunday (1/24) with Drew Carey (Whose Line Is It Anyway?, The Price Is Right) and 6 other really funny comedians! All proceeds will be donated to Relief International in aid of Haiti. Enjoy an evening of laughs while raising funds for a great cause!
Again, reply either to this message with your name and e-mail address or via the KSCR Twitter.
And finally, since KSCR loves music, why not end this post with an appropriate song?
When In Rome – The Promise
Get Ready for Another Great Season of Programming here at KSCR.
Over and out.
"The View From Nowhere" - Spinning an eclectic mix of House Music & Electro, spanning the most soulful to the most distorted
Featured on KSCR Radio (http://kscr.org,1560AM) Air Date: 12-08-2009 10pm-12:00am
Photo Credit: http://www.ivetthcser-parsons.com
Announcements: WORLD PREMIERE TRACK: Venecy - Black Sail (Piste) (http://myspace.com/venecy) Etienne De Crecy DJ set @ Control Fridays (Avalon Hollywood 12/11) Photography & Event info Courtesy of Club Soda (http://www.clubsoda.fm) Ticket Giveaways Courtesy of INfamous PR
Tracklist Grandmaster Flash – The Message (pre-show track) VFN/WDPK Intro Junior Boys – Bits & Pieces Pryda vs. PNAU – Baby Bug Stockholm LCD Soundsystem – Get Innocuous (Soulwax Remix) Kraftwerk – We Are the Robots (sample) Telex – Moskow Diskow Force of Nature – I-Iight Modern Talking – Cheri Cheri Lady Kate Bush – Running Up That Hill (Ashley Beedle Edit) Plastique De Reve – Lost in the City Yazoo – Situation (Hercules & Love Affair Remix) Evil Nine – They Live! (Breakbot Remix) Randy Newman – I Love L.A. Klaxons – As Above, So Below (Justice Remix) Venecy – Piste / Black Sail (http://myspace.com/venecy) Rubies – I Feel Electric (TieDie Remix) Erol Alkan & Boys Noize – Waves (Chilly Gonzales Piano Remake) (Interlude) Phillip Glass – Opera “Einstein on the Beach” - Knee Play I Astrolabe – Leave the Station (Pelifics Remix) (sample) Aphex Twin – Vordhosbn Efterklang – Step Aside Ghosthustler – Someone Else’s Ride Morgan Geist – Detroit (c2rmx1 by Carl Craig) Steve Angello and Sebastian Ingrosso – Partouze (Funkagenda Remix) David Bowie – Let’s Dance (Glitch’s 2083 Edit) (http://myspace.com/levonproduction) Paul – I Feel Change (http://www.myspace.com/impaul000) Guns n Bombs – Riddle of Steel (Classixx version) (http://myspace.com/classixxmusic) Midnight Juggernauts – Into the Galaxy Space – Running in the City
Featured Artist: VENECY (http://myspace.com/venecy)
Disclaimer: If the respective artists wish to have these uploads removed, please contact publications@kscr.org and content will be taken down.
So I got to thinking about the Boy Least Likely To again because it occurred to me that their second album was supposed to have come out this summer, and I must own my own copy of “A Balloon On A Broken String” an example them at their very best, all sweet glockenspiel-synth pop and adorable heartfelt lyrics. Unfortunately, that bit about the album coming out this summer was apparently all a lie. I can’t find any evidence of it anywhere. However, rumor has it that their soon to be iconic cartoon characters, which adorn all their albums, will take three dimensional form as knit stuffed animals.
I could not be more pleased about this. A pointless bit of trivia to some, I can’t help but be fascinated by album art and other forms of packaging/merchandising of bands. And this is so cool; the charming, childish and somewhat creepy creatures drawn for the band by Jof Owen’s brother, Tim. And the reason this is so perfect is because their music has been described by those who ought to know (Rolling Stone) as sounding as if, “all your childhood stuffed animals got together and started a band." And soon they will be! So check ‘em out. If you like adorable critter country pop, they’re pretty much the only band working that genre right now.
http://www.myspace.com/theboyleastlikelytouk
I was surprised and touched by the number of men scattered amongst the still predominately female crowd at Ground Zero, silenced and awed as they stared up at the stage where the lovely speaker gestured at the screen as cheery, colorful slides sped by. Dressed chic in all black, with black lustrous fur and incomparable thick, black rubber skin. She was a Guerilla Girl, appearing at USC in her full badass regalia of head to toe black and the iconic rubber gorilla mask. As she turned her head to address the audience, we could see flashes of glittering red from behind the cut out eyeholes; either wicked glasses frames, or the flames of her ardor for activism burning in her eyes. Whichever, just seeing one of the founding Guerilla Girls on the stage was one of the coolest things I’ve gotten to do at USC, or, y’know, ever.
The Guerrilla Girls are a band of female activists who work through art and anonymity to protest the under representation of women and/or minorities in the art world, Hollywood and politics. Through posters, billboards and biting wit they’ve been working since 1985 to redress wrongs and be “the conscience of the art world.” The anonymity is key; all members assume the name of dead female artists, and never appear without their masks. When asked how they settled on this particular persona, she answered: “We decided to be anonymous from the beginning… you couldn’t hate what we were doing because you hated us. Then we realized we needed an identity. One of our early members was a terrible speller, and during one of our meetings she was doodling GO-rilla girls the animal as opposed to GUE-rilla girls the freedom fighters… it confounds expectations and pushes people’s buttons.”
She entered the room after the lights were turned off and the bar closed the curtain to business, and broke the ice by handing out bananas on the way to the stage. The presentation then started with a PowerPoint talk covering the history of the Guerilla Girls activism, a sort of lite intro into what they were all about. It covered them from the beginning, when they were a small band of outsiders and renegades in New York, going out late at night to plaster the city with posters and stickers to the present, with their posters hanging in the TATE permanent collection, and shows at contemporary galleries around the world from Shanghai back to New York again.
Not that the recent somewhat ironic embrace from the art world has dulled their acerbic commentary any. At the recent opening of the Eli Broad gallery at LACMA, the Guerilla Girls protested the under-representation of women artists and artists of color at a tax supported museum, whose mission is purportedly to “educate a culturally diverse population.” When the curator of the Broad collection claimed that Cindy Sherman has forty-nine pieces on display, the Guerrilla Girls responded with another letter, pointing out that there were only four female artists out of thirty, and one black artist out of thirty. These numbers don’t coordinate with the number of women artists, and of artists in minority groups just in the Los Angeles area. It runs into the problem of museums, as elucidated in the Guerilla Girls activity book, as “places where rich people put their stuff.”
http://www.guerrillagirls.com/posters/dearestelibroad.shtml
Not that they are limited to the art world; they have pointed out similar failings in the Hollywood system, and especially recently in the problems of government. My favorite is the “estrogen bomb” a poster and billboard campaign to bomb the various houses of government with estrogen pills to chill them out. They approach everything with a sense of humor; “communication is really important to us… if you don’t have a sense of humor we cannot speak to you.”
It was in that swinging sense of humor that she ended the presentation by getting a guy into skirt. There’s a cool story behind it, of course: the New York Times published an article and accompanying photo entitled “Arnold Glimcher and his Art World All Stars;” all of which were white men. The Guerrilla Girls did a responding poster entitle Hormone Imbalance Melanin Deficiency, catching the attention of Village Voice art critic Betsy Hass. Hass called Glimcher to ask him about his collection, and the skit was a re-enactment of the transcript of that telephone conversation. The guy from the audience was called up to play Hass; the Guerrilla Girl took on the role of Glimcher. It was both funny and disturbing, especially Glimcher’s lines—“we only represent artists who fit into our program,” and the suggestion that they continue the conversation “maybe over lunch.”
For the Guerilla Girls, it’s not a matter of men versus women, but of enlightened human rights and equality for all, and for not settling for tokenism. Their verve and jocularity were refreshing and inspiring, especially in the recent political and social climate, which considers the battle for equal rights basically won, and demonizes feminism. And their attraction isn’t an isolated phenomenon. They apparently receive tons of mail, especially in response to one of their earlier posters “Advantages of Being a Woman Artist” from female artists, most of which tend to be musicians, saying that this is the story of their lives.
By the end of the talk, the general excitement was such that the news that the Guerilla Girls weren’t looking for any new members, that in fact they preferred to stay small, and so didn’t solicit members in any way cast a tangible pall of disappointment over much of the room. She advised us to “find your own crazy way to be an activist… Speak out against what you think is wrong. The art world is a very f*cked up place.” She ended with this call for more activism, with undertones of addressing the type who make up the USC community especially--young people with all the advantages of education. The most important thing is to be active; after all “you wouldn’t be paying attention to a woman wandering around in a gorilla mask if it wasn’t attached to a body of work.”
Comic books are the new music videos. Or the old music videos, come back to the new. They’re something, anyway. Music is having a more direct effect on comic books, to the point where comic books are starting to refer to themselves in music industry terms. For example, the anthology PopGun (which is awesome, by the way, and will appeal to both old lovers of comic books and neophytes alike) bills itself as “the ultimate comics mix-tape.”
Musicians are finding a lot of success in the comic book world. Some admittedly are doing things of dubious quality (Courtney Love published a short lived series through TokyoPop which was incredibly underwhelming), but on the flipside we’re getting some really cool comics out of the music industry.
One of the most awesome things to come out of this are music/comic collaborations, wherein comic book artists and writers go back to musicians songs and adapt them into short comics. Tori Amos, for instance, has long been tangentially involved in the comic book arena (she wrote the intro for Death: The High Cost of Living) through a relationship with Neil Gaiman, the great author of the Sandman series. Amos has just published her own music/comic collaboration. Comic Book Tattoo, a massive book put out by Image Comics, is huge collection of comics based on Amos’s songs. It is so cool. Not everything in it is for everyone, but there’s at least one thing you will like.
Belle and Sebastian have done a similar thing with Put the Book Back on the Shelf. However, Put the Book Back on the Shelf just seems to be quirky for the sake of quirkiness -- indie just to be indie. I love Belle and Sebastian’s music, and when this book first came out, just the idea of it blew my mind. But since its sequel and the subsequent publication of Comic Book Tattoo, the shiny veneer of novelty has worn off. Hardcore fans will still like Belle and Sebastian's result, but bigger, more diverse anthologies like the aforementioned PopGun and Comic Book Tattoo are probably the way to go.
But for comic book nerds everywhere, our time in the spotlight is coming. We’re getting hip, my friends. Between awesome bands and Christian Bale, comic books are being drawn out of the basement and into the light. They’re claiming some of that cool that emanates around the music scene. Someday, someday soon, a sweet ass pen collection and a stack of Green Lantern issues will be as hot as a kick ass Fender Stratocaster.