After years and years of hearing about how great this annual festival in the desert is, EMERGE finally went out to Indio, California for this year's Coachella festival. We had a blast over all, saw some amazing performances, went to some killer afterparties, hung with great people, and didn't get much sleep. Here are some of our thoughts, fresh off the red eye flight home from LA:

1. Coachella is really white: It's probably not just the programming of the festival itself but also the cost of tickets and accommodation as well as the fact that it takes place in an extremely posh part of the country. Whatever the reason, the throngs of punters in every stage we visited were overwhelmingly young and caucasian. The same complaint could be leveled at indie rock as a whole presumably, but coming from NYC, EMERGE was struck by the conspicuous lack of people of color amongst both the audience and performers.



2. Girls, put on some clothes. In the age of amateur papparazzi, webcasts, youtube and relentless videography of everything, we were pretty surprised by the number of ladies who seemingly left home for the festival in nothing more than a bathing suit, some sneakers (sometimes motorcycle boots), and a backpack. Sure, drunk dudes love you, but your mothers would be appalled. Plus it gets chilly once the sun goes down.  (see photos below for more...)

3. While all sorts of hipster publications, from The Fader to Anthem to Flaunt Magazine all threw parties at Coachella, some fared better than others. The Fader and Anthem's day parties got high marks- especially Anthem's utterly bonkers Fiesta De Las Fiestas, the Flaunt events at the Horizon Hotel were marred by noise complaints and an aggressive police presence, which effectively killed the party spirit. In a town of gated communities and tourist hotels, party people need more secluded locations to throw a rager.

Check out the Anthem Fiesta on Last Night's Party (some of this is NSFW!!!)






Posted by James Friedman

Ok, so normally EMERGE isnt' really that interested in the gear-obsessions that drive people to sell organs for an iPhone or to discuss the relative merits of granular or analog-modeling synthesis. However, we are interested in technologies that take esoteric- dare I say nerdy- processes from outside dark rooms filled with cables and doodads and turn them into engaging performances. AND, as our devotion to Daft Punk's Alive tour last Summer indicated, we love a good electronic music performance that transcends the dude-behind-a-laptop paradigm.

Hence EMERGE's fascination with the Tenori-On-Tour, a live product demonstration tour showcasing a really interesting little gizmo from Yamaha that looks like this:



Basically, this is similar to the much more homespun Monome machine from a couple  years ago, allowing users to customize a grid of pads to control their music software, and translate some of the normally unseen aspects of electronic music production into a visual language of blinking lights and patterns. To really find out what's going on here, EMERGE is going to check out the New York stop of the tour on April 16 and we encourage any curious folks to stop by the SAT in Montreal on April 11th or 1015 Fulsom in San Francisco on the 18th. The demos will include a presentation by Tenori-On inventor Toshio Iwai as well as performances by top-shelf button-pushers including Robert Lippok, Sutekh, Pole, Safety Scissors, I Am Robot And Proud, and Nathan Michel. Best of all, attendees can enter a raffle to win their own Tenori-On and rest assured that there will be many other music geeks and gadget freaks there to attend what is basically a glorified version of the infomercial...




Posted by James Friedman

Apologies for the long silence. EMERGE was on holiday, catching a bit of late season snowboarding out in Colorado... We got lucky. Two feet of fresh powder and next to no crowds on the slopes. We don't mean to brag, but it's the best excuse we've ever had for not updating the site for a few days...

Berlin rooftops


EMERGE's favorite nightclub, Panoramabar


With the advent of user reviews, blogs and web resources like Superfuture the travel guidebook our parents used back in the days (Frommer's Europe On $10 A Day, we're looking at you) feels less than totally relevant. Sure, there are things like Time Out's The Other Side Of guides or Monocle's 2007 Top 50 but Unlike is something a bit different. Launching with Berlin, but promising more cities to come, Unlike presents search functions, specialized guides focused on art collections, vintage clothes hunting, and architecture, events listings and much more. So if your idea of tourism includes checking out the hottest young galleries, coolest shops and maybe a demonstration of a new type of synthesizer, Unlike is the guide for you. As they say themselves:

unlike.net looks at the most personal, treasured locations, events and urban themes, capturing the spirit of life’s journey: in the club, in the shop, in the restaurant, at the gallery.

unlike.net is the definitive city guide in motion, it’s where experiences are shared, styles are formed, and ideas accelerated. unlike.net offers a fresh perspective that reinvents the city guide for the 21st century.

Available whenever and wherever you need it. unlike.net is more than a simple guide, itīs where guests become locals.

Posted by James Friedman

If you've ever found  yourself on the corner of Center Street and Kenmare Street in downtown Manhattan, you've probably noticed an absurdly narrow storefront space with a really interesting design that allows much of the exterior walls to rotate open, exposing a really compact but impressive exhibition within. This is the Storefront for Art and Architecture and it's a seldom-celebrated cultural feather in the already crowded cap of EMERGE's fair city. Here is one reason why:

Whitehouse Redux



In collaboration with Surface Magazine and Control Group, the Storefront is holding a design contest to reimagine and redesign the White House. Three winners will be chosen and their design materials, including videos, images, designs, drawings etc will be showcased in a month-long exhibition come July 2008. The contest is to be judged by Beatriz Colomina, Architectural historian, New York; Stefano Boeri, Editor-in-chief, Abitare magazine, Milan; Liz Diller, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York; John Maeda, President Elect, Rhode Island School of Design; Geoff Manaugh, BLDGblog and Dwell magazine, San Francisco; Mark Wigley, Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Columbia University; Laetitia Wolff, Editorial director, Surface magazine, New York. Winners will also receive cash prizes, a trip to NYC for the exhibition, accommodations at the appropriately named White House Hotel, and exposure in Surface.





Posted by James Friedman

EMERGE isn't entirely sure of what Copyshop is exactly, and their website isn't the most clear thing we've ever seen, but we're intrigued.



From what we can gather, Copyshop is a project of the Art Gallery of Knoxville and is designed to be franchised, leading to similar institutions anywhere there is an interest. Beyond that, EMERGE knows that Copyshop is a store that sells products that play around with ideas of intellectual property. According to their own boilerplate, Copyshop's "inventory includes modified originals, improved copies and political anti-brands- all products that discuss the existing notion of intellectual property rights as a prerequisite for development and economic growth." Fitting into that list of products are what they dub "Supercopies"- essentially these are knock-offs that are stamped with the word "supercopy," thus creating a new original. It's all a bit cerebral if you ask us, but the idea of creating a culture jamming pop up shop is sort of interesting. If you happen to be in Knoxville anytime soon, go check Copyshop out.






Posted by James Friedman

This post was researched, written and photographed by friend-of-EMERGE Michelle Morton-Banks of Angalossy. We hope to have more posts from Michelle in the future as it's always nice to get a local's perspective on a cultural phenomenon like resurgence of rave culture both in fashion and lifestyle over the past couple years... Read it and rave on:



As I walked into London's most celebrated Neo-Rave party, Bang Face, I felt nostalgic to say the least.  Sheepishly passing a huge queue of frustrated party people and waving a press card at the Electrowerkz door girl, reminded me that I’m in the now, not back in the day. But as I walked into the club everything looked the same as it did back then: a winding corridor made of jet-black breeze blocks, bodies chatting and bouncing up dirty concrete steps, a vast warehouse style nightclub – and best of all- a happy and friendly crowd, thrusting an amalgamation of rave toys into the air to the decadent sound of bass. There were blow up dolls, colorful acid house smileyface balloons, and the signature Bang Face logo molded into party masks (you can download artwork from their website). Each iteration of Bang Face is themed, and this party, the 51st in the series, was Whisky-A-Go-Go- disco inferno meets rave- meaning lots of the Bang Faces sported afros in an almost comical collision of dance music fashion styles.







I was attending Bang Face to get some cultural insights for a futures report Angalossy will be producing later this year “The Future of a Good Old Knees Up." Using existing research by Derek Woodgate’s team at Future Lab and some of our own, we hope to plan a sustainable and fun vision of what the Future holds for the entertainment industry – it was definitely a night were pleasure and business were mixed.




After my anthropological adventure I returned home with a cruel hangover, but what a great night I’d had: 808 State offered-up a sizable dose of nostalgia and Hellfish gave me the injection of Gabber I often crave. Aside the fun I’d had, I was left feeling miffed by my Neo-Rave experience. Saint Acid, or James as I’ve become to know  the man responsible for the night, spoke of a phone call he received last year when the New York Times asked him to explain the difference between New Rave and Neo-Rave – they’re the same aren’t they? That started me thinking- what is Neo-Rave, apart from the obvious connotations?

Saint Acid explained that when rave returned, it was confused with a fashion fad. "Some people actually thought that when we started three years ago, it was us who started the whole movement up again," he explained. New Rave essentially describes a look - 14 to 24 year olds who read Super Super Magazine and listen to the Klaxons  According to Dr. Stuart Bothwick of John Moores University “Neo Rave is less a rebirth of rave, and more a rebirth of indie-dance. In 1989/90, a rock/rave crossover [happened] in the form of bands such as Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, The Farm and Flowered Up was briefly popular on dance floors.” But as we well know, it was more of a cultural than a musical crossover. This musical crossover is quite new, B-Pitch’s Modeselektor, regulars at Bang Face, typify this trend. Their latest album Happy Birthday features Indie/dance infusions from Thom Yorke alongside a heady mash of electro, hip hop, grime and bass. Bothwick continues: “As the 1990s progressed, this scene declined whilst house, techno and later, jungle and garage increased in popularity. Come the early to mid 2000s, we saw a second generation of NME-friendly bands whose audience was younger than the now thirty-something plus clubbers of the 1990s, and who were rejecting the divide between rock and rave that had developed since [the birth of acid house].” Neo-Rave is more of a demand for a “melting pot of musical genres” as Saint Acid says, than a fad or trend in itself. Party revelers need more than nostalgic rave tracks from Shut Up and Dance et al, they require a whole mix of Indie, Industrial, Gabber, Techno, Electro, Jungle, Breakcore and so on, and by the turnouts at Bang Face – they seem to be getting the mix right.

If you are in London, Bang Face 52 is on February 8 at Electrowerkz




Posted by James Friedman