I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: SHABAZZ PALACES-Tiny Desk Concert #662 (October 23, 2017).

Shabazz Palaces is really nothing like anything else I’ve heard.

“On the ground we have leopard skin carpets Only the exalted come in and rock with us.”

With those words, spoken in the opening moments of Shabazz Palaces‘ Tiny Desk performance, Palaceer Lazaro (aka Ishmael Butler, also of Digable Planets fame) lays the ground rules for all present to enter the group’s metaphysical headspace.

And, man, talk about being transported to the other side. It’s impossible not to envision the Seattle studio, Black Space Labs, where Shabazz’s otherworldly soundscapes emerge to provide the ideal backdrop for shining a light on the fake.

 It’s the perfect proxy for the growing sense of alienation we’re all suffering, to some degree or another, in today’s space and time.

Shabazz Palaces is perhaps the most unusual rap band I’ve heard. There are hardly any beats. The songs are trippy with washes of synths and other sound effects.  There’s no heavy bass, it’s just up to Palaceer Lazaro to keep the flow.

There’s an 80 second intro in which Palaceer Lazaro introduces the band and talks about their sacred study, safe from the “Colluding Oligarchs.”

The first proper song “Colluding Oligarchs”says that “sacred spaces still exist / safe from colluding oligarchs.”  Theirs almost glitchy (but pretty) synth melodies (which I think Palaceer Lazaro triggered before he started rapping).  His partner Tendai Maraire plays a hand drum and congas (as well as some synth triggers).  And all the while he is singing echoed backing vocals.  Meanwhile, Otis Calvin plays an intertwining, slow, almost improved bass line.

For “They Come In Gold” there is no bass.  He says “this one we wrote to our phones.”  There’s a weird repeating melody that sounds like  snippet of vocals. Once again there’s lot of percussion–shakers, cymbals etc.  Half way through, he puts a filter on his voice to slow it down (a cool spacey effect) and then speeds it back up.

“Shine A Light” includes some squeaky synths and Palaceer Lazaro singing into a different mic.  When the music starts formally, the melody is a looped sample from Dee Dee Sharp’s 1965 song “I Really Love You.”  The bass is back playing some simple but groovy lines.  That second mic is connected to a higher-pitched echoed setting when he sings shine a light on the fake.

[READ: March 15, 2017] Punch

I don’t know much about Pablo Boffelli aside from that he is an Argentinian artist–he creates music as well as visual arts.

This book is a collection of line drawings (which remind me a lot of things that I draw when I am doodling).

Since the book is published in Spanish, with no English information anywhere (it’s not even on Goodreads), I couldn’t get a lot of information about it.  So from the publisher’s website I got (in translation):

In the PUNCH world, space is a character that unfolds and unfolds in millions of scenes. Cynicism and the absurd coexist with hints of synthetic humor.

Punch is the book drawn by Feli. His imprudent stroke runs through the pages building a city in which everything can happen. In the Punch world, space becomes a character that unfolds and unfolds in millions of possibilities. The urban landscape eats everything, the exteriors become interior and the fantasies materialize in the most unforeseen forms. The cynicism and the absurd coexist with hints of humor: the joke to discover for that spectator who contemplates in a disinterested way.

Punch is tender and corrosive, is infinite and minimal. It reverses the logic of physics and plays with the scale: stacked things, types or giant landscapes, a springboard that does not point to the pool, soccer balls in a refrigerator, humans without head, debauchery and micro-obsession. Put another way: this book is crazy. We recommend looking with a magnifying glass.

While a magnifying glass isn’t strictly necessary, there is a lot going on in these pages.  The cover alone can show you that much.

The general sense of the book is that Feli likes to draw absurdist images, and he has a kind of focus on heads (his own, I assume), sex (his own, I assume) and cities (which one, I’m note sure).

So there’s a full-page drawing of a large man being towed down the street by a tow truck.

But he also has a serial drawing of a person slowly sinking in to the ground (or rising out of the ground if you prefer) and trucks carrying a series of ever decreasing trucks on its back.

He’s got surreal drawings set in bathrooms: an oversized wolf at a urinal, a cannon in a stall, a floating head, an and man at a desk.  And that’s just one bathroom.

There’s a series of six panels of headless torsos–one drawing its own head, one walking it on a leash, one on a plate.

There’s an amusing mechanical scene in which a toilet leads to a machine and then men are analyzing the contents (yuck).

I enjoyed the scene of him checking his phone and pouring (and subsequently overflowing) coffee.  There’s also a faucet with AC, AF and COCA on the taps.

How about a cat that is so big it is squeezing out of the windows and chimney?

I liked the series of dreams.  In one a man on a bottom bunk dreams he is sleeping on the top.  Another man asleep at his desk dreams that he is awake at his desk.  Perhaps the best is the man dreaming of a woman taking off her clothes and see the alarm clock reaching over with a pair of scissors to snip that dream right off.

And then there’s the penises.  One has a dog/lampshade collar on the tip, another one is dunked in a glass of wine. In yet another scene a man is looking at a nude model but drawing a giant penis and in another one, there’s a scribble of a penis on a piece of paper taped to the wall.

But my favorite comics were the ones that flipped regular life.  A pool with diving board facing the wrong way–so yo would dive onto the cement. Or the series of soccer jokes like the one with the net facing backwards, or with a tank driving towards the goal, or the one with the goalie receiving a pizza or taking a selfie and letting the ball in the goal.  A few pages later there’s more–one with an elephant fully stuffed in the goal.  Another one where the goal is actually a basketball net with the goalie looking very casual.

His cityscapes are really the most interesting though–full pages with tons of little details to look at–like the skyscrapers made of cookies.  Or the ones with giant people, dinosaurs, boats and tanks all scattered throughout the pictures.

I’m not sure these drawings are “saying” anything, but they are amusing to look at.  As is his website.