Latest news with #PJHarvey
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on a new era for museums: letting the public take control
The museum of the future has arrived and it looks like an Amazon warehouse. But art critics have unanimously awarded it five stars. From Saturday, visitors to the V&A East Storehouse in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park will be able to wander among the 250,000 objects in the Victoria and Albert Museum's collection that are not on display in its west London home. The headline-grabbing order-an-object initiative means you can book online to get your hands (gloves are provided) on a priceless artefact any day you like. And all for free. It is a triumph born out of necessity. After the V&A's eviction from their Kensington storage home a decade ago, they decided that instead of hiding one of the world's largest design collections in an expensive warehouse, they would turn it into an attraction in its own right. Storage is a big issue for institutions: only 1% of the British Museum's more than 8m artefacts are on public display. Showing off your overflowing attic makes the most of what you've already got, repurposing a closet that, for the V&A, includes a Balenciaga gown (the most requested item so far) and PJ Harvey's hotpants. Open-access storage is not a new idea. In 2021, the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam became the first purpose-built (and presumably the only Ikea-salad bowl-inspired) public art-storage destination. The V&A Storehouse takes a leap further. You are invited behind the scenes of the museum, where everything is jumbled together and conservators are at work – a giant version of the BBC's The Repair Shop. Like the children who run away to New York's Metropolitan Museum for a week in EL Konigsburg's classic 1967 novel From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler, visitors are able to explore freely. 'We wanted people to feel like they're trespassing,' said Tim Reeve, the deputy director of the V&A. 'That feeling of joy, seeing behind the curtain.' Part of the V&A's mission was to inspire innovation, to be a bit radical. Ordering an object is a user-friendly way of engaging newcomers, not just a click-and-collect for art lovers. Like Sadler's Wells, which also launched a Stratford venue earlier this year, the V&A hopes to draw in a younger audience who may have felt excluded from its stately South Kensington home. A sister V&A East Museum will open close to the Storehouse next year. Putting everything on show cannot get over uncomfortable questions about the provenance of a museum's acquisitions. But it does give transparency to how the museum works and what – down to every last pin – it has got. This week, Manchester Museum won the European museum of the year award for its own approach to opening up the curatorial process. As part of its revamp in 2023, the museum handed its new South Asia gallery to a collective of 30 people from Manchester's diaspora communities to design and fill as they chose. The top floor has been given over to a college for neurodivergent students, with a London campus opening at the Design Museum in September. The pandemic, as well as funding and sponsorship crises and anxieties over legacy, have put institutions under pressure. Both the V&A East Storehouse and Manchester Museum show bold new ways forward. They mark a shift in how museums perceive their role. They remind us that these collections are our collections. Fill your basket.
Axios
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
From Steve Albini's shelves: Music gems for sale
Fans of music ephemera and pop culture collectibles just got access to a goldmine. The big picture: Longtime Chicago musician and producer Steve Albini 's collection of records, T-shirts, books and "mystery bargains" are for sale with proceeds going to Albini's estate. Flashback: Albini died suddenly last May at the age of 61. He famously recorded Nirvana's "In Utero" album, as well as the Pixies and PJ Harvey, and fronted the Chicago bands Big Black and Shellac. State of play: The first 300-400 items dropped Friday, and nearly all sold out. Each week 100-200 more items of "the unusual, the rare, the weird and the overlooked" will be available, according to the website. "Det som engang var," an album by the Norwegian black metal solo project Burzum is still available with a list price of $1,500. All items purchased are accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from the collection's administrator, Byron Coley. What they're saying:"Steve pursued many fields of interest, and most of them are represented somewhere in his collections," according to the website.
Vogue
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
Hear Me Out: What If Gen Xers Are Actually the Cool Ones?
I am nine years old and my mother—in her mid-20s at the time—is vacuuming the living room while 'My Favourite Game' by the Cardigans plays on full blast. With each drum thwack she hits another corner with the power nozzle, bare feet padding across the carpet in low-rise jeans, me watching deadpan from the sofa. I will always associate that song with this memory. Sunlight splashing through the open window; those distorted vocals, turned up to full; and the big, blocky CD player, with speakers that make your hands shake if you touch them. Though I was born in the '90s—a millennial—I was raised by a dyed-in-the-wool Gen Xer, and was therefore spoonfed Gen-X culture from an early age. Our CD rack was full of '90s bands: Pixies, PJ Harvey, Placebo. The films I later became obsessed with were all of this era: Girl, Interrupted; Fallen Angels; Run Lola Run; Hackers. By the time I got into Bret Easton Ellis, Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation, and Irvine Welsh—all Gen-X writers, with Gen-X sensibilities—something had become abundantly clear. I had been born 15 years or so too late. And now I was destined for a life of Instagram and Asos packages, as opposed to being a '90s slacker making mixtapes and hating on my corporate job. Over the past few years, generational warfare has only ramped up—so much so that it's become boring to even reference: Gen Z hating on millennials for being cringe, millennials hating on Gen Z for being puritanical, and everyone hating on boomers for being, well, boomers. But Gen X—born somewhere between 1965 and 1980—has been largely forgotten about (although even saying that has become a cliché of sorts). Alongside all of this finger-pointing among the generations are claims that, actually, we were the cool ones—no, it was me! But what if it's none of us? What if the cool ones are actually those unbothered people that nobody talks about?
Scoop
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Scoop
Wet Kiss Tease Upcoming Album With ‘Skirt'; Thus Spoke The Broken Chanteuse Out June 27 Via Dinosaur City
Naarm/Melbourne antic glam rock group Wet Kiss unveil 'Skirt', the second single from their sophomore album Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse, out Friday, June 27 via Dinosaur City. The single arrives ahead of their headline show at The Curtin on May 9 with Wrong Way Up and Boyfriend TV. 'Skirt' deals with a disastrous, yet funny and formative, gig mishap abroad. It's a 70s rock anthem by way of 90s PJ Harvey, serving as a retort to leering audience members but also poking fun at Wet Kiss frontwoman Brenna O 's on-stage humiliation ('Girls get paid in fascination / even while the night gets wasted'). She had just moved to Berlin and was playing her first solo set, but the show didn't pan out as planned. 'I got really drunk on white wine and it was a disaster. I luckily saved it by bantering. I had my foot up on the amp the whole time, and after the set my friend was like, 'Oh my God, everyone was trying to peer up your skirt.' The accompanying music video was shot and edited (last night!) in two takes in collaboration with Sam Eidelson. Brenna O explains the creative vision: 'We filmed the video in Chinatown, taping a pair of those diffraction rave glasses that turn light sources into love hearts to the camera lens. I styled myself to be my own image of Marylin Monroe in reference to the iconic manhole photograph. To create the effect that wind was blowing my skirt, up we had an assistant use a garden leaf blower. As a twist, I stitched fairy lights in my stockings so when Nathan cranked up the leaf blower, my vulnerable area was glowing!' Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse is exactly what the title suggests. Our chanteuse here is the sensational jezebel Brenna O: Part Factory Girl, part Fassbinder heroine, all peroxide locks and shiny, skin-tight '$2 dresses', sneering and growling across the stage, mixing greasy punk with cabaret excess. Or as she likes to put it: 'the punk Bette Midler is here.' What is she saying? Well, a few things. Produced by Andrew Huhtanen McEwan, Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse is about the grubby pleasures of hopping on the Melbourne-to-Berlin artist pipeline. It's about 'daddy at the abattoir,' slaughtering piggies. It's about gloomy waits at the gender clinic so you can get your estrogen. It's about dingy, crap clubs, desolate glamour, strutting down the street with your dignity in tatters, upskirting, indulgence and the glory of turning fantasy into reality. The album name is also something of a joke, melding a music journalist's snide comment about the band ('broken chanteuse') with a nod to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The story of Wet Kiss is the story of myth-turned-real. Brenna knew what she wanted — glam-rock mutated for the adderall age — she just needed to find the players. So she put out ads in local rock magazines and found them: Daniel Dog (guitar), Aldo Thomas (piano), Ben Sendy-Smithers (Bass), Ju Shung (Lead Guitar), Ruby Rabbit (drums) and Agnes Whalen (backing vocals). The band quickly moved in together, quickly put out their beguiling debut record She's So Cool, and quickly built a live reputation. Their performances left crowds gobsmacked: there were floppy bunny ears and buckets of sweat; costume changes and clothes ripped to smithereens; ecstatic howls and hilarious antagonism. Plenty of Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse is brimming with this tension — between the hedonistic triumph of inventing oneself, and the dreary texture of modern life. Brenna became well acquainted with this conflict during a long stint in Berlin. Much of the record was written there, and as such, many of the songs are slathered in a thick glob of Weimar decadence. 'I want to carry on that spirit of dirty street decadence, but also the great tradition of self-invention,' says Brenna about Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse. Catapulting onto the live music scene with the release of their debut album She's So Cool via Dero Arcade (cumgirl8, Divide & Dissolve) Wet Kiss have built a dedicated following through word-of-mouth and their righteous live shows. In between support stages with Amyl & the Sniffers, RVG, Bar Italia, HTRK and CIVIC, the group were selected for SXSW Sydney 's official 2024 showcase, made their debut on The 'Sup for Golden Plains XVII last month, and have toured across Australia's east coast, Europe and the UK. Dunk yourself in Wet Kiss' filthy, lavish depths when they perform a headline set at The Curtin on Friday, May 9, 2025 with Wrong Way Up and Boyfriend TV, return to Gadigal Land/Sydney for Nag Nag Nag on Friday, May 23 and support Floodlights at The Forum on May 24. Stay connected with Wet Kiss on Instagram for another festival announcement next month.
Yahoo
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
It Sure Looks Like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs Will Play Some Shows This Year
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs appear to be gearing up for a live return in 2025. On Tuesday, March 11, the indie rock greats shared a poster on social media with a list of eight cities: Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Manchester, Mexico City, Nashville, New York, and San Francisco. The post was captioned 'Wait…' — a likely reference to their classic 'Maps' — and the band encouraged fans to sign up for updates. More from Rolling Stone Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Yeah Yeah Yeahs Contribute Unreleased Tracks to LA Wildfire Benefit Compilation Franz Ferdinand Deliver a Snazzy Return to Form With 'The Human Fear' Karen O and Danger Mouse Release Indie Lullaby 'Super Breath' Currently, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' website offers RSVP options for the eight cities, as well as one for folks whose hometowns don't appear on the list. If this is indeed a teaser for a tour — and it's hard to imagine it being anything else, but never say never — no other details have been revealed at the moment, such as dates or venues. It's been nearly two years since the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' last tour, with the band spending much of 2023 on the road in support of their 2022 album, Cool It Down. That record marked their first full-length album since 2013's Mosquito, with the trio pursuing solo albums and other projects in the intervening years. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs returned to the stage in 2017, playing a handful of shows, including some in support of the 15th anniversary of their breakthrough debut, Fever to Tell. They spent the next two years playing scattered festivals and one-offs before their official return with Cool It Down. While the Yeah Yeah Yeahs haven't announced, or even teased, any new music, they did recently contribute an unreleased track, 'Turn Into Redux,' to Los Angeles Rising, a charity album benefiting Los Angeles wildfire relief efforts. Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
