All posts filed under: Culture

Analog Room sets the pace of Dubai’s music scene

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Dubai is famous for many things – most of those things are bigger than other city’s things, because Dubai is like an over excited child whose just knocked back a can of Coke and eaten three Mars Bars … Dubai is on a sugar rush, frantically running around being bigger and better than everyone else. However, when it comes to a frantically buzzing music scene, then Dubai seems to fall flat on its face. Sure, Dubai gets the big names coming to visit like The Rolling Stones and Lady Ga Ga or you can catch Gilles Peterson play at a big seven star hotel.   But what about some smaller venues where the crowd is hyped and the music is much more personal and immediate? Well FNND took time out of their busy schedule of drinking sugary drinks to track down a venue with a sound system and good honest music programming that should be commended  … The Analog room. Analog room was founded by Mehdi Ansari. As the chief promoter of and one of the residents at Analog Room, …

The Old Fashioned

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adjective: old-fashioned 1. In or according to styles or types no longer current; not modern. 2. Favouring traditional or conservative ideas or customs. noun: old-fashioned 1. A cocktail consisting chiefly of whisky, bitters, water, and sugar. The origins of the cocktail has been greatly contested and little has been documented, but what we do know is that back in the eighteen hundreds a letter was written to a New York newspaper asking what a cocktail is. The newspaper responds with these four elements… A mixture of spirit – any spirit – plus water, sugar and bitters. Therefore, ‘The Old Fashioned’ is the original old fashioned cocktail. No one really knows if the first old fashioned cocktails contained rye or bourbon, but it seems that most bars prefer to reach for the bourbon sooner than the rye. However, there seems to have been a surge in Old Fashioned variations in bars all over the world. I guess you could call it ‘a modern old fashioned’. One reason that could be said for this recent interest in modernisation …

Archigram – ‘every generation must make its own city’

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Sketches and collages from ARCHIGRAM are a recurring reference point for Fat Nancy. The magazine dominated the architectural avant garde in the 1960s and early 1970s with its playful, pop-inspired visions of a technocratic future after its formation in 1961 by a group of young London architects – Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron and Michael Webb. “A new generation of architecture must arise with forms and spaces which seems to reject the precepts of ‘Modern’ yet in fact retains those precepts. We have chosen to by pass the decaying Bauhaus image which is an insult to functionalism. You can roll out steel – any length. You can blow up a balloon – any size. You can mould plastic – any shape. Blokes that built the Forth Bridge – they didn’t worry.” So wrote David Greene in a poem published in the first issue of Archigram magazine or, as Greene’s co-editor, Peter Cook, called it “a message, or abstract communication”. It was published in 1961 on a large sheet of the …

Cover Story – Part VI – ZE Records

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ZE Records (always written with two capital letters) was originally a New York-based record label, started in 1978 by Michael Zilkha and Michel Esteban. It has been re-established by Esteban since 2003. Michael Zilkha (b. 1954) is a British-born Oxford graduate of Iraqidescent, the son of Selim Zilkha, former owner of Mothercare, a major UK retail company, and the stepson of Cabinet member Lord Lever. In the mid-1970s, Zilkha worked in the New York publishing industry and was a contributor to the Village Voice. Michel Esteban (b. 1951) studied art in Paris and at the School of Visual Arts in New York, before returning to Paris in 1975 and opening the shop Harry Cover (a pun on “haricots verts”), which specialised in current rock music merchandise from the US and UK. The basement shop quickly became the rehearsal place for Parisian new wave bands. Between 1975 and 1976, Esteban published Rock News, which covered the birth of the punk rockmovement in London, New York and Paris. In 1977 he published Patti Smith’s books Witt and The Night, and Lizzy Mercier Descloux’s first book Desiderata. In 1977, Esteban signed French new wave band Marie et les Garçons, and asked John Cale – who had been introduced to him …

In The Words of Sparks …

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In The Words of Sparks … Selected Lyrics Sparks – the long-running duo of brothers Ron and Russell Mael – are among the most respected songwriters of their generation, their songs ranking alongside those of Ray Davies (The Kinks having been a formative influence), George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim. Formed in Los Angeles in 1971, Sparks have issued over 20 albums and scored chart hits with songs such as ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us’, ‘Cool Places’ and ‘Never Turn Your Back on Mother Nature’. While their musical style has changed dramatically over the course of 40 years – embracing the British Invasion sound of the 60s, glam rock, disco (they teamed up with Giorgio Moroder for 1979’s ‘No. 1 in Heaven’) and even techno – their work has consistently stretched the boundaries of pop music and the song form. Sparks continue to break new ground: they are currently working on a project with filmmaker Guy Maddin and are soon to embark on a world tour. Now, for the …