November 25, 2015

SOLO ORGAN / ATOM HEART AND BEYOND THE INFINITE






SOLO ORGAN "ATOM HEART AND BEYOND THE INFINITELP


We here at the hive played a hand in the visuals for our favorite metaphysical channeler of hammond organs and cosmic aural doom, filmmaker DOUGLAS KATELUS's musical project, SOLO ORGAN.

http://www.douglaskatelus.com/




November 19, 2015

READING AT MISSION COMICS AND ART






They came down from Carson City. A few travelled on the backs of bears.
Some made home between the panels of pages, tunneling to China through a piece of paper with self-reflexive VIGOR.
I came in where the story went strange, "Saturday's Alright for Fury" was promptly placed behind me, as the title came on while I broke my way into the SFMoMa to pee on some paintings. Quiet night on the east garden letting the wind manhandle my mad nakedness. Then I thought about all that jazzy new material I had set to be READ ALOUD by someone dressed just like me (same face, same hair, glasses, everything) pretty darn soon. 

Dasha SevaShalo PScott Longo, D. McKeever




VALLEY / BABY GOT BACKSTORY





1. VALLEY - FROM THE DESK OF SHALO P

MOUTH TO MOUTH WORTH DROWNING FOR.

BABY GOT BACKSTORY.

WITH DUAL SUNSETS CLOSING IN AT BOTH SIDES.

V A L L E Y  is a sprawling multi-dimensional body of work (books, writings, sound, video, etcset to the tune of ominous gloom.
Its composer, Shalo P is reticent to speak about the project in full, some blame his nervous nature, or the fact that he hides himself away for months at a time in an office steeped in books and dust
We do receive letters though, sometimes referencing a certain mythical personal figure, or else going on about the nature of "The Sister Spread" as an aspect of immediate memory, the frenzied free-time that memory naturally wisps away in its continually coiled recalibration of the self's illusions
"We are only who we remember to be", he wrote to us. "As far back as I can recallI've been Sister Spread", he added.

If a life were to be mapped out as points that memory guided back, like sign posts, towards some vestigial semblance of an initial self nestled in the primordial influences that doomed us to our natures, so does this exhibition peer back in order to pull this landscape with it like a black cape wherever it treads, like a valley across mountains made of lush crackling styrofoam
If these signposts, routinely called "memory" - as unreliable guides as they are - serve some workable version of ourselves for the present, it's still to present merely the opposite of the amnesiac, another bad detective riddled with jumbled clues, conveniently framing some mishandled conclusion with withering fragments of story. "We are only who we remember to be", he wrote. And yet who is to say that this was not written by any of the myriad of interns and secretaries that ensconce the self-styled digital wizard of North Beach?

With VALLEY, Shalo P presents us another way to envision memory's lack by embracing the seemingly dark dense expanses of The Sister Spread, the space between those prized little markers leading back to the only self memory grudgingly allows, like dark energy cradling all the visible
It is with dark energy in mind that this valley was conjured.

The spread between memories is a free place, clear of guilt, death, or memory of pain. It is a honest nothingness; the memory of trees, fields, and streams.

As with any intangible idea as heavily depended-upon as memory, whose currency frequents self-deception and subtle streamlining, we present the history of what never happened - as it did
It crawls best across a new landscape bereft of the familiar. It is a thing complete in its regards to being incomplete. A valley is merely the tendon of mountains, a gulf bridged by the invisible - lush, foreboding, empty, or reachinga synergy of viewpoints.

It began as a investigation into exciting forms of lust, although unfaithfully it simply mutated violently into another creature.

From The Desk Of Shalo P:

The original concept was bound by an oath between artists concerning the other as sensual canvas, with hungry bodies expressing wordless whimsy, with only a glittering gulf between them swarming with tigers.

It served as a natural extension of the work I'd made resulting from friendly dares, deals, and promises
I'm like a vampire. I needed to be invited.
(honestly, I might just need delicious fresh warm blood...)


The work held solid promise, as the lengths they reportedly took to woo one another often took turns vicious and frightful.

After the project eventually fell through, a vast emptiness lay before the artist
Whilst his collaborator's works were summarily pulled from the project, his still lay still abed in thoughtful incubation
It would take some years to grasp a shape from within that void, and yet it did indeed manifest.
"It rose up with a black cape..." he wrote to us in an email,
with an attachment to a music video on youtube by Bob Welch.
"Or was it the black cape that I followed..." he added in the post-script, while also asking for additional money to get some posters done.

We could feel for him. He was left with a project without its other half, and yet stubbornly clung to his promise like Linus Van Pelt's iron grip on his blanket.
"And still, nothing is more intimate than promises kept to an empty room." he said.

When his collaborator opted for anonymity, the codename Sister Spread was adopted, styling her as a refreshed Melody Nelson, a new courageous Vivian Girl, a newly anointed Made In Heaven Cicciolina bristling in bronze
But in this case
"I could never hope to present the ethereal goddess. I couldn't believe in her, even though it seems that's what folk seem to talk about. But I never met an ethereal goddess. I met a real woman though, much more remarkable, in my opinion. I wanted to present that - but more specifically HER. I want the insular logic of stereo obsessions on blast, tethered like a rabid dog to the heavy weight of amorous wants, like all them vials of organs pulled out of that secret scientific research center, and laid out for viewing like in AKIRA... And there is no viler organ than the valley."

Also:
"An interesting aspect of the project is that over the years I incorporated as many and more of Sister Spread's own personal traits / talents into myself as I could, infusing myself in a well of wasted wishes,
knee-deep in coarse whore's hair.
I had wanted so much to be utterly obliterated by ideas. I wanted my body to be scoured by someone else inside my skin, thrashing at the places I pretend are tender.
But In the end I'm uncertain how much of Sister Spread resides inside me... but when I look at my maze I can't tell if I'm the Minotaur of the Medusa either."

These are the new gestures apparent in the work
"They say La Saranghina is the devil. But Sister Spread expanded my way of thinking.
I thank her by setting myself on fire".

VALLEY is a series of whimsical gestures bridging a complex rift.
It's a searing journey of sorts, with liminal discoveries lying somewhere mysteriously beyond the horizon over the horizon
The original premise was based on mutual lust, now it's all ostensibly about _______.

As Shalo P is wont to say, "Hell Prevails",

San Francisco
Oct 2015





2. SHALO P's description of VALLEY

V A L L E Y  is a series of whimsical gestures bridging a complex rift, spurned on by a couple of awful freaks.

Taking advantage of our respectively rambunctious fiery personas, along with a shared fondness for flair, we initially approached the project as artists bound by love and duty. The goal was to evolve a call / response framework of frenzied pitter-patterned adulation with honestly scathing bittersweet scintillation. It was a noble quest for those of restless sex, but reality's fangs fared sharper than mere oaths.

With VALLEY, the investigation takes place long after the fact, to thoroughly assess what remains
to be gleaned with "ruse-tinted" frames.

At first, it presented a blend of structured, and semi-stream-of-thought books of funnies, and yet it expanded into videos, musical compositions, as well as a series of essays, parables, and poems regarding "The Sister Spread", and the demon named "Lust". 
It has filled out into a strange subdued narrative splintering into facets of self-effacing stories - mirroring, documenting, and paralleling in tone the ultimate shape of the emptiness that engulfed the original project, drawing a silhouette of its absent half - with its exaltation to lost causes full of fire, with its wastelands of wanton energy smoldering in piles of literary lithe.

It's a clever show for clever cats.
Milky thinkers welcome.

love,

Shalo P
North Beach, San Francisco, California




3. A Note on the Initial Death / A Letter concerning VALLEY

Dear Friends,

I wish to confess that VALLEY (the initial exhibition within a physical space) died a quiet death
during the week of Thanksgiving four years ago. 
An open window enabled the warped sensibilities of the work to come through materially,
and the images shriveled up like wet leaves on the dew-dropped walls. 
The show lasted five days
Weather, the harsh critic of marriages, boating, and picnics, had poetically foiled a show earnestly concerned with the nature of "wasted energies" - which had also initially been a picnic of sorts, with a grip of small promises I was undoubtedly married to, on this swishing ship called LIFE
An artist is nothing if not bound to certain duties - "finish it" - being paramount.
And yet, re-botched as it was, it was also revived by an ice-cold bucket
of fresh wasted energy: and so the valley widened accordingly.
Sheer resolve became implacable stubbornness on my part.

What had begun as a project fulfilling a lover's pact grew out of scope and form, spurned on by a new spirit.
The appendices to a few scattered rooms became a haunted mansion of ghouls. 
Like a ghost I paced the studio looking for the links to the chains of inertia that kept my corporeal form trapped, which obscured the new shape the project had take before me.

(And yes, the show is cursed, and all that watch it will die or eventually curl into a screaming stone statue.
There, I admitted it.)

This work became a document of a time, and a place crafted by that time there.
It exist now as a shard of moment reigned upon by the ssspirittt of ecstasy.

Please enjoy.

love,
Shalo P
San Francisco
October 2015

SARAH BURKE'S "ENTER THE VALLEY WITH SHALO P"
(a finely written review)



images shown.
Video Still from "Television For Ghosts : Wilderness / White Furnace" from Valley, Photograph "Watching", Video Still from "Television For Ghosts : The Spy / The Secret Group", Image (collab) "The Descent Down" 

October 31, 2015

SHALO P - V A L L E Y

OCT 17 - NOV 10

M O U T H
T O
M O U T H
W O R T H
D R O W N I N G
F O R

SSSPIRITTT OF ECSTASY / A STROLL 'ROUND MEDUSA LAKE







Hey Ho!

Valley is up. All howls past All Hollows, 'cause the terror is flowing nonstop down the administrator's hilltop.
These days we got devilish good news. V A L L E Y - OCT 17 - NOV 10. 
An Eternity in one month.
IT'S THE WRATH OF SISTER SPEAD.
Call your pals, and get your hankies 'cause Shalo P's gonna make you laugh 'til you cry.
It's probably just gonna be a lot of weeping and kicking things into corners.
V A L L E Y

Sorry for the INTERNET lags - we make up for it by being negligent
We were letting the new girl work on the updates. Can you EVER trust a mohawk? Tell me true.
She'd made about fifty little paper boats with the notes we'd supplied, half of them downstream by the time we decided to just jot the word "DOOM" on new sheets ALL OVER AGAIN.
We are priming up for some "choice" fun on Halloween with big news from the office.
There's going to be a personal tour. Check here.

PLUS, this came into the office today (A REVIEW). Some scamp copied it like crazy (along with a bevy of scanned butts) and papered the walls of the workshop like a madhouse. There was a hush when the boss shuffled in. Breath was held. At the office we're kind people - we want the environment to spring forth with cheer,
but surprises are a notch above civility.
Anyhoo, Betty's out back crafting a totem pole of crack addicts out of wax with the leftover paper

Strange, FROM THE DESK OF LINDA ISCALI SCOBIE :
Sometimes I'm asked if Shalo P is real.
I tell them: NO.

Yep, a tour. Usually, there's nothing like a little silver spray paint to the eyes to make silly requests go away, but this gig is NAILED DOWN. See you there, unless an intern finds that box of cans I KNOW is stashed somewhere in the back.
Personally I'm just hankering for a crack at lighting that big ole' pumpkin's head just to see fire spurt from behind his black glasses and curly hair.

Fun Fact: Shalo P was originally going to call the show "AKA everything in this universe fought me to finish this sentence, 'cause I'm releasing this blasted thing, or I die right fucking no-"

And that's when I heard news of Shalo P's passing. This was, coincidentally, also his reaction to the walls. He just withers and dies. We embalm him, and then boil his remains, ladling the Shalo P syrup into a tin "The Smiths" lunchbox until he adequately recovers.

Yep...
Just spoke to Sister Spread over the phone. She's fine with me handling things for now. I felt trapped in keeping back that this "mid-career opus" thing Shalo keeps mentioning isn't magically turning into the sort of "loving gesture that echoes out into eternity" like the "human psychic energy reverb" he'd hoped for. It's nice and all, yes, but frankly, Mr(s) Franks, I work alongside him, and I'm of the mind that he's all out of loving gestures these days.

Oh He's fine.

This was his last email:
Didya read the review? It might have a connection to a dream I had of a loud stone echo symphony shaking the trees as distant loping wolves wildly led each other to a moonstone marbly ravine where they all howled, nestled like leaping lizards in the dark lord's ivy bowl, carving out the shape of the sky. The sky was affected like a prism. Can you please send a bouquet of those to the writer?

What sounds like hell swallowing down a thousand souls playing little laughing pianos? VALLEY.
What reads like an all-at-once novel swirling in questionable literary mischief? VALLEY.
What do cunningly crafted conceptual comic strip soundtracks and orientation musical mystery thrillers have in common? VALLEY.

SEE YOU THERE.
OR SEE YOU NEVER. (how about a little of both?)

From the Desk of Shalo P :
Let's let the curve get another raise from what we have carved from dark.
But then again, having a three-way with your Calculus and Algebra teachers isn't the only way to prove you're a Polymath

Let's motor,
BB


Sarah Burke's Review of VALLEY for East Bay Express





October 30, 2015

BEHIND THE SUN IS A SON A BITCH





Hi Pals,

We've had "fawlty" internet in the workshop of late, AND constant work - this passion is prison
(it would be laughable if it weren't so charmingly insistent).
We've faced some pesky delays in getting out word out, with this pesky interface being what it is these days...
we've resorted to just telling you straight up.
New Horizons (on the horizon, and a  V A L L E Y  perched on the edge of the abyss)! 
YEP, we're steadily heading down those kind dusty slopes on blood red horses frothing hell's flame from open maw. I could've been the fifth horseman, indeed - I'd have dubbed myself "Psyche!". 
But then again it may be misleading, since I do believe the phrase goes "it's all uphill from here".

V A L L E Y  sees its return to the gallery space after four years or so, boiling over in its stygian flood of forms, with its latest shape to be presented on October 17, with glorious spectacle and stirring swirling cleverness(es). 
If you'd like to help out in anyway, or wish to know more about it; I can take you there, but I might not be able to tell it to you completely - it's a mystery (am I misspelling misery?). 
The boss has been cooped up in his office for months now it seems.
We'll be rolling out more news, once the interns are trained.
We do our best to avoid the foul smell coming from the backroom.
Maybe he's dead.
Well, we could just scoop that mother out clean, and fill his soft thorax with icecream and just have ourselves a social with all the secretaries on hand. 
How's that for a  V A L L E Y ?

Well, what I CAN say is that it's our first exhibition involving a theme that cannot merely be encapsulated by just saying "with emphasis placed upon the overlapping of voids". This time our subject is Lust, if only tangentially at the point its reached now. Aw, it's actually about ______.

Here's something that just hit my desk a moment ago:

FROM THE DESK OF SHALO P

Please state that this time it may actually be Lust Deferred or Dreams Defrayed.
Also, who's been using my T-square? I desperately need that lil' mother.
Nothing wacks ass like primed wood.
I'll accept any available extension cords in its place, to make do in its stead with a cat-of-nine-tails to awe the internet age.
Hell Prevails,
sp

We hope to see you soon. Tell your friends and those you love.
Tell you enemies that you'll be basked in a bash of brash rhythms 'til kingdom crumble, amid the humble ruins of a prisoner's passion (yes, I was told to write that too). If the knaves laugh, give 'em a smile on a subtle.

You are invited.
We love you and thank you again for all your support and love,

"Stay Savage" - KMK

yours truly, and anxiously - frothfully, even,

Dordery Marks
San Francisco, California.






June 2, 2015

GAMES FOR MAY - THE BOOK













GAMES FOR MAY 
by SHALO P FRIENDS

featuring
George Kuchar, Rebecca Parks Ramage, Marion Hunt, Katie Burge, Peter Gray Hurley, Alex Chiu, Owen Takabayashi, Jose Gabriel Angeles, Kat Toledo, Monet Clark, Taeer Maymon, Homero Hidalgo,  Ana Maria Salcedo, Johnny Rogers, David Castro, Sadie Lune, Lindsay Laven

The book is available at Ladybug House in Chinatown, San Francisco.
We'll have copies on hand with the new tape we're dropping JUNE 5th - lush ecstasy in duotone hues - exquisitely in limited supply - made with heart and dripping with spit.
Please write to us if you'd like to make an order out of state.


GAMES FOR MAY - SOLO ORGAN and TAPE RELEASE