With King of the Beach‘s high position on our year end list, the Wavves hat we put out a couple months ago, and the just-dropped Black Bart Simpson X Wavves tee, it should come as no surprise that, yes, we at Мишка love Wavves. I am a huge fan of King of the Beach, but when it came out I will say that I definitely made curious note of how overwhelmingly fun and upbeat it is. That’s a good thing, and not necessarily a surprising one, but after Wavvves, I got the feeling that Nathan’s next project could go one of two ways.

He certainly has a considerable pop mastery, and an internal day-glo hook factory, both of which he put to great use on King. But no one would say it was impossible for him to instead turn down a slightly darker avenue. Well, apparently that bizarro-world album actually exists (at least in part). Nathan just released three as-yet unheard tracks from unused recording sessions he did last year with a different incarnation of Wavves, this one featuring experimental drummer Zach Hill (whose new project, Death Grips, I mentioned here). Pretty different, pretty heavy, pretty awesome.

Hula Hoop (feat. Zach Hill) by wavveswavves

Goldy Lox (feat. Zach Hill) by wavveswavves

Glued (feat. Zach Hill) by wavveswavves

Via The Fader

UV Race - Homo (2011) [Aarght!] // Grade: B+

Add this to the list of coulda-shouldas: Why didn’t I see UV Race when I had the chance? One listen to the Melbourne band’s sophomore full-length, and I started kicking myself hard for bailing on their tour with Total Control; these jams are so sweaty raw, so studded with sax and Stooges and shrill noise, they must’ve shattered the foundations of show-houses nationwide.

But listen, they’ll shatter your speakers too, if you let ‘em. Homo’s a riot of energy, the kind that thrives in a live setting but works just as well (if a little more tempered) on record. Tracks like “Girl In My Head” and “Low” buzz with a sort of Velvet Underground meets Wipers vibe, all sloppy jangle and singalongs, while “Lost My Way” and “Nazicistic” waft around the idea of a ballad—except not really, because no number of wistful-ish progressions and airy backing vocals really take the edge off all that screech and scuzz.

Still, despite the noisy dissolves on, say, “Burn That Cat” (and lyrics that go dark as often as they do unintelligible; see “Down Your Street”), Homo is a super-upbeat record. Bouncy, grimy fun, conjuring all those images of frontman Marcus on stage in neon fringe and ballerina costumes. Not that I’d know from experience. Totally blew that opportunity. But I’ll content myself with Homo until one day, maybe, these Aussie garage-punk paragons make their way back Stateside.

Not much needs to be said. Broadcast showed an entire generation that their grandparents’ music could be cool.  Almost single-handedly, the Birmingham quartet, led by singer Trish Keenan and keyboardist Roj Stevens, reintroduced youth culture to the freakbeat sounds of artists like Delia Derbyshire and The United States of America. In short, they once again made it hip to make music with a variety of repetitive bleeps and blorps. Quite frankly, they made the world a better, better place.

OS OVNI know this all too well. The Austin, Texas duo make the kind of music that would make the late Trish Keenan proud.  This isn’t your usual Chris and Cosey clone-age. Logan Owlbeemoth and Omebi Velouria owe more to fringe artists like Mort Garson than Miss Kittin. For their tribute, they decided to cover Broadcast’s “You Can Fall” with metallic talons. Where the original revels in its own Space Age bachelor pad, this one lies somewhere on the corner of Tinnitus Pan Alley. C’mon, anything too faithful would hardly be a tribute to a band that took pride in sounding exactly unlike their musical peers.  Retro has always been the new Futurism, and analog synths have always sounded more modern than their digital counterparts.

If you like the way this sounds, and I am sure you will, you can find their limited output on their Tumblr (linked above) and also look for their track on the new Twin Peaks tribute released on Phantasma Disques.  Hopefully, they signal the coming of a new breed of artists that take themselves a little less seriously and make music that retains its density without being heavy to the point of fatigue.

This track, and an OS OVNI cover of Kraftwerk’s “Radioactivity” are both currently available for download as the latest Beko digital single.

Мишка x Wavves Black Bart Tees & Tanks Now Available!

We all know you guys love our Black Bart Bootleg flips. Be it the Notorious G.A.R.F. or our Obama ’09 tee, they’re simply some of our most inquired about old designs. We like to keep you guys guessin’ on the next time we’ll bring one out and exactly how, but needless to say it’s gotta be special. This new Black Bart Bootleg is not only special, but one of our faves to date.

This time it’s for one of our favorite bands and good pals, Wavves! We mentioned when we dropped the Wavves Starter snapback that we had something else up our sleeves, and well, this is it, and seriously how can you resist? There’s Nathan (the main Wavve) toking out with a beach alien, Black Bart, and the pièce de résistance, Chronic the Hemphog. This is a great shirt for all the fuckups, and there’s gotta be at least one or two of you out there reading this.

The shirt is available in Black and White. This is actually the first Black Bart bootleg style that we’ve ever made in Black. In addition to the tees, we also made tanktops in Black and White. Based on past experience, all styles will probably be long gone by the time you finish reading this post. People love Wavves, people love Black Bart.

Мишка
350 Broadway
Brooklyn, NY
718-388-1725
—
Мишка LA
1547 Echo Park Ave
Los Angeles, CA

Here is your chance to get one foot in our grave! We are looking for brave souls with a variety of talents who will be able to commit for a minimum of 3 days a week, for a 3 month tenure. Please submit your resume and a cover letter explaining to us why you would make a good candidate for any of the following internships:

• Design Interns will assist the Art Department in seasonal designs, i.e. creating CADs, tech packs and promotional materials. You must be proficient in Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Free-hand or digital illustration ability a huge plus.

• Operations Interns will assist in the organization of the online/store inventory, partitioning and shipping of the orders and general office/store upkeep duties. You must be proficient in the MS Office suite.

• Marketing Interns will assist with press sample pulls, sponsorship and event projects, press/tear sheet archiving and general office upkeep duties. Knowledge of the music, art and fashion industries are a must. Proficiency in the MS Office suite is required; proficiency in Adobe suite a plus.

• Bloglin Interns will assist with maintaining the blog, preparing drafts and creating new content. You must regularly keep up to date with some combination of music, art, film, TV and fashion. Please have a strong grasp of grammar, proficiency in Photoshop, and basic HTML skills. Maintaining your own blog and knowing your way around a camera are big pluses. Please also enjoy writing and blogging!

• Photo Interns will assist with product and catalog shoots as well as photo retouching, and be sent assignments to cover Мишка-sponsored events. You must have your own SLR and know how to use it! Please be proficient in Photoshop. Basic HTML knowledge and blogging ability are also pluses. If you are a wannabe nightlife photographer, here’s a great opportunity if you’ve got the chops.

• Retail Interns will assist in the day-to-day operations of running 350 Broadway, from merchandising to retail sales. Being proficient in MS Office suite and being handy with a camera is recommended. Past retail/merchandising experience is a big plus.

Select your area of expertise and put it in your email’s subject line, then send along your resume with a cover letter explaining your reason for wanting to be part of the darkness, to interns@mishkanyc.com. Please put some thought into your cover letter. We also ask that anyone applying as an intern already live in NYC or be willing to relocate here for the duration of the internship. Please be a motivated self-starter, ready to service Satan’s every whim. All internships are unpaid… but Hell ain’t a bad place to be.

Frank Ocean – Nostalgia, Ultra. (2011) [Self-Released] // Grade: A

Don’t call this record R&B. I mean do it if you want, but don’t put it in a category as if it belongs there. Times are changing, and this record is certainly on a wavelength with a vital avant-garde that springs from young American music yet again. You can almost see it oscillating directly into your mind, or out of your mind—totally trippy. For real though, this record has a quality that simply doesn’t exist in most of the music that’s come to serve as the representation for our times. Nostalgia, Ultra. has the same kind of vitality that drove me to dig through garage sales, flea markets, estate sales, thrift stores, rummage sales, classified ads, storage unit sales, and more looking for older music that would show me the light. We’ll see if it has the staying power—which I think it does—but it’s off to an incredible start, and it is at the least one of the greater releases of the year so far.

The record came out towards the middle of February, and has apparently built up a decent amount of recognition which doesn’t seem like it’ll end soon. I kept overhearing about it. Then someone mentioned it on twitter and forwarded me a link. Nostalgia, Ultra. is pretty incredible. Not only by the standards of current music, not just as one more in the endless series of releases, but as the artifact of a real human life. On “Novacane” he doesn’t paint himself as the typical money-certified monolith of a flawless life of envy that we’ve come to expect from hit records. Instead, he speaks about his life in candid terms admitting that while he is living a life of envy, he is conflicted, and still struggles with being human:

From “Novacane:”

I think I started something/ I got what I wanted/ Did didn’t I/ I Can’t feel nothing superhuman/ even when I’m fuckin’ viagra poppin’/every single record auto tunin’/ zero emotion muted emotion/ pitch corrected computed emotion

From “There Will Be Tears:”

Cause these boys ain’t had no fathers neither/ and they weren’t crying/ my friends said it wasn’t so bad/ They say you can’t miss what you ain’t had/ well I can I’m sad

Apparently Frank Ocean has been around for a bit in Def Jam record limbo, and has written songs for John Legend and Brandy, and more recently #BeyondSay but as we’ve come to learn just because you make great music, and have a deal with a major label, doesn’t mean you’re gonna put out a record.

The music maintains an incredibly compelling mood somewhere between relaxed and exhausted. At times it feels like the narrative is born out of succumbing to sheer overwhelming pleasure, and at times it seems to tell the tale of ongoing futile efforts to overcome the causes of discomfort, or regret in a somber world. While sex is definitely a topic, and its excess is told of, it isn’t glorified at the expense of the depiction of women. And it’s all done in a manner that skirts classification more than it concedes to it. It’s contemporary music, sophisticated in the ways that our lives have become sophisticated. And when we try to understand it as pre-ordained to fit outdated categories we fail to see that it is in fact more like Werner Herzog’s Ecstatic Truth, than the new sound of R&B. It is much-needed empowered alternative to what we’ve settled for.

Download Frank Ocean’s Nostalgia,Ultra. (Click Here)

WRSTGHST is a dude from Slovenia I discovered while delving through the sonic world of Witch House on Soundcloud. He makes a whole bunch of music in that vein, as well as Drag and Zombie Rave sounds, and more dreamy ambient and beat-based stuff, too.

Alongside the kind of tracks I’ve just mentioned, he’s also adept at putting together Hardcore Rave mixtapes, as his Soundcloud testifies. This is what makes me like WRSTGHST – this isn’t just someone jumping on a Witch-ian bandwagon by making a load of poorly executed Drag remixes and using symbols for no good reason. You can tell his musical repertoire just naturally slots into a lot of these musical movements. There is a real dynamic of sound with different elements siphoned off from various sources, re-packaged and smartly produced, and there is a definite connection to artists like Pictureplane, Teengirl Fantasy and Com Truise.

ITSalwayzzSUNday@maHAUS (draft) by WRSTGHST

09012011 by WRSTGHST

To me, what makes WRSTGHST’s mixtapes totally brilliant is their embracing of old skool Hardcore sounds: the whole hyper-fast, fist-pumping beats and sped up “chipmunk on helium” vocal thing. It’s great to hear that kind of vocal alongside the slowed-down baritone of Drag mixes all coming from the same artist. This is someone with the possibility to take elements of that Witch House sound out onto more commercial dancefloors.

My Hardcore Is Better Than Urs Vol. 2 by WRSTGHST

WRSTGHST is also adept at making a YouTube video or two, with some of the more interesting ambient Witch House style offerings, around his beautiful ЇdЯ3amổfîИdiănğh0stsątnîgh† from last summer. Check it out below; t’s a a hauntingly beautiful psychedelic affair.

Everything on his Soundcloud page is available to download for free, so go grab it all. Rave out and chill out at once to the same artist. Expect big things.

With the news that Cage and John Travolta are pairing up for not one but two new films, I’m reinvigorated with my belief that you can’t hold the Cage man down. He will rise again, not only to the top of the box office but to the height of creativity and talent. If anything, watching some of his more recent films this week has reminded me that, though he’s often ridiculed for his recent work, it’s more the films around him than his performances. One film in particular proves that when given the right material, he can still reach dizzying highs. Let’s review!

Day 59: Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans (2009) – Dir. Werner Herzog

What a perfect way to start off the week, and the perfect reminder of why Nic Cage is still one of the most important and talented actors working today. By all accounts, this should have been a pretty normal film, at least judging by the script. But put in the hands of Cage and Herzog, this cop dramedy turned into one of the most acclaimed pictures of recent memory. Seriously, who doesn’t love this movie? Hell, I’ve seen it on numerous best of the decade lists. It’s the defining role of Cage’s mid career, and I think it made a lot of haters have to shut up for a bit. Cage absolutely stuns as Terrence McDonagh, the drug addicted New Orleans cop who’s world is crumbling around him. Long story short, it’s a perfect performance. The kind of over-the-top that only Nic Cage can produce. It’s funny and sad and dangerous all at once. The movie around him ain’t no slouch either, with the supporting cast all on the top of their games. If you haven’t seen this, do it immediately.

Day 60: Kick-Ass (2010) – Dir. Matthew Vaughn

One-two motherfucking punch! I was at Comic-Con the year they premiered the first Kick-Ass footage, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a reaction like that at the Con. The panel came between two other, much larger ones, so I think a majority of the crowd in Hall H was just there to keep their seats. But Vaughn came out and played like 10 minutes of the movie and I would say it was the most buzzed about thing there. For the most part, it delivered, and Cage was fantastic as Big Daddy. His Adam West delivery whilst in costume, his heartwarmingly weird parenting strategy, and his bizarre agonizing death are arguably the best parts of the movie.

Day 61: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (2010) – Dir. Jon Turteltaub

Yeah, this movie sucks pretty bad, and not even Cage can save it. I was medium excited to see it (I’m a sucker for the Cage/Turteltaub collabos) but this was even worse than Book Of Secrets. It’s weird because I like Jay Baruchel and Cage (not to mention Alfred Molina and Monica Belucci) but the movie is just super flat. I think it was really expensive, but the action scenes aren’t even mediocre. It’s not fun or funny or anything really. It’s just blah. This is probably the best thing to come of it.

Day 62: Best Of Times (1981) – Dir. Don Mischer

Makeup time! Pretty cool to watch something from the very beginning of Cage’s career now that I come to the end. Man, he was like 17 when he did this, and it’s funny to see him so full of positive youthful exuberance. He’s just so gung-ho about everything, hopping around like he can barely contain himself. He’s also in pretty ludicrous shape, and has a righteous borderline unibrow. This relative normalcy buttressed up against the decidedly strange reputation he has now shows just how confused Hollywood was about what to do with his unique talents.

Day 63: Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Brokenhearted (1990) – Dir. David Lynch

A filmed version of David Lynch’s musical stage show, which was performed only twice at BAM in the late 80′s. It begins with a pre-taped scene between Cage and Laura Dern, presumably reprising their roles as Sailor and Lula from Wild At Heart. It’s never expressly mentioned, but the accents and costuming pretty much confirm it. It’s a sad scene, in which Cage breaks up with Dern over the phone. I hope it’s not supposed to be Sailor and Lula’s future… anyway, the rest of the performance is Dern’s dream, filled with walking bi-pedal skinless deers, burnt out cars, and floating singers. It’s pretty cool.

Day 64: Voodoo Child (2008) – Authors: Nic Cage, Weston Cage, & Mike Carey

Voodoo Child is the comic book that Cage penned with his son Weston (with some help from seasoned writer Mike Carey). It take place in post-Katrina New Orleans, and is centered around all kinds of Voodoo hoodoo goodness. Rituals, voodoo dolls, Baron Samedi, reanimated corpses, crow people, and a shitload of French and Creole. A surprising amount of the comic is actually not in english, and yet there is no translations anywhere, which I thought was pretty weird. Cage has lived in Nola for a long time, and you can see he’s very fascinated with it’s history. The book isn’t great, but you can tell he really wanted to write a comic.

Day 65: Season Of The Witch (2011) – Dir. Dominic Sena

Dark and boring. I feel like Cage could’ve done a lot more with the role of Behman, an AWOL Crusader tasked with transporting a supposed witch to trial. I have a feeling he only did this film out of friendship for Sena, his director in Gone In 60 Seconds. On paper, the pairing of Cage and Ron Perlman is a fantastic one, and the limited time their allowed to just chum around with each other are the best parts of the film. The scariness never takes off, and too much of the film is cast in obscuring shadow. There is a character who makes no attempt to cover his Boston accent, despite it being the Dark Ages. That pretty much sums that up.

So, next week I will cap everything off with Drive Angry 3D, and then take the rest of the post to do a post-mortem on the whole situation. Hopefully, I will have learned a great lesson which I can then impart upon the world. Come back next week to see if I succeed, in the final installment of 66 Days Of Cage!

All Posts: Intro, Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5, Week 6, Week 7, Week 8, Week 9, Week 10.

Swarm Windbreaker In Teal ($168.00)

People have been swarming the brand lately and we at Мишка truly appreciate that. There’s a lot of fucking streetwaear companies out there and we appreciate that you like us. We’re not too cool to appreciate you liking us and we’re not to cool to like you back. It’s a two way street with Мишка. Is that okay? Is that weird?

It starts off all nice with you wearing our shit and Мишка saying thanks but then the next think you know you’ve got seven voicemails from Мишка and Мишка’s swarming your facebook and you’re thinking you just fell into a hornet’s nest of a relationship with us. You look out your window and we are out there looking back at you. You call the cops and get a restraining order to cease Мишка’s buzzing around the outside of your home and after a few years of rehabilitation you think everything’s back to normal. You’re just sitting in a rowboat on Crystal Lake thinking the terror is over and that’s when Мишка jumps out of the water and drags you under. No one escaps Мишка’s love.

Swarm Windbreaker In Black ($168.00)

The Swarm windbreaker is serious business and we demand that you respect that. There’s 5 pockets on this thing negating the need for a bag unless you’re a messenger or a lady with a purse or you’re biking with a big camera. This shit is water-resistant and cuts the through the wind like a knife through your throat should you ever try to leave us. Oh and have we mentioned that’s incredibly light? This shit is built to last and will be fine unless you’re falling off your bike or getting into scraps on a regular basis. It’s also stylish enough to be cool but basic enough that it’s not going to be corny in a few years.

The Swarm Windbreaker is available in Black and Teal nylon. Get one today cause we love you. Мишка + U 4E!

Мишка
350 Broadway
Brooklyn, NY
718-388-1725
—
Мишка LA
1547 Echo Park Ave
Los Angeles, CA

Statement: Cute hipster chicks can be good rappers too! Proof: Zebra Baby. This BK twosome has had a run in with Mishka before. Our friend The Vidiot used a remix of one of their songs for an installment of his amazing Kill With Video series. But they’re more than just remix fodder. Their self-titled EP dropped a few weeks ago, and it’s good old fashioned sex rap.

You grow up liking Lil’ Kim? Well here ya go. Instead of being oddly aggressive with it though, Milky and Black Accent (sweet names) adopt a sort of icy Detroit house delivery, standing on their pedestal of synths and shouting out sexual desires and frustrations. Liberated culture. Revel in that shit. Black Accent in particular has a woozy, lilting delivery, with Milky ready to jump in on the double time. They may be Zebra Baby, but these ladies aren’t kids.