Tag: Genesis P-Orridge

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Collapsing Scenery Shares Woozy and Uneasy “You Already Know”

Collapsing Scenery — long-time friends, New York-based artist and musician Don De Vore (Ink & Dagger, Sick Feeling, Lilys, The Icarus Line and Amazing Baby) and Los Angeles-based artist and musician Reggie Debris — can trace their origins back several years back: De Vore and Debris initially began collaborating in programming events with the Lower East Side-base D’agostino and Fiore Gallery.

Their first collaboration was a video installation, which led to a month of music and visual programming called “Rebuild Babylon.” That turned into a traveling residency series, which led to the duo’s musical project Collapsing Scenery.

Through their multimedia-based work, De Vore and Debris have been passionate about challenging and subverting perceptions in both the worlds of outsider art and political protest — and embracing the joyous, carnivalesque aspects of both. A 2016 artistic residency in New York saw Collapsing Scenery create a psychedelic immersive art installation that incorporated projections, layers of colorful plexi-glass, a reading from Genesis P-Orridge and performances from De Vore and Debris. Meanwhile in a clash of the old and the new, the gallery upstairs hosted a Picasso exhibition.

As a musical outfit, the duo started back in 2013 “in a pall of paranoia and disgust.” De Vore and Debris put their guitars away and began acquiring and assembling as much analog electronic equipment as possible, including samplers, step sequencers, synths and drums machines, and plugged them into a variety of effects pedals.

Their initial writing and recording sessions were largely improvised and were accompanied by Ryan Raspys (drums). The material they wrote managed to express their rage and frustration at the stage of the world, while drawing from punk rock, industrial electronica and techno, hip-hop, free jazz, disco, folk and more. Since they started the music project, De Vore and Debris have been restlessly prolific while also collaborating with Ninjaman, Money Mark, and James Chance among others.

The duo’s recently released Acid Casual EP is the first batch of material released from many hours of recordings they made during the pandemic. And with Acid Casual, the members of Collapsing Scenery sees the pair pushing deeper into sonic and genre experiments while finding beauty — and even joy — hiding within the cracks of the existential dread we’ve all felt in the past couple of years.

“You Already Know,” Acid Casual‘s latest single is a woozy and uneasy song centered around glistening and blown out electronic percussion, a mournful horn sample, live drumming wobbling synth arpeggios, Debris’ dreamily plaintive vocals, a chanted hook and bursts of scorching guitar before gently fading out. Sonically, “You Already Know” seems to nod at Tour de France era Kraftwerk, psych pop, trip hop and psych rock in a seamless and mind-bending fashion.

Directed, shot and edited by Kansas Bowling, the video stars Floyd Cashio, Park Love Bowling, Lo Espinosa and Kathy Corpus in a surreal fever dream fueled by obsession, slow-burning dread, violence. The video features a cameo from the members of Collapsing Scenery as inept and goofy hotel bellboys.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: ADULT.’s Stark and Sensual Collaboration with Nitzer Ebb’s Douglas J McCarthy

Comprised of Detroit-based husband-and-wife multimedia artist duo Adam Lee Miller and Nicola Kuperus, ADULT. have received both national and international attention both for their music, which features elements of industrial electronica, house music and punk rock — and for their visual art, which includes sculptures, paintings, photographs, films, videos and installations; in fact, since the act’s founding back in 1998, Miller and Kuperus have strove to blur and intersect the lines between visual art and their music, exhibiting their work at the Austrian Cultural Forum (NY), Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh), Detroit Institute of Arts, MOMAS (Saitama, Japan) and Centre d’ar contemporain de Meymac (France). Their film The Three Grace(s) triptych has been shown at the Anthology Film Archives, Distrital Film Festival, Mexico City and Grey Area for Art and Technology.

The duo’s latest effort Detroit House Guests is largely based on the visual artist residency model, in which Miller and Kuperus invited a varied and impressive array of musicians and artists, including Nitzer Ebb’s Douglas J. McCarthy, Swans’ Michael Gira, Light Aslyum’s Shannon Funchess, Lichens, Austrian thereminist Dorit Chrysler and multidisciplinary artist Lun*na Menoh and others to their studio for a three week period — with the parameter that they all live, work and collaborate together to create an album that also manages to be an anthropological sound experiment.

“We Are a Mirror” is the latest single off Detroit House Guests and it finds Miller and Kuperus collaborating with Nitzer Ebb’s Douglas J. McCarthy. Featuring an glitchy and minimalist yet propulsive production consisting of subtle, industrial clang and clatter, an assortment of bleeps, blips and bloops, stuttering drum programming and club-rocking that manages to seamlessly mesh both artists’ sound while being incredibly brooding and seductive.

Directed by Hazel Hill-McCarthy III, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker, whose previous work includes a documentary featuring Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis P-Orridge, the recently released video for “We Are a Mirror” was filmed in Miller and Kuperus’ hometown of Detroit between the hours of 6pm and 6am — and it employs a relatively straightforward concept: the trio of Miller, Kuperus and McCarthy in a sparsely arranged mirrored room with a light display, broodingly posing and performing the song. And while evoking a murky nightclub, the video also feels as though it could be an fashion shoot as it possesses a grungy and glamorous quality.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Comprised of Sally Spitz (vocals), Ali Day (guitar, bass), Max Albeck (drums), and Daniel Trautfield (bass, sax), the Los Angeles, CA-based feminist art-punk quartet French Vanilla can trace the band’s origins to the members being partially driven by a desire to forcefully challenge Southern California’s established music scene, dominated by a few influential, male tastemakers and to do cool shit while hanging with friends, the band played their first shows within their hometown’s queer punk underground. Interestingly, the quartet quickly developed a local and regional reputation for socially conscious lyrics paired with a post-punk and No Wave-leaning sound — and as a result, the band has opened for the likes of Girlpool, Screaming Females, Tacocat, Genesis P-Orridge and Cherry Glazerr and others.

Adding to the growing buzz surrounding the Los Angeles-based band, their self-titled full-length effort is slated for a March 24, 2017 release through Danger Collective Records — and as you’ll hear on the album’s latest single “Anti-Aging Global Warming,” the quartet pairs the propulsive and angular bass lines and slashing guitar lines with incredibly neurotic lyrics that express the narrator’s anxious and neurotic worries about the impending end of the world as we know it, and how easy things can suddenly turn to shit before you know it; but sonically speaking the song strikes me as being reminiscent of Talking Heads: 77 and Fear of Music-era Talking Heads, Entertainment and Solid Gold-era Gang of Four and A-Frames.