Friday, January 7, 2011
Friday, December 24, 2010
Merry Christ... OH SHIT!!!
Colors of the Dark will be on Holidaze break until sometime next week. In the meantime enjoy this warm and cozy little bit of seasonal cheer...
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
BloodShop!
BloodLust!, one of the best sources for noise / power-electronics / experimental drone, now has an online store... BloodShop! (Click for link)
Here are some of their recent items:
Monday, December 20, 2010
Friday, December 17, 2010
Human Nature
Click here for our previous post on the art of Daikichi Amano.
Here's a description from Boungout... In his photographs, Daikichi Amano (b.1973 in Japan), enfant terrible of Hokusai, does not shun even the most impossible types of embraces.
In his monstrous orgies—elaborate and disturbingly sensual encounters of otherworldly beauty that flirts with the abject—angel-faced women frolic with snakes and earthworms, elegantly contorted and interlaced eels slipping into every orifice of the human body. Live toads are sucked-on gluttonously, cockroaches, larvae and other invertebrates embrace, interweave, absorb and suck on each other until they lock into a hybrid body moving as one under the waves of a new kind of irresistible sensuality.
Each animal possesses its own secret beauty – Amano has made it his calling to reveal their graces: smooth undulating eels, shiny and transparent octopuses arranged in precious and enthralling compositions. Despite being disturbing to the point of nausea,
Daikichi Amano’s works are celebrated internationally. He composes new kinds of tableaux with the bodies of actresses, animals and insects, translates his nightmares and visions into frozen images, portraits of an almost surreal beauty.
Amano pursues this photographic enquiry into the bizarre realms of erotic imagination with an obsessive and perfectionist eye for detail, inspired by the Dutch still-lives painters as well as Japanese mythology and the great Ukiyo-E woodcut masters of the Edo period and in particular the erotic Shunga prints.
Textures, surfaces and bodies weave themselves into abstract compositions in his photographs, with flesh, scales and skin taking on the colours of jewels. The abject becomes sublime. This is Amano’s great talent: to reevaluate death not as sterile horror, but as an aesthetic resurrection. He takes up the ancient idea of beauty as ineluctably doomed to wilt, condemned to eventually disappear and thereby aligns himself as an artist in a thousand-year-old poetic tradition that sings of all things fleeting and ephemeral.
Click here for ordering info and images from the book (NOT WORK SAFE).
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Hush / Joka Exhibition Opens Saturday in Philly
Artist Hush was featured on Colors of the Dark previously here. You can see more Joka here.
Click here for The Toothless Cat Gallery blog.
Monday, December 13, 2010
vidnaObmana 1987-2007 Chasing The Odysee
(Click photo to view larger. Photo by Patrick Ceuppens)
Coming in January, a very special box set for one of the greatest ambient / experimental artists the world has ever known...
vidnaObmana - 1987-2007 Chasing The Odysee (8LP, Tonefloat)
From the vidnaObmana newsletter: This is arguably the biggest project ever released on tonefloat. first announced as early as 2006, Chasing The Odyssee comprises 37 tracks on eight vinyl discs and an oversized 24-page booklet featuring exclusive liner notes. Covering the years 1987 to 2007 and following in the footsteps of an earlier set dedicated to the project’s obscure tape years, it documents Dirk Serries’s gradual development from an industrial sound sculptor to an artist equally at home in the world of electronica and contemporary composition.
Over the course of these 20 years, he would influence the gradual growth of ambient from nothing but a fleeting idea by Brian Eno to an established and challenging genre, sell 10,000 copies of his classic The River Of Appearance, write a soundtrack for the giant aquarium of the Antwerp Zoo and work with the likes of Steve Roach, Steven Wilson and a symphonic orchestra. Most of all, he would efficiently demonstrate that stylistic limitations are purely rooted in a lack of imagination.
To make these developments and changes transparent, Chasing The Odyssee has been divided into four chapters. While two records present a selection of pieces recorded and originally released before 2000, four sides have been reserved for a variety of previously unreleased Justin K. Broadrick remixes and live tracks providing for a hands-on impression of how powerfully the vidnaObmana studio sound studio sound translated to the stage. Meanwhile, highlights from two unique cycles make up the extensive middle section of the box: the Dante Trilogy, a collaboration with ground breaking extreme metal label Relapse, as well as Serries’s Opera For Four Fusion Works, an uncompromising stint into the world of the avant garde. Many of these pieces have long been out of print, but merely compiling oddities is not the aim of Chasing The Odyssee. Rather, it intends to present the music on the format they would have been released on in an ideal world in the first place and at premium acoustic quality – vidnaObmana has certainly never sounded better.
Rather than resting on his laurels for the rest of his career, Serries decided to end the journey at its peak. Now, you can relive the experience.
From the liner notes: “listening to these records from beginning to end will take you on a personal journey, which, despite its occasional twists and turns, is devoid of stereotypical cliches and mythical transfigurations. Chasing The Odyssee is not just a collector’s item. Cinematic, evocatively physical and full of memories, it is a perfect representation of everything that vidnaObmana has stood for over the last 23 years.”
Chasing The Odyssee, pressed on eight 180 grams black vinyls discs, is packed in a hardback box with lid, and comes with 1 24-page booklet.
The release date for the box (which is limited to 400 copies) is January 24, 2011, and is available for pre-orders from the tonefloat store at the introductory price of only 49.99 euros (plus postage). CLICK HERE TO PRE-ORDER.
Also, last year Vinyl On Demand released the vidnaObmana "1984-86 testament of tape“ box set. Click here for more info on that release (scroll down).
For more on the work of vidnaObmana and Dirk Serries check out the following links:
vidnaobmana.be
dirkserries.com
3secondsofair.com
fearfallsburning.be
microphonics.be
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