Announcements – Page 2 – Roy Christopher

February 21, 2016

Fallen Footwear Logo

Since I don’t have enough to do lately, I started working on another unsolicited logo design, this time for my friend Jamie Thomas’s company Fallen Footwear.

It started, as many of these do, with my waking up with part of it in my head. This time it was the middle Ls. As you can see in the rudimentary sketches on the left in the picture below, they form an arrow pointing down. That was to be the guiding visual concept for this design, which evolved over two weeks of intermittent sketches and doodles.

As it came together through the various versions above, I realized it needed some more space. This is what I ended up with:

Once I had that one drawn, it felt kind of empty, too sparse for this particular logo, so I tried filling it out a bit more, and I got this one:

Seeing them together like this, I actually like the spindley middle one best. I think the ideal version might be somewhere between it and the more organic one at the bottom. Maybe another iteration is in order.

February 21, 2016

Illustrations for the Hong Kong Review of Books

Thanks to Alfie Bown, I am now doing illustrations, like the one below of Umberto Eco, for the Hong Kong Review of Books.

This sketch was done from his photo on the cover of MIT Press’s reissue of his 1977 book, How to Write a Thesis (MIT Press, 2015). I’ve been experimenting with quick sketches with very little planning, partly to capture that hot space, and partly because I just don’t have time to do the kind of labor-intensive drawing I want to do.

Thanks to Alfie and the HKRB! Umberto Eco, R.I.P.

April 7, 2015

Dead Precedents on Repeater Books

I am proud to announce that I have signed a contract with Repeater Books for my book about cyberpunk and hip-hop. Titled Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future, the book uses the means and methods of cyberculture and hauntology to thoughtfully remap hip-hop’s spread from around the way to around the world. Its central argument is that the cultural practices of hip-hop culture are the blueprint to 21st century culture, and that an understanding of the appropriation of language and technology is an understanding of the now.

Here is an excerpt from the first chapter, “Endangered Theses”:

Though their roots go back much further, the subcultures of hip-hop and cyberpunk emerged in the mass mind during the 1980s. Sometimes they’re both self-consciously of the era, but digging through their artifacts and narratives, we will see the seeds of our times sprouting… My original guiding premise was that hip-hop culture provides the blueprint to 21st century culture. After researching and writing this book, I am even more convinced that this is true. If we take hip-hop as a community of practice, then the cultural practices of the culture inform the new century in new ways… The heroes of this book are the architects of the future: emcees, DJs, poets, artists, scholars, theorists, writers. If they didn’t invent anything but reinvented everything, then that everything is where we live now. Forget what you know about time and causation. This is a new fossil record with all new futures.

Repeater was founded by the crew that brought us Zer0 Books. Their mission statement is as follows:

Radical change is possible and necessary but only if alternative thinking has the courage to move out of the margins. Repeater is committed to bringing the periphery to the centre, taking the underground overground, and publishing books that will bring new ideas to a new public. We know that any encounter with the mainstream risks corrupting the tidiness of untested ideals, but we believe that it is better to get our hands dirty than worry about keeping our souls pure.

I’m super excited to be working with Tariq Goddard, Mark Fisher, Matteo Mandarini, Alex Niven, and Tamar Shlaim on this project, and to be joining authors Christiana Spens, Dawn Foster, Steven Shaviro, Steve Finbow, Eugene Thacker, Kodwo Eshun, Pamela Lu, Adrian West, Graham Harman, Mark Fisher, David Stubbs, Evan Calder Williams, Alberto Toscano, and others on Repeater.

Dead Precedents will be out on March 19, 2019.

March 20, 2015

Bookshelf Beats Interview

Bookshelf Beats is an interview site run by Gino Sorcinelli. He interviews different authors and writers about their favorite books. For mine, I chose James Gleick‘s Chaos (Viking, 1987), a book that blew my head wide open during a tumultuous time in my late 20s.

Here are a few excerpts:

My life while reading Chaos went through a total upheaval. The start-up company I was working for was purchased and shut down, I broke up with my girlfriend of six years, and I moved from Seattle to San Francisco to work as Slap Skateboard Magazine’s music editor. It seemed like a dream job, and one toward which I’d been working for a long time. By the time I finished reading Chaos, though, I knew I wanted to do so much more. After a month, I left Slap and worked my way into graduate school. I hadn’t been a heavy reader up to that point, but I haven’t stopped reading several books at a time since reading Chaos nearly 20 years ago.

…[T]he first tenet of chaos theory is “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” more commonly known as “the butterfly effect.” Small changes at the start of any dynamical system can have huge ramifications later on. If we apply that to the time of my discovery of Gleick’s book and its content, I can’t say whether or not I’d be here talking about it now if any of those factors were different. The book changed my life.

There are many major interests and introductions that have landed me where I am now, but reading Chaos was one of the biggest bifurcations. Chaos theory was largely borne of phenomena that had been filtered out by other scientific and mathematical methods. In part it teaches you to look between things and not leave anything out. Once I started reading other books about science and media, I spent a while trying to distance myself from my past in skateboarding, BMX, ‘zine-making, and music journalism. I eventually realized that it all goes together, it all has its place. Now I refuse to choose between being nerdy and getting my hands dirty.

Many thanks to Gino for the opportunity to talk about the book, Steve McCann for loaning it to me way back when, and James Gleick, of course, for writing it. Read the whole interview here.

January 5, 2015

The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies

I am proud to announce that I’ve been asked to contribute a chapter to The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies, edited by Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, and xtine burrough. The collection includes essays by Lev Manovich, Mark Amerika, Kembrew McLeod, Aram Sinnreich, as well as the editors — a whopping 41 chapters in all! My essay, which has largely been hashed out via posts on this very website, is titled “The End of an Aura: Nostalgia, Memory, and the Haunting of Hip-Hop.” Using the tropes of hacking and haunting, as well as a chunk of thought from Walter Benjamin, it deals with the question of memory in a time of easy digital reproduction. Of the essay, Navas, Gallagher, and burrough write in the Introduction,

His inquiry is realized as an actual literary critical performance. Christopher’s text by and large comprises a series of quotes by divergent authors, ranging from cyberpunk to hip-hop, which take the shape of an intertextual collage that turns into a case study of authenticity in the time of constant digital reproduction (p. 6).

Many thanks to Eduardo Navas for inviting me to contribute and to Barry Brummett for pushing me to write about this idea in the first place.

The collection is out now!

October 22, 2014

Alex Chitty’s Artist Talk and Panel Discussion

I am happy to announce that I will be on a panel for Chicago artist Alex Chitty’s artist talk at Latitude on Wednesday, October 22nd, from 6:30-8:00 PM.

According to the announcement,

Former artist-in-residence Alex Chitty comes back to the lab to discuss self-sustaining systems, mutability, and loops. She is joined by panelists who engage with these topics within their own respective fields. These guests include a scientist investigating nanoparticle sheets, a freestyle BMX rider, and a fabricator of machines that create parts for other machines.

Chitty will show work created during her residency at a 2015 exhibition at Adds Donna gallery in Chicago, and we’ll all be talking about how our areas of interest overlap.

Alex Chitty panel

Update: Here’s the panel, post-talk (l to r): Alex Chitty, Alex Kapadia, Steven Kase, and myself. Alex gave us all pomegranates and coconuts to illustrate the complex parts and wholes we had all just discussed. It was a great talk, and I am honored and stoked to have been a part of it.

August 21, 2014

Gritty City Fam: See Us on the Dancefloor

With their usual working-class class, the Gritty City Fam has dropped another gem. See Us on the Dancefloor (Gritty City Records, 2014) is the product of Richmond, VA stalwarts Johnny Ciggs, Skweeky Watahfawls, and Fan Ran.

Ciggs claims that this record was spawned by a conversation he had with Skweeky about Mike Daily and me:

We wouldn’t have done this album if it wasn’t for y’all. I literally told Skweeks, “I think those dudes would like it if we did an album.” I hope you all enjoyed it. Thanks for sharing.

We both get shout outs on the song “Celebrate” (at around the 4:35 mark), which is a personal dream come true. It’s an honor to promote gracious people putting in good work. Mad thanks and respect to Ciggs, Skweeks, Fan Ran, and the whole Gritty City Fam.

March 2, 2014

The First Time I Heard My Bloody Valentine

I have an essay in Scott Heim’s new collection The First Time I Heard My Bloody Valentine. I’m super stoked to be sharing pages and experiences with musicians like Bob Mould, Christian Savill of Slowdive, Ian Masters of Pale Saints, Kellii Scott of Failure and Veruca Salt, James Chapman of Maps, Gazz Carr of God is an Astronaut, and my man Alap Momin of dälek, among many others. The book is available for the Kindle, Nook, iBooks, and other e-readers. Below is the cover, designed by Joel Westendorf.

Here’s an excerpt of my piece in the book, in which I describe the first time I saw My Bloody Valentine live, and the girl I shared the show with:

The next hour or so is difficult to describe without sounding like a complete imbecile. My Bloody Valentine makes the loudest, most beautiful noise I’ve ever witnessed. It doesn’t wash over you as much as it just plows right through your being. You’re not hearing it with your ears as much as you’re feeling it viscerally with your guts. While their records strain the constraints of recording technology, their live presence bends to no such limits. It is akin to standing near an airliner as it taxis toward takeoff or a tornado ripping through trees. It’s strong, certain, and it hurts.

This is the sixth entry in Heim’s The First Time I Heard… series. Other acts include Joy Division/New Order, Kate Bush, David Bowie, The Smiths, and Cocteau Twins.

December 12, 2013

My Seidr Ginnungagap Review on Reality Sandwich

I wrote a review of Seidr’s new record, Ginnungagap (Bindrune Recordings), for Reality Sandwich. Seidr is one of my favorite bands made up of members from some of my other favorite bands: Panopticon, Wheels Within Wheels, Kólga, and others. These folks make some of the most expansive doom available anywhere in the galaxy.

Seidr

Here’s an excerpt:

Though their name comes from Norse religion, Seidr is as low-key as they are Loki. A subtlety that’s often missing from heavy genres is the mark here. With members from some of my other favorite bands (e.g., Panopticon, Wheels Within Wheels, Kólga, etc.), Seidr is more than a supergroup: They are a collective of seers, mapping new territories in consciousness and the cosmos. Ginnungagap is only their second missive, but it sounds like the product of eons. “A Blink of the Cosmic Eye,” “The Pillars of Creation,” “Sweltering II: A Pale Blue Dot in the Vast Dark,” and the title track churn and smolder like dying stars. This is doom on the largest possible scale.

You can read the whole review over on Reality Sandwich. Thanks as always to Ken Jordan, Faye Sakellaridis, and Daniel Pinchbeck for the opportunity.

August 28, 2013

Herc Your Enthusiasm: Ice-T’s “The Coldest Rap”

As part of HiLoBrow‘s “Herc Your Enthusiasm” series, named in honor of legendary DJ Kool Herc, which consists of 25 posts by 25 critics about old-school Hip-hop tracks, I was asked to contribute one from 1983. That was kind of an in-between year being just after the reign of Kurtis Blow but before Run-DMC became the Kings of Rock. Fortunately, 1983 was the year of Ice-T‘s “The Coldest Rap.”

Here’s an excerpt:

Ice-T’s first single, “The Coldest Rap”/”Cold Wind Madness (a.k.a. The Coldest Rap, Part 2)” (1983) consists of a two-part rhyme-fest of boastful wordplay. The single is backed with “Body Rock,” an electro-dance number that puts in extra work trying to explain what Hip-hop is all about. Past all of the playful posturing and woefully dated structure, one can hear the seeds of Ice-T’s lyrical heyday. His distinctive delivery, his cadence, his occasional turn of phrase, and his gift for innuendo all shine through, hinting at his future success on the mic. “The Coldest Rap” is a player anthem, a party song, a Hip-hop trope that Ice-T would revisit throughout his recording career. The power production team of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who were then core members of Morris Day’s band, The Time, as well as close associates of Prince, provided the backbone for the track. They stretch out a bit on Part 2, but Part 1 is all Ice-T’s, though the track originally had female vocals on it. “They stripped the girl’s vocal out,” he told Wax Poetics in 2010, “gave me the instrumental, and I rapped over it that night in the studio.” In spite of the single’s inauspicious origins, Ice-T sounds as authoritative as ever, if not as focused as he would become a few years later. “Those were just some rhymes I had in my head,” he said.

So maybe Melle Mel and Kurtis Blow are the most revered and remembered emcees of the time, but Ice-T was in the mix, and he was just getting started.

You can read the whole post over on HiLoBrow. Many thanks to Joshua Glenn for the opportunity and Jeff Newelt for the push.