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Saturday, 28 January 2012

Zazou @ Kage 27.01.12

To the Kage nitespot last night for Zazou, billed as "a phantasmagoria of Italo, Hi NRG and obscure Disco". I took a few photos and here they are:

Italo like you mean it

Zazou resident DJ Il Discotto

Stefan Blomeier meets his public

Dancers

Deejay for money

Friday, 27 January 2012

receipts

Bought a few records:

Book Of Love - Boy (Sire) 12", € 2.00

Jellybean – Just A Mirage (Chrysalis) 12", £0.99

Blancmange - Waves/Game Above My Head (London) 12", £4.99

Thursday, 26 January 2012

Yuck 'n Yum - Our New Cover Artist – Helen Flanagan

Yuck ‘n Yum are delighted to announce that our new cover artist for 2012 is Helen Flanagan.

Helen is a photographer based in Birmingham, returning there after graduating from Falmouth University of Arts in 2010. Her photography captures human fragility with a delicacy in framing and the slightest of touch. She has exhibited across the UK and has been featured in multiple photographic publications including Dazed and Confused magazine. She is also cofounder of Books & Others, a project aimed at promoting photographic works, with visual artist Alex Bailey.

We at Yuck ‘n Yum are very excited to have Helen as our first photographic cover artist and are curious to see what direction Helen takes YNY in 2012. Helen has been featured twice in Yuck ‘n Yum in our summer and winter editions of 2011. You can view these works amongst others by heading to our zine archive.

You can read a nice interview about Helen’s project ‘No Strings Attached’ courtesy of It’s Nice That magazine here and view her photography and other projects at   www.helenflanaganphotography.co.uk, www.booksandothers.org and www.whenimsleepy.blogspot.com

We would also like to say a big thank you to Ross Hamilton Frew who is handing the baton over to Helen. Ross produced four stunning covers for us last year and we wish him all the best for the future.

The deadline for the Spring 2012 issue is the 23rd of February. 

LINK

Monday, 23 January 2012

curious

Gregor Schneider - Totes Haus u r, 2001

Extract from H.P. Lovecraft - Supernatural Horror in Literature:

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naïvely insipid idealism which deprecates the æsthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to "uplift" the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism. But in spite of all this opposition the weird tale has survived, developed, and attained remarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound and elementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness.

The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to tappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. But the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our innermost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, though not numerically great, minority of our species.

Saturday, 21 January 2012

Jane & Louise Wilson @ DCA 21.01.12

To the DCA tonight for the opening of the Wilson Twins show. I took a few photos and here they are:

Face Scripting – What Did the Building See?

Atomgrad (Nature Abhors a Vacuum)

The Dundee art massive

http://www.dca.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/jane-louise-wilson.html

Thursday, 19 January 2012

Hollywood Seven

In 1974 Gloria Sklerov, a prolific songwriter who now specialises in wedding music, was asked to write an "urban story song" for Terry Jacks who needed a follow-up to the hit single Seasons in the Sun. "On the way home on the freeway one night I passed a motel called Hollywood Eight which intrigued me. I started to think about who might be checking in there. We decided to change the name to 'Hollywood Seven' because it 'sang' better. We then plotted the story and it all came out like it was meant to. Unfortunately the Terry Jacks deal fell though but we were thrilled when we heard the recording by Jon English. It used some of the synth riffs we had used in the demo and I was very proud of this version."

However it's the 1980 cover version of Hollywood Seven by Dutch singer Alides Hidding which has been "rescued from the depths of dollar bin obscurity" by DJs Mike Simonetti and Johnny Jewel. Recently released by Perseo Records (with other rare covers such as the German one with psychedelic guitar) Simonetti and Jewel's extended edit "clocks in at 6.51 and is mastered with extremely heavy drums."
http://aordisco.blogspot.com/2011/11/hollywood-seven-disconet-dilemma.html

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In 2008 Mike Simonetti & Johnny Jewel were in a record store in Perth, Australia killing time on tour when they found another version of the song while looking through crates of discount records. It was definitely fate! To find this song in the most random record store in the most remote city on the planet had to mean something. Mike spun it that night at an after party deep in the belly of a basement. The song had the classic feel of the original, but was more like a version performed by Neil Diamond's long lost Australian brother. Nine months later, Glass Candy had the night off in San Diego. Outside of a record store in an alley behind a pharmacy, Johnny stumbled across an even more bizarre interpretation of "Hollywood Seven." A strangely hi-NRG inspired version mixed with shredding psych guitar riffs and sung completely in German! In 2010 Nat Walker (Chromatics / Desire) found yet another version of "Hollywood Seven" at a North Portland church rummage sale while looking for hip hop samples. This piano-driven version was a glammy early 80s gospel private press record and is the only version known to contain the fourth verse (this is the original Jon English 1976 version).
http://www.piccadillyrecords.com/products/MikeSimonettiJohnnyJewel-HollywoodSevenEP-Perseo-77353.html

To be honest the press release for this 12-inch is so epic that the best thing to do would be just to quote it in full. With full record geek's enthusiasm it details the cratedigger's journey that befell Mike Simonetti and Johnny Jewel and lead them to no less than four versions of "Hollywood Seven." As a result, Simonetti and Jewel take the artist's slot on this one not only for their extended edit of the original track but for their digging chops in unearthing a little dusty, dollar-disco diamond. It seems like there's weird cover versions of this all over the world. One surfaced in Australia. Another at a North Portland rummage sale. Another, sung in German, was found by Jewel in San Diego, "outside of a record store in an alley behind a pharmacy," which is how you know these guys are hardcore: they are literally looking for records in the alley outside the record store.

The original, a lynchpin of the duo's lauded Albuterol mix, is an immensely catchy trash-disco delight, with over-the-top everything: urgent horns, handclaps, scratchy guitar, rousing melody and an unbeatable soap opera storyline that revels in the clichés of stardom dreams born and broken in California. With its brutal, near-ridiculous melodrama, I could imagine Rainer Fassbinder spinning it.

The cover versions are a cabinet of wonders, or hotel mini-bar of wonders, unto themselves. The German version plucks the riff from Clapton's "Layla," replaces the horns with bright-ass synths and retells the tale in Dietrich deadpan, suddenly conjuring not only smoky Berlin cabaret but traditional German schlager-schmaltz. The "Piano" and "Ballad" versions are close kin, both slowing the tempo and upping the pathos with that world-weary feeling you only get in overwrought '70s rock.
http://www.residentadvisor.net/review-view.aspx?id=9499