A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the Portland group show, A Matter of Life & Death, at the Screaming Sky Gallery. by all accounts, the April 26th opening went well, and Screaming Sky sent me some photos to share with you. The calibre of artist in this show is outstanding, and you can still pick up some of the original works they have on display by Halseycaust aka Halsey Swain, Dan Harding, Jeremy Hush & Elli Adams at the gallery and in their webstore. After the jump, check out photos of A Matter of Life & Death, and if you’re in the portland area, make sure you head over to Screaming Sky to check out the show.

Hello Jenks, thank you so much for doing this interview. How is everything in the Horseback camp?

Great, thanks Bryan.

The Invisible Mountain was the album that really put Horseback on the map, and you’ve released a lot of material since then. Your offerings on splits and collaborations since that release have been very different sonically. Did you intend to distance yourself from the sound of that record a little bit to avoid repetition?

I try to keep the process open. I’m not as concerned with whether or not I’m repeating myself as I am with pursuing ideas as they come. I try to avoid molding these ideas to fit any particular genre — some suggest a “rock-band” approach to realization, while others work best in more abstract arrangements.

The follow up to Mountain was a release called Forbidden Planet which was released initially very quietly on cassette by Brave Mysteries. That release was highly textural and an exploration of drone and soundscapes that focused primarily on guitar. Listening to it on tape adds an extra layer of hiss and noise. Do you see that record as lending itself specifically to the format of cassette?

I did, after it was finished. Listening back to Forbidden Planet is a challenge because there are so few concessions to listenability on that one. Like many harsh noise records, it’s to be endured — maybe even “beaten” — so that completion is an accomplishment. Records like that seem to benefit from an explicit layer of physicality between the listener and the sounds themselves. Cassettes provide that sense of confrontation: they are physical things that the listener must wrestle with, unlock. As you suggest, there’s a layer of hiss that won’t allow you to forget there’s a machine whirring away behind the music. Tape gets tangled in players, sometimes it tears. Cassettes demand a certain level of physical interaction that you don’t get from the digital medium.

Still, I don’t like obscurity for the sake of obscurity. I’m happy to reissue cassette releases in more accessible and widely-distributed formats, should the opportunity arise. The listener can choose which format is right for him or her.

Rest of the interview after the jump…
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This spring is so far a celebration of metal! With Roadburn just passed, now we are setting our sights on the upcoming Heavy Days in Doomtown, soon to be darkening the streets of Copenhagen (you’ll read more about that soon). Two of our favorite artists will be collaborating with HDD to bring light to the artwork that is such an integral part of metal. David D’Andrea & Glyn Smyth will be a part of HDD’s art showcase May 3rd to 6th, and then will be holding their own show in Berlin at Sdw Neukolln, with the opening on May 12th from 4-11 pm. The show, “screen prints and drawings,” brings together the work of these two illustrators, who share an interest in the esoteric, nature worship, and underground music. They will be showing their screen prints and drawings, and will also have prints for sale. Check out the flyer below and a small selection of their artwork after the jump…

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Four artists I have the utmost respect for, Dan Harding, Jeremy Hush, Halsey Swain & Elli Adams are bringing their images of doom and darkness to the Screaming Sky Gallery in Portland, OR, next Thursday, April 26th. I wish I could pack up my life into a car that worked and head up there to check out the opening, because it seriously does feature a dream team of the macabre, artists that are highlights of my journalistic career here at CVLT Nation. If you are on the Rain Coast and have mobility, make sure you head over to the gallery from 5pm to 9pm, shake the artists’ hands and drink some free beers for us in sunny LA. The skies will be a little darker here next Thursday.

Tomorrow at 7pm, Breath of the Black Muse opens at the Black Vulture Gallery in Fishtown, PA. This celebration of the macabre arts is the first of a series of installations curated by JL Joseph Beaulieu at Black Vulture that will showcase artists whose work is so often admired in the metal/hardcore/blackmetal scenes. This first installation in the quarterly series features artists from around the world, including Belgium artists Kluze Hellion and Patina Vas Diaz, Irish artist Paul McCarroll, Brooklyn’s Karlynn Holland – who also curates the Dreams Were Made for Mortals series, Bianca Olson from California, Seldon Hunt from NYC, Yeshua Hill from Burlington, VT, and many more talented and morbid artists. If you’re in the area tomorrow, we highly recommend that you check out Breath of the Black Muse! Check out some preview pieces and a list of the artists showing after the jump…

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Blackmeat is an artgroup consisted of two russian artists Konstantin Tarasov and Pavel Lyakhov, whom I have not been able to collect very much converse from, yet have spurned my imagination to places I have not bothered or perhaps not been able to think about yet with their manifest of weird dark art. This only hungers my palette for further invocation of paint, and pencil produced from the temporally diffused sections of this man’s mind. I came across his exhibit entitled ПОD. Displaying a commerce of occultic and deathly incipit art in the confines of a cave, illuminated by horrifying glows and the halo of candles. A peer into his collection, if unknowing of the creator, one might suppose a reliquary tribe of aghori, venting their altered perception of the world and using the pictures as ritual shrines. This might be one even to fool anthropologists if they were to stumble on its array of dark displays of death, blood, and form. Sometimes the pictures seem at one with the eerie atmosphere of the cave, and other times a stark aberration of life and physicality of hallucination. The Existence “ПOD” meaning (“UNDER”) took place in a cave in February 2011. It is considered that it was the first exhibition in history of modern dark art which took place in a real cave (artwoks are still there) which means that it was really “underground”. Despite its expressiveness and gloominess the project took your attention to the relevant social problems. Cult of violence and a fear of being “not perfect” accompany the mankind in its way from cave existence to nowadays and uncover a disappointing reality: a human being in his historical aspiration for better life fights with his environment forgetting of where he has come from. Disharmony in humans environment leads to physical and mental mutations. We return to our backgrounds and realize that “we didn’t leave our caves, we just have made them more comfortable created seas of blood around us”. The collection seems to be suppressed in such a way to show on a 2 dimensional screen, but one might be able to transcend the value of this art and immerse their mindset at least into it’s outpouring…

But this are not the only things spewed out by Константин Тарасов & Pavel Lyakhov, not content with just bending the perceptions of imagery, but somehow philosophizing on it as well with acts of provocative augmentation. One of their other exhibits transforms the mere looking of, and permanence of ar,t into a window of experience wherein as the paintings become destroyed by fire after they have been seen…

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Enter a world of technicolor madness, with patterns assaulting your eyes in blinding color and images tearing at your retinas with whirling movement. This is the universe of Claudio Parentela, painter, illustrator, collagist and artist of all trades. His pieces are a humorous take on pop culture and mass mythology, combining collage and paint to create beautiful hideous creatures. Standards of female beauty are central to much of his work, but he depicts it as grotesque and ridiculous, with arms and legs askew, lips blubbering, doe eyes bleeding. I enjoy how he reworks models into monsters and objectifies Hitler with massive breasts and hairy legs -you don’t realize how suggestive his gaze is until it is perched on a weirdly sexy body. This artwork reminds me of John berger’s Ways of Seeing, in that Parentela has turned the objective gaze of patriarchy on its head, revealing the jumble of contradictions behind its simple dichotomies. After the jump, prepare to have your rods and cones blown away by Claudio Parentela.

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“Cheap” movies always have a special place in my heart, be it film noir, exploitation, surreal, ‘cult’, horror, or even sci-fi. Not just about the cheesy stories, but they also have the best titles and even the coolest taglines than other ‘mainstream’ movies. How come you dont love the titles like “I Dismember Mama”, “Plan 9 From Outer Space”, “I Was A Teenage Frankenstein”, “Night Of The Howling Beast”, “I Was A Shoplifter” or even “Teenagers From Outer Space”? Fuckin’ ‘classy’ movie titles! Well dont forget about the poster’s artworks too: the vibrant colors, the illustrations, the layout and typos are amazing. Collecting original vintage movie posters is always worthed, even the price of original movie posters like “Jaws” or “Creature From The Black Lagoon” are amazingly insane! Well enough said, check out some cool “B” movie posters after the jump!

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I’ve always been interested with visual art since my early years, I bought and collected various Japanese comics when I was around 8 or 9. But when I came to a bookstore to buy a comic with my parents, suddenly I saw a stack of horror novels and the covers really attracted me. Yes it was Goosebumps, I picked up a copy that day – I remember it was “The Beast From The East”. I have to admit that the main reason I bought the novel was because of the cover art, I couldnt get enough of the series ever since. If you have keen eyes, some of the covers have the signature of the cover artist Tim jacobus. He’s became one of my first fav artist as a kid, I remember I tried to redraw “Vampire Breath” and “Bad Hare Day” back then. The vibrant colors and the surrealistic yet horror imagery that Tim created really stimulate the reader’s imagination, you can tell after seeing the covers that the stories are rad. Dont judge the book by its cover? Well I have to disagree! I cant seem to find the scans of the covers in good quality, but anyway check out Tim Jacobus’ cover artworks after the jump!

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As a visual artist, doing art collaboration is always fun and keeps me creative. Especially if the artist we collaborate with has a unique style, or if the technique is different from usual. I love anything surreal and bizarre, for me doing an Exquisite Corpse collaboration is a homage to the Surrealism movement. Some of you might wondering, what the fuck is Exquisite Corpse? Exquisite Corpse was invented by Surrealists and started about 1925, but different source would say it was already invented before 1918. It was started as a “writing game”, one player would write a phrase on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player. The name of the collaboration is derived from a phrase that resulted when Surrealists first played the game: “Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau” (“The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine”), and later this technique was adapted to drawing and collage. But the technique is not forgotten, nowadays many artists still doing Exquisite Corpse. Usually an artist would draw / make a collage on a paper, and let half of the paper blank. When he/she has finished, his/her part will be covered except for 3 cm. This artwork will be sent via mail, and other collaborator will finish the blank part with only seeing 3 cm strip. Other way is done digitally, but the same rule still apply: only let a small part seen. Sounds rad right? Here are some Exquisite Corpse done by Surrealists, both from the pioneers and nowadays artists!

Paul Éluard, André Breton & Nusch Éluard (1929)

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