Naked & boring: Shia LaBeouf is nude in aimless Sigur Rós clip

It's delightful to see the words "Sigur Rós" appear on a number of major news sites. The adventurous Icelandic outfit makes lovely, atmospheric music. Theirs are soundscapes that develop like a satellite lost in space -- orchestral arrangements that drift and manage to feel a little futuristic.

The band deserves a wider audience, and if it takes a naked Shia LeBeouf to get one, so be it. After all, indie rock involving naked famous people seems like a fine-enough trend.

Yet life is too short for the 8½ minutes it takes to sit through Sigur Rós' "Fjögur Píanó." The video was released today as part of a video project the band commissioned for new album "Valtari." The director is Alma Har’el, and she has a gift, no doubt, for arresting, photo-worthy moments.

Her acclaimed documentary "Bombay Beach" was shot in the California desert and described by The Times as "more lyrical tone poem than straightforward documentary." Her video for "Fjögur Píanó" is far from ordinary as well, and also proof that not everything is improved by violence and eroticism.

Granted, "Fjögur Píanó" is perhaps the most difficult song on "Valtari" to translate into a music video. It's little more than sparse piano strikes. The tone is dour, and the orchestral touches at the end are tense and panic stricken. 

The video renders the song laughable, turning seriousness into pointless, art-school pretension. LeBeouf and partner Denna Thomsen are lovers, apparently, and spend the clip slapping and carving each other. They're also quite good at synchronizing their ability to sit up straight in bed. They get intimate with and without clothes, and move as if they're Olympic ice dancers. There are also dead butterflies for those looking for metaphors and worst of all, there are ceramics. 

Unfortunately, the full-frontal nudity from both actors/dancers means we can't embed or link to it. If it's a bad video you want, we can instead offer this head-scratcher from the Offspring. 

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-- Todd Martens

Image: Shia LeBeouf and Denna Thomsen in Sigur Rós'  "Fjögur Píanó." The image is a screenshot from the not-safe-for-work video directed by Alma Har’el

Raphael Saadiq, Moby booked for free Century City concerts

The heavy commercial district that is Century City will be getting an injection of rock 'n' roll this summer. In conjunction with the upcoming exhibit “Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present,” KCRW-FM (89.9) has revealed the lineup for three free Saturday evening concerts outside the Annenberg Space for Photography. Raphael Saadiq, Moby, Band of Skulls and Portugal. The Man are among the artists scheduled to play the events, which will require an RSVP.

The concert series begins July 14 with a live performance from electronic artist Moby, who has dabbled in photography himself. Moby last year released a book of photos with his album "Destroyed." Moby will DJ, but will also perform an acoustic set, according to KCRW. 

The evening of July 21 will serve as a tribute to glam rockers T. Rex, as the day coincides with the 40th anniversary of the band's album "The Slider." In addition to a performance from rock act Portugal. The Man, who performed Wednesday night at UCLA's Royce Hall, the event will function as a release party for the “KCRW vs. T. Rex Soundclash” EP, which features T. Rex remixes from KCRW DJs.

PHOTOS: 'Who Shot Rock & Roll' at the Annenberg Space for Photography

The free concerts will wrap up on Aug. 4 with a performance from R&B star Raphael Saadiq and English rock act Band of Skulls. Each artist appeared on the four-CD, 70-plus-song multi-artist tribute album “Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan: Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International,” and no doubt each artist will roll out Dylan covers. 

Each concert will also feature DJ sets from KCRW personalities. All performances will begin at 7 p.m. and are free, but advance registration is required on the KCRW site. On arrival, those who RSVP-ed will be given wristbands to gain admittance to the concerts. The concerts will be staged on an outdoor plaza next to the Annenberg Space and the gallery will stay open for the performances. 

LACMA's next big project: L.A. hip-hop

Murs had a revelation while waiting in line to see the Louvre Museum in Paris. A longtime staple of L.A.'s underground hip-hop scene, Murs had a day off while on tour in Paris last year. Spotted by museum workers, Murs and his wife were pulled from the line and told to bypass the crowds.

"Some fans came up to me and gave us some free passes," said Murs, who was born Nick Carter. "That's when it hit me that we're old enough to be involved with the arts. I have fans who work at the Louvre? That's crazy."

Not, perhaps, as crazy as collaborating with a similarly world-renowned art institution.

This week, Murs and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will launch a six-month exploration of L.A.'s hip-hop culture with the series Through the Mic. On Thursday night, Murs' own group 3 Melancholy Gypsys will stage its first performance in about five years; monthly concerts will follow, each presented in front of the 200 vintage lamp posts that make up the museum's "Urban Light" installation on Wilshire Boulevard. The goal, said Murs, is for "the Los Angeles hip-hop scene to get some validation as art and not just gangsta rap or pop music."

"Even in the past, in traveling to New York, my friends think a lot of the gangsta rap is just made up," Murs said. "They think it's a product and they think it isn't real hip-hop. They think it's entertaining, like everything else in this city. We're known here for entertainment, but not necessarily known for our art scene and our hip-hop scene. I aim to change that."

'Through the Mic' will return June 21 with Koreatown's Dumfounded and pioneering female MC Medusa. While LACMA is no stranger to live music, showcasing bands as part of its events-focused Muse membership program in addition to hosting a jazz series, the museum's hip-hop ambitions will be the first step toward turning the outdoor area near the "Urban Light" exhibit into a venue.

"We want that venue in front of 'Urban Light' to emerge as one of the best outdoor concert venues in Los Angeles," said Jason Gaulton, coordinator of the Muse program. "We'll never be able to take anything away from the [Hollywood] Bowl, but 'Urban Light' makes for a stunning backdrop. It's an intimate experience but creates a unique experience."

Murs said he has acts lined up through much of the series. The artist, who now lives in Tuscon, Ariz., has been programming the annual Paid Dues hip-hop festival  since 2006, and that event's promoter, Guerilla Union, will be handling stage setup and sound for 'Through the Mic.'

"I have relationships with everyone from Snopp Doog to Kendrick Lamar," Murs said. "When I first started meeting with LACMA, I was telling them about Kendrick Lamar, and I said, 'By the time we get this started, he'll be the biggest rapper in L.A.' Now we won't get him to slow down enough to do this.

"But who doesn't want to be a part of presenting their art at LACMA?" Murs continued. "If it doesn't mean anything to you, it means something to your mother and your grandmother."

Gaulton believes the events will target those who don't usually come to LACMA, and he hopes it's the first of many music-focused happenings. "When we first started talking about the series, we were talking about an eclectic series, where each installment would reflect a different genre," Gaulton said. "We felt like the strength of being a museum, and what you find in exhibition, is an exploration of one topic."

L.A.'s '80s punk scene part of photo exhibit at Morono Kiang Gallery

A new photo exhibition in downtown L.A. should hold special interest for Southland music fans, as it includes images from the region’s wild and woolly punk rock scene of the early 1980s.

Among works being featured in “Faraway So Close: Photographs of Los Angeles in the '80s” at the Morono Kiang Gallery are shots by Edward Colver, who captured virtually all of the great bands in the first wave of punk rock that swept through town at the time. One of the shots he'll have on display shows dozens of motorcycle police officers stationed outside a Hollywood Boulevard movie theater for the 1981 premiere of Penelope Spheeris' documentary "The Decline of Western Civilization."

Another photographer whose images will be shown is Ann Summa, who also spent considerable time among the punk community, although she told Pop & Hiss that the four shots she plans to have on display, taken with her Widelux camera, focus on other aspects of L.A. life in the '80s.

Here's what she has to say about the image above, titled "The Tourists, Hollywood, 1984," which she shot on Hollywood Boulevard near Selma Avenue:

"As a Nikon devotee, working with the Widelux, a Japanese spy camera, brought a certain liberation. It wasn’t in your face punk rock photography, but the opposite: fly-on-the- wall, catching a 180-degree image. The nature of the camera changed the nature of my work. It was quiet, it was a range finder; it had a set focus and only four f-stops and three shutter speeds. The lens moved. The subjects never knew what hit them."

The punk rock kid in that shot, James Creamer, now works as an electrician in Orange County, Summa said.

Beyond the indigenous L.A. music scene material from Colver and Summa, photographer Willie Robert Middlebrook will be displaying his large prints of reggae giant Bob Marley on a 1981 visit to Watts.

Photos by Mark Vallens and Shervin Shahbazi will be more political in nature, Summa said, and additional photos from Sara Jane Boyers, May Sun and Richard Wyatt will round out the show, which runs through March 31.

The photographers will be on hand for a panel discussion on from 3 to 5 p.m. The gallery is in the Bradbury Building at 218 W. 3rd St. Information: (213) 628-8208 or www.moronokiang.com.

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-- Randy Lewis

Photo of "The Tourists, Hollywood, 1984." Credit: Ann Summa.

Antony Hegarty's art show at the Hammer Museum opens in January

New York musician Antony Hegarty, best known for his atmospheric and delicate compositions with his supporting band, the Johnsons, will have his artwork on display this winter at the Hammer Museum.

More than 60 pieces -- drawing and collages made between 2004 and 2011 -- will showcase Antony's ritualistic process involving washing and burning paper, as well as repetitive mark-making and cutting, tearing and sewing found images. The exhibit, Antony's first solo museum show in the U.S., will open Jan. 22 and run through May 13 in the Hammer's Vault Gallery.

Some of Antony's work will be familiar to those who bought the special edition of "Swanlights," his 2010 album that came with an accompanying book of his paintings, drawings and collages exploring his connection to the natural world and liminal, fragmentary states of consciousness. 

Also in January, Antony will present "Swanlights" at Radio City Music Hall, a performance piece with a 60-piece orchestra playing songs from all four of Antony and the Johnsons' albums. No word yet on if this show will come to Los Angeles.

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-- Margaret Wappler

 Photo credit: Clive Osborne

 

It's ‘Crazy Clown Time' with David Lynch

The iconic director, whose debut solo album is out this week, talks jamming, electric music, working with Karen O, drinking beer and the origin of that ‘Crazy' title.

Iconic weirdo director David Lynch releases his debut solo album, “Crazy Clown Time,” this week, and it is as predictably warped as its title suggests. Recorded with engineer Dean Hurley, the CD is a psychosexual map of twisted landscapes, blues guitar and Lynch's own falsetto (think Neil Young hallucinating in the woods). He chatted about the album from Paris, where he was designing a bar, Silencio, loosely based on the club in “Mulholland Dr.,” and co-curating an exhibition on mathematics at the Cartier Foundation.

What inspired this album?

Dean and I like the ideas of blues, some kind of modern take on blues. That was an inspiration for each jam. I would think about a gasoline-powered guitar, a dirty sound. It doesn't all stay dirty, a lot of it gets cleaned up, but I really like dirty music, electric music. I like the idea of electricity, when a guitar gets plugged into an amp. That moment is a thrill beyond the beyond. It's just euphoria to me.

You spent more than a year recording. Describe the sessions. 

A lot of times I'd say, “Dean, let's jam. Are you up for it?” Dean would play the drums and I would play the guitar. A theme will start to emerge and then a variation will emerge on that theme.

Nikki Sixx: Ace photographer?

Multiple sides of Nikki Sixx's personality will be on display around Los Angeles in the latter half of August. His band Mötley Crüe will perform in the Sunset Strip Music Fest on Aug. 20;  on Aug. 25, fans can get a glimpse of a lesser-known facet of the Sixx oeuvre at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Century City when he discusses his approach to photography.

But Sixx isn't hiding a PhD in his bass case. The artist has a new book, "This Is Gonna Hurt: Music, Photography and Life Through the Distorted Lens of Nikki Sixx," and Sixx's appearance at the Annnenberg Space is no doubt something of a promotional one. The book is a follow-up to his 2007 memoir, “The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star," and Culture Monster has a little more details:  

Home in the Wild West: Devendra Banhart, Beck and Caetano Veloso at MOCA

The multimedia artist Doug Aitken, who envisioned the Artist's Museum Happening at MOCA on Saturday night, had a singular mission: to describe and then harness the energy of the West, for one fleeting evening.

The trio of musicians who performed as the evening's central entertainment scraped at the spirit of this ineffable and wild territory: Devendra Banhart, filling in the role of scruffy bohemian; Beck, the sun-kissed folkie who's drawn inspiration from trashy strip-malls; and the Brazilian former exile and Tropicalismo poet, Caetano Veloso.

Before the musical interlude, the mood in the tent set up outside the museum was already sparking. Yet, it was also curiously mellow, a California combination if there ever was one. Bejeweled diners picked at their delicate heirloom lettuce salads underneath white sculptures designed by Silver Lake architect Barbara Bestor. With black draping covering the walls, the room was dark and softly lit. Wherever the eye roamed, the contradictions of this particular slice of Los Angeles could be caught in the complex interchange between the nipped-and-tucked patrons of the arts, and the networking gypsy artists who need them.

On a stage in the center of the room, Banhart was the first musician to perform, playing "At the Hop" from his 2004 album, "Nino Rojo." Wearing a wide-brimmed hat and cleanly shaved, Banhart relied on his vibrato to color in the song's child-like rhymes. It was an openhearted start, effectively setting the mood for Beck's and Veloso's wistful music.

Slap a piece of a Jesus Lizard on your wall; David Yow art show coming to Echo Park

My first ever date as a teenager was to take a girl to a Jesus Lizard concert, and the somewhat sinister, head-splattering noise rock set the tone for that budding relationship -- and pretty much everything that has happened in my dating life straight up till this morning, for that matter. But hey, at least there was nudity on that first date, as Jesus Lizard frontman David Yow has never been one to leave a crowd wanting more.

A little more subtle, albeit not much, are Yow's paintings, which will be on display Aug. 14 through Sept. 11 at the DIY Gallery in Echo Park. Times policies -- this being a family paper and all -- forbid me from showing the piece I want, but let's just say there are male appendages on display, as well as devil horns and cutesy animals in frying pans. Of course, it's all given a pleasant cartoon makeover.

The opening reception is at 7 p.m. Aug. 14. Yow is promised to be in attendance, and works will be for sale. Music is promised too, although attempts to seek out more information as to whether or not any of it will be live are still unknown (Yow did some time with locals Qui). Yow's career as a visual artist actually predates his days as one of Chicago's most famous punk rock howlers, as he was studying art at a Texas university before diving full-time into music.

-- Todd Martens

David Yow's "SOLO" exhibition at the DIY Gallery, 1549 W. Sunset Blvd. Opening reception is Aug. 14 from 7 to 11 p.m. The exhibition closes Sept. 11 with a not-yet-announced event. Photo: David Yow's painting "Pus."

The Lucky Dragons: Droning, collectively

The Los Angeles band blends performance, music and visual art

Near the end of "Live Sprawl," the Lucky Dragons' performance at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA last month, a sly, silly orgiastic scene broke out, like something lifted from Woody Allen's "Sleeper."

Awash in an eerie blue light, eight or nine swarming audience members groped at several colorful cords attached to a computer, drawing and modulating delirious sounds from the jury-rigged instrument with their own touch. Others danced around them or piped in on plastic recorders that were there for the taking.

Sarah Anderson and Luke Fischbeck, the duo at the center of the Los Angeles art collective-cum-band, crouched on stage or sometimes wandered into the thick with a microphone and primitive percussion. Lanky, fine-boned and skyscraper tall -- Anderson, who often calls herself Sarah Rara, is 6-foot-1, Fischbeck 6-foot-5 -- they closed in on a peaceful drone oscillating between tribal drum circle and tropical meltdown.

At the forefront of a growing number of bands that yolk together artistic and musical practices, the Lucky Dragons have performed at several museums, including the Whitney in New York and the Pompidou Center in Paris. Like kindred local spirits Los Elegantes and My Barbarian, or YACHT from Portland, Ore., they view performance, visual art and music as one seamless expression.