With the 2012 Movement Festival coming up this weekend, there’s so much to see and hear. — Festival sets, after-parties and you-name-it!

One of our top party picks this year is Down & Out, with performers from the Items & Things label: Troy Pierce, Magda, and Marc Houle (all former M-nus label mates.) 

The Down & Out event takes place downtown and if their past events in Miami and Berlin are any indication, the decor for this party should be dark and glitzy!

As their tagline says, it’s about music you can reach out and touch. Expect visuals and graphics in their signature style of gold and black. 

Over the course of 2012 the Items & Things label team (mostly based in Berlin) are creating 15 shows in North America under the Down & Out name to celebrate the dark, underground and intimate vibe they fell in love with when they first started going out.

Following the Detroit party, Down & Out will have events in Barcelona, and Lyon. 

Buy tickets for the Detroit party here. Find complete Movement festival details here.  

This impressive new music video for “LIttle By Little” by the French band Manceau is directed by Gunther Gheeraert. Featuring retro lighting and effects, Gheeraert filmed it using various Canon 5Ds and several different lenses to achieve the soft lighting and dream-like effects. 

On his blog about the making of the video, Gheeraert explains that he and the band filmed it in March, when the weather was quite nice, around the Champs Elysees, Parc des Batignolles, Defence and the Sacred Heart - all recognizable places, for those who know the city. 

Stay tuned for Manceau’s new album, “Little Traffic Jam,” set for release on June 12th. Find the band here. 

PAN/TONE

Techno artist Pan/Tone (aka Sid leRock, Gringo Grinder) joins me during his recent visit from Berlin for a chat about his new releases and his continued interest in the Toronto techno scene. Pan/Tone was visiting Toronto for a Break and Enter party. 

Presented by www.samplingculture.com on www.studiofeed.com radio.

What did you think? Feedback is Welcome. 

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A couple weeks ago Magnolius, the Toronto based hip-hop duo, released a new music video, which features colorful animation over bleak cityscapes. 

The inspiration for the video came from the ‘Escadaria Selaron’ (Selaron Staircase) in Rio de Janeiro - a mosaic of tilled steps that feature representations of different countries for each stone. The Staircase appears at the end of the video.

“When I found out the song was inspired by Jorge Selaron, I thought of the Gaudi-like style that he used in creating the ever-evolving masterpiece. I looked for places that were grey or dismal so that I could bring them to life,” says Barbosa, the video creator.

MAGNOLIUS will be embarking on their second U.S. tour this summer promoting their upcoming album The Chosen Ones. Find more Nuno Barbosa videos here.

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C2-Montreal is a new conference taking place from May 22-25, 2012.

C2 bills itself as an annual global business affair, promising to explore creative answers to commercial questions. Thankfully they include some important questions surrounding corporate social and environmental responsibility. 

The sizeable line-up of speakers includes Arianna Huffington (notorious for her questionable labour practices at Huffington Post!), Sakchin Bassette (founder of Moment Factory studio in Montreal) and Daniel Lamarre (CEO of Cirque du Soleil).  

The ‘meeting of the minds,’ is a central concept for the event, which envisions young entrepreneurs and C-level execs collaborating and exchanging business ideas, amidst late night parties.

There will also be many installations and interactive audio-visual experiences on offer, including a surprise from a creative design studio in Montreal. Moment Factory are given carte blanche to create a “reset” moment for the site entrance and a collaborative experience on the central plaza.

Watch Moment Factory’s funny teaser video to whet your appetite. Will they read minds and then project them onto an outer surface? - Stay Tuned!

For more information about the event visit c2mtl.com. Visit Moment Factory’s site here.

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On Wednesday April 25, 2012, Repair performed live at Toronto’s Drake Underground to an eager audience of friends and local music enthusiasts.

The show featured many of Repair’s great industrial-tinged house music ballads, that they’ve produced over the last 10 years. Guest visuals for the concert were done by the inspiring visualist Markus Heckmann, aka Wuestenarchitekten.   

Repair is comprised of Matt and Mark Thibideau (brothers) and Dawn Lewis on vocals. Their new label is called Obsolete Components and their new EP is called Radio Talk - currently available on Beatport. For more information and to catch their next show visit repair-lab.com.

To see more videos and the work of visualist Wuestenarchitekten, you can visit his vimeo page: vimeo.com/wuestenarchitekt.

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From now until May 5, 2012, lucky local Angelenos and visitors can check out a special show curated by Mike D of The Beastie Boys at the MOCA, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. 

The show features quirky contemporary art and music installations that highlight the interplay between vision and sound. Los Angeles might very well be the perfect city to host such a show because it boasts some of the foremost artists of this kind.

As just one example of the active AV scene in LA, there’s LA-VA (Los Angeles Video Artists), a collective that hosts workshops about new technologies and practices in the constantly evolving field of video art.

Transmissions was also on display in Berlin previously, another city with some of the world’s best visual selectors and events. 

Here’s Mike D, telling everyone more about the current exhibit at MOCA.

Full details for the show are at MOCA’s website.

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Visual artist, VJ and electronic musician extraordinaire, Tycho (Scott Hansen), makes music from his home in San Francisco, CA. His journey started in 2002 with his debut release, a four-track EP called ‘Science of Patterns,’ and since then he has gone on to join the Ghostly label family, where he released a series of singles and EPs prior to his acclaimed album ‘Dive’ last year.  

Now Tycho runs his own art shop from his website tychomusic.com, where fans can find his music and beautiful art prints, including the two new ones below, which he created to support two of his upcoming gigs. 

Tycho’s Tour Posters

The Troubadour, Los Angeles: June 1 | Webster Hall, New York: July 14, 2012 

Take a listen to this beautiful LP by Tycho: Hours

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Speaking with me from the Coachella grounds in Indio, CA, Sensory Sync’s Director Bryant Place, aka CyberPatrolUnit, discussed the journey that has taken place to create the large Gateway installation on the grounds of Coachella festival. 

[Constructing the Gateway. Photo by Sensory Sync/ http://www.sensorysync.com] 

With over 20 people on their team working this past weekend and two weeks prior to the event, Sensory Sync built a massive gateway. It took them several cranes and trucks to get the job done, in heat that was sometimes 100 degrees during the day. 

“The Coachella installation was one of the most physically enduring projects I’ve ever done,” said Place. It took Sensory Sync and the team which included Stageworks (the company who built the Skrillex spaceship in Miami), and Alexis Rochas (@Stereo_bot), a professor at SCI-Arc, to conceptualize, design and construct the installation.

“From concept to build it took us two and a half months,” Place said. 

With top of the line projectors, Sensory Sync VJs and a group of talented freelance visualists did projection mapping on the surface of the structure and then used Derivative’s TouchDesigner software for live manipulation and real-time effects. “Many of our ‘looks’ are generative and can run for extended periods of time,” explained Place.

They created their own inspirational designs and used footage a friend had provided from a camping trip in Joshua Tree a month earlier, and then mixed it with Mixxa VJ software. 

The experience was gratifying, not only for festival attendees, who danced around the large illuminated structure at night, but also for Sensory Sync. 

“Seeing it light up at night and seeing people’s reactions was great. It made a big impact for the festival. At night it transformed into this whole other thing… it totally transformed the space,” explained Place. 

“Because the structure has been under so much analysis and engineering testing, it can stand for 25 years if not dismantled. It can also withstand winds at speeds up to 50 or 60 miles per hour.” Thankfully, winds did not gust that much during weekend one of Coachella.

Festival attendees can catch Sensory Sync’s Gateway Visuals next weekend, during the second weekend of Coachella. If you can’t make it there, you can always follow their twitter for more photos. 

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British band of the moment, Metronomy, are set to perform both weekends at Coachella Festival in Indio, CA, this weekend and next. They’ll also be opening for Coldplay in North America, leading up to their return to Europe for gigs in May.

Prior to their gig in Toronto on April 2, I caught up with two of the four band members, Joseph Mount and Oscar Cash (Lead vocals and composer, and keyboards and back-up vocals), to hear their thoughts.

On The Music Industry… 

“My whole feeling about the music industry is you know what you’re getting involved in… And it’s not a big evil machine. It’s like an employer. I guess you find the people who generally have beefs are people who are laid off. And I think it’s much better to concentrate on what you’re doing, rather than blame other people…”

“Having said that the music industry did screw over a lot of its employees, by not sorting out the digital download stuff, and I think they’ll forever regret that. It’s something that means that we have to work a lot harder and tour a lot more. But my only problem with that, really, is I like the idea of buying records — but that’s probably old fashioned…”

- Joseph Mount 

On their rise to fame:

“When I see bands getting very big, very quickly, I think they need to be careful…For us, having a slow rise in popularity has been good because at least we can see what’s coming, rather than having it thrust upon us, not knowing what to do.”

- Oscar Cash

“A few years ago there wasn’t as much interest in us, so we had to do some stuff that we felt compromised our integrity a little bit… But we did it because that was the only stuff we were getting offered. We have done some crazy stuff, but at the end of the day all that’s ever going to be left is three albums. -The best thing is that they’re not going to be bad albums.”  

-Joseph Mount

On producing music with new technologies: 

“It’s weird because what I really respect about people who are technically minded and who are always using new technology, is that they end up doing things which are going to be really recognizable of ‘now’… Like when we first heard N.E.R.D. and they were using the crappy little guitar sounds from old keyboards and it was like ‘how did they make that sound so good?’ So there’s an element of confidence that I see in other people when it comes to using this stuff, that I’m quite jealous of.”

-Joseph Mount

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British band Metronomy are set to play Coachella Festival in a few weeks, and are playing in Toronto tomorrow night as part of their North American tour. The band recently announced that they’ll be touring as the opening act for Coldplay starting on April 17th. 

Stay tuned for an interview with Metronomy after the Toronto show, here on samplingculture.com. 

Metronomy’s 2011 music video for their single “Everything Goes My Way,” from their album The English Riviera was directed by Alexander Orlando Smith.

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With over 75 music video director’s credits on his CV, Alexander Orlando Smith is no stranger to artists and their issues.

Smith is based in London and Sydney, and has created videos for some of the most iconic musicians of our time: Kylie Minogue, Coldplay, Manic Street Preachers, The Darkness, Juliette Lewis & The Licks, Peaches and Iggy Pop. 

Here’s Smith’s compilation of edited, chopped and sliced parts of some of the fantastic music videos that he has directed over the years. It’s set to a tune by King Missile that irreverently celebrates the sensitive artist and highlights their eccentricities. 

Smith is currently developing a feature film with Edinburgh Film Festival, which will be an adaptation of The Boy With The Thorn In His Side.  It’ll be exciting to see what he comes up with next!