Monday June 15, 2009
It’s 1994 and for a short kid with black horn-rimmed glasses, you’ve made quite a splash in the post-grunge MTV-friendly universe. This could not have been possible without a stellar self-titled debut record (which would later become knows as The Blue Album), three hit singles and two Spike Jonze-directed music videos that landed you several awards and a large cult following. So how do you spend your lucrative wealth and spare time?
Normally, this is the period when a rock star falls into the cliché trappings of the inevitable self-destructive lifestyle – but not Weezer front man Rivers Cuomo. Cuomo instead famously traded sex and drugs for the two next best things – an education and painkillers – and used his newfound earnings to both attend Harvard University and surgically correct the length of his right leg, which had been shorter than the other since birth.
Come 1996, and the world is hungry for the follow up to The Blue Album. Unbeknown to his fellow classmates, the barely recognisable Cuomo (who had grown a beard of Crusoe proportions and required a walking cane to manoeuvre about on campus post-surgery,) was already well underway with Weezer’s next outing.
Words by Angus
Thursday June 11, 2009
Tom Ellard is an ARIA award winning Sydney-based electronic musician, best known as the founding member of the seminal’70s electronic-industrial band, Severed Heads. Severed Heads’ early body of work was comprised of basic tape machines and loops, but as one of Tom’s biggest traits is adapting to the technological advancements around him, their soundscape soon included music sequencers and spread to multimedia, via the video synthesiser.
While the line-up has changed over the years, Tom is still very much the closest thing to the Severed Heads’ “front man” and maintains their online “museum” Sevcom, as well lecturing at UNSW’s College of Fine Arts.
Words by Angus
Thursday June 11, 2009
Arturo Escartin, Modular’s IT guru and Ideas man has had an “erratic” and “colourful” history, to say the least. But euphemisms never suffice. Not too long ago, Arturo, better known as Kripy, provided the tech savvy residents of Sydney with daily doses of what’s good and what’s not. This of course was when he wasn’t DJing under the same moniker – and of course that was before being forcibly removed from his many booths, at many postings for “disturbance of the peace.”
It wasn’t always zero’s and one’s. Arturo’s past record points to sightings in several territories, including running a ski lodge in Hokkaido, cooking under Peter Doyle at the once-infamous restaurant, “Cicada”, in Potts Point and getting peachy in Launceston with his Hawaiian speed metal band, Newt.
Words by Angus
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remixes http://bit.ly/8JtU6 2009-11-17RT @modularpeople: Circa 1979: Signal to Noise just got Facebooked - http://bit.ly/L42VT - check it! 2009-11-04
RT @modularpeople: Modular presents Circa 1979: Signal to Noise as part of the @Sydney_Festival: http://is.gd/4NvnF 2009-11-04
Can you hear the whispers? http://bit.ly/11ZlNe 2009-10-21
The groop whisper http://bit.ly/45IgRg 2009-10-20
a short film http://bit.ly/39px6Q 2009-10-18
Australian Edge interview with great photographer Carine Thevenau http://bit.ly/DBAd8 2009-10-05
The Groop's own @littlegonzales in the Mona Vale Attic http://bit.ly/9Q3xH 2009-09-30
A sneak peek at what we are up to http://bit.ly/1MKlTS 2009-09-25
What were you doing on Saturday night? http://bit.ly/l566r 2009-09-23
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