Stiv Bators, 1980
 
David Arnoff‘s post-punk era photography appeared in the NME, Melody Maker, Trouser Press, N.Y. Rocker and many other publications. The Cleveland-born, but London-based photographer and disc jockey’s work captures iconic bad boys and girls, relaxed and at their most playful. Arnoff is currently readying his photographs for a book and is looking for a publisher. I asked him a few questions over email:

Tara: Tell me about the Stiv Bators shot.

David Arnoff: I was hanging around with Stiv and his post-Dead Boys band in their hotel—pretty sure it was the Sunset Marquis—and we decided to do some shots of him on his own. He’d been messing about with a new air pistol, so we brought that along and just stepped out into the hall, after which it occured to him to maybe go back in the room and put some shoes on, but I said not to bother.  We started out doing some rather silly and predictable 007-type poses before he chose to just sit on the floor and look disturbed. I always thought the stripey socks made him look even more so.

Nick Cave, 1983
 
Tara: You worked with Nick Cave several times. He seems like a guy very concerned about his image, yet playful, too. What’s he like as a subject or collaborator?

David Arnoff: Nick is very easy and unaffected to work with. That shot with Harpo is the result of what started out as another cancelled session at the Tropicana Motel. He apologized for being up all night and indicated all the empty bottles on the TV as evidence, but was perfectly happy for me to carry on regardless even though he was not looking his best. The only downside was he was trying in vain to play “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” not really knowing the chords and the guitar was painfully out of tune.  Not an enjoyable aural experience. He was quite happy with the photos though.

Jeffrey Lee Pierce, 1983
 
Tara: Maybe it was the era, but several of the people you shot were junkies. Any “colorful” anecdotes about the likes of Cave, Jeffery Lee Pierce, Nico or Johnny Thunders?

David Arnoff: Far be it for me to say whether or not any of these people were actually junkies, but it’s funny you should mention Nick and Jeffrey together because I did squeeze all three of us into my little Volvo p1800 to go score on the street—Normandy, I think, around 3rd or somewhere. We then went back to my place in Hollywood, where Jeffrey became convinced they’d been ripped off. But Nick seemed more than happy with his purchase. Afterwards we went to that lesbian-run Mexican place near the Starwood. Nick tried to remember what he’d had previously and proceeded to attempt to describe what he wanted it to the baffled staff. I think they just gave up and sold him a burrito.

More with David Arnoff and his photographs after the jump…

 
Bram E. Gieben (aka Texture) is the editor of the Edinburgh-based fiction/non-fiction website Weaponizer, and also co-founder of the net label Black Lantern Music. I asked him to write DM a primer on the genre “witch house”:

The Niallist (aka Niall O’Conghaile) asked me to write something about witch house, summing it up, providing a genre overview, and talking about some of the artists I’ve discovered over the last year or so. The problem is witch house is nothing like a traditional genre. It is not defined by a tempo, a style of production, a specific group of artists, a region or country or city, or any of the things one could use to pigeonhole, say, shoegaze, dubstep or hip-hop. Even the pool of influences from which it draws are so diverse as to stagger the mind of even the most ardent avant garde completist: witch house can (and does) sound like everything from experimental noise and drone to EBM and darkwave and aggrotech, from hip-hop to punk rock and black metal, often all at the same time.

Witch house is perhaps the first anti-genre, in that it has always actively resisted not just definition, but also detection. Much mockery has been made of artists spelling their band names with strange typographic symbols, but in the early days of witch house this had a specific intent: namely to create a ‘lexical darknet’ (to quote Warren Ellis, the comics writer and novelist whose blog posts led me to my first discoveries in the field), whereby fans had to use the specific symbols in the band names to locate their music online.

Witch house has incubated and mutated on free music sharing platforms such as Soundcloud and Bandcamp, and survives and breeds on private forums like www.witch-house.com, and on invite-only Facebook groups like Witchbook and Dior Nights, which use Facebook to run miniature secret societies and covens. These technologies (or services, however you want to define them) are core to the distribution of the music, but equally important have been the Tumblr and Vimeo platforms. The cut-and-paste ethos behind many witch house projects extends to their visuals, and the gifs, music videos and photo collages that populate artists’ feeds and channels are as much a part of the aesthetic of witch house as the music is.

The equal importance of visual and audio material helps us get closer to a definition of witch house: it is a mood or a feeling, the kind of atmosphere generated by the seminal Goblin’s soundtrack for ‘Suspiria,’ the creeping, schizophrenic suspense of the Laura Palmer mystery, or the Red Room at the heart of Twin Peaks, the final twenty minutes of The Wicker Man, or a basement rave in the house at the end of The Blair Witch Project. In repose, it generates an aura of ritual, darkness and suspense. In motion, it combines the glamour of fetish clubs and serial murder and hard drugs into an amoral dystopia of sound and vision.

Excited yet? You should be. Witch house is almost completely free from the constraints of mainstream hype - aside perhaps from the majestic witch pop of S4LEM, the mysterious feedback glyphs of WU LYF, and the luxurious electronic experimentation of Balam Acab, the three artists closest to crossing over into mainstream consciousness.
 

 
After the jump, the bands including Gummy Bear, Ritualz, Skeleton Kids, Fostercare, Gvcci Hvcci, Mater Suspiria Vision, oOoOO and many, many more.

 
As you will detect from his charming accent, DMRH debutant Steven Daly isn’t from around these parts: He’s from Glasgow, although these days he lives in New York’s allegedly fashionable outer borough of Brooklyn and works as a contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine. Steven’s first tentative steps up the glass mountain we call show-business were as the drummer for Orange Juice, a band that is frequently accused of “inventing” indie-rock. Next week Orange Juice are nominated in the box-set category of the Mojo Awards in London, alongside the like of the Kinks, Eric Clapton and David Bowie. Good luck, Steve. Let us know how you get on against that competition!
 
Ian Dury and the Blockheads - There Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards
The Boys - The First Time
Subway Sect - Nobody’s Scared
Nosmo King and the Javells - Goodbye Nothing to Say
Dexy’s Midnight Runners - I Love You
Holland-Dozier-Holland - Don’t Leave Me Starving for Your Love
Lauryn Hill and Refugee Camp All Stars - The Sweetest Thing
Syreeta - I Love Every Little Thing About You
George Faith - To Be a Lover
I-Roy - Don’t Get Weary Joe Frazier
Morrissey - The Last of the Famous International Playboys
Sugababes - Push the Button
The Faces - You Can Make Me Dance, Sing Or Anything (Even Take The Dog For A Walk, Mend A Fuse, Fold Away The Ironing Board, Or Any Other Domestic Short Comings)
Juggy - Soul at Sunrise
 

 
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Bonus video : 50,000 supporters of my beloved Celtic Football Club, of Glasgow, singing an early Depeche Mode classic in a stoutly heterosexual fashion!
 

 
Although a famous Vogue cover shot by Patrick Lichfield of Marsha Hunt, naked, with a huge Afro, as a London cast member of Hair is an indisputably and quintessentially iconic image of the 1960s, Hunt remains under the radar of most music fans. For one (quite good) reason, there are exactly zero CDs of her music on the market currently and there is nothing on iTunes either. This is too bad, because she made some worthwhile music during her career. However, some pretty great clips of her live on European TV have been popping up on YouTube and many of her better known singles have made it to some audio blogs, as well, so there’s plenty for me to illustrate here what still makes Hunt the object of cult fascination. Eventually, I have no doubt, she’ll be rediscovered by music nerds.

Hunt, an insanely gorgeous, highly intellectual 19-year-old model, originally from Philly, who went to Berkeley (and marched with Jerry Rubin!), moved to swinging London in 1966. She married Mike Ratledge of the Soft Machine so she could stay in the country (and is still married to him to this day, although they have not been together for decades) and sang back-up vocals for blues great Alexis Korner. She became a cast member of Hair, having but two lines as “Dionne” in the West End production.

Below, a clip of Marsha Hunt performing her cover version of Dr. John’s Walk on Gilded Splinters:
 

 
Next up, my favorite Marsha Hunt track (Oh No! Not) The Beast Day. To my ears this sounds way, way, way ahead if its time, reminding me (a lot) of Demon Days by the Gorillaz or mid-career Talking Heads. Turn this up LOUD, you’ll be really glad you did:

More Marsha Hunt after the jump…

 
Here’s a bunch of clips of amazing people doing exceptional things in front of other very lucky people which I curated for our pals at Network Awesome, many of which have turned up in previous blog posts here on Dangerous Minds. Probably the first of many to come ! Special thanks to Shannon Fields, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Dave Madden and Eddie Ruscha.
 
Hamlet Gonashvili - Gogov Shavtvalav

Cutty Ranks - Sleng Teng Riddim

George Harrison - Wah-Wah

Rimpa Siva - Tabla Solo Calcutta 1997 Part 6

John Cage - Excerpt from “Good Morning Mr. Orwell”

Wolfgang Dauner & Et Cetera - Raga

Quicksilver Messenger Service - Dino’s Song

Judee Sill -The Kiss

Yes - And You And I

Nara Leão - Camisa Amarela

Tim Buckley - I Woke Up

The Carpenters - Ticket To Ride

Turkmenian shredding

Tony Oxley - Combination

Derdiyoklar Ikilisi - 1984 Show
 

 
Originally posted on 03/30/11