05 May
tUnE-yArDs - Water Fountain Music Video tUnE-yArDs - Water Fountain Music Video
An appropriate follow-up to our feature on Experimental Music on Children's TV, Nor-Cal powerhouse Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs leads listeners into similar notalgic territories with the music video for "Water Fountain". With the aid of director Joel Kefali, the group explores nostalgic backdrops of children's television shows, incorporating everything from dance routines and 8-bit animations to Peewee's Playhouse-style puppetry and hoaky scientists. In the Q&A below, Kefali speaks to the ease of working with Garbus and company as well as the benefits of mixing media.
tUnE-yArDs - Water Fountain Music Video tUnE-yArDs - Water Fountain Music Video
27 Aug
The music video for tUnE-yArDs' "Bizness" fluttered through the internet as a colorful extension of main lady Merrill Garbus' long-standing style of bridging movement, geometric facepaint, and playful insanity. It was Garbus' first video to reach the extreme masses, and it, along with the music video for "My Country", were directed by San Francisco's Mimi Cave. They are both exercises in give and take between dancer and creator, and spontaneity and choreography, and both give young children the opportunity to participate in a professional art project. In the Q&A below, Cave speaks with REDEFINE about the creative process behind the videos, and we take a look backwards at the role of movement in tUnE-yArDs music videos through the years. The music video for "Bizness" will also be featured at REDEFINE magazine's Motion & Movement In Music Video panel at Bumbershoot and MusicfestNW 2012. SEE FULL DETAILS

 

REDEFINE magazine interview with Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs See all articles related to tUnE-yArDs

 

29 Apr
tUnE-yArDs' Merrill Garbus lends her voice to Elephant & Castle in this laid-back jazzy tune, which flies through prismatic landscapes feathered by bursts of light. In this highly digital rendering, balls of red and purple tones expand like nuclei in space, walking the line between hoakily animated and just artistically removed enough from our current plane of existence.

 

Visuals by Timeboy Elephant & Castle's latest record, Transitions, was released by Plug Research at the end of March 2012. You can also catch a live video of them performing "I Will" on a house stoop, below, along with a full tracklisting for the record.

 

31 Dec
Our third-annual album cover art feature uses interviews with artists and musicians to highlight the philosophical, thematic, and conceptual significance of great album cover artwork. THE BREAKDOWN    12 Collage + 14 Digital Illustration, Drawing, Design + 19 Illustration, Painting, Drawing + 8 Black And White Photography + 22 Color Photography + 6 Deluxe Packaging + 10 Fashion, Sculpture, Installation _____________________________    91 Album Covers For 2011 Best Of 2011 Album Cover Art

Adventure - Lesser Known
Using a purely spontaneous creative process that begins with nothing more than a general interest, Elena Johnston created an album cover for Adventure that musically and thematically captures the band's dynamic spirit.
QUOTES FROM: ELENA JOHNSTON, DESIGNER THEMES & CONCEPTS "I had been working with the idea of framing compelling found images with other found images to play with texture and spacial relations. I was also really into water imagery and space imagery at the time, so I played with how these two ideas visually and conceptually play with each other." THE EXTRAS "I hand-drew the typography, and it was eventually printed in glossy ink onto the matte finish of the image, so it stands out more." Record Label Carpark Records The Artists Design - Elena Johnston Booklet Design - Benny Boeldt Mediums & Materials Collage, Digital
RELATED ARTICLES: LESSER KNOWN ALBUM REVIEW
Adventure "Rio" by Carpark Records
31 Dec

This in-depth feature highlights how well-executed album artwork can go beyond genre lines to expand into territories of philosophical, thematic, and conceptual significance. Perhaps now more than ever, album cover artwork plays a vital role in music....

23 Dec

A staff-compiled list of some of our favorite songs from the year 2011, in no particular order or with allegiance to any particular style....

26 Apr

On a Tuesday night in San Francisco, I wandered to Great American Music Hall, alone, having been told I would only have a ticket for myself. This turned out to be untrue. But with the man at will call telling me that my guest needed to be present right then...

17 Apr

tUnE-yArDs' new video for "Bizness" off her upcoming album, w h o k i l l, combines manic editing tricks, modern dance, and lipsyncing by young students pretending to be Merrill Garbus. These elements themselves are nothing new, but as one might expect from Garbus, everything in this video is...

19 Feb

To use the word "unusual" to describe the performance February 19th, at the Merkin Concert Hall in NYC, is an understatement. As part of the Ecstatic Music Festival taking place from Jan-March 2011 in NYC, Roomful Of Teeth performed songs composed by William Brittelle, Caleb Burhans, and Merrill Garbus of...

13 Feb

The San Francisco trio, BEEP, is equal parts experimental electronica, free jazz, and jam band -- a delectable mishmashing, ragbagging, hodgepodging mingle-mangle of sounds. The band's latest record, City Of The Future, will tickle the sensibilities of easily distracted individuals, while driving fans of the orderly to the brink of...

03 Aug
In 2009, Portland record label Marriage Records released Merrill Garbus' first album under the moniker tUnE-yArDs. The album was called BiRd-BrAiNs, and only one month later, Garbus was signed to 4AD, a reputable label known for their work with everyone from Deerhunter and Blonde Redhead to The Mountain Goats. With only one month of buffer time between her record release and her label signing, what was it about Garbus that captured the attention of such a huge label?
To put it concisely, Garbus is a helluva woman. Armed with a ukelele, free music editing software, and a digital recorder to capture samples with, Garbus created the lo-fi BiRd-BrAiNs in as DIY a manner as possible. She channeled the hopelessness from a particularly low point of her life into an experimental album – one which feels positive in its instrumentation but has hints of cynicism in its lyrical content. The album is chock full of rhetorical questions -- hypothetical what-ifs one might ask when questioning oneself.

"At a certain point in my mid-20s, I hit real rock bottom -- I mean, in terms of, feeling I wanted to exist on the planet. When I realized that if the choice was between dying versus doing something that made me want to live and made me want to be a part of the world, that was the obvious choice," explains Garbus. "And I guess through my music, I found that."

Listen to "Hatari" - DOWNLOAD MP3
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