This website is the home of Day For Night, a Brooklyn-based music collaboration. Here are our thoughts, our songs and other things that inspire us.
Spike Jonze & Ty Evan’s created an explosive titled open for the Lakai - Fully Flared skate film. Brilliant slow motion footage is seen as skaters perform in an urban environment that is literally blowing up around them. This footage was reworked into a music-like piece for the UNKLE track heaven.
David Lynch and Moby while they jam in a studio together, oh and meditate.
Annie Kevans is a woman after my own heart. While Portraits of Our Presidents proliferate, there are few artists creating homages to their recreational pursuits. Kevans has created a series as cheeky as it is brilliant: Portraits of Our Presidents’ Mistresses. To look over these tastefully rendered oil paintings, visit Kevans’s site, where they’re displayed. Below is a Kevans painting of Sally Hemmings, Thomas Jefferson’s intimate “friend” and confidante.
A disquieting collection of photographs that capture the stillness in Prypiat, a northern Ukranian ghost town that was once home to the Chernobyl workers. The city has been empty and—owing to radioactive fallout—uninhabitable since 1986. This unsettling group of photos gives a rare opportunity to study a slowly decaying city that, despite once being the home of some 50,000 people, is now utterly and completely lifeless. [via Boing Boing]
Erik recently went to Louisiana on a trip to take photos. He documented his experiences in a series entitled Kingdom of Heaven.
I’ve always had a strong place in my heart for photography with a darker experimental quality. Growing up, I was attracted to the work of Man Ray, and later Joel Peter Witkin and Matt Mahurin. I just discovered and adore the photographic work of Scott Irvine whose work seems to be in a similar tradition to the afore mentioned photographers. Inky black lines bleed throughout his frames blurring edges. The photos are riddled with texture and often glow like an old daguerreotype. As an image taker, Irvine snaps up shots of both people and places. He has collaborated on striking shoots with a long list of bands including: Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Kasabien, and James Chance.
Off the top of my head, I can rattle off a handful of reasons that hatchetfish have started to interest me lately: the fact that they’re bioluminescent (would that only I could make random parts of my body glow at will), that they travel in migratory nocturnal packs that aren’t so much schools as gangs, that they are shaped like…well, hatchets. That’s all pretty good on its own but even better is the fact that, head on, they seem to photograph like desperate, lonely souls trapped in boundless, watery purgatories. Other face-forward images of these fish I’ve found have the same eerie, pleading quality to them. It’s just a striking look on so many levels, from the starkness of what’s featured in the surrounding darkness to the sadness—even grief—that seems to stretch across their faces. Nature is the coolest weirdo ever.
Many of Frank Juery’s photos have a dreamy quality that resonate with me in a way that feels akin to our music. This series particularly seems like a set of images that could be screen captures from a DFN video.
Imagine if the Mona Lisa were painted not by Leonardo di Vinci, but Picasso…or Matt Groening for that matter. This is a goofy time killer, but it’s still kind of neat to see how Meowza Katz reimagines the most famous painting in the world were it created by another artist. To see the gallery of images, go here.
Leslie Hall is a comedian, musician and artist, but her greatest achievement may be her ability to turn bedazzled sweaters into striking—and somewhat disturbing—pieces of art. If Cindy Sherman knew what was good for her, she’d take a page out of Hall’s book: Her bedazzled series—featuring sweaters she’s gathered in thrift stores in states across the country—are brilliant in their faux-serious, repetitive, dazzling beauty. For more, visit Hall’s Gallery of Glamore on her website.
Thurston Moore will be introducing and providing commentary for the early videos of David Bowie presented Monday December 1st at MOMA.
EBN may have pioneered video remixing and VJing, but it is Eclectic Method who have continued their tradition into the 21st century. The creative group have just launched a new website worth checking out.
I’ve never listened to a single song by The Hours even though I’ve heard their name tossed around a lot. However; this week I just saw the music video for their newest release See the Light. The short film-like video stars Sienna Miller and was directed by Tony Kaye with art direction by Damien Hirst. Translation, not a small budget. Here is more from NME.
When we are first exposed to a band or a piece of music by a visual representation, we are bound to have impressions shaped by that very image. Often, I find myself off-put by a performer’s sense of self aesthetic; this is of course most disappointing when there is something really good about the music glimmering in the background. There are countless ways to encounter new music and it’s maker; in a movie or perhaps in the aisle of a grocery store. Because of my obsession with music video as a form, I am rather critical of this marriage between sound and vision.
Just this morning, I discovered a band called Dimmer through the promo for their track Degrees of Existence. On frame one - note one I was immediately curious. It became clear very quickly that I was in for a visual feast of photographic portraiture. The sound is something pensive with a washed out wall of guitars and angular bass lines. There is something absolutely familiar about this song and I like it. But more than I am moved by the song, I am reminded by the video that every now and again imagery has the ability to make something good great. In this case, the sound has been heightened and rendered more visceral. I am struck by the notion that a music video is almost always a visual afterthought and thus in a certain way is by it’s very nature at odds with the musical starting point. I believe that it may be this tension itself that makes some videos exceptional and others complete distractions. This video is an example of the former.
Hilary Berseth’s sculptures are only partly his doing; most of the heavy lifting and building is completed by his assistants—groups of honeybees specially flown in for the job. Following the patterns Berseth sets for them—he builds a basic template which the bees, notorious for their attention to detail and commitment to organization, then follow—the droning workforce produces mountainous, rippling structures of wax and honey. The finished product is astouding not just because of the uniqueness of the process or the ingenuity of employing hives as helpers, but also because the aesthetics of Berseth’s works are both manufactured and natural. New York magazine has a feature on Berseth’s work in its latest issue, including words from the artist about how his pieces come into being and a slideshow of the construction of a piece from start to very finish.
Chris Berens’s art goes beyond simply being compelling or engaging, and is worthy of a slew of other words that highlight the fanciful aspects of his work that make it so noteworthy—words like enchanting, fantastic and magical. I’m not sure that there is an exact label for Berens’s style; there are obvious surreal overtones in many of his paintings, but I also see warped versions of the fleshy, perfect faces so omnipresent in Flemish works, mixed with the same oddly playful beauty of an artist like Remedios Varo. Berens, who is Dutch and works from his studio in Amsterdam, is also incredibly prolific: check out his 99 series, which sees the artist producing cameo-like renditions of otherwordly polar bears, bunnies and presumably (though not quite) human faces.
I just got the chills looking at Todd Hido’s photo series Homes at Night. Oh how they’d make for perfect DFN posters.
Not much to say; I just saw this picture and found the image quite arresting. It’s by an amateur photographer, residing in France, and calling himself Hippolyte.
Hyperbolic descriptions of the uniqueness and beauty of pieces of art abound, though few are actually warranted. But in the case of Cal Lane, the critical praise heaped upon her work hardly seems to measure up to the adulation it deserves. Lane takes the everyday—collapsing wheelbarrows, rusted shovels, even dirt—and works them, like an artisan, into beautiful, carefully carved, seemingly delicate sculptures. It can’t be easy to coax lace from steel or doilies from soil, but Lane has a way of making the hard, soft; the average, amazing; the mundane and purely functional, decorative and lovely. Be sure to check out her Dirt Works and Wheelbarrows and Shovels series. They’re particularly captivating, but there’s nothing here not worth a closer look.
Artist Evan Roth deserves so much applause and so many props for this awesome creation. These metal plates go in your carry-on luggage. When they appear under x-rays, they spell out—in no uncertain terms—your message of choice. They should make one for touring bands that says, “That “bomb” you’re freaking out over? The one you’re about to take apart? That’s my guitar pedal, stupid.” But maybe there’s not enough room for all that…
Banner photos courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photos Division, FSA-OWI collection.
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