Bat for Lashes, “Pearl’s Dream (Skream’s Pour Another Glass of Champers RMX)” MP3
- story Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
- photo Leonie Purchas (F60)
Can you get more cathartic than Bat for Lashes? Last time we saw her perform in New York we stood alone by the staircase at Bowery, chugged whiskey and cried. Yeah that’s Drama Time 5000, but her music is more effective at purification than three days at a Korean megabath. We emerged like a goddamn phoenix. Skream’s sensibility though is to make everything darker, and on his remix he swoops in with a swift hand and bubbling snares, putting a very very light underscore of synth melody and man-vox like he’s David Bowie in Labyrinthe. The result is less doomsday and more “magic of the natural world.”
Download: Bat For Lashes, “Pearl’s Dream (Skream’s Pour Another Glass of Champers RMX)” (via Annie Mac)
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posted on Oct 5, 2009 in MP3 / STREAMS tags Bat for Lashes, dubstep, electronic/dance, Pearl, rock, skream
In the Shadow of Things with Photographer Leonie Purchas
As one of our favorite and oft-used photographers, Leonie Purchas has graced the FADER with her probing, visceral portraits of Bat For Lashes, Little Boots and Tough Alliance, among others, and we’ve admired her personal work documenting families across the world and the ties that bind them. For her latest gallery show, though, she’s taken on a more intimate subject: her own family. For In the Shadow of Things, she documented her mother’s struggle with depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder, as she unpacked moving boxes that had been shelved and unopened for 12 years. In what must have been a difficult process for Purchas, she ended up truncating the distance between photographer and subject, in the process turning the camera into a sort of magic vessel for coping. It won her the KLM Paul Huf Award out of 81 nominees, and will exhibit through October 25 at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam as a result. After the jump, check out a few more images and read her artist’s statement.
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posted on Sep 14, 2009 in ART+CULTURE NEWS tags Bat for Lashes, Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, Leonie Purchas, Little Boots, Tough Alliance
Video: Bat For Lashes, “Sleep Alone”
Every single video from FADER #59 cover star Bat For Lashes‘ latest album has topped the last for awesome creativity—it’s like the modern version of the old Michel Gondry/Björk collabos, each work like a journey into the many-tiered creative brain of Natasha Khan. This is a woman who writes albums about knights and diamonds and shit, so you know, not surprising, but still. This is about some OCD triangle art project, sneaking into these dudes’ studio wearing a Harriet the Spy raincoat, and making a robot friend from orange plexiglass. It is an art project about making an art project. Heads are spinning! Also, at one point she caresses a patch of a wolf howling at the moon that is affixed to her back jean pocket. (via Common)
Video: Bat for Lashes, “Pearl’s Dream”
- story THE FADER
A couple days ago over whiskey, we were talking to our friend who has never seen Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain. We tried to explain how Brian Epstein gave Jodorowsky a blank check to realize whatever impulse his tripped out surrealist brain came up with. Therefore, in the film there will be like, one scene with a live panther walking through it, and the panther never shows up in the rest of the movie. A vanity panther, rented for one frame. This Bat for Lashes video most certainly cost a lot less than Holy Mountain, but proves all you need to make, ahem, THE BEST VIDEO EVER is a jacket with human hair epaulets, a wolf and a laser shooting from said wolf’s eye.
Weeping Willows: Bat for Lashes Live in NYC
- story THE FADER
We kept hearing about people crying at Bat for Lashes shows and we were kind of dismissive and eye-rolly about it… we love Natasha Khan’s music enough to have put her on the cover of FADER #60, but we’re not really the types to break out in public displays of emotion. We even joked about it with our friends: “Let’s go cry into our whiskey gingers dudes!” That is, until last night at the Bowery Ballroom, in the middle of her epically snowy banger “Daniel,” we found ourselves breaking out in some sort of uncontrollable face-leakage that was somewhat beyond weeping but a little below hysterics. It was completely confusing and caught us off guard, but we went with it because Khan live is amazing: shockingly she hits every single note, even the high ones, with perfect pitch. Plus her ensemble was fittingly on point: sparkly bustier and lacey half-gloves looking cool but not too Flashdance. Some smart person was also there and flipcammed said performance, along with shooting a grip of great photos.
Video: Bat for Lashes, “Daniel”
- story THE FADER
New video from Bat for Lashes, directed by Johan Renck, reminds us dudes to wear headbands and sleeveless hoodies more often — babe magnets. Don’t forget about our cover story on Natasha Khan from our current issue.
FEATURE: Bat For Lashes
- story Kim Taylor Bennett
- photo Leonie Purchas
In her supple, lullaby-like speaking voice, Natasha Khan slowly reels me in. She’s describing the story of “Glass,” the ambitious opener to Two Suns, her second album as Bat For Lashes. In the song, amidst hand drums, crashing cymbals, field recordings from a Brooklyn subway stop on the JMZ line and the sound your finger makes when you rub the rim of a half-filled glass, Khan’s vocals charge like an unbridled unicorn. She invites the listener to float into the middle distance and picture a castle made of crystal where watchmen in the towers point to a glass knight whose heart burns bright as the sun.
Freeload: The FADER Issue 60 Podcast
- story THE FADER
Because this is the Style Issue and we couldn’t figure out a way to turn clothing into sound, we decided it would be just as good if we had our pal DJ Rezound put together a collection of the music that was featured in the issue. That music includes a new age love song from Bat for Lashes, Beirut’s collaboration with Teotitlan del Valle’s Banda Jimenez, Gen F jams from San Francisco’s Girls (featuring no actual girls), Nite Jewel, Assassin, Brick Bandits, Sholi and a whole bunch more. As always, download the mix for free below, check the tracklist after the jump and don’t forget to read the magazine that it goes with, available for free download here, or available for a $5.99 physical download from some guy at the magazine store’s hands into your own hands.
Download the FADER 60 mix as an mp3 (right click, save as)
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Check the tracklist after jump.
Video: Bat for Lashes, “Joshua & The Bat”
- story THE FADER
Tomorrow morning we’ll be making our newest issue, FADER Number 60, available for free download. On one cover of that issue is Bat for Lashes aka Natasha Khan who looks quite ravishing and sounds quite epic in the above promo video for her new album Two Suns out April 6th. Shot in Joshua Tree National Park and featuring many of the songs from said album, it’s a pretty good moodsetter for our story in which the first pull quote is “I needed to reach out to some kind of objectivity, some universal cosmic something.” Okay Ms Khan, ride the sky, man.
Video: Bat For Lashes, “Moon and Moon” (Live on BBC2’s ‘The Culture Show’)
- story THE FADER
Since we’ve already spilled the beans that Bat for Lashes aka Natasha Khan will grace the cover of our Spring Fashion issue, we might as well start publicly obsessing over her. Her new album Two Suns will be out on April 6th but has already cemented itself in the sidewalks to our music hearts. And if we didn’t know a bunch of people were watching we’d tell you that “Moon and Moon” makes us cry like babies almost every time we hear it. FADER’s Spring Fashion issue will hit the streets (tear stains included) on February 27th.
