Christian Eede
, March 15th, 2021 16:06
The artwork sees Richard D. James team up with frequent visual collaborator Weirdcore
Aphex Twin has auctioned off artwork as an NFT (non-fungible token).
Titled
afx\/weirdcore\blockscanner, the artwork is a collaboration between Richard D. James and visual artist Weirdcore, with whom the producer has frequently worked before. The digital artwork, which features music from Aphex Twin, was made available on the cryptocurrency marketplace Foundation and the winning bid was 72 ETH, equivalent to around $128,000. An NFT is a token that defines ownership of part of a digital asset, which could be an MP3, a gif, a PDF or any other kind of digital file.
Oobah Butler
, March 15th, 2021 09:01
A chance encounter on an otherwise dry BBC art documentary took Oobah Butler down a revelatory rabbit hole peopled by Polish weightlifters, fake Jesuses and irate fortune-tellers
The author, acting as Jesus aged 13, in a school version of Jesus Christ Superstar
“Do you like to shock people, Christian?” says Dr James Fox, perched on the edge of a squat sofa, straight-backed, his neck angled upwards like a dad at a service-station urinal. Just an arm’s length away, Christian Jankowski looks back, smiles, and uncrosses his legs.
It’s September 2016, I feel poorly, and I’m watching a documentary about conceptual art. I’ve no real knowledge on the subject and the film is trying to educate me. It does this in the same language as pretty much any BBC documentary of the past 80 years: polished accents offer informative and dry anecdotes; stock footage brings colour; cameras are slowly approached by presenters who gesticulate and expertly
The Art Of Losing
Marc Burrows
, March 15th, 2021 09:33
With guest vocals from James Dean Bradfield (and drumming from Sterling Campbell, it s nonetheless Catherine Anne Davies s own production skills that make her second Anchoress album so special, finds Marc Burrows
“Ouch,” sings Catherine Anne Davies, right at the starter pistol, “this is going to hurt”. Any good iconoclast knows to put their manifesto in the first line, and in her persona as The Anchoress, Davies is always iconoclastic about her own trauma.
She’s absolutely right as well.
The Art of Losing really fucking hurts. It hurts more as it goes along. The whole record is a processing plant for rage and pain, sharpening it to a point, adding the cruellest barbs and driving it into your skin. Deeper it goes, hurting more with every tap of the sonic mallet. Right through the wrists and ankles, right against the rough wood of the cross, right through the side. Every line is a thorn, a nail, the whole Lance o
Christian Eede
, March 15th, 2021 15:49
The event s debut edition was cancelled last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic
London is getting a new day festival, Waterworks.
Taking place in late September at Gunnersbury Park, Waterworks will host a number of big names in current electronic music, with DJ sets confirmed from Objekt, Ben UFO, Mala, Josey Rebelle, object blue, Call Super and Batu, among others. Karenn and Novelist have also both been enlisted to play live.
Waterworks had originally been set to take place at a new East London location last August, but was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic and will this year happen in West London instead. The new city festival is the brainchild of promoters behind events such as Love International and Percolate.
Patrick Clarke
, March 15th, 2021 10:30
With his new modular project Microcorps, Alexander Tucker blurs the lines between human and humanoid as he investigates how language can shift our perception. He tells Patrick Clarke the story of new album XMIT
The algorithms that dictate so much of our consumption – the next song you listen to, the next film you watch, the next person you go on a date with – are now so complex that they are approaching the point where not even their creators can comprehend them. “One of the biggest sources of anxiety about AI is not that it will turn against us, but that we simply cannot understand how it works,” wrote the Harvard Business Review in 2019. Algorithms now make so many decisions without consulting the people they effect, wrote Towards Data Science in a lengthy essay on the need for increased ethics in the field, that “they have become the decision makers, and humans have been pushed into an artefact shaped by technology.”