Erika Simmons: Transforming cassette tape into art

Remember cassette tapes? Now, remember when your Walkman ate your favorite LL Cool J album, disembodying the string of tape from the plastic case, leaving you with one less thing to listen to and a pile of black waste? Fond memories.

Erika Simmons, an artist from St. Louis, has turned those nostalgic frustrations into beautiful homages to music legends. Intently ripping into her cassettes, Simmons, 25, molds the lump of tape into sculptures of rock stars.

In the year or so since she started the "Ghost in the Machine" project, she has made works in the shapes of Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Trent Reznor, the Beatles and countless others. Her Michael Jackson artwork will be on display in a gallery at UCLA on Oct.  4 -- her first such show in the United States.

"The idea came from the idea of mind-body dualism and how your spirit lives in your body," Simmons said.

The photos of the sculptures on Flickr have drawn tens of thousands of hits each and international attention. Simmons charges between $800 and $4,000 for original cassette-tape artwork.

And she supplies her own cassettes. You can hang onto your bootleg REO Speedwagon tapes.

-- Mark Milian

Jimi Hendrix cassette tape art. Credit: Erika Simmons

Mark Mothersbaugh sets the record straight on the new Devo album -- and also makes rugs

Artists of the world, take heed: Mark Mothersbaugh is your champion.

When the Devo frontman isn’t scoring Wes Anderson films (“Rushmore,” “The Royal Tannenbaums”) and a litany of children’s TV shows (“Rugrats” and “Clifford: The Big Red Dog”), he makes visual art. Starting with postcard pieces he would create while touring with Devo -- he still makes at least one every day -- his output has grown to include canvas pieces and even rugs, all of which will be on display at his new gallery show at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, opening June 13.

“For about the last 10 years, I’ve been doing about 20 to 25 gallery shows a year,” he explains from the offices of Mutato Muzika, his Hollywood music production company. “I would find galleries in the classified ads of Juxtapoz magazine. They would be in deserted, industrial areas deep in Detroit, for instance. 

"Generally, they’d promote really great local artists but could never get any media coverage," he continues. "But if they did a show with Mark Mothersbaugh from Devo or 'Rugrats' or whatever, the local papers would suddenly get interested. It turned into a symbiotic relationship. When I get to go to these shows, I meet people that are still excited about art in the same way I was when I started Devo.”

But his artistic dedication comes with a price. Mothersbaugh is enduring what he calls “the most incredibly stressful morning” due to officials at his youngest daughter’s kindergarten school, upset with him for missing a Father’s Day event to tend to a litany of professional responsibilities.

“There was just no way to change all of the things on my schedule today,” he sighs. “In my defense, they never sent me any information about it ahead of time. I didn’t know. I was willing to blow everything off and go, but my wife talked me out of it. I just let my girl stay home today, so she doesn’t realize that she’s missing anything. She’s having fun running around in her robe.”

Pop & Hiss talks to Mothersbaugh below, discussing everything from the making of rugs to the status of the new Devo album. 

'Dark Night of the Soul' can be seen but not heard

Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse's project hits a contractual snag.

Call it this year's most notable cross-species creative partnership: When Grammy-winning studio whiz Danger Mouse reached out to musical surrealist Sparklehorse about a possible collaboration in 2004, the stated intention was to make music, not art.

But that's not exactly how things panned out.

After roping in 11 indie rock and alt-country star pals on two continents to contribute guest vocals, the duo produced an album's worth of atmospheric soundscapes. Then Danger Mouse, who is one-half of the hip-hop-psych-soul duo Gnarls Barkley, called on idiosyncratic director David Lynch to "visually interpret" the tunes with photos.

Many of Lynch's 53 images are theatrically stage-lit and peopled with costumed extras in intimate, transitional moments. Others capture scenes of suburban torpor, skid row decrepitude and giddy enactments out of some weird hyper-realm.

"The photographs are a representation of what went on in my head when I heard the songs," said Lynch. "It all came from the music."

The fruit of the trio's labor is a multimedia gallery installation titled "Dark Night of the Soul," opening today at Michael Kohn Gallery in L.A. A limited-edition bound book of Lynch's imagery of the same name was released earlier this month. And in a widely Twittered-about ongoing dispute between Danger Mouse's management and his record label, EMI, the music has been embargoed from distribution.

The project began when Danger Mouse, a.k.a. Brian Burton, met the manager for Sparklehorse, a.k.a. Mark Linkous, at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas, in 2004. Burton told her how much he admired the reclusive musician's ability to marry "harsh distorted sound and static" with the delicate nature of his voice. Afterward, the manager passed Linkous a CD of Burton's breakthrough recording, the so-called Gray Album, his bootleg mash-up of the Beatles' "White Album" with rap a cappellas from Jay-Z's "The Black Album."

It set the two on a collision course.

"I thought the music was fantastic without knowing anything about who Danger Mouse was. I thought it was a band," Linkous recalled. "[Burton] said he was a fan and wanted to take my music in another direction. And he said, 'Don't be surprised if I'm at your studio next week.' I live in the middle of nowhere in North Carolina. But there he was."

Burton acknowledged that his motives weren't totally unselfish. "Back then, people I wanted to work with were people I wanted to learn from," he said. "Rather than try my best to copy him sound-wise, I wanted to learn to see how he did what he did -- in songwriting and in sound."

The initial result was four songs on Sparklehorse's favorably reviewed 2006 album, "Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain." But the two exacting musician-producers -- both known for demanding final say behind the studio control console -- felt a kind of musical kinship.

Near the end of recording, Linkous, 42, and Burton, 31, hatched the idea to record their own album but clashed on what animal hybrid to name their outfit after. "I always liked Sparkle Mouse. He liked Dangerhorse," Burton said.

When most of the tracks were done, the two solicited help from friends from across the musical spectrum to provide vocals: Julian Casablancas of the Strokes; Iggy Pop; James Mercer, singer-guitarist for the Shins; Nina Persson of the Cardigans; Suzanne Vega; Grandaddy chief songwriter Jason Lytle; Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd of the Flaming Lips; Black Francis, formerly of the Pixies; singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt; and Gruff Rhys from Super Furry Animals.

Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse's Mark Linkous and David Lynch bring 'Dark Night of the Soul' to L.A.

While the title suggests a melancholy-drenched LiveJournal post, “Dark Night of the Soul” is actually the latest offering from Gnarls Barkley’s Danger Mouse (real name: Brian Burton) and Mark Linkous, the enigmatic frontman for Sparklehorse. The pair crafted an album layered in pulsing electronics, insistent rhythms and at times urgent guitar, with a roster of guest vocalists including Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle, Julian Casablancas of the Strokes, Frank Black, Suzanne Vega, Iggy Pop and Scott Spillane of Neutral Milk Hotel.

Artist and film auteur David Lynch also contributes vocals, and was inspired enough to shoot haunting and atmospheric photographs to accompany the songs. Fifty-seven deliciously creepy stills — like a blurred face frozen in a scream or a dinner table interrupted by the presence of a severed head — have been bound in a limited-edition book, also called “Dark Night of the Soul.” On Saturday, the Michael Kohn Gallery exhibits the collaboration, displaying Lynch’s photos mounted on aluminum, while tracks from the album stream through the space. Eerie imagery and music pregnant with tension? Sounds pretty Lynchian.

But not everyone is enthused.