STAVO CRAFT "Be Other: Cosmic Hits from the
Future Room"
CD-R+DVD-R+Communiqué- LPN7 - 2008
CD-R+DVD-R+Communiqué- LPN7 - 2008
It is with great pride that Disques de Lapin and Eskimo Films present the essence of Stavo Craft for posterity. Both retrospective and futurist, "Be Other: Cosmic Hits from the Future Room" includes the very best of Craft's musical releases to date (spanning more than a decade of "low budget - high-impact" recordings) along with a DVD experience and curious communiqué "On Being Other". In short, "Be Other" transports the turned-on listener from this modern psychic wasteland to a timeless wilderness of consciousness.
These classic tracks evoke a world where the French pop of Serge Gainsbourg, Yoko Ono's conceptualism, Sun Ra's otherworldliness, and perhaps even a touch of early Cat Stevens melt into a strange and previously undiscovered creature. The video portion of the release contains a music video for "Aberration" shot by Thomas Nöla, a film interpretation of Craft's "Godstorm" by Steven Boling, several performances by other artists who use Craft's music as a soundtrack, and an in-depth interview.
Let the unicorn priest into your stereo...into your TV...into your very mind!
The physical version comes as a silk-screened CD-R and DVD-R in a slim DVD case with a curious 11X17 communiqué. A digital download of just the music is also available directly from eskimofilms.com for $7.77.
CD
TRACKLISTING:
1. Aberration
2. Freedom's Little Baby
3. My Skyplane
4. Wavelength in Your Tower
5. The Sound Mirror
6. Yukio Mishima
7. Addict
8. Alien-Sponsored Pirate Radio
9. The Future Room
10. King Coria (Rise Mago Rise)
11. Walking on Water
12. Love is a Unicorn
13. kill kill
14. View Over Williamsburg
15. The White Darkness
16. Blue
17. Beaujolais
18. Bonjour...Alors
DVD NOTES:
NTSC - Region free - approx 40 min. - 4:3
INCLUDES:
"Aberration" music video
"Godstorm" short film
"Other by other"
"Stavo Craft's Wilderness of Consciousness" interview
1. Aberration
2. Freedom's Little Baby
3. My Skyplane
4. Wavelength in Your Tower
5. The Sound Mirror
6. Yukio Mishima
7. Addict
8. Alien-Sponsored Pirate Radio
9. The Future Room
10. King Coria (Rise Mago Rise)
11. Walking on Water
12. Love is a Unicorn
13. kill kill
14. View Over Williamsburg
15. The White Darkness
16. Blue
17. Beaujolais
18. Bonjour...Alors
DVD NOTES:
NTSC - Region free - approx 40 min. - 4:3
INCLUDES:
"Aberration" music video
"Godstorm" short film
"Other by other"
"Stavo Craft's Wilderness of Consciousness" interview
A
BIT ABOUT STAVO CRAFT...
Stavo Craft is a conceptual artist (electronic music and illustrated stories) who studies planetary phenomenon from his homemade space 'craft' … a spacecraft more composed of innerspace than outerspace, but where Alien Beings nevertheless reside. Not little green men, but the aliens we, on Earth, have become to our own natural state.
Having merged so much with our technologies, and the stories we have told ourselves through history, we are now a self-creation culturally that is in part cyborg, inseparable from the tools we live through. As a space traveling diarist, Craft mines the depths for mirrors of our true and false selves, and the ideas about ourselves we hold as both illusion and fact.
A strange child from the start, Stavo would walk away from his home and into the woods, outstretching his arms to "call the aliens" hoping that they would see the purity of his oddity-oriented spirit and engage him in an interplanetary dialogue.
Craft doesn't recall ever getting the visitation from the alien ship he had wished for, but he does recall his first encounter with another form of unidentified being; a real life unicorn…it entered his room one night like an invisible gust of wind, and it was this mysterious and glistening magical creature that let him know he had a special mission in life—to create fantasies more real than the mundane structures of daily life on an otherwise warped planet.
Meanwhile, another fantasy come-to-life was brewing within the family hearth. Fate had seen to it that Craft's mother was the person ultimately responsible for giving form to the mythology of the rock group KISS from 1972-1980 in the heyday of their breakthrough into the cultural landscape of rock fame. She wrote under the name of "Bob Steele" as the voice of the KISS Army Fan newsletters, and was the writer of all the promotional stories for radio, TV, and concert programs of each band member's archetypal identity: Gene the demon, Paul the 'Starchild' lover, Space Ace, and Peter the Cat. Craft saw first-hand how the mythology of a band could enter the bloodstream of the world, and that "larger than life" approach to performing reality that KISS employed so successfully. It all planted a seed.
But rather than wanting to appeal to screaming 8-12 year-olds as KISS had, Craft followed the calling of the Invisible World proposed by his muse. Determined as an artist to fly under the radar while developing his craft, Stavo worked like a unicorn; unseen and as he likes to say, "Internationally Unknown" – an unusual desire for placing art before notoriety in today's cult of the attention seeker. "But I was world famous in Williamsburg Brooklyn, and that was kind of like my unicorn's forest," he says. "But I was always writing and developing the particulars of my art and finding its best expression."
I
ndeed, being a key player in the development of the now-famous abandoned warehouse artist community in Williamsburg Brooklyn beginning back in 1995, some of the tracks on the Disques de Lapin release of Stavo Craft's "BE OTHER" retrospective CD go back that far and beyond, and yet others are as recent as 2008. The consistency of a persona on a mission for a new and greater world is indelibly etched in these songs.
While this is his first non-self-release, the works of Stavo Mustang Craft have been manifested in video, illustration, books, and his eight homemade concept albums of original music. The "Other By Other" feature in the DVD experience also shows how artists learned of Craft's creations and used those soundtracks to spark new creative works, shared with audiences around the globe. Even Craft's unique take on the Unicorn mythology is well-chronicled through the pages of his illustrated novelette "The Future Room" which is shared free of charge on the artist's website.
Stavo Craft is a conceptual artist (electronic music and illustrated stories) who studies planetary phenomenon from his homemade space 'craft' … a spacecraft more composed of innerspace than outerspace, but where Alien Beings nevertheless reside. Not little green men, but the aliens we, on Earth, have become to our own natural state.
Having merged so much with our technologies, and the stories we have told ourselves through history, we are now a self-creation culturally that is in part cyborg, inseparable from the tools we live through. As a space traveling diarist, Craft mines the depths for mirrors of our true and false selves, and the ideas about ourselves we hold as both illusion and fact.
A strange child from the start, Stavo would walk away from his home and into the woods, outstretching his arms to "call the aliens" hoping that they would see the purity of his oddity-oriented spirit and engage him in an interplanetary dialogue.
Craft doesn't recall ever getting the visitation from the alien ship he had wished for, but he does recall his first encounter with another form of unidentified being; a real life unicorn…it entered his room one night like an invisible gust of wind, and it was this mysterious and glistening magical creature that let him know he had a special mission in life—to create fantasies more real than the mundane structures of daily life on an otherwise warped planet.
Meanwhile, another fantasy come-to-life was brewing within the family hearth. Fate had seen to it that Craft's mother was the person ultimately responsible for giving form to the mythology of the rock group KISS from 1972-1980 in the heyday of their breakthrough into the cultural landscape of rock fame. She wrote under the name of "Bob Steele" as the voice of the KISS Army Fan newsletters, and was the writer of all the promotional stories for radio, TV, and concert programs of each band member's archetypal identity: Gene the demon, Paul the 'Starchild' lover, Space Ace, and Peter the Cat. Craft saw first-hand how the mythology of a band could enter the bloodstream of the world, and that "larger than life" approach to performing reality that KISS employed so successfully. It all planted a seed.
But rather than wanting to appeal to screaming 8-12 year-olds as KISS had, Craft followed the calling of the Invisible World proposed by his muse. Determined as an artist to fly under the radar while developing his craft, Stavo worked like a unicorn; unseen and as he likes to say, "Internationally Unknown" – an unusual desire for placing art before notoriety in today's cult of the attention seeker. "But I was world famous in Williamsburg Brooklyn, and that was kind of like my unicorn's forest," he says. "But I was always writing and developing the particulars of my art and finding its best expression."
I
ndeed, being a key player in the development of the now-famous abandoned warehouse artist community in Williamsburg Brooklyn beginning back in 1995, some of the tracks on the Disques de Lapin release of Stavo Craft's "BE OTHER" retrospective CD go back that far and beyond, and yet others are as recent as 2008. The consistency of a persona on a mission for a new and greater world is indelibly etched in these songs.
While this is his first non-self-release, the works of Stavo Mustang Craft have been manifested in video, illustration, books, and his eight homemade concept albums of original music. The "Other By Other" feature in the DVD experience also shows how artists learned of Craft's creations and used those soundtracks to spark new creative works, shared with audiences around the globe. Even Craft's unique take on the Unicorn mythology is well-chronicled through the pages of his illustrated novelette "The Future Room" which is shared free of charge on the artist's website.
-FUTURE ROOM RECORDS