WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Chicago Zeuhl: Ga'an

Led by drummer Seth Sher, Ga'an has gone through a few line-up changes since its inception, but each change has propelled the evolution of their proggish/Zeuhl/Italian horror soundtrack sound. On their latest LP Black Equus, their vision is put into new focus with a fantastic production job not present on past releases- revealing the depth and epic nature of the minimal, intricate and slowly evolving compositions. Lindsey Powel's powerful yet etheral vocals float in and out of Tyson Torstensen's slippery bass and monumental synth work as Sher pushes everything into a ritualistic dance of death/life.

 

The Fart and Wheeze of Gardenella Dingledart

Gardenella Dingledart is Marge Gardenella, cello player for the weirdo Austin band Attic Ted. I have been following her on Soundcloud where she posts her lo-fi songs of mostly organ and voice. Her lyrics are dark, crass, funny and sometimes sweet, yammered and cooed over wheezing organ, farty sounds and rhythm box- a lot of it reminds me of the soundtracks to Cafe Flesh and Liquid Sky. My favorite track is "The Plague" where the tale of viscera and garbage flushed down the toilet is sung over burpy and manic classical figures and haunted house organ grinding.

Heather Benjamin

Heather Benjamin's comic and ink work is a flurry of deeply hacked out lines of sexual frustration. Characters stab and fuck each other in fountains of blood and dirty underwear. Through all the angst, a sensual gentle hand is apparent as seen in the way Benjamin handles hair- it's lovingly rendered even when it theatens to envelope and strangle.

This is the only image that I could get away with putting on the blog. Go to her blog (nsfw) and make sure to check out her comic Sad People Sex. 

Korehiko Hino

Kerehiko Hino's paintings are populated with homogenous child-like figures that are in some sort of ecstasy trance. Their faces resemble fish heads with large eyes and gaping mouths; they stare into a void, seemingly stricken with some sort of post-orgasmic rigor mortis, unaware of the viewers' gawking. Hino's lush handling of flesh, odd lighting and candy pastel palette creates even more dissonance in the uncanny tableaux. This treatment of the body as an abject object is continued in his still-life work that reduces personal items such as wigs and cheap costume jewelry into absurd piles.

Aleksandra Waliszewska

Aleksandra Waliszewska's drawings depict a world populated by self-mutilating children. They roam the woods, cutting themselves in a ritualistic fervor. Animals and beasts sometimes pet the children, sometimes they eat them. Waliszeska's drawing style is crude but controlled, giving her characters an odd vulnerability even as they are hacking the limbs off of some unfortunate victim.

Trubble Club Collaborative Comics

Trubble Club is an informal group of Chicago comic artists that meet every week to produce collaborative comics. Inkers such as Edie Fake, Jeremy Tinder and Grant Reynolds delight in farting out the most absurd panels full of gross-out humor and ridiculous surrealism.

8 Bit Beefheart

Bingo!

 

Here's a nice little 8mm documentary about Grandma Belasco and her bingo habit.

Highlights from Wildwood, N.J. - 1994

Amy Lockhart - Shrivelled Creatures and Cut Paper Animations

Amy Lockhart's is a Canadian artist and filmmaker. Her art-brut drawings and paintings are playful, reminiscent of Lee Godie, squishing figures into awkward tube shapes and detailing the fleshy fold-overs. Her most recent animation Walk for Walk continues this grotesquerie into a stream-of-conscious parade of licking, skipping, and merry-making.

"This 16mm film was created using over 1,000 hand painted cut-outs and paper puppets with paper backgrounds. I recorded the sounds in an isolation box I built in my living room, out of cardboard, insulation and drywall." The soundtrack is also an astonishing collage of unexpected Foley sound and warbly electronics. You can view more animations, including her collaborations with Marc Bell, on her blog.

Tonetta777 - Demented Spastic Gyrations

I have no idea...mental breakdown dirty dancing to self-produced jams that sound like a cross between The Pod-era Ween and Right Said Fred. Watch all of Tonetta777's videos on his youtube page. Not necessarily NSFW, but it might creep some people out. 

Lauren Luloff's Mountainous Bed Sheets

Lauren Luloff's current show at Horton & Co. features messy abstracts constructed from bed sheets. Luloff has managed to make abstract painting disgusting...the sheets are mountainous, hard and crusty; resembling mummified skin. The works imply a history of sweat and ooze, sheets that have been left to rot...like a homeless man's bedding, ossified with pigeon shit, abandoned underneath a bridge.

The clean photo documentation at the gallery's website doesn't do the work justice...check out more photos from the Anaba blog. 

Miniature Tableaux of Mark Powell

Mark Powell creates horrific and gory miniature tableaux of hellish interiors occupied by rotted meat monsters. The photo documentation of these little worlds is also impressive as it creates a cinematic narrative while also being very painterly in a Francis Bacon sort of way. His site is here, although I prefer the larger images and simple navigation of his Flickr account.

30 Ways to Electrocution

Old illustrations of electrical accidents from the book Elektroschutz in 132 Bildern! Weeeee!

Mighty Titan, The Most Scary Lovely Dog

 
Sunday treat! Fantastic pictures of a flappy faced Bordeaux Mastiff gnawing and slobbering on a ball!

As an aside, I just spent ten minutes consulting Google on the proper capitalization of dog breed names. I can't find a definitive answer as it seems to be a case of style, so I decided to capitalize the whole damn thing because this goddamn dog deserves it. Look at him.

My Name is Rar-Rar

My Name is Rar-Rar was a spastic no-wave band from Chicago that was formed in late 2000 by guitarist Chuck Falzone and bassist Jonathan Hischke. Both had served time in various incarnations of the Flying Luttenbachers and they brought the dissonance and speed to My Name is Rar-Rar, setting it to a more playful dancey tribal thump provided by Chrissy Rossettie.  Falzone's odd guitar timbre collided with Hischke's ridiculous synth-bass lines that snaked between rubbery farts and calliope bounce.

Original singer Camilla Ha, later of Magic is Kuntmaster, made the stage shows a surrealist fanfare as she fronted the band in elaborate and absurd Victorian-inspired costumes. She liked to assault the audience if they seemed too stuffy and pretentious, other times she stood motionless as she wailed her Nico-like croon over the manic music.

When Ha left the band, Greg Peters took over on vocals, bringing his trademark bark over from his previous band Xerobot.  His whoops, coughs and delusional ramblings transformed the band into a speeding circus caravan that misses a turn and goes tumbling over a cliff. Peters' on-stage antics were also always something to behold as he flailed about, cupping the mic to his mouth and gripping the side of his leg as if his bowels were on the verge of bursting.

My Name is Rar-Rar released a split 7" with Neon Hunk on Hello Pussy/Liquid Death Records, a comp track on White Denim records and a mini-EP on an obscure Italian label. They recorded their first record in 2003 but broke up before mixing it.

Chuck Falzone and Greg Peters have a new band called Buck Pig. Jonathan Hischke went on to play in the more easily digestible Head of Femur before moving to California to play in a touring line-up of Hella. Chrissy Rossettie moved to Brooklyn and has a dancey futuristic noise project called Iyaxia.

Hilfe, Hilfe, Die Globolinks!

Help! Help! The Globolinks! Is a science-fiction opera for children by Gian Carlo Menotti where strange alien creatures can only be destroyed by music. The Globolinks in this German production look like they stepped out of a Matta painting. They are accompanied by some fantastic and bizarre electronic blip-blop squeeling which adds a nice contract to the neoclassical fanfare. Youtube version here.

My Life in Bagels

The smell of bagels is permanently lodged in my olfactory memory bank.  It is a smell that I have been neglected of since I moved to Chicago from New Jersey years ago. A few months ago my girlfriend brought home some bagels. I had grown to loathe bagels and I ignored the bag she plopped on the kitchen table...thinking it was a batch of Chicago bagels...essentially an inedible and tasteless mass of Wonderbread shaped in an "O". But soon a familiar smell wafted past my nose...a smell that brought back waves of memories and a healthy rumble in my stomach...those are BAGELS! REAL BAGELS! It is a very distinctive smell- doughy, slightly sweet and always accompanied by the scent of a well-worn paper bag.

I have a very nostalgic and emotional relationship to bagels. In high school I had a group of girlfriends that worked at my town's bagel shop (they only hired teenage girls).  It was a dumpy little strip mall storefront that just had the bare essentials- bins of bagels, a couple pots of coffee and a small deli case for lox, cream cheese and butter. Customers rarely came in- giving us free reign of the place to use as our little clubhouse.  Every day after school I would hang out and stock up on bagels...breeding a ridiculous fanaticism. I always had a paper bag of them in my backpack, eating them as I spent hours roaming around town and exploring the woods. Pumpernickel! Sesame Seed! Even a plain bagel was enough for me. I ate at least five bagels a day. A surplus would often accumulate in my school locker, many of them hardening into a concrete that would smash into many pieces when you threw them against the wall.

Imagine my surprise when I arrived in Chicago and bit into the region's bagel! A bagel shop underneath the El tracks by Wrigley Field came highly recommended and I immediately hopped on the train to hunt it down. Unfortunately, what my mouth was greeted with was a puffy and elastic ball of dough. I should have known better when I saw that they offered chocolate chip, blueberry and pumpkin varieties. A bagel is not a muffin! A bagel is not simply a surface to smear cream cheese upon! A bagel is the product of a highly refined recipe and cooking process passed down through hundreds of years- resulting in a bread product whose flavor is rich but simple and a texture that is always challenging. I don't need a goddamn thing on my bagel and honestly, I find bagels most delicious when they are a couple days old and slightly hard.

P-R-A-W-D-A

From what I can tell, P-R-A-W-D-A is a duo of Russian women who create site specific performances in costume. Super-heroes, bunny costumes, plush headpieces- these are images that have been beaten to death in western hipster art...but P-R-A-W-D-A's approach seems more ritualistic, sexual and defeated. In their wonderful photo documentation, they arrange themselves symmetrically as in icon paintings, holding stoic stances even though their uniforms are bizarre concoctions seemingly picked out of the garbage.

Hausu: Surreal Japanese Horror

Manga, Vienna Aktion, weird experimental optical printing and a white cat collide for the most insane two and a half minutes I have ever seen. The entire film can be viewed on Youtube here.

(via Wheat)