After 3 or so months of frantic busyness, we finally have a chance to update, albeit ever-so-quickly. For today, we offer some songs from Bienarte 8, otherwise known as the Costa Rican Biennial, which VF artists Paulina Velazquez-Solis and Travis Johns not only participated in, but were also selected to represent Costa Rica in next year’s upcoming 2012 Central American Biennial. More on that later – but for now, enjoy the sonics!
VauxFlores: Phase 2
•October 15, 2011 • Comments Off
After years of fabricating boutique experimental electronics, we’ve decided to take a stab at economic self-sufficiency with our crafts and expand into small-scale production venture, effectively uniting our artistic endeavors in a way we’d never thought possible. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the second phase of VauxFlores. Second phase? Hunh? Please Explain.
So ok, it’s 2011. The traditional concept of a record label evaporated over a decade ago and with the advent of clouds, torrents, and streaming music services, the concept of making a living strictly from your music is a luxury reserved exclusively for decrepit stadium-rockers and pop spinsters living on the touring circuit. Of course, there’s the occasional flukes who pop up from time to time, such as the breakthrough sensation ponied out by the majors to prove they’re still with it, the legally-embroiled protege set to watch over the empire while their master’s serving time on a number of charges, or rarer still, the teenage video sensation forced to perform by way of a handycam and their mother’s menopausal desires for a vicarious lifestyle. But all said, the notion of a viable career as a creative or experimental musician went out the door around the time of a 50th birthday concert.
So here we are. Albums can be easily replicated in multiple formats, labels subside in bedrooms and shoeboxes, entire discographies are bought and sold for less than $5, record stores barely exist outside the obscure, nostalgic and collectible and the thought of giving away a cd is equivalent to a business card and a handshake from less than a generation ago. In most situations, to be a musician or an artist is synonymous with crippling poverty, dead-end jobs, less than ideal performance spaces, and a toxic apartment on the wrong side of the tracks. All said, not so appealing.
It’s time we do something about that. So, in effort to fully devote ourselves to the arts and better support our endeavors, we’ve decided to expand exactly what it is we do. Our predecessor, Thinktank Media prided itself as a record label – with VauxFlores, we intend to be more. Granted we will still release records, and will be introducing a couple new series within the next couple of months, but for the moment, our new focus will be on creating tools to allow creative musicians and experimental artists work, effectively expanding our economic reach to allow artists to support artists without relying on external corporate influence to provide the tools with which we produce our wares. And to begin, our first offering comes in the form of Number 23, a unique, hand-hewn guitar pedal that blends the best aspects of DIY aesthetics with a professional build, beautifully packaged and designed to allow us to continue making art and music by making art and music and by extension, allowing others to do the same. That said, we invite you to check it out, support small-business, the artistic community, one less corporate influence on your art and once again, a.) welcome to phase 2 and b.) you are loved.
Mitotica Documentation
•October 5, 2011 • Comments OffA quick glimpse at the resultant performance stemming from a three-week intensive workshop conducted with Spanish multimedia artist Marcel-li Antunez Roca throughout the course of September 2011.
Near-Completed Stacks and the Next Steps Forward
•September 5, 2011 • Comments Off
Ladies and Gentlemen:
After a productive and fun time building instruments and tweaking synths in New York, we, being the singular management, have once again returned to our current port-of-call in Costa Rica, willing and ready for the currently all-to-secretive next phase of the evolution of VauxFlores. More on that will come in the next few weeks as region-specific plans are drawn and prototypes are completed. However, before can move forward, there’s still the matter of archiving the past. For those who’ve read the past couple posts, one should recall that we were once one of several entities known as Thinktank Media. But owing to the need to diversify, we decided to abandon that mantle and press forward with modern tools and streamlined interfaces, etc. And shortly after doing so, our server host similarly decided to get out of the business, leaving our past archives floating in the digital ethers, albeit with some clever redirect coding to help lead the way. However, most of our media was also left in that ether – and considering the amount of time and work we put into it all, we decided that the first step of the VauxFlores saga would be to archive as much of the Thinktank catalogue as we could. Ladies and gentlemen, it brings us much pleasure to say that the aforementioned saga is officially complete, with every major Thinktank release available as the initial digital offerings with which we intend to build a bedrock to move forward upon – providing that metaphor makes sense, of course. Rounding out our final offering is 001 – the initial EP offering from the Satellite trio.
SO, before we move forward, here’s a little about that:
Once upon a time in a small liberal arts college in Oakland, California, three musicians found themselves enrolled in a masters program, studying some of the finer points of contemporary music. Hailing from three equally unique locales and bringing their own approaches to extended-techniques, free improvisation and lowercase electronics, they met one rainy Sunday to perform together in a dreary classroom, in hopes that their discrepancies in languages, variations in vocabularies and fascinations with the unknown and would combine and intertwine into a unique acoustic environment. Lines were drawn, spells were cast and sounds were made, combining mechanical pulses with arthropod dance steps, lulling trances into dirges into whispers in the wind. They played for hours, pausing only to reflect, recollect and continue with even more fury and direction – and never once playing a conventional note on their instruments. And with that, Satellite, otherwise known as the unique combinations of Liz Meredith (violia), Gudmundur Steini Gunnarsson (guitar) and Travis Johns (bass) was formed – with this disc, previously only released in extremely limited batches, serving as a documentation of that instance. On behalf of the ensemble, as well as the collective as a whole, we invite you to come sing along with our past whilst looking towards the future, once contained in hand-assembled envelopes embossed with our handprints as a souvenir to our collective temporal bridges – and now available digitally for the technologically progressive masses! If you like what you hear, please feel free to check out Satellite’s second release – Sylvedic, also available via VauxFlores. As a final note, if you would like Satellite, or any member therein to perform for your exclusive pleasure, siesta or new music solstice event, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line and we’ll gladly proceed accordingly.
Ladies and Gentlemen, The Pink Canoes!
•August 17, 2011 • Comments Off
‘lo
In an effort to simultaneously archive and trudge forward, we’ve decided to digitize the entire out-of-stock back catalogue of the Pink Canoes, most notably known as some sort of noisy, free-improvised, psychedelic guitar band from the San Francisco, Bay Area circa 2005-2010, or thereabouts. We begin with the most recent, entitled “Arabs, Cowboys Drifters.” – a disc recorded in December 2007 and released in March, 2009.
In their own words:
Imagine you’re at the end of a Western. One of the gritty ones where you already know that noone will be riding into the sunset. It is sunset, however. And we are in an abandoned, dusty corral. From three cardinal directions, three figures emerge. From the East comes the Drifter, his hair long and eyes wild. With him he carries a small box, the contents of its interior unknown. From the South comes the Cowboy, his trail weary, his journey long. A poet at heart, some have said that to see him move can be equated to the finest lines of verse ever written… though few have lived to say. Finally, from the West comes the Arab, his journeys mysterious, his face wizened. One by one, each member takes his place at their respective coordinates. And one by one, they pay their respects to their absent comrade from the North, his whereabouts disputed, their circle incomplete. A bell rings – they draw their guns and…
Again, perhaps not the most concrete description for an album, but all said, we feel this scene is an apt description for Arabs, Cowboys, Drifters – the second live album brought to you by le Pink Canoes. Recorded at the Climate Theatre in San Francisco, Ca. on December 18th, 2007, this album documents an interesting time in the grand narrative of said ensemble, as it follows the departure of a founding member and a slight paradigm shift as the band worked to redefine its sound from the confines of established non-idioms, removed their vessel from dry-dock and embarked again into uncharted waters. While communication’s been sparse, wayward locals and other lost souls have reported tales of ominous visions of shrouded figures inhabiting a small vessel at the edge of the mist, always shortly before sunset and gone in the blink of an eye. Though confirmation of these sightings have yet to be documented, we once again wish nothing but the best to our adventurers and anxiously await their return from afar.
And if you don’t believe them, please feel free to take a listen:
Blank Verse on VauxFlores
•July 4, 2011 • Comments Off
Another digital first as we archive the old, welcome the new and cross our fingers and hope everyone will play nice together for the duration. This time we have, for the first time in digital, streaming web-format, the definitive audio mix from Blank Verse, a 5-day interactive art installation a the Fisher Gallery of the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin, Oh., which took place from November 15-20, 2004.
From the original liner notes, circa August 2005:
“This recording represents over a year’s accumulation of various digitally processed field recordings and other experiments conducted in collaboration with visual artists Iz Öztat and John Hensel, originally premiered as part of a five-day installation at the Fisher Gallery of the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin, Ohio from November 15-20, 2004.
It is a portrayal of nothing and everything simultaneously and interchangeably. It is a work in progress. Take that as you will. – t.”
MaryClare Brzytwa’s Stairwells Now Available in Europe
•June 23, 2011 • Comments Off
Just a quick note that MaryClare Brzytwa‘s Stairwells has recently been re-released by the Italian label Setola Di Maiale, featuring new artwork and an exciting chance for a great disc to reach a larger audiences outside of the states. For the moment, we will still continue to carry our edition of the disc, though please feel free to purchase whichever edition seems most aesthetically pleasing – not to sound entirely camp here, but it is really about the music and not the monetary kickback that the capitalist venture aspect of it all entails. Either way, MC will thank you.
Also worthy of mention is Stairwells’ recent review in Foxy Digitalis. Feel free to read the review here.
Another From the Archives
•June 22, 2011 • Comments OffA heads up from the editor’s desk: much is in the works ala paperwork, applications and behind-the scenes moving, shaking and shuffling. Much will be happening in the next few months, in spite of what may seem like a hiatus to front-pageworthy news events. But in the meantime, one from the video archives – namely a video of M+V’s performance in San José, Costa Rica, last month – enjoy, and of course, if the spirit moves you, please feel free to get in touch.
This Week in Costa Rica
•May 23, 2011 • Comments Off
Saluto.
Just a heads up that Paulina Velazquez-Solis and Travis Johns will be performing as M+V this week at the 5th annual Festival de Música Electroacoústica in San José, Costa Rica. For additional information on schedule and performance, please check the link!
One From the Archives
•May 20, 2011 • Comments Off
A single raindrop amidst a deluge, contributing the smallest part to a resounding cacophony, indifferent, yet equally important to the environment it exists in. Perhaps not the most orthodox way of introducing a release, but in this case we find it to be an apt description for Satellite’s first full-length release, presented in glorious stereophonic sound and available exclusively here, from us. We recorded this album in July 2007 in various outdoor locations throughout New York’s Hudson River Valley – the air was thick with humidity and thunder rolled in the distance, creating low, symphonic rumbles amidst a sea of singing insects – and somewhere between the cicadas and the ozone we attempted to add our own voices, mixing prepared guitars and electronics, cutting through the heat with our own pianissimo voices, indifferent yet important as the rain began to fall. Originally available as a limited edition pressing of 25 hand-assembled packages, Sylvedic is now available exclusively as a digital release, documenting and disseminating a unique record made by unique people during a very unique time. Come join us in the infinite as we invite you to drift away with us, melting into the night to sing our songs once more amidst the deluge of indifference.
