Published Work:
september 17, 2011
GEN F: Salem
Heroin, hustling and a kinship with witch trials aside, the members of gutter industrial trio Salem are more delicate than damaged. Like many salient artists, Heather Marlatt, Jack Donoghue and John Holland have wounds to spare (Holland’s salacious sex-for-drugs backstory was recently featured in Butt magazine). Unlike many, Salem isn’t jaded. “We’re, like, children,” Marlatt says. And like children, they’ve retained their innocence by living and creating with abandon.
Photographer BETH ROONEY
december 1, 2008
Black stars: Fan Death's devotion to disco and darkness.
There's something otherworldly about Fan Death. Maybe it's how members Dandilion Wind Opaine and Marta Jaciubek-McKeever whisper about Eastern European cartoons and the perilous state of planet Earth. Or maybe it's how they make disco sound dangerous. It's as if together they negotiate their own time zone, tide and orbit. The duo, named for the Korean myth about electric fans suffocating victims by sucking out the room's oxygen, make beats and write desperate lyrics in Vancouver--a place they say fosters art because there's shit else to do. Still, it's a pretty far hop to go from being bored to constructing soundtracks fit for visions of crystal ponies in a Depeche Mode universe. …
september 23, 2008
HEATERS
Michna is game
On the hottest day of the year so far, Coney Island is crawling with dirty little kids and Michna wants to play skeeball. He wants to smash bumper cars. He wants to “shoot the freak” with a mounted paintball gun, and pushes through a sweat-soaked crowd for his turn. After his barrage of bullets hit their mark square in the freak’s wooden chest plate, he turns to me and grins. “Shoot him in the nuts,” he says. So I do.