1 ?uestlove and Black Thought of the Roots
Cool Dudes
Issue #36
By Venus Zine Staff
Published: June 1st, 2008 | 4:01pm
Seamster Anthony Ferrario is starting a “slow design nonstop acid couture party revolution” and clothing his enlistees. Ferrario fashions original, handmade sweatshirts, jackets, dresses, and T-shirts. He constructs garments using salvaged materials, often hand-dyed and screen-printed, and stitches scintillatingly bright swaths of fabric together, making each piece unique. His new line premieres at Renegade Craft Fair Brooklyn in June. (CloudBringsRainbows.etsy.com).
— Kara Oehler
Oregon’s Jaguar Love rises from the ashes of Blood Brothers and Pretty Girls Make Graves. With a new self-titled EP under its belt, the trio releases a full-length called Take Me to the Sea on Matador in August. Jaguar Love’s spastic sound includes howling vocals and gyrating rhythms. Songs such as “Highways of Gold” encompass escalating guitar and piano chords, syncopated melodies, and awakening lyrics. — Adrian Finiak
Tucson musician Michael John Serpe makes records. We mean makes them — his album packing is entirely handmade and uses as little plastic as possible. His latest release, In Seed, is made of silkscreened birch, and his 2006 release, A Night in Gin’s Hollow, folded out into a gin bottle and actually smells like gin. Find him at homerecordedculture.com. — Annie Holub
Composer Nico Muhly has worked with Phillip Glass, Björk, and Rufus Wainwright, premiered pieces at the Whitney Museum and Carnegie Hall, and in July is releasing Mothertongue, the follow-up to his 2006 debut, Speaks Volumes. Did I mention he’s only 27 years old?
Mothertongue’s beautifully crafted compositions pull from classical, medieval, American folk, and experimental music to create collages of sound and voice that are alternately fractured, whimsical and luminously pretty. — Anna Breshears
What do you get when you cross My Bloody Valentine with hardcore punk? No Age. The duo’s album, Nouns (Sub Pop), makes tuneful cloudbursts of anarchy, where every fuzzy note is splintered and fragmented prism-style into rainbow shards. “Eraser” vibrates like an electric pop song shorting out in your bathtub, while “Brain Burner” buries inchoate shreds of longing under bristling thickets of hard-strummed guitar. — Jennifer Kelly
From corrupt music industry execs (“The Pow Wow”) to the pitfalls of a broken legal system (“Criminal”), Rising Down (Def Jam) — the 10th album by the Grammy Award-winning Philadelphia hip-hop syndicate, the Roots —fearlessly traverses the tough subjects. Rife with hidden tracks (dating back to Howard University in 1994), impressive cameos (DJ Jazzy Jeff arrives in full force on “Get Busy,” Common takes control of “The Show,” and Mos Def sets the album’s tone on the title track), and even a long-lost recording of a 15-year-old Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter freestyling, Rising Down has “album of the year” written all over it. — K. Tighe
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