This month we're exhibiting Hannah Parr's
delightful little pieces of food-inspired sculpture in our L-Gallery. (It is officially London's second-smallest gallery and is located in the glass case that forms part of our reception desk.)
Hannah introduces us to her playful
take on a lunchtime snack with painted wooden slabs of cheese, ham and bread,
and juicy-looking watermelons.
She finds satisfaction in
reviving the overlooked beauty of discarded objects, presenting them once
again to the world. Bold and energetic strokes are painted onto wood,
complementing and exposing the qualities of the original material. A colourful start to February
for our L-Gallery.
The folk here at Wieden + Kennedy are a multitalented lot and strategic planner Oscar Powell is no exception. By day he's devising breakthrough strategies for clients like Nike, by night he is 'splicing rough and gritty new beats from sampled No Wave debris'. Powell is featured in the current issue of alt-music bible The Wire this month.
More Powell info, purchases and downloads (but sadly not fluorescent afro wigs) available from Diagonal Records.
Boomkat said of Powell's latest release 'Untitled' on The Death of Rave label:
"Powell's third release refines his ascetic blend of lawless New York no
wave, cold European electronics and late '90s D&B with incisive
vision and propulsive torque. The EP's standout 'A Band' emphasises a
chimeric indistinction between the "real" textures of sample-spliced
guitars and drums and the gritted tension of painstakingly processed
electronics, somehow sounding like MMM producing for MARS, whereas the
ductile, visceral wormhole of 'Acid' feels more like Bob Ostertag
mangling Phuture. At its iciest, the bruxist thump of 'Rider' is an
assured nod to Suicide, yet sliced with the precision of prime period
Digital or Dom & Optical, whilst the loosely skewed but
in-the-pocket groove of 'Oh No New York' is one of few contemporary
examples that genuinely augments post punk tropes without merely
reaffirming them. And far from stylistic tourism, these tracks are
wrought with integrity and guile, forged with awareness of their
sub-cultural history and coolly swerving its dead ends with a stoic
intelligence and discipline that's sorely lacking from the reams of
"yeah, we've got 3000 unreleased tunes on our hard-drive" set of
producers: Powell may only have a handful, but they're probably better than yours."
Below is a taster of the Body Music EP that you can stick in your ductile wormhole, described by Boomkat (again) thus:
"If Blast First's Vainio / Väisänen / Vega sessions spawned offspring,
there's every chance they would sound something like Powell. Alloying
the motorik rock efficiency of Suicide with the dryly stoic purism of
Pan Sonic, he's conceived one of the most impressive, refreshingly
potent new sounds we've encountered in ages. It's Techno for bored
rockers, or rock for jaded Techno fiends, working calloused, industrious
grooves with more swagger than a teddy boy on payday, coupled with the
kind of stiff, anti-social funk branded by Ancient Methods."
