Some good music I listened to in 2010
I recently did my best of year shows on the radio, it was a challenge to fit it all in – so much goodies!

Something I wish I hadn’t done in 2010
No regrets!

Worst film I had to sit through in 2010
No Regrets!

Best TV of 2010
Mad Men Season 4 & Boardwalk Empire Season 1

Favorite purchase of 2010
Margaret Howell Cashmere Cardigan

Best place to visit in 2010
Deviation dancefloor. And LA.

Most important news story of 2010
Students taking it to the streets.

Amen Benji. Happy Christmas + hope 2011 is another great year.

Well hold on to that enthusiasm tightly while watching the amazingly horrible video for “Derezzed,” one of the Daft Punkiest songs in their score (barely a violin in sight!). The stance dude takes before his bike is cued up? The polygonal phoenix? The lance? Um, enjoy.

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“Come meditate on bassweight…” Anyone who’s been to DMZ (or just seen the flyers) will know these four famous words, like a mantra or some Confusician epigram for young bass heads to get their blunted brains around. Does bass have weight? What does Einstein say on the subject? And what’s meditation got to do with it? Fortunately, it’s not these questions that Bassweight, the original dubstep documentary, deals with, concentrating instead on the evolution of one of the few good things ever to come out of Croydon. Shown sporadically in the cinemas, it hasn’t seen an official release till now. It’s out on DVD in November and you can pre-order your copies here. Featuring interviews with Mary Anne Hobbs, Kode 9, Skream and Benga, Bassweight shows how the movement grew out of a small community of producers and went on to conquer subwoofers the world over. Here’s some questions we put to director, Suridh Hassan of The SRK.

KSPACE: Were there any other music docs you had in mind when shooting Bassweight?

SRK: No specific music docs – we looked at a lot of pirate radio bits and pieces on youtube plus a few interviews about dubstep…rather we wanted to create something a little bit different…

KSPACE: How long was it in the making and what were some of the most exciting scenes you managed to pull off?

SRK: We spent a lot of time checkin nights in 2005/2006 and it was some point in 2006 we just thought it would be great to follow the scene develop… I remember being very, very ill, driving to Benga’s house in South to do a two-camera set-up on Skream, Hijak and Benga while my temperature was high as… Other exciting scenes included following Deapoh to the Deep Medi night and getting footage from Bruno in Brazil!

KSPACE: It was filmed a few years back when dubstep was at a different point in its evolution. What, if anything, would you add to the story in 2010?

SRK: I would have enjoyed following some of the guys to some of the Sonar festivals and then on to cover just the explosion of Magnetic Man and some of the world they now inhabit.

KSPACE: Who got to choose the sync music and were they any tracks you struggled to license?

SRK: Both myself, Ryo (the producer) and Iloobia chose the music. There’s always problems with music – it was a pleasure getting to work with our friends Jamie Vex’d and Goth-trad…plus greats like Cyrus came through. We had to of course clear a Burial track which is never easy, but in the grand scheme of things the struggle was not too bad (though maybe Ryo, the producer, might have something to say there).

KSPACE: What projects have you been working on since Bassweight?

SRK: We’ve worked on two books; Graffiti Asia which came with a 23min film and Stickerbomb2 – a book full of peelable stickers. We also produced and directed our first major feature, Soka Afrika, which looks at the way young African footballers make it in Europe. That’s going through the selling process now and knowing how long these things can take, don’t expect it out for a little bit at least!

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It was in 2004 that a pair of Frenchmen, the diminutive Renaud Barret and the laconic Florent de la Tullaye, met Papa Ricky and his group of polio-affected paraplegic musicians in the capital of Democratic Republic of Congo – Kinshasa.

Papa Ricky told this pair of earnest Europeans that he wanted them to help him realise his dream: for his band, Staff Benda Bilili, to become the best known paraplegic band in the world. At the time, the idea must have seemed absurd. Here was a loose group of disabled men who could barely afford to feed their families, who wheeled between the traffic in their customised tricycles, begging for money when they didn’t steal it, and rehearsed at night at the local zoo, although ‘rehearsal’ might be putting too a fine point on it when they used flip-flops for percussion and customised instruments out of tins of milk powder and scraps of wire.

Barret and de la Tullaye became sort of reluctant A&Rs. They filmed footage of the musicians with a view to making promotional material and maybe sparking some interest from Europe. Five years later, through dogged persistence, Staff Benda Bilili’s album was signed to Crammed Discs and what had initially been material for YouTube was now 600 hours of footage and ripe for a feature treatment.

The result, Benda Bilili!, is perhaps one of the most heart-warming films you’re likely to see any time soon and, just like Buena Vista Social Club, follows the band from obscurity to international acclaim. Whatever your reservations about world music (after all, there’s nothing like a group of paraplegic Africans to get the world music fans all excited), nevertheless you can’t help but be touched by the footage and amazed by the wisdom of the band’s members who, despite living at the bottom of the food chain in Kinshasa, never give up hope.  When they ride in a taxi through the capital, there’s a sticker on the dashboard that reads: ‘This car is protected by God’. By the end of the film, you feel that Papa Ricky and his musicians must surely be under his protection too.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So it’s exciting to hear that, in a brand awareness exercise, Vimeo are holding the 2010 Vimeo Awards to shine a light on creative online content. On 8-9 October in New York, there’ll be screenings of the 45 finalists for the awards, whittled down from some 6,500 entries. The judging panel consists of familiar names like M.I.A., Morgan Spurlock and David Lynch who will be deciding which of the finalists walk off with the loot. Broken down into categories including Narrative, Documentary, Experimental, Music Video etc. the quality on the shortlist aint too bad. We especially enjoyed Schlimazeltov!, a beautifully-shot documentary about the London Jewish community, as well as Thrush, an innovative short film, composed mainly of digital phots, about a love affair that was doomed from the start.

Schlimazeltov! by the Light Surgeons:

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Thrush by Gabriel Bisset-Smith:

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Winstan Whitter’s ‘Legacy In the Dust’ is one film that refuses to go gently into the night. It’s a film about the Four Aces nightclub in Dalston, which for 33 years served as venue for generation after generation of Londoners from all walks of life and sharing one thing in common – a love of good music.

Originally the place to go for ska and soul in the capital, the Four Aces played host to live acts like Percy Sledge, Ben E King as well as reggae stars like Desmond Dekker and Prince Buster. Into the 70s, it became a punk venue where The Slits and the Sex Pistols graced the stage, and people like Bob Marley, Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan all passed through those famous double-doors with the four-card hand decorating the awning. In its final incarnation, the Four Aces was home to Labyrinth, the rave night where the junglist massive came to party, until owner Nelson Dunbar received a solemn letter from Hackney Council. 

Look for 12 Dalston Lane these days, and you might be searching a long time. The building was knocked down to make way for the new Overground station at Dalston Junction. It was a situation which prompted Winstan Whitter to make this important historical document about the club’s legacy.

The film will be showing between 6-9 October at the BHVU Gallery in Stoke Newington, and ticket revenues will go towards a general release for the film, so galang and raise some dust.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For me, Broadway Market has always been a symbol of the gentrification of Hackney. Located smack in the middle of rows and rows of housing estates, the street has changed unrecognizably over the past ten years, attracting annoying new residents and upmarket ‘creative’ businesses. This change is encapsulated best in the organic Saturday Market, which with its £3 loaves of bread, excludes most of the long-standing local inhabitants.  This documentary, however, achieves a more nuanced perspective than my own instinctive dislike of Hackney’s mass of creative loafers, showing the positive aspects of gentrification on local businesses, and the attempt by the new inhabitants to put all that Marxist theory into practice. Even novelist Hari Kunzru gets his hands dirty.

In 2010, the sell off of Hackney to developers continues unabated – each time you pass through E2, E8 and E11 there’s a new development of designer flats, and you wonder where all the old inhabitants have gone and what this means for the character of London. As Linton Kwesi Johnson said, Inglan is A Bitch. The Battle for Broadway Market is ample proof of that dictum.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I had heard the ferocious kicks, uptempo rhythms, and downright filthy lyrics of Baltimore Club Music before but nothing could have prepared me for my first time at the Dox.  The home of Baltimore’s own brand of club music, the Dox (or Paradox), with security tighter than most airports, a half-court inside the club, and BYOB policy, suggests a club experience unlike any other.  To see people get down to the rhythms made in their own hometown and lyrics that speak directly about their neighborhoods, suggests an authenticity that one simply cannot find anywhere else.

Similar to Baltimore Club Music, Brazil has its own brand of perfected dance tracks.  Born out of the Brazilian Favelas (or shanty towns), Funk Carioca or Baile Funk is the sound that resonates with the people of these impoverished areas.  With millions poverty stricken in Rio alone, the city provides the backdrop for the hard rhythms, raw lyrics, and thriving sub culture that is Favela music.  Largely influenced by the Miami bass music imported from Florida, Baile Funk is a collection of bootleg old school hip-hop/electronic beats layered with their own Brazilian rhythms topped off with chopped up lyrics and melodies creating percussive dance floor wrecking anthems.  In the Favelas one has to make use of what’s accessible, so the music tools and sounds are not often picked by choice per se, but rather incorporated through whatever is readily available creating a cultural gumbo of elements that coalesce into a unique sonic experience.

Mad Decent’s Diplo (Wesley Pentz) is largely responsible for bringing this sound to the US and to the rest of the world through his various mixes such as Favela on Blast and Favela Strikes Back.  Having lived in Brazil, absorbing the culture of the Favelas while documenting his surroundings, Favela on Blast, Mad Decent’s first film, shares with the world a visually provocative place where passion for music and dance thrive despite hardships.

The film focuses on the stories of various Funk MCs and musicians, letting them describe their world in their own words.  The passion is evident.  Although one may look down on the rawness of the music and it’s association with sex and violence, there is a strong sense of reality and reason for it’s purpose which this film tries to show. For those unaware of this sub-culture, it is inspiring to see the passion and work they put into every song. With few films sharing the stories of the favelas, it is great to hear them of the people first hand.  Rather than a comprehensive study on favela culture and its people, the film resembles the rawness of a Smack DVD.  One may be familiar with the epic drum tracks of M.I.A, or other mainstream hits but the opportunity to get a first hand look into the origin and context of how these sounds originated is rare which is precisely why films like this need to exist.

Buy it here: http://favelaonblast.com/

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Mortal Kombat original theme

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It was in this climate that Jean-Michel Basquiat first saw attention in New York, a young native son who gained first attention as a self-promoting tag artist (Tao Lin has obviously taken some notes), noise musician, and general personality. His rise to success was relatively meteoric, going from dropping acid and selling painted sweatshirts in Washington Square Park to a group show to the Venice Biennale and on; a steady ascent as onlookers gushed, frowned, or smirked. Eight years after his death the same person who had made his career culturally palatable, Julian Schnabel, made his first film a self-involved biopic of Jean-Michel. While that movie was panned even by its star, Jeffrey Wright, who said “I think my performance was appropriated, literally, and the way I was edited was appropriated in the same way his story has been appropriated and that he was appropriated when he was alive.” Good then, maybe, that after all these years Basquiat has a proper documentary in which to parse an odd, interesting, and too-short life. The documentary’s centerpiece would definitely be the footage director Tamra Davis shot and sat on for two decades. Having screened at the Sundance and Tribeca Film Festivals, it will probably or possibly be arriving at a Landmark theater near you sometime this year.

A preview of the film:

Mr. Brainwash is either a genius or the luckiest art-world hustler on the planet. Either way, his story is an interesting paradox of streetwiseness and seeming mental illness. Turns out he is the main character of Exit Through The Gift Shop, the Banksy documentary that has been buzzing since Sundance. While most folks, including me, thought it unusual for the most notorious clandestine artist would be appearing on camera, but in typical Banksy form he turns the tables and employs the opportunity to issue his own spectacle. This time, it is Mr. Brainwash that is the foil, a sort of sad-sack L.A. filmmaker and street art enthusiast who becomes obsessed with his subjects, especially the illusive Banksy. Mr. Brainwash is a Frenchman named Thierry Guetta who gains unprecedented access to many of the most prolific and talented street artists today through his relative, the one and only Invader, at a time when the medium (as well as the art market itself) was heating up quickly. Banksy, as a notorious and talented maverick, became Guetta’s (who had habitually documented numerous murals on his video camera) main obsession in the year running up the “Barely Legal” gallery show in Los Angeles. However, Banksy manages to turn the camera back on Guetta and the result in a seemingly effortless twist on the ‘street art documentary’ that Guetta himself couldn’t pull off. Banksy as a filmmaker crafts a commentary on the state of the art scene as well as a characteristically smart, tongue-in-cheek and ‘meta’ view on the spectacle. The joke turns out to be something I don’t even think Banksy could have conjured up on his own, at least not knowingly.

The interesting phenomena (or perhaps the most implicating) are the roots of this story in Los Angeles, the perfect backdrop to this fantastical tale. If you didn’t manage to catch the first hype on Mr. Brainwash, you didn’t miss much as his ascent was meteoric. Guetta’s rise was solely built at the suggestion by those who he’d been filming over the years, and via some carefully chosen quotes. Brainwash was born a la some sort of Warholian (he does owe equally to Andy as well) daydream, and this is where the core of the documentary seems to amazingly coincidental and too absurdly true to not be some exercise by the hand of Mr. Banksy. Still, the film itself hangs together as timely context for the best street art and most prolific artists, like some modern day ‘Wild Style’ if Lee Quinones was enabled as a self-referential filmmaker. Banksy moving into filmmaking is as natural a move as when he embarked on gallery shows in America. I expect his immersive brand of art could continue to morph to the point that, as in this situation, no one will know who the joke is on, including Banksy, but that is largely the point.

‘Exit Through The Gift Shop’ Opens in Select Cinemas Nationwide from April 16

Mills died at the age of 48 of a brain aneurism in New Orleans as he was working on Treme, a new drama he was developing with David Simon about New Orleans’ music, culture, and the struggle of post-Katrina life.

From HBO’s statement:

“He was rushed to the downtown Tulane Medical Center where he died without regaining consciousness. Doctors there said he suffered what appeared to be a brain aneurism. Mills was on the film set as a writer and executive producer, monitoring filming of an episode of the series, which is slated to premiere on HBO in little more than a week.

Mills won two Emmy awards for television writing and was nominated for three other Emmys for his writing on “NYPD Blue” and “E.R.” As a newspaperman, his coverage of race and popular culture for the Style Section of the Washington Post in the 1990s was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize by the newspaper.”

Ken Tucker, writing for Entertainment Weekly, mentions Mills’ Parliament fanzine and encyclopedic funk brain: “I knew Mills slightly, mostly via e-mail and a mutual love for all things George Clinton and funk music. Before he became an important TV writer, Mills and some friends put out a newsletter called Uncut Funk that celebrated Clinton and P-Funk in all its forms. I’m proud to say Mills allowed me to contribute an entry or two to this enterprise. David was an endless source of funk knowledge and deep trivia.”

A clip from The Corner:

When the White Stripes do something, they do it fully, as was clear when Flux’s Cinema Tuesdays presented a special sneak-peek screening in Los Angeles of the Detroit-bred duo’s epically brilliant new concert documentary, Under The Great White Northern Lights, at the Egyptian Theater on Tuesday, March 9th. A live bagpiper heralded audience members as they entered and special red-and-black, White Stripes-themed cupcakes were also served. Yes, no detail goes unspared in making the vision of Meg and Jack White tangible, as the film itself makes abundantly clear. The White Stripes are one of the most gloriously idiosyncratic of all rock bands, doing things their way or the highway, and sometimes those highways are fascinatingly odd: Under The Great White Northern Lights captures moments from the pair’s extensive nationwide 2007 tour of Canada—not just the big cities like Toronto and Vancouver, but also smaller out of the way places in the Yukon like Yellowknife, and an Inuit reservation—places, director Emmett Malloy noted in a Q&A after the screening, that many Canadians don’t even go to.

In addition to the more typical rock shows depicted, the White Stripes played a free, impromptu show in each town, from a show in Newfoundland where they literally played one note (the audience chanting “one more note” as they exited the stage) to a hootenanny on a Winnipeg city bus. Indeed, it’s these moments, and the pauses between concert sequences, that prove most revelatory—like an offhand moment capturing Jack playing boogie-woogie piano backstage while Meg smokes and bobs her head to the rhythm, the chat with a city mayor about the gory joys of local buffalo hunting, or watching Jack White eat (and enjoy) raw caribou. The little details prove deliriously charming as well—like the Canadian flags custom appliquéd to White’s amps, or the fact that Meg’s drum stool has her name emblazoned on it in leather (as if it could be anybody else’s). The film’s style also perfectly suits the subject. Malloy shoots the band in varying patchwork film stocks, alternating between video, grainy black and white and color sixteen millimeter film; even the color sequences have a shockingly lurid, graphic quality that suits the band’s aesthetic just peachy. As well, the editing creates a perfect rhythm: a jump-cut medley proves utterly kinetic, but the action also lingers when necessary to render a moment. Most of all, Under The Great White Northern Lights distills the awesome, visceral power of the White Stripes’ live playing, whether banging out “Icky Thump” in a packed hall, or finger-picking a Blind Willie McTell blues in a reservation rec room. The band’s homemade charisma and sheer work ethic also bleeds through, and staggeringly so; as Malloy noted in the Q&A, “Your brain starts to forget there’s only two people doing it.” The Canada tour was set up to honor the White Stripes’ first decade of existence, and there are candid, fly-on-the-wall sequences, like when Meg White sheds a tear as she sits next to Jack playing a heartfelt piano, but Malloy doesn’t give away too much. Best of all, from the light, humorous moments to the energetic concert sequences, the film manages to impart everything great about the White Stripes without taking away the mystery that makes the duo so compelling—if anything, it adds to it. “Watching the film, you get a little more, but you still know nothing about this band, which is why we all love them so much,” Malloy stated, and he couldn’t be more correct.

A film premiered at Sundance last night about an artist that couldn’t be filmed, or wouldn’t. “Exit Through the Gift Shop” is about a French shopkeeper and an amateur director that wanted to make a documentary about the prolific, and famously secretive artist named Banksy. An artist who’s sold millions of dollars worth of artwork, taken over complete galleries without so much as showing his face in public, Banksy is sort of the superhero to the creative class, which is why this doc sounds so perfectly apt. The film is about the effort it took to try and film the phantom artist.

Billed as “the world’s first street art disaster movie,” it quotes Banksy saying, “It’s the story of how one man set out to film the unfilmable. And failed.” It’s even more amazing that sometime last Thursday, Banksy struck on Main St. in Park City — one of the most trafficked by filmmakers and cameramen almost all year in the tiny mountain town. The townsfolk want to cover it up, and there are petitions going around to save it. Regardless, if this film manages to sell like so many other Sundance films do, it will be yet another meta moment for Banksy’s art career — or will it be another work of art?

More: UK Guardian

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Soundtrack for a Revolution is the story of how music played a significant, powerful role in the Civil Rights movement. From Mahalia Jackson’s “How I Got Over” to her mentoring of the inimitable Aretha Franklin who carried the torch to the numerous artists that held steadfast during their careers so that these young instruments like The Roots, TV on the Radio and John Legend could perform all over the world. The imagery is obviously rooted in Martin Luther King’s leadership, archival footage and interviews with the foot soldiers like Harry Belafonte and others. The soundtrack is today’s voices like Anthony Hamilton, who with the Blind Boys of Alabama, lendvocal arrangements to the sound of the day. Today, in tribute to Martin Luther King, we share a sneak peek at the trailer. Directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman (Nanking), and executive produced by Danny Glover, SOUNDTRACK FOR A REVOLUTION is a vibrant blend of heart-wrenching interviews, dramatic images, and thrilling contemporary performances — a film of significance, energy, and power.

Aaron Rose has long been a force in bringing marginalized artists and creators into mainstream culture, like skate, music and film. From his work with RVCA and Nike to his Alleged gallery (RIP) and Beautiful Losers art show and documentary, Rose has been at the flashpoint of many amazing artists careers such as Phil Frost, Barry McGee, Ed Templeton and many more. More recently his interests seem to be in film, and rightly so. His work and relationships have included folks like Mike Mills, Spike Jonze and Thomas Campbell, all who are represented in a new project called Projections, which is billed as “a festival of rare and hard to see films” and most certainly has some rare gems that will find their way out into the world on the back of some hip new filmmaker we’ve never heard of. One such filmmaker of the throwback variety is Jonas Mekas, who many probably didn’t realize his status as the godfather of American “underground” cinema who promoted and praised the works of directors like Kenneth Anger and Paul Morrissey. His Walden film will be on display at Rose’s opening for Projections, bringing the rare and hard to see to the forefront. No doubt this festival will be used to celebrate the art of cinema, and there will be no shortage of artists handy.

Saturday, January 16th

Roberts & Tilton

5801 Washington Blvd.

Culver City, CA 90232