Founded in 1991 by Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani and art director Tibor Kalman, Colors is an Italian quarterly “about the rest of the world.” Colors has been called the magazine of the MTV generation, and Kalman once described it as, “a mix of National Geographic and Life on acid.”

After nearly twenty-five years and counting, a book about Colors explores the best of this influential magazine, recombining text and images from the far and near past into a strong iteration of Color’s ever-relevant, ever-expanding story about the enormity of human experience and art. Due to the publication’s wildly eclectic nature—with a range and scope that foreshadowed that of the internet—its content is organized thematically, including: “That’s Amore” (physical and emotional love); “Bang!” (weapons, violence, lust, shock); “Elvis” (fame, excess, degeneration, disguise, kitsch) and “I Want to Believe” (faith, cult, what we worship). With a foreword by renowned art curator and writer Francesco Bonami, Colors gives homage to this unconventional magazine, which tackled the era’s social and cultural issues with shrewd eccentricity.

via Damiani/Fabrica

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In 2015, when the internet has rendered publishing easy, accessible and above all free, why self-publish? Self-publishing has long been a way to beat censorship, but the internet has no such boundaries as a communal space open to all. And therein lies another familiar problem: there’s way too much.

In reply to media oversaturation and digitization, a disparate mass of artists have banded together to create physical books of their work, resulting in a collective effort founded by Bruno Ceschel—Self Publish, Be Happy. The London-based organization began collecting self-published photo books in 2010, donated by the self-publishers themselves. Five years later, the archives of Self Publish, Be Happy comprise over three thousand titles.

Ceschel conceived the eponymous book form of the project as a sampling of the current collection as well as manual to the reader, offering ideas and information for pursuing DIY photobooks. His manifesto in the preface opens with, “Self Publish, Be Happy is not a survey of recent photobooks. It is not a best-of. It is a call to arms—a rallying cry to take part, to act, to share.” In short, a modern revolution of tangible art and communal experience against a virtual backdrop of homogeneity.

via Aperture

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Venezuelan electronic musician Arca is set to release Mutant, the follow-up to his outstanding 2014 debut Xen and 2013 mixtape &&&&&. Arca collaborates regularly with artist Jesse Kanda and has co-produced several innovative albums in the past few years, including FKA Twigs’ EP2, Björk’s Vulnicura and Kanye’s Yeezus.

via Mute

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This month, Taschen Books is reissuing a 20th anniversary edition of Richard Kern’s iconic 1995 photobook, New York Girls, which includes an original interview by Kim Gordon, photos rejected as too explicit for the first book and outtakes from his original sessions.

Marlborough Chelsea’s Broome Street location will be showing the accompanying exhibition, New York Girls Revisited, opening November 19-December 23. A retrospective of his work, Richard Kern: Photographs 1979-1990, is also on view at Marlborough Chelsea through December 23, 2015.

via Taschen

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Hailing from Nashville, JEFF the Brotherhood is the two-piece of brothers Jake and Jamin Orrall. Their newest double-album Global Chakra Rhythms is their second release this year (and 10th in total), following last spring’s Wasted on the Dream. The album features collaborators Jack Lawrence of The Dead Weather/Raconteurs, Reece Lazarus of Bully and Jessica McFarland, and a song originally recorded with Jack White at Third Man Records.

This year, Jake Orrall also played on friend/fellow musician Colleen Green’s album I Want to Grow Up. Read our doodle Q&A between the two here.

via Infinity Cat

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Honduras gives you two options: either turn them off or turn them up, because once they’re on you certainly can’t ignore them. Now a four piece based in Brooklyn, Honduras came into shape as a collaboration between two friends—lead vocalist Patrick Phillips and guitarist Tyson Moore—living rent-free in a basement in Bushwick. Or rather paying a lawyer for a civil case, which was cheaper than paying the landlord. Since taking a stab at Americana early on, Phillips and Moore have tested out various sonic personas before they eased into their current sound, putting out two EPs and now a debut album, Rituals.

Raucous live shows and a punk ethos draw Honduras comparisons to the Buzzcocks and The Sex Pistols, among a whole range of others, to which Phillips responds, “I think it means you’re creating original music if you’re not pinpointed down to a couple different bands. I find that flattering.” It’s clear that Honduras is a band bent on growing their sound organically without constricting themselves to a certain image. Adding drummer Josh Wehle and bassist Pauly Lizarraga to the mix for Rituals led to a broader, more communal effort, influenced by what they describe as “psychier stuff.” When the band came through LA on their tour, they talked about their beginnings, their video for “Paralyzed” and what it means to carry punk into 2015.

You are both from Missouri and relocated to Brooklyn?

Patrick Phillips: I played basketball at Hunter College [in New York], but the move was always about music. That was kind of the opportunity, but even back then I had no clue. I was just a big Bob Dylan fan at the time. We were making music when we were teenagers.

Tyson Moore: I went and studied audio engineering in Chicago, and then I worked at a small studio there. He came and stayed with me and we started writing some stuff. It was super different from what we do now. It was like Americana, Dylan-inspired…

PP: Ryan Adams kind of vibe

TM: We had good chemistry. Then he moved back to New York, and I decided I was done with the studio hustle game. I just wanted to get back to playing my own music.

PP: We just wanted to play in a band, and play more aggressively and just be loud. So we kind of started from scratch.

Since the beginning of last year, you put out two EPs and now a full album. How do you feel you’ve evolved since then?

PP: I’d say the big difference in this operation is that we’re fully a cohesive band now. These new songs that we’re playing now are all of our songs as opposed to me and him in a basement.

What do you think it means to be punk right now?

PP: The big punk thing is having control over your music. Not having anyone tell you what it really needs to sound like or whatever.

TM: That’s why people like Thee Oh Sees and Deerhunter are amazing. You see Bradford Cox’s progression of different genres record to record. Nobody’s calling the shots for him.

PP: You know, Kanye West and Bob Dylan are punk cause they’re making their own decisions.

TM: But then there’s the punk aesthetic of music, which we are also really influenced by. So I think we’ll always have that, even when we get into psychier stuff—the punk delivery comes through.

Tell me about your new music video for “Paralyzed.”

PP: Josh directed it and conceptualized it.

Josh Wehle: It was between me and our friend [Danny] Dwyer, who’s a brilliant dude. It went from just sitting at a bar crossing out ‘bad idea, bad idea’ and we all hit this love motel, sleazy fucking Jersey S&M dungeon. So I spent hours reading the Yelp reviews. People leave these hotels after doing whatever the fuck they do there and write these detailed reviews of what they did and how clean the showers are. I found pretty much the most disgusting one I could because you need a spot that wouldn’t really notice if you filed 15 people into a room with strobe lights.

PP: We were doing a lot less crazy stuff than what was going on in the other rooms, too. It was dark.

JW: Watching that parking lot could have been a reality show and would have done really well.
It’s in a part of Jersey that only has in-service strip clubs, abandoned strip clubs or sex hotels. They have rates that are like by the minute and by the hour. It’s some dark shit. But an amazing set for a music video. And you can’t really fake that unless you have 50 grand. You either need 15 dollars or 50 grand. And one Yelp review that really pushed you towards it.

via Black Bell Records

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EL VY is the collaboration born of a ten-year friendship between musicians Matt Berninger of The National and Brent Knopf of Ramona Falls. Berninger and Knopf met while touring a string of small clubs along the West Coast back when Knopf played with his Portland-based band Menomena and both bands’ shows were still half-empty. The pair finally united on their debut album, Return to the Moon, a medley of Berninger’s trademark storyline lyrics and Knopf’s playful arrangements. The album was mostly written while the two worked in different parts of the world, sending samples and lyrics back and forth. Return to the Moon reflects this lighthearted banter. Rest assured that EL VY (pron. “el viy”) is a separate entity from the musicians’ current projects and does not mark a split with either—both bands are set to release new material in the coming months. As Berninger put it, EL VY indulges in “a lot of guilty pleasures without any guilt.”

via 4AD

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The world’s first punk record label, Ork Records, emerged in 1975 as the brainchild of Terry Ork, a SoCal cinephile who, after meeting Warhol’s clique shooting a surf film, relocated to NYC in 1968 for its underground post-disco scene and The Factory. Ork led the success of the club CBGB, and his fledgling Ork Records went on to release raucous debuts by Television and Richard Hell, as well as legendary recordings from Lester Bangs, The Feelies, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Brian Eno, Blondie and The Ramones. Ork Records underlies punk mythology as a leading story of an underdog in a world of hustlers. It is riddled with heartbreak, financial straits and raw ambition. A musical narrative, Ork Records: New York, New York is a box compilation curated and released by Numero Group, giving voice to the forgotten genesis of punk and the birth of the New York indie scene ever after.

via Numero Group

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