Kool Keith (b. 1963, USA)
Keith’s Salon, 2021

Keith’s Salon

2021

Written with a libidinal urgency that has come to characterize Kool Keith’s legendary lyricism, “Keith’s Salon” explores our current obsessions with luxury, beauty, and notoriety. But rather than fetishize the beautiful dum-dums who walk red carpets in black Prada gowns, Kool Keith's most recent studio album shifts our attention to the work and workers that underpin our fantasies of American excess and the good life. As such, the album is also a timely meditation, during quarantine, on the economic precarity many of us now find ourselves in. Having doubled-up with Triple Parked, the production team of avant-techno maven Bruno Pronsato and Benjamin Jay, “Keith’s Salon” moves between halcyon sonics and atonal warlord dystopia, while keeping beats minimal for Kool Keith to spread extra ketchup on the hamburger. An album at once topical and futuristic, lush and bizarre, "Keith's Salon" is about the business of making people beautiful. It's time to work.

Kool Keith

Born in 1963, The Bronx, NY, USA
Lives and works in The Bronx, NY, USA

Keith Matthew Thornton (born 7 October 1963), better known by his stage name Kool Keith, is an American rapper from The Bronx, New York. He is known for his surreal, abstract and often profane or nonsensical lyrics. Kool Keith has recorded prolifically both as a solo artist and in group collaborations.

Kool Keith began his career as a cofounding member of Ultramagnetic MC's, whose debut Critical Beatdown was released in 1988. After two more albums with the group, Funk Your Head Up and The Four Horsemen, Kool Keith released his critically acclaimed solo debut album, Dr. Octagonecologyst, under the name Dr. Octagon in 1996. He subsequently released a series of further independent hip hop albums, including Sex Styles and First Come, First Served. 

After releasing one album on a major label (Black Elvis/Lost in Space), Kool Keith returned to independently releasing music, producing further albums as a solo artist and in collaboration with groups such as Analog Brothers, Masters of Illusion and Thee Undatakerz.

Visit his Wikipedia page www.wikipedia.org
Follow him on Instagram @officialkoolkeith
Follow him on Facebook www.facebook.com/officialkoolkeith

Triple Parked

Founded in 2009, USA
Live and work in Austin, TX, USA & Berlin, Germany

Triple Parked is a production team consisting of Steven Ford (Bruno Pronsato, Archangel, NDF) and Benjamin Jay (Persian Malibu, NDF, Lights Fluorescent). The two met in 2009 and have been making music together ever since – mostly in Berlin where both can be seen walking around Prenzlauerberg in matching imaginary black capes laced with ermine and gems. Their debut hip hop project drops with the legendary Kool Keith whom they approached in the Spring with an idea for an album about working in a salon – all acrylics and fashion perms. Their beats are for block parties and underwater rhymes and posses on Broadway.

Follow them on Instagram @tripleparked

Marianne Marić

Born in 1982, France
Lives and work in France

Marianne Maric (born 1982) is a French artist. She earned her Master’s of Fine Arts with distinction from NCAD (Dublin). Maric works with different mediums such as video, sculpture or photography and uses stylism, fashion, and performance. In addition to her artistic practice, Maric also works as a curator.

For Marianne, the body is architecture and her work mocks symbolism. She deconstructs stereotypes for more efficient use and takes photographs of her friends as if they were living sculptures (dixit “La Lettre de La Photographie” in March 2012 about her works in London at Showstudio gallery).

She considers the body as architecture, and plays with symbolism in her works, while often employing her close friends as subjects. Her pieces are representative of Surrealism: her favourite word and artistic period.

Her artwork has been shown on various occasions, particularly a solo show at the Duplex100m2 Gallery of Sarajevo in May 2014 and recently at Villa Noailles in Hyères but also during a collective exhibition named “Reversibility” presented at CAC Brétigny, at Nofound (Contemporary Art Fair dedicated to photography) at Art-Paris.

Her “lamp-girls” have been presented in Nick Knight’s legendary studio Showstudio in London as well as at Musée Galliera (Musée de la Mode) in Paris.

Her photographs have been published in Reporters sans frontières, as well as Art Press or The NY Times. She flirts playfully with political risk when she shoots in mine fields, she denounces the exclusion of the homeless with performances in the Parisian métro and fools around with her models, for instance getting Lydia Lunch to lick mirrors for her.

She collaborated a lot, with musicians like The Dø, Jessie Evans, Thomas de Pourquery, Rodolphe Burger, ... With these performances, she uses reality as if her surroundings were her own large studio. She deconstructs stereotypes to exploit them, making a merry naughty mess out of them, and bending them to her will.

Maric took the famous residency at Les Arques in France and created an opera with the Baschet cristal music  instruments in le CAC, Brétigny.

Visit her website www.mariannemaric.com
Follow her on Instagram @maricmarianne