Mexican Artist - Ernesto Muñiz

Friend of LSD Magazine Ernesto Muñiz steers away from using paints and chooses to create complex college's. He has exhibited his work in various cities including London and Madrid where he has also pasted his works on the streets... Check out his Facebook Page for more works...

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Pioneri by Kollektiv Artists (Free Album Download)

Support Our Friends in Russia Download Latest FREE Album

Pioneri by Kollektiv Artists

'a mellow, mysterious and melodic sampler album from the 

Kollektiv Artists of Moscow and St. Petersburg.'

Featuring 

Samwell, Lazzich, moroza_knozova, voia, Legobyte, Muzikalist, 

Bobo Lo, Fern, Gameboydrice, and The Lonely Schizo.

DOWNLOAD FREE ALBUM NOW

Kollektiv Artists

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Team Robbo - The Sell-Out Tour @ Signal Gallery London

8th April - 7th May 2011

Already a legend within the international graffiti community, London’s ‘King Robbo’ will soon lead his entire UK crew (known to the world as ‘Team Robbo’) into Signal Gallery for their first gallery show of the year.


Team Robbo is an intentionally amorphous and anonymous graffiti crew, which has now grown into The Team Robbo Network. Its presence stretches across the world, overseas members working in collaboration with their UK counterparts. 

Team Robbo UK will be represented in this show by core crew members: ROBBO, CHOCI-ROC, DOZE, FUEL, PRIME and P.I.C. – some of whom have worked together as a crew for around 25 years! 

They will be supported by the artist known as ‘Pranksky’, who provides coverage of Team Robbo’s continuing war with street artists via his media organization, Prank Sky Media. His work is described as hybrid art (merging art, photography and graffiti) providing a commentary on the ongoing art feud between street artists and graffiti writers that has received considerable media attention.

Several members of Team Robbo are already well-known to members of the street art/ graffiti community and to art collectors alike. This stemmed from several very successful shows last year, including Robbo's solo show at The Pure Evil Gallery plus Fuel & Prime's work in 'The Architects' Group Show at The Atom Rooms in London. Prime's controversial piece 'The Age of Shiva' was widely publicised when it appeared again last year in Pictures on Walls' show - 'Marks and Stencils' before Christmas.


The crew’s new show, ‘The Sell-Out Tour’ (which can be interpreted in a variety of ways), will be the first time that Team Robbo UK have exhibited in a gallery together. It will showcase an impressive variety of their work: prints, canvases, sculpture and photographic work. The photographs trace Team Robbo’s joint output, (both legal and illegal) over the years. They will be shown alongside new solo work where crew members push forward the graffiti genre and develop their own work in highly divergent and novel artistic directions. The show is expected to tour the world after the Signal Gallery launch.

The show offers a rare chance to both view and purchase original new works and prints by this notorious crew. All work shown is for sale. 

Quote by Robbo: “Nowadays nobody seems to care about talent anymore they’re just happy to be spoonfed shit, it’s like being stuck in X Factor.”

When
7th April: Private View and Press.
Writer's night (By invitation only).
8th April - 7th May: open to public.
 

Where
32 Paul Street, London, EC2A 4LB
www.signalgallery.com
Tel: 07766 057 212

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Emergent Artificial Consciousness - Matt Banbury (Team LSD)

Matt Banbury (Team LSD)

To this day, the Internet has been growing for roughly 30 years, but the commercially accessible web as we know it is not yet 15 years old. Early economic models of the web suggested it would be like television, but better. In retrospect, this ‘Television 2.0’ phase passed as quickly as it came to serve as the platform from which the Internet would launch its explosive growth into the user-driven paradigm of social collaboration now called «Web 2.0.» Today, the Internet is the hub of our communicative existence, with more and more individuals «plugging in» through progressively capable devices.

Imagining the entirety of this ever-increasing web of connections among us seems daunting considering its restricted accessibility. Looking at the web through our computers, laptops, and mobile phones is like looking at a window from afar: We can see only a small portion of what is beyond the glass. However, if we could press our faces right up against that window or, even better, open it wide enough to put our heads through and witness the web in three dimensions, we would see a vast neural network similar to that of any complex organism with computers and servers acting as though they were neurons in a brain among their shared, interconnected, digital space.

Kevin Kelly, expert of digital culture and founder of Wired magazine, posits that “the rapidly increasing sum of all computational devices in the world connected online, including wirelessly, forms a super-organism of computation with its own emergent behaviors” (Kelly). He defines this “One Machine” as the emerging super-organism composed of billions of sub computers which compute individually on their own, but also coalesce to form a collective smartness that is superior to any of its parts. How could this be possible? Is the Internet really the birth pangs of a “super-organism” with its own emergent behaviors?

Answering such questions proves rather difficult because even the definitions of our own life, consciousness, and intelligence are far from ironclad. We know for certain how life is distinct from non-life and how consciousness and intelligence are distinct from the lack thereof, but the infinite continuum between the extremes of these traits makes defining them in concrete, unchanging terms impossible. More importantly, our ability to evaluate these traits in other entities is bottle-necked through how they manifest within our own perceptions and interpretation of those observations. Therefore, we can only assert what life, consciousness, and intelligence are in our own linguistic terms. Asking someone for proof of whether or not there is an internet super-organism, or what its “behaviors” might be, is like asking one of the tens of trillions of cells in our bodies how the biological system it contributes to operates as a whole. Surely it could never do such a thing when we have a hard enough time doing it ourselves.

At the most rudimentary level, the cells that compose our bodies are not that different from the individuals who make up human civilization: Both of them modulate their attention and effort towards the goals of obtaining, retaining, and maximizing specific parameters. Simply put, life uses what is at its disposal to sustain its own existence as optimally and for as long as possible. With this fundamental motivation in mind, it will be easier to understand the reasons underlying technological evolution, the role artificial machine intelligence will play in our lives, and what kind of future to expect for humanity.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE - LSD MAGAZINE ISSUE 6

Team LSD Exclusive

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LSD Magazine Interviews Bristol Graffiti Legend - Lokey (Issue 6)

Fat as fuck, heaving with vibrant, electric, throbbing life, bursting with colour, form and dimensionality, and fluctuating between the awesomely futuristic and a cheeky wink, Bristol writer Lokey’s mesmerising industrial symphonies of spray are an object lesson in the perspectives of imagination. Lighting up the streets as his tags burst clean off the walls and rampage through the cityscape before rocketing back into the wall and tearing it a depth it never dreamed of, he’s been bombing the game 16 shades to twilight for 20 years now...

How did you initially start out writing?

Well I was only about nine years old, and a family of kids that I was pretty good mates with had gone off to America on their summer holidays to visit their relatives and when they came back, they were loaded with all these photos of the graff in the Bronx and a sackful of mix tapes. Now at the time, we were all hanging out in this park up the road from my house, and we had lino down, trying with limited success to breakdance, so the mix tapes were the instant draw from their haul, but when I came across the graff photos, I was just like ‘what the hell is this?’. And that was it – I was totally hooked from that moment on, although I didn’t do my first proper piece until I was about 11. It was only a small piece – about 4 foot long and 2 foot high, round the back of a petrol station in Kingswood, where I used to live, but once I was up and running, I never looked back.

Did you come up from that kind of age with a group of mates who were all bang on the same tip or were you on your own with it?

When I initially got into it at around 9, I was in junior school, and it was that much more difficult to find other kids into graff around me, but by the time I hit senior school at 11, right when I was actually starting to paint instead of just dreaming and sketching, there were 4 or 5 other kids in my year alone who were at the same sort of stage – just picking it up and starting to pull bits and pieces together. So like minds and all, we gravitated towards each other and started hanging about together, swapping photos, sharing the odd magazine that came along, and getting stuck into books like Spraycan Art – don’t forget, this is all pre internet, so books, photos and magazines were like gold dust, and by bouncing ideas and pooling our resources, we all got deeper into it.

Now when did the name Lokey come along, and was it a conscious decision to step away from this idea of the big brash tag into something more understated and, well, low key! 

I’ve been Lokey since about ’91. Up until then, I’d toyed with a few other tags which usually weren’t words at all but just letters I liked and combinations of them – it was more about the visuals of it than a specific meaning I think. Then, round 1991, I was over at a girlfriends house with a few tunes playing when this new jack swing band called Lo-Key came on and I instantly locked onto the name. The next day, I gave it a thorough test drive from the dictionary to the black book, and all the meanings and connotations seemed to tie in perfectly while I felt I could really work with the letters, and it just stuck from there on.

How did it feel coming up in an intensely vibrant Bristol scene where there was just so much stuff going on?

When you’re young, you see things in a totally different way. There were already a lot of crews around at that time – and the likes of Cheo, Teaoh, Inkie, Chaos, Shab, Turroe, Sp27 and a few others were already painting and they all ended up forming one big crew called TUB – The United Bombers, and a few of them used to knock about up at the shopping precinct in Kingswood which was all of 5 minute’s walk from my house. So I’d be up there too, sort of loitering with intent around all the older kids. I’d also get the bus down to dug out , so not only was there this thrill of watching a big crew in action, but I was learning off them as I went. Obviously as far as they were concerned, I was the annoying young lad, but their girlfriends would always step up with an ‘Ahhh – ain’t he cute’ which probably both wound the kids up and allowed me to stay around at the same time! Cheo used to live one road up from me, and my mum thought he was a right lovely lad so she was more than happy for me to stay round his. Bearing in mind he was about 3 years older than me. The playing field was suddenly completely different . Now that meant that I could get out and have free wanders whenever I fancied them and be able to hang out with the older kids, go to all the parties and go out tagging with them, so it was seriously exciting for a lad in my position to have access to that world and be able to be so free with it.

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW - LSD MAGAZINE ISSUE 6

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LSD Magazine Interviews Tattooist - David Corden (Issue 6)

We have never featured a tattoo artist in LSD’s pages before, but when we were tipped off about David Corden by a supremely proud wearer of his art who was overjoyed at having something quite so breathtaking to distract from the walking catastrophe that is the rest of him, we we were so dumbstruck by the vibrancy, the detail, the love and the visual dynamism of his work that we got straight in touch with him.

How did you get your start in tattooing?


It was by pure chance really as I wasn’t looking to be a tattoo artist. I had done a design that I wanted as a tattoo and after asking around to see who was the best artist for the job I found myself in Jim Gambells chair. We got along famously and he asked to see my portfolio and after he did he offered me an apprenticeship.

How difficult is it to judge skin as a medium when you are used to drawing on paper?


At the beginning of your career it is pretty difficult. Paper is consistent whereas skin types vary greatly. The age of the skin, the body part, and a persons health all contribute to how the ink will go into flesh . It takes a while before you have encountered every skin type, and you have to work on each enough times to see how you need to change your technique in order to do the job at hand. One of the biggest difficulties is the fact that flesh moves and on top of that people cough, sneeze and answer phones without telling you...it’s all pretty challenging!

Can you give us a brief insight into how technique and art come together in a tattoo – how a tattoo actually works 


There are general rules that are held to be true in order to make ink go into flesh correctly. You have to stretch the skin with one hand in order to keep the skin as tight as possible so that the needle will penetrate the flesh. If you don’t do this the skin will give under the pressure and the needle will bounce and make your lines go all over the place. Once your machine is set up you dip the tip into the ink and when you press the foot pedal the machine will start making the needle pass in and out of the tip dragging ink as it moves. When applied to skin the needle will push any ink that passes in front of it into the flesh. Whether or not you want to specialise in realism or more graphic type work will influence your technique a great deal, what works for one artist may not work for you

How much of a responsibility is permanence?


It is the most important part of the job. We turn a lot of people away or advise them against making a bad mistake with their choice of tattoo. We have a book in the studio called ‘I wish I had listened to you’. It has been filled in by people who have come to regret tattoos they had, in most cases they are boyfriends or girlfriends names or tattoos done on the cheap by someone with an ebay kit. We will not do necks or hands on anyone if it is their first tattoo as they need to have lived with ink first in order to know the seriousness of their choices and we won’t do it if they are under 21 anyway. You change so much as a person in your younger years and tattoos are so fashionable at the moment that everyone wants to be covered as quickly as possible. We don’t do joke tattoos or cartoon characters either, if it’s not artistic then we are not interested

Laymen have this image of getting a tattoo immediately on a whim. How much thought, debate and preparation really go into each commission?


The artists in our studio are booking up to 6 months in advance. We ask to meet each client first and for them to bring any research they have done with them. We go over ideas and take notes in order to produce a design that is both original and unique to them. We will not copy someone else’s work and it will take at least a couple of months for a design. We are not machines, ideas come when they are ready to and we are up to all hours making them come to life. We take our jobs very seriously and want every tattoo to be our best. Work doesn’t stop when the studio closes, we lose a lot of sleep. Inspiration can come from anything and at any time, if a client has a problem waiting then they can go somewhere else.

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW IN LSD MAGAZINE ISSUE 6  (Below)
EXCLUSIVELY IN LSD MAGAZINE

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Rennie Pligrem - Street Legal 3 (FREE TRACK / FREE MIX)

The latest in the Street Legal series is another double EP of multiple dancefloor goodness. Street Legal 3 ups-the-ante even more than brilliantly received number 2

From the trip-hopped, transcendental 'Dream 104' through to the monstrous, carnival meets G-funk of 'Revolution 7', via the futuristic 'Machine'. From the full-on breaks of 'One Time' to the banging, 140bpm breaks/Nu Jungle throw-down of 'Here We Go' if you don't like any of these, you don't like electronic music!

As if that was not enough Rennie has also collaborated with Britain's hotly-tipped answer to The Roots...'Left Step Band' for some skanking, dubby, vocal action. The hooky, hook-up came about after Rennie met bass-man Zac on the set of the final Harry Potter movie. As Zac was a 'Death- Eater' his suggestion of a remix was taken very seriously.

Rennie is currently doing a rave-breaks remix for Supertronix act Jurassic & Codec called Hit Dat and is preparing his next release which is a Soundtrack Album from the film ʻThe Fixʼ. He is also one half of ʻones to watchʼ uberfunkers The Bush Doctors with Jem P from Fingerlickin. They have just started their first Residency (The Bush Doctorʼs Medicine Show) at West Londonʼs new Hotspot The Raving Buddha in (aptly named) Shepherdʼs Bush. The second dose on Feb 25th sees the mighty Freestylers join the Doctors for all things funky.


!!FREE STUFF!!
FREE TRACK - Rennie Pilgrem 'Erica's Fix' (Rennie's Breakspoll Mix): http://snd.sc/ihm02c

FREE MIX - Rennie Pilgrem '140' a Jungle Breaks Mix: http://snd.sc/fmzTB0

CHECK OUR INTERVIEW WITH RENNIE IN ISSUE 6 - STAND AND DELIVER BELOW

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Rants of infamous filmmaker Chaz - Team LSD (issue 6)

This is England ’86. Oh God. Not again. Just as we have all stupidly fallen for The Sun’s editorial and re-elected some kind of Toryled regime to govern us. Up steps Channel 4 to cheerily remind us of the great fun and games we had trying to keep our heads above water during the reign of the Arts-baiting Totalitarian Margaret Hilda Thatcher. Thanks for that, but lets take a closer examination of this re-tailored set of Emperors New Clothes, shall we? See if we can learn how to fight back against this latest round of Conservative wet dream slashes.

The Director: Shane Meadows, was a ray of hope in the mid-nineties when he burst onto an unsuspecting film scene with his nobudget, underground films, namely “24/7” and the emblematic “Small Time” (which is roughly the template for everything he’s done since – dominant male ruling the roost and scaring the heroes or heroines). Some of these have been great – “A Room For Romeo Brass” and “Dead Man’s Shoes,” but too often since and after the original film version of “This Is England” (which is by no means a Perfect Movie) cracks the size of the fiscal deficit have begun to appear and this televisual offering of “This is England” is the biggest crack of all. How depressing that a movie that originally shone its light on the dark days of racist Britain has been homogenised into a weak episode of that other Channel 4 Teenfuck Fest “SKINS.” What was Shane thinking? Hiring that writer, who has butchered the historical accuracy of that period and reduced the characters to one-dimensional parodies of who we were back then, or even who the characters were in the original film? In the original film we followed the character Sean (a character apparently based on Shane Meadows and his experiences) as he is manipulated into joining the National Front. 

 

 The writer of Skins has taken this character and given him absolution, which I will buy, but asking the audience to accept overtly racist characters suddenly being loveable and charming is a little bit hard to swallow. Surely Mr. Meadows should have gone down the route of doing some research and opened his fucking eyes to what really went on back then. As well as being six years out in the wardrobe department, it would’ve been much more interesting to look at how politically influenced young people were back then (Redskins 1986 anyone?). As opposed to how they are today, little heelclicking robots repeatedly pressing the LIKE button on Facebook at anything that doesn’t have words. Right now I can hear the Producers going “Yes, Chaz and that’s exactly what we set out to do – to show how today’s youth are callow and, Yes! The 80’s are hip again, you only have to jump on a bus to Shoreditch to see that, Men in capes with Edwardian moustaches - lets throw the whole thing together and see who wants to advertise!! But lets actually make it look like 1980!” (Which is the one successful thing it did do.)

In 1980, Britain was vicious. In 1981, Britain exploded – Handsworth, Toxteth, and Brixton all went up in flames as the Youth of Britain took to the streets to make a protest. Can you really see that happening today? Even in the face of cuts more savage than the Iron Lung Lady could manage? Of course not! They’ve all been mollycoddled with pap, chased for their advertising stream to such an extent that we’ve bred a complacent, self-important generation of divas and dunces far too consumed with narcissism to give a fuck about the Politics of the day. 

 

 

READ THE FULL ARTICLE IN LSD MAGAZINE ISSUE 6  (Below)
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Soulflux (Team LSD) debates Big Bang, Religion & Consciousness

 If you tuned into my last column, you will have probably witnessed me have right old dig at the scientific mainstream for choosing a mechanical and lifeless model of the universe with which to indoctrinate the “civilised” world. Fair enough it may sound a damn sight better than the picture painted by western religion, where one step out of line will have you condemned to fire and brimstone for eternity, but I find both to be wholly ineffective at describing the world as I see it.

 The source of this great divide between science and religion is usually attributed to the philosopher Rene Descartes, who in the early 1600’s pioneered the idea that the world of matter is purely mechanical; that atoms are just lifeless balls of energy which coast around the universe governed by simple physical laws. Although he and his contemporaries still believed in God, they had created a secular science by extracting God out of the physical world; the universe became a clockwork device, where God was the watchmaker and had no further involvement after winding it up. The roman catholic church accepted this, and the scientific revolution began - people could explore the physical world with a renewed sense of freedom as there was no longer any fear of committing heresy and getting burned at the stake.

One of the consequences of this, was that man was essentially promoted to a God-like status within the physical world. Even animals were believed by the intelligentsia to have no spirit in them, but were viewed as mere complex clockwork phenomena resulting from the laws of motion, and thus equally amenable to scientific experimentation. One source writes “They administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference, and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they felt pain … They nailed poor animals up on boards by their four paws to vivisect them and watch the blood circulate, which was a great subject of conversation”.

So the so-called “Enlightenment” got off to a pretty unenlightened start, and although we have come a long way since that particular kind of vile materialism, the belief that Earth is merely a resource to feed man’s whimsical desire has persisted. It fueled the industrial revolution and underlies our entire world economy. Nothing is sacred except human life, and even then some of us are more sacred than others. In theoretical physics, the idea of a spiritually devoid universe has been explored to obscene levels. The creators of the universe, they say, are lifeless energy membranes floating in some hyper-dimensional vacuum and colliding with each other to produce “big bangs”. Most of the collisions lead to “failed universes” and we happen to live in one which succeeded. But don’t get too excited, because according to one recent article on BBC News, it’s all going to end in cold dark emptiness, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

You see, in between the big bang and the cold dark emptiness, the debris from the explosion accidentally happened to organise itself into what we call life. It’s a total fluke, an uncountable series of highly improbable events, one after another. Our consciousness is just the latest in the chain; an illusion at the leading edge of the big bang explosion. Eventually it will all decay into absolute nothingness, just like before the accident. Now to be fair, it’s probably one of the least ridiculous theories of the universe you can create without incorporating a spiritual dimension. But as many people will attest, this 400 year old paradigm of secular materialism is crumbling, and the global economy which is built upon it is sinking like the proverbial house on sand.

TUNE IN 2 SOULFLUX EXCLUSIVELY IN LSD MAGAZINE

READ THE FULL ARTICLE IN LSD MAGAZINE ISSUE 6  (Below)

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