If you thought that having two brothers in the same band was dangerous, wait until you meet Mavis Victory Project. Featuring a near-record breaking four brothers, and aided and abetted by a childhood friend, the band’s unconventional line-up is the perfect match to their equally mold-breaking sound. Oozing seedy electronic loops and with echoing, swooping vocals, their sound is all dangerous street corners; distant sirens and the creeping underworld. Appropriately, their video is just as unhinged, inviting you into their world whilst looking at you suspiciously out of the corner of their eye.
Formed by the Ransom brothers – singer Michael, Phil on rhythm guitar, Ollie on bass, Chris on drums and Robert Rosser on guitar and keyboard – the whole collection is self-taught, taking the indie and garage rock blueprint to heart and learning their craft in any place they could. They honed their sound so it flowed organically – time signatures are out of the window; traditional verse/chorus/verse structures burned and thrown over the neighbor’s hedge. Their new single gets under your skin and slowly starts to peel it off, Michael’s breathy, ethereal vocals lulling you into a false sense of security and then pouncing.
With influences including Arctic Monkeys; Kanye West and ScHoolboy Q, Mavis Victory Project is the musical equivalent of joining a cult – once you’re in, you wonder how you ever managed without. The video to “Baby, Don’t Go Away” is due for release on September 22nd and is just as arresting as their sound; with girls, gangs and clandestine weirder likely to eat away at the inside of your head in a way you won’t be able to resist.
SOURCE: Official Release
LINKS:
https://soundcloud.com/mavisvictoryproject/sets/mavis-victory-project
https://www.youtube.com/user/MavisOfficial
https://www.facebook.com/mavis.official
https://www.instagram.com/mavis_victory_project
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Herman Dune – Early Morning Anderson Blues
Herman Dune is David Ivar’s musical project. It was started in 1998 in Paris, France. David is a French/Swedish citizen who began playing antifolk in Paris at a time when no DIY scene existed, let alone with songs performed in English. In 2001 he started the MOFO music festival in Paris which featured acts like Daniel Johnston, Bonnie Prince Billie, The Silver Jews, Dinosaur Jr., and The Moldy Peaches.
After spending years in a Lo-Fi territory with the label Shrimper (The Mountain Goats), 2006 found Herman Dune signing to EMI/Source (UK Virgin) and releasing two albums. The album “Giant,” was certified Gold in France and both records had Herman Dune touring non-stop for the next two years. Herman Dune played 42 States in the USA and many festivals including; SXSW, End of the Road, Green Man, Benicassim, Primavera Sound Festival, All Tomorrow’s Parties, and Central Park Summer Stage festivals.
In 2008, Funny Or Die-produced the video for the song “Tell Me Something I Don’t’ Know,” featuring John Hamm and a puppet made by Jim Henson’s Studio.
Through a “Never-ending” life on the road, Herman Dune has toured with Arcade Fire, Jolie Holland, Kimya Dawson, Of Montreal, and opened for Sleater Kinney and Wanda Jackson. Whenever in the UK, he was always welcome at BBC1 to record exclusive sessions and holds a record for tracking 10 John Peel Sessions with the mythical British DJ.
David Ivar has also been recognized as a visual artist and his work has been seen in Playboy, Flaunt, and Spray magazines. His art has been shown at the FIAC in Paris, Art Basel in Miami, Triennale in Milano. He’s had multiple exhibitions in galleries in Paris (Nivet-Carzon, Agnes B), New York City (Cinders Gallery), Los Angeles (Small World Books), and institutions and galleries in Europe. David Ivar has written and recorded the soundtracks for theatrical movies like Mariage A Mendoza (Edouard Deluc), Blockbuster (July Hygrek, a NETFLIX film), and Chasing Bonnie & Clyde (Olivier Lambert).
David Ivar – On writing the album:
“Sweet Thursday” is the third volume of the Cannery Row trilogy by John Steinbeck. After leaving France in all kinds of clashes and hurries, I felt that in my new home in San Pedro, California, I had found my own Cannery Row. I moved to Santa Cruz Street, by the harbor, where life starts at 4 AM. The nine songs of “Sweet Thursday” were recorded live with my band (Kyle McNeill & Lewis Pullman) and produced by myself and Kyle. It was then mixed by Adam Selzer (M.Ward, Langhorne Slim).”Now an Immigrant in California, I set up a studio in my backyard, gave up my phone, stopped touring and started working intensely on music and art. I also drove around the South Bay in my 1992 Toyota with its old cassette deck. Most songs on “Sweet Thursday” are inspired by this new life and the doubts and fears of being an alien resident in the shift of the US during this current administration.
At a recent show of Mike Watt & The Missing Men in a warehouse on the docks near my house, Mike shouted out to the audience, “Release your own stuff! Put out your own music!”. I felt like the King of the San Pedro Punk Scene was pointing at me to inspire me in my process of going back to doing things myself, my own label, my own everything!
The album has strong visual themes to me and I decided to work with video artist Brett Sullivan of the NYC antifolk band American Anymen to help realize music videos for the entire album. I really dug his editing style in connection to music, so when he came up with the idea of a video campaign for “Sweet Thursday”, almost a movie, I really jumped on the idea and we got to work filming music videos about San Pedro that inspired the album so much.
LINKS:
http://www.davidivar.com
https://www.facebook.com/HermanDuneYeah -
Rachel Mintz – Silly Weight
Jammerzine has a special treat in the form of an exclusive interview with mega-talent Rachel Mintz as well as her brand new video and single titled ‘Silly Weight’.
In the interview, we get a glimpse of what it’s like to be that artist at the edge of going to the next level. Professionally and personally. We get that virtual screen capture of a moment where an artist shows how she’s gotten to where she is now and what that next level holds in store for her and those she is taken with her.
Plus, we get what draws most people closer to an artist as well as brings new fans. We get that personal glimpse at the mind behind the music!
Click HERE to listen to the interview.
The video for ‘Silly Weight’ matches the music in originality and scope. Rachel has that uniqueness to her vocals and it is perfectly complemented by the music of Mintz and DSBlade in that dynamic-duo combination of musicians who understand one another. The dystopian feel and sparse setting give Rachel more room to play with the settings and interact with the camera as if the viewer was there. And they are.
ABOUT RACHEL MINTZ
Rachel Mintz is the kind of genre-fluid mind that could easily become an algorithm’s dream, even if the LA-based artist has some doubts on her latest single about social media as a whole.
Growing up in Miami with a musical family, she performed with one of the world’s most celebrated children’s choirs before pivoting to gritty rock and punk bands in her teens and eventually relocating to California. “Being raised in Miami, I never quite felt I fit in,” Mintz adds in retrospect. “My upbringing influenced my rebellion, which may have led to the artistic freedom expressed in my music. My teenage girlfriends and I listened to a lot of hip hop growing up, which cemented my love of rhythm.”
Working with Grammy Award-winning engineer and co-producer Ian Cross (Usher, Janet Jackson, Lauryn Hill, Gwen Stefani), Mintz finally found her own voice on her 2019 debut Shed A Tear, which found her gleefully weaving between dream pop, darkwave, and baroque pop to praise from The Big Takeover and Pure Grain Audio. Building on top of Tear’s success, Mintz is readying a new EP for 2021 heralded by “Silly Weight,” a Bangles-reminiscent synth-pop blast of a lead single questioning social media and technology’s grip on daily life.
“I would regularly lament social media culture with [producer DS Blade]… which oddly enough, is how we were introduced,” recalls Mintz. “There are things, especially now, that we focus way too much of our energy on. Things like social media and consumerism are ultimately meaningless and don’t serve us at all. I am just as guilty of this as the next person. In a way, I wanted the lyrics to be a reflection of our conversations.”
LINKS:
https://www.facebook.com/rachelmintzmusic
https://twitter.com/Rachelmintz
https://www.instagram.com/rachelmintz
https://linktr.ee/Rachelmintzmusic
https://rachelmintz.bandcamp.com
https://open.spotify.com/artist/54RQwyzpAT4tNL71xGLdhg?si=yh6gc11LSc2F5iPv4OBOJQ
https://music.apple.com/us/artist/rachel-mintz/1486127780
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgSkTzQNTrCXEXI5oNTgcrg -
The Academy of Sun – The Parts That Need Replacing
Formed in Brighton nine years ago, The Academy of Sun is a four-piece comprised of Nick Hudson (piano, synths, Hammond organ, harmonium, vocals, percussion, synths), Kianna Blue (bass, synths), Guy Brice (guitars) and Ash Babb (drums).
Together, they present dystopian fantastic creations that combine the deeply personal and the poetically arcane. Dark yet buoyant, this is a controlled explosion of psychedelic and dark power pop with atmospheres couched in vast and expansive landscapes and cinematic arrangements.
The video for this single was directed and edited by Nick Hudson with cinematography by Samuel Horn. It features Wolfgang Storm with dinner guests Mark Walter, Gillian Rodgers and TAOS frontman Nick Hudson in what seems to be a red-brushed-culinary spread of grisly delight held in a gothic lair.
“The Parts That Need Replacing’ was written to sate my desire to ‘reconsecrate’ 16th Century Hungarian countess and noblewoman Elisabeth Bathory, whose reputed cannibalism and serial murders were most likely reputation-staining fantasies dreamed up by the church out of institutional jealousy. How could a woman possess such vast wealth and estates AND resist conformity with the church’s ways of being. Same tarring-brush as used on Jeanne D’Arc and Gilles de Rais. Usually, Bathory is immortalized in doom and black metal, so I wanted this reconsecration to take place by feeding these myths, scenarios, and allegations of bloodbaths, black magic, and eternal life into the medium of a hyper-catchy, high-energy pop song,” says Nick Hudson.
“The video, just as the song, alludes to various parts of the Elisabeth Bathory mythos – the alleged bathing in blood to replenish her youth, the cannibalism, the occult, and gnostic preoccupations, the aristocratic sensibilities, etc., whilst also ‘queering’ Bathory by having her played by the 23-year-old musician and artist Wolfgang Storm. The local butchers are getting fairly accustomed to my infrequent but memorable extra-curricular requests for off-cuts. As the song states “the best special effects are those you cannot see”… we shot it in one, fevered, orgiastic and insanely fun day. The dinner sequence was as deranged to shoot as it looks to be in the resultant video.”
Following 2017’s ‘Codex Novena’ LP, a hypnotic, doomy opus that found its way onto both Dangerous Minds and Sweeping The Nation end-of-year lists, ‘The Quiet Earth’ offers a colossal meditation on dystopia, irradiated landscapes and extreme states of human emotion. This 15-track collection of post-punk, chamber ballads and darkly prog studio epos was recorded at Church Road Studios with Paul Pascoe, whose work includes the last 2 albums by Barry Adamson (Magazine / Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds).
Nick Hudson’s musical juggernaut has been active in various incarnations since 2012, always transcending expectations. The Academy Of Sun has collaborated with Massive Attack’s Shara Nelson, members of NYC’s Kayo Dot, David Tibet of Current 93, Asva and Matthew Seligman (Bowie, Tori Amos, Morrissey). Hudson has also collaborated with Wayne Hussey of The Mission, as well as Canadian queercore icon GB Jones.
Known for explosive and psychedelic live shows, The Academy Of Sun has performed in a medieval castle in Italy, a boat on the Thames, an abandoned railway carriage in Offenbach, colossal churches, The London College of Fashion, The Old Market theatre in Brighton, the MS Stubnitz in Hamburg, Brighton Dome, and a string of L.A. shows in 2019. Having toured 3 continents, highlights include appearances with Mogwai, Toby Driver and Keith Abrams from Kayo Dot, and Timba Harris (Mr. Bungle, Amanda Palmer).
LINKS:
https://www.facebook.com/TheAcademyOfSun
https://nickhudsonindustries.bandcamp.com
https://www.twitter.com/theacademyofsun
https://www.instagram.com/The_Academy_Of_Sun
https://www.youtube.com/user/NickHudsonMusic
https://open.spotify.com/artist/5CxsNgEPz9v8iBgO52VUUd