As the inimitable Radiohead and Atoms For Peace frontman Thom Yorke landed on the cover of our February Issue this month, we launched our highly prestigious music school with huge names in new electronic music, including the likes of The Gaslamp Killer, FlyLo, Pearson Sound and Actress enrolling.

Now we're calling all art students and illustrators to get involved in the University of Yorke's brand new art department for an exclusive Atoms For Peace competition. This month, the supergroup will be releasing their debut album, AMOK, so we're inviting you to put your artistic hats on and design the most mind-blowing, inventive and trippy cover artwork for the mixtape Thom Yorke made us using the cassette tape template above - taking inspiration from the mix itself and/or the AMOK art (featured in the gallery below).

The artist and longtime Radiohead collaborator, Stanley Donwood, on the AMOK artwork:

"I’ve recently been reading about the Anasazi people, an ancient Native American civilisation that existed in the American Southwest from about the 1st century CE until the 13th century.They built the biggest structures that are known to have existed until the construction of 20th century, massive buildings consisting of hundreds of rooms, which were part of huge cities, and home to hundreds of thousands of people.Theirs was a very sophisticated culture; complex, long-lasting, technologically advanced and evidently very successful.

Although it’s difficult to be certain, it’s clear that many things contributed to the sudden downfall of the Anasazi: overpopulation, resource depletion, deforestation, pollution of waterways, climate change.It’s likely that some people could see what was happening, and equally likely that the great mass of people refused to acknowledge that their way of life was becoming rapidly unsustainable.In the end, nothing could prevent the collapse of this highly-developed and venerable civilisation.It appears that social structures broke down very quickly into a kind of holocaust.Human remains indicate violence, killing, dismemberment and cannibalism.Other evidence is arguably best interpreted as ‘ethnic cleansing’.

Whatever happened, it’s clear that the disaster that overtook the Anasazi people has many parallels in history.It’s a very ‘human’ disaster.We pay a lot of attention to kings, conquests and wars, but more often it is environment and geography that determine the fate of a civilisation, however complex and technologically accomplished it may presume it is.

Strange weather we’ve been having lately, don’t you think?And it seems that we’ve been reduced to fracturing bedrock for oil, rather than it just squirting up out of wells.Doesn’t that seem a bit… desperate? It’s probably all okay though, because we’ve got ‘technology’.Just as well, really, as our civilisation is global.And there’s only one globe."

The prize: An exclusive Thom Yorke-signed 12" vinyl copy of the Atoms for Peace debut album, 'Default', and an issue of the new Dazed & Confused magazine.

To enter: Tag us in your submissions onFacebookor by using #uniofyorke onTwitter.

Deadline: 6pm, Tuesday 5th Feb 2013

See the gallery below for some ideas to get started...

There’s no two ways about it: George Saunders is one of the greatest living writers of fiction in America now. Since his scorching debut collection in 1996, he’s stuck with admirable firmness to his short-fiction guns, publishing only stories and novellas, almost all of which take place in either the contemporary US or a harrowingly shit-awful, worryingly near-futuristic version of it. Saunders’ stories tend to be faultless masterclasses in sentence-perfect brevity, hilariously dismal corporate language and that weird unquantifiable thing that squishes up your heart and makes you do embarrassing involuntary audible laugh-sobs in public. He is a MacArthur-Fellowship-certified proper genius and we were pleased as punch to get to talk to him about his forthcoming collection Tenth of December, which might be his best one yet.

Congratulations on such a head-spinningly good new collection! Your publishers are calling this one your ‘most accessible collection yet’. Do you think that's right?
I think it is more accessible. By which I mean, maybe, that a person who isn’t necessarily a big reader of contemporary short fiction could dive right in and find something in it. Lately I’ve been writing these non-fiction travel pieces and have noticed that a lot of very bright, engaged people I know, who don’t really get my fiction, seemed drawn in by these. So I had that goal in mind – to, where possible, reach out – put up a bigger tent, so to speak.

There’s a pleasing structure to this new one. Do you set out to write a cohesivecollection, or do you just do one story at a time until you've got enough to lump together into a book? When does it become a book?
I don’t have a big, overarching idea for a collection when I start out, no. I try to keep my focus on the small stuff – on the sentences, on keeping the energy high – trusting that the greater whole – story, then book - will take care of itself: it will be coming directly from the subconscious and therefore will have some sort of cohesion. It’s what I think of as a ‘seed crystal’ approach, like in biology class: start with something small and let it accrete organically outward. Using this approach, you can sometimes outwit that simplistic/thematic guy inside yourself.

We’ve always been brimful of admiration at your sticking exclusively to short fiction. But will there ever be a novel?
I think there might be. But not if it would cause you to stop admiringme. Ha. No – I try not to have too many ideas about what I might do/might not do/should do. My hope is just to follow my own natural energy and interest and see what happens. So far, the natural DNA of my writing has been inclined toward brevity. It may be a version of that sports idea, that there are fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscles – maybe there’s something similar re: prose style? I imagine my stories as little wind-up toys: wind them up, put them down, they go directly under the couch. I would like to write a novel, just because – at least here in the States – there’s a certain level of cultural and critical attention that seems reserved for that form.

You've said before that it's the improvisatory quality that attracts you to the story form: the way you can start out and not know how you're going to end up. Don’t you know what you’re doing from the outset a bit more these days?
It’s changed a little. In some cases now I have a sort of pre-sense of what I need to make a story – usually just these broad action/escalation markers. If I can figure those out in advance, I can engage that improvisatory energy in figuring out how I get from one marker to the next. In Tenth of December, ‘Victory Lap’ and the title story were written like that – the rest were pretty much improvisations.I love that Gerald Stern quote: ‘If you start out to write a poem about two dogs fucking, and you write a poem about two dogs fucking – then you wrote a poem about two dogs fucking.’ Or, as Einstein said it, in his slightly more snooty manner: ‘No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.’ So the trick is to keep the conscious, conceptual mind at bay and thus stay open to mystery, revelation etc.

So the character who turns out to be narrating his story from beyond the grave, for instance: did you know he was going to end up dead when you started out?
No, I didn’t know that. I actually wrote about 100 pages of that story where he lived and actually did escape, before reeling it back in and finding out he was dead/had to die.

You've done quite a bit of dead people speaking or acting, post-mortem: ghosts, disintegrating zombie aunties, narrators who’ve already killed themselves in the most horrifying way possible. Why do you think you keep coming back to this talky-dead business?
There are probably all sorts of thematic implications and so on – but for me the main reason for writing about ghosts is the little rush of pleasure I get from doing it. And I hope that pleasure shows up in the quality of the prose, and also takes the story in an unexpected direction – a story will often take an intriguing turn while you are occupying yourself with making the language energetic.

And why all the futuristic stuff?
My futuristic tendencies are more a means to an end – I want to write about human tendencies at the end conditions. Like in a science experiment: if you want to know something about a concrete beam, put it under extreme stress. One can do that pretty handily in an alternate world.

The other thing we see a lot in this alternate world is this constant anxiety about poverty. You're writing about the richest country on earth, but almost all of your characters are dirt-poor and fretting like mad about it. Not exactly The Great Gatsby, is it?
Well, I think that’s the real American story: the severe divide between the rich and the poor, and the cost the poor pay in grace and ease, and how untroubled the rich are about that. Just about every American life below a certain level is dominated by work and the depredations caused by far to talk about sex or religion or even a small disgusting goitre we have in some private place.

Legal and thoroughly depressing mind-altering drugs come into play a lot in Tenth of December. Is America’s dependence on pharmaceutical drugs an issue you're particularly worried about, or are drugs just a good device for a story for you?
The latter. I loved the opportunities those drugs gave me to write in different registers. I’d made a living out of writing in a sort of stripped-down, vernacular minimalism, and sometimes feel like busting out – ergo, drugs. In the story, that is.

You’ve said before that you came late to literature and that your scientific background (studying and working in the field of geophysical engineering) meant that your writing was “Like if you put a welder to designing dresses.” Do you still feel like the welder, or do you admit by now that you’re basically Karl Lagerfeld?
No, some things die hard. I was poorly trained as a reader and I think will always suffer for that. So what I’m trying to do is make that malformation to work for me, ie make really cool metal-dresses.

It’s kind of reassuring that the final sentiment of the new book – in the acknowledgements in the back where you thank your daughters – is, ‘Goodness is not only possible, it is our natural state.’ It’s way-grim in the world of your fiction, and outside of it much of the time; are you really optimistic about the world your kids are going to inherit?
I don’t think I’m optimistic or pessimistic – these are both versions of the same disease, the disease of wanting to say, ‘Oh, I see how life is (all good/all bad) – now I can stop thinking and worrying about it and interrogating it.’ I will say, however, that one of the revelations I’ve had over the last few years is that goodness is possible and attainable – that we do have the power to move ourselves in the direction of openness and awareness and so on. And that there are remarkable people in the world who are inclined – through disposition and/or training – to positive vision and action.

Cool. What about Ben Stiller? Didn’t he buy the rights to one of your stories, and wasn’t he going to direct and star in it, and you’ve written the screenplay, and oh-God-please let’s have that film soon, please? What’s going on with that?
I think that’s not happening. I wrote one for Ben Stiller that came very close but the signals I’m getting is that that ship has sailed. Or sunk. So we will just have to watch the movies that our minds make. Eesh. That sounds like a bad self-help book: Improving the Movies Our Minds Make: Reinventing Your Inner Tape Loop.

Tenth of December is published by Bloomsbury on January 3

Just a few blocks over from the violence-heavy Overtown district in Miami, Asif’s Guns greeted visitors in Wynwood with a giant striped balloon on the roof that held the name – something you’d find at a fireworks tent somewhere in the deep, deep south. Neon signage, American flags, and shooting targets belied the true contents of Asif Farooq’s Art Basel exhibit: 300+ meticulously handcrafted cardboard guns. Walking in, you’d have seen happy moms and exuberant children handling .44 Magnums and M16 Assault Rifles made from cereal boxes and packaging matter.

Asif Farooq, a Miami-born visual artist and musician, started making the guns as Christmas presents, which he sent to friends that were spread across the United States. Though the guns are models, they contain every single working mechanical piece of the actual pistol or automatic. They cock back, lock into place, and still even intimidate – they do everything but shoot. When Farooq first started making them I’d see him at bars where the bartender’s eyes would go anxiously wide until they recognized their artifice and then hold the ersatz gat like a giddy little kid.

Primary Projects, a gallery based in the Design District, represents Farooq and helped put together the pop-up shop. The guns are composed with fine-art precision and impressive replication due to Farooq’s tireless work ethic and enthusiasm. He – along with a veritable assembly line composed of friends and family – created the hundreds of guns over a period of nine months and 7,000 hours of labor all in his mom’s garage. Asif’s Guns was, as he said, a “real gun store,” with each fake gun selling for around the same price as a real one (i.e. around $300 for a revolver and $2,000 for a rifle).

It wasn’t easy getting the store approved; pushback from authorities was intense. The store and all the guns therein serve as an “open letter” to Farooq’s father as well as his close friend William Stuart Watkins, both of whom are deceased. About Watkins, Farooq said that "He really loved guns and we loved guns together." The works, though representative of literal killing-machines, actually castrate the objects they epitomize. By making guns you can play with and “art that people can touch,” Farooq is taking the allure of violence and transforming it into a display of respect for creation.

The guns still are not monuments to peace. Farooq, a natural entertainer rife with melancholia and dark humor, places the practice of making and selling fake guns in a larger political context. Specifically, he calls out the idea of the social contract – the implicit agreement by the members of a society to give up some freedom for greater social protection – as something that “no one ever really sat down to write.” He applauds the right of people to own guns but criticizes the senseless violence that comes with them. Whether one finds this contradictory or not, there must still be a certain reverence for the sheer toil that went into the making of so many perfect facsimiles.

Some of the proceeds from Asif’s Guns are going to Stop Handgun Violence, a non-profit organization dedicated to ending the maiming and slaughtering of people through education and sensible gun laws. Farooq sees the necessity of laws that regulate the sale and use of guns, but also the obligation of governments to respect the public’s right to protect themselves. With Asif’s Guns, there exists a form of art that decries the savagery of firearms, while also heralding their beauty and deadly virtuosity.

You can always hear the call of the wild in a Miharayasuhiro collection. Since Yasuhiro added menswear to his sneaker empire eight years ago, the label’s eponymous(ish) founder has been roaming the great outdoors, producing collections that merge a romantic notion of nature with an urban sensibility. The richly textured silhouettes are rooted in English tailoring, but executed in spliced-and-diced fabrics printed with painterly motifs from his homeland, and often presented alongside live performances by Japanese artists. For spring/summer 2013, Yasuhiro turned his gaze upon American rockers, transforming hard-as-nails leathers into something altogether more poetic to create an anti-hero outlaw.

This year, Yasuhiro is gracing the UK with two major events: a place in Tate Britain’s Pre-Raphaelites Victorian Avant-Garde exhibition, where his spring/summer 2012 womenswear film Ophelia Has a Dream by Paolo Roversi will be shown alongside Sir John Everett Millais’ Ophelia, and a pop-up store at London boutique Browns’s menswear store, the scene of our interview.

How did you approach the design of your Browns installation?
I wanted the room to give an insight into the work that goes into my clothes. So I wallpapered the space with images from the shoe factory I use in Tokyo, and the chairs in here are inspired by the workers’ chairs in the factory. I like the look of the chipped paint – you can see it’s been in use. Each chair represents a different stage in the work process and the craftsmanship and hours that go into making the pieces, like the camouflage and Japanese motif suits from AW12.

Could you explain your thoughts behind this idea of weaving in camouflage with traditional Japanese clouds and cherry blossoms?
My collection is called Inside Out, and plays on different aspects of that notion. There’s a Japanese expression that says your outside shows your inside, but I wanted to challenge this idea by creating pieces that show both – pieces where you don’t know which is which. The needlepoint prints are part of this idea and were done at an old obi factory in Tokyo. The flowers and waves are traditional patterns from the kimono, blended with camouflage to contrast the ancient and pure with the military connotations of modern amouflage. It’s also about what’s hidden. Camouflage is about hiding among the trees and flowers, but this camouflage clearly displays itself. So I was playing with the hidden meanings of an outfit.

Is the idea of man versus nature something you think about?
I find the contrast very beautiful. Tokyo especially is a very grey city – all concrete and asphalt – and the reality is that most fashion today is seen in a grey cityscape environment, so people become the nature element. I like to draw on nature themes in my work, but I also like to then do them in an all-grey medium, like the Japanese obi prints.

How much of your work process is an intellectual response and how much is an emotional one?
Good question. I think I’m more of a realist than a dreamer. At art college I was very caught up in the emotional side, and a lot of artists probably maintain that way of working. But as a designer, the practical can overtake the emotional. Patternmaking and production are quite unemotional. Everything for me starts with an emotional response, but I have to intellectualise my feelings. The point where I’m most emotional is when I have to explain a piece to the craftsman who’s going to make it. Then I tend to get very passionate. But a lot of the time it’s a hidden emotion.

Is there an idea or concept that you always return to?
The idea of ‘sublime meets ridiculous’ really fascinates me. For example, these two contrasting tartans on the jacket I’m wearing might seem ridiculous to some, but at the same time the expression is also very noble. I’m always looking at the clash between the two, and how things might change depending on the viewer.

You’ve collaborated with samurai guitarist Miyavi and Japanese design studio WOW for your shows. What is your secret to a successful show?
A show is such a fleeting moment. When you’ve worked on something for six months, day and night, you want that moment to make an impact. I’m interested in giving people something unexpected. I want them to leave with a story to tell.

Jun Inoue’s live calligraphy at your SS13 men’s show was striking.
Previously, I’ve been a bit against using certain aspects of Japanese culture in my work, and there was a time when I thought something like shodo calligraphy was too Japanese. I’ve had similar feelings towards the kimono. Living in Japan, you can feel very removed from all that nowadays. It’s like a costume from a bygone age that you can’t relate to, and it’s become almost a clich. But I’m seeing all this in a new light now.

So what do you think of non-Japanese designers working with the kimono?
It may look Japanese, but it’s not. But then, tailoring came from the west, and (Rei) Kawakubo and that generation of designers became famous for destroying tailoring. So I think about what western designers think of my tailoring. They might feel I’m destroying the concept of it, but I hope people can see I’m trying to retain the structure while making something new. Which is also why I’m now rethinking my views on aspects of traditional Japanese culture. There’s always more than one side to everything.

What part of Japanese pop culture inspires you the most?
Manga. I love it. I buy manga magazines every week, and my collection keeps growing. Manga is a very immediate and often critical reaction to what’s going on in culture and society right now, and a medium that reaches a huge amount of people. What do you hope to convey with your work? It’s quite simple, really. I want to see people happy. It might be impossible to change the world or the economy, but at least you can change how people feel.

Text by Susanne Madsen
Photography by Gareth McConnell

Taken from the December issue of Dazed & Confused