Tag: english

Cult experimental band PVT premiere their stunning fourth new album,Homosapien, in an exclusive full stream on Dazed Digital. Coming three years after 'Church With No Magic', having pivoted from one band name to the next, the Australian outfit have re-arrived with an 11-track record that invokes from the shadows dark electro beats, but whose rhythmic ensemble is, instead, intended to inspire optimism.

As it retains a monophonic tone through its beats, it almost promises certainty through its listening. But in opposition to its name Homosapien, the record is daubed with unearthy-like tones that flit from one sphere to the next, layered with an in-flux of jittery, oscillating vocals from Richard Pike, the possibility of knowing what to expect is taken away again, making for interesting and thought-provoking listening.

Dazed Digital: The titles for your previous albums and track titles for your new record Homosapien are pretty dark. Is that just something you're naturally drawn to?
PVT: Hmm, that's interesting 'cause I don't see Homosapien that way. For me it's a very positive record. It was a positive experience to make and although the songs do contain sadness, it's mainly hope. The title track, the lyric is 'you're the same as me - homosapien'. I think that's a positive message; we're all human, we're all cut from the same cloth. Having said that, yes, our last record was dark - deliberately dark. This one is more... spiritual, I guess. Maybe I am drawn to noir-ish things. But it's always about balance. You need dark to appreciate light, right?

DD: Where did the inspiration for the album first come from / what is it based on?
PVT: The first lyric I wrote was for Evolution, track two on the record. It's about your own personal evolution - 'you can never know the evolution of a heart'. Only you, personally, can know your own history, and how your heart makes its choices. Also, a big inspiration was a documentary I saw by English filmmaker Adam Curtis. He has an amazing style when looking at history. Everything has a butterfly effect, everything is connected. That was the start of the idea. I hope not to sound really nerdy, but there's a famous philosophy book called Mille Plateaux (A Thousand Plateaus). I haven't read all of it, it's far too complicated, but it's a world view about the interconnectedness of everything; all philosophies. I then saw the words Homo Sapiens on a poster for a museum, on a trip to Italy of all places. The cradle of civilization. It seemed like the perfect title, to put it into one word Homosapien, seemed to make it more descriptive.

DD: Billed as your most 'accessible' album to date, was this a conscious decision in the production process?
PVT: Good question. It's never a conscious decision to make something 'accessible'. It's a dangerous trap to use words like that when creating. You don't want to spook the muse.But we wanted the album to sound more human, warmer, and definitely calmer. More open than before, not so anxious and twisted and dense. That was conscious. Whether it's accessible or not is really not up to me.

DD: What's next?
PVT: I'm sure we'll do some touring with the record, Europe/UK in April-May. We've already played in the new songs last year, doing some tours with Bloc Party and Gotye - so they're ready to take on the road. Also, I've already started work on new songs. I think the next one will be very different again.

Taken from the February Issue of Dazed & Confused:

“Doona is an angel. She creates art without artifice; often it feels like there is nothing between the lens and her pure, vulnerable emotion. She is also as lovely and kind as you might imagine her to be.” - Lana Wachowski

She might be an unfamiliar face to western audiences, but in Korea Doona Bae is a household name. Highly regarded for roles in Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) and the Japanese film Air Doll (2009), she is able to cherry-pick parts from some of the world’s most acclaimed directors. So her audition for the German $100-million adaptation of David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas was her first audition in 13 years – but one she was happy to undertake. “I really wanted to work with the Wachowskis and I don’t like big main roles,” Bae says. “If my favourite director gives me a role that is very...” – she pauses to find the right word – “sparkly? A very brilliant character? I’ll do it.”

In her role as clone Sonmi-451 in the dystopian country of Nea So Copros, Bae delivers a poignant performance that required serious prep. She had to learn English from scratch and play three characters, all of different ages and ethnicities. “I was a little bit confused to be absolutely honest,” Bae says of the challenge. “I went to Berlin by myself because I wanted to become Sonmi. She is very miserable at the beginning and I was also really lonely, but Lana and Andy Wachowski were amazing. In the end we were like a family.”

After Cloud Atlas wrapped, Bae elected to travel straight to London to tackle her next project – mastering English. “When filming ended I could still hardly tell my friends and my directors how much I loved them, and how much I enjoyed making the film,” Bae explains. So she spent six months living with her dialogue coach in Primrose Hill, enjoying a spell of rare anonymity. “No one knew me, no one bothered me. It was refreshing.”

What challenge next awaits the multilingual, award-winning actress? Bae remains undecided. But it seems likely she will undertake it with characteristic dedication. “I really love learning and working long hours. I was even jealous of my Cloud Atlas stand-ins because I love being in front of the camera,” she says, earnestly. “In social situations, when I’m surrounded by people, I become very shy. But if there’s a camera in front of me, I feel free.”

Cloud Atlas is out on February 22

Photography Lauren Ward
Styling Sara Paulsen

Message by berserk message my inbox fills up with fragments of poems, jpegs of fiery abstract paintings, broken English and Cantonese characters, until I begin to feel stoned. You probably won’t have heard of Ami Hsu (阿米, 1980- ) and, like any self-respecting genius, Ami doesn’t seem to care. From the tone of her emails, neither is she fussed about how I came across this unGoogleable novelist-librettist-painter-poet with no website from Taipei City. At the beginning of our correspondence I sense marked disengagement. No sign-off. No small talk. When an answer doesn’t come to her, she’s disinclined to search herself for one: “(Last question: I don’t know)”.

Ami’s becoming well-known in Taiwan thanks to Yen Hung-ya (閻鴻亞), pen name Hung Hung (鴻鴻), a Taipei City-based translator, publisher, filmmaker and theatre director, poet and editor who charged himself with reviving poetry as a medium to “recover and conquer the land that all [the] propaganda and official language occupy.” Hung Hung chose Ami as one of his poets for Off the Roll, Poetry +, a group who “use the written word to…make very simple but powerful statements about life or about what is human.”

Previously untranslated and still without a UK publisher, Ami was a tip-off from the Templer Collection award-winning poet and translator, Matt Bryden, who, as well as waxing lyrical about her poems and paintings, had also warned me, “I only actually met Ami once. I was teaching in a language school in Bath about seven years ago and I made her cry. She ran out of the classroom. At the break I told my principal, and he said, Ah, so you've met the poet then.” I’d also read hazy things about on-going depression and an “episode” of mental illness in London, but now that I was in contact with her, Ami was unnervingly composed.

“I was a psycho in the UK, it’s my fate: a gift to my creation and also a curse to my spirit. I was missing about ten days in the London street [sic] till my sister picked me up… I wrote the days into my novel and poems. The illusion occupied me, a mad world becomes so real. The experience is beautiful, wonderful, and scary.” Her “split mind” clearly drives her –the first collection of poems, To Sing, To Dance, To Be A Wolf, full-length novel – “poetic, chaotic and disordered” –and exhibition of paintings were all inspired by this ten-day-long schizophrenic episode on the streets of London when she was studying away from Taipei City.

Early on in our interview Ami describes herself as having been “broken to a poem”, and throughout the course of our exchange, it’s clear this isn’t an affectation. When I ask her whether she thinks mental illness can facilitate strong art her response is beautifully disorienting. If she begins an answer in prose, more often than not it runs into verse: “Yes. It’s strong but short like a firework display. You can’t always depend on illness to create or you’ll die for it very soon. I have a poem about this:

All summer

Meteors crossed the sky

Polished my back, haunches, rump…

And finally the silver horn on my forehead

But everything reverted to darkness …”

Perhaps it’s got something to do with her stilted English, or perhaps they are little flashes of genius (a diamond in the rough), but I start to read poems in everything she writes. I ask her about love and pain, and why they always appear inextricably in her poems and paintings: “Blink, and love becomes pain. See it poetically. Blink, becomes love again.

I return to the flotsam and jetsam Ami left in my inbox and spot a typo I hadn’t noticed before –“Hi Sophie, Please find attacked.” From the streets of London to Taipei, through love and pain (“Loving you/Made me the best comic actress”), she makes madness real - and so palpable it’s unsettling. It is little surprise that when I ask Ami if all her work is confessional, she answers, “Yes. I like the word “confessional”. I like Sylvia Plath.” There’s a type of precarious brilliance that, in the western world, critics and readers of poetry often associate with Plath, herself “broken to a poem”, and it’s a Plath line that sums up Ami’s rough talent best: “Perfection is terrible”.

The pamphlet, The Desire to Sing after Sunset (trans. Ingrid Fan and Matt Bryden) is a hybrid collection of paintings and poems from 2009 to 2012 and which will be self published early next year. Take a look at the paintings in the gallery below and read two longer poems underneath

讓一切腐朽

蘋果變黃

老黃狗貪睡

蠟燭燒到了世界的盡頭

•

花朵隨著四季輪迴

祖母的肉身化成土壤

老舊的屋舍和社區老樹在政客的舌尖消失

唯有不經意與你路過婚紗街的午后

仍然是一半斜陽，一半天真

Let them all rot

An apple browns

An old dog drowses

A candle burns till the end of the world

Flowers reincarnate through the seasons

Grandmother’s flesh becomes dirt

Clapped-out houses and old trees disappear through politicians’ tongues

Only this afternoon, we passed through a street of wedding dress shops,

a little light still to the day, half innocent

命運一下子把我吹進荒廢花園

每一朵花都有各自的苦果

每一幅肖像都熱淚盈眶

飽受折磨的人，逐漸長成蒸好的熱饅頭

•

那種溫柔與勇敢

比方說，理髮師的手指

比方說，作他的妻子

比方說，在日子裡，失去一些詩

說真的，我去去就回來

每一個荒廢的日子，都值得記憶

Fate swept me into a disused garden

Each flower had its own bitter fruit

Each portrait’s eyes welled

Through suffering we gradually mature

Tenderness and courage –

For example, a barber’s fingers

For example, being his wife

For example, losing poetry in daily life

I’ll be back soon,

Each disused day is worth remembering

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