Marc Blackie is an absolutely incredible Fetish/BDSM photography from London. His photography is abnormally incredible and his use of black & white contrast is stellar. He describes his work as “being a product of various parts of my mind; my love of the erotic, the female form & sexual fantasy and quite obviously the more sinister underbelly of these things.”

“Marc Blackie’s photographs depict a surreal, heightened eroticism in a manner that manages to be both playful and solemnly ritualistic. In elegantly-shot black and white photos – technically clear and unfussy – women with faces as impassive as kabuki masks (and sometimes, indeed, wearing actual masks) are depicted enacting little scenarios of power and contrast: light against dark; soft against spiky; innocent against corrupted; natural against artificial.

Nobuyoshi Araki is clearly a reference point in Blackie’s work and he shares the Japanese photographer’s interest in bondage themes, but also his dead-pan sense of humour. A more subtle influence, however, comes from the American Francesca Woodman. Woodman – who died by her own hand in 1981 - practised in her photography a kind of moody, backwoods surrealism, in which narrative has been siphoned away, leaving only a layer of queasy, erotic atmosphere and unanswered questions.

It is this same sense of the unknown – the feeling that something as banal as an ice cream cone can be utterly mysterious – mingled with a dark erotic impulse, that forms the heart of Marc Blackie’s work.” - Jim Anderson

Shannon Hourigan is a Los Angeles based Bachelor of Visual Arts graduate from the Queensland College of Art in Australia. She does some very interesting model shoots as well as some themed still life sets. Evidence is a fun set which makes use of some random autopsy/surgical tools, as well as a rather large bullet and some fake blood. You cant really go wrong with that.

At any rate her eye is great and her depth is awesome and her atitude is quite dark. She has some twisted ideas, and I love her for that.

I can across some John Santerineross art today randomly and I was pretty impressed. It’s some of the best dark art photography I’ve seen in a while that didn’t depend on heavy editing. He’s been called “The worlds leading neo-symbolist photographer of our time”, and for obviouse reasons. According to his bio, his inspiration comes mostly from his exposure to Catholocism and Santeria when he was younger.

I suggest checking out his portfolio. It’s very Giger-ish, only more of this world, and with less biomech influences.

Promoe is basically fucking awesome. You’ve probably heard him while listening to Looptroop as early as ‘92, and never even noticed. According to my iPod I’ve listened to Promoe about 680 times in the last year with an almost non existant skip count. I’d say that’s pretty good.

If you have any interest in a hard blend of Raggae and Hip-hop from a crazy swedish white boy with a lot to say about life, politics, and the swedish street art scene, then start spending a lot of time listening to Promoe. Easily one of the best MC’s out there right now.

I had to listen to it twice before I knew what I thought. Simply because the entire first round was basically spent on the edge of my seat waiting for some glitchy breaks and some industrial thumps. About 50 minutes into the album I got past my denial and just realized that they were infact, not going to come. I knew I had to listen to this album with an entirely different ear now that it was apparent that it was going to be an entirely ambient album.

So I started it over.

It was dark, (thus the name, one would think) however it wasn’t the darkest ambient album I’d ever heard. It was dark but stayed light hearted with some very loud but well spread out piano hits. The first few tracks had a very Paul Ruskay Homeworld OST style to it, while as I got more toward the end it felt more along the lines of Stratvm Terror, or Necrophorus.

All in all it’s a good album, but realistically the next time I had the urge to listen to Hecq, I’d put on Bad Karma, A Dried Youth, or 0000.

The album cover reads the following:

“I am not myself. I am the one
Walking by my side, without me seeing him,
The one I often visit and the one I often forget.
The one, who remains silent when I speak,
Who gently forgives, when I hate, who wanders
Where I’m not, who will stay upright, when I die.”

Why? Why do people insist on tagging artists with the artists name, or other artists name?

For example, Nine Inch Nails, is tagged as Nine Inch Nails. No, really? Are we sure this is NIN? Might we forget that Nine Inch Nails is in fact, Nine Inch Nails, if we don’t tag it as such?

Heres an example of tagging artists with other artists names. Boards of Canada, Error Unknown, and Thalassa are all tagged Aphex Twin. Guess what. None of those artists are Aphex Twin.

Can we at least all make the extra effort to put “music like” in front of the artist your comparing it too? For example, Squarepusher could be tagged “music like aphex twin“. Its literally only 10 extra characters. It seems like a small price to pay to not look like a retarded bastard who’s cluttering Last.fm with stupid tags.

Arguably, there are some cases where it may have a point. In the instance of artists like Aphex Twin and Syndrone who have recorded under multiple names. But for the sake of organization and cleanliness, can we just not? You know that Polygon Window is Aphex Twin, so is it really necessary to tag it as Aphex Twin?

That is all.