Art, books, music, comics. Combinations of all four, if possible.
Movies
This is a clip from the DVD included with every copy of Cheryl Dunn's "Some Kinda Vocation," available at www.pictureboxinc.com. And check out our new YouTube channel www.youtube.com/pictureboxinc for more clips from our products as well original video content. Hoo-yeah!
Books
Our books include:
Gary Panter (Gary Panter), The Magnificent Excess of Katherine Bernhardt (Katherine Bernhardt), Chuck Webster & Eddie Martinez (Chuck Webster/Eddie Martinez), Storeyville (Frank Santoro), Maggots (Brian Chippendale), Some Kinda Vocation (Cheryl Dunn), New Engineering (Yuichi Yokoyama), Goddess of War (Lauren Weinstein), Powr Mastrs (CF), The Ganzfeld, Paper Rad, B.J. and da Dogs (Paper Rad), The Wilco Book (Wilco), Gore (Black Dice and Jason Frank Rothenberg), Me a Mound (Trenton Doyle Hancock), Cold Heat (BJ and Frank Santoro), Art Out of Time (Dan Nadel), We All Die Alone (Newgarden).
About me: PictureBox (www.pictureboxinc.com) is a Grammy-Award winning studio that publishes books of its own and produces books for other publishers, too. We work with artists or bands we love to create unique projects in print. Sometimes we publish these ideas ourselves, but sometimes a museum or another publishing company will publish them. It depends on whats appropriate for the project. The Ganzfeld (www.theganzfeld.com), an annual book of visual culture, is out ongoing journal, and we've recently added a new magazine, Comics Comics (www.comicscomicsmag.com) to the fold.
Artists we publish include:
Marc Bell, Black Dice, C.F. Brian Chippendale, Julie Doucet, Ben Jones, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Taylor McKimens, Gary Panter, Paper Rad, Jason Frank Rothenberg, Frank Santoro, Peter Thompson, Matthew Thurber, and Wilco.
xNoBBQx Skewer 10" LP (Ltd to 300 copies) - Out May 12th
We first came across xNoBBQx (just call them No Barbeque, I guess) in Piccadilly Records last year when the Siltbreeze vinyl reissue of their first CD-r appeared on its shelves. The Siltbreeze label being a bastion of all that is great in terms of dirgy, lo-fi, transcendental unmusicality, we were thus intrigued to hear this slab. And, we have to say, it was one of the greatest shop-listening experiences of all time. Here was a duo, probably of fully grown men, bashing away at their instruments in a manner that suggested they had never really learned any 'proper' technique. We later read a review, in fact, that put it thus:
"So what exactly is the difference between an xNoBBQx recording and a couple of 14 year olds bashing instruments in the garage with record pressed down on one of their mum’s old tape recorders? Probably not a whole lot, actually, but I get the feeling that’s precisely the point. " (Cyclic Defrost)
Well, yes, that does largely seem to be the point. But it's a helluva point. The Australian duo, in spite of their unabashed simplicity, manage to create sounds that are warm as an old-fashioned blanket, each piece having the ability to induce a state of complete, dribbling mental stasis. It's disjointed, scratchy and 'difficult', yes. But it also manages to be completely absorbing. If you like your rock deconstructed to the nth degree, we highly recommend you dig this.
xNoBBQx will be touring the UK from 10th May 2009. We'll be putting them on in Manchester on 12th May (venue TBC), so keep yr eyes on this page.
