Cosign Presents is back with Chicago’s most lovable DJ,Kid Color. Kyle Woods came out to Chicago from Cali with nothing but a keen taste for 70s disco and a dream of making the kids dance. And dance they did as Kyle painted the town with his high energy sets everywhere from Wicker Park’s sweaty lofts to the biggest clubs and venues. Watch as Kid Color tells his story with pal Dan Coop (of Does it Offend You, Yeah?) and Abbey Pub’s resident bad ass Adam.
Have an idea that you want to see realized but need that extra collaboration or motivation? Sign up and post your invention, business or art on the new innovative social network Original Projects. Project centers around helping young thinkers find others of the same ambition to help bring their dreams to reality, find a home for it, and even make that green from it. There’s no project too small or lame either because it’s free, so sign up and find some people to help you out or surf around current projects to get the inspiration you need from others.
Who decides what’s relevant in hip hop now? Why ask… hip hop hasn’t always been the artistic force that it once was in the golden age. But its a new game now, with a new aesthetic and new drive to stay relevant, innovative and still make a little money all at the same time. Enter hip hop photographer and newfound videographer Zach Wolfe. Hailing from Atlanta and in the game for years, Wolfe’s client list spans generations and genres of music shooting everyone from Larry the Cable Guy to Soulja and everything in between. Now, with the purchase of the Cannon 5D Mark II, Wolfe has spanned mediums with the addition of Zach Wolfe Live to his signature franchise. Live brings quick, beautifully shot memorable snippets of the artists Wolfe works with or tracks down to open them up to a level of intimacy that fans crave but can’t fulfill through rapid-fire Twitter visits. What makes Wolfe’s eye memorable both in still and video is the clean and idyllic style that helps cement the current players he works with as true musical legends, to be captured and distributed to the masses through online and print media. Not an easy task when any caliber artist can easily garner semi-professional press shots at the click of a button in an attempt to gain legitimacy.
The stockade of photos and videos that Wolfe has accumulated through the years are realized with a consciousness of the journey the artists have gone through to make it to the top, a journey Wolfe shares himself. In a recent interview with XTM Online, Wolfe explains that despite the saturation of amateur hip hop photographers that the internet and consumer cameras affords, there is still a distinct craft and process to becoming a professional; “…if there was any beef in photography, than it would have to be with some of these young kids who want to be where I’m at and have no I idea what it took to get here. I don’t respect these kids that get their digital rebels and don’t want to assist other photographers. Photography is a craft. You work under someone and then you become a photographer. I get at least 5 emails a day from young kids wanting to get all your secrets and think in a matter of weeks they can become a photographer. I beef with that.” Creating a recognizable distributable style is a tough and rarely achieved art, especially when the stakes are high and hard to come by in the commercial rap game. Fortunately for the fans, Wolfe seems like he’ll be bringing new heat for years to come.
Exclusive production shots from “Miral”, the new film by Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Basquiat) staring Willem Dafoe and Freida Pinte shot on location in Jerusalem. Here, we see 1st AD Sebastián Silva (Babel, Titanic) directing the extras on a controlled set in the heart of Jerusalem as Willem Dafoe (playing Eddie) walks up to an old building and distinguished DP Eric Gautier (Taking Woodstock, Intro The Wild) shoots a long crane shot.
Miral tells the story of Hind Husseini’s (Hiam Abbass) effort to establish an orphanage in Jerusalem after the 1948 partition of Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel. It is set for release in 2010 by Pathé Films (pathe.co.uk/)
Wah Do Dem, means “what they do” in the Kingston, Jamrock vernacular. Its the name of a new feature from young Brooklyn filmmakers Ben Chace and Sam Fleischner who decided to pack up a Panasonic HVX200 and some greatactors when Ben won a raffle to take a luxury cruise over the beautiful island of Jamaica. The film, shot and imagined on a slim DIY budget, features a handful of musical Brooklynites including Ira Tuton from Yeasayer, Ben Goldwasser from MGMT and most epicly, Norah Jones in her first film appearance since her wild role in Wong Kar-Wai’s “My Blueberry Nights“. The film attempts to capture the unique and vivid Jamaican culture through the eyes of an out of place and out of mind young American faced with a crossroads in his life after Jones’ character dumps him. But it brings much more to the table.
During his journeys (as standard by anyone crossing from Montego Bay to Kingston…) irie Max comes upon the island’s early roots reggae legends The Congos adding a unique cultural bridge between the two dynamically different yet musically bonded characters. As director Flesher states,
“The nyabinghi drumming sessions – like the scene we portrayed in our movie – are not about authorship or who is steering the rhythm one way or another. Its more like a group attempt to tap into a timeless cultural thing or a feeling that is deeper than any one drummer…I feel a similar dynamic exists with filmmaking, and especially the kind of filmmaking we undertook with Wah Do Dem. Sam and I had ideas about where the story would go and how it would get there, but the real feel and energy of the movie came out of the people and places with whom we worked and as the directors of the film we were less the ‘auteurs’ in the classical sense, and more like the bass drummer and the falsetto singer at the binghi session, keeping the pulse moving and steering the swell and fall of music to a certain extent, but only as much as two pieces can in a group of many parts”
Their journey just won the Los Angeles Film Festival narrative award this summer, an amazing feat for any low budget digital film so look for a possible small release soon! For further studies check their site.
Two front runners of digital production, Akai and Abelton have colabed to bring the first dedicated midi controller for Ableton Live, the unmatched production software for live performance. Designed by the same engineering team responsible for Akai’s iconic MPCs, the APC40 features a slew of fancy lit buttons (109) nobs (16) and faders (9) that synch with Live’s interface to bring real-time mixing and an innovative easy compact surface for bedroom production. In a nice move, the controller is set up to practically mirror Abletons interface… and its only 400 shells. Step your game up.
Pioneering street artist Dash Snow has died on July 13 from a heroin overdose at Lafayette House, a hotel in lower Manhattan. Read the New York Times’ obiturary here and photographer Ryan McGinley’s amazing account of life with Snow here.
As the new Dirty Projectors album Bitte Orca has gotten increasingly more adored and important, many wondered how the “avant-pop” jewels would push their way past the indie market and into the mainstream where their popularity suggests they should stand (read MPP). Enter young indie auteur Matthew Lessner, the 26 year-old film school prodigy whose early shorts garnered a youth sensibility unique to the current generation while channeling the classic cinematic elements that have always attracted the young to film.
First creating the bizarrely hilarious and well produced short Darling Darling staring a Michael Cera whose relentless awkwardness seemed trendsetting in the pre-Superbad era, Lessner defined himself as a director who had studied the classics, but would do anything not to repeat them again. Fed up on his assistant directors eating all the pizza and driving the budget up, he then went on to produce a minimal, new-waveseque meditation on two young Americans exploring the grandeur and complexities of the world as they journey through fields and deserts accompanied by a French narration. Shot in four days, his $1000 By Modern Measure landed a spot at Sundance, officially announcing his arrival to the scene of new American independent film.
Now, with his video for the Projector’s “Stillness is The Move”, Lessner (matched with DP Adam Newport Berra) has brought his keen sense of the entertainingly bizarre to a song whose complexities and accessibility mark it as a masterpiece that could be easily ruined by any sort of attached visual element. Lessner, however, kills it with an unexpected combination of Dave Longstreth’s sole role as a spinning llama herder and Amber, Angel and Haley somewhat sexualized by fun and simple choreography matched with beautiful close-ups and crane shots that present their presence as an extension of the vast Vermont mountains that surround them. Check one of the best videos of the year (a product of pinning these two forces together) below and be sure to check out the teaserfor Lessner’s first feature, The Woods produced by Greencard Pictures.
Last September, Cannon released their upgrade of the 5D series called the Cannon 5D Mark II. With the new camera came a video function as is becoming popular with higher grade consumer cameras. However, the Mark II is definitely a huge step forward for consumer HD video as the the small and light camera impressively houses 16:9 full 1080 HD video at 30fps with HDMI output for the very first time. This pretty much means that for this price, and for the size seen above, one can make stunning HD which looks better than anything out in the low light the CMOS sensors master and with the shallowest depths of field that the Cannon lenses afford. The outcome, a slew of HD films that look better than ever before shot in places easy to bring a small camera into, and then easily thrown all over the creative community that is Vimeo.
Last Day Dream shot on the Mark II from amazing music video director and photographer Chris Milk
As the innovation of its HD features caught on, people of all technical caliber and experience have begun to shoot documentaries, tests, features and shorts showcasing its versatility and technical advancement over even the largest and most expensive HD video cameras, let alone still photography cameras. Its fair to say the camera’s release is exciting for HD video and a dominant force in the consumer market in the age where HD media is most popularized online. One can only imagine what will happen when Cannon releases their new HD video camera coming in the next year or so.
Pioneering urban photographer and filmmaker Zach Wolfe shoots Hurricane Chris with the Mark II for his awesome series Zach Wolfe Live, all of which is shot with this camera (including a full length doc with Bun B dropping soon…)
DP and film-maker Philip Bloom showcases the Mark II’s advancement in low light. This is shot with no addtional lighting or post production and takes advangtage of the DOF of the Zeiss ZF 50mm f1.4 lens.
TheSuper Villian has made his return to the legitimate rap game droppin the MF and still spellin in all caps- DOOM. After the The Mouse and the Mask project (probably the most commercial release of his career), DOOM posted up in the dungeon and decided to open the door for three years’ worth of fanbase-angering concerts featuring DOOMposters along with forgetting a promised album with Ghostface, and forcing a trade-in of a Madvillian followup with a remixed Madvillainy with enough Madlib bangers to make you wish he actually recorded new lyrics over them. This is just a few of the let downs from the past few years and fans and critics alike were tearing up all around the globe and for the most part wrote off the legendary MC as a lazy sell out who was sitting back and collecting the checks off his long legacy.
But now, by way of his new mostly self-produced album Born Into This off Lex Records, DOOM has announced his return to the top of underground hip-hop. The abstract album is short but deeply dark and personal with samples from Bumpy Knuckles preaching “my motto for 2009 is fuck everyone”, a satirical intro of poorly crafted auto-tune announcing the Villian’s return and a track relating DOOM’s new woes with society, playing out most of Charles Bukowski classic “Dinosauria, We” (which clearly inspired the title of the album) over a familiar foreboding soundtrack; “Born like this, Into this, As the chalk faces smile As Mrs. Death laughs, As the elevators break, As political landscapes dissolve, As the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree, As the oily fish spit out their oily prey, As the sun is masked, We are Born like this Into this Into these carefully mad wars”. The album is great for the most past (a lot of recycled material) and is getting the critics back on hype train.
After the release, DOOM sat down with XXL to spit some truths, excuses and plans for the future in his first interview since the drama arrived and dissolved. Read some highlights below including DOOM’s most ambitious project to date, a dive into metaphysics as a colab with the theories of Einstein for a study of the Unified Field Theory:
XXL: Let’s clear something else up. I heard a rumor that you’ve had people show up to shows as you with the mask on and everything, that obviously weren’t you. Is there truth to that?
DOOM: Show up as the character? I’m not the character. You’re talking to the writer right now. In that respect, think about it like this. If you write a screenplay, or a stage joint, some type of theater presentation, like Tyler Perry’s a perfect example. He writes the joints, but then he plays the character of Madea, the old lady and shit. If he decided to outsource that, and get another actor to play Madea, it’s still Madea, you know what I mean? I’m trying to snap niggas out of that getting too caught up in the person as opposed to the music. It’s sound. Go with what you hear, not what you see. So if somebody comes to the show expecting to see me, the writer, you might not. But you will hear the work. So if I feel the need to hire somebody to do the character, I will. I might hire Denzel [Washington] to do it and really get it rockin’. He costs a lot though probably [laughs].
XXL: Can you break down the science behind your other characters besides DOOM? And are you’re working on other projects as the writer?
DOOM: Yea, of course I got the character King Geedorah, a three-headed dragon and shit. He’s working on his second shit now. That’s a whole other separate thing from DOOM. Then I got Vik[tor Vaughn]. He’s like a younger version of DOOM, but he’s still his own character. He got a little more slick mouth with him. Little young nigga think he know it all and shit. He’s nice in his own respect. Then with the evolution of the character DOOM, it’s definitely gonna change up. This one I came straight lyrical, but the next record may be a whole set of ballads. Have the Villain hitting the notes, on some Freddy Jackson shit [laughs]. I’m also working on a series of children’s books. That’s still in the works. And also a book on the Unified Field Theory, which is just a theory of everything and how it pertains to us as a people. It expands on Einstein’s theory of relativity. So I’m breaking it down in layman’s terms of how it pertains to us. It’s more of a serious book based on facts and research.
Check DOOM’s Myspace for further studies and I’m not sayin to go rush out and buy the album after how much dough he scored off his younger more suggestible fans but, yah know….
