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Dangerous Minds’ M. Campbell unveils his new music video
05.23.2012
05:24 pm
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Here’s the world premier of a video I just finished editing last night for “The Sound,” a song from my forthcoming album, Tantric Machine.

I wrote the lyrics for “The Sound” after a night of drinking, walking 47 miles of barbed wire and listening to Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love” and some Petey Wheatstraw records.

It’s an old song (writ in 1999) that I resuscitated after years of ignoring it. I didn’t like it at the time I recorded it but I’ve had a change of heart and decided to unveil it (or allow it to escape) for all the world to hear, particularly folks who frequent Dangerous Minds.

After three decades of making records, I still can’t get a handle on my own music, which in some ways is a good thing. If a song takes me by surprise it generally means it has something to say to me. In the case of “The Sound,” I was playing around with the kind of over-the-top, often funny, boastful lyrics you hear in old blues and rock tunes like the aforementioned “Who Do You Love” to which I added a dose of noirish Peter Gunn guitar and a Morricone-esque wail from a Casio keyboard. I’m not sure the song has anything to “say,” but it certainly draws from my history of loving the dark shit.

The Sound

This is the sound
Of big love come to town
In the night

This the beat
That crawls up the street
In the night

I’m the mighty soul brother
The mighty machine
That generates love
In your groovy love scene
In the night

This is the sound
Deep and profound

Well young Aphrodite
Was hung from the trees
When I rode though the town
With a bitch on my knees
In the night

The Portuguese mother
With albino twins
Gouged out her eyes
When she saw me walk in
In the night

Women love men
With money and wit
Some will respond
To the crack of a whip
In the night

I’m the mighty soul brother
And Lord there’s no other
Go ahead ask your mother
She knows what this brother can do
In the night

This is the sound of big love come to town

Thanks for indulging me. This is like undressing in public.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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05.23.2012
05:24 pm
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Three songs and a short film by Marc Campbell
01.25.2012
12:22 am
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I was in New Orleans for the past couple of weeks and while I was there I visited Cypress Grove and St. Louis Cemeteries and shot some video and film footage. I combined that footage with some clips from some older films, including Alucarda, Tilly Losch and The Dance Of Her Hands, Danse Serpentine and vintage burlesque to create a short film. It’s raw and spontaneous and owes a bit of a debt to film makers I admire like Kenneth Anger and Stan Brakhage. Of course, they are masters and I am not.

The soundtrack is composed of three songs from my album Tantric Machine (release date: May 2012). The album will be a two-disc affair containing 24 songs and some videos. The recording sessions were produced by Hugh Pool and involved the use of old microphones, synthesizers, rhythm machines and effects boxes. I wanted the project to sound like it was recorded with instruments that had turn to rust - something ancient and yet modern.

As I sang some of the tunes, I found my voice going into a place it hadn’t really gone before. My Texas roots emerged and a “country” feel entered the songs. I made no effort to sing like a hillbilly convict. It just happened. I also tapped into my French side. The result is some kind of weird hybrid that sounds like music for a Gallic spaghetti western with some LSD thrown in. None of this was planned. I was taken by surprise and that’s what I love about making things.

Tantric Machine has been a long time coming. Not because of the time spent recording it, but because of my reticence to get back into the music business. Now that the music business is barely a business anymore, I’ve returned to seeing music in the way that I saw it when I started my first punk band in 1976; something that I do out of love.

Songs:
“Already Dead”
“The Night Goes On”
“Strangled By Flowers”

Thanks for indulging a musician who still heeds the voice of the Muse when she comes calling. Or as Jack Spicer called it (and I’m paraphrasing), “the Martian that re-arranges the furniture in your head.”

Contains brief nudity.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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01.25.2012
12:22 am
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Boris Karloff presents ‘Mondo Balordo’

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Marc Campbell previously drew our attention to Mondo Balordo, with his post on Franz Drago: 27 inches of swingin’ dynamite. Though not a classic of the shockumentary genre, Mondo Balordo (1964) continued the trend of exploitation documentary devised by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, with Mondo Cane (1962) and La Donna nel Mondo (aka Women of the World).

Directed by Roberto Bianchi Montero and Albert T Viola, Mondo Balordo has some classic bizarre moments, and a commentary by none other than horror legend, Boris Karloff. 

Our World…What a wild and fascinating place it is! Filled with love, hate, lust and all the hungers and driving passions by which the strange creature called man is possessed.

Karloff’s association with the film, and billing, gave it a certain amount of respectability. However, the sixties was an odd decade for Karloff as the great septuagenarian actor continued to churn out a volume of films enviable in a man half his age. Though he made some excellent films during that decade, Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets, Roger Corman’s The Raven and The Comedy of Terrors, and Michael Reeves The Sorcerers, he did make some of his worst Cauldron of Blood, The Incredible Invasion, La muerte viviente.

Mondo Balordo is a novelty for Karloff fans, a distracting piece of bizarro movie-making, tasteless in places, though not necessarily for the reasons the film-makers originally intended. The whole film is available below, and here’s how the producers sold it:

Horror icon Boris Karloff wittily narrates Mondo Balordo, a shocking and depraved mondo movie that chronicles perversions and abnormalities from around the globe. You will be unable to look away as your eyes fill with shocking images that will burn scars into your retina and render you paralyzed in your seat. Grotesque and exploitive, but also riveting and defiant of taboo, Mondo Balordo seeks out the most twisted and surprising images. Subjects explored in graphic detail are dwarf love, white female sex slavery, Eastern brothels, black-market smuggling, marijuana, lesbianism, needless dog surgery and the phenomenon of raincoat-clad peeping toms. Experience Mondo Balordo if you dare!

 

 
Previously on DM

Franz Drago: 27 inches of swingin’ dynamite


Witchfinder General: The Life and Death of Michael Reeves


 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.30.2011
05:10 pm
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Francis Bacon’s lost painting of Lucian Freud turns up after 45 years

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As Marc Campbell pointed out on DM last month, when a b&w Coke bottle by Andy Warhol sold for $35, “some things are recession proof.” Now, a painting of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon has turned up after being kept in a private collection and not exhibited anywhere since 1965. This triptych goes on sale next month at Sotheby’s, in London, and according to the Daily Telegraph its $10m-$14m estimate “does not seem unreasonable.” Not unreasonable if you think of art as just a money-making exercise, like Warhol once said, “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”

Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud is a powerfully rendered triptych of small, 14in x 12in portraits, and is a testament to one of the most significant artistic relationships of the 20th century.

Bacon and Freud met in 1945 through the artist Graham Sutherland and became close if competitive friends, painting each other on several occasions. At one point, they met on an almost daily basis, frequently at their favourite watering hole, the Colony Room in Soho. But their friendship cooled in the late Seventies after an argument.

Only four portraits of Freud by Bacon have been at auction in the past 20 years. The last was in 2003 when a very similar small triptych sold to Pierre Chen, chairman of the Taiwanese Yageo Foundation, for $3.8 million (£2.2 million), which was record for a Bacon painting of these dimensions.

Since then, the price of Bacon has risen dramatically, climaxing in May 2008 with the $86 million (£44 million) paid by Roman Abramovich for a large-scale triptych.
However, top-drawer paintings by Bacon have been scarce at auction during the credit crunch. Since the summer of 2008, four works of varying quality have been unsold, creating a state of uncertainty in the Bacon market, and potential sellers have been waiting for someone else to make the first move to ascertain its strength. Hopefully for Sotheby’s, that deadlock was broken last November when a late painting of a cricket player belonging to Bacon’s doctor, Paul Brass, sold for $14 million (£8.7 million), comfortably above its estimate.

Considering that two small-format self-portrait triptychs by Bacon made £14 million and more in 2008, the £7 million-£9 million estimate for this triptych of Freud does not seem unreasonable. The only thing against it is that it has recently been offered privately and not sold, but that was for a much higher sum.

Sotheby’s is not saying who is selling the portrait, which was bought directly from Bacon’s dealers, Marlborough Fine Art, in 1965, apart from indicating that it is part of a family inheritance. Trade sources, however, confirm that the painting belonged to the Geneva based collector, George Kostalitz, who died last year. A private man about whom little is on public record, Kostalitz is said to have had a close working relationship with Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art.

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Warhol’s $35million Coke Bottle


 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.01.2011
08:48 pm
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A new album from the man who brought you ‘88 Lines About 44 Women’
08.06.2010
02:40 am
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Big Love and God Lays Her Love On Me are tracks from my forthcoming album, Tantric Machine, produced by Hugh Pool.

Tantric Machine was recorded at Excello Studios in Brooklyn. The idea was to create an album that sounded post-apocalyptic, as if the recording equipment and instruments had been salvaged from the rubble of a dying civilization. So, we used lots of pawn shop rhythm machines, synthesizers, cheap shit microphones, antiquated effects boxes, analog equipment, etc.

I wrote the music and lyrics over the course of a few months in 1999. The album was recorded in 2000 and I just sat on it. It took pressure from friends who had heard it and liked it for me to finally decide to release it.

The album cover is by Alex Chavez.

I humbly offer Big Love and God Lays Her Love On Me for your listening and viewing pleasure. The album will be released later this year.

 
God Lays Her Love On Me after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Marc Campbell
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08.06.2010
02:40 am
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88 Lines About 44 Women
07.18.2009
01:43 pm
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Marc Campbell of New Wave group The Nails posted this on Facebook:

In the 30 years since 88 LINES ABOUT 44 WOMEN was first recorded there has never been a video version authorized by THE NAILS. Of the dozens of videos on youtube that pay homage to the song, this is the only version created by a member of the band, me. So, here’s the world premier of 88 LINES the video. Hope you enjoy it. I had fun making it.

(NSFW-ish)

Update: This is the infamous video of 88 LINES ABOUT 44 WOMEN that was banned by youtube.

Posted by Tara McGinley
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07.18.2009
01:43 pm
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