Photographs by Jaroslaw Talacha
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Ragana came to me in a dream in Brazil. Deep into a block of late morning/early evening music videos, MTV played a teaser clip for “A-A-A-A.” I was not-so-fresh off a bottle of White Horse from the night before, dealing with a sweltering climate quickly filling with cigarette smoke, but those 15 seconds made me feel a lot better. By the next day, I still hadn’t seen the entire video, and I wanted that feeling back, so to the Web I turned with oohs and aahs, and, of course, these precious words have been exchanged and reproduced, for your pleasure, with a little help from the artificial intelligence enslaved within my computer. Shall we set it free, you and I?
Who are the players in Ragana?
Jahga sings, Marek Piotrowicz plays on drums, Rastuch plays on keyboards, Kuba is a sound engineer, Rusek plays on guitar, and me, Tomasz Krawczyk, I play bass. We are still young people from southern Poland.
When, why and how did Ragana form? What are your influences? How did you get into reggae? Did you ever go through a death metal phase?
The band was formed in 2007. We wanted to make dub with a very minimalistic formula and dry sound. We decided to simplify as much as we can the composition frames and leave the rest for improvisation, to make it in a meditational, repetitive way. To give Jahga’s voice a steady background so she can sing her own ideas.
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Düsseldorf, Germany
Friday, April 23, 2010
While we’ve been sewing up some legal matters this quarter, our friends at Mazine Clothing have been hard at work planning an assault of the arts on Eastern Europe. Operation Tirana kicks off May 1 at the Mazine headquarters located near Düsseldorf, Germany and will feature international street stars The London Police, Morcky, Swanski, Ripo, DXTR, and Peachbeach squaring off against each other in a series of visual duels. “Like your battle rhyming, we will take it from the trainyard to the stage and have 2 cats battling each other on the same canvas — crossing each other’s pieces.” Reveille will be provided by Brooklyn’s own Rocky Business. From here the carnival will press onward to Tirana, capital of Albania, and sister city to Grand Rapids, Mich. Seven days of artistic and charitable outreach will ensue.
Check out OperationTirana.com for more info and…prepare for war!
A summer soul mix by Joe Cristando
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Spring is finally here, an unquestionable sign that summer is just around the corner, a fact has a few implications for me: lots of swimming, lots of traveling, lots of All American Hamburger, lots of Ralph’s Italian Ices and tons of soul music of all varieties.
From my collection of Northern Soul, Soul and R&B 45s I’ve compiled a mix of what I feel are some essential sunny weather tunes that apply in many warm weather situations: dance parties, beach ragers, BBQs, and road trips just to name a few. There is a criterion for a feel-good summer soul song that I used to find the best examples for said mix. Blaring horns almost always a must, desperate, almost screamed, soulful vocals with instantly memorizable melodies, ripping upbeat drums, syrupy sweet guitar hooks (see Steve Cropper for a lesson), a little bit of whistling in some instances, organs in most, and finally, a good sturdy and bouncy bass line. There are a few exceptions to the formula here, which I’ve added for tension and to create some valleys and peaks.
These songs are intended get your foot moving, your head shaking, and to compliment the crazy feeling of a hot summer in the streets of America. Winter is dead, let’s celebrate.
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Photographs By Elizabeth Weinberg
Friday, April 2, 2010
Israel is many things, but most of all a strange place. Rabbis driving tractors, Arab and German foods comingling, men-only gyms. Plenty of Anglo-Saxons (Americans, Canadians, etc. are called that) sticking out like sore thumbs. There’s nothing softer than an Anglo-Saxon college grad, and nothing harder than the Gaza Strip, but the two meet often. And there are weirder things out there than the interns: Hoards of street cats, mile-long tilted highways, dripping soapy water everywhere. It’s hard to describe what it’s like to live there, but these photos do a great job. Elizabeth is an excellent photographer, but (or maybe and) Israel really looks like this. Plenty of beaches and friendly people, but just as many drizzly weekdays and everything else. Like any homestead, sometimes it’s just a place to be.
click to launch slideshow
The Union Square Spartans
Photographs by Anna Rozhdestvenskaya
Thursday, April 1, 2010
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One night awhile back, we were leaving the movies and saw a crowd at Union Square watching something. We followed, it was a fight. Lots of people fighting. The one fight we saw from the start was between a couple of young kids, no older than 16. A lean one who knew what he was doing, the other a chubby Puerto Rican kid. He held his own for more than a few minutes, but tried to relay a spin move into a punch, and didn’t look good doing it. Most people just kept cheering, although I caught a bigger dreadlocked guy in skinny black jeans laughing. The crowd was big, mostly young, but with a few security guards and women, for measure. It was like your regular bus stop crowd1 but bigger.
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