"Return To Danger Bay" by Robert Mason

This is some deliciously dark, growling dance music: "Return To Danger Bay" by Robert Mason. I'd love to lose myself on a dance floor to this tune...flashing lights, sweat, hypnotized...it's the kind of music you'd dance to in The Matrix before Trinity and Neo come and tear up the place (welcome back T and N, missed ya, see ya soon).

BEAUTY: Installation--Ian Strange

Ian Strange uses light to interrupt reality. His most recent iteration of Light Intersection just closed in Sydney, Australia. The artist says:

Commissioned by the City of Sydney, LIGHT INTERSECTIONS II inserts beams of light through the facade of a late 19th century Victorian terrace home. Appearing to puncture the building across two perspective planes, the lines of light are drawn from the building's perspective lines, abstracted and inserted back into the architecture. The series explores the hand-drawn line in the landscape. In particular, perspective lines and their relationship to art and architecture as a way of understanding, interpreting and affecting landscape.

https://ianstrange.com/

"Snake Charmer" by Eagle Eye Williamson

One-man-band Eagle Eye Williamson released this amazing track five years ago and it has lost none of its punch. "Snake Charmer" is a fantastic, dark, psychedelic groove that seems to evoke sounds and feelings from rock n' roll past, but is resolutely itself.

I don’t know where I’m going
I don’t know where I’ve been
I’ve been told there’s a place
That no one has ever seen
If your travels take you there
You’ll never come back again

Stars have all been delayed
Causing your course to stray
What was once dark and grey
Has become bright blue and green
When the machine becomes you
And you become a dream

Now you finally closed the door
Start trying to find your way home
And you look all around
Don’t know which way to go

http://www.eagleeyewilliamson.com/

BEAUTY: Interiors--Stephen Shadley's Castle In The Catskills

Interior designer Stephen Shadley lovingly restored a dilapidated house in the Catskills. I love how he used a combination of red and black, not a palette one usually associates with Catskills homes, but wow, does it work. The house as a whole is gorgeous and evokes an early 1900s sense when homes in the Adirondacks referenced a just-past Victorian sensibility. The home was profiled in Architectural Digest and they wrote:

It was decades ago when AD100 designer Stephen Shadley first glimpsed a burned-out stone ruin, perched cinematically on Potic Mountain, just a few miles from his home in Catskill, New York. “Everyone in the area referred to it as ‘the castle,’” he recalls of the fascinating site that, after a fire in the 1970s, had turned into an illicit hangout spot, covered in graffiti. “All that was left was the foundation and a couple of chimneys, a little road leading up to the 16-acre property, and this view that was just breathtaking to behold.”

After he got his hands on some photos of the original 1913 structure—a three-story, Arts and Crafts–style summer house designed by Wilfred Buckland for a pair of English sisters—Shadley vowed that if he ever had the opportunity to purchase the property, he would rebuild the house to its former glory. Many years later, he received a call from a woman who had inherited the property. She was ready to sell.

Shadley, who had lived in the area since the 1980s, bought the place 12 years ago. But the process of rebuilding it took time. After several years of research and design, he hired a local mason to repair the stonework. “The house is visible from some of the roads down below and I wanted it to evoke the image of what had been here,” says Shadley, who—with guidance from his mentor, interior designer Robert Bray, and an eye toward the environmentally sensitive approach of Frank Lloyd Wright—followed the lines of the original foundation. Ultimately, that meant conjuring what looks like an old Adirondacks lodge, accented with bright red windows—a look he lifted from a book of old lodges that became something of an homage to Wright, who often used a similar hue.

Largely, what’s inside either reflects or makes space for the scenery out the window. Shadley, tapping into his roots as a scenic painter, created several murals based on 19th-century photographs of nearby sites; at the entry, he hung a vintage photograph of hemlock trees that was made for the National Parks Service. Perhaps the most striking pieces in the home are hewn from the literal ground it sits on. Two huge pieces of bluestone—scavenged from the property when the team blasted away a bit of the mountain to create space for a garage—were brought in on a forklift and embedded in the concrete floors as tables.

Ultimately, however, the most jaw-dropping decorations in this house are what lie out the windows. And after five years of living there—with a year-plus of around-the-clock time at home—Shadley has had the chance to really soak it all in. “Deer walk through in hordes, [plus] foxes, porcupines, wild turkeys, everything imaginable,” he says. “Just looking out the windows can be a fun experience. It’s pretty phenomenal.” Also phenomenal? Now, when Shadley gazes up at Potic from town, what he sees is not a total ruin but a castle, standing tall.

A circa 1913 photograph of Potic Castle

https://www.stephenshadley.com/

BEAUTY: Painting--Joanne Hastie

I am loving the loose, painterly, Matisse-like still lives of Joanne Hastie. Gorgeous color palette.

https://joannehastie.com/

"Chiaroscuro" by Alessandro Cortini

Let's listen to Italian electronic musician Alessandro Cortini's amazing new song "Chiaroscuro" as it builds to an emotional climax. This is a great example of what I like to call Dark Ambient. It makes sense since Cortini was a member of Nine Inch Nails (previously here) and a touring member of How To Destroy Angels (previously here), Trent Reznor's side project with his wife Mariqueen Maandig.

https://cortini.bandcamp.com/

Bonne Fête Nationale! 2021

Aujourd'hui c'est la Fête nationale en France!

The French National Day is the anniversary of the Storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, a major event of the French Revolution, as well as the Fête de la Fédération that celebrated the unity of the French people on 14 July 1790.

A mes lecteurs qui habitent en France, je vous souhaite...

Bonne Fête Nationale!

"Skyline, Be Mine" by Shura

I seem to be a teensy bit obsessed with this song, "Skyline, Be Mine" by Shura. I've had it on repeat for, oh, quiiiiiite a long while now. I just can't get over how it builds and builds and just keeps going with layers of sounds and lines...wow...

https://www.weareshura.com/

The Average Colors of the World

Erin Davis creates data visualizations to, as she puts it, "express my weird arty side and cold analytical side in one nice package." And this is a fascinating visualization: she used satellite imagery from the Sentinel-2 satellite to average out the colors it sees in various countries and continents around the world. It sure is easy to see where the dry regions are...

https://erdavis.com/2021/06/26/average-colors-of-the-world/

BEAUTY: Painting--Sarah Ann Weber

Feast your eyes on the engaging patterns and colors of Sarah Ann Weber's marvelous works filled to the brim with the glorious shapes of nature. And I appreciate how her figures, when and if they are present, are basically outlines, inconsequential against the pervasive psychedelic tapestry of leaves and branches and flowers...

Top to bottom: After Etant Donnes; Ambassador's Hotel Return; Arrest All The Beauty; Let The Wolves Out; Nature Boys of Hollywood; New Fields; Palm Canyon; Self Portrait; Worship In The Grove

But I particularly love her In Paris series...and how she painted on the mat surrounding each piece as well, so the work seeps out as it were...it feels lively and alive.

Top to bottom: Canal St. Martin; Giverny; Luxembourg Gardens; Musee de Cluny, fountain; Musee d'Orsay, steps; Train To Fontainebleau; Tuileries Gardens; Versailles

http://sarahannweber.com/index.html