BUNCH issue three // time
QUADRON
bunch issue three // time
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Editors’ Lizzy
Letter
bunch
Okoro &
Astrid
issue three // time
carrillo
Astrid
Carrillo
&
Lizzy
Okoro
//
Editors-In-Chief
Lani
Trock //
Art Director time has
has
been
advanced
face,
and
inspiring
-khalil
transformed, set us
us
with
in
and
we
motion;
have
it
bewilderment
has
and
changed; unveiled
it its
exhilaration.
gibran
Christi
Thompson //
We’re consumed by time, it’s unshakable, it’s unpredictable, and it’s so big
that it’s almost unfathomable. But we’ve dared to define it for this issue. We
Copy Editor
decided to go bigger and bolder and explore each feature through the lens of a concept that we all experience.
We get lost on memory lane for our Nostalgia editorial with a group of
New Yorkers who share their thoughts on period fashion. Plus our Lookout features three creatives who reclaim the old and make them new.
We get real with Billy Tangredi about what life is like when you’re an
actor-slash-bartender in In My Words, and spend a day in artist, Shantell Martin’s world for A Day in the Life.
Our cover story, Present Perfect, digs in deep with music duo Quadron.
Their story embodies every layer of time; a tone and aesthetic that pays homage
to past legends while smoothly transitioning to au current electro pop beats that are giving way to a long lasting future.
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brendan
bruce
&
Asia
//
Graphic Designers
david
Behind
The
Scenes
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bunch
Current photography words
by
by
//
//
lani trock
alanah joseph
Project the do over
ummer is within view and we’re dreaming of tan lines,
tropical drinks and humid days spent listening to music as loud as we can.
Gearing up for warmer days, we wax nostalgic about time spent last season with the the creators of an epic
party series, figuring out what makes thousands of people turn up and turn out on a Sunday afternoon.
The Do-Over has been a summer phenomenon since its rise in 2005. Mastermind creators Christopher Hay-
cock, Jamie Strong, and Aloe Blacc transformed their Sunday ritual of beats, brews, and bros in San Francisco, California into Hollywood’s premiere party destination. Every Sunday of summer you can find the best DJs under a sun-heated tent as partygoers wave pitchers of sangria in the air with swaying hips and smiling faces.
The name Do-Over stems from playground memories of “doing over” an activity after conflict arises, similar to
a replay. Founders Haycock, Strong, and Blacc hope to create a space where the week’s stress and mishaps are overridden by the present music and atmosphere.
The creators’ love of music attracts crowds worldwide. As DJs, they wanted a platform with the freedom to play
music without being tied down by the Top 40 or a particular genre. The result: a fresh infusion of hip-hop, reggae, dance, and electronica--with zero wallflowers.
Featured DJs include Jazzy Jeff, J. Rocc, Questlove, Flying Lotus, and Pete Rock. The Do-Over philosophy is
hard to resist. In 2014 they celebrate their 10th anniversary, so here’s to another decade of debauchery.
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If he never went back to the desert again it would be 100 leather-tanned years too soon. A man wasn’t supposed to feel like that. Positively wilted by the outdoors, a man transformed into a petal pressed between the crisp pages of the air, a long-forgotten relic from some boring adolescent date years before.
He moved out to Arizona to become a cowboy. He had most always envisioned himself a hardened Western type, a hat dipped mysteriously over his left eye, little rocks permanently stuck between his pink toes, jeaned butt softened white with wear, sun and age lassoing cattle ropes away from his eyes. He was a cowboy trapped in a middling college town on the East Coast, far away from all the cattle and the sunsets and the solitude and all the manhood robbed from him by academia. So he moved out west.
He refused to take a plane, telling his mother he was doing it the right way: by train. He gathered his belongings in a knapsack and hopped aboard a cast-iron locomotive cable car filled with other unapproachable transients, each of them keeping to their own corners of the car by day. At night, they’d all migrate closer to the center, the cities whooshing by the half-open door as the tips of their cigarettes became firefly herds in a glass jar, ushered across the moonlit country. He couldn’t wait for total independence, he couldn’t wait to ride a horse down a steep trail by himself, he couldn’t wait to tell a woman that he was her man.
At train stops, he would watch women for the duration of a cigarette, he would consider her curves and what her hair said about her on the inhale, and he would exhale “I’ll be your man,” coughing, trying to get used to the taste of those vile cowboy things but mostly he just felt like he was inhaling the cremains of something that used to taste good. “I’ll be your man,” he’d spew, and he would practice looking hard and looking true, whilst birthday hats of smoke disappeared into the morning light.
Cact Us
photography words
by by
// //
laura taylor kira hesser
He saw flatland and midlands and highlands undulate on by, the American landscape a graph of sound waves on a frequency spectrum. He hopped off at Arizona, a handshake to go around to the other cowboys with their hearts set on California.
His first night sleeping alone in the desert, the outskirts of Phoenix his new home, Oren couldn’t keep his eyes off the windows. Cacti reached out into the shadows of the night like so many untouchable arms, like the embrace of an emotionally manipulative lover whose game is begging for generosity, then punishing for it. A cruel lover hardened by a crueler climate. For years he had daydreamed of looking out a window and seeing vast Dalian nothingness interrupted by the weird-looking bodies of cacti, stout or swanlike, stubbornly chubby or flatly gamine. He finally had his surrealist dream, a panorama of faceless Gumbis offering no fun.
Two years passed, then five, then ten. Once things ended with the woman he made himself a man for, time sort of changed. Whereas what he found so thrilling about the West was its sense of absolute limitlessness, a planetary kind of solitude unattainable under whispering maple trees over there by his mother, by his sisters, by everyone that knew him and what he was capable of and more than that, what he wasn’t. He started over again with nothing owning him and owning nothing at all. And then when he lost her, watched her walk away from him, dust actually kicking up from her heels, the curve of tension rotting into her fine, impossibly fair neck, that’s when time and space became a weight and a curse. After that, the years were taxidermied: dead and stuffed to look alive, to look capable of movement and feeling.
He used to think he heard UFOs out there, in the deep desert night, but it was only the strain of wishing so hard for the sound of something, anything. It sounded metallic, the sound of his wishing, like an ice cream truck a mile away, like a pocket full of change clanking against a tunnel as he crawled through on his hands and knees, clang, clang, click clack, chug, chugg. A man wasn’t supposed to feel like that, wishing for something so hard he hallucinated -- a feminine kind of fantasy.
He supposed this all happened because he thought himself a more savage man than he truly was, and he paid for it in years bloated with failure. Before he went West, he would have sworn that deep within him were all of the savage values: instinct, passion, violence, madness. He only needed the space with which to unbury them, a landscape of ghost towns to exhume his mettle. As it turned out, he really only had instinct, and it was delusive.
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photography words
by
//
by
//
dabito
barbara sueko mcguire
love may be a universal language,
but like any other language, sometimes its meaning can get lost in translation. Danish singer Coco O of Quadron discovered this firsthand in her current relationship with an American. “In Denmark you don’t say it as often,” she says. “Every time he talks to his mom or brother he’s like, ‘I love you bye.’ For me, that’s something that has happened one or two times with my parents—with both of them. It’s really something that is not used in common talk. There’s a lot of emotion, so it’s a little bit more raw.”
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While it may be a word used less freely for the Dane, love is nevertheless something Coco thought a lot about when she and Robin
“Which later changed drastically,” he says, smiling. “You know, you put it out there…” “Yeah, it was weird that experience I had,” Coco
Hannibal, her partner in music making, were working on their latest album, “Avalanche.” Released this past May, it’s the follow up to their 2009
continues, laughing. “I never had a boyfriend until I was 25 and I felt, ugh, it was such a pain to live with. It was also really embarrassing. It was
self-titled debut. The two wrote around forty songs for the record, collaborating with artists like Raphael Saadiq, Kendrick Lamar and Pharrell.
a big taboo and I didn’t want to talk to anyone about it besides my closest girlfriends. I always avoided the subject and tried to make it seem like
Only eleven tracks made the final cut because they were the best fit for what Robin calls the story of the album, a story that is deeply personal for
there was a lot of shit happening.”
Coco.
“Lyrically, it was very much about that I never had a boyfriend,” she says. “This album was the first time I opened up a little bit.” It was
also the first time in the decade they’ve known each other that she talked to Robin about her lack of, as she calls it, a love interest.
Tapping into such an intimate subject inevitably made for an album filled with soul. The duo was committed to not just making music,
but making art. There’s been much buzz about “Avalanche” being inspired by Michael Jackson, but for Robin and Coco, his influence is far beyond obvious melodic nods—he’s affected them as musicians and as people.
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“It’s very inspiring to us to be such a perfectionist in everything you do and to be so detailed about your music,” Coco explains. “Also
the sense of rhythm and musicality he had. I think it’s something that we just put in mind when we create music—how to make things even tighter and more pocket.”
“He sets the bar really high so he’s a good person to reach for,” Robin continues. “Like Coco was saying, it wasn’t necessarily, ‘Oh this
song, let’s make it sound like Michael Jackson.’ It was more that we wanted to revoke some of that era in our music and get that kind of musicianship back.”
To listen to the two speak of this album is to listen to two intuitively connected friends. You can tell they’ve been working together for
10 years. Whether Coco’s making fun of herself for blaming Robin when she gets writer’s block, or they’re joking around about Robin taking over Pharrell’s producing empire, their chemistry is evident and powerful. Writing a song for them is like having a conversation, mind you a very intense one.
“When you’re only two people it’s really important that you can trust each other,” Robin says. “The dynamic is different than if it’s a
seven piece band, so it makes for better songs when we include each other in the whole process cause it gets both of us excited and also pushes the quality. It makes it better.”
Currently, Robin and Coco both live in Los Angeles, a city that’s still growing on them, but one they believe is teeming with limitless
opportunities. “Like the other day I went to a birthday party and I sat next to Lionel Ritchie,” Coco says. “I don’t think that happens in Copenhagen. I think you have the possibility of really finding where you want to be and how you want to be in this city.”
With the duo’s talent and drive, it’s not hard to imagine a world filled with possibilities ahead of them. Quadron is lined up to perform
at this year’s CMJ Music Marathon, which is well known for featuring artists on the rise. And they were busy this summer, from a performance on the “Late Show with David Letterman,” to two sold-out concerts at the Troubadour in LA and the SummerStage in New York City’s Central Park.
“I know where I want to go,” says Coco without hesitation. “I want to go up the charts. I feel like there’s so much bad music that’s doing
really well and I think it’s a shame that people are kind of forgetting what a good album can do. We’re trying to put good music out there to get more people to remember what an emotional heartfelt album feels like.”
BUNCH
is
a
publication top
limited that
influencers
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print​
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communities.
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creaim
is to cultivate a like-minded collective through interviews, photographs, film and BUNCH are
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