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Photography by Jim Newberry for Thrill Jockey

Here on Chicago’s west side, the streets are closed for Puerto Rican pride weekend. A swirl of festivities that could just as easily be celebrating a return to form for the pioneering avant-garde instrumentalists whose Beacons of Ancestorship, the follow-up to 2004’s tepidly received It’s All Around You, is just days away from hitting record stores.
     Tortoise has never been a full-time band, yet with all five members involved in countless side-projects – drummer Dan Bitney’s Isotope 217, for example – their many hiatuses have ensured an endurance that most indie bands from the ‘90s failed to cultivate. “High Class Slim Came Floating In”, the opening track on Beacons of Ancestorship, finds Tortoise embracing more playful and fuzzed-out sounds that Bitney admits might have been reserved for other projects in the past. “There’s always been a line with my ideas and stuff that I didn’t think was appropriate for Tortoise,” he says. “When I started 217 it was kind of a way to do what Tortoise was doing but more stripped down. It could be more funky or have hip-hop elements. So now I think that line of what was appropriate is gone.”

Photography by Iwan Baan

The most common response to the question “What’s your dream home?” is probably something like “A place in the woods, surrounded by nature.” That’s because many of us equate living deep in the forest or high in the mountains with serenity and, if the house is modernist (or better yet, a modernist take on a log cabin!), a sort of rustic sophistication. Think of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater; hell, even that vampire family’s house in Twilight. But many of us spend as much or more time at work than we do at home. And many of us work in some of the world’s most demoralizing, low-ceilinged buildings in the busiest and smelliest areas of major cities. So, short of becoming a lumberjack, how should today’s cooped-up white-collar employee dream of escaping his or her miserable workspace? By getting a master’s degree in architecture and applying for a job at Selgascano, a Spanish design firm whose new studio is in the middle of the woods outside Madrid.

Ghostly International

With three albums’ worth of music in just five years, 22-year-old Randolph Chabot has been producing his home-recorded electro-pop at an astonishing clip. This week, after much anticipation, the prolific prodigy from Detroit has released his proper full-length debut, Moondagger — a swirling set of twelve songs whose titular implement reportedly refers to a space-age myth about seeking “ultimate power.” Sci-fi fantasies aside, Moondagger indeed seems to herald a powerful voice of tomorrow, a voice that likewise befits today’s age of ADD. On “Toxic Crusaders”, Chabot’s swooning vocals over jaunty guitars evoke the wide-eyed wistfulness of Vampire Weekend mixed with the hyperactive futurism of New Order. Meanwhile, “Parallelogram” (stream below) launches the M83 model of lush, spacey synths out of this stratosphere with a frenzied rush of propulsive rhythms.

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Deastro – Parallelogram

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First was the Tesla – an electric dream car taking you from zero to sixty in four seconds with a range of 220 miles per charge, bringing environmental responsibility and high-performance sports cars together in perfect harmony. Of course, its one drawback is its price tag, affordable only to the super rich.
     Enter the Zero, straight out of the land of Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Maserati. Named for its lack of greenhouse emissions, the name might also be a hint at its accessible cost. The newcomer isn’t able to go as fast or as far as its competition but the Zero brings something much-needed to the world of electric cars: affordability. Its €18-20.000 price tag makes it a realistic option for the average driver, beating the much-anticipated Chevy Volt to the punch by a solid year. And the cute compact design makes it the Mini-Cooper of electric cars. Let’s hope consumers will find it as irresistible as we do.
     Hitting markets early next year, the 113-inch two-seater will be a perfect for cramped city streets. Constructed primarily out of cast aluminum, it weighs merely 1,200 pounds, one quarter of which is the latest generation of Lithium batteries. It charges simply by connecting to a normal socket. The chassis is one hundred percent recyclable aluminum. With a range of eighty-eight miles on a single charge, it is well within the average daily usage of most drivers, and can accelerate from zero to fifty-five km per hour in less than five seconds.
     The Zero will have its world premiere at the International Motor Show in Bologna, Italy, in December.

Downtown Records

Baile funk, hip hop, electro breakdance, mash up, pop, and indie rock remixes – is there anything these guys can’t do? Diplo and Switch, two of today’s most innovative producers and the guys that brought you “Paper Planes” and Santigold, have once again proven there’s no genre they can’t conquer. After skating around reggae and dancehall on previous productions, Major Lazer is the duos’ headlong foray into the world of Jamaican music and also their first official full-length collaboration. Recorded at the legendary Tuff Gong Studios, the album not only captures some of the original reggae magic left there, but succeeds in forwarding that sound through deft integration of programmed beats and sampling. At times, electro takes over and relegates Rasta to mere words (like the frenetic lead track “Hold The Line”) while others, like the great “Can’t Stop Now”, take a more traditional approach to classic reggae with occasional “peek-a-boo” hip hop samples and dub effects. And credit is due to the vocalists showcased throughout (including Santi, Turbulence, Mr. Vegas and Amanda Blank), who take these productions even higher. It’s almost unfair how prolific and versatile Diplo and Switch are, and Major Lazer demonstrates they’re not only on point but one step beyond.

Sin título / Untitled (prelude to sumer), 2005

I first became friends with Dr. Lakra a few years ago when I went to his studio in Oaxaca to get a tattoo. Stepping inside, it was like walking into a baby devil’s playpen: there were toys and dolls and weird shit everywhere, stuff he used in his art. Books, paintings, postcards and stickers covered the walls. We cleared a space on the floor so he could get to work on my flesh.
     Once finished, when he refused payment, I gave him a couple of poster-size photos of mine instead for him to intervene on, knowing that was one of his preferred mediums. He’d spent years tattooing skin, why not tattoo paper? At first, he just did it for fun, but soon the scrapbook turned into a unique body of work which I wrote about for PLANET several years ago. Now, RM Editorial has published a book of one of his collections of magazine interventions, titled Health and Efficiency.
     With an all-black velvet cover and beautifully printed inside, Health and Efficiency is a sexy little book. The pieces are all derived from a pile of old nudist camp magazines he picked up in Brick Lane market in East London. In the original clippings nubile porcelain-white maidens pose puritanically next to ponds and lillies. But in Lakra’s versions they have sailor tattoos and get skewered by monochrome skeletons and mugwumps. On the surface, the tattoo-scratched images appear gaudy and comical, like doodles in a textbook. But if you engage them, the shapes and figures he inserts have a mythical underworld quality.

Daptone Records

Even though The Budos Band hails from Staten Island, you’d swear their eleven members are a mixture of Detroit and Nigerian tribes. Their sound is a fantastic confluence of Afrobeat and classic American soul that never forgets its ultimate goal of filling the dancefloor. This EP collects seven lost grooves recorded between the band’s two albums, and while standing on its own as a great listen, it also shows the crystallization of the their unique sound (self-described as Afro-Soul). The standout track, “The Proposition”, (stream below) could even be taken as a Budos aesthetic manifesto. Driven by blazing horns, electric organ, and funky guitars, it evokes Booker T. and the MGs, memories of Fela and even Boogaloo. Just another step in the right direction from our friends at Daptone. And for you New Yorkers, catch The Budos Band at Central Park’s Summer Stage next month.

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The Budos Band – The Proposition