The spectacular textile/sculptural piece pictured above, entitled The Shaman Suit, has been featured on a few different blogs recently, so it’d be natural to assume the artist behind it is a dedicated designer of conceptual couture pieces. And while yes, she is that, Nadine Byrne is also much more. She’s a 23-year-old Swedish artist whose staggering body of creative handiwork spans across nearly every medium: fashion, sculpture, video, drawing, zine-making and beautiful experimental music. Whatever the format, Nadine Byrne’s work is largely characterized by a sinister yet glamorous sense of enigmatic Nordic mysticism.
Her band is called Ectoplasm Girls. (Even the name blows my mind). They make music that’s somewhere between drone, disco punk, and the type of near-spiritual kinetic noise that Lucky Dragons has honed into an art form. On Ectoplasm Girls’ MySpace page, they aptly note that their music sounds like the soundtrack to everyone’s favorite heroin addict teen-angst classic, Christiane F., if Christiane F. had been directed by Kenneth Anger.
Los Angeles-based cassette-only label Living Tapes distributed Ectoplasm Girls’ Forever Nothing album last fall in a limited run of 100 tapes that are available at Amoeba and Family. Aaron Aldorisio of Living Tapes (and occasional internet-ordained minister) described Forever Nothing thusly:
Utterly mind-destroying, dark, synth-heavy pop (but not synth-pop) experiments by two shadowy sisters from Sweden. You can’t really pigeonhole what the Ectoplasm-Girls do because they do a little bit of everything while somehow, magically, retaining a completely unique sound. Some songs are done in an electro-forest-folk-style (think Fonal), while other jams are more aggressively experimental. One cut even evokes the idea of an ultra-crude black metal artist taking a stab at drum and bass!
Aside from Ectoplasm Girls, Nadine Byrne has another music project called The Magic State, an audiovisual experience where “every concert is a screening and every screening is a concert. The Magic State is sound and moving images, suspension of time, transcendence, mysticism, rituals and poetry. A magical state of mind and a physical sovereign place.” Sounds rad to me! The stills from The Magic State’s video component look amazing– they bring to mind one of my favorite Olaf Breuning video pieces, Group. With any luck, Nadine Byrne will come stateside sometime soon and we’ll be able to check out her video and performance work firsthand.
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Seems like she is trying to be the Knife. And failing.
Sorry, I was drunk last night when posting that. But the aesthetic is similar and they are both from Sweden.
Thanks for that clarification :P I was trying to see the connection beyond Sweden and weird costumes, and it was really troubling me that I couldn’t.