Grafitti has existed on this planet since humankind landed. I know that I have been into scrawl on walls ever since I saw my first gang tag in the 70′s. The writing on the walls has so many different meanings to everyone. For some, it’s a political statement or an expression of art, for others, it’s vandalism. Street art has started to gain respect in the mainstream in the last decade, but cops are still assholes, so there is still that outlaw factor. Another interesting thing about the grafitti subculture is that it transcends gender, race, class, nationality and musical preference. A good example of this is heavy metal-loving NECKFACE. This Stockton-bred latino skater-turned-artist has taken the New York streets and the art world by storm over the past five years. It’s been killer watching this cool dude spray paint his demented imagination all over the world and make a living while doing it. NECKFACE has been able to balance his street cred while maintaining a presence in the art universe that is full of oversized egos. I dig the way that his art has almost a child-like quality, but at the same time it deals with our darkest thoughts. My personal favorites of NECKFACE are on the walls of Tokyo’s alleys, or on top of New York businesses. Today, CVLT Nation wants to celebrate our favorite grafitti creep NECKFACE with a huge gallery of his work. Stab your eyes out and have look at death itself after the jump!

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Text and photos Maren Michaelis via Dit is Fashion!

The Art of David D’Andrea is gloomy, doomy iconic and beautiful. The topics include magic, occult, mysticism, folklore and natural history. The drawings are beautifully detailed, decorative, and the writing is archaic.

On May 12, 2o12, David D’Andrea and his Irish colleague, Glyn Smyth (also an illustrator for the music business), exhibited their work in the screen printing workshop in Berlin-Neukölln.

The exhibition was relatively small, the posters hung side by side, on a line in space, their presentation rather temporal. There was a DJ and a quasi-merch booth where you could buy prints, t-shirts and stickers by the artists. The nice thing was the relaxed atmosphere, and that the two artists were on site and you could chat with them. The screen prints, which I bought, must be framed!

David D’Andrea studied illustration at the CCAC (SF, Oakland, CA) and is now one of the leading visual artists in the punk and metal scene. The young D’Andrea began with show flyers, zines and skateboard graphics, which is why he uses different media in his work, such as photocopiers, spray paint and screen printing. Today he works mainly with bands that are Doom / Sludge / Psychedelic / Stoner in orientation. Among his first clients are Oakland natives prog-rock trio High On Fire. His work for Om D’Andrea calls the most personal, because it is his favorite band. Om is a stoner-doom metal band who shares its rhythm section with the band Sleep, and whose music and aesthetic recalls the structure of Byzantine and Tibetan chants.
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“My art is dark because life is dark…people would not be able to be in search of light if they didn’t know what darkness represents.” – Maxime Taccardi

The dreams of Maxime Taccardi speak. Each night when this French-born artist closes his eyes, a whole new world stands unveiled. A subversive fantasy where darkness reigns supreme and the most perverse aspects of humanity are stripped bare. Using death, and all its facets, as his greatest muse – he fleshes out the lucid visions using parchment, ink and his own blood. The results, although frightening for some, signal beauty for another.

 This is CVLT Nation’s exclusive and in-depth interview with this artist…

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Have you ever walked by a building and said to yourself, rad dark shit is happening behind those doors? This was the case when I used to walk by Last Rites Tattoos in it’s old location in the Lower Eastside. I could tell that this shop created the kind of skin art that people would travel far and wide to get inked on their bodies. Paul Booth, the owner and head artist, seems like a person that is dedicated to making people’s nightmares a reality, so that we can all see the beauty in those dark fantasies. His work is pure evil, but it still has a sense of humanity that draws you in. Paul fit well into the fabric of the LES, and you could tell he was down for the community. Today CVLT Nation would like to celebrate Booth as a tattoo artist, but also as a fine artist – his work will speak for itself!

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Not everything can be explained or looked at from what we might consider to be a normal perspective. Right now, I want to share with you a mind-warping experience that I went through, that left me almost without words. I combined two things that are so otherworldly, it took me putting them together to make sense of them. This is what happened: I watched the Hermann Nitsch’s videos that he created in 1982 of one of his performances that totally had my mind racing with all sorts of thoughts about his work. Then I put on William Fowler Collins‘ album The Resurrections Unseen, which became the perfect soundtrack for what I was watching. The Hermann Nitsch videos are broken into 6 parts, so with each one I played a different song from The Resurrections Unseen. It was interesting to hear the tension and drama in William Fowler Collins’ compositions while watching something parallel play out in Hermann’s work. As an artist, I feel that they both would like the listener or viewer to make up their own mind about their art. I find it impossible to label what I feel when I hear “Embracing Our Own Annhilation” from The Resurrections Unseen, or where my imagination went as I saw the flowing blood in Hermann’s videos. As art, both of these works can stand alone no doubt, but together, a new vortex could open up in your brain. Below you will find Part 1 of Hermann Nitsch, plus a full stream of the William Fowler Collins album out now on Type Records. After the jump, you will find the five remaining videos…this will be intense, but what else would you want it to be?

More Hermann Nitsch flims after the jump!
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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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