Photography by Bohdan Cap

Nobody loves indie anymore. Dancing to intentionally awkward rhythms while students stamp on your toes? Why bother? Indie wasn’t always that. Once it really was independent — someone recording sometimes funny songs on their own in small spaces with little interest in sharing what they made with the world.  
     Le Volume Courbe are like that, which explains why they’ve gone almost unnoticed for the best part of a decade. Moving to London thirteen years ago from the North of France, Charlotte Marionneau has been writing songs and keeping the company of some of Britain’s most respected musicians ever since. Singing her heart out in her bedroom, she’s been joined by everyone from My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields to Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval strumming a guitar. “But it is just something I do for fun,” Marionneau pipes up. Even when Alan McGee got his hands on the track “Harmony” in 2001, “I didn’t take being a musician seriously,” she lilts in her French accent. “I never thought it was something I could do.”

Photography by The Standard New York

After roughly two years of construction in one of the more desolate stretches of Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, the highly anticipated Standard New York is finally pulling back its doors this December — well, sort of. For its soft opening, this latest and most ambitious addition to hotelier André Balazs’ über-sleek suite of Standard hotels will book a limited number of rooms for guests eager to check out what all the fuss is about. In fact, the hotel won’t really have a hard opening so much as a gradual unveiling of different sections as they’re finished — including a restaurant adjacent to the lobby and a bar/lounge on the top floor. The completion date for everything is set for sometime next spring.
However it opens, the Standard will inject a much-needed dose of style and bustle into the neighborhood, which has become littered with sub-standard destinations of late. The eighteen-floor, 335-room hotel is a bold addition to the Westside skyline, consisting of two semi-separate pieces set at an angle and supported by a series of strategically placed columns. Half of the hotel literally straddles the soon-to-be-revitalized High Line, making it perhaps the most dramatic High Line-related architecture we’ve seen yet. And although it doesn’t yet connect to the High Line (special permits are required), reps for the hotel don’t discount the possibility.

Photography by Alice Hawkins

Of all the tough decisions to make in life, picking Heart over Pat Benatar doesn’t really qualify. Yet Phillipa “Pip” Brown, or the musician known as Ladyhawke, is deliberating over which femme rocker she would consider a primary influence. “It’s not fair to make me pick one,” she jokes. “I would say Heart just based on the merit of “Magic Man”. The New Zealand-born electro-pop singer is on the phone promoting her guiltily pleasurable self-titled debut, an unabashed amalgamation of all the great synth-pop records of yesteryear. “I had a lot of great memories of listening to music while growing up,” Brown explains. “Yeah, I listened to Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins as a teen, but it’s the Pet Shop Boys, Madonna, and Split Enz that I find myself coming back to now.” And while Brown is keenly aware of the inevitable naysayer union’s dismissal that her songwriting is either ironic or cheesy, she has already prepared a response for those skeptical about her sincerity: “You’re damned if you do it your way, and you’re damned if you don’t. But I’m not second-guessing anything. I was so sick of brooding. I’ve done the depressing lyrics and writing sad songs thing for so long. My heart wanted to be happy and write poppy songs.” A seemingly modest goal for a newcomer but Brown’s songs go way beyond the typical, top-40 call of booty. Her dance-inducing singles, like the shimmering new-wavy “Paris Is Burning” and her Chrissie Hynde impression as heard on “Back of the Van” are a time machine to our favorite musical era.

Courtesy of Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH & Co. KG

If complacency generates mediocre art, the works in Iranian Photography Now don’t have the luxury of this problem. Showcasing the work of thirty-six photographers — some already well known and some still emerging — the styles in this volume run the full spectrum from journalistic to fine art. There’s an urgency on these pages, where tradition and modernity go head
to head.
     For instance Mehraneh Atashi’s series takes a glimpse inside a traditional zourkhaneh, which literally means “house of strength”, a kind of spiritual gym for men that combines physical exercise, religious chants, and recitations from epic literature. Atashi manages to play with the mirrors in the space, so her own image appears alongside them. Amirali Ghasemi’s documentary series, Tehran Remixed, is a journey into the city’s underground life. His images capture young people drinking, smoking, dancing, and flirting like they do all around the world. However in this case their faces have been whitened out to protect their identities; their actions might be deemed inappropriate by the authorities.

The collaborative drawing project by JANE FINE and JAMES ESBER, J. Fiber, reconciles the struggle of the creative process with the duality of the self and the decisions that must follow. Featured in Issue 20, J. Fiber is risky reality, a dripping world undulating with booted appendages thwarting attempts to distinguish human orifices from artillery openings. Fine’s work has been presented in solo shows at the Bernard Toale Gallery in Boston and AR/Contemporary in Milan, and she has held a residency at Paris’ Yaddo. Esber received the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in 2002 and 2008, and recently had solo exhibitions at Pierogi in Booklyn, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC, and the PPOW in NY.

Photography by Alexander Wagner

Somewhere in the middle of Louisiana, en route to a show in Baton Rouge, Greg Gillis, the 26-year-old mash-up master behind the one-man party band Girl Talk, is listening intently to the local rock radio station — in other words, he’s working. “’These Dreams’ by Heart just came on,” Gillis says. “That song has a great instrumental breakdown — I really think I need to get into that.” The Heart classic would feel right at home among the 500-odd songs Gillis has sampled on his 2006 break-out, Night Ripper and on the recently released follow-up, Feed the Animals. Picking up where mash-up pioneer Danger Mouse left off, Gillis creates complex dance anthems that sound a bit like a Now That’s What I Call Music album on steroids. By frenetically sampling pieces of current top-40 pop and hip-hop with ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s classics (along with some insider hipster fare like the Unicorns and Of Montreal), Gillis re-contextualizes the songs involved, creating beats that are both brand-new and really, really danceable, all the while boldly layering where no sound collagist has gone before. We’re talking about a man who thought to mash-up MIA’s “Boys” with The Cranberries’ “Dreams”.

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Illustration by Marie Bliss Delpy

They name songs after 1960s dentistry equipment. Their first video employed ‘self-hypnosis’. Their merchandise includes yo-yo’s and jigsaw puzzles and they have had a long and well-documented love affair with vintage gear. In 1991, the year Tim Gane & Lætitia Sadier kick-started an eccentric Anglo-French musical experiment, few would have gambled it would last eighteen years. But “The Groop” also known as Stereolab has survived divorce and the death of a founding member to emerge stronger than ever, all the while retaining their status as bona fide outsiders. An encyclopedic knowledge of music from krautrockers Neu! to Mexican lounger Esquivel! remains stitched to their sleeves, and they blend apparently anachronistic sounds and musical eras into a formula all their own — breezy Motorik beats on the surface, with Brian Wilson-like attention to detail bubbling underneath.
      With the release of Chemical Chords, the band have notched up their eleventh album to date. Unlike the eighteen-minute guitar drone of one of their earliest releases, Jenny Ondioline, this latest batch of dense, pop-infused tunes barely scratch the three-minute mark, and were inspired, according to their composer Tim Gane, by Motown drumming and ‘60s girl groups. As you might expect however, laconic French chanteuse and pioneer of librarian chic Lætitia Sadier isn’t about to be swooning over boys on motorbikes or prom night dresses.

Photography by Thomas Beale

A Child overlooking the Hudson River at the right time and place during the late summer of 2008, may catch a sight that to most eyes will appear, at least for an instant, as either enigma or hallucination. Seven boats, crafted from scrap wood, metal, foam, barrels, bottlecaps, fabric, and a host of attendant detritus are due to leave port from Troy, New York in mid-August and arrive in New York City during the fi rst week of September. Titled Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, the craft resemble less boats or cities than fantastical hybridizations of tree houses and shantytowns, playgrounds mixed with refugee rafts — Miyazaki-like contraptions woven together from bits and pieces of a known world, though seeming to arrive from some imagined past and headed fully prepared toward an uncertain future. Swimming Cities is the vision of Swoon, a 30-year-old artist who first came to attention nearly four years ago for her ambitious, expertly skilled prints and cut-paper portraits that she was pasting on derelict walls and construction sites around New York City. The simultaneous beauty and ephemerality of her work — the focus apparent not only in her attention to detail in the portraits themselves, but also in their contextual placement — brought her wide acclaim and quickly set her apart in the genre of “street art”. In 2005, Swoon made her New York gallery debut with an installation at the infl uential downtown gallery Deitch Projects.

Alice Braga photographed in New York City by Christian Witkin. Grey Wool Jersey Kerrigan

This year at Cannes everybody wanted to see the new Fernando Meirelles film called Blindness. I should know, I half-patiently waited in line on the last day of the festival after missing an earlier screening because it got too crowded. It was then that I rediscovered Alice Braga on screen, the sultry vagabond from Lower City (2005) whose youngish good looks instantly turned the dangerous boys of City of God (2002) into oafes. Braga’s characters belie half-undisclosable truths that are ready to boil over. But in real life she’ll likely confront you with a disarming combination of buoyancy and coyness.

We spoke on the phone while she was in Sao Paulo, taking a break from too much traveling and not enough time out. But then, Sao Paulo wasn’t exactly conceived for relaxing. The sprawling metropolis pulsates night and day. And it happens to be the home of Meirelles, the director who put resurgent Brazilian cinema on the map and with whom Braga has been acquainted since City of God. Braga told me about her first steps in the film business and that funny Canadian band she’s been listening to
named Metric.