Woohoo! Yasuko and the Melt Banana crew will descend on San Francisco tomorrow night with another show of torrential noise rock. I can’t think of a better way to expunge the excesses of holiday madness.

It’s been 14 years since I first fell in love with Plaid’s Not For Threes album. For the record, 1997 was a very good year for Warp Records, which also put out Aphex Twin’s Come to Daddy and other releases by Squarepusher, Mira Calix and Autechre. Catch the duo tonight at Mezzanine, who are touring to promote their new album, Scintilli.

A/V Performances Flyer for GAFFTA

Tonight at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts: A/V Performances, featuring Rafael Anton Irisarri, Morgan Packard, and Agraph. Should be a sweet evening.

Merce Cunningham Dance Company is coming to UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall as part of  its farewell Legacy Tour. With the passing of Cunningham in 2009, this is the final opportunity to experience not only the work of the company’s legendary founder, but also several remarkable audiovisual collaborations. The company will disband after the tour.

Below is a brief outline of two different programs offered over three nights:

• Program A (Thursday, March 3 and Friday, March 4)
  - Cunningham: Pond Way, music by Brian Eno, décor by Roy Lichtenstein
  - Antic Meet, music by John Cage, design by Robert Rauschenberg
  - Sounddance, music by David Tudor, décor by Mark Lancaster
  
• Program B (Saturday, March 5)
  - Cunningham: Roaratorio, music by John Cage, design by Mark Lancaster

For full details, see the Cal Performances website.

Pantha du Prince - Black Noise

Hooray for National Record Store Day! I went by Aquarius Records and picked up the new Pantha du Prince album, Black Noise, on vinyl. It’s every bit as good as This Bliss (2007), and includes pop-infused tracks produced with Panda Bear (Animal Collective) and Tyler Pope (!!!, LCD Soundsystem). There’s even a nod toward the Durutti Column’s “Hilary.” It was nice to see the store bustling with people who enjoyed free beer and snacks as they shopped.

The folks at AQ were also nice to order two albums which had sold out earlier: Etienne Jaumet’s Night Music and Jan Jelinek + Masayoshi Fujita’s Bird, Lake, Objects. If you haven’t supported your local record shop in some time, go and refresh your ears by picking up some new music!  It’s good for the economy and your soul.

Thomas Fehlmann

I can’t wait to catch Thomas Fehlmann‘s live ambient set this Thursday evening! Come out and experience him and the super chill vibes of the Ambi-Sonic crew. Live visuals will be provided by Ty Humphrey of the Los Angeles Video Artists.

Thomas Fehlmann (The Orb/Kompakt)
8 pm – 2 am
Sanctuary for the Arts (Map)
38th Street
Oakland, CA

Here are a few photos snapped yesterday at SFMOMA’s 75th Anniversary Party, where Matmos and Nate Boyce performed to a packed audience. Earlier, I went to the Legion of Honor for the opening day of the Cartier and America exhibition where crowds came to ogle the extravagant collection of jewels.

SFMOMA's 75th Anniversary Party

SFMOMA's 75th Anniversary Party

This week will be exciting too — Someone Else and Robag Whrume are coming back to SF for more fun times. See some of you there!

There are works from some of the best known names of the era — El Lissitzky (see his Soviet poster, below), Malevich, Kamensky, even Lenin and Trotsky — though to my great delight, I learned of seemingly countless other groups and their often humorous counter groups:

The somewhat staid Ego-Futurists, mostly in the literary camp, were later superceded by the Imaginists who indulged in long, deeply metaphoric poetry; there were also the painterly Cubo-Futurists, who counted Malevich and Mayakovsky as primary leaders. Then there were the Acmeists, the Suprematists (Malevich at his finest), the Neo-Primitivists, the Rayonists, the Bicosmists, the Luminists, the Electroorganists, the Constructivists and the Productivists.

The funniest groups were the Eggists, who formed as a joke in a newspaper article; the Everythingists, who embraced all styles of expression; and the Nothingists, whose slogan was “Write nothing! Read nothing! Say nothing! Print nothing!”

But these groups seem disappointingly shallow when compared to artists like Iakov Chernikhov, who is worth mentioning here as one of the most imaginative minds in modern architecture — even if his perspective is missing from Baku. Though best known for the Flying City, his body of work (especially his collection of Architectural Fantasies) is well worth a peek.

One of the album’s highlights is About Two Squares – A Suprematist Story by El Lissitzky (1920-22), a children’s tale about a red square and a black square. They travel toward a red circle (Earth) and smash into each other, creating abstract forms on Earth.

It’s a futuristic narrative that combines experimental typography with the fun of reading aloud “colour-blocks of Word”… a synesthetic experience from one of the Russian greats! View the entire story here.