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Kim Gordon Reminding You That She’s The Greatest

  Kim Gordon, Courtney Love, Marilyn Manson, and Ariel Pink (Ariel Pink?) all star in Hedi Slimane’s great new Saint Laurent rock fashion ads. We only posted the Gordon one because our server could only take so much awesome, but in the event that you’d like to see the rest (and you should…), you should just go here. Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, Google +, our Tumblr, and sign up for our mailing list.

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New Age Now

I’m sitting on a cushion on the floor of the Body Actualized Center, a yoga studio and event space in Bushwick, with my eyes closed and my hands on my knees, surrounded by a bunch of other kids around my age. On a chair in front of us is an older woman, draped in beads and a gauzy blue outfit, leading us in song: “I am opening up, I am ooo-ooo-opening up, to the luminous love-light of the One.” Her […]

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Band Booking: Talking I Ching with Montreal’s Valleys

Marc St. Louis and Tillie Perks are the duo behind electronic Montreal-based band Valleys, whose newest album Are You Going to Stand There And Talk Weird All Night? will be released April 30th on Kanine Records. Marc and Tillie have been making music since the mid-’00’s, trading places on guitars, synthesizers, drums and sequencers. On previous River Phoenix and Stoner EPs, and their Sometimes Water Kills People LP, they have skirted the line between dream pop and post rock, with an increasing if subtle introduction of electronic elements and rhythms. Their […]

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Debating Goth in a Castle: A Dispatch From the Gothic: Culture, Subculture, Counterculture Conference

You can argue that intellectualization of any music subculture signals its death knell, but for a genre that prides itself upon already being dead, goth seems particularly desirous of an academic evisceration. Last weekend’s Gothic: Culture, Subculture, Counterculture conference in London did just that, with nearly 70 papers presented by PhD students, professors, journalists and independent scholars on the Gothic literary genre, Gothic architecture, and goth subculture. While the classic blood and guts were all discussed, True Blood, Twilight, and […]

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Band Booking: Deciphering “Twilight Language” With Family Curse

Family Curse play deeply abrasive punk rock. Their new album, Twilight Language, is menacing and paranoid in all the right ways; writing at Noisey, Zachary Lipez noted that “[t]he record sounds mean, like the speed is still working but the visuals have gone sour.”  It’s a bracing listening experience, and I checked in with guitarist Ken Edge and vocalist Erick Hughes via email to learn more.

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Band Booking: Talking Maxwell Perkins, DC Legacies, and the MC5 with Deathfix

Looking at the lineup of Deathfix, whose self-titled debut was just released on Dischord, might prompt all sorts of expectations of what one might hear on their album. Guitarist Brendan Canty was one-quarter of Fugazi; keyboard player Rich Morel has been a house producer and worked with Bob Mould. The rhythm section of Devin Ocampo (drums) and Mark Cisneros (bass) come from Medications. And yet the seven songs heard here fall into a sort of dark, rhythmic pop sound, anchored by […]

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Poetry and Punks on The Bowery: Richard Hell’s “I Dreamed I was a Very Clean Tramp” Reviewed

I Dreamed I was a Very Clean Tramp By Richard Hell Ecco; 304 p. “Broadway had two shadow companions,” Luc Sante wrote in his book Low Life. “Starchy, upper-class Fifth Avenue on the one hand, and on the other the Bowery, the proverbial den of all vices.” Sante was writing about the Bowery as the street and neighborhood of mid-1800s to the early 20th century, but prior to the Civil War, farmland, estates, and theatres populated the area we recognize today […]

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