Nick Cave Soundsuits, Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery

Artist Nick Cave has been using his wearable Soundsuits in performances, collaborating with locals to create dynamic visual and aural sequences that are unlikely to be confused with the output of the other musician with the same name.

Nick Cave Soundsuits: Untitled, 2009 Digital c, print, Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery

Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth (travelling exhibition), Seattle Art Museum, Washington, March 10–June 5, 2011. Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery

Cave’s work resembles moving sound sculptures that appeal to both kids and adults cross-culturally. He brings his Soundsuits to different cities and hires locals to perform in them, engaging the community. Recently he collaborated on a video with Dr. Dre beats and Fendi for a fashion sequence.

Cave is comfortable in the melding of art and fashion being the director of the graduate fashion program at the Art Institute of Chicago. But Cave has said that his first Soundsuit was created as an emotional reaction to the Rodney King beating in 1992, when he decided to address his response through art, creating a suit out of twigs that he later discovered made sounds. Since then he has created suits from various discarded and scavenged materials that borrow from African, Carnivale and high fashion traditions.

Nick Cave: Speak Louder, 2011 buttons, wire, bugle beads, upholstery, and mannequin, Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery

Nick Cave Soundsuits, Soundsuit, 2011 dogwood twigs, wire, upholstery, and mannequin - Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery

For more information on where his Soundsuits will be traveling next visit: http://soundsuitshop.com/

'Braindrop' - Photo by Marc Whalen

At the Escape to New York festival in Southampton earlier this month, I found myself sitting inside a 17-foot tall sculpture called Braindrop alongside it’s creator, Kate Raudenbush, and a mix of good friends and strangers. With eloquence and charm, Kate explained her inspiration for the artwork and how to best experience it – from the inside, lying on one’s back, looking up into the vortex – which reveals a surprisingly breathtaking, kaleidoscope effect.

Kate Raudenbush is a New York City-based sculpture artist who uses symbolism for social commentary and self-reflection.  Integral to her work is the public’s participation, so it was nothing short of kismet that we found ourselves, friends and strangers alike, conversing and sharing, while inside a huge steel drop of water.

'View from inside Braindrop' - Photo by Aaron Barr

'Guardian of Eden' - Photo courtesy of Kate Raudenbush

SPREAD: What did you think about the first Escape to New York Festival?

KR: Escape to New York’s producers got the mix exactly right with a wonderful balance of both art and music. It felt thoughtful and well crafted from the food all the way to the set stagecraft. It also felt intimate, but large enough to wander and discover a multitude of creative spaces to interact with beyond the main music stage. Both Patti Smith and Edward Sharpe and Magnetic Zero’s were a revelation in genuine strength and unbridled creativity.

Braindrop was the piece that you showed there, what led you to create that piece specifically?

Braindrop was essentially my answer to the thematic question of “Evolution”, put forth at Burning Man in 2009. I thought, what is that element essential to all life on this planet we call Earth? What are we made of? What is the substance most wasted and most cherished? Water is at that core source of life. Because of climate changes, this complex alchemical element is putting humanity at risk throughout our planet with a combination of melting glaciers, retreating polar ice, disappearing underground aquifers, droughts and floods affecting our agricultural systems and destabilizing nations the world over. Yet we do nothing to protect it. We in New York City barely raise an eyebrow when our own city’s pristine water reservoir upstate is at risk of being irrevocably poisoned by the chemicals used in hydrolic fracking by natural gas mining corporations. Why is that? It’s time to wake the fuck up!

Braindrop is a just a simple meditation space to honor the element of water, and bring a measure of consciousness to a life force that we take completely for granted until it’s gone.

'Futures Past' - Photo courtesy of Kate Raudenbush

So, what is the mantra for your work – what inspires you to create?

Art is the consciousness of our age expressed in physical form. More than any other human artifact, it is art that informs how a civilization sees itself: what it reveres and reviles. It informs us of its ideals, morals and drives, its rebellions, tragedies, and triumphs, it’s religious zeal, its sexual, spiritual and social self-expression. Art has incredible power to communicate and inspire; it is one of the triumphs of the human species. I would love to see it treated as such in American society, where instead we try to commodify everything and give it meaning by attaching a price tag to it. I am more in that mind of art that sees it as an expression of both love and revolution.

The role of artist as communicator, as activist, as intellectual, as iconoclast, is what we should be striving for; not artist as a self-serving goal unto itself, but as liberators and fearless explorers of collective human experience—drawing on both our madness and our compassion—in order to reveal to ourselves what is best in our species, not just our nation, or cultural subset. I want to see how much light we can shine into the darkness.

What do you have coming up in the next year – where can people see your work?

Over the next year I‘m not going to say no to anything and try everything out. I’ve got plans to install Braindrop at the Electric Zoo music festival on Randall’s Island over Labor Day, to go to Burning Man for the 13^th time, then participate in Maker Faire at the Queens Hall of Science in September. I’m also working on possibly installing art for some Nocturnal concert events this fall in California. On another level I’m planning on building more livable art works– that you can actually fit in your house—like laser-cut light sculptures, jewelry and indoor/outdoor sculptural elements. I sell this type of art in a beautiful store in Nolita called Love, Adorned and also at Jonathan Burden in Tribeca.  I’ve got some really wild large-scale sculptural ideas up my sleeve for next year too, some are based on political commentary and society, and some ideas will require artistic collaboration, like stage set ideas for music, which has always been a huge inspiration for me.

Photo courtesy of Kate Raudenbush

See more of Kate’s work here: www.kateraudenbush.com

Photo by Bodgan Pedovic, EXIT Photo Team

This weekend, concertgoers in the hundreds of thousands will venture into a gorgeous 17th century Petrovaradin fortress perched on the right bank of the Danube river in Novi Sad, Serbia for four days and nights of music from around the globe.

Stages are scattered in various locations throughout the fortress, from grass covered moats through stone tunnels to expansive courtyards – that create an incomparable music festival experience.

Photo by Milovan Milenkovic, EXIT Photo Team

First held in the summer of 2000, the EXIT festival originally started as a form of protest, the name alluding to wanting an ‘exit’ from Slobodan Milosevic’s regime. It lasted a whopping 100 days, ending only a few days before the landmark elections which overthrew the government and ended Milosevic’s regime.

EXIT has since evolved to become the largest music festival in Southeastern Europe.

Highlights for EXIT 2011 include: Arcade Fire, Underworld, Deadmau5, Portishead, Grinderman, M.I.A., Editors, Santigold, Bad Religion, Beirut, Big Audio Dynamite, Steve Aoki, and Pulp.

Watch a live stream from the Main stage here: http://www.livestream.com/exitfestival

More details on EXIT Festival at http://exitfest.org

Listen to a sample of tracks from attending artists below:

Sounds of @ExitFestival 2011 by ExitFestival

Illustration by Luke Wilson

Alexis Georgopoulos, or ARP, follows up 2007’s In Light with The Soft Wave, out September 7, 2010 on Smalltown Supersound. Recorded as Georgopoulos relocated from San Francisco to New York, The Soft Wave is expansive in scope, unfolding like a collection of short stories or filmic vignettes, each piece building upon the other. Whereas In Light was made with only vintage analog synthesizers, The Soft Wave incorporates guitars, piano, flute, and Ebows to create a dense brocade of sound. Georgopoulos even steps up to the mic for the gorgeous centerpiece “From A Balcony Overlooking The Sea”, calling to mind classic John Cale and Brian Eno along the way. Though Georgopoulos still has a knack for creating environments in which you want to recline, hammock–style, he’s also peppered The Soft Wave with soft blasts of blissed–out fuzz. Recorded to 2–inch tape, it’s warm glow and blown–out formalism will undoubtedly appeal to a broad, sophisticated range of tastes.

“I tend to approach each album I record as a separate entiy,” Georgopoulous say. “I try to let the album determine itself on its own terms.” Read more about what Georgopolous has to say about his new album in SPREAD|Artculture magazine.

N.E.R.D. rolling around the California desert in their custom Rolls Royce

Previous coverboy Pharrell Williams has been busy, he’s in two new music videos. After multiple teasers by director Fro Rojas, N.E.R.D.’s “Hot-n-Fun” music video featuring Nelly Furtado off of the upcoming album Nothing has been officially released. Pharrell is also featured in the first single “ADD SUV” off of Uffie’s very first album, Sex Dreams and Denim Jeans. Apparently, riding around in cars with the top down is the thing to do this summer. Watch the videos after the link.

N.E.R.D. – Hot-n-Fun featuring Nelly Furtado

FriendsWithYou created a “tripped out masterpiece” to be wrapped around the Rolls Royce in N.E.R.D.’s “Hot-n-Fun” video.

Uffie – ADD SUV featuring Pharrell

Photo: Ruud Baan/Bernstein and Andriulli

M.I.A.’s third album “/\/\/\Y/\” drops July 13th, 2010, and leading up to the release is a flurry of media attention. The latest development is a less than flattering write-up in the New York Times by Lynn Hirschberg full of thinly veiled barbs. The singer responds in true M.I.A. fashion, tweeting the writer’s mobile phone number and inviting people to “CALL ME IF YOU WANNA TALK TO ME ABOUT THE N Y T TRUTH ISSUE.”

The Observer catches Hirschberg’s response to the M.I.A. tweet. The author says, “It’s a fairly unethical thing to do, but I don’t think it’s surprising… She’s a provocateur, and provocateurs want to be provocative.” Hirschberg also finds the tweet “infuriating and surprising.” Despite the various messages from people trying to connect to M.I.A., Hirschberg will keep the same mobile phone number.

Look for M.I.A. on the cover of our next issue, hitting newsstands June 14th, 2010. Inside she waxes about the state of the music industry, saying “You can’t just turn everything you’re doing into encouraging other people to be product buyers,” she continues. “It’s fucked up because I have to make music and ultimately, everyone should hear the music. But people have to buy it for my label to be happy. I just feel like everything is being consumed by corporations. It’s such a thin line for me, because they help me get [my music] out to more people, but I don’t want to be in there.”