Plectrum - The Cultural Pick

(Mute)
CD, Vinyl, 2CD, On Release

By Guy Sangster Adams

That the excellent new Liars album already has an host of influential fans is borne out by the second CD in the 2CD edition of Sisterworld which features remixes and reinterpretations of each track by other artists including Thom Yorke, Alan Vega, Devendra Banhart, and Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti, and packaging designed by the Grammy award nominated Brian Roettinger/Hand Held Heart which when one opens the CD case allows a ‘through the keyhole’ view into the concertina-fold outer sleeve and a glimpse into the sunshine filtered woods of Sisterworld.

Sisterworld is Liars’ parallel world, a conceptual space to which they have ascribed the criteria that it is their “own space, devoid of influence, somewhere remote from the false dreams amassed in L.A.” in which they “explore the underground support systems created to deal with loss of self to society,” by way of “the alternate spaces people create in order to maintain identity in a city like L.A.”

Sisterworld is, as the view through the concertina suggests, as dramatically and sensorily charged as being in the midst of a dense forest on a summer’s day; light when it breaks through the branches creates temporal spaces of the most magical beauty, whilst the dark corners seem darker than you could ever imagine, the shadows forever shifting and encircling, accelerating one into fright-or flight-or freeze.

Liars, Sisterworld ©Zen Sekizawa

In short, the fifth album from this three-piece is phenomenally engaging. It creates an highly evocative soundtrack to a personal film that plays so vividly through your mind as you listen; a film of falling through the cracks in the film capital of the world, adrift and alone in the city of angels with a paucity of guardian angels. Sisterworld is by turns transcendent and troubling, the smoothest caress can quickly become the harshest of grips, ethereal harmonies, and floating violin, viola, and cello strings are blown away by the rawest garage rock, following the hopeful will-o’-the-wisp bassoon can be fatal as you realize that the rasping vocals are framing a counterpoint picture of despair.

But the best alternative realities are made stronger by recognition and understanding of the mainstream to which they are opposed, and Sisterworld is a brilliant alternative to the mainstream, and a wonderful escape from the glass and steel forest of homogenisation.

Links

Liars
www.liarsliarsliars.com

Mute
www.mute.com

(Laurence King) £24.95

By Guy Sangster Adams

Maia Adams’ supremely elegant new book provides the first overview of the extraordinarily innovative designs and diverse creative practice that has transformed fashion jewellery over recent years and instigated its current renaissance.

Fashion jewellery has antecedents in the costume jewellery of the twentieth century, from Coco Chanel in the 1920s who, as Adams writes, “challenged the status quo that jewels were only for the very wealthy,” to the 1960s and the use of plastic, wood, and paper by designers such as Paco Rabane, to its apogee in the diamante studded 1980s, and the prevalence of the “supersized imitation jewels” of Butler and Wilson, and the rubber bangles and crucifixes designed by Maripol which Madonna made ubiquitous. But as Vicki Beamon, of Erickson Beamon, explains in Fashion Jewellery, “Costume is an antiquated term for jewellery that, on the whole, was designed to look real,” and as Adams elaborates, to define the theme of her book, “this new breed of designer fashion jewellery makes no such claims - its purpose is not to imitate but to innovate.”

Erickson Beamon AW08 jewellery ©Greg Kadel

Erickson Beamon are one of the 33 designers profiled in the book, and provide a key link from the 1980s to the present day, three decades during which their “jewels of fantasy,” as Hamish Bowles has written, have reflected the times “from the rollicking, coruscating, dangerous 80s, the sleek, spare, barely there 90s, and our eclectic new century.” Judy Blame equally provides a link to the 1980s and in both his pioneering use of found objects in his jewellery and multi-faceted career that has also included accessories design, styling, and photography,  he has equally become an iconic mentor and inspiration not only to a new generation of fashion designers such as Gareth Pugh, but also to the new fashion jewellery designers.

Judy Blame coin purse ©Judy Blame

Many of whom, as Adams writes, “work simultaneously as stylists, photographers and fashion, costume, or product designers [which] means that they bring an eclectic arsenal of techniques and influences to bear on a body of work that runs the gamut from craft-based to technology-led; cerebral to silly; witty to whimsical.”

Amongst its line up of luminaries, Fashion Jewellery also features Scott Wilson, long time Hussein Chalayan collaborator, whose  sculptural headwear/jewellery hybrids have become renowned “spectacular catwalk statements” and whose earrings adorn the model on the book’s striking cover. In addition, Laurent Rivaud, to whom Vivienne Westwood went when she choose to launch her jewellery line in 1994, including the iconic orbs, and who now, under his own label R, creates minutely detailed jewellery, antique in appearance, drawing inspiration from a host of influences including Arthur Rackham, Fortunato Pio Castellani, Lord Leighton, and PJ Harvey. Whilst Natalia Brilli wraps an eclectic array of objects such as whistles, sea urchins, scarabs, and watches in leather to create her one-off jewellery pieces.

Natalia Brilli's gemstone bangles ©Julien Classens & Thomas Deschamps

Fashion Jewellery is crammed with great photographs, including still lives, catwalk shots, and fashion editorial spreads, working drawings, and features exclusive interviews with many of the featured designers, and provides a fascinating, inspiring, and exciting exploration of an equally fascinating, inspiring, and exciting time in jewellery design.

Links

Laurence King
www.laurenceking.com

Nintendo
b/w Abraham, Martin, & John; On the Turner Grand #2;  Nintendo (demo version)
(Xtra Mile Recordings)
EP available now, download only

(Xtra Mile Recordings)
Album, released 15th March

By Guy Sangster Adams

The resplendent piano saturated Nintendo EP is a wonderful prologue to Chris T-T’s excellent new album Love is not Rescue. Nintendo, which is also the opening track on the album, immediately establishes the sea change in sound and themes from T-T’s last album Capital which, fittingly as it concluded his London Trilogy, featured a far more caustic, rockier and inner city edge and edginess. But although both the new EP and album are less about kicking over the statues that is not to say that they don’t pack just as powerful a punch, and in many ways perhaps more so.

Against a piano as calming as watching a gentle incoming tide, lyrically Nintendo charts a relationship on the ebb, and holistically creates a superb and contradictory mix of poignancy and self deprecation, with a knowingness and great wry humour; for managing to make Nintendo Wii both a moving and funny lyric alone T-T should be lauded! For the EP Nintendo is backed with three tracks not included on the album: a demo version of Nintendo, On the Turner Grand #2 a six minute piano improvisation, and a great cover version of Dick Holler’s Abraham, Martin, and John. The latter is a beautiful, melodic, reflection both on loss and the struggle for human rights.

Key facets, equally, to the other tracks on Love is not Rescue, which are erudite and engaging, set to a stripped back sound of piano, organ, or acoustic guitar, to which the sounds of pedal shifts or fingers sliding on the fret board, all add to the whole. They are highly reflective and explore love, loss, and relationships, from the stand point of looking back over the decade since the release of his first album, and the effect that career choices, nigh on perpetual touring, to say nothing of getting older, have had on T-T’s personal life, and conversely the effect of the personal on the professional. As with Nintendo, Stop Listening and In The Halfway House (I Don’t Sleep Around) adroitly mix the laying bare of emotions with wry humour, not least in their pay-off lines, whilst Tall Woman is an acutely affecting study of saying goodbye to someone who has literally loomed large over one’s life.

Love is not Rescue also includes a great reworking of A.A. Milne’s Market Square, from When We Were Very Young, which as with Milne or T-T alike could be enjoyed as a wonderfully whimsical tale about wanting to buy a rabbit or as a more cautionary story about how even in a market of global availability the things that are most worthwhile to us don’t always have to be bought and sold.

That said, Nintenedo EP and Love is not Rescue do both have to be bought and sold, but they are entirely worth your money!

Links

Chris T-T
christt.com

Xtra Mile Recordings
www.xtramilerecordings.com

(Laurence King) £19.95

By Guy Sangster Adams

The sequel to her book Restaurant Design, Bethan Ryder’s New Restaurant Design which is published in paperback for the first time, continues her exploration of the world’s most “elegant, unusual, and spectacular dining spaces.” Underscoring and continuing her theme established in the earlier book that eating out can be “as much a lifestyle choice and source of entertainment as a form of nourishment,” Ryder showcases 45 restaurants grouping their designs under four sections Global Views, New Baroque, Modern Classic, High Concept.

Philippe Starck features twice in the New Baroque section with both the “fairytale fantasy” of the Bistro of the Faena and Universe hotel in Buenos Aires in which the gilt detailed, snow white furniture is watched over by white unicorn heads emerging from white silk draped walls, and also with Bon in Moscow, the third Bon restaurant but the first outside Paris. Predominantly black and gold the space “conjures up a hauntingly gothic atmosphere” with an interior that includes black crystal chandeliers, gold Kalashnikov lamp bases, distressed, graffiti scrawled walls, and a white skull motif on the black upholstery of the “half burned gilded armchairs.”

Whilst the major feature of the dining experience at Evo, within the High Concept section, are the views of 18 kilometres (11 miles) afforded from the UFO-like glass, geodesic dome perched atop the 105 metre (344 foot) high Hesperia Hotel in Barcelona, designed by Richard Rogers Partnership, Alonso I Balaguer Arquitectes, and GCA Arquitectes Associats. Thus the interior has been kept simple with glossy black lacquered tables, cream chairs, and golden yellow rhomboid-shaped fabric shaded lights which arch up following the curve of the dome “like sci-fi sunflowers.”

Bon Moscow designed by Philippe Starck

Modern Classic includes the Lebanese architect Bernard Khoury/DW5’s extraordinary Black Box, the restaurant for the shop Aïzone, a branch of Aïshti the Beirut fashion department store akin to Harvey Nichols or Barney’s. The exterior is lined with black aluminium panels and there is a projecting arm which not only contains a three-dimensional picture frame to display images and advertisements, but can also accommodate Aïshti fashion shows. Khoury’s, as Ryder writes, “daring and creative reclamation of war-torn buildings” has continued to reassert the identity of this troubled city; Black Box itself was damaged during the 2006 Lebanon War.

But Khoury remains phlegmatic, as is underlined in Ryder’s interview with him in the introductory section of the book which features interviews with 11 of the most influential restaurant designers (including Patrick Jouin, Marcel Wanders, Rob Wagemans, David Collins):
“Our part of the world raises far more burning and dramatic questions which you are faced with and which you cannot avoid. The problems are so obvious, especially when it comes to entertainment, and the situations are very interesting, I like tough situations, and I don’t like cute, happy little stories. That’s not my department.”

Bon Moscow designed by Philippe Starck

New Restaurant Design is richly illustrated with photographs, drawings, and floor plans, and coupled with Ryder’s erudite, informed, and unstintingly researched text creates both a superb overview of current restaurant design and an highly evocative travelogue.

Links

Laurence King
www.laurenceking.com

(Optimum Releasing)
DVD on release

By Guy Sangster Adams

The Avengers: The Complete Series 3 is the second phase of Optimum’s fantastic intention to release the first full restoration of every episode of The Avengers over the course of a year, which began in October 2009.  Where episodes have been lost, they are recreated through stills and commentaries, and the DVDs come replete with a host of fascinating extras.

With series 3 The Avengers established the model for which it is best remembered and the ingredients that have ensured it has remained both highly influential and a classic exponent of the spy-fi genre.

Filmed in 1963 and originally screened in 1964 in a peak time Saturday night slot on ITV, for series 3 Patrick Macnee’s John Steed, described in the original promotional material as a top level secret agent “who works under cover of his life as a wealthy man-about-town with an aristocratic background,” became ever more dandified, his bowler hat, furled umbrella, and flared cufflink displaying cuffs now omnipresent. Whilst the idea of Steed being aided by alternating amateur assistants in the earlier series was shelved in favour of Mrs Catherine Gale (Honor Blackman) being his partner in each episode. Which also allowed for a crackling sexual tension to be developed between the two characters.

With her PhD in anthropology and social conscience Mrs Gale was presented as a foil to counter Steed’s more ruthless and louche character traits. Though she equally, and importantly, subverted stereotypical roles for women combining not only brains, beauty, and independence, but also physical prowess; the fight scenes in each episode more often than not displaying Gale’s expertise in Judo. Blackman, as she explains in an interview included amongst the host of great extra features on the DVD, always threw herself wholeheartedly into the action sequences, which in the episode Mandrake, also included here, lead to her inadvertently knocking out the actor playing her assailant for seven minutes. Early in series 3 Gale’s leather outfits were introduced, ostensibly as clothes it would be easier for her to fight in, and became both influential and infamous. They were teamed with knee high leather boots that very quickly gained the widespread sobriquet of ‘kinky boots’; their popularity leading Blackman and Macnee to record the single Kinky Boots in 1964.

Lobster Quadrille, the last episode of series 3, was originally screened in March 1964, and was Blackman’s last episode as she left the programme to take up the role of Pussy Galore in the James Bond film Goldfinger, which was released in September of that year. Redolent of the humour inherent in both The Avengers and the Bond films which the series undoubtedly influenced, the final scene features Steed bidding farewell to Gale as she sets off on holiday with the suggestion that she might spend her time “pussyfooting along those sun-soaked shores.”

Links

Optimum Releasing
www.optimumreleasing.com