Mixtape Monday: Desert Island Playlist
Coffee in hand. Watching my neighbors from the back window, "so it just rained and they are running the sprinkler...while mowing the yard.... as one kid screams in the corner and two others jump on the trampoline. Guess it's do-whatever-you-want day next door." This is what the quarantine has come to. If music can't save us now, what is the point. This is my salvation of a playlist. - Jay Armstrong
Artist Spotlight: “Bloom” by Brat Baby Beauty
I began this project wanting to show off the incredibly creative people whose work I love. To come up with a comfortable place where we could be vulnerable together, a place where we could speak openly about our dreams and excitement for the future. Hopefully, there, in that place, we would create something truthful, reflecting our trust in each other, a moment made beautiful collectively.
Artist Spotlight: Cyril Ely & Anatoly Pavlov
Using photo manipulation Russia’s Cyril Ely and Anatoly Pavlov create white empty spots and corruption with the use of a heat lamp to transform their photographs. On this Illume project, there is an equal balance between chaotic destruction and the crisp emotive truth of black and white film. You can find more of their work here.
New Music: Country Legend Roky Moon – “Choo Choo”
It seemed impossible to love Roky Moon any more than we already did. We were wrong.
Artist Spotlight: Yuka Kobayashi
Abstract in a Brakhage sense with defined simplicity of underlying confusion, Yuka Kobayashi (aka St. Discipline) has a ghostly presence of future and past speaking directly to the unsureness of our place, her place, in the now. Originally from Tokyo, currently creating in Berlin, Kobayashi's voice through the breadth of her work carries a warm mystique. Each individual piece created—be it drawing, collage, painting, etching, photography, or the NOT TO BE OVERLOOKED videos (!!!!!!)—stands out solely for itself while offering one more perspective on an everchanging volume of work increasing in substantiality.
Mixtape Monday: SXSW SPIRIT
"Don't ask me why I obsessively look to rock 'n' roll bands for some kind of model for a better society... I guess I glimpsed something beautiful in a flashbulb moment once, and perhaps mistaking it for a prophecy have been seeking its fulfillment ever since. And perhaps that nothing else in the world ever seemed to hold even this much promise." - Lester Bangs
New Music Video: Holy Wave – “I’m Not Living in the Past Anymore”
...nails their simplistic aesthetic in craft while still feeling orgiastic in creativity. Basically, business as usual for this band who have been around just long enough to start being grandfathered in as the torchbearers of the Austin ideology.
New Single: Half Dream – “Strange Lover”
As if experiencing intimacy were not already a heavy confusing mess of emotions, "Strange Lover"—the new single from Half Dream—is a humble crying out to the wilderness of introspection. Where sadness and nostalgia is often reserved solely for the looking back while optimism and positivity come in looking forward, there is that moment which lies at the very center of it all, time suspended in bated silence, all spinning madly around us; at that moment we taste Plato's agalma being pushed against by our own sense of individuality speaking in contrast of our experience as we try to understand the why; this is the place in which "Strange Lover" exists.
Artist Spotlight: Alex Paradox
Setting out to capture with nostalgic appreciation the staying gold glory days of Roberta Bayley and David Godlis when they first lit the eyeballs of the world on fire via those inky pages of Punk Magazine, the new series from Austin's Alex Paradox, Punks, is a true to form reminder of how late seventies New York is the holiest of holy for still relevant inspiration and why transposing the ideology to our place now through noble appreciation under a skillfully directed lens becomes once more a transcendent snapshot of the everlasting beauty in greasy rebellion lifted by the optimistic wings of youthful conviction.
