#Julia is fucking amazing at collages

[treedaddymcpuffpuff]

Excessive Force : Tom Ludlow x Fem Nurse Reader (COLLAB W/ THE INCREDIBLE @johnwickb1tsch) - Chapter One Two Three

TW: forced proximity, restraints, unequal power dynamics, sexual harassment

Officer Ludlow makes his way into your examination room not once but three times in the following two weeks. Once for torn stitches again. Once for broken glass embedded in his arm. (He seemed pissed about this, so you actually believe that a perp broke a window he was on the other side of, and he didn’t do it on purpose), and the third time for deep bruising and cracked ribs after taking a 9mm bullet to his flak vest. 

The thought that he might have done the latter on purpose terrifies you. They’re a great precaution but bullet proof vests do not prevent all the damage from a bullet. You can still get seriously hurt. So naturally, as you’re wrapping his ribs, you’re more than a little pissed off. 

“This had better have been an accident,” you grumble, forced in close quarters while you have to reach around his ridiculously broad chest with the bandage. You can’t help but notice at this point of his shift that the brain-addling addition of his own sweat and musk added to that edible fucking cologne makes for a near weapon of mass destruction on his skin. It should be illegal, for what it does to your insides. 

“What, you worried about me, sweetheart?”

“As a healthcare professional? Yes, this worries me. It could have been a lot worse.”

“If only I had incentive to be more careful…” he muses with a smirk, his stupidly handsome face just inches from yours. 

“Are all cops this fucking creepy?” You purposefully brush his side a little too hard and reign triumphant when he grunts in pain.

Kinda like shooting a bear with a handgun - it just makes him mad. 

He catches your hands again, only this time he uses the bandaging already wrapped around his torso to bind your wrists. He’s too quick for you to pull away, tethering you up with those beautiful hands that seem far too bulky to be this dexterous, tugging you forward so you’re more than a little cramped. You don’t think you can get any closer until he spreads his thighs and you fall right into the trap. 

You have to crane your neck to avoid being cheek to chest with him, feeling so fucking tiny and useless and enveloped. It pisses you off. It makes you burn with involuntary, awful want. 

“My little nurse speechless?” 

You try to glare at him, but it resembles more of a pout. 

“God,” his voice drops lower if that’s even possible. “You’re so fucking cute.” 

You want to jump off the roof for the thick, high choke of your tone. “You didn’t even ask me if I have a boyfriend.”

“Cuz I don’t fucking care if you do or not.” 

“Well I do,” you lie. “And he’s gonna kick your ass.” 

He snorts. “And I’m gonna let him so his girlfriend has to patch me up.”

“Fuck you.” You are seething with rage at this point, powerless, helpless, fucked in the head for somehow liking it. 

“Mm. What would you prefer? Fingers? Tongue? Cock?” He makes you gasp with a sharp tug at your makeshift bondage and that lewd word in his handsome mouth. “Yeah, that one?” 

“You’re going to get me fired.” You don’t know why you keep trying to appeal to his rationality and humanity, when both seem to not even be in his vocabulary. 

“That’ll free up your schedule so you can spend more time tied to my bed.” 

You’re terrified he can somehow feel the violent clench of your lower body. 

Maybe god does exist, but he has a fucked sense of humor. Your pager buzzes loudly from your scrub pocket as the automatic “CODE BLUE CODE BLUE CODE BLUE” goes off over the loudspeaker. 

“I have to go.”

“Yeah, yeah.” To his credit, and, let’s be honest, you’re super reluctant to give him credit right now, Tom loosens up on your wrists and lets you go attend to the patient currently in cardiac arrest.

[righteoustuff]

A Brief History of Japanese Chillout & Downtempo

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                It’s no secret that Japan has produced some of the finest meditative sounds. From the environmental music of Hiroshi Yoshimura to the warm synths of Haruomi Hosono, blissed-out electronics have been surfacing since the 1980s and have continued to evolve through to the present day.

Ken Hidaka, Max Essa and Dr. Rob are three friends and deep digging collectors who’ve been immersed in these sounds for years, be that through writing, DJing or throwing their long-running monthly listening party at Bar Bonobo in Harajuku.

In 2017, whilst in Copenhagen on tour with Midori Takada, Ken visited the home of Kenneth Bagger – the boss behind Copenhagen-based imprint Music For Dreams – who asked him if he’d lead the charge for an instalment of their Collectors Series. Enlisting the help of Max and Dr. Rob, the trio spent the next three years charting the history of Japanese chillout and downtempo music from the 80s through to 2018. Titled Oto No Wa: Selected Sounds of Japan 1988 – 2018, each track is the result of friendships and physical connections, mapping out the development of chilled sounds, from ambient to electro-acoustics, post-house and balearic.

Alongside a mix of Japanese chillout and downtempo from Dr.Rob, we asked him, Ken and Max to discuss some of their personal favourites.

Oto No Wa is out now on Music For Dreams.

Where does your love for Japanese Chillout stem from?

Ken Hidaka: For me, it was when I heard the Silent Poets: Moment Scale (Dubmaster X Remix), the first track on Jose Padilla compiled Cafe Del Mar- Volumen Dos. Not sure where I bought this compilation as I was in between living in London and in Tokyo around the time of when this compilation was released in 1995. At the time, to be honest with you, I was way more into western club music and really not much into Japanese music at all so this Silent Poets’ track in this compilation surprised me a lot!

Although my tastes for music were still leaned towards mostly western club music, after coming back to Japan, I slowly started to discover a few Japanese music that caught my interest. Artists that released music out of Bellissima Records at the time such as Nobukazu Takemura’s Child’s View, Reflection out of Lollop (their debut album, The Errornormous World was also released out of Clear in the UK), Major Force crew, etc. You could say that my roots for Japanese down tempo/ chill-out music stem from Jose Padilla and his Balearic aesthetics, Club Jazz sounds and electronic music that was emerging from Japan.

What Japanese Chillout record has left the biggest impression on you as a DJ, and why?

Rob Harris: As a DJ, I don’t know, but as someone passionate about recorded music, a student of sound, I can give you two Japanese, downtempo / chill out records that made a big impression on me.

The first is Haruomi Hosono’s Paraiso. When I lived in Tokyo, which is about ten years ago now, I spent a lot of time digging for vinyl. Using the second-hand stores as an excuse to get to know the city, and searching for stuff, both for my own collection and to sell. Paraiso was one of the things on my “wants list”. It was on there because Jose Padilla, the former DJ at Ibiza’s Cafe Del Mar, had mentioned it in a radio interview. Even back then this album wasn’t so easy to find. It wasn’t expensive because the boom in Japanese music was still off on the horizon but there didn’t seem to be that many copies around. Produced in 1978, maybe it hadn’t been issued on CD, and those folks with were hanging onto their copies.

Anyhow when I did find one I didn’t know what to make of it – why was it in Jose’s favourites? I’d already hoover-ed up most of the Yellow Magic Orchestras output – the band Hosono founded with Yukihiro Takahashi and Ryuichi Sakamoto – for its chugging electronic afro / cosmic crossovers, but this was acoustic guitar-driven, softly strummed singer-songwriter stuff. But then bumping the needle, scanning from track to track, I hit the title number and understood – as Hosono-san used studio effects to deconstruct the song – send it into the stratosphere. Mid-way through it just dissolved into sonic shimmer, like a passing comet’s tail. Creating an extra-terrestrial exotica – an easy-listening muzak with its sights set not on Hawaii but the stars.

The second record is Sth. Notional’s ‘Yawn Yawn Yawn’. For me this is a defining Japanese downtempo / chill out release. Again it was a favourite of Jose’s – but I only learned that in hindsight. It was Mancunian balearic guru, Richard “Moonboots” Bithell who tasked me with finding a copy. His London-based counterpart, Phil Mison, had one and he didn’t. This record was and still is super rare, since it was made in the early-90s, and kinda opposite to Paraiso, was far more abundant on CD. But then the CD didn’t have all the mixes. Jose and Phil had both championed the break-driven G-Tar Canyon Mix at the Cafe Del Mar, but it was Moonboots who picked up on the Dream… Another Reality version – which is an eight and a half minute meditation of sampled shore-line, piano and poetry. A hippie ode to Mother Nature – which to the West might sound cheesy – but captures a spirituality that exists in everyday Japan – something you only really appreciate, learn to respect, and hopefully come to understand, by living here. These are largely islands of gentle souls.

Moonboots later put this mix on his Originals compilation – co-selected with “Balearic” Mike Smith – for Claremont 56. I can’t tell you how ecstatic I was when I came across the record’s sea-blue sleeve in a rack labelled “Major Force & Friends” in Shibuya`s Recofan. I was seriously in double-take shock. To date I’ve only ever found three copies of the OG. Yawn Yawn Yawn was however reissued by Italy’s Archeo Recordings in 2018. The package expanded by a host of new remixes, and spread across six sides of vinyl. Reworks by Max Essa, Chee Shimizu, and Kuniyuki Takahashi. The update by Tadashi Yabe – ex of Untied Future Organization – is truly amazing. It’ll catch you off-guard. A fucked-up funky, psychedelic collage that – I’ll stick my neck out here – is the best Japanese “balearic” track of modern times. In my opinion if you only own one Japanese downtempo / chill out record then this Archeo reissue of Sth. National’s Yawn Yawn Yawn should be it.

What Japanese Chillout record has made the biggest impact on your sound as a producer, and why?

Max Essa: It’s difficult to single out one particular record, but I’m going to go with ‘Julia’ by Seigen Ono from the Comme Des Garçons Volume Two LP (1989). I got my first break making records in the early 90s through house music. Dance music genres/sub-genres are very rigid stylistically. When one is making those kind of records you can’t just make something that exists purely because it’s a beautiful, emotive, powerful piece of music, it ‘has to be’ a certain tempo, it has to have a 4/4 kick drum etc etc. This is the way I ended up thinking when I approached making music and I thought like that for many years!

I remember hearing ‘Julia’ for the first and being utterly charmed by it. It’s a very elegant piece that combines a calming tranquility with an ever so slightly mysterious, emotional undertow. The effect it had on my own approach to making music was to make me place far more value on the music for it’s own sake. I wanted to start creating music, moments, combinations of sounds that appealed beyond dance floors, DJs, beat-mixing.

[nofomoartworld]

Art F City: SLIDESHOW: Mexico City Galleries, Part 3

The diversity and sheer volume of art on view in Mexico City at any given point in time never ceases to amaze me. This week, I had an uncommonly un-cerebral experience of conceptual art critic Robert C. Morgan’s retrospective at Proyectos Monclova. At the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum, I went down the rabbit hole of curator Iñaki Herranz’s pleasantly chaotic survey of young Mexican artists, El placer de la incertidumbre, at Casa de Cultura San Rafael. And at Museo Experimental el Eco, got to check out Folke Köbberling & Arturo Hernández having a demolition derby in the name of international relations and clean air.

Of course, I snapped plenty of pictures of all of the above.

Robert C. Morgan: Concept and Painting

Proyectos Monclova Colima 55, Col. Roma Norte, Mexico D.F. On view until April 29th

Robert C. Morgan has been an art critic, conceptual art theorist, and teacher for five decades. He’s somehow managed to keep up a studio practice—a feat at which I marvel. This exhibition includes documentation from his early experiments with Gutai-like performances, abstract paintings, and photo collages. Curiously (for a retrospective, his first in Latin America) it doesn’t include much in the way of wall text, so viewers are left a bit in the dark as to context or even dates. But that reveals something else: nearly all of Morgan’s work looks like it could’ve been made in 1970 or 2017. That realization is somehow rewarding and reassuring in and of itself.

There’s an unusual sense of luxuriousness to Morgan’s minimalist abstractions, which oddly make them feel less like “decor” (a common criticism of abstract painting) yet more like textile or ceramic motifs. I’m having a hard time resolving that contradiction in terms internally/logically. But the “presence” of certain paintings feel more like kimono fabric or flags for an esoteric ceremony than the brand of hard-edged painting one might encounter in a hotel lobby. That’s an association that might be based on the inclusion of Morgan’s ritualistic performance documentation or regal color palette. Whatever the reason, it’s a must-see-in-person kind of show, largely because that aura isn’t done justice by photography nor language.

Alcázar: Crushed Autogeddon

Museo Experimental el Eco Calle Sullivan 43 Col. San Rafael, México DF On view until 28th of May

Mexico and Germany are in the midst of a year-long cultural exchange known as the Año dual Alemania – México. Through this program, artists Folke Köbberling & Arturo Hernández Alcázar were united for a collaboration. They decided to comment on the (in)famous auto industries of both Mexico and Germany, in particular Volkswagen’s emissions-test-cheating scandal and the problem of air pollution in the Mexican capital. The two decided to strip old cars down for parts, recycling the usable components into bicycles (which were distributed in the park across from the museum) and the unusable components into an installation.

It’s a great idea, but a lot more could’ve been done with the “useless” remnants. As it stands, the installation is evocative of (but less interesting than) the junk markets of Iztapalapa. I’m more curious about those bicycles, which I’m assuming are out being used rather than put on a pedestal. The video documentation of the pair furiously dismantling cars alternates between monotonous and vicariously cathartic—what city dweller hasn’t dreamt of taking a sledgehammer to the hood of a particularly loud or smelly car?

The installation is at its best in the courtyard, which Alcázar transformed into a functional metal-smelting forge. There, the aluminum skeletons of cars were melted down and poured into a blindingly-reflective floor sculpture that looks a bit like a Jackson Pollock painting. It’s really what makes a visit to the museum worth it—but I don’t recommend staring directly into it at noon.

El placer de la incertidumbre

A burning truck-shack from Vlocke. Also pictured: a super creepy banner of someone in a latex Donald Trump mask beckoning visitors inside.

Curated by Iñaki Herranz Casa de Cultura San Rafael. Calle José Rosas Moreno 110. Colonia San Rafael, Delegación Cuauhtémoc, D.F. Artists: Emerson Balderas, Julia Carrillo Escalera, Andrea Garza Romero, Abraham González, Antonio Gritón, Henri & Nazka, Iñaki Herranz, Julia, Isauro Huizar, Carolina Magis, Tláhuac Mata, Enrique Minjares Padilla, Josué Morales, Francisco Muñoz, Miguel Ángel, Patricio Jose, Fernando Pizarro, Miguel Ángel Salazar, Marcia Santos, Ricardo Sierra, Taller El Ajolote/Noé Vázquez, Roberto Tostado, Javier Velázquez Cabrero, Allan Villavicencio, Vlocke Luther Blizer, Pamela Zeferino y Ediciones Gato Negro (León Muñoz SAntini, Juan López & Andrea García Flores). Invitado especial: el niño Pablo.

The majority of artwork I’ve seen in Mexico City has been in the context of immaculate modernist spaces that put most blue chip galleries’ Chelsea digs to shame. Walking into Casa de Cultura San Rafael, however, feels refreshingly like entering a ramshackle squat in the best way possible. In reality, it’s the neighborhood cultural center, and the exhibitions programing (comprising dozens of artists) overlaps with the center’s workshops, studio programs, and events. Even the small library has been reshuffled to arrange the books in a color gradient rather than by subject or author.

That vibe is reinforced by the anarchic curatorial style—the exhibition’s conceit is one of uncertainty and the nervous excitement that accompanies the creation and display of artwork. The atrium is dominated by what looks like years’ worth of graffiti (a piece by Jocelyn Nieto) and in at least one gallery Pamela Zeferino has peeled away chunks of the white ceiling paint to reveal a former layer—sky blue, which gives the impression of a disintegrating roof. Works are hung in odd locations (over doorways, nestled among potted plants, in windows separating artist studios from public spaces) and even overtly political pieces have a playful sensibility.

I’m thinking especially of Marcia Santos’s t-shirts, which are screen printed with common questions and answers exchanged between US border agents and Mexican nationals during crossings (“Where are you coming from? My house, I live in Juárez. Where are you going? Shopping.” etc…) . There’s a sense of absurdist dark humor to the shirt, one that’s cemented to the even more absurd reality of the militarized border by her documentary photos, which depict the artist handing the shirts out to travelers near the checkpoint.

Marcia Santos

Marcia Santos

Antonio Gritón with Carolina Magis. “In Nawatl (the Valley of Mexico’s indigenous language) the ‘ñ’ doesn’t exist. It was used on them in the conquest”.

Ediciones Gato Negro

A Barbie-inspired take on Angélica Rivera, Mexico’s first lady, who was at the center of a scandal involving her husband’s abuse of power in regards to a multi-million dollar real estate scheme involving her suburban mansion. Watch out Melania. The display case includes her notorious “Casa Blanca” and evidence of how much media attention the dolls attracted.

detail of a wall-full of schematic drawings by Ricardo Sierra

Tlahuac Mata

Tlahuac Mata’s delicate oil painting of an improvised lean-to propped up against a concrete wall was unexpectedly moving. Its position near the ornate plaster ceiling—two contrasting visions of “a roof over your head”—was especially effective.

Disaster landscape paintings by Tlahuac Mata (L) and Patrício José (R).

Julia Carrillo Escalera. A mirrored sculpture that focuses on a single pane of the window, flanked by geometric abstractions on paper.

Work by an artist known solely as “Pablo”.

Painting and strange, plant-eating sculpture by Allan Villavicencio.

More recent Mexico City coverage:

We Went to Gabriel Orozco’s OXXO

SLIDESHOW: Mexico City Galleries, Part 1

SLIDESHOW: Mexico City Galleries, Part 2

Museum Punk Show in Need of A Sound Guy

Material Light on Substance, Heavy With Dick Pics

Slideshow: Zona MACO, The Art Fair Where Commerce and Politics Make Strange Bedfellows

We Went to Mexico: General Idea at Museo Jumex Restored Our Faith in Art For Fuck’s Sake

We Went to Mexico: Barbara Kruger and Juan Pablo de la Vega Take the Subway

The Timelessness of Sex, Violence, and Portraiture: Otto Dix at MUNAL

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