— Boy Trips and Punches $1.5M Painting: A 12-year-old Taiwanese boy recently lived out a field-trip nightmare when he tripped and fell into a $1.5 million Paolo Porpora oil painting at an exhibition in Taipei, leaving a fist-sized hole in his wake. Despite a wonderfully passive aggressive statement posted to the exhibition’s Facebook page (“All 55 paintings in the venue are authentic pieces and they are very rare and precious. Once these works are damaged, they are permanently damaged”), it does not appear that the boy and his family will be responsible for restorative costs. Apparently there’s something in the air, because on Sunday, a young girl broke a vase at the Israel Museum. The museum reports, however, that the vase is already repaired and in better shape than it was before. [Guardian, Independent, Slate, Haaretz]

— Staff at National Museum of Scotland Strike: Another museum strike, this time not at the National Gallery in London: Staff at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh are staging a seven-day action over the withdrawal of a weekend allowance. Around 120 members are participating, disturbing the schedule at both the National Museum of Scotland and the National War Museum during the high season of the Edinburgh Festival. Alan Brown, industrial officer for Public and Commercial Services union in Scotland, said: “This has been an 18-month long dispute now and essentially it’s about fair pay. If someone was employed by the National Museum of Scotland in December 2010 and worked weekends then they earn between £2,000 and £3,000 more than a colleague working beside them if they joined in January 2011, so it’s wrong that this is the case. We’ve been taking action to get both the National Museum of Scotland and the Scottish government to accept responsibility for this and do something about it and to end this two-tier workforce that exists.” Meanwhile, a Scottish government spokeswoman called the strike “deeply regrettable.” [BBC]

— UNESCO Deems Baal Shamin Bombing “War Crime”: On Sunday, ISIS detonated a number of explosives in the UNESCOWorld Heritage site of Palmyra’s Baal Shamin temple — and now, their actions have been deemed a war crime. A statement from UNESCO also referred to the act as “cultural cleansing,” citing ISIS’s ongoing pattern of cultural demolition in the region. “The systematic destruction of cultural symbols embodying Syrian cultural diversity reveals the true intent of such attacks, which is to deprive the Syrian people of its knowledge, its identity, and history,” said UNESCO director Irina Bokova, adding that those responsible “must be accountable for their actions.” [BBC]

— Singapore Unfreezes Bouvier’s Assets: The Singapore Court of Appeal has unfrozen the assets of Yves Bouvier, the Swiss dealer accused by Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev of hiking up prices on artworks by Modigliani and Picasso, among others. (The dispute was sparked by a marked-up Modigliani painting, which Rybolovlev overpaid for by around $20 million.) “We are satisfied that it was deployed as an instrument of oppression to inflict commercial prejudice on Mr Bouvier,” Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon wrote on Friday of the injunction. The freeze was lifted because the court believes there is no possibility of Bouvier distributing his assets. [Artnet]

— Kazuo Ishiguro Archives to Texas: The Harry Ransom Center at University of Texas will acquire the archive of novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. The archive of the author’s notes for his seven novels appears to be extensive: “I’d originally started this box-under-the-desk system not because I’d anticipated one day preparing an archive, but because I was nervous I’d throw out work I’d need later,” Ishiguro said. [AD]

— Philly Museums Ready for Pope’s Visit: It is like “a combination of the president coming and the Olympics,’” said a spokeswoman for Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, referring to an upcoming visit by Pope Francis for the World Meeting of Families (September 22-27). The Catholic triennial event will draw in 1.5 to 2 million visitors, and museums around the city are plotting to lure them in with religious-themed exhibitions. [TAN]

— The World Erotic Art Museum may move its collection to Germany, restoring the “degenerate art” pieces banned from the country under Nazi rule. [NY Daily News]

— California art dealer Lumsden Quan has pled guilty to violating the Lacey and Endangered Species Act after selling two rhinoceros horns in Las Vegas last year. He faces five years in prison. [Courthouse News]

— Former investment banker John La Gatta has donated $2 million to the Nevada Museum of Art. [ARTnews, Artforum]

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Check our blog IN THE AIR for breaking news throughout the day.

The Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Atlanta is bowing a new museum dedicated to fashion, it announced August 27.

The museum, named SCADfash, will open its doors on October 1, and its inaugural exhibition, Oscar de la Renta, will run from October 3 to December 21.

SCADfash will add 10,000 square feet of space — comprising a public gallery space, a fashion conservation lab, and a media library for educational film and digital presentations — to SCAD’s existing 27,000 square feet of academic studio space, serving the institution’s fashion and fashion marketing and management students.

SCADfash complements the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, which the college founded in 2002, and which has previously staged fashion retrospectives on designers Stephen Burrows (An American Master of Inventive Design, which ran in 2014) and Vivienne Westwood (Dress Up Story — 1990 Until Now, running now till September 13).

It is designed to be the dedicated site for hosting cutting-edge international fashion exhibitions, films and lectures, as well as showing off pieces in SCAD’s permanent collection, which houses more than 1,000 garments made by Yves Saint Laurent, Oscar de la Renta, Givenchy and many more.

“SCADfash celebrates fashion as a universal language and garments as vehicles of identity,” said SCAD President and Founder Paula Wallace. “This museum focuses on the past, present and future of fashion design, connecting conceptual to historical principles of dress, whether ceremonial, celebratory, or casual.”

Oscar de la Renta will feature the designer’s creations from the mid-1960s till his death in 2014, as well as pieces by the maison’s new creative director Peter Copping. It is a re-staging of the Oscar de la Renta: His Legendary World of Style exhibition, which the SCAD Museum of Art presented earlier this year from February to May.

Each ensemble featured in the show comes from the closets of some of de la Renta’s most iconic clients, including his wife Annette de la Renta, his stepdaughter Eliza Bolen, Iranian American philanthropist Mercedes Bass, and Diana Taylor (the former New York State Superintendent of Banks and the domestic partner of former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg), according to curator André Leon Talley. Other important gowns include those worn by former first lady Laura Bush, pop star Taylor Swift and talk show host Oprah Winfrey.

The film Ovation for Oscar, an intimate behind-the-scenes look at the amount of work taken to produce a major museum exhibition honoring the Dominican-American couturier, who had over the years generously gifted fabrics from his collections to the SCAD School of Fashion for student use, will also be screened.

The culture warriors are back, and they’ve been Googling. “The word civilization is endangered,” writes Michael J. Lewis in the July/August issue of Commentary magazine, “as shown by Google’s Ngram, which tracks the frequency of word usage in print.” This unusual remark arrives near the end of his lengthy diatribe linking “postmodernism,” blockbuster museum exhibitions, censorship, and the putative retreat of art from its great civilizing function to cottage-industry irrelevance. Lewis, a professor of art and architecture at Williams College, meanders through the 20th century’s apparent ruins, conscripting along the way the example of his students’ response to Christopher Burden’s 1971 work “Shoot,” extravagant museum buildings and tawdry exhibitions, the art market, censorship, and, of course, “postmodernism.”

Lewis’s essay — titled “How Art Became Irrelevant” — practices the familiar tactic of hitching anecdotal events emblematic of the cravenness of the art market or museum sphere to the intellectual history of art at the end of the 20th century, with muddled and alarming results. In an interview on National Public Radio about the piece last weekend, Lewis claims that “the art museum used to offer objects — the finest that we have” and now instead offers “experiences.” Is that really all that a museum offers, according to an art historian — “objects”? And who constitutes this creepily homogenous “we” for whom Lewis speaks? If anything, it is more apparent than ever that the institutional “we” of the museum has never been some democratic curatorial abstraction.

Indeed, there have been troubling developments in the world of museums — admission costs are at historic highs in New York, elite museums seem content to operate as soft-power franchisees connected to authoritarian regimes, and substantial resources are being redirected to statement architecture and misbegotten digital nativism — but the two examples of museum drift Lewis cites, the international “Treasures of Tutankhamun” exhibition, which broke attendance records and toured US institutions including the National Gallery and Metropolitan Museum from 1976 to 1979, and the Guggenheim’s widely-disparaged “Art of the Motorcycle” exhibition in 1998, are thin gruel for those trying to digest his asynchronous argumentation.

That the most widely-attended museum exhibitions are trivial, non-art “blockbusters” is an old canard. A glance at The Art Newspaper’s annual exhibition attendance rankings would have disabused Lewis of his bad memories and worse assumptions. Major museums continue to draw major crowds with exhibitions that are utterly conventional — Ming Dynasty masters, Van Gogh/Artaud, Magritte, and so on. (Also, a reminder that the Guggenheim’s Thomas Krens, the architect of the “Motorcycle” show and the short-lived Guggenheim Las Vegas, was ousted.) But then, what of the whole question of “postmodernism,” and the collapse of judgment that Lewis diagnoses in his students when, as related in the piece’s opening paragraphs, he shows them Chris Burden’s “Shoot” and they responded by asking if Burden had his subject sign a waiver? “None of them expressed revulsion,” he tells Weekend Edition’s Scott Simon. “The art world cannot survive an indifferent public,” Lewis adds, as if history in his classroom and actuality in the public square are one and the same. Time and again, he marshals non sequitur evidence — whether it’s treating his students as stand-ins for a public focus group or citing two museum exhibitions with at-best weak parallels to his argument.

We’re not done yet. Enter the catchall culprit, “the age of postmodernism” — an exhausted straw man, paraded by the culture warriors of the 1980s and ’90s, from Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” to Hilton Kramer’s New Criterion — invoked again here. But Lewis goes further than indulging this intellectually meaningless trope: he marshals the decades-old provocations of Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, and the NEA Four to offer a rousing defense of censorship, squarely blaming the “irrelevance” of art to the American public on the decades-old alleged shock-tactics of seven artists. “The impulse to evade censure can inspire raptures of ingenuity,” he continues, not content to merely simmer the baby in the bathwater. In a following parenthetical, he tells his readers that the Hays Code, which he incorrectly dates to 1932, was in fact a great boon to Hollywood. That self-imposed motion picture industry censorship agreement, implemented in various guises from 1930 to 1968, barred depictions of interracial couples and, implicitly, homosexuality from films, among other moral and ideological strictures. For Lewis, this “prim” straightjacket “increased the sophistication and wit of American films by a magnitude.”

This kind of violent and deeply illiberal criticism may be par for the course for today’s neoconservative Commentary, but the fact that Lewis’s inchoate anger found currency with National Public Radio is exemplary of a wider exasperation. And that is, in some sense, a burden that must be borne by those within the art system: that the actual problems that plague it, its complicity in suspect commercial and political agendas, threaten to overtake the serious public discourse on art itself by providing alibis for warmed-over culture warriors and other bullies. 

London’s Moniker Art Fair has collaborated with bitcoin-based global art, music, and technology collective Fork The Banks for its 2015 edition to become the world’s first international art fair to accept Bitcoin payments.

Specialising in urban culture and its related genres, Moniker Art Fair returns for its sixth year from October 15-18 with a lineup of approximately 20 national and international contemporary art galleries. The fair will be held at East London’s iconic Old Truman Brewery which it will share with The Other Art Fair, the UK's largest artist-led fair.

The centerpiece of Moniker Art Fair’s collaboration with Fork The Banks will be “Renaissance is Now,” a giant 50ft wall installation that will focus on what Moniker describes as “the solutions offered by global connectivity, decentralisation and collaborative consumption.”

Frankie Shea, Director of Moniker Projects, commented: “Over the last 6 years, Moniker Art Fair has helped forge a direct, unpretentious approach to appreciating and collecting art from a new generation of contemporary artists. With ‘Renaissance is Now,’ our goal is not only to produce a visually stunning installation, but to introduce Bitcoin and its benefits to the wider public.

Highlights of Moniker Art Fair 2015 will include an immersive showcase of works by Bristol stencil artist Nick Walker, the first UK solo show of French street artist Bom.k, a Star Wars inspired collection by Ryan Callanan (RYCA), original works by French artist WK Interact, as well as secondary market works by the likes of from Banksy, Peter Blake, and Takashi Murakami.

For the first time in 2015 the fair will also host “Art On A Postcard,” a secret auction of 200 original postcard-size artworks which will be available to buy with a £50 lottery ticket that will be matched to the artworks on the closing day of the fair.

Galleries:

34 Fine Art(SA), 44309 STREET//ART GALLERY(DE), Curious Duke Gallery(UK) , Folly & Muse(UK), Hawkins & Blue(UK), Jealous Print Studio(UK), Jealous Gallery(UK), Graffik Gallery(UK), Iaysha Art(UK),  Kallenbach Gallery(NL), Kumi Contemporary(UK), London Westbank Gallery(UK), Moniker Projects(UK), MYA Gallery (FR), Smithson Gallery(UK), TAG Fine Arts(UK), Worldart(SA), and more.

1. Dâm-Funk, “Invite the Light”

Known as ‘the ambassador of boogie funk’, Los Angeles producer, DJ and musician Dâm-Funk, is gearing up to release a 20-track album “Invite the Light” on September 4. Although this is his first solo studio album in six years, since he debuted with “Toeachizown” in 2009, Dâm-Funk aka Damon Riddick has established his music cred in recent years through projects such as the popular Funkmosphere and collaborations with talented artists such as Snoop Dogg (“7 Days of Funk”), Steve Arrington from Slave, Nite Jewel, Animal Collective, Erykah Badu, and Ariel Pink.

“Invite the Light” is a loosely autobiographical concept album inspired by the highs and lows of the artist’s personal and professional life over the last six years. Dâm-Funk describes this LP as his first fully realized effort and “a concise, beginning-to-end vision”. One of the most passionate champions of the genre of funk, Dâm has always insisted, “Funk is the underdog, the black sheep of black music… Funk is not just a Jheri Curl.”

The album features collaborations with Snoop Dogg, rapper Q-Tip, pop surrealist producer Ariel Pink, the father-son duo of Leon Sylvers III and Leon Sylvers IV, singer-songwriter Nite Jewel, Chicago rapper Kid Sister, jazz and soul artist Jody Watley, and funk musician Junie Morrison of the Ohio Players.

The video of funk anthem “We Continue”, directed by Jeff Broadway, was released earlier this month, followed by the single “Glyde 2Nyte” that features vocals by iconic producer Leon Sylvers III and his son Leon Sylvers IV. The collaboration on the latter is a nod to Dâm -Funk’s beginnings.

Pre-order “Invite the Light” on iTunes and receive a free download for “We Continue” or pre-order vinyl via the Stones Throw website. Dam will embark on a string of West Coast tour dates with his full band in September.

“Invite the Light”Tracklist:

1. Junie’s Transmission Feat. Junie Morrison/ 2. We Continue/ 3. Somewhere, Someday/ 4. I’m Just Tryna’ Survive (In The Big City) Feat. Q-Tip/ 5. Surveillance Escape/ 6. Floating On Air/ 7. HowUGonFu*kAroundAndChooseABusta’?/ 8. The Hunt & Murder of Lucifer/ 9. It Didn’t Have To End This Way/ 10. Missung U/ 11. Acting Feat. Ariel Pink/ 12. O.B.E./ 13. Glyde 2nyte Feat. Leon Sylvers III & IV/ 14. Just Ease Your Mind From All Negativity Feat. Snoop Dogg/ 15. Virtuous Progression Feat. JimiJames, Kid Sister, Nite Jewel, Novena Carmel & Jody Watly/ 16. Scatin’ Toward The Light/ 17. Junie’s Re-Transmission Feat. Junie Morrison/ 18. I’m Just Tryna’ Survive (In The Big City) Party Version Feat. Q-Tip/ 19. ‘Kaint Let ‘Em Change Me/ 20. The Acceptance

2. Micachu and The Shapes, “Good Sad Happy Bad”

Micachu and The Shapes’ fourth album “Good Sad Happy Bad”, out on September 11, emerged out of an informal jam session in an East London studio. The British experimental pop trio comprising of vocalist Mica Levi, keyboardist Raisa Khan and drummer Marc Pell, who released their debut album “Jewellery” in 2009 to rave reviews, met to rehearse at a studio, when drummer Pell secretly recorded the entire session on an Edirol field recorder. On playing it back, they liked the artless, lo fi nature of the recordings and decided to turn them into a new album.

London’s Guildhall School of Music alumnus and the force behind the band, Levi earned a BAFTA nomination and a European Film Award last year for her otherworldly soundtrack to the Scarlett Johansson-starring film “Under The Skin”, directed by Jonathan Glazer. Levi who studied composition and electronic music, and has been commissioned in the past to write an orchestral piece for the London Philharmonic Orchestra, exhibits a DIY approach to making music when with her avant-pop band, often creating her own musical instruments using ‘found object’ components.

The 13 tracks on “Good Sad Happy Bad” retain the experimental pop sensibility, with raw, freeform vocals layered over single groove tunes. The band likes to think of these tracks as more than simply songs, and rather as collections of sonic ideas. An idea that is further illustrated if you see the track list, that has song titles such as “Relaxing”, “Dreaming”, Thinking”, “Crushed” and “Suffering”. Levi says of the album, “It’s the most free we have been.”

Preorder the album now via iTunes, Google Play, Amazon and Rough Trade. Micachu and The Shapes will be performing in the US, UK and Europe starting September.

“Good Sad Happy Bad” Tracklist:
1. Sad/ 2. Relaxing/ 3. Dreaming/ 4. Sea Air/ 5. Thinking It/ 6. Crushed/ 7. Oh Baby/ 8. Waiting/ 9. Unity/ 10. Peach/ 11. LA Poison/ 12. Hazes/ 13. Suffering

3. Mild High Club, “Timeline”

The Los Angeles-based musical act of jazz artist Alexander Brettin originally from Chicago, Mild High Club, makes its debut with the album “Timeline” on September 18 via Circle Star Records. The 10-track album was recorded by Brettin with a Fostex 4-track cassette recorder, a MacBook, a 12-string electric guitar, a PortaSound keyboard, bass, drum machine, software instruments, “and whatever was lying around”.

Over these last couple of years, the Mild High Club has evolved into a collective with a revolving door policy for musicians from all over the United States. Says Brettin, “The advantages to working alone are being selfish and taking all the time you want. The disadvantages to working alone are being selfish and taking all the time you want. When I wrote and recorded the bulk of “Timeline”, I just wanted to have a vinyl record. Two and a half years later, we’ve got the band and handfuls of other ‘club members’ around the country who occasionally get together for ‘club meetings’. The Mild High Club is just a vessel for our musical and comical curiosities.”

Having already shared stage space with artists such as London’s seminal post-punk band Wire, Canadian singer-songwriter Mac DeMarco, Ariel Pink and American musician Mikal Cronin, this summer Brettin will tour alongside the seven-piece Australian psychedelic garage band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.

The album can be pre-ordered via iTunes. Mild High Club will be performing August through October in the US, Canada, UK and Europe.

“Timeline” Tracklist:

1. Club Intro/ 2. Windowpane/ 3. Note To Self/ 4. You and Me/ 5. Undeniable/ 6. Timeline/ 7. Rollercoaster Baby/ 8. Elegy/ 9. Weeping Willow/ 10. The Chat Feat. Ariel Pink & Weyes Blood

4. Blue Daisy, “Darker Than Blue”

Experimental rapper Blue Daisy is set to release a new full-length album titled “Darker Than Blue” on September 25. Blue Daisy also known as Kwesi Darko is a North London-based vocalist, musician and producer with the widely respected label R&S Records, which boasts a roster featuring the likes of James Blake, Aphex Twin, Space Dimension Controller, Vondelpark, Lone, and others.

While the artist refuses to conform to any one genre, he tends to traverse jazz, classical, electronica, rap, rock, blues and punk. “Darker Than Blue” is being toted as a jazz-grime fusion record that makes an intense emotional journey fueled by love, loss, religion, faith, and doubt. Blue Daisy draws from personal life experience to create a cinematic meditation on the clash of the forces of dark and light, yin and yang, good and evil.

The video for the title track “Darker Than Blue”, directed by Kamil Dymek, uses sinister stripped down visuals; and the song graduates from a melancholic Oriental-meets-Classical space to a menacing instrumental frenzy layered with an outburst of spoken word. The blistering “Gravediggers” sounds somewhat like a Depeche Mode “I Feel You” (1993) redux, but with ominous rumblings. The soulful track “Alone” features the vibrato of guest singer Connie Constance alongside Darko’s.   

Blue Daisy comments on the album, “Darker Than Blue arisen from the sewage, rodent mentality, birthed to the gutter, raised up out of the ruins.”

“Darker Than Blue” comes out September 25th on R&S Records with pre-order links on iTunes and Bandcamp. Fans receive instant downloads of “Alone feat. Connie Constance” and title track “Darker Than Blue” with pre-orders. The artist will be touring UK and Europe this year.

“Darker Than Blue” Tracklist:

1. My Heart/ 2. Daydreaming/ 3. Home/ 4. Alone Feat. Connie Constance/ 5. Darker Than Blue (Interlude)/ 6. Darker Than Blue/ 7. Six Days/ 8. Heroine/ 9. We’re All Gonna Die/ 10. Let’s Fly Tonight 11. Gravediggers 12. You and Me

5. Julia Holter, “Have You in My Wilderness”

Making her debut in 2011 with the album “Tragedy”, Julia Holter is a Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter who will be releasing her fourth full-length album “Have You in My Wilderness” on September 25. On this collection of 10 eclectic ballads that explore the themes of love, trust and power in human relationships, Holter’s voice tinkles intimately over airy instrumentation.

The album was recorded over 12 months with Grammy-winning producer and engineer Cole Greif-Neill, and a video for the song “Feel You” was released earlier this month.

“Have You in My Wilderness” will be available on CD, Digital and LP. For a very limited period the vinyl LP will come with a photographic print signed by the artist, via Dom Mart only. The album is available to pre-order from Dom-Mart and iTunes. Julia Holter will be touring the UK and Europe throughout October and November, and possibly also Asia, Australia and the US later. 

“Have You in My Wilderness”Tracklist:
1. Feel You/ 2. Silhouette/ 3. How Long?/ 4. Lucette Stranded on the Island/ 5. Sea Calls Me Home/ 6. Night Song/ 7. Everytime Boots/ 8. Betsy on the Roof/ 9. Vasquez/ 10. Have You in My Wilderness

6. Girl Band, “Holding Hands with Jamie”

Irish punk quartet Girl Band is an all-male group comprising of vocalist Dara Kiely, guitarist Alan Duggan, bassist Daniel Fox and drummer Adam Faulkner, who describe their sound as noise/ post-punk. Their nine-track debut album “Holding Hands with Jamie” releases on Rough Trade on September 25.

The band that first got together in 2011 in Dublin Ireland, and went on to tour Europe extensively, left an indelible impression on critics and fans alike. Their the “France 98” EP in 2012, the eight-minute cover of Blawan’s “Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?” in 2013, and the 2014 single “Lawman” resonated with the audience and established their musical identity as a livewire act that produces a unique brand of abrasive pop. Subsequently they delivered breakout performances at festivals such as the SXSW in Texas, California’s Burgerama and Brooklyn’s Northside Festival. This year in April, they got together to record an album, and guitarist Duggan says of the experience, “It required a different mindset (from recording singles). It was way more challenging to stay focused – tricky to find a balance between keeping a distance from the songs for perspective but also to fully concentrate on them.”

The band have also released a video for the album’s first single “Paul”, which is an example of the energy they bring to the table. Explaining the inspiration behind the video, Gallagher says, “While I was researching I watched a documentary about Big Bird and there’s a line in where Carol Spinney says that a woman was complimenting his performance but that she couldn’t see that inside the costume he was crying. It’s quite tragic. I think everyone has experiences of having to put on an outward expression, and feeling trapped so Paul’s costume is a visual extension of that. He’s inside the suit, at a distance from everybody around him, but wearing this absurd smile that’s totally false to what’s going on inside.”

The album “Holding Hands with Jamie” can be pre-ordered from iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, and Rough Trade. Girl Band will be touring the US in November and December.

“Holding Hands with Jamie” Tracklist:
1. Umbongo/ 2. Pears for Lunch/ 3. Baloo/ 4. In Plastic/ 5. Paul/ 6. The Last Riddler/ 7. Texting an Alien/ 8. Fucking Butter/ 9. The Witch Doctor

7. Rizzla, “Iron Cages”

Brooklyn-based artist and producer Rizzla launches his debut EP “Iron Cages” on Los Angeles record label Fade to Mind on September 25. Schooled in art history, sociology, and gender studies, Rizzla aka Brian Friedberg, is also a co-founder of KUNQ Collective, an alliance of queer DJs and artists originating in Boston. Influenced by Caribbean genres of ragga, soca, and dembow music, and Dutch-origin bubbling and hardstyle, Rizzla’s five-track EP, in his own words, is “about taking charge of abusive relationships, sexual or sociological, and the pleasure that ending pain causes.” The EP title is inspired by the works of political thinkers Max Weber and Ronald Takakai, and refers to entrapment; a feeling the artist associates with modern corporatized club culture.

Themes of apocalypse and survival are explored through the various tracks – the dembow-heavy “Fucking Fascist” is described as a funeral march for a dictator; “Airlock” as an extra terrestrial horror story, the carnival music of a world plagued by the dead; “Twitch Queen” as a meth-fuelled human sacrifice at the club; and “Black Jacobins” that derives its title from the work of legendary Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James, tells a story of sacrifice amidst an uprising. The title track “Iron Cages” described as a story of defiance and heartbreak, features vocals by Montreal-based singer and producer Odile Myrtil, and Daniel Aged of the Los Angeles act Inc. on guitars.

Rizzla will play an EP launch party at Trans Pecos in New York on Saturday, August 29, with Ma Nguzu and more. Tickets are available here. Pre-order Rizzla’s debut EP, Iron Cages, now via iTunes or Bleep for limited edition vinyl, and catch it September 25th via Fade to Mind.

“Iron Cages” Tracklist:

1. Iron Cages Feat. Odile Myrtil/ 2. Fucking Fascist/ 3. Airlock/ 4. Twitch Queen/ 5. Black Jacobins

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1. Dâm-Funk, “Invite the Light”

Known as ‘the ambassador of boogie funk’, Los Angeles producer, DJ and musician Dâm-Funk, is gearing up to release a 20-track album “Invite the Light” on September 4. Although this is his first solo studio album in six years, since he debuted with “Toeachizown” in 2009, Dâm-Funk aka Damon Riddick has established his music cred in recent years through projects such as the popular Funkmosphere and collaborations with talented artists such as Snoop Dogg (“7 Days of Funk”), Steve Arrington from Slave, Nite Jewel, Animal Collective, Erykah Badu, and Ariel Pink.

“Invite the Light” is a loosely autobiographical concept album inspired by the highs and lows of the artist’s personal and professional life over the last six years. Dâm-Funk describes this LP as his first fully realized effort and “a concise, beginning-to-end vision”. One of the most passionate champions of the genre of funk, Dâm has always insisted, “Funk is the underdog, the black sheep of black music… Funk is not just a Jheri Curl.”

The album features collaborations with Snoop Dogg, rapper Q-Tip, pop surrealist producer Ariel Pink, the father-son duo of Leon Sylvers III and Leon Sylvers IV, singer-songwriter Nite Jewel, Chicago rapper Kid Sister, jazz and soul artist Jody Watley, and funk musician Junie Morrison of the Ohio Players.

The video of funk anthem “We Continue”, directed by Jeff Broadway, was released earlier this month, followed by the single “Glyde 2Nyte” that features vocals by iconic producer Leon Sylvers III and his son Leon Sylvers IV. The collaboration on the latter is a nod to Dâm -Funk’s beginnings.

Pre-order “Invite the Light” on iTunes and receive a free download for “We Continue” or pre-order vinyl via the Stones Throw website. Dam will embark on a string of West Coast tour dates with his full band in September.

“Invite the Light”Tracklist:

1. Junie’s Transmission Feat. Junie Morrison/ 2. We Continue/ 3. Somewhere, Someday/ 4. I’m Just Tryna’ Survive (In The Big City) Feat. Q-Tip/ 5. Surveillance Escape/ 6. Floating On Air/ 7. HowUGonFu*kAroundAndChooseABusta’?/ 8. The Hunt & Murder of Lucifer/ 9. It Didn’t Have To End This Way/ 10. Missung U/ 11. Acting Feat. Ariel Pink/ 12. O.B.E./ 13. Glyde 2nyte Feat. Leon Sylvers III & IV/ 14. Just Ease Your Mind From All Negativity Feat. Snoop Dogg/ 15. Virtuous Progression Feat. JimiJames, Kid Sister, Nite Jewel, Novena Carmel & Jody Watly/ 16. Scatin’ Toward The Light/ 17. Junie’s Re-Transmission Feat. Junie Morrison/ 18. I’m Just Tryna’ Survive (In The Big City) Party Version Feat. Q-Tip/ 19. ‘Kaint Let ‘Em Change Me/ 20. The Acceptance

2. Micachu and The Shapes, “Good Sad Happy Bad”

Micachu and The Shapes’ fourth album “Good Sad Happy Bad”, out on September 11, emerged out of an informal jam session in an East London studio. The British experimental pop trio comprising of vocalist Mica Levi, keyboardist Raisa Khan and drummer Marc Pell, who released their debut album “Jewellery” in 2009 to rave reviews, met to rehearse at a studio, when drummer Pell secretly recorded the entire session on an Edirol field recorder. On playing it back, they liked the artless, lo fi nature of the recordings and decided to turn them into a new album.

London’s Guildhall School of Music alumnus and the force behind the band, Levi earned a BAFTA nomination and a European Film Award last year for her otherworldly soundtrack to the Scarlett Johansson-starring film “Under The Skin”, directed by Jonathan Glazer. Levi who studied composition and electronic music, and has been commissioned in the past to write an orchestral piece for the London Philharmonic Orchestra, exhibits a DIY approach to making music when with her avant-pop band, often creating her own musical instruments using ‘found object’ components.

The 13 tracks on “Good Sad Happy Bad” retain the experimental pop sensibility, with raw, freeform vocals layered over single groove tunes. The band likes to think of these tracks as more than simply songs, and rather as collections of sonic ideas. An idea that is further illustrated if you see the track list, that has song titles such as “Relaxing”, “Dreaming”, Thinking”, “Crushed” and “Suffering”. Levi says of the album, “It’s the most free we have been.”

Preorder the album now via iTunes, Google Play, Amazon and Rough Trade. Micachu and The Shapes will be performing in the US, UK and Europe starting September.

“Good Sad Happy Bad” Tracklist:
1. Sad/ 2. Relaxing/ 3. Dreaming/ 4. Sea Air/ 5. Thinking It/ 6. Crushed/ 7. Oh Baby/ 8. Waiting/ 9. Unity/ 10. Peach/ 11. LA Poison/ 12. Hazes/ 13. Suffering

3. Mild High Club, “Timeline”

The Los Angeles-based musical act of jazz artist Alexander Brettin originally from Chicago, Mild High Club, makes its debut with the album “Timeline” on September 18 via Circle Star Records. The 10-track album was recorded by Brettin with a Fostex 4-track cassette recorder, a MacBook, a 12-string electric guitar, a PortaSound keyboard, bass, drum machine, software instruments, “and whatever was lying around”.

Over these last couple of years, the Mild High Club has evolved into a collective with a revolving door policy for musicians from all over the United States. Says Brettin, “The advantages to working alone are being selfish and taking all the time you want. The disadvantages to working alone are being selfish and taking all the time you want. When I wrote and recorded the bulk of “Timeline”, I just wanted to have a vinyl record. Two and a half years later, we’ve got the band and handfuls of other ‘club members’ around the country who occasionally get together for ‘club meetings’. The Mild High Club is just a vessel for our musical and comical curiosities.”

Having already shared stage space with artists such as London’s seminal post-punk band Wire, Canadian singer-songwriter Mac DeMarco, Ariel Pink and American musician Mikal Cronin, this summer Brettin will tour alongside the seven-piece Australian psychedelic garage band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.

The album can be pre-ordered via iTunes. Mild High Club will be performing August through October in the US, Canada, UK and Europe.

“Timeline” Tracklist:

1. Club Intro/ 2. Windowpane/ 3. Note To Self/ 4. You and Me/ 5. Undeniable/ 6. Timeline/ 7. Rollercoaster Baby/ 8. Elegy/ 9. Weeping Willow/ 10. The Chat Feat. Ariel Pink & Weyes Blood

4. Blue Daisy, “Darker Than Blue”

Experimental rapper Blue Daisy is set to release a new full-length album titled “Darker Than Blue” on September 25. Blue Daisy also known as Kwesi Darko is a North London-based vocalist, musician and producer with the widely respected label R&S Records, which boasts a roster featuring the likes of James Blake, Aphex Twin, Space Dimension Controller, Vondelpark, Lone, and others.

While the artist refuses to conform to any one genre, he tends to traverse jazz, classical, electronica, rap, rock, blues and punk. “Darker Than Blue” is being toted as a jazz-grime fusion record that makes an intense emotional journey fueled by love, loss, religion, faith, and doubt. Blue Daisy draws from personal life experience to create a cinematic meditation on the clash of the forces of dark and light, yin and yang, good and evil.

The video for the title track “Darker Than Blue”, directed by Kamil Dymek, uses sinister stripped down visuals; and the song graduates from a melancholic Oriental-meets-Classical space to a menacing instrumental frenzy layered with an outburst of spoken word. The blistering “Gravediggers” sounds somewhat like a Depeche Mode “I Feel You” (1993) redux, but with ominous rumblings. The soulful track “Alone” features the vibrato of guest singer Connie Constance alongside Darko’s.   

Blue Daisy comments on the album, “Darker Than Blue arisen from the sewage, rodent mentality, birthed to the gutter, raised up out of the ruins.”

“Darker Than Blue” comes out September 25th on R&S Records with pre-order links on iTunes and Bandcamp. Fans receive instant downloads of “Alone feat. Connie Constance” and title track “Darker Than Blue” with pre-orders. The artist will be touring UK and Europe this year.

“Darker Than Blue” Tracklist:

1. My Heart/ 2. Daydreaming/ 3. Home/ 4. Alone Feat. Connie Constance/ 5. Darker Than Blue (Interlude)/ 6. Darker Than Blue/ 7. Six Days/ 8. Heroine/ 9. We’re All Gonna Die/ 10. Let’s Fly Tonight 11. Gravediggers 12. You and Me

5. Julia Holter, “Have You in My Wilderness”

Making her debut in 2011 with the album “Tragedy”, Julia Holter is a Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter who will be releasing her fourth full-length album “Have You in My Wilderness” on September 25. On this collection of 10 eclectic ballads that explore the themes of love, trust and power in human relationships, Holter’s voice tinkles intimately over airy instrumentation.

The album was recorded over 12 months with Grammy-winning producer and engineer Cole Greif-Neill, and a video for the song “Feel You” was released earlier this month.

“Have You in My Wilderness” will be available on CD, Digital and LP. For a very limited period the vinyl LP will come with a photographic print signed by the artist, via Dom Mart only. The album is available to pre-order from Dom-Mart and iTunes. Julia Holter will be touring the UK and Europe throughout October and November, and possibly also Asia, Australia and the US later. 

“Have You in My Wilderness”Tracklist:
1. Feel You/ 2. Silhouette/ 3. How Long?/ 4. Lucette Stranded on the Island/ 5. Sea Calls Me Home/ 6. Night Song/ 7. Everytime Boots/ 8. Betsy on the Roof/ 9. Vasquez/ 10. Have You in My Wilderness

6. Girl Band, “Holding Hands with Jamie”

Irish punk quartet Girl Band is an all-male group comprising of vocalist Dara Kiely, guitarist Alan Duggan, bassist Daniel Fox and drummer Adam Faulkner, who describe their sound as noise/ post-punk. Their nine-track debut album “Holding Hands with Jamie” releases on Rough Trade on September 25.

The band that first got together in 2011 in Dublin Ireland, and went on to tour Europe extensively, left an indelible impression on critics and fans alike. Their the “France 98” EP in 2012, the eight-minute cover of Blawan’s “Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?” in 2013, and the 2014 single “Lawman” resonated with the audience and established their musical identity as a livewire act that produces a unique brand of abrasive pop. Subsequently they delivered breakout performances at festivals such as the SXSW in Texas, California’s Burgerama and Brooklyn’s Northside Festival. This year in April, they got together to record an album, and guitarist Duggan says of the experience, “It required a different mindset (from recording singles). It was way more challenging to stay focused – tricky to find a balance between keeping a distance from the songs for perspective but also to fully concentrate on them.”

The band have also released a video for the album’s first single “Paul”, which is an example of the energy they bring to the table. Explaining the inspiration behind the video, Gallagher says, “While I was researching I watched a documentary about Big Bird and there’s a line in where Carol Spinney says that a woman was complimenting his performance but that she couldn’t see that inside the costume he was crying. It’s quite tragic. I think everyone has experiences of having to put on an outward expression, and feeling trapped so Paul’s costume is a visual extension of that. He’s inside the suit, at a distance from everybody around him, but wearing this absurd smile that’s totally false to what’s going on inside.”

The album “Holding Hands with Jamie” can be pre-ordered from iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, and Rough Trade. Girl Band will be touring the US in November and December.

“Holding Hands with Jamie” Tracklist:
1. Umbongo/ 2. Pears for Lunch/ 3. Baloo/ 4. In Plastic/ 5. Paul/ 6. The Last Riddler/ 7. Texting an Alien/ 8. Fucking Butter/ 9. The Witch Doctor

7. Rizzla, “Iron Cages”

Brooklyn-based artist and producer Rizzla launches his debut EP “Iron Cages” on Los Angeles record label Fade to Mind on September 25. Schooled in art history, sociology, and gender studies, Rizzla aka Brian Friedberg, is also a co-founder of KUNQ Collective, an alliance of queer DJs and artists originating in Boston. Influenced by Caribbean genres of ragga, soca, and dembow music, and Dutch-origin bubbling and hardstyle, Rizzla’s five-track EP, in his own words, is “about taking charge of abusive relationships, sexual or sociological, and the pleasure that ending pain causes.” The EP title is inspired by the works of political thinkers Max Weber and Ronald Takakai, and refers to entrapment; a feeling the artist associates with modern corporatized club culture.

Themes of apocalypse and survival are explored through the various tracks – the dembow-heavy “Fucking Fascist” is described as a funeral march for a dictator; “Airlock” as an extra terrestrial horror story, the carnival music of a world plagued by the dead; “Twitch Queen” as a meth-fuelled human sacrifice at the club; and “Black Jacobins” that derives its title from the work of legendary Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James, tells a story of sacrifice amidst an uprising. The title track “Iron Cages” described as a story of defiance and heartbreak, features vocals by Montreal-based singer and producer Odile Myrtil, and Daniel Aged of the Los Angeles act Inc. on guitars.

Rizzla will play an EP launch party at Trans Pecos in New York on Saturday, August 29, with Ma Nguzu and more. Tickets are available here. Pre-order Rizzla’s debut EP, Iron Cages, now via iTunes or Bleep for limited edition vinyl, and catch it September 25th via Fade to Mind.

“Iron Cages” Tracklist:

1. Iron Cages Feat. Odile Myrtil/ 2. Fucking Fascist/ 3. Airlock/ 4. Twitch Queen/ 5. Black Jacobins

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“Louisiana on Paper – Lucian Freud– A Closer Look” is a rare exhibition of graphic works by renowned British artist Lucian Freud (1922-2011) at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art from September 3 through November 29, 2015.

“Lucian Freud– A Closer Look” showcases 52 stunning examples of Freud’s graphic production after 1982, the year he returned to etching following a 34-year hiatus, and draws primarily from the UBS Art Collection, one of the largest corporate collections of contemporary art in the world

Curated by Anders Kold, the exhibition allows visitors to examine the compelling range of gazes, sensations, and actions expressed by Freud in his distinctive black and white depictions of the human body, which the Museum describes as “confrontational, challenging, and impossible to ignore.”

“Lucian Freud stands as one of the most striking artists from the post-war era. His exclusion of social and period-related contexts around his figures is radical and underscores the extent to which his art is and remains art,” Kold explained.

“Freud’s portrayal of the human body involves not only the totality of his many observations and his point of view, but also implicitly the models’ responses and our own – the public’s – reactions. This is art that calls not only on our faculty of seeing, but also in a wider sense on the feelings that are associated with something remembered in our own bodies and psyches.”

“Louisiana on Paper – Lucian Freud– A Closer Look” is at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark from September 3 through November 29, 2015.

The only way to survive India, as a tourist or even as a resident, is to have a sense of humour. As soon as you start seeing the funny side of things, this country will pull out all the stops to put on the most entertaining show in the world. It has religion spilling out of its ears, political incorrectness pouring out its mouth, and a superior brand of faith that adds a twinkle to 1.3 billion pairs of eyes. It is wedged awkwardly between the ghost of India past and the ghost of an India yet to come. And it’s this gauche state of being, this tottering on a precarious perch, of an entire nation that inspires the stand-up comic trio of Varun Grover, Rahul Ram and Sanjay Rajoura to create their show Aisi Taisi Democracy.

Call it musical comedy, political satire, or simply a stand-up act, Aisi Taisi Democracy or ATD is an attempt to shine light on the idiosyncrasies of India and Indians. A two-hour long performance by Varun Grover, lyricist and writer on such movies as “Masaan” and “Gangs of Wasseypur”; Rahul Ram, bassist and vocalist with one of the country’s best loved bands, Indian Ocean; and stand-up comic Sanjay Rajoura, intends to shake the ennui out of its audiences by raking up issues such as police bullying, religious sentimentality, political hyperbole, and dysfunctional systems in the largest democracy in the world.

The act is interspersed with satirical songs by Ram, whose singing voice tends to reverberate in your head and your heart long after you’ve heard it. The three artists encountered each other through various work projects and realizing they had similar views on the state of affairs in the country – which off late have been supplying much fodder for criticism – decided to get together to write this act.

Aisi Taisi Democracy will travel across India to perform in Bangalore, Kolkata, Mumbai and New Delhi, in September 7-10, 2015. Mumbai-based comedian Kamal Trilok Singh will open for ATD on this tour.

A Q&A with Aisi Taisi Democracy:

Do you feel our country and people as a whole lack a sense of humor, taking into account the comedy in our mainstream films, TV, reaction to art, the recent AIB Bollywood Roast, and the sense of outrage that is always simmering just under the surface?

Varun: Not at all. I think we have a great sense of humor and things will only improve as more and more people discover stand-up comedy and realize that stand-up comedians mean no harm – they are just making fun of things that amuse them. The reaction to AIB etc was by just a handful of goons who are in the ‘outrage industry’ for making money or getting cheap publicity from our gullible media. Had AIB been disliked by the majority, it wouldn’t have become such a huge hit that pirated DVDs of the show are being sold on the streets in many Indian cities.

Rahul: Indians have a great sense of humor and we joke and laugh a lot. However, there are a lot of taboo subjects that people don’t really joke about, for instance about families (jokes about wives are historically an exception). However of late, a certain intolerance about various things has manifested itself in our society... people get upset or outraged by films, books, cultural references etc and then call for bans, attack theatres and offices. Political issues raise hackles very quickly. With ATD, we hope to make our audiences laugh with us about the various absurdities in our society.

Sanjay: We have a great sense of humor when it comes to others, but are not the best people to take a joke on ourselves, and over the years we have just become more and more intolerant. Now we define ourselves by the things that offend us. Whether or not the AIB Roast was funny or not is a matter of individual taste. Don’t like it, don’t watch it, don’t share it. But it was nobody’s business to hound AIB the way they were hounded over this.

How would you categorise your act? Only a stand-up comedy act or does it follow in any old traditions since it involves storytelling and music?

Varun: It’s a mix of good ol’ stand-up, music, and stories from around us. The novelty is that these three things flow smoothly into each other and the songs are woven into the narrative. Also, there’s a lot of impromptu conversation among the three of us on stage.

Rahul: So many old traditions exist... Haasya Kavita, the spinning of impromptu stories, making up new lyrics to existing folk songs etc. We are a continuation of a whole set of traditions. Stand-up as a separate concept may be relatively new to India, but comics are not. Yes the songs plus stand-up adds an additional dimension to the show, which gives ATD its unique flavour.

Sanjay: ATD is a socio-political satire, where we use music as a vehicle to further drive home a point. The show itself is delivered in a very informal, unstructured way where we try to come off as three guys sharing their views. There is a lot of talking amongst ourselves while we deliver our piece to the audience.

Rahul Ram’s songs add a new dimension to this stand-up act. Whose idea was it to add music to the performance? Who has penned the lyrics to these songs?

Varun: I suggested to Sanjay that we should have a musical element to the show. Initially it was only Sanjay and I who wanted to do this kind of a show. Sanjay knew Rahul for a few years and they both liked each other’s ‘voice’. Rahul agreed to do this the moment Sanjay asked. Lyrics have come from all permutations and combinations possible amongst the three of us.

Rahul: Sanjay and I had spoken years ago about adding songs to his act, but we didn’t take it forward. Then he asked me last May, saying Varun and he are doing an act called Aisi Taisi Democracy, and whether I would like to join them. So I did, since I love their work and respect their worldview. Most of the lyrics are written by Varun and Sanjay, but we all discuss, modify and adapt everything, even the delivery.

Sanjay: Varun and I were frustrated with the whole comedy scene and wanted to bring a change by introducing comedy that takes on relevant issues. Rahul, Varun and I respect each other’s political views and opinions, so we really wanted to do something together. We approached Rahul and he brought his unique flavor to the proceedings.

What factors inspired you to put together this political satire act now, not earlier or later?

Varun: Mostly coincidence. I saw Sanjay perform in Mumbai in 2013 and he saw me in Delhi later that year, and we agreed we should perform together. Also, as stand-up comedy is getting acceptance in the country, more spaces for such shows are popping up.

Rahul: It was an idea waiting to happen that just coalesced at the right moment. It was summer, and I was much freer than I am during the winter, so I was willing to give this my time and effort.

Sanjay: I find most of the comedy out there unfunny. To me comedy makes maximum impact when its hardhitting. You must question your own thoughts and beliefs while you are laughing and having a good time. I realised that Varun and Rahul are similar people as well, so we all got together and decided to form ATD.

Do you have plans of taking this concept further? I believe you performed a few times in Delhi and at the SAARC meet last year? Have you changed the material for these upcoming performances?

Varun: I don’t really know where ‘further’ is. If you mean bigger or diverse venues, yes of course. Smaller towns all over India? Of course. For the second season, we have at least 60-70 per cent new material and it keeps evolving anyway with each show. 

Rahul: Constant change is the mantra. And the beautiful thing is, our politicians and our reality give us new material every day! Almost 80 per cent of the content we have planned for our upcoming tour is brand new.

Sanjay: Definitely, we believe that our brand of comedy is something that the country needs, and the whole premise is that we keep talking about socially and politically relevant things. We intend to keep modifying our material so that the audiences have something to look forward each time they see us. That is the plan for our upcoming tour this September as well.

What are the different issues that ATD intends to touch through these performances?

Varun: The only issue is stupidity. How stupid we are as a country, as a people, and as a race. How we are unique, frustratingly hilarious, and severely flawed as a nation – and how we are obviously happy to laugh at these things.

Rahul: Censorship, political promises, cleanliness, false intellectuals, the cult of the family in India, corporate bullshit. And so much more!

Sanjay: Some of the topics we like to talk about or question are the ethos and values that have been shoved down our throats for ages. Also, we love discussing the politics of the choices we make and the hypocrisy of modern lifestyles in India. 

Is the show entirely in Hindi? Do you feel it might find an audience beyond the urban cities?

Varun: The show is roughly 70 per cent Hindi but all three of us are comfortable switching to English on demand.

Rahul: Mixed Hindi and English. Of course it has an audience outside the metros... I wish we could take it to the Narmada valley...

Sanjay: The show isn’t completely in Hindi and it doesn’t have an English bias like most stand-up in urban cities usually does. It’s a happy mix, which we can always alter on the fly. Because we talk about issues that affect everybody in the country whether you live in Bombay or Gaya. We definitely believe that the show can reach out to a wide audience.

What are your views on the state of stand-up comedy in India? Do you think it’s catching on?

Varun: I think the state of comedy is great in India currently, and it’s catching on very fast. Lots of diversity in styles and stories – and it’s reaching smaller centres too. In fact one of the biggest contributions of AIB Roast was that it took stand-up comedy to WhatsApp forwards and now everybody in India knows (at some level) what stand-up comedy is.

Rahul: Evolving rapidly, but a long way to go as yet. Too much English, too many regional jokes, gaalis (abuses) substituting for substance... but lots of hope!

Sanjay: It is a great time for comedy in India, with the format itself catching on and audiences being open to this form of entertainment. The quality of the comedy itself doesn’t impress me much. I find a lot of the comedy seriously unimpressive. We still have miles to go before we create a scene of some value. But things are definitely looking up and we just need to keep at it. Comedy does have the ability to start a conversation that might otherwise never be started.

Aisi Taisi Democracy Tour Details:

City: Bangalore/ Date: September 7/ Venue: Alliance Francaise/ Opening act: Kamal Trilok Singh/ Tickets: www.bookmyshow.com

City: Kolkata/ Date: September 8/ Venue: GD Birla Sabhaghar/ Opening act: Kamal Trilok Singh/ Tickets: www.bookmyshow.com

City: Mumbai/ Date: September 9/ Venue: St Andrews Auditorium/ Opening act: Kamal Trilok Singh/ Tickets: www.bookmyshow.com

City: New Delhi/ Date: September 10/ Venue: Kamani Auditorium/ Opening act: Kamal Trilok Singh/ Tickets: www.bookmyshow.com

Teaser Video:

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— Illinois Budget Cuts Threaten Chicago Museum: The Illinois State Museum Chicago Gallery may close due to cuts proposed in Governor Bruce Rauner’s 2015 budget. The institution’s $6.29 million operating budget has apparently been chopped. Ed Paschke, Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Karl Wirsum, and Miyoko Ito are among those represented in the museum’s permanent collection of 150 works, which will head to storage should the center be shuttered. [Chicago Magazine]

— Does $4.5 Million Simco Lawsuit Exaggerate Dealer Impact? Art-world observer Greg Allen has taken a closer look at the suit brought by dealers Stefan Simchowitz and Ellis King against Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama. Allen’s post gives close scrutiny to Simchowitz’s claims regarding his impact on Mahama’s career. Of particular note in the complaint filed by Simchowitz and King is the characterization of Mahama — who was selected for Okwui Enwezor’s Venice Biennale, among other honors — as an artist with “little, if any, recognition in the Western art world” before he was discovered by the pair. [Greg.org]

— Takashi Murakami’s Private Collection Will Go on View in January: Japanese art-world icon Takashi Murakami will show his private collection of artworks at the Yokohama Museum of Art for the first time ever in January — an exhibition that will include plenty of quotidian ephemera like beer mugs, fantasy figurines, and antiques. Much of the collection “looks like garbage,” the artist told The Art Newspaper, emphasizing its eclecticism and wide span. Yet the trove of more than 1,000 objects also includes masterpieces by the likes of Anselm Kiefer, whose 2010 “Merkaba (chariot)” will be among the pieces on view (and which the artist recounts he purchased on an installment payment plan from his own dealer, Larry Gagosian). [TAN]

— Segerstrom Center Launches $68 Million Fundraising Effort: Los Angeles County arts organization Segerstrom Center has announced a major, $68 million effort to raise funds for a planned renovation and to cover the costs generated from past fundraising efforts that fell short of goals — though $42 million has already been raised. Architect Michael Maltzan has been hired to create a “town square” atmosphere, wherein outdoor spaces will host free public events. [LAT]

— Frank Gehry Reveals Sunset Strip Renderings: Following up on the March announcement that Los Angeles real estate developer Townscape had hired Pritzker-winner Frank Gehry to design its massive multi-use complex at the eastern gate of the famed Sunset Strip, Gehry’s firm released renderings that show a 333,600-square-foot complex in his signature geometric style. The 2.6-acre site, currently home to a strip mall and a midcentury bank building, will be redesigned to house five distinct structures that contain 249 residential units. [Architectural Record, Artforum]

— Philanthropist Marion “Kippy” Boulton Stroud Passes Away: Philadelphia-bred arts patron Marion Boulton Stroud committed suicide on Thursday, which comes as tragic news for those who knew the 76-year-old philanthropist and worked with her. Stroud is most famous as the founder of Philly’s Fabric Workshop, which has hosted and commissioned pieces from renowned artists like Louise Bourgeois, Marina Abramovic, and Claes Oldenburg. [Artnet]

— Aristophil, the beleaguered French investment fund that amassed the world’s largest private collection of manuscripts, is liquidating its assets after a court judgment. [TAN]

— The Metropolitan Museum of Art will stay open until midnight for the last weekend of its record-breaking “China: Through the Looking Glass” exhibition. [ARTnews]

— A new analysis of Sandro Botticelli’s “Portrait of a Lady known as Smeralda Bandinelli,” c.1470-5, by experts at the Victoria and Albert Museum has disproven a “longstanding myth” regarding the work’s modification by a later owner, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. [Artdaily]

“When I was younger I would have found it somewhat hammy and questionable,” Dan Bejar said of his new album, “Poison Season,” which comes out on August 28. The singer, who records under the name Destroyer, is known for his sardonic personality, so much so that I was warned beforehand that trying to get to him to answer questions might be difficult. But sitting down in a coffee shop in Brooklyn in late June, I found Bejar, fresh off a red-eye flight, in a somewhat talkative, if deadpan, mood. Maybe it was the jetlag.

“You can tell that before making the record I listened to ‘Mack the Knife’ a thousand times,” he said with a laugh. But the songs on “Poison Season,” which range from E-Street Band struts to Rat Packy ballads — hence the Bobby Darin reference — are more diverse and contain a greater level of depth than he’s willing to admit to a journalist. The album’s first single, “Dream Lover,” is the most explosive and classic-rock sounding recording he’s ever made, a brash mirage of horns and propulsive drums that concerns the mystic escape path of runaway lovers, a Springsteen-like ode to getting away from it all.

It’s also something of a bait-and-switch: thrown toward the front of the album, it announces a theme the rest of the songs refuse to deliver on. “It was an accidental song,” Bejar admitted. “When I brought ‘Dream Lover’ to the band, it was like, this song probably won’t even be on the record,” he added. “It’s so thick-headed, let’s not even bother practicing it. You get the gist of it. But then it turned out in a way that’s quite cool. But that’s because the band is cool.”

Bejar also spoke several times of the importance of the band — a group of musicians that joined him during the tour for his previous album, “Kaputt,” in 2012. “The ease of playing with the band, and how comfortable I felt as a singer with it, was one of the main reasons why the album occurred,” he said. “I went through a bunch of cockamamie schemes in my head,” he noted, including making “Poison Season” a disco-salsa record. “But it became apparent quite quickly that I hadn’t written 12 disco-salsa songs…. The songs asked for something else. And I always kept coming back to the band.”

When I mentioned that “Poison Season” feels like an album about being lost, he reluctantly agreed. “It’s more the idea of wandering around a space, which maybe at one point you knew quite well, and realizing it’s been erased,” he said, mentioning the “violent tendency” of redevelopment in his hometown of Vancouver. “I definitely feel more distant from the world than ever,” he added. His acceptance that “showbiz” is now his life, he said, is really more of his own failure to come up with an alternate plan.  

During our conversation, I began to realize that the lyrics on “Poison Season,” more stripped down and simplified than on any other Destroyer record, seem to echo different things we talk about regarding alienation and the spiritual concerns of growing older. But Bejar deflected the notion that the new album might be confessional.

“I think with songwriting especially, that’s still the main mode of working, especially in America,” he said. “Pouring your heart out. When you think of the great American traditions of songwriting, there’s not a lot of remove. And as it should be because once you open your mouth, once you’re singing, that’s your body laid bare.”

I pressed the issue. “It wasn’t like diary entries, but for the most part a lot of Destroyer songs sound like a monologue that’s going through my head,” he said. “That’s why I never understood when people would paint Destroyer lyrics in the light of some ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ style gibberish or some kind of language poetry. I never saw it that way.”

The biggest change Bejar sees in the progression from “Kaputt” to “Poison Season” has less to do with lyrics or sounds but of confidence, of finding himself as a performer. “I don’t like to be really put into the world that much,” he said, grinning. “Maybe subconsciously there was some kind of burnout. It seemed like there was a demand.”

“But it also seemed like for the first time I became more and more comfortable on stage,” he added. “I was finally getting to the heart of what I wanted to do as a singer. I think that’s one of the main things about this album. It sounds like me, finally.”

An interactive exhibition celebrating style, culture and art hopes to draw and delight weary fashion editors at New York Fashion Week this September.

Digital lifestyle media company Refinery29 is outfitting a 50,000-square-foot waterfront warehouse in Greenpoint in Brooklyn with 29 rooms that showcase art installations, performances, virtual reality experiences, film screenings, and music. Collaborators from the worlds of fashion, beauty, food, art and design include Shantell Martin, Hattie Stewart, CONFETTISYSTEM, Charlotte Tilbury, Petra Collins, Danielle Levitt, Amirah Kassem, Print All Over Me, Hisham Bharoocha, Crystal Moselle, and the women of ALDA. The multi-sensory experiences are designed to shine a light on issues facing society today, such as gender identity, body positivity, and politics.

Speaking to Blouin Lifestyle, Refinery29 founding partner and executive creative director Piera Gelardi says the installation, titled 29Rooms, is to celebrate the company’s 10th anniversary this year.

“We wanted to bring our site to life in a physical way so the audience can have an immersive experience of our brand,” she says, adding that art was a natural medium given her own background in studio art, which she studied at New York University. “We were inspired by the emotional and unforgettable immersive art installations we had been to over the years. The element of surprise is something that has always been important for us, because the content on our site is driven by things that the audience doesn’t expect.”

Finding a location that already came with 29 rooms — alluding to the number in the company’s name — was also fortuitous, Gelardi adds.

The visually-driven playground comprises concepts including: “1,000 Questions,” where artist Shantell Martin invites participants to answer the question “Who are you?” by writing on the wall using Sharpies provided on a string; “Literary Heroines Fashion Dioramas,” where visitors can peek through tiny holes in hallways to discover whimsical dioramas that celebrate two literary heroines: Alice of Alice in Wonderland and Dorothy of The Wizard of Oz; “Drive-In Cinema,” a desert-inspired movie theater that will screen short films from cutting-edge female directors such as Crystal Moselle, Ry Russo Young, Jessica Sanders, Janicza Bravo, and Tatia Pileva; and even a bouncy castle — in the shape of an oversized women's handbag styled with props, such as inflatable lipsticks and a cellphone.

Meanwhile, London-based doodler Hattie Stewart has designed “Art In The Dark,” a room for guests to dance through black lights and a silent disco (pictured above), and “Sound In The Clouds” (pictured below) is a space where guests can pop their heads inside “clouds” and listen to music curated by Saint Heron, the new movement under Solange Knowles' label, Saint Records.

Courtesy of The Gathery for Refinery29

“Style is at the core of whatever we do, and we view it as something that influences many more life choices that women make today. Home is part of style, and even what you eat is part of style,” explains Gelardi. Staging this experience during New York Fashion Week was to “create an open conversation about fashion content [that has traditionally been] very exclusive and top-down, bringing it to the audience [in a way] that they can access, understand and bring into their own lives.”

The 29Rooms exhibition is free and open to the public on September 11 and 12, from 12 noon to 8pm, at 15 Huron Street, Brooklyn, New York.