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Reimagining French Elegance: The Rise of Tassiana Laurre

In the design sphere, where boundaries are often rigidly defined, a new visionary emerges, challenging norms with creativity and versatility. Meet Tassiana Laurre, an interior designer breaking moulds by crafting captivating spaces, innovative products, and iconic brand identities. Seamlessly blending form and function across diverse mediums, she breaks past  conventional labels, crafting immersive experiences resonating with authenticity and elegance.

“For me, design harmoniously intersects functionality and aesthetics, transforming not only physical spaces but also how people experience and interact with environments,” explains Tassiana, a graduate of Strate School of Design in Paris and Italy’s Politecnico Di Milano. She sees design as a means to address societal challenges, foster innovation, and build community, enriching lives with beauty and efficiency.

With cross-disciplinary knowledge and a fresh perspective, Tassiana integrates new materials and processes into her work, distinguishing her in the industry. Beginning her journey at Studio Ange, she contributed to notable projects like the Mandarin Oriental Residences in Beverly Hills and the Ulla Johnson luxury fashion store in Los Angeles with Kelly Wearstler’s award-winning team.

Tassiana’s success lies in her blend of artistic ingenuity and strategic insight. Her leadership at My Exclusive Collection, crafting the brand identity for their French Haute Parfumerie, exemplifies this. Drawing from Guerlain’s legacy, she designed the perfumery’s bottle, logo, website, and social media content, leaving an indelible mark on the brand.

Recognized internationally, Tassiana’s work has been featured in publications like Elle Romania and Vogue Mexico, showcasing her diverse portfolio spanning interior design, art direction, and brand identity across France, Italy, and the United States.

Rooted in a childhood fascination with art and architecture, Tassiana’s journey is guided by her motto, “Innovate with Purpose, Design with Soul.” Her love for interiors, nurtured by her grandmother’s passion for antiquing, fuels her constant exploration and self-discovery through design.

While her proficiency in design and technology, coupled with multilingualism, enables her to work seamlessly with international clientele, interior design remains Tassiana’s passion. Her latest project on the French Riviera demonstrates her knack for infusing spaces with sophistication and creativity.

In 2018, Tassiana established Laurre Studio of Design, undertaking projects for My Exclusive Collection and Doctor G, alongside residential ventures like the Côte d’Azur project, embodying the essence of the French Riviera. Additionally, she plans to launch an international design consultancy firm, catering to those seeking to enhance living spaces with expert advice.

Tassiana Laurre’s journey exemplifies a relentless pursuit of innovation and excellence in design. Through her transformative approach, she continues to leave an indelible mark on the world of design, shaping environments that evoke emotions, tell stories, and enhance lives.

Beyond Words: A Cinematic Journey Through Loneliness and Connection

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Experiencing a foreign country, facing difficulties alone, and not understanding the language can evoke feelings of loneliness and helplessness. In 2023, the Cinematographer and filmmaker Han Wang’s film Alone poignantly showcased these emotions through the experiences of an individual in unfamiliar surroundings. Despite its brief eighteen-minute duration, the film has received 2023 Los Angeles Film Award – Best Docudrama and nominations at numerous film festivals, affirming not only the talent of the actors but also honoring the contributions of everyone behind the scenes.

The film centers on the life of an elderly Chinese woman and her grandson living in the United States. As the film opens, the grandson prepares a list of groceries for his grandmother, advising her to take care of herself before he leaves with friends. As the film’s name Alone, the grandmother spends her evening dining solo, reading the newspaper on the sofa, and eventually falling asleep. The next day, a neighbor informs her of her grandson’s unsuccessful attempts to reach her by phone. Discovering the home phone service is disconnected, the grandmother resolves to pay the bill herself. Her limited English proficiency, however, complicates this task, and she manages to succeed only with the neighbor’s assistance.

Conveying a director’s message in a mere ten minutes is challenging, yet Han Wang skillfully uses his lens to immerse the audience in the film, allowing them to connect deeply with the grandmother’s experiences. Initially, Wang captures the elderly woman seated on the sofa, engrossed in a Chinese newspaper, setting the stage for her character as someone who does not speak English. This scene lays the groundwork for the story’s progression.

Wang then directs the camera to a post-it note and a photo left by the grandson on the refrigerator. The grandmother’s interaction with her grandson’s photo reflects her love, dependence, and yearning. When she attempts to pay the phone bill alone, Wang focuses on her despair as she sits helplessly on the ground outside the store, struggling to understand the bill. Through the use of music and cinematography, the film reaches a climax, highlighting the elderly woman’s profound sense of isolation in a foreign land.

In this film, Wang’s expertise in lens usage, attention to detail, and character portrayal deeply immerses the audience in the elderly woman’s solitary inner world. Through changes in lighting, shadow, and camera angles, warm memories are skillfully woven into the narrative, allowing viewers to empathize with her feelings. Wang’s photography transcends the depiction of solitary living conditions for the elderly, exploring themes of family, love, and companionship with depth and sensitivity.

Warp to Release Two Demo Collections by Broadcast

Broadcast have announced two collections of demos, Spell Blanket and Distant Call, which are billed as the British duo’s final albums. They’re set to arrive later this year on Warp. Spell Blanket, arriving May 3, features demos that Trish Keenan and James Cargill were working on between 2006 and 2009 for what would have been their fifth album. Distant Call, out September 28, comprises demos for songs that appeared on the albums Haha Sound, Tender Buttons, and The Future Crayon. Below, listen to ‘Follow the Light’ from Spell Blanket and ‘Tears in the Typing Pool [Demo]’ from Distant Call.

Broadcast’s last album, a collaboration with the Focus Group, was released in 2009, two years before Keenan’s sudden death at the age of 42. Distant Call also includes two early demos that Cargill discovered after Keenan’s passing, ‘Come Back to Me’ and ‘Please Call to Book’.

Spell Blanket – Collected Demos 2006-2009 Cover Artwork:

Spell Blanket – Collected Demos 2006-2009 Tracklist:

1. The Song Before The Song Comes Out
2. March Of The Fleas
3. Greater Than Joy
4. Mother Plays Games
5. My Marble Eye
6. Roses Red
7. Hip Bone To Hip Bone
8. Running Back To Me
9. I Blink You Blink
10. Infant Girl
11. I Run In Dreams
12. Luminous Image
13. A Little Light
14. Hairpin Memories
15. My Body
16. Follow The Light
17. Tunnel View
18. Where Are You?
19. Singing Game
20. I Want To Be Fine
21. The Games You Play
22. Grey Grey Skies
23. Puzzle
24. The Clock Is On Fire
25. Petal Alphabet
26. Tell Table
27. Fatherly Veil
28. Dream Power
29. Heartbeat
30. Call Sign
31. Crone Motion
32. Sleeping Bed
33. Join In Together
34. Colour In The Numbers
35. I Am The Bridge
36. Spirit House

Distant Call – Collected Demos 2000-2006 Cover Artwork:

Distant Call – Collected Demos 2000-2006 Tracklist:

1. Tears In The Typing Pool [Demo]
2. Still Feels Like Tears [Demo]
3. Come Back To Me [Demo]
4. The Little Bell [Demo]
5. Distant Call [Demo]
6. Valerie [Demo]
7. Colour Me In [Demo]
8. Ominous Cloud [Demo]
9. Flame Left From The Sun [Demo]
10. Where Youth And Laughter Go [Demo]
11. Poem Of A Dead Song [Demo]
12. O How I Miss You [Demo]
13. Pendulum [Demo]
14. Please Call To Book [Demo]

Softcult Announce ‘Heaven’ EP, Share New Song ‘Spiralling Out’

Softcult have announced the Heaven EP with a new single, ‘Spiralling Out’. Set for release on May 24 through Easy Life, the EP features the previously unveiled ‘Shortest Fuse’, ‘Haunt You Still’, and the title track. Check out a video for the new cut below.

“We wrote this song about those times when we ruminate over a situation over and over again to no end,” the band said of ‘Spiralling Out’ in a statement. “Sometimes it feels like there’s no amount of self-talk that can get us out of that spiral. It feels like everything is out of control and the world is like a carnival ride spinning all around us, but we are paralyzed and unable to step on or off. Hopefully this song is one that lets other people who struggle with anxiety know that they aren’t alone and we can also relate to how they feel, and that they have the ability to step into their power and take it back.”

Commenting on the video, the duo’s Mercedes Arn-Horn Mercedes added: “Motion was a huge factor in the music video. I wanted to evoke the feeling of being pulled into an anxious spiral. I wanted to recreate the feeling of the world spinning out of control around you. We used any means of motion that we could find: a Merry-Go-Round that physically made us sick after filming, a carousel in Seattle on tour, etc. We actually gave ourselves motion sickness filming this video.”

Say Anything Detail New Album, Share New Single ‘I, Vibrator’

Say Anything have shared the details of their first album in five years. The follow-up to Oliver Appropriate is titled …Is Committed, and it’s out May 24 via Dine Alone. It includes the early singles ‘Psyche!’, ‘Are You (in) There?’, and ‘Carrie & Lowell & Cody (Pendent)’, as well as a new song, ‘I, Vibrator’. Check it out below and scroll down for the album cover and tracklist.

“’I, VIBRATOR’ is about wanting to be objectified as a righteous tool against the patriarchy for a particular girl to use at will,” frontman Max Bemis said in a press release. “One great tool for any historically undermined person with a vagina is a disembodied, always-ready penis, a role I’m proud and lucky to play for a certain lady in my life that may have been brought up to believe sex is for dudes and she isn’t the one with all the fucking power in the world.”

…Is Committed Cover Artwork:

…Is Committed Tracklist:

1. Be, Children (Introduction to the Reunion Record)
2. On Cum
3. Auto-Harmonic Ass Fixation
4. I, Vibrator
5. Psyche!
6. We Say Grace in This Goddamn Band, Mister
7. Carrie & Lowell & Cody (Pendent)
8. Are You (in) There?
9. Say Anything, Collectively, Made Love to Your God
10. Daisy’s
11. Woman Song
12. Fan Fiction

Wild Pink Shares Surprise New EP ‘Strawberry Eraser’

Wild Pink have released a surprise EP called Strawberry Eraser. It includes the recent single ‘Air Drumming Fix You’, which marked the band’s signing to Fire Talk and made our Best New Songs segment, as well as ‘Unconscious Pilot’ and the instrumental ‘Cielo Wheed’. Take a listen below.

Wild Pink’s last album, ILYSM, was released in 2022. Last year, the band’s John Ross teamed up with Laura Wolf for a collaborative project named Lilts.

Shabaka Enlists André 3000, Floating Points, Esperanza Spalding, and Laraaji for New Single ‘I’ll Do Whatever You Want’

Shabaka Hutchings has shared ‘I’ll Do Whatever You Want’, the latest single from his first solo LP Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace. The track features André 3000 on Teotihuacan drone flute, Floating Points on Rhodes Chroma synth and vibraphone, Esperanza Spalding and the Invisible’s Tom Herbert on bass, Dave Okumu on guitar, Marcus Gilmore on drums, Carlos Niño on percussion, and vocals from Laraaji. “‘I’ll Do Whatever You Want’ is about surrender and the intimate space we go to within the grasp of possession,” Shabaka said in a statement. Listen to it below.

Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace will be released on April 12 via Impulse!.

Lionlimb Announces New Album ‘Limbo’, Shares New Single ‘Hurricane’

Lionlimb – the project of New York-based singer-songwriter and producer Stewart Bronaugh – has announced a new LP, Limbo. The follow-up to 2021’s Spiral Groove is due May 24 on Bayonet Records. Today’s announcement comes with the release of the lead single ‘Hurricane’. Check it out and find the album cover and tracklist below.

“‘Hurricane’ is about escapism and searching for THAT feeling that puts you in a flow state, away from the anxiety and uncomfortableness of being human,” Bronaugh explained in a statement. “Creativity can help, and then there are other ways that are much more harmful. This song is about saying goodbye to those, but I feel like I’m always searching for that next thing.”

Bronaugh composed, produced, and mixed Limbo, with additional recording from Robin Eaton, live drums by Joshua Jaeger, and vocal contributions from Angel Olsen. “When I’m working on music, it’s like I’m trying to make my own world,” Bronaugh said. “It’s that feeling of wanting to exist somewhere else. I’m trying to express something and get out of my head and body.”

Limbo Cover Artwork:

Limbo Tracklist:

1. Sun
2. Hurricane
3. Underwater
4. Hiss
5. Dream Of You (feat. Angel Olsen)
6. Runaway
7. Two Kinds of Tears
8. Nowhere to Hide
9. Til It’s Gone
10. You Belong To Me

Bat for Lashes Shares Video for New Single ‘Letter to My Daughter’

Bat for Lashes has released a new single, ‘Letter to My Daughter’, alongside a music video. It’s the second preview of Natasha Khan’s upcoming album The Dream of Delphi, following the previously unveiled title track. Check out the Freddie Leyden-directed clip below.

Discussing the song, Khan said in a statement: “This title is pretty self-explanatory. If I was on my deathbed, it’s what I’d say to Delphi to give her some sense of being at home in the world, the galaxy, the universe we live in. Before Delphi was born I started writing her a book of letters, inspired by Maya Angelou’s book of the same name, Letter To My Daughter. It documents a very strange but magical year, full of special memories and historic worldly moments. This ride of life is always continuing and we’re all just energy moving from one form into another, always. She’s also just part of an echo, ancestral line or spiral in the cosmos, like the spiral that I saw in her soft hair when she was a baby. She is part of something much greater than any of us individually; she comes from the past and she comes from the future.”

Khan became pregnant a few months after the release of her last album, 2019’s Lost Girls. “I was writing letters to Delphi from the time she was the size of a tomato seed,” she added. “About everything that was happening in the world, like the riots after George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement, about the pandemic and COVID, about the world that she was going to be born into.”

The Dream of Delphi arrives May 31 via Mercury KX.

Album Review: Waxahatchee, ‘Tigers Blood’

Katie Crutchfield calls ‘Right Back to It’, perhaps the best single released this year so far, the first real love song she’s ever written. “The fundamental parts of my whole songwriting style are built on being inspired by sadness, so it’s more about evoking heartache and heartbreak,” she said in a recent interview, adding, “But it’s tricky to write songs about being happy.” Crutchfield is not the only beloved indie singer-songwriter with a record out on Friday that takes up the challenge of communicating a version of love that’s steady, freeing, and contented; with her latest collection Bright Future, Adrianne Lenker also shows she’s come a long way since the early Big Thief song that compared real love to a heart attack. Like Lenker, Crutchfield continues to find compelling ways to write about relationships – including those she keeps with herself and her work – falling in love with the patience rather than the torture they require. “It plays on my mind/ How the time passing/ Covers you like a friend,” she sings on the first song of her new album Tigers Blood, a timeless, staggering achievement that’s in many ways about the unfolding of that friendship.

2020’s Saint Cloud was a stunning balm of a record, one that saw Crutchfield embracing the Americana aesthetic that carries onto the new record; she tried experimenting with more pop-leaning production for “a good six hours,” she estimates, but it didn’t stick. Reuniting with producer Brad Cook to record the album at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, this time with help from Cook’s brother Phil, Spencer Tweedy, and Wednesday guitarist MJ Lenderman (who plays on every song and provides harmonies on many of them), Tigers Blood leans into and refines its predecessor’s sonic palette in ways that make space for the growth in Crutchfield’s lyrics. If Saint Cloud aspired toward and invited the clarity that comes with getting sober, Tigers Blood settles into it without losing grasp on the melodic and lyrical acuity that makes Crutchfield’s music so impactful. She’s too self-aware to make a boring record – the way she stretches out the word on ‘Bored’, a fiery tune that imagines how an older Waxahatchee song might sound with her presently more clear-eyed approach, it sounds like the burning indictment of a friendship that’s run its course – and too conflicted to simply bask in Saint Cloud’s warm afterglow.

“I get caught up in my thoughts/ For lack of a better cause/ My life’s been mapped out to a T/ But I’m always a little lost,” she sings on ‘Lone Star Lake’. It’s not only the way she writes about it, though, that’s changed, but the feeling she decides should ultimately hover over each song, no matter how deeply you read into it. The circles Lenderman’s electric guitar and Phil Cook’s banjo draw around ‘Lone Star Lake’ and ‘Right Back to It’ contribute a lot to the songs’ light, airy romanticism, but there’s a shift in Crutchfield’s language, too. On ‘Hurricane’, her 2022 single with Jess Williamson as Plains, Crutchfield used nature as a metaphor to describe the same destructive behaviour she acknowledges on ‘Right Back to It’, where she sings, “I let my mind run wild/ I don’t know why I do it,” but coming back around is less of a promise than a comforting certainty. ‘Lone Star Lake’ builds a stunner out of the simple proposition of heading out to the titular lake in Kansas, replacing old vices with “the drunkenness of free reign,” while ‘Evil Spawn’ is in direct conversation with a past lifestyle she now recognizes as toxic, admitting, “What you thought was enough now seems insane.”

Serenity is always in the air, but it’s not easy to get a grasp on, even in the state of stability that Tigers Blood finds Crutchfield in. For every breezy melody and universal truth she uses as a guiding torch – “If you’re not living then you’re dying” – there are literary passages that veer off course and into a tangle of contradictions that, impressively, her voice navigates with fierce precision. These often relate to her role as an artist and storyteller who sees doors open with each breakthrough; “I make a living crying, it ain’t fair/ Not budging,” she admits on the opener, knowing, as she sings on ‘Crowbar’, that the alternative is taking it “pretty far on a prayer that’s pale and synthetic.” ‘Crimes of the Heart’ is about how tempting it is to tear yourself apart for the sake of art: “You’re an agent of truth, twisted up at the tail end/ You play the villain like a violin.” She understands that time, moving slowly, can prove itself a friend, but darkness, coming from within, can take that spot just as easily.

As with Saint Cloud, Crutchfield proves she’s in it for the long haul. As open-ended as the album’s final refrain is – “I held it like a penny I found/ It might bring me something, it might weigh me down” – the group singing along makes it feel like a triumph, winding down a journey that’s worth more than it costs. The authenticity of Waxahatchee’s music is hard-won, the joy and love in it steadfast, her language as rich as the instrumentation that colours fluidly around it. But there’s a gravity to it all, and Crutchfield doesn’t buckle under it. She rises to the occasion, still awestruck and wholly devoted.