Since he moved to Los Angeles, Mac DeMarco has had plenty of musicians over to visit the home studio in his backyard. Today’s guest, however, is a special one. Haruomi Hosono has arrived, trailed by a Japanese film crew, who are shooting a documentary about the legendary musician’s hugely influential career and recent cultural resurgence. DeMarco is an avowed Hosono superfan, so while he’s usually as laid back as they come, today even he betrays a few nerves as he plays Hosono some of his recent recordings. He mentions that he was even more nervous last night, when DeMarco joined Hosono onstage at The Mayan Theater to perform the Japanese artist’s 1975 track “Honey Moon” together.

Haruomi Hosono’s music is impossible to pigeon-hole. The 71-year-old experimentalist started out playing with Tokyo psychedelic rockers Apryl Fool before he became the bassist for California Sound-indebted four-piece Happy End, but it’s his work with Yellow Magic Orchestra, the pioneering electronic group that he formed in 1978 with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi, that he’s most known for. To a certain type of musician, however, Hosono will be equally recognised for his mind-bogglingly eclectic solo career, which has experienced something of a revival in the west as of late. A number of his albums were recently reissued by Light in the Attic, and Vampire Weekend sampled his ambient track “Talking” on their single “2021”. DeMarco has been covering his songs, too, and in a recent interview with CBC Radio, he said that since hearing Hosono’s music ten years ago, “I’ve just been trying to rip him off. He’s been my favourite thing to dive in to or listen to or try and emulate for a long time… There’s a wealth in terms of what I’d like to achieve.”

So today, beneath the shade of a pomelo tree, the pair are sitting down to discuss Hosono’s work, his studio clothing etiquette, and all the times he’s been as starstruck as DeMarco is right now.

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In August 2009, Afghanistan went to the polls to choose a president for only the second time in its history. While incumbent Hamid Karzai would eventually be awarded another term amid widespread allegations of fraud, the opponents who risked their lives to run against him captured a thirst for change amongst many Afghan voters. A year earlier, Havana Marking had directed the remarkable and award-winning documentary ‘Afghan Star’, which had focused on hopefuls competing in Afghanistan’s equivalent to Pop Idol. Three weeks before election day she returned to the country with co-director Martin Herring to go on the campaign trail with the candidates auditioning for the job of President of Afghanistan. With screenings of ‘Vote Afghanistan!’ now starting at the ICA, Dazed Digital met the two directors to discuss democracy in a warzone and compare electioneering in Kabul with the race to Downing Street.

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Daniel Johnston is a cult singer-songwriter whose seventeen albums have taken him from working at Astro World in Houston and handing out his homemade tapes after his shows to international acclaim and a queue of artists, including TV on the Radio, The Flaming Lips and Tom Waits, lining up to cover his songs. He was first thrust into the public consciousness when Kurt Cobain was pictured wearing one of his t-shirts and a bidding war between record labels ensued, despite the fact that he was in the middle of a five year stint in a mental hospital. In 2005, ‘The Devil and Daniel Johnston’, a documentary about his life, his music and his struggles with bipolar disorder, won the Documentary Directing Award at Sundance. He was back in the spotlight last year when Karen O covered his song ‘Worried Shoes’ for the ‘Where The Wild Things Are’ soundtrack, and he is currently touring Europe with BEAM, an 11-piece orchestra from the Netherlands. Dazed Digital caught up with him before their show at London’s Troxy.

Dazed Digital: How did this tour with BEAM come about?
Daniel Johnston: The orchestra? My brother arranged it and got some really good players together. There’s like three guitars, bass, drums, trumpets, trombones, saxophones, violins, everything you can imagine. It’s a lot of music. We got off to a kind of rough start yesterday at the show, but I think our shows will be more and more improved, you know?

DD: Have you written new songs specifically to play with them?
Daniel Johnston: They’re all a lot of my older songs, some are the newer songs. Well, there are some ‘new’ songs about that are already ten years old. It’s a lot of fun playing with the orchestra. They’ve got it all arranged well. It’s easy to singing along with.

DD: How do you set about writing songs?
Daniel Johnston: Well, for a long time, if something happened to me, with different girls and stuff, then I would write about certain days and include just about everything that happened. But this year I’m trying to write fiction, fictional songs, you know, made-up songs that aren’t fake or false. I’m trying to do that at the moment, that’s what I keep telling everybody but I haven’t really done it that much.

DD: Are you still drawing as well?
Daniel Johnston: Yeah, I draw all the time. My drawings really are more of a fantasy. It’s not really my own life anymore.

DD: Do you find it difficult to always be honest and open in your writing?
Daniel Johnston: I just keep writing autobiographically and when I think that way the songs almost write themselves, just thinking about everything that’s happened.

DD: You seem to be becoming even more popular and you’re playing bigger venues each time you come to London. Are you enjoying this tour?
Daniel Johnston: It should be easy now. If I keep selling records, I should be able to make it through life without going too crazy. It’s fun to go around the world. We just got back from Australia after a month. We went to Australia and Japan.

DD: If your music’s taking you all over the world, is there anything left that you still want to achieve?
Daniel Johnston: I want to make better sounding recordings. When I started out I was just recording on my dad’s little tape player. I thought that when I made tapes for my friends, I’d just pretend like I’m making an album, so all my friends got plenty of tapes.

DD: But now you’d like to make records that sound more produced?
Daniel Johnston: I try to make it different just to keep an interest in it. The thing about a song is that I might have it done in like a half hour. Then I’ll play it over and over again, if I like it. In the big time, they spend forever on recordings. That’s what I’d like to do. All those kinds of overdubs and everything, that’s what I’d like to do someday. I’ll get rich enough, I’m sure I will.

Originally published by Dazed & Confused.

Mixing his mordant sense of humour with a childlike style, Neil Farber’s artwork inhabits a world of its own. It is a melancholy world, populated with a macabre cast of characters: girls with shining eyes, ghosts, gorillas and endless disembodied heads, spreading rapidly across the canvas. They often carry a weight of sadness or foreboding, but their sense of absurdity and surprising juxtaposition of ideas means that they’re more likely to make you laugh than they are to bring you down.

His work, which at times recalls David Shrigley at his darkest, has explored relationships, religion and in particular illness and death, as in last year’s Canniballistics exhibition. He has worked variously with watercolour, oil and mixed media, to build rich, densely layered pieces.

Born in 1975 in Winnipeg, Farber was an original member of the Royal Art Lodge, a Winnipeg-based artist’s collective where he worked alongside Marcel Dzama and Michael Dumontier. Since the collective disbanded in 2008 Farber has continued to work with Dumontier and has also begun exhibiting solo. For Volta 2010 in New York, Farber has created a series of new works. His major piece is Nuisance Grounds, named for a Canadian expression for a rubbish tip. It is 160 inches (over 4m) wide, a leap away from the two inch square pieces he produced with the Royal Art Lodge. Dazed caught up with him to find out why, in this case, bigger means lighter…

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