https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
Alexandre Souêtre, originally from Paris, is a LA-based creative director & visual artist.
Jesse Draxler is a multidisciplinary artist.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- Souêtre Growing up in Paris
- Souêtre's beginnings in film which lead him to creative direction, design, and photography
- Souêtre moving to America for college
- How Draxler and Souêtre met and became collaborators
- Draxler’s process with working with photographers
- Skateboarding as an art form
- Setting up creative constraints to create artwork
- French cinema
- Filmmaker Gaspar Noé
- Gaspar Noé films, “Irreversible” and “Enter The Void”
- VR
- “The Book of Joan” by author Lidia Yuknavitch
- Alexandre’s book he’s writing
- Icelandic pop music including Samaris
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About VOWWS: VOWWS is an Australian Death-Pop duo based out of Los Angeles.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- Creating and attaining goals
- Financial burdens of going to college
- Education in Australia
- Pitfalls of the American educational system
- Old school video games
- The story of how they met in college
- Celebrating death and western culture’s view on death
- Deathpop
- Genres being subjective
- Over conceptualizing art
- Touring
- Depression
Photos by Olivia Shove
In this podcast, we interview actor Martin Starr from the hit tv HBO comedy Silicon Valley.
We take a deep dive into topics such as: being recognized at hipster parties, seasonal depression, being a child of an actress, the future of pornography, bitcoin and human connection.
This episode was produced and co-hosted by Saman Kesh.
www.artistdecoded.com
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Ania: Ania Catherine is an artist and choreographer based in Los Angeles. Her work merges movement, film, and performance art and has been shown internationally at the British Film Institute, Art Basel Hong Kong, Peacock Theatre (London), LA Center for Digital Art, Agora Collective (Berlin), Forum des images (Paris), Dansmuseet (Stockholm), International Meeting on Screendance (Valencia, Spain), among others. She holds a master's degree from the London School of Economics, and through bodies explores the intersections of performance and her academic research in gender, sexuality, representation, and politics. In addition to her personal practice, she works internationally performing, choreographing, speaking, directing, and teaching.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- Growing up in Orange County in California
- Gender and sexuality
- How “slow cinema” has influenced her work
- Films by Roy Anderson and Chantal Akerman
- Creating work that’s personal
- Misrepresentations of sexuality
- How she met her wife
- Surrounding yourself with people who project positive energy
www.instagram.com/aniacatherine/
@artistdecoded
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Mary: "How do we understand, connect with and react to traces of the metaphysical? My work is about becoming, a process that encompasses both doing and undoing; energy goes into my materials and then there is a natural or simulated process of destruction. Transformation is central to my practice: a metamorphosis that reveals the ruin and beauty of both the body and the psyche. With the intention of revealing layers and residual deterioration, I unravel, scratch, burn and peel parts of the work. I use many natural materials in my practice—particularly linen, sisal rope and dye—which exude a distinct smell and permeate the senses before the demanding visuality commands attention. This address to the olfactory helps to create an active environment rather than a static installation. My works, unlike the products of conventional fiber practices, bear traces of my hand—bits of imperfect or unfinished warp and weft—and the inexact results of hand-dyeing. Parts of the work are undone, unmade and unraveled, lending credence to their indeterminate nature. While the process of weaving, in its demanding repetition and methodical rhythm, is a contemplative endeavor typically exact in execution, the ruinous state of these works points to my interest in the limits of the physical and preoccupation with the ethereal.
I am fascinated by the connection between the physical and metaphysical, and, in this vein, I take ancient mythology, metamorphosis, ruination and entropy as inspirations in my work. Like ruins, my works are remnants of what was once whole; they are inscribed with traces of their previous life, death endured and the hereafter. My works embody these remnants that prefigure thought and feeling." - Mary Grisey
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- Kindred spirits
- Her trajectory as an artist
- Finding her voice
- How a traumatic experience created a shift in the way she created art
- The relationship between creating artwork and meditating
- Breaking down mental systems
- Her spiritual journey
- Clairvoyance
- Her encounters with ghosts
- Working in the metaphysical realm
- How she got into tarot card reading
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Elly: Originally from Ottawa, Elly Smallwood graduated from OCAD University in 2011 and now works as an artist in Toronto. Her paintings are intensely personal, a visual exploration of her mind and body, and those of the people around her.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- Her workflow
- The business of art
- Getting paid as an artist
- “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”
- “Nocturnal Animals”
- The importance of failure
- Her transition leaving Toronto to move to Ottawa
- Having a solid art community
- Understanding human anatomy for your art practice
- Conspiracy theories
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Nicole: Nicole Miglis is the singer / songwriter of the band Hundred Waters.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- The origin story of Hundred Waters
- OWSLA
- The power of introverts and listening
- Language
- The feeling behind captivating artworks
- Their new album “Communicating”
- Nicole’s journey as a musician
- Choosing art as a career
- Turning your weaknesses into strengths
- Ideas surrounding femininity and masculinity
- Power in vulnerability
- The idea of self and others
- Standing the test of time
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Dado: Dado Valentic is the CTO of Acute Art, based in London and Los Angeles. Alongside Acute Art's co-founder, Jacob De Geer, Dado worked on the launch of the 'VR Museum,’ an app that exhibits subscription-based, interactive, multiuser fine-art artworks. The "VR Museum" is now available on the HTC Vive from the Acute Art website and HTC Vive store
Dado Valentic is also an award winning colour grading artist and one of the leading developers in the area of colour science for digital film cameras. Dado is the founder of Mytherapy, a creative studio for digital colour correction and motion picture retouching. He is known for his unique approach to the processing of digital images and his film stock emulation technology.
Dado Valentic has worked on over 30 feature films and numerous commercials. His latest work was creating a colour science for Netflix HDR production of 'Marco Polo -Season II', which was awarded Best TV Picture, ASC 2016.
As a colour scientist, he was involved in 'Exodus' by Riddle Scott, as well as 'Game of Thrones', 'Total Recall', 'Mr Nice', and 'Sherlock Holmes' by Guy Richie. Dado's colourist credits include: 'Absolutely Anything' directed by Terry Jones, starring Simon Pegg, 'A Hundred Streets' starring Idris Elba, 'Dough' starring Jonathan Pryce, and 'Blackwood' by Adam Wimpenny.
Mytherapy is based at Warner Bros. De Lane Lea offering High-End Motion Picture Post Production Services.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- The start of Acute Art
- Working with artists Olafur Eliasson, Jeff Koons, Marina Abramovic, Anish Kapoor for VR Museum
- VR and art working together
- Adaptability within VR environments
- His career as a color scientist for feature films
- Using neuroscience to understand human behavior in the VR world
- Implications of the Technological Revolution
- Ed Atkins work
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Norberto: Born + raised in Miami by Cuban immigrants, Norberto Rodriguez began his career at 18 as a multi-disciplinary conceptual artist known for his continuously disruptive + innovative practice. He works in all media + genre including installation, performance, photography, sculpture, digital, music, film, text + tenderness. Currently, Rodriguez is developing A SCHOOL OF THOUGHT: a center for exploring how ideas give life meaning, IP DIVISION: A company providing creative solutions + services to consumers everywhere, + The Waiting Room: an experimental, collaborative space for private reflection + public exchange. He also shares his journey documenting various other projects + his ongoing evolution as an artist + friend on social media @norbertoinc.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- Using commercial platforms to your advantage as an artist
- Alternative ideas to bypass and subvert the traditional art gallery model
- Slash from Guns and Roses making an appearance on the episode
- Exploring deep philosophical ideas about the ramifications of the art market
- Questioning your legacy as an artist
- “The pre-career retrospective”
- Steve Jobs and Apple
- When Bert got married to a stranger for a year
- The Bert Rodriguez Museum
- When he killed Bert Rodriguez
- Pitfalls of galleries
- Artists as a commodity
- Art evolving culture
- Kanye West
- The sale of his will
- Shamans
- Alejandro Jodorowsky
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Gavin: It’s impossible not to become infatuated with soulful pop princess Gavin Turek. The LA Native is always clad in a hand-made 70s fringe dress (designed herself in every color) and armed with the best dance moves you’ve ever seen. It’s easy to draw comparisons anywhere from Tina Turner to Beyoncé but really, Gavin is her own force to be reckoned with. Performing always came natural: she grew up with a father who played piano and tagging alongside her mother, who toured coffeeshops singing gospel. Her origin story goes like this: at age three, a teeny tiny Gavin interrupted her mother mid performance, took over the mic and to the astonishment of the audience, finished the song for her. She knew every single lyric, word for word, and whoa, that girl could sing. Suffice to say, a star was born.
Growing up, Gavin obsessively studied two things: music (the likes of Donna Summer, Prince, Lauryn Hill, Diana Ross. Michael Jackson, Giorgio Moroder) and all forms of dance. Originally aspiring to be a professional dancer, she spent months at a time in India and Africa, immersing herself in different cultures. Ghana was where Gavin first discovered her love for fringe and learned that the popular disco-era fad had much deeper origins. Everyday while in Ghana, Gavin learned and performed the traditional dances of the northern region, with falling in love with their massive fringe belts that moved with the music and drums as an extension of body and spirit. As Gavin jokingly told Nylon Magazine, “fringe really makes your hips look good and accentuates the movements.” Another great discovery for her was that in other cultures, dance is much more than a form entertainment, it is a way of life. It is used to celebrate births, weddings, religious worships, achievements and even deaths and afterlife. Upon returning to the United States, Gavin eventually returned to singing and songwriting as her main medium of expression, but when the time came to perform her own music, dance and fringe costumes naturally became a vital component for her live shows.
Two special artists in particular became champions early on for Gavin. Brainfeeder genius TOKiMONSTA has been a longtime friend and collaborator. Early on in both their careers, she asked Gavin to contribute vocals to her productions, which lead to the fan favorite track “Darkest Dim.” Mayer Hawthorne was next, not only inviting Gavin to open his sold out tours but recruiting her as the female counterpart in his retro funk act Tuxedo with producer Jake Uno. (You may recognize her as the golden disco goddess gracing the stage with them everywhere from the legendary Hollywood Bowl to Japan).
In 2015, word of mouth about Gavin’s music and electric live shows spread with the release of her electro R&B infused mini-album “You’re Invited” produced by TOKiMONSTA. The girl power duo followed the release with a sold out tour and received accolades from Billboard, NPR, The Fader, Apple / Beats 1, KCRW, etc. That year,Spin named Gavin as the summer’s Top Artist to Watch and her disco funk-tinged single "Don’t Fight It” as one of the best tracks of 2015.
By 2016, Gavin’s star quality was undeniable. She dominated the stage with guest performances at legendary festivals such as Outside Lands and Coachella and late night performances on Jimmy Kimmel with Mayer Hawthorne and Cee Lo. Her crowning achievement this past year began with the release of her single “On the Line” (produced by Chris Hartz of Passion Pit) last May. In support of the release, she played a beyond sold-out month long residency in Los Angeles. The long time venue promoter said he had never seen anything like it in LA, with lines wrapped around the block in hopes of catching Gavin perform what would soon become her new EP Good Look for You. “On the Line” premiered #1 on HypeMachine very organically thanks to dedicated love from the hippest underground blogs and airplay from six of KCRW’s top tastemakers. KCRW DJ Anne Lit proclaimed it the “song of the summer.”
Gavin preps now to release her EP “Good Look for You” February 17 via her own label Madame Gold Records. A self starter and entrepreneur whose mission is to inspire women of all ages and ethnicities, Madame Gold continues the tradition of female greats taking the reigns of their own success. Gavin considers it an homage to the artists she admires most: Solange, Janelle Monae and TOKiMONSTA. The EP’s single “Good Look for You” (November, 2016) already has garnered attention from Stereogum, Nylon, Okayplayer, etc and the EP release will be celebrated with a live KCRW Morning Becomes Eclectic in-studio session and release parties in both Los Angeles and New York this February.
"Making pictures is one of the earliest memories I recall. Before learning to write the alphabet I was drawing from my imagination in crayons. And over all the years that followed, there has never been a period where I didn’t continue the practice. I remember for example just after graduating high school and living on my own as a dishwasher with no ambitions in life but to get drunk and high. But when the party was over I would be in the kitchen of a house I didn’t live in, drawing past dawn. Or even when I was a student at the University of California Berkeley, on my way towards a corporate life, having never conceived even the possibility where art could be a profession, I filled my notebooks not with words from lectures, but with sketches of teachers and classmates. And though later I would become a ‘professional artist’, I sometimes look back at such moments if confused with the roots of my creativity. It started purely as an act of autonomy, where nothing outside myself influenced or affected it. I simply drew because I enjoyed it above all else. Sure, like anyone I’ve had plenty of typical life experiences that have brought their own joy, but nothing compares in consistency and meaningfulness that making art has provided. Even during those unavoidable periods with living that challenges us most, drastic life change/loss/death, art has functioned as a medium with giving meaning to suffering, transforming it into an experience with healing. This I hope, begins to describe the art I make. The drawings and paintings you see on this site, are similar to snapshots with the lens pointed in Life's direction with penetrating force. I hope you enjoy any of what's reflected back. Thanks for visiting." - Akira Beard
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- Identity
- His Japanese American heritage
- Akira’s self portraiture work where he addressed the theme of identity
- The idea of “self, culture, nature”
- Self-realization
- The Buddhist concept of impermanence
- The difference between a technician and a fine artist
- “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying”
- The enigma of love
- His body of artwork called “Love In Spite of Everything”
- His 4 year path of discovery
- Marcus Aurelius
- Stoicism
- Daily rituals
- Anais Nin
www.artistdecoded.com
Steve Kim is an artist and illustrator. Born in Seoul, Korea, he immigrated to the states at the age of two and currently resides in Oxford, Mississippi. He received his undergraduate degree from Art Center College of Design in 2006 and his masters from Claremont Graduate University in 2010. He has shown in Korea, Italy, London, Amsterdam, Krakow and throughout the United States and clients include The Outline, FRAMƎ, Matter/Medium, Adobe, Hohe Luft, The New Republic, Arc/New Scientist, and The Verge. His work has been featured in print in Quiet Lunch, New American Paintings, Computer Arts, Beautiful Decay, PRINT Magazine, and American Illustration and online on Hi-Fructose, Juxtapoz, BOOOOOOOM!, The Fox Is Black, Supersonic Art, and Tumblr's Radar. Most recently he completed a 3 month residency at the Red Bull House of Art in Detroit.
www.artistdecoded.com
Colin Chillag, born in 1971, is a painter based out of Phoenix, AZ.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- Personal approaches to creating artwork
- Meditation
- The challenges of commercialization
- Realism
- Painting from found photographs
- Colin’s “girlfriend” series
- Black Mirror
- Ray Kurzweil
- Museum of Jurassic Technology
- Psychedelics
- The realities of being an artist
www.nohwave.bigcartel.com
Casey Gleghorn grew up in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. He is the Director @ Booth Gallery and Last Rites Gallery in New York City. He has been a gallery owner/director for over 9 years, has curated international museum exhibitions, and currently works with various international established and emerging artists.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- How he became the director of Booth Gallery
- Jesse Draxler
- Richard Prince
- Stress and overworking
- Creating balance in your life
- Meditation
- NOH/WAVE
- Modern technology effecting the way galleries operate
- Extinction of the mid-tier gallery
- Artist run spaces
- Adapting to the changes in the art market
- Eric Lacombe
- Odd Nerdrum
- Social media marketing for artists
- Casey’s opinion on art fairs
- Remembering Gregorio Escalante
Ian Daniel is a filmmaker, producer, writer, and curator. He is the Co-host and Executive Producer of the Emmy-nominated television show GAYCATION on VICELAND, where he and actress Ellen Page explore LGBTQ culture around the world. He is currently in post-production on a feature-length documentary film he directed and is developing other documentary, television, and art projects.
Daniel is also the former Director of Artistic Programs at The Civilians, a theater company in NYC that derives their work from intensive investigations into today’s vital questions, on topics such as death, crime in the US, LGBTQ issues, the porn industry, and the Women’s Prison in Bogota Colombia.
As a curator, he has organized several exhibits and multimedia events at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, Exit Art, LaMaMa Gallery, Storefront Bushwick and the Waterpod Project in NYC and Brooklyn.
www.artistdecoded.com
nohwave.bigcartel.com
Dave Elitch first garnered attention with his band Daughters of Mara’s debut album “I am Destroyer” in 2007, but his time touring with the American progressive rock band The Mars Volta in 2009-2010 is what really put him on the map. He has since worked with Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, M83, The 1975, Juliette Lewis, Big Black Delta, as well as many others. He is a regular in the LA session scene, including performing on various records, syncs and film scores for major motion pictures, (most recently “Trolls” and “Logan.”) In addition to playing, he also conducts master-class lectures worldwide and keeps a busy private teaching practice in Los Angeles where he has developed a reputation as THE technique/body mechanic specialist who has helped many of the industries top players as well as educators.
“Ever since I decided that I was going to be a drummer, I wanted to be the best I could possibly be, and I put all my faculties toward that. Eventually that can take a toll, so I kind of hit a wall and needed a break. I’ve always had an appreciation for art, and luckily where I live in LA there are all these rad galleries – the Getty, the Hammer, Thinkspace, C.A.V.E., Giant Robot – so I frequent those. I get a different vantage point on the creative experience. I started getting inspired by documentaries about artists, like The Radiant Child about Jean-Michel Basquiat, Rivers and Tides about Andy Goldsworthy, the Gerhard Richter documentary Painting, Francis Bacon movies on YouTube… It’s just such a fascinating take on making sense of the world around you. Plus, I’ve dedicated my life to knowing all there is to know about drums, and I’m expected to know everything, With art, I can just go from my gut, so there’s a huge sense of freedom and escape for me there.” – Dave Elitch
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- The pitfalls of formalized education
- The realities of being a musician
- Over exposure of art through technology
- Distractions of social media
- How Dave became a professional drummer
- Andy Goldsworthy “Rivers and Tides”
- Drawing similarities and differences between his approach to music and his approach to art
- The compulsion for knowledge and exploring
- Understanding the veil of perception
- Creative adaptability
- Spirituality in art
- Breaking free of systematic thinking
- Branding within the art world
- The ripple effect of art and commerce interacting with each other
www.artistdecoded.com
With iconic photography of young iconoclasts, musicians, and bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tom Waits, Nick Cave, The Circle Jerks, Ice Cube, and Bad Religion, as well as hundreds of other early punk and hip hop bands, Edward Colver was an insider to the turbulent and burgeoning underground music scene of early-eighties Los Angeles. Since active in photography for more than forty years, he first documented an average of five local shows a week using only a 35mm camera, flash, and Kodak Tri-X film.
Colver’s book, Blight at the End of the Funnel, collects some of the best of his hardcore punk and promotional work for record companies. His shot of Henry Rollins for the cover of Black Flag’s “Damaged” album was used on billboards and lamppost flyers throughout Los Angeles during the Annenberg Space for Photography’s Who Shot Rock and Roll installation in 2012, curated by Brooklyn Museum curator and author Gail Buckland. In addition to numerous other openings, including Shepard Fairey’s Subliminal Projects gallery and a solo show at Lethal Amounts this last year.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- The punk rock revolution in Los Angeles
- Edward’s experience shooting Henry Rollins for Black Flag’s “Damaged” album cover
- His run in with Jerry Lee Lewis
- Working with Ice Cube
- Suing Interscope Records
- His experiences shooting photographs for 36 years
- Shooting the Circle Jerks “Group Sex” album cover
www.artistdecoded.com
Winning the Archibald Prize as Guy Maestri did in 2009 would be a defining moment in most artist’s careers, but he is quick to cite physical immersion in the landscape as revolutionary to his painting practice. It’s easy to gloss over the history of plein-air as a European tradition, born of gentle grasses and mild sunlight. Practiced in Australia, away from the slip of green coastline, plein-air demands rigor of vast dimensions. For Maestri, the material and temporal challenges of extended painting sessions in the hard country around Hill End, Wilcannia and Broken Hill has been instrumental in a new understanding of local art histories and ecologies, as well as the atmospheric and elemental qualities of landscape. Beholden to intimacies of place, the artist stakes out a subtle void or stillness in these dry landscapes without surrendering his animated, almost kinetic approach to paint.
Masquerading as a shady retreat, the studio retains its disciplinarian attitude but demands a different kind of focus. Here the void is more theatrical, Maestri’s compositions orchestrated with operatic tempo. Desiccated road-kill (the anti-trophy of inland highways) perform as contemporary Gothic vanitas, shot through with equal measure of beauty and pathos, the eye and the heart facing off.
A graduate of the National Art School, Maestri won the 2014 Kings School Art Prize and the 2013 Premier’s Plein Air Painting Prize. He is a regular finalist in the Wynne Prize for Landscape at the Art Gallery of NSW and his work is held in several public collections, including the National Portrait Gallery and Parliament House collections.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- His experience studying at The National Art School in Sydney
- Education in the arts
- Exploring mediums within your artistic practice
- How his work has evolved over the years
- His paintings of road kill
- Discussing self portraiture
- How he began experimenting with sculptures
- His process creating his sculptures
- Morbid curiosities
- Wes Anderson
www.artistdecoded.com
Virginie Picot – originally from Paris – has devoted the last 17 years of her career to talent management and visual creations, specializing in the fashion and music industries. Currently living in NYC, she is an agent and Executive Producer for Iconoclast Image and leads the print department. She represents emerging photographers such as Olivia Bee, David Uzochukwu, and Mathieu Cesar, as well as established talents such as Jean-Baptiste Mondino, Cyrille de Vignemont, and Gus Van Sant. She has worked alongside globally renowned recording artists such as Katy Perry, Future, and Kesha, as well as fashion designers including Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy, Damir Doma, and Zaid Affa.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- Starting her career directly out of university within the music industry
- Working for V2 Music
- Her experience working at a photo gallery in London
- Working for Givenchy in Paris
- Magic vs magick
- Her love for the work of Francis Bacon and Alexander McQueen
- Working for Iconoclast Image in NY
- The balance between art and commerce
- Servicing clients
- Changes going on in the entertainment industry
- Understanding the creative vision before developing a project
- How to stay true to your creativity while taking a brief from a client
- The realities of commercializing your artwork
- Floria Sigismondi
- Creating a body of work that defines your creative vision
- Creating long term relationships vs. creating short term networks
Brad Kunkle was raised in rural Pennsylvania and graduated from Kutztown University with a BFA in painting in 2001. Rather than continue his artistic pursuits in an academic environment, he became a house painter. That dubious, professional beginning however, taught him valuable lessons that became crucial to his later success. Having taught himself how to gild with precious metals for some of those residential projects, he later implemented those skills in his personal, fine art works.
His debut, fine art exhibition in 2010 at Arcadia Contemporary in NYC sold out before the show's opening night and was followed by a second sold-out exhibition two years later. Since then he has exhibited his paintings in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, London, Miami, and his works can be found in private collections all over the world. His paintings have twice graced the cover of American Art Collector Magazine and have been published extensively online and in print in such highly read publications as Hi-Fructose, American Arts Quarterly, Lapham’s Quarterly, Juxtapoz and Fine Arts Connoisseur. Kunkle continues to be represented by Arcadia Contemporary in Los Angeles, where he had his debut, West Coast solo exhibition in November of 2016. More recently, Kunkle collaborated as an Art Director with the award-winning, special effects house, Imaginary Forces as his paintings became the foundation for the main title sequence of the Netflix original series, “Anne With An E.”
He lives and works in New York's Hudson Valley.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- Reflecting on his 2016 show “Invisible”
- Muses
- Social media misconceptions
- “The Invisible Man” by H.G. Wells
- Technical elements behind his work
- Dreaming and lucid dreaming
- The benefits of listening to music while you work
- Meditation
- Intention in creation
- Elevating vs. entertaining
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“What I want is to open up. I want to know what's inside me. I want everybody to open up. I'm like an imbecile with a can opener in his hand, wondering where to begin—to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I'm sure of it.” - Henry Miller
Digging beneath the mess of the world to find the beauty underneath is perhaps the most consistent theme in Chelsea Wolfe’s expansive discography—a theme that ties together her ceaseless explorations in unorthodox textures, haunting melodies, and mining the grandeur embedded within ugliness and pain. With her sixth official album Hiss Spun, Wolfe adopts Miller’s quest to become empowered by embracing the mess of the self, to control the tumult of the soul in hopes of reigning in the chaos of the world around us. “I wanted to write some sort of escapist music; songs that were just about being in your body, and getting free,” Wolfe says of the album before extrapolating on the broader scope of her new collection of songs. “You’re just bombarded with constant bad news, people getting fucked over and killed for shitty reasons or for no reason at all, and it seems like the world has been in tears for months, and then you remember it’s been fucked for a long time, it’s been fucked since the beginning. It’s overwhelming and I have to write about it.”
Hiss Spun was recorded by Kurt Ballou in Salem, Massachusetts at the tail end of winter 2017 against a backdrop of deathly quiet snow-blanketed streets and the hissing radiators of warm interiors. While past albums operated on the intimacy of stripped-down folkmusic (The Grime and the Glow, Unknown Rooms), or the throbbing pulse of supplemental electronics (Pain Is Beauty, Abyss), Wolfe’s latest offering wrings its exquisiteness out of a palette of groaning bass, pounding drums, and crunching distortion. It’s an album that inadvertently drew part of its aura from the cold white of the New England winter, though the flesh-and-bone of the material was culled from upheavals in Wolfe’s personal life, and coming to terms with years of vulnerability, anger, self-destruction, and dark family history. Aside from adding low-end heft with gratuitous slabs of fuzz bass, longtime collaborator Ben Chisholm contributed harrowing swaths of sound collages from sources surrounding the artist and her band in recent years—the rumble of street construction at a tour stop in Prague, the howl of a coyote outside Wolfe’s rural house in California, the scrape of machinery on the floor of a warehouse at a down-and-out friend’s workplace. Music is rendered out of dissonance—bomb blasts from the Enola Gay, the shriek of primates, the fluttering pages of a Walt Whitman book are manipulated and seamlessly integrated into the feral and forlorn songs of Hiss Spun.
The album opens with the sickening bang of “Spun”, where a lurching bottom-heavy riff provided by Chisholm and Troy Van Leeuwen (Queens of the Stone Age, Failure) serves as a foundation to a sultry mantra of fever-dream longing and desire. The first third of Hiss Spun—whether it’s the ominous twang and cataclysmic dynamics of “16 Psyche”, the icy keyboard lines, restless pulse and harrowing bellows of Aaron Turner (Old Man Gloom, SUMAC) on “Vex”, or the patient repetition and devastating choruses of “The Culling—all carry the weight of desperation, lost love, and withdrawal. Wolfe’s introspection and existential dread turns outwards to the crumbling world around us with “Particle Flux”, an examination of the casualties of war set against an aural sea of static. White noise is a constant thread through Hiss Spun, with Wolfe finding solace in the knowledge that radio static is the sound of the universe expanding outwards from the Big Bang—a reminder that even dissonance has ties to creation. The electronic thump of “Offering” serves as an ode to the Salton Sea and the encroaching calamities stemming from climate change. The obsession with white noise and global destruction carries over into “Static Hum”, where the merciless percussive battery of Wolfe’s former bandmateand current drummer Jess Gowrie helps deliver the dire weight of a sonnet dedicated to a “burning planet.” By the time the album closes with “Scrape”, Wolfe has come full circle and turned her examinations back inward, reflecting over her own mortality with arguably the most commanding vocal performance in her entire oeuvre.
“The album is cyclical, like me and my moods,” Wolfe says of Hiss Spun. “Cycles, obsession, spinning, centrifugal force—all with gut feelings as the center of the self.” And it’s an album that Wolfe sees as a kind of exorcism. “I’m at odds with myself… I got tired of trying to disappear. The record became very personal in that way. I wanted to open up more, but also create my own reality.” Every Chelsea Wolfe album is cathartic, but never before has both the artist and her audience so desperately needed this kind of emotional purging. Sargent House is proud to release Hiss Spun to the world on September 22nd, 2017.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- Her radio show through Red Bull Music Academy called "Hypnos Hour"
- The process of discovering yourself as an artist
- The novel "1Q84" written by Haruki Murakami
- The film "The Sevent h Seal" directed by Ingmar Bergman
- Writing lyrics and song writing
- Psychedelics opening up access portals
- Her collaboration with Converge
- Her new album "Hiss Spun"
www.artistdecoded.com
Nika Roza Danilova has been recording and performing as Zola Jesus for more than a decade. As a classically trained opera singer with a penchant for noisy, avant-garde sounds, she launched her career with a series of lo-fi releases that pitted her soaring vocals against harsh industrial clatter and jittery synths. The signature Zola Jesus sound became more hi-fi as she began to explore her own skewed vision of pop music on releases like Stridulum, Valusia, and Conatus. With the release of Conatus, Danilova was propelled to regular appearances on festival stages all around the world, as well as a special performance at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. That era culminated in the release of Versions, a collection of string quartet interpretations of her most beloved work, conducted by J.G. Thirlwell (Foetus). That album and subsequent tour were followed by her most hi-fi outing to date, Taiga. Now, coinciding with her return to both the Wisconsin woods in which she was raised and her longtime label, Sacred Bones Records, Zola Jesus has produced Okovi, her darkest album yet. It is, in Danilova’s words, “a deeply personal snapshot of loss, reconciliation, and a sympathy for the chains that keep us all grounded to the unforgiving laws of feral nature.”
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- Depression
- Dissecting sections of her creative process from an emotional and technical standpoint
- Creative resourcefulness
- Identity
- Her thoughts on constructing honest lyrics
- Yoshino and Zola Jesus’s collaboration together
- Kindred spirits in collaborative creative partners
- Exploring morbid curiosities and ideas surrounded around death
- Understanding human suffering
- Collaborating with David Lynch
- Finding your own path
- Resilience through failure
www.twitter.com/yoshinostudios
"Jesse Draxler is an artist best known for his collage and mixed media works, though with his new exhibition "Tire Fire" we find him returning to the medium that sparked his love of image making, drawing. As a child growing up in rural Wisconsin Draxler drew incessantly. Being that his father was a mechanic he would spend hours upon hours drawing cars, trucks, and engine parts. Later in adolescence, his attention changed as circumstances became bleak.
Draxler’s mother was in a near-fatal car accident when he was nine. Upon her recovery, over a year later, his parents were divorced. His mother, whom he was now living with, soon remarried. Then just months after the wedding she was ran over and killed by her new husband in his truck, an event to which he arrived just moments later.
In the following years, Draxler states that he barely remembers a thing. These times of pervasive uncertainty and loss changed him forever and his focus shifted to much darker interests. He was always an outcast from his peers, but from this time on Draxler leaned into his outsider lot in life. It wasn’t until almost two decades later that he began to see a light at the end of a very dark tunnel.
Themes of bewilderment, isolation, ambiguity, and absurdity are all strongly represented in Draxler’s work, along with frustration and aggression. Yet these are not endpoints but have rather become the in-roads to deeper understanding and acceptance. It is clear he has spent the better part of his life straddling the line between fear and ecstasy, the beautiful and the grotesque. The result is Draxler’s unique ability to present a point of view in which the subtle nuances of the human condition are concisely illuminated, satisfying a psychological and emotional itch that so seldom gets scratched."
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- Talks about his show TireFire
- Containing multitudes
- Finding the balance between commercial work and personal work
- Developing a point of view
- Susan Rothenberg
- Viewing the entirety of your life as an artistic practice
- Listening to music as a tool for creating art
- Billy Corgan
- “The Inner Game of Tennis” by Timothy Gallwey
- The intersection of physical activities and artistic practices
www.twitter.com/yoshinostudios
"Photographer John Kilar’s site will tell you, simply, that he is a nomad. Portraits and landscapes by Kilar will show you that too, with a raw presentation of untamed characters and equally wild and beautiful locations. Variety does not shake the colorful, documentary aesthetic that is true to his photos, which show a curious admiration for each subject.
John Kilar’s images can be found in Oyster Magazine, VICE, Dazed & Confused, Purple Fashion, and DIS Magazine. His client list includes Heineken, Urban Outfitters, The Cobra Snake, and several other lifestyle-saavy brands which Kilar worked with while living in Venice Beach, California."
Text by Linnea Stephan @ Juxtapoz
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- His journey into a nomadic lifestyle
- Synchronicities
- Following your bliss
- Deactivating technology to be more focused on the present moment
- Expanding consciousness
- Identity
- Having empathy towards others
www.twitter.com/yoshinostudios
Originally hailing from Toronto, Canada, Michelle Groskopf is a Los Angeles based photographer. Her work is a mix of photo journalism, portraiture and street photography. She holds a BFA in film and video production from the School Of Visual Arts in New York where she also taught as an adjunct professor in the graduate film and video dept. She is a member of the celebrated flash photography collective Full Frontal Flash. Michelle is dedicated to empowering youth through photography and education initiatives working with the Lucie Foundation, Educare and Youth Arts to inspire the next generation of photographers and artists. Her work has been shown around the world and featured in publications such as The British Journal Of Photography, American Photo, The Huffington Post, Vice Magazine and It’s Nice That, among others. Her clients include, Refinery 29, Bloomberg Businessweek, Vice Magazine, Marie Claire France, Aftenposten, and Stern Magazine. Her first monograph is being published by The Magenta Foundation and will be released in the fall of 2017.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- Making thematic work
- Her early life/work as a filmmaker and producer
- How she became a photographer
- Visual iconography
- Outside forces polluting ideas
- Her experiences living in Hollywood
- The path of least resistance
- Physical and emotional stress
- Larry Sultan
- Thinking about life as a marathon as opposed to a sprint
- Changing the idea of success
- Romanticizing the artist lifestyle
- Seeing the light at the end of a dark and hopeless tunnel
- Looking at other mediums of art for inspiration
- Over intellectualizing artwork
- The “Full Frontal Flash” photography collective
- Finding a community
www.artistdecoded.com