Over the past few years, we have reported on a range of exhibitions the gallery has held and really enjoyed many of them too. Some highlights for us have been last summer’s Kill Your Darlings, Kid Acne’s first UK retrospective. 2010′s Art Sheffield was also a success, with fantastic work from all over the world including Susan Hiller.

Currently, Museums Sheffield are appealing this decision. If you’ve ever been to something you enjoyed at the Museum, or are just sad to see an another great organisation lose it’s funding, please go to this website. There are a number of things you can do, even if it is just tweeting at some local MPs or commenting on their website.

Sort it!

Skateboarding VS Architecture: A Study of Public Space and Materiality in Auckland City from SwineTrotters on Vimeo.

Any claims that Braxton was the main creative force, or that there’d be a perceptible lack without a ‘frontman’, or that Battles would take the easy route of reverting to being entirely instrumental, have been boldly rebutted. Their second album, Gloss Drop, released this summer, and their subsequent live performances show a band thoroughly embracing new dynamics and creating music that sounds organic and more effortlessly fun than ever.

Focus on any one of the three on stage – Ian Williams, hands on keyboards at both sides of him like he’s coolly pacing through a treadmill workout, John Stanier driving a sweaty pace and pounding his drum kit almost to tears, Dave Konopka with an unflinching absorption in his effects pedals and guitar strings – and you’ll find no void bemoaning a frontman.

In time for Battles’ series of gigs across the north starting tomorrow, we spoke with Dave Konopka about the band battling through obstacles to bring together their new album and live show.

Tyondai splitting from the group clearly slowed down progression of a second album, but when did you become aware of cracks appearing in Battles?

You can have a leak in your roof without seeing any water for a long time. After finishing Mirrored, coming out of two years of putting as much as we could into touring and working that album, we needed some down time. When we came back and reconvened it felt like we had a harder time gelling with one another, maybe because we’d spent so much time focussing on touring and not writing. This slowly progressed into something much bigger, that in retrospect I should have seen coming for a year.

What process did the three of you then go through in rethinking the band’s direction?

We felt deflated, like we’d spent three months of our lives sleeping in a studio, working on an album, for it to go to nothing. Really the feeling had nothing to do with Ty leaving, it was more what happens to these songs? We immediately set ourselves up with trying to figure out how to move on, the process of learning how to be a three-piece, how to rewrite and restructure what we’d been working on so it was coming from where we were at. We had no grand idea of where it was going; we just had to learn to do this stuff on the fly and had no time to waste. We might have lost something, but we gained so much more. We’re a tighter, better band from it. Our vision, our work ethic and our standards of quality; the three of us are willing to give 110% to Battles.

On Gloss Drop you collaborated with different vocalists – Gary Numan, Yamantaka Eye, Kazu Makino and Matias Aguayo – on individual songs; in each case they do more than just vocalise, they bring a unique sound and style to the song. How does this transfer from record to stage in Battles’ current tour?

When we started learning how to play these songs we had hoped to find a person to sing and tour with us, but as we looked for this person we realised it was hard to find someone to encompass the different stylings that each vocalist contributed to the album. We’ve always embraced technology, so we solved that problem by asking each vocalist to make a video of them singing the song. It still performs live; we find the BPM and use it to trigger their vocals and sync the video. Though they’re not there in real time they’re virtually there with us.

Have you re-appropriated tracks from Mirrored to fit the three-piece live set-up?

We have been playing some tracks from Mirrored. Some of them are a direct representation, such as ‘Atlas’, and we play around with ‘Tonto’ a little bit. But it takes a little time, because the three of us have to go back and relearn the songs and new responsibilities we have. At the moment we’re more interested in playing the songs from Gloss Drop; we’re making up for lost time and trying to be in the moment with the album we have now.

When things were looking up and you had Gloss Drop out there, being well received, the second single, ‘My Machines’, melted along with Warp’s back catalogue in the PIAS warehouse fire. What was your reaction?

A lot of things go wrong, so I think that we are at a point where we accept when things do, and I wasn’t really angry. The day that it happened we were playing a show and I just made a joke like, ‘we have good news and bad news. The bad news is that all of our records caught on fire at this warehouse in England and are all destroyed, but the good news is some of our records melted with the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ new 7inch’. I totally encourage standing up and rising against police stateship, but those riots went on too long. It gets pretty lame when opportunists in society take advantage when some others are fighting for a cause.

After going through setbacks, what will the band take with it from the past two years?

It’s been a tremendous learning experience. When you retrospectively look at things you wonder why you didn’t rectify a problem. But our main issue was that we were so complacent with what we’d accomplished on Mirrored that parts of our band separated in different directions and the truth came out regarding what people wanted to pursue. The learning experience lies within really realising what your intentions are and where your heart lies in it all. I feel like I was in that spot at the beginning of Gloss Drop, but not all of us were. You can’t control that nature, and you need to figure out how to embrace change when it happens. Its probably going to take us a long time before we come out with our next album, but I think the odds of Ian and John and myself being ready to embrace that next album are more likely than where we were at when we started Gloss Drop. As a band we’re in a good spot and couldn’t be any happier with the album we released.

To see the band and their LCD-screened vocalists, head to one of these venues on one of these dates this month:

Wed 16th SHEFFIELD Plug
Thu 17th NEWCASTLE Gateshead Town Hall
Fri 18th LIVERPOOL Kazimier
Sat 19th DUBLIN Button Factory
Mon 21st LONDON Forum

ABOUT from VILLAGE on Vimeo.

More info here.

Want one? Go here. Both were printed in Sheffield on organic cotton using Earth Positive inks.

Since we’ve started this magazine, Park Hill has regularly featured in our pages. Living in Sheffield, the epic weight of the concrete megastructure is an inescapable part of the city’s landscape. Its sprawling grid structure, which rises above the train station, is one of the first things anyone sees when first visiting Sheffield, and is easily one of the most interesting and imposing buildings in the city.

We wanted to make memorabilia that celebrated the raw, imposing structure, and also its status as a listed piece of English Heritage. So it’s obvious – concrete tea-towels.

The concrete inspired merchandise will first be available on Friday in Park Hill. They are limited so bring your pennies!

I f you’re not going to Drum Roll on Friday but can’t wait for them to hit shops drop us a line now.

Disregarding trendspotting, this year’s show included an encouraging amount of painting and photography. However, the stand out pieces were largely video works, including Untitled 1 by Hyewon Kwon in which the same set of dry news story-like clips about a room in Korea is repeated eight times, each with a new narrative, and Samuel Williams’ ‘We Are the Robots’;  a six minute film, in which someone behind the camera attempts a series inexplicable tasks, such as putting nails into new potatoes, with tools taped to the end of pieces of two by twos. This worked particularly well being positioned in Site Gallery opposite Hyun Woo Lee’s clip of a sprinkler in a stadium titled ’17 times of I hate this job’, where the robot-like machine is given human sentiment, with the looped subtitle ‘I hate this job’ repeated as endlessly as the sprinkler’s rotation.

The opening night ended off with a party at S1 Artspace, where Django Django put on a fittingly aesthetically pleasing show, performing on a raised platform surrounded by venetian blinds, on which images and text were projected and beyond which Bloomberg volunteers kept suspended light bulbs swaying.

Bloomberg New Contemporaries will be on display until 5th November, at S1 Artspace and Site Gallery.

Sheffield Zine Fair, the first of its kind in the city, is organised by Katie Govier, a graduate in art who recently returned to South Yorkshire from London. Her love for zines grew in the self-publication fairs of the capital and she hopes to ‘create a more prominent zine community in Sheffield, an event where people can socialise, swap, meet others with similar interests and celebrate alternative publications.’

Publications to expect include poetry courtesy of Unquiet Desperation, some really intriguing cut up and collaged zines by Jean McEwan, and Chella Quint’s comical account of monthly cycles, ‘Adventures in Menstruating’. Following on nicely from their talk at Site Gallery’s DIY Summer last month, our good pals Rotherham Zine Library will be there with their collection, including a few back issues of Article. There’ll also be talks and workshops to get involved in, so head down and feel inspired to turn your zine-related dreams into reality.

The Mill Press, purveyors of beautifully laid out journals on themes like space and Switzerland, are bringing together the best of design, art and photography that side of the Pennines for the first Manchester Print Fair.

In attendance you can expect Manchester Modernist Society, a gathering of ‘urban enthusiasts, amateurs and latter day dandies’ who explore the region’s 20th century architecture and design, and who publish The Modernist magazine. There’ll also be Manchester based zine shop Good Grief!, Salford Illustration, and some beautifully put together visual storytelling by Mmopus Books.

Article favourites OWT Creative are putting it about a bit, with stalls at both the Sheffield and the Manchester fairs.

Sheffield Zine Fair runs from 11am to 6pm at Cafe Brezza on Wellington Street

Manchester Print Fair runs from 11am to 5pm at Night & Day Cafe on Oldham Street

The results are often crackers, like their  ‘Human Scanner‘ designed and built by Household in collaboration with Dario Utreras who is now part of the Household team. A person is wound through a ‘human scanning’ structure whilst quickly sketching the gradual passing appearance of a person laid on the glass screen above. Rethinking the machines which are designed to make us efficient, to make us think about the human process and our own abilities. This is where we first came across Household, and now we’re hooked. Here are some burning questions we put to George and Sarah recently.

Your name ‘Household’ is the basic term for a residence in which people and things are made and nurtured, a base for progress. Are you the parental unit of the Household family?

We came up with the name Household exactly because of it’s meaning, we felt it well suited the structure and way of working we wanted for our studio. It also fitted with the greater idea of working with a broad network. So yes, to some extent we do see us as the parental unit of the Household family, although we might fit under the category of very experimental family structures.

What has been your most ridiculous idea to date, and did you make it?

All of our ideas are a bit ridiculous, we have been very fortunate to make them! Our most recent exhibition is Paper Labour, at the Space X gallery in Exeter. A series of three large sculptures these explored how paper toils for us everyday. One of these is a large book that users can lie on and become a page. The experience is quite surprising, you feel pretty exposed lying there and it’s very hard work to turn yourself over. Quite ridiculous but it gets the point across!

How do you differentiate between your design and art?

We don’t. Labels are hard, as we come from a design background we think we will always see ourselves as designers. Even if some of our work appear in galleries and in “the art world” we will see it more as pushing the concept of design and what you can call design, rather than calling those projects art.

You seem to be putting humanity back into mechanics, do you think people need reminding to distinguish between virtual and real life?

We think mechanics bring things to a level which is easier to comprehend and there’s an element to physical, tangible things which seems irresistible to all of us; it automatically makes playing and involvement natural. As we have a main emphasis on collaboration, this is a particular interest we also want to shine through in our installation work and mechanics has been a great output for these ideas.

HUMAN ERROR_The Scanner from Household on Vimeo.

50 Hands Orchestra is a book with 50 pages which are designed turn into 50 whistles, allowing readers’ to become musicians without musical ability. How do you know people will respond and understand?

Well hopefully if you have designed something right, it should communicate and involve the audience it is aimed for!
We have held several workshops with the book and the particption level, and FUN, that we have had give us a pretty good idea about involvement. But this said, it is always that side of design that we have missed in traditional graphic design; audience involvement.

50 Hands from Household on Vimeo.

Household thrives on collaborations. Who do you want to work with next?

We are in the middle of a collaboration with Fabien Cappello, who we have worked with on our very first collaborative project while we were still all at the RCA together. It is great to work with him again and we do really enjoy doing several projects with the same collaborators and building up a proper family relationship. Currently we are preparing the next Poundshop for London Design Week, our ultimate dream has been to take this overseas, to discover and collaborate with new designers abroad.

The simplicity of your designs; unpolished inexpensive materials and straightforward mechanisms, are in turn clever and beautiful. What materials would you avoid and as technology progresses at a rapid pace, how will Household change?

We think we wont have restrictions as such, we always want to use materials and techniques appropriate for the idea whatever that might be. We have always been pro exciting technological progess. It might more be a matter of the lack of skills that have restricted us to only work within a certain material and mechanism level, but hopefully new collaborators could bring new skills and therefore new ideas and methods!

The Poundshop designed by Household is now open. If you can’t make it down during London Design Week, you can shop online for some very nice things, from screen prints to mini-rosettes for ‘minor sporting achievements’. Well designed things priced from just £1. And a beautiful website.

http://www.house-hold.org/

Jane Faram