The world lost a singular artist on March 6, as Mark Linkous passed away from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was 47 years old. The singer-songwriter had produced six albums with his band Sparklehorse, and over the past fifteen years played and worked with an amazing array of icons, such as Radiohead, Tom Waits, the Flaming Lips, Cracker, PJ Harvey, Vic Chesnutt, Daniel Johnston, Julian Casablancas, Frank Black, Iggy Pop, Nina Persson, the Brothers Quay, and Guy Maddin — and no doubt, Linkous stood deservedly tall among these fellow talents. More recently, he collaborated with David Lynch and Danger Mouse on the Dark Night of the Soul project, which we profiled previously and will be released this summer.

Emcees Goyo, husband Tostao, and brother Slow claim Colombia’s oft-overlooked Pacific coast as home and their positive energy easily translates to themes of greater unity on Oro, the trio’s U.S. debut. Synthesizing two releases, from 2007 and 2009, that are available only in their native nation, Oro incorporates many styles, demonstrating the dexterity of this trio — not to mention the excellent production from honorary Colombian Richard Blair (of Sidestepper) and Ivan Benevides. Just crank the dubby first single “De Donde Vengo Yo” and these well-seasoned emcees reveal a hidden Colombian rhythm. The dance-floor bangers of cumbia are traded in for the funky raga behind Goyo’s velvety smooth delivery on “Alguien Como Tu” and the spitfire rhymes of the piano-driven “Pescao Envenenao”. Choc Quib Town champions a localized sound layered with global influences, and Oro, like golden honey, hits a sweet spot.

After the jump, check out the video for “De Donde Vengo Yo”.

Here’s a book from last year that slipped under our radar: Extreme Architecture: Building for Challenging Environments.  It’s a compilation of contemporary structures that were designed in response to extraordinary environmental conditions (heat, cold, water, altitude, and outer space) and less directly in response to aesthetics.
     Some of the projects, such as a ski jump by Zaha Hadid and a spa by Mario Botta, are self-consciously avant-garde and others, such as snow sheds and desert schools, are fundamentally utilitarian. Yet all, as they turn to meet the challenges of the environment, unsettle expectations of what a building should look like. They don’t simply fall into fashion.
     Rather than sit upright on the ground, as conventional buildings do, those in hot and windswept climates tend to burrow beneath it, and those in wet and high climates tend to leap away from it.  The buildings are similarly polarized in appearance, evoking either prehistoric or futuristic styles. A hotel in Patagonia, finished in roughly hewn wood and sunk into the earth, resembles a neolithic ruin. A giant drum-shaped workstation in Antarctica, hovering on squat steel legs, looks like a science fiction stage set. Many of the structures have an animated quality, as if they’re creatures who’ve undergone evolutionary mutations and adaptations. A cultural center in British Columbia, Canada lies camouflaged within the scrubby landscape. A ski jump in the Alps lifts its head above adjacent peaks like a brontosaurus. 

In the digital age, photographs are everywhere and all the world has a camera. At the same time, classical photography is being forgotten and, consequently, has become even more expensive as pixels replace actual film.
     Here to remind us of photography’s most rudimentary origins is Czech designer Jaroslav Jurica and his “Rubikon Pinhole Rebel”. Published under a Creative Commons license in PDF format, anyone with access to the internet and a printer can print out and glue together the pieces to form a functioning pinhole camera.
     A pinhole camera, whether made of paper or plastic, is essentially a hand-held camera obscura. Latin for “dark room”, the term camera obscura refers to the premodern discovery that when light was filtered into a dark room through a small aperture, images would be projected upside-down onto an opposing wall or screen. Aristotle, da Vinci, and Chinese and Arabic philosophers dating back to the tenth century B.C. understood and wrote about the phenomenon that laid the groundwork for modern image-making.
     Thanks to the Rubikon Pinhole Rebel, three thousand years later the haunting, unexpected beauty of simple photography is made as easy for us to explore as it was for the ancients.

As efficient and magical as digital photography has become, nothing can compare to the raw, visceral quality of a film print. Maybe it’s the surprise factor, the photographer’s inability to really know what they’ve got until it’s too late, but film assumes a significance and power digital SLRs still have trouble competing with.
     Malick Sidibe’s new exhibit, “Other Africa”, is a small collection of black and white prints influenced by the people and street scene of Bamako in the 1960s and 70s. The images capture the infectious spirit, rhythm, and lightheartedness of post-colonial West Africa at a time when immense shifts of the paradigm and culture were taking place. Whether it’s a staged portrait or a spontaneous dance move, there’s a refreshingly honest, intimate quality to the gelatin prints.
     Sidibe purchased his first camera in 1956 when he was about 20 years old. From night clubs to boxing matches to riverside picnics, he soon became the only photographer documenting the kinetic street culture and pulse of the neighborhood. Sidibe’s insider status permitted him access to an era bubbling over with impulsiveness and life. His studio became a popular hangout and he would regularly set up portraits with the youth that hung out there, reinventing his subjects using outrageous costumes and props. The results are spur-of-the-moment glimpses of West Africa in the crux of curiosity and optimism. The results are a revelation of Sidibe’s deep passion for people and his country.

Rapper, actor, author, television host, reserve policeman, Twitter megastar, and, yes, basketball legend, Shaquille O’Neal is perhaps the consumate populist Rennaissance man. This month he extends his reach with a new role as curator and muse for the much-buzzed about art show Size DOES Matter at Chelsea’s FLAG Art Foundation. The show, which sets out to display work where size is a central component, boasts an impressive catalogue of artists — Jeff Koons, Anselm Kieffer, Cindy Sherman, Chuck Close, and forty others — and offers an excellent opportunity to experience some fantastic pieces. Whether or not these pieces deal with size is a separate matter.
     Shaq personally selected or commissioned the artwork from a list put together by FLAG, and his choices range from pinhead-size sculptures of the First Family to wall-size paintings of body parts, rap stars, and dead Chinese dictators. Highlights include Kieffer’s portrait of a young Mao, a masterful example of the artist’s thick impasto; Koons’ “Beach House”, a frenetically erotic pastiche of swimsuits, deck chairs, and breasts; and Richard Dupont’s lifesize sculptures of himself that play with twisting perspective. A nine-foot-tall photograph of Madonna and her audience, taken from afar, demonstrates each person’s insignificance, while nearby, a collossal sculpture of a table and chairs inspires feelings of childlike joy and awe.

Ecological design technology is based on the idea that manmade “machines” can be harnessed to mimic biological systems, giving us the power to restore environmental contaminants and neutralize the build-up of waste on the planet.
     John Todd, a marine-biologist, inventor, and designer, is using eco-technology to address the global wastewater crisis. Todd applies principles of bio-mimicry to create Eco-Machines, which are networks of biological systems built to strategically transform industrial sewage into usable water. Eco-Machines are custom built for size requirements, but they all look like a series of connected fish tanks, each tank a separate treatment zone utilizing anaerobic, flow-equalization, anoxic, and aerobic processes. Water flows through the tanks and sifts lastly through an effluent filter, such as a constructed wetland or fluidized bed, to catch leftover solids. All of this is accomplished without the use of chemical-based inputs that are used in sewage treatment plants, which eject chemically imbalanced water back into water streams, starving our rivers of oxygen with unwanted algal blooms.
     Living Machines are built to recreate the complexity of ecosystem relationships, which are fostered between microscopic algae, bacteria, protozoa, fungi, zooplankton, minerals, snails, fishes, and plants.

Last month, we were lucky enough to catch these Scottish upstarts at one of their sold-out New York shows at the new Knitting Factory Brooklyn. Outside, snow may have been falling in large soggy clumps, but the dismal freeze could not stand up to the buzz burning inside. Taking the Williamsburg stage, these four Edinburgh natives looked relatively out of place, more resembling brawny hooligans than the hypersensitive hipsters that constituted their audience. As the band briskly moved through highlights from last year’s debut, These Four Walls, such as “Moving Clocks Run Slow” and “Roll Up Your Sleeves”, thoughts of compatriots and FatCat label-mates the Twilight Sad and Frightened Rabbit were inescapable. But the band’s penchant for angular guitars also evokes comparisons to Bloc Party, while their urgent melodies at times inch toward the terrain of U2’s earliest anthems. This last reference point seems even more suitable with We Were Promised Jetpacks’ new EP, The Last Place You’ll Look, which will hit stores on March 9.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Peter Bialobrzeski’s photographs of houses in the informal community of Baseco, Manila, might be especially relevant right now. The small, tilting, wood-framed homes in these pictures, sealed with scraps of fabric, plastic tarps, and posters, are vivid expressions of vulnerability and determination. They remind one of the emergency conditions in Haiti, where thousands of people are currently living in similarly constructed makeshift shelters and, because of cyclical poverty and challenges in rebuilding, could remain indefinitely.
     The collection’s title, “Case Study Homes”, refers ironically to the Los Angeles Case Study Houses of the 1950s, a series of modernist prototypes documented in coolly glamorous photographs by Julius Schulman. Bialobrzeski’s photographs don’t have that gloss, of course, but they possess a stately formal beauty that confers dignity on the houses. A diffuse tropical light mutes vivid colors and shadows to give the images a silvery, etched appearance, like Walker Evans’ Depression-era photos. While Evans looked straight into his subject’s faces, however, Bialobrzeski only examines the outside of their homes, a strategy that steers clear of sentimentality. These photographs give straightforward testimony.