GlubDub: How did you come to make such cool looking pieces?
Adam Wallacavage: I wanted to learn how to make things I couldn't afford, such as, ornamental plasterwork and elaborate interiors. I witnessed a terrible amount of destruction in my city of Philadelphia, specifically, to the churches of the Archdiocese, and instead of crying about it, I learned to how to make the things that were disappearing and this led to the realization that I can basically make anything I ever wanted as long as I was able to put in the time and research. The Octopus chandeliers came about after coming up with the idea of creating an underwater, 20,000 leagues under the sea style dining room.
GD: What from your past either as an artist or just a person walking the planet lead you to decide to create such works of beauty?
AW: The Catholic church has a big part of it. I grew up in the suburbs and I went to boring, boxy, minimal, modern churches. When I got older, I started going to older churches in the city and loved it. That is really the thing that kept me in the church. I love to space out and just stare at beautiful old ceiling and stained glass and dark old statues. I compare heavy Baroque interiors to nature and forests and underwater coral reefs. I love the ocean but hate flat sand beaches. I need to be near cliffs and rocks. I love skies full of different shaped clouds and I love architecture that hovers over my head. I love chaos over boring calmness. To answer the beauty question, my parents always judged art according to whether or not it was beautiful or uplifting. I respect them immensely and have always strived to produce things that were beautiful and uplifting.
GD: Was there some point of clarity that you knew this is what you had to do?
AW: There really is. As a photographer, I was in situations where I didn't like being because I needed to pay the bills. I always prayed for a path to produce things that were worthwhile and beautiful and a balance against the negative things in life. Not to sound like a prude, I like the other side, I mean, I shot the cover of GWAR's last album and I listen to some heavy music when I make my art, bands like Orange Goblin, Kyuss, and Mondo Generator. I have always lived a life on really weird levels but in the end, I want to leave something positive and uplifting.
GD: What were you working on that evolved into these chandeliers?
AW: I have a really hard time producing "art" I need to make something that is functional. One of the reasons I rarely show my photography work in galleries is because I can't seem to justify making something that just hangs on a wall, not that I don't appreciate things that hang on walls, I just have a hard time doing it myself.
Black Bird Stitches - Apple Cobbler and Bird Song
Written by Max Stout
This from Sara Bir of the North Bay Bohemian: "Black Bird Stitches primeval torch songs could burn down a barn. These are not torch songs of knuckle-biting, physical yearning, but of something deeper and darker and more mysterious, their ghost narrators yellowing with age and fettered by quietly powerful nostalgia."
Glubdub: Tell me a little bit about where your music comes from. What inspires it?
Black Bird Stitches: My music comes from a crooked old house in the woods, a cockeyed mind and a sincere heart. My inspirations are authentic, kind people with a healthy dose of ridiculous. I love people who aren't too cool to be kind and push themselves over the edges of their potential. Mysteries that can't be answered. Plus absolutely everything in nature. Nature amazes me and keeps things in perspective. I believe nature and music are intimately linked. To explore the intricacies of nature and music can help you to have a deeper understanding of relationship as well as compassion for yourself and other people. It also helps with apple cobbler. If you can't enjoy a good cobbler, then life just isn't worth living. And ice cream. But it all has to be made from scratch. As much as possible. I mean pick the apples, make the ice cream, all of it. Know where your food comes from. Then wash dishes. Other than these things my music is inspired by an odd and vivid imagination.
GD: Your sound is very rich with aspects of different styles of music, what do you listen to?
BBS: I listen to a wide range of music from Erykah Badu to Grinderman to Taraf de Haidouks to La Perla de Cadiz to Ghazal to the Avengers to Duke Ellington to Chopin, just off the top of m'head. GD: Can you give me an example how nature and music are linked?
BBS: When thinking about music as an idea that organizes sound to inspire feeling, it is a lot like the life cycle of a plant. It begins with ground that has been fed to be fertile, a seed, nourishing the seed to encourage growth, caring for it so that it will blossom and then enjoying and sharing the fruit (or vegetable) which contains the seed.
Here's my total geek out on the weird and wonderful: Modern French composer Messiaen (famous for compositions based on birdsong) and Béla Bartók who composed this atonal piece using principles of the Golden Mean.
GD: Where have you been and what have you seen that sounds like an orchestra?
BBS: For a time I lived by the ocean and one evening a huge flock of red winged blackbirds started singing during dusk. GD: Tell me some natural wonder that has inspired music in you.
BBS: This is not a cop out but, seriously everything just everything, ourselves included. It can all be music.
GD: How does that odd and vivid imagination infiltrate the rest of your life?
BBS: That's none of you business.
For Black Bird Music and other great and interesting music check out Glubdub Radio
Vanished Acres - Love Letters to a Scarecrow
Written by Max Stout
Jerod Grot's once-prosperous farm is now a twisted shadow of its former self. With his land overrun by crows and a scarecrow with a mind of its own, Jerod is forced to seek solace in the fading happy memories of his past. Each day is as the next. But today, Jerod finds a lost love letter from his deceased wife. The letter is not to him, but rather to his scarecrow.
With his world turned upside down, Jerod is met with many more memories - dark and unpleasant ones which he chose to ignore. As he confronts the scarecrow about the letter, these buried secrets begin to surface, shattering the uneasy peace that once existed on this haunted land, and forcing him to face his past as it truly was.
Glubdub: I love the story, where did it come from?
Adam Bolt: The story for Vanished Acres came from a dream.
GD: is this dream symbolic of something in your own life, your own past, or was it just some random dream?
AB: I believe most dreams are symbolic. The decaying old farm in the dream was surely inspired by our family farm in Texas that was developed over months prior, and that created a lot of nostalgia in me. That I imagine set the regretful tone of the dream - for a whole personal history erased. The other details are more mundane. The Japanese Pop theme seeped in from some music research I was doing for a school short. The scarecrow, talking crows and the love affair, no idea. But it certainly was interesting.
GD: Have you ever thought about what it might mean?
AB: Because the film itself is open to interpretation, it's always been amusing to hear others' takes on it, as if they're pointing out the symbolism of my dream, and, in a way, interpreting me.
GD: How were you able to realize the dream in the form of a film?
AB: Realizing the film took a lot of painstaking design work, and a big chunk of money from the aforementioned purchased farm. I was very much a perfectionist on the look (and sound) of the film, to maintain its dreamlike qualities.
GD: How much did you embellish the original dream to add to the story?
AB: The content itself was definitely embellished. Images and feelings that casually played together were interpreted as a narrative, which I found a very fun exercise - I didn't exclude a single thing from the dream.
Momix
Written by Max Stout
I used to live in Red Bank, or Dead Bank by the time I moved there. Red Bank was where the local artists and musicians flocked to after surviving high school. But Red Bank had fallen on hard times when the malls swooped down and snatched up all the shoppers, and the fine diners. Thats when the artists and musicians began to move into Red Bank taking advantage of the low rent lofts and studios, and just like that, Red Bank began to come alive.
From Momix
Of course that was all the big money needed to litter Shangri La with over stuffed cigar smoking suits, and plastic tits in full length fur. Quickly Red Bank became Rude Bank, as eclectic boutiques and high class restaurants sprouted up, catering to the well-to-do. This made the town as much fun to partake in when you have the money, as it is to goof on, when you don't.
Now when I come back to Red Bank there seems to be a nice balance of the five star restaurants and chic boutiques, grit and grime of the graffiti scrawled boarded up buildings, and an interesting arts and culture scene. So it was no surprise when I found out that Momix was at the Count Basie Theater.
From Momix
Known internationally for presenting work of exceptional inventiveness and physical beauty, Momix is a company of dancer-illusionists under the direction of Moses Pendeleton. For 20 years, Momix has been celebrated for its ability to conjure up a world of surrealistic images using props, light, shadow, humor and the human body.
We took Lukas to see the show and he hung in well for a strong willed, sleepy five year old. Averting a major meltdown, we wound up in the balcony with Lukas half naked and sprawled out on the floor. Finally feeling comfortable enough to really take in the show,even for just a few minutes, I could see Lukas understood just how special what he'd witnessed was.
From Momix
Three shrouded dancers stood in shadows of darkness, as the ominous drones of a nightmare in search of the sleeping, vibrated the entire theater. The dancers morphed between jellyfish floating in air and creatures with tails like large umbrellas. Lukas' hand found mine, and he looked back at me with a frightened but excited look in his eyes. I knew at that moment he was hooked.
Leeble Skeet - Staring Through The Color
Written by Max Stout
Sometimes when you take a walk through Myspace, you trip over dead branches and step into holes dug out of the ground by some wild critter, but every once in a while you stumble upon something that catches your eye that makes falling flat on your face worthwhile. That something this time is Leeble Skeet.
Glubdub: I like your designs....what do you do with them?
Leeble Skeet: fanks man. I'm just using Illustrator for now. I'm about to get into combining Photoshop in the process so I can take it to the next level. For right now it's just pen tool, live paint, gradients, and the occasional layer of photo realism.
GD: Thats cool man. Are you able to envision a design and then recreate it, or are you creating on the fly? Have you gotten any work with your designs?
LS: It's about 50/50. A lot of the time I plan the overall idea, but there's always a lot of random shit that happens along the way. I only got back into it about 3 weeks ago, so I haven't had much time to promote. The only payment I've received so far is a grip of VIP passes for a sts9 design. Guess that doesn't count huh? I'm still finding my niche market. I have a feeling it might do well eventually, because alot of people seem to relate to it.
GD: What inspires the designs that come from your head?
LS: I'm about to give some pretty useless answers, but I've been a space cadet my whole life. I spend a lot of time staring at thangs and stuff. When my gears are turning, i see weird shapes/designs inside a lot of those thangs/stuff. I like designing from the ground up, but i also like to change it up sometimes. For instance, recently i wanted to create a toxic cloud pouring from the skull of a character. I brought in a photograph i took of some smoke, then stared into it until the design took form. At that point i just go in on a new layer and create my own outlines. Well that's all i got on that subject. it's all about finding new ways to project your creative flow, and keeping your head right so you can do that consistently.
GD: What were you doing before you got into the digital design to scratch that creative itch?
LS: I've always bounced between audio and visual expression. I wanted to be a cartoonist as a kid, but after a couple years of art classes I was told I couldn't because of being color-blind. I stopped doing art for the next 15 years and became obsessed with techy EDM. I just sat in a studio learning how to produce dnb/dubstep, played some shows, and turned down every chance I got to be successful at it, because of my stubborn idealism. Digital art worked its way back into the picture when I went to school. I did a couple short animations as I learned my way around Illustrator, Flash, and After Effects. I actually fell off again these past couple years, but as of a few weeks back have been driven by something.
GD: That was anything but useless. I love hearing how different one creative process is different from the next, how each creative person comes from a completley different background from the next, and how many different places a creative flow can come from. When you say you're colorblind, do you mean you can't see color at all or do you have trouble distinguishing between colors?? It fascinates me that you can create such cool work and be colorblind.
LS: Yeah, Deuteronomy is what it's called I think. I can see alot of colors, but alot of the time I'm way off. Recently we finished a piece and Rhett says "I really like that gold you threw in there." My reply was "wow there's gold in there???" People are constantly telling me things about my use of color that I didn't know. I think Illustrator's inclusion of color guides is what made it possible for me to get back into art.
Thanks so much for the words of support. I've been creating my whole life, and have always been vastly misunderstood. These past couple weeks have been the first time people have actually been able to relate to the stuff that comes out of my head. it feels very fulfilling and makes me wonder if my life will take on a new direction.
