Directed/edited by Planningtorock. More about the song here.
Archive: Planningtorock
+++ Cakes Da Killa‘s new album “The Eulogy” is now online and can (and SHOULD) be streamed and downloaded for free via Bandcamp / Mishka NYC or right here:
+++ Planningtorock has released a new song Misogyny Drop Down - a wonderful, de-gendered hymn against gender-based discrimination with nice house references. The song will soon be released on a new EP on the new exciting Human Level label, which also released Planningtorock’s Patriarchy over & out split single with rRoxymore last year.
+++ THEESatisfaction have a beautiful new EP dedicated to Erykah Badu. You can stream “THEESatisfaction Loves Erykah Badu” here and buy it via Bandcamp (price on a sliding scale):
+++ Portland based duo Unicorn Domination aka Chelsea Dixon and Clint Havard have self-released a cute synth and beat based debut album entitled “Status” in March last year. Last week I’ve stumbled over the video to their single “Babblestacks”, and since then I can’t get the track out of my head. The video shot in Los Angeles was directed by artist and filmmaker Jessie Kahnweiler.
+++ Planningtorock has recently released a new free song: “My Valuable Hunting Knife” is a cover of Guided By Voices and part of the free “DFA Shamash Hits 2011 Collection“, which you should really check out if you haven’t yet. You can stream and download the song right here:
+++ The fashion brand Hood By Air has just released a pretty crazy free hip hop mixtape called “Swagot Thrilltape”. You can download it from their website.
+++ For their new single “Shady Love” the Scissor Sisters have teamed up with Azealia Banks, a 20-year-old rapper and lyricist from NYC and producer Alex Ridha from Boyz Noise. The song is not really my thing, but if you’re curious what this strange combination sounds like you can watch the new video to the song on YouTube (if you wonder who is “Krystal Pepsy” – it’s Jake Shears’ DJ side project)
+++ I guess I’m a little late with this video for the song “Stay In Touch” by a Sydney based beary electro pop duo called Garçon Garçon, which was already released in October. Nathan Mahon and Nick Tsirimokos (the guy on top, picture by Elvis Di Fazio) will release a full EP on the 14th of February. You can listen to two demo songs of Garçon Garçon from early 2011 on BIGSTERO.
+++ S.C.U.M.: “Whitechapel” +++
Album “Again Into Eyes” out via Mute Records.
Full album stream on here, free awesome Light Asylum Remix of “Whitechapel” here.
www.myspace.com/scum1968″>.
+++ Planningtorock: “Living It Out” +++
Album “W” out via DFA
http://planningtorockoffical.tumblr.com
Toronto-based, minor-key-addicted Austra have blown up in such a short amount of time since the May release of their debut album Feel It Break, so it would be easily to dismiss them as hype — a video censored for nudity and a mention on Jay-Z’s blog couldn’t have hurt — but thankfully the quality of the music indicates otherwise. Their cold synth patterns and Katie Stelmanis‘s rich voice are a soft sell on melancholic ears, and their sound perfectly defines the Blacksmith Synth-Bop trend of 2011 (a micro-genre I coined just now).
Berlin based Janine Ronstron aka Planningtorock is the first female artist ever to release a solo LP on DFA records (“W” is out now) and has created quite a hype around herself with her releases “Doorway” and “The Breaks” recently – especially because of the irritating, transgressive visuals that accompanied them. It’s been a while that a pop artist has played so effectively with gender roles and concepts of identity in such a straight, puristic way I think, this is why I was quite happy when the German music magazine Intro asked me to interview her a couple of weeks ago (The issue with the text was published a couple of days ago). This is the transcript of the conversation, in which Janine talks about her approach to “extent herself” as a (feminist) artist on different levels and gives a little insight on the origins of her new nose drag appearance.
Janine, as part of your artistical work you’ve always been wearing masks and playing with concepts of identity. At the samt time this new “character” you’ve created as part of your new record seems to hide yourself less than before. Like you’re being someone else and yourself at the same time. Was this part of the conecpt.
Kind of. It’s an evolution from the masks and the helmets, because for me they were always like extensions and adding. But I didn’t want to do that this time, I didn’t want to repeat myself. I thought it was interesting to push this side more.
But it’s still some sort of an extension.
Yeah, absolutely. There’s this term in English – “augmented”. It means that you maximize something, add something and by that disturb or disjoint reality, but it’s still reality. This is what I wanted to do. Also, I’m not the kind of person that feels a “the real me” kind of thing, there’s no “real me”, and that’s what it is about.
It’s also very interesting from a gender perspective. I wouldn’t have expected that changing the nose and the brow would make such a difference, would make a person seem so androgynous…
The video just premiered over at Gorilla Vs. Bear. “The Breaks” will be relelased as a limited 9″ single on May 9, the new album “W” is out on May 24 via DFA.
A little journey through last 3 decades of pop culture I just put together for a German music magazine. You can watch all the music videos after the jump, and don’t forget to click away the advertisement in the Dailymotion videos by using the cross in the right corner.
This past Saturday was the second edition of Berlin’s Gegen party at M.I.K.Z. Club, including DJs Olof Dreijer of The Knife and Mt. Sims, plus a second room for experimental music and live performances from Mater Suspiria Vision and Butterclock. In keeping with the party’s theme (“gegen” is German for “against”), I decided to cause a bit of a stir by approaching bearded bears with a pair of scissors and an edition of ten “Bartbeschneidungsbescheinigungen” (“Beard circumcision certificates”). I was happy to find a few good sports – including co-organizers/DJs Warbear and Tom Ass — who let me take a small symbolic snip of their facial foliage, and Verena of Transnational Queer Underground was there to photographically document my victims and my dumbass smirk.
“…while there’s nothing inherently wrong with facial hair, beards have become a tired cliché in the “alternative” gay scene, a gesture often signifying little more than conforming to nonconformity, a superficial expression of masculinity in an attempt to compensate for personal insecurity. Plus, food gets stuck in there.”
Planningtorock’s new album ‘W’ will be out via DFA records on May 16
Olof Dreijer of The Knife, Matthew Sims aka Mt. Sims and Janine Rostron aka Planningtorock have worked together on the soundtrack of “Tomorrow, In A Year”, an opera about Charles Darwin and his evolution theory which was brought on stage by the Danish performance group Hotel Pro Forma (I already posted a clip of the piece here). As far as I know the soundtrack is going to be released tomorrow and can be prelistened to on The Knife’s webpage.
You wanted all journalists that are going to interview today to read the transcript of your roundtable conversation about the way this whole project started and on what ideas your soundtrack to Hotel Pro Forma’s Darwin opera is based. But something that still isn’t really clear to me is how you actually interacted with the other ones involved in the project. For example: At what stage was the stage performance when they asked you to make the music?
Olof Dreijer: It started the same for all people involved in the project. In the beginning Hotel Pro Forma gave us a loose framework for the piece. It was a long list of literature and they also told us that the play was supposed to feature three singers, six dancers and that it should focuse on biology and geology. We also did some research by going to museums wit them, we went to the Nature history museum and the geology museum for example.
