Mexico City

If you wondered where your musical inspiration would come from in the waning hours of 2013, or the early hours of 2014, we’ve got some ideas. In lieu of top-this-and-that lists, we have a motherload of musical listening and discussions for a series we’re calling Music into 2014. Eclectic and electronic, Mexico’s label Static Discos has become a nexus for artists from around the globe. Now, you can tap into that network as a listener, free. The new Dimension Series – a massive collection of free mixtapes from some extraordinary international artists – joins a year-end mix from the label …

FIBER Festival – Sharing Signals from Hotpixel on Vimeo. When you see artistic ideas spreading, practices evolving, part of the reason is that people are being exposed to those ideas. (It’s nice when contagion has artistic symptoms, rather than, you know, nasty illnesses and whatnot.) Here, the design agency Hotpixel documents a video montage love sonnet to Holland’s FIBER Festival, as the Netherlands meet Mexico City. In March 2012 we were invited to co-curate the video gallery, exhibit at the expo, participate in a discussion panel and give an openFrameworks workshop for the FIBER Festival 2012. This is a video …

If you think live visual performance doesn’t attract the kind of passion that indie music production does, you might need to think again. I’m writing from Rome and the latest installment of the Live Performers Meeting (LPM), a massively-epic international gathering of artists now in its eleventh year. Over 500 individual artists are here just to play – not to watch or passive attend, but play. They’re largely self-funded, with LPM providing only accommodation and a venue in which they can show their work. Plug in your DVI and go – that’s it. It’s clearly taken some significant sacrifices for …