STOCKTOWN AFRICA: DJ Gazelle and LIM POP
We have moved our base temporarily from Addis Ababa to New York City. From NY we will report on the creative forces from Ethiopia and Africa we encounter in the big city, and we hope to present you with a lot of interesting and inspiring people and projects.
And everything started pretty good as we attended the STOCKTOWN party and screening at a lovely rooftop in the Gallery-district of Manhattan yesterday. For those of you who are not familiar with Stocktown we can tell you that Stocktown is all about videos! Stocktown.com is the first videomagazine ever dedicated to the global street culture in motion. Videos are selected by a committed international team of video curators, sharing and praising personally selected video clips with included reviews. It is a creative and inspiring platform dedicated to pay tribute to awesome video productions and talented filmmakers out there. The mission of Stocktown is to present headlines and themes from the global urban culture be it; music, art, fashion, or documentaries, covering alternative, global and independent productions. Stocktown was started in the late 90es as a collective of creative souls documenting all aspects of street culture via documentaries, pirate television and various exhibition projects. It was orginally created by Teddy Goitom based in Stockholm, Sweden but always collaborating with artists,filmmakers, grapic designers, programmers, architects and fashion designers all over the world.
A couple of years ago Stocktown expanded their programmes with a specific Africa-series, finding and filming creative souls and innovators in urban environments in all corners of the continent. Stocktown Africa produce tv-series and shorts that present viewers with the stories of creative people from Africa. Stories, images and people in the series challenge stereotypical representations of the continent but perhaps more important they underline the value of arts as empowerment and as a medium for self-expression. Stocktown finds some of the coolest, most inspirational and sometimes most unpredictable creative forces on the continent and share their inspiring stories with us.
One of the films that captured our eyes and ears yesterday was the short on DJ Gazelle based in Cape Town, South Africa. The men behind DJ Gazelle, Xander Ferreira and his partner Nick Matthews, are masters of cool. They have an impeccable style, and have even invented their own musical genre, LIM POP: ”We just kind of combined, collided and did our thing. I think the style is our own. We use the genres that we like and throw it together. People ask us: “What kind of genre, what kind of music?” We came up with the name LIM POP,” says Xander.
Gazelle’s music have a public appeal that in many cases pinpoints some of the current social issues or dilemmas their countrymen face, which – in spite of their kitsch/avantgarde/futuristic looks influenced by African dictators Idi Amin and Mobutu - make them quite down-to-earth. Their aesthetics and style is quite lavish, and their stage performances are complete and conceptual in an always extravagant, theatrical and almost Lady Gaga-ish way. Listen to Xander talk about about their music, fashion and creating opportunities for yourself and people around you, and one of their – in our opinion – best hits ‘Just Now’ below.
Visit Gazelles website here and listen to more songs on their Myspace here.