*Cibelle's our favorite brainy global diva here at Beyond the Beyond.
*William Gibson sells shoes. Douglas Coupland has a new fashion line. Cibelle is, somehow, retailing Brazilian fashion gear in London – and check out that art-installation tie-in.
*This is like an object lesson in Chris Anderson path-toward-free marketing. You use the whatever-wants-to-be-worthless – movies, software, novels, music, journalism – to move laterally into some non-digitizable industry that you apparently have nothing to do with. Except that you do.
*About the best I've come up with to date is a lamp and some electronic art. Kinda by accident. Clearly I need to refine my chops here.
*Not gonna do any clothes or shoes. Not that they're easy or anything – (Warren Ellis's cult t-shirts, those are, like, the awesome, especially "Science Gangster") but I'm just not that into clothes and shoes. Fabricated, generative objects, maybe with embedded RFIDs. That would be much more in my line.
http://www.planetnotion.com/2010/09/14/exclusive-cibelles-exotic-pop-hits-selfridges/
Exclusive: Cibelle’s Exotic Pop hits Selfridges
Cibelle to perform at the Vivienne Westwood party for Melissa
Following in the footsteps of Vivienne Westwood, Zaha Hadid and Jean-Paul Gaultier, Tropical songstrel and Notion favorite Cibelle has collaborated with shoe manufacturing giant Melissa.
Cibelle will be celebrating at Selfridges this Saturday with a gig for Vivienne Westwood’s closing party. It will be covered live for Planet Notion by Cibelle herself. (((Check out the convergence-culture metamedia thing where the star provides her own Internet media coverage.)))
This shoot by Cassia Tabatini (courtesy of Plastic Dreams Magazine) is a Planet Notion Exclusive.
PlanetNotion: Hi Cibelle!
Cibelle: Hi Honey. (((She's in character as "Sonja Khalecollon" here, apparently. When you're a diva like Cibelle, and you've got a scifi nutcase apocalyptic diva as your avatar, man, that sure fertilizes your eccentricity. It's like Bowie doing "Ziggy Stardust.")))
PN: How did the Melissa collaboration come about?
C: It’s like we’ve been dating for years. They wanted me to do a collaboration after the first album. It was a matter of good timing. Eduardo at Melissa said he was in a shop in New York and my song was playing and then he got into his car and it was playing on the radio. It was like the music was chasing him down. Spooky. (((I don't think this woman reads William Gibson, but this paragraph could have been pulled whole out of ZERO HISTORY.)))
PN: Do you think that the marriage of music and fashion is a natural one?
C: I think that my role in all this is more to do with the visual arts, not only fashion. (((That's tellin' em, sister.))) Melissa as a company is heavily involved in the arts in Brazil and has their own gallery, which I’m going to be doing an installation at next month.
It feels great to be following in the footsteps of people like Zaha Hadid and Vivienne Westwood who have also worked with Melissa. It’s great to see my artwork getting exposure on a larger scale, physically as well as in a publicity sense. It’s lovely to be connected with the fashion industry, although it’s not in a trends sense, I’m more into the art side of fashion. ((("My disciplinary siloes! They're... they're melting!")))
PN: Tell us about the shoes and how they tie into your music. (((Gets popcorn.)))
C: Well I wrote a piece about imagined products for the universe that I created for the Las Venus album. (((They're a sci-fi tie-in!))) We made “the blue shoe”, aka, ‘meu sapato azul’ like the song in the album – It’s one of the ‘Sonja products for a better life’ from the Las Venus Resort Palace Hotel Gift Shop. (((It's just the awesomest. Where is this "gift shop?" Etsy, maybe?)))
(((For those not up to speed on the "Las Venus Resort Palace Hotel," check out this fine piece of sci-fi tropicalia-fiction off the Cibelle "Crammed Discs" website:)))
http://www.crammed.be/index.php?id=37&rel_id=345
"The world ended. The last whistle blew. The moon waned away, the sun plunged so low it burned out of the sky, and a last wave took out the planet. You’re one of the lucky few who escaped to another galaxy. But sometimes you can’t resist climbing into your spaceship and coming back to see all that’s left of your old Earth: a jungle on a floating rock, where monkeys are mutated by the acid rain, birds are turned to neon and the ocean drips into nowhere. And where a paradise nightclub band is playing at the last cabaret in town, the Las Venus Resort Palace Hotel. This scorched old bar has become the only hangout for anyone who’s left, and they’re all partying like it’s the end of the world - because it is - lulled by the sultry sounds of the enchanting hostess Sonja Khalecallon and her band Los Stroboscopious Luminous. As she sings and shimmies, it tastes like a cocktail so sweet, so sad, so seductive, that you will forget all others. Welcome to the pleasure zone to end all pleasure zones. But please remember: don’t feed the monkeys!"
(((Back to the interview about the blue rubber Brazilian shoes. Man, life is good.)))
The products are ‘The F**k-it Button’, (((Not that I have anything against the buttons – I'd probably buy one – but I'm trying to keep the webspiders and comment bots from freaking out here))) ‘The Poetic License Card’, Fresh Eyes Eyedrops (to see the world with no emotional luggage or pre-conception), Anti-skeptic lotion and The Blue Shoe (which is the only product living in physicality). The idea is that the Melissa shoes are made from 100 percent sky, and when you put them on, you can automatically view the world and your life from a higher point.
PN: How does this tie into the Melissa Gallery work?
C: Well at the gallery I’m doing a series of infomercials/video installations for the retro-future for all the products. ((("Design fiction."))) It’s great to see the album coming to life. (((Yeah, I bet.))) It’s amazing that people can actually buy the shoes from a song that I wrote. (((Yes, that is indeed amazing. And get ready for more of that. LOTS more.))) The album was never just about the music. (((As if that was even allowed for musicians, any more.))) It was about taking people somewhere. A larger conceptual universe. (((I think I'm gonna put Sonja Khalecollon in my new SF novel. As a character. Conceptual universes need to get lots larger.)))
It’s beyond perfect because I’m actually selling fictional products that wrote about on the album. My songs are becoming a physical reality and its wonderful to be able to hold in your hand something you wrote about.
PN: Will you cover your Selfridges gig for us?
C: Hell Yeah!
- Aaron Francis Walker
(((This just in – the all-Portuguese "Making Of" video with the aptly-titled "multiartista.")))
Glam from Marina Meirelles Braga on Vimeo.
