Zee Avi has not had breakfast. She has not had lunch. At twenty minutes to 6 p.m., she is wolfing down her first meal of the day. This is not a good start on the eve of a tour that is going to last until the end of summer. Sounding like Avi is 73 rather than 23, the Malaysian native’s self-titled debut has an old world jazz and lounge feel to it. Strums of acoustic guitar drive sparse songs showcasing Avi’s crackly vocals.
     Avi takes cues from all the music she has been exposed to over her limited years—from classic rock and oldies to hard rock to jazz. She also bears the influence of her various places of residence. Starting her life in Borneo, at 12 she moved to Kuala Lumpur, at 17 to London, and then at 22 to Southern California. While London may be an obvious musical reference point for Avi, the singer/songwriter circuit in Malaysia must not be discounted.
     “We get big acts back home, mainstream stuff, boy bands, pop bands,” says Avi. “But people underestimate the local music scene. We have an amazing local music scene, which quite surprised me when I first got into it. They are such amazing people and they make amazing music. They’re all different from each other, really unique. And they all ended up being my friends.”

Dark Night of the Soul – the first collaboration and installation between Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse, and David Lynch – explores the idea of collective introspection. Now showing at the Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, the exhibit consists of a two-room installation streaming the album written by Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse, accompanied by photos taken by Lynch. Inspired by the album, Lynch’s photo sets read like mini-storyboards, and resemble a series of film stills. The album features guest vocalists The Flaming Lips, Gruff Rhys of The Super Furry Animals, Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle, Julian Casablancas of The Strokes, Frank Black of The Pixies, Iggy Pop, James Mercer of The Shins, Nina Persson of The Cardigans, Suzanne Vega, and Vic Chesnutt. The interplay between music and visuals in Dark Night of the Soul heighten and confuse the sensory experience, creating a myriad of emotions and responses.
     Hauntingly beautiful and grotesque, poignant and sometimes comical images accompany lyrics about revenge, war, pain, loss and hallucinatory states. From the opening track, The Flaming Lips’ “Revenge”, to David Lynch’s “Dark Night of the Soul”, we are taken on a disturbing and cerebral journey, one that moves increasingly from the tangible to the surreal. Each track is accompanied by a set of three or four images, which individually and collectively tell a story.

Interesting things are happening in the south of Senegal a few miles northwest of Dakar. Edouard François, the architect known for his innovative green establishments, is rebuilding the old Les Almadies Club Med creating a sustainable holidaymakers paradise.
     The 250 rooms – made of clay, wheat and wood – are perhaps best described as wooden bird’s nests, or cocoons, as they rest above ground elevated by poles. The location of the resort is stunning with the North Atlantic Ocean on one side and a lagoon on the other. To provide the guests with a full view, each of the rooms have 360-degree windows.
“In our daily life we normally only have windows facing one way, maybe two, but never all the way round. A 360-degree view means that you are free”, he says.
     François has become known as one of the entrepreneurs of green architecture and the new Club Med is no exception.
     “With this place I want to do something that is very poetic and unusual and that also deals with ecology. We have a very high level of ecological ambition for the project and are aiming to become self-sufficient.”

All Images © David Boureau

The recently unveiled Villas des Vignoles, in Paris, is the most charming public-housing complex in the world. Occupying one rectangular city block, the two- and three-story dwellings have many features most people don’t associate with the PJs: pitched roofs of varying heights, nooks designated for gardening and composting, vine-covered facades, and rabbit hutches. Yes, rabbit hutches. It’s also called Eden Bio, perhaps because when compared to most subsidized housing around the world, Vignoles is paradise. The rabbits here will likely live better than many people in the city’s less desirable housing projects — with apologies to those that end up as delicious lapin a la cocotte.
     Vignoles is getting a good deal of press in part because the bar for public housing is so low. Paris, like all large cities, has its fair share of unfortunate housing projects, and its reputation took a beating after the riots in October and November 2005. While the unrest in the city’s Clichy-sous-Boi neighborhood was reportedly a result of the lack of jobs available for the young, predominately Muslim residents, as well as police brutality, urban planners and other critics also blamed the buildings these kids called home: colonies of tall, concrete slabs which failed to provide residents the slightest feeling of warmth or security. The housing projects had a de-humanizing effect on the immigrants who were placed there and, perhaps even more so, on their children who’d never lived anywhere else.

Stool, Pom Pom, 2002. Photography by Fernando Laszlo. All Images © Estudio Campana

For Fernando and Humberto Campana, economic necessity turned into a creative blessing early on in their career. By celebrating the materials that the rest of us discard — such as scraps of fabric, plastic hoses, or carpet padding — they invented a vibrant, energetic and definitively Brazilian approach to design. Fast forward twenty years, and they’re considered two of the most significant designers in today’s Latin America and still going strong, collaborating on projects both large and small. While many of the Campana’s creations are for international manufacturers of furniture, lighting and home accessories, the majority of the work coming out of their São Paulo studio consists of custom-made designs. These one-off objects for the home display the brothers’ playful sense of humor, their clever combinations of materials and a vibrant palette that comes straight from sunny Brazil. For instance, random bits of wood they found on the street make up their Favela Chair, their Sushi Chair is inspired by the patchwork quilts in São Paulo’s slums, and their Vermelha Chair consists of brightly colored cord tied and woven around a metal frame.

Hermas Zopoula is an artist we just got turned onto by our friends at Asthmatic Kitty, which is putting out his debut album this month. His music is simple, warm, and heartfelt. In this video, shot in the front yard of his home in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, he plays a song from his debut, Espoir, called “Attention”. What I love about this video is how naturally the music fits into his environment, with the sound of the wind rustling the tree leaves, the faint noise of children playing nearby, a bird squawking, a storm brewing in the distance. It’s about as authentic as things get. Hermas is set to play a show in New York on June 12, at Sycamore in the Ditmas Park area of Brooklyn – that is if the U.S. of A. comes through on his visa. Fingers crossed.

SP2 ‘New Born’ (Viper A), 2007. Photography by Keizo Kioku. All Images Courtesy of the Artist and YAMAMOTO GENDAI

Odani Motohiko knows how to generate a reaction. In his first solo show back in 1997, the artist arranged for a nurse to come and take 1.4 liters of his own blood for an installation he was planning entitled, Fair Completion. A small fan in the corner of the room was used to float a series of soap bubbles filled with a single drop of that blood across the gallery. After a few moments the soap bubbles would burst, sending ruby splatters across the white space and a collective chill down the spines of the audience. At the Tokyo opening, a single woman was overheard saying, “Isn’t it beautiful?” Though Odani’s work seems purely confrontational, the themes he explores are as interwoven as the Tokyo streets and hold just as many questions. Time, the human body, and primitive senses such as sensuality, shame and fear are evident in everything Odani creates, including his newest installation, 9th Room, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. The piece is made up of an enclosed room of waterfalls projected onto four different screens. The ceiling and the floor are mirrored, encapsulating anyone inside with a 360-degree sensation of falling. Terrifying, yes, but extremely primordial; the title is a reference to Dante’s ninth and final circle of Hell. Installation aside, Odani is equally at home working in digital animation, photography, and sculpture. His recent return to the latter has the art world buzzing that this “dead art” may be in for a little shock treatment. Until then, trust that Odani Motohiko will keep the answers hanging in the air.

Photography by Pascal Textiera

Despite name-dropping Mozart and Franz Liszt, one would certainly be hard-pressed to discern any obvious classical currents on Phoenix’s new album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix and its lead single “Lisztomania”. And perhaps this is the French four-piece’s master plan; for a record whose cover art shows technicolor bombs about to explode, understated subversion hardly seems the point.  “Vandalism” is the word Thomas Mars initially employs in trying to explain the album’s off-kilter title and overarching ethos, comparing the act of affixing one’s own band to the surname of the composer-god to “a kid drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa. It’s like pop art. You take culture and make it your own.”
     Vandalism, culture clash, chaos, contradiction, and brats — such words and concepts appear and reappear throughout Mars’ slightly fractured-English account of his band’s fourth album. Clad in faded leather boots, artfully torn blue jeans and collared shirt, the singer sat down with PLANET over soda at the sun-drenched hotel lounge of NYC’s Thompson LES to discuss the album, the importance of chaos and culture clash, tourism in Versailles, and the magic of fatherhood. (Mars and girlfriend Sofia Coppola welcomed daughter Romy in 2006.)

1901 Alan Wilkis Remix

BPitch Control

Moderat are a German electronic supergroup comprised of the members of Modeselektor and Apparat. After working on an EP together more than 5 years ago, both acts went their separate ways and came to fame on their own: Apparat, most notably, for his collaboration with compatriot Ellen Allien and Modeselektor for 2007’s worldwide crossover Happy Birthday. The two acts ran into each other on the way to a public swimming pool in Berlin and had an argument about whose most recent album was better, and how each could have benefited from the other’s involvement. So, it only made sense to resurrect their long-lost project to prove the point. In that respect, Moderat (BPitch Control) is a successful exercise in synergy, and thrives on the explorations its members are willing to take together, from dubstep to atmospheric IDM, alternating between instrumental and vocal-driven tracks. The most memorable of these experiments, “Rusty Nails”, showcases Apparat’s Sascha Ring on vocals, and feels like what would happen if the Notwist let Burial make its beats. In case there was any doubt, Berlin is in the house.

Images courtesy of Philly's ICA

George Clinton, Afrika Bambaataa and Bootsy Collins can all trace their creative lineage back to Sun Ra. His space age philosophy, flowing capes, and Egyptian headdresses paved the way for their own colorful personas decades later. More than a man before his time, Sun Ra transcended time. Nestled in between the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of his day, Sun Ra’s message was about more than race; it was about enlightenment on a cosmic scale, and he spread his message primarily through music but also through words and art. A disciplined musician since childhood, Sun Ra headed his Arkestra, an ever-changing line-up of jazz musicians, from the mid-1950s up until his death in 1993. His prolific output spanned poetry, music, and album cover art, much of which is exhibited at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art in Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-1968.
     Born Herman Blount in 1914, Sun Ra claimed he was abducted by aliens in the early 1950s, a story he maintained throughout his life. On this intergalactic journey, he visited Jupiter and Saturn, and upon his return to Earth he christened himself Sun Ra (Ra is the Egyptian god of the sun) and formed his Arkestra, a clever play on words.