Two young American filmmakers traveled and filmed in rural Haiti for five weeks before the earthquake, and they’ve now decided to release the resulting 40-minute documentary to view for free over the Internet. In doing so, they hope to inform the world about the deep, systemic poverty that existed in rural Haiti even before the devastating earthquake, as well as the community spirit and hope that persisted in spite of it. The filmmakers’ synopsis describes the film as such:

The first interview introduces Sandelwi, a farmer and a mystic, who is riding on top of a bus that is speeding around the treacherous curves of the mountainous road to Port-au-Prince, mindless of the precipitous drop to the valley below. ‘When you’re in Haiti, I consider you Haitian,’ he says. ‘It’s up to us, we have to put our heads together to do development.’ … The Road to Fondwa is not a one-way street, but rather a conduit between two very different, yet intricately connected nations.
 
The film’s exploration of America’s role in creating the perilous political and economic situation in Haiti before the earthquake serves as a potent reminder of our continuous responsibility to help. Head over to the film’s website, to view The Road to Fondwa and/or purchase the DVD (all proceeds go to Partners in Health). And as always we urge you to continue to help the Haiti recovery by donating to reputable relief organizations like Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders.

Rough Trade

When you are a young, smart group, whose initial recordings are done without much supervision, there is a good chance your later albums will turn out sounding entirely different. This is the case with Northern California’s The Morning Benders. For the band’s follow-up to 2008’s Talking Through Tin Cans, group leader Christopher Chu takes on co-production duties with Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor. Attempting a lo-fidelity approach again (as on Tin Cans), Big Echo crackles with the hiss of purported vinyl. “Cold War (Nice Clean Fight)” is the most upbeat with a bouncy acoustic guitar and thrumming bass drum tightened by a simple chorus. “All Day Daylight” has a bit of a bite with edgy riffs and hand claps. But for the most part, Big Echo is slow and calculated, the rhythms moving at a leisurely pace. This unhurried attitude is also adopted by Chu’s vocals, which harmonize fluidly, reverberating with the others. Keeping with Tin Cans’ spirit of brevity, none of the songs on Big Echo take too long to get to the point — or labor it once they arrive there. The Morning Benders may not win any originality points, but they have climbed up a few rungs on the songwriting ladder.

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Buy this at iTunes.

Ever wanted to touch a cloud? Now you can. Because that’s what a Faliero Sarti scarf feels like in your hand. For Monica Sarti, the head designer, the tactile experience is of paramount importance – her company’s most popular fabric is a cashmere/silk blend that infuses the scarves with extraordinary softness.
     L’Accessorio Faliero Sarti was founded in 1949 in Tuscany, Italy. It started out as a fabrics house, supplying the newly reborn Italian clothing industry with high quality textiles from its mill. As its reputation grew, so did the list of their clients, which now includes Chanel and Donna Karan.
     But Monica Sarti wanted to take the company further than a mere textile manufacturer. Making accessories seemed like a first logical step, since Sarti already possessed extensive expertise in fabrics. Nevertheless, she wanted to push her obsession with manipulating the yarn further. I caught up with co-owner Federico Sarti at Pitti Uomo in Florence to discuss their fabric choices and methods of production. “We are famous of course for using traditional fabrics like cashmere, wool, and modal,” said he, “but we are now also experimenting with more innovative materials such as protein and bamboo.”
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Frenchkiss Records

Nowadays, underground bands typically do something fancy to get noticed — creating baroque arrangements and baffling song structures or using whacked-out instrumentation to impress. So it’s particularly refreshing when a band like Local Natives comes along and does something brilliant without really doing anything radically different. Gorilla Manor, their debut album (which finally hits U.S. stores this week, after building a buzz in import exile) simply has the catchiest songs you’ve heard in a long time, underpinned by fantastic, creative drumming and three-part vocals veteran bands would kill for. At first blush, it sounds like My Morning Jacket performing songs by The Shins, with soaring crescendos that provide gravity to would-be pop songs. While it’s a reference point for their sound, this critic’s “short cut” fails to peg the immediacy this Silver Lake, California quintet creates, like an old musical friend you’ve heard before but aren’t sure where. The early standout “Sun Hands” trickily vacillates between subdued and exuberant, both delicate and raucous, while “Airplanes” trots along nostalgically, nicely measured out. It’s a safe bet that the first part of their name will become a misnomer, as the world beyond California, and even the US, takes notice of this gem in the months to come.

Check out the “Airplanes” video after the jump.

Buy this at Other Music or iTunes.
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San-Zhr Pod Village, Taiwan, 2008 (Photography by Magda Biernat courtesy of Clic Gallery)

In a world subsumed by top tens and to dos, Polish-born photographer Magda Biernat takes aim at our itemized approach to travel. Now running at Clic Gallery through March 2 is her Continental Bounce, culled from a year of transcontinental exploration. Documenting remote spaces through a local lens, Biernat captures Kenya, Australia, and everything in between. Oceanic vistas aside, though, Continental Bounce is no ordinary tourist brochure. Subtly elusive, the exhibit disorients even the most surefooted of jetsetters. Take Tipi Resort in Swakopmund, Namibia, for example, which features an African chalet seemingly plucked from the Sonoran desert. Avoiding major sites in favor of the interstices that define the journey, Continental Bounce is a testament to shifting borders and cultural ambiguity. We sat down with the artist to discover more.

What draws you to interiors and architecture?

Early on, I noticed that I have a good eye for structures and geometrical shapes and combinations of colors. That’s why I decided to go into architecture commercially…. Even though I love good portraits of people, first of all I am taking pictures of spaces.
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Photography courtesy of Kevin Mazur/Wire Image

Tuesday night, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, I watched a 77-year-old woman perform a three-hour rock concert at full tilt. She danced, shook, shimmied, sang, screeched, howled, and cajoled and charmed the crowd, all while beaming with lightness and pixie playfulness — she even dropped some major doses of universal love and unity on us throughout the evening. Who was this enlightened septuagenarian banshee? Yoko Ono, of course.
     The occasion was a multi-pronged celebration: Yoko’s upcoming birthday; 2009’s release of Between My Head And The Sky (which marks a new beginning for her and John Lennon’s seminal Plastic Ono Band); a reunion with some of the original band’s members after nearly forty years (Eric Clapton and Klaus Voorman!); her collaboration with son Sean; and life itself. Joining the celebration were the band’s new members — fairly evenly divided between cutting-edge Japanese noise pop musicians (Yuka Honda, Cornelius, Haruomi Hosono, and others) and downtown New York experimentalists (Erik Friedlander, Shahzad Ismaily, Michael Leonhart, to name a few) — along with a list of heavyweight special guests: Paul Simon, Harper Simon, Bette Midler, Justin Bond, Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Mark Ronson, and Scissor Sisters. Needless to say, it was a memorable, possibly historic show.
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The new building at Brunnenstraße 9 in Berlin’s Mitte district was recently hailed by Artforum Magazine as “a retroactive manifesto of ’90s-era hypercontextualism” and, more simply, “gorgeous”. What their praise didn’t recognize, however, is that this mixed-use space is not just something to look at but a building to listen to; passers-by can plug their headphones into the inconspicuous silver jack embedded in the building’s concrete and literally hear the otherworldly orchestrations of the structure itself.
     For the permanent sound installation, titled BUG, American artist Mark Bain embedded seismological sensors at various points of the building. Using a force-feedback system, he then converts the micro-vibrations the sensors pick up into audible sound that can be heard by anyone, at any time of day or night — provided they bring their own headphones. External elements such as wind or rain, as well as the mechanical sounds of the elevator, heating system, and underground metro — in addition to footsteps and muffled voices — are all picked upand mixed into an impromptu, experimental composition. Upon hearing the sound, some listeners dance; others have claimed that it gives them goosebumps.
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Photography courtesy of Alfredo Santa Cruz

The home is where a culture begins, and the members of the Alfredo Santa Cruz family are re-defining our culture/environment relationship by building homes from unlikely materials. The Casa De Botellas was created by the Santa Cruz family in Puerto Iguazu, Argentina, as a tool for promoting ecological and social responsibility. Although they are not architects or engineers, the Alfredo Santa Cruz family successfully designed their portable structures to be accessible, simple, and creative down to the last detail.
     The structures of the house and every piece of furniture inside are constructed entirely from used plastic. PET remains intact for 300 years, which is longer than cement, and more durable. This is an ingenious re-use that turns the hazard of slow decomposition into an asset.
     The walls are made from 1,200 PET plastic bottles, which support a 1,300-piece Tetra Pack roof holding 140-piece CD jewel-case doors and windows that surround plastic-bottle couches and beds. A self-invented casting technology keeps the bottles fused together without obstructing the visual symmetry.
     Creating environmental solutions from the ground up, the Cruz family provides free home building courses to address both trash and housing scarcity in Latin American countries, “realities that nobody can hide”.
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Irish designer Bernice Kelly launched Macha jewelry (named after her hometown in Northern Ireland) in 2007. Pretty without being too precious, the London-based line offers incredible rings and humble necklaces in simple materials like silver, gold plate, and gemstones. To craft her accessories (many of them unisex), Kelly antiques and textures the pieces for a worn-in look. It’s an aesthetic that sometimes renders pieces a little imperfect; a few designs are even fashioned by starting with an accidental shape or a carving mistake. But Kelly calls her vintage-inspired jewelry “classics of the future”.  And some of these handmade pieces are even a little whimsical: crab-claw cufflinks, molar-shaped pendants, sterling silver rings shaped like string knots. Kelly’s own photography reveals the intricacies of the pieces. One ring boasts a huge nugget of a gemstone – or does it? Upon closer look, the stone is actually a ridged chunk of metal, set like a diamond. Past collections have drawn on diverse, historical contexts, more industrious than elegant, from the American roadtrip to Victorian mining. And as a label, Macha is truly about the work, quality over an image or a pretense. The modern brand regularly posts its newest, modestly hewn pieces on its Facebook page. Lately, Kelly has been advertising her chunky-stoned rings for Valentine’s Day.
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