Paisley Babylon is about the unleash Beautiful Chaos upon the great
city of Chicago. Beautiful Chaos is Paisley Babylon’s electronica/live
mashup multi-media happening–five turntables, five echo boxes, two
mixers, video and a whole lot of retro/future sounds mashed up live
for a full consciousness reboot.

Details are being finalized for three shows in the Chicago area and
more to come. Paisley Babylon has played live from Texas to Iceland
and now Chicagoland is about to get a taste of Babylon, too. Full
details are coming once dates and times are firm. Look out, Windy
City!

Paisley Babylon has been getting much more active in the last few months and it's high time the regular updates started. After all, you don't want to miss a single hallucinatory moment…do you?

Beautiful Chaos features five turntables hooked up to echo boxes and other effects pedals, all going at once, artfully mixed and mashed up live with other sound sources by Joe Wallace, AKA DJ Paisley Babylon. The live mashup performance is only a single layer of the work on display at the Beautiful Chaos show–there is so much going on here you may have to see two or three performances to process it all.

But this is not entertainment through pain–Paisley Babylon isn’t here to torment an audience with sheets of noise. This is BEAUTIFUL Chaos.

In a world where religious extremists on both sides of the war strive to become media darlings, where a country fighting two wars at once is still wrestling with conspicuous consumption, Beautiful Chaos is a mad, dreamlike escape from front page headlines and workday deadlines alike.

Book the Paisley Babylon show BEAUTIFUL CHAOS now by called (312) 504-1264 or e-mailing management[at] paisleybabylon [.] net for more information.

It’s a sound collage, music mix and live mashup being rehearsed in preparation for performances in Chicago to be announced soon.

In the meantime, enjoy this one-hour journey into the central nervous system of Paisley Babylon. Have a listen to the Mp3 and please feel free to drop comment on what you think of the clip–keeping in mind that it’s rehearsal quality, not performance quality.

Join me tonight (Saturday July 24) at 9PM at Lucky Number Grill for a full evening of disco fever, with zombie make-up done on location and all the boogie-down you can stand. I’ll be spinning the mirror-ball madness from 9 til 2. Come out for some DJ Paisley Babylon fun and a GREAT crowd of zombies from the Chicago Horror Society.

If you can’t make it out to the night’s madness, there will be a special Zombie Disco set list mix posted here later in the week. Stay tuned.

Guitar Hero for the Commodore 64 computer system? Some kinds of madness transcends both the medium AND the message of the presentation. This is all at once the most pointless thing ever done and the coolest. Why would you want to play Guitar Hero on the C64? For the same reasons people climb Mt. Everest–just freakin’ BECAUSE. Forget about “can’t be done” or “shouldn’t be done”, anyone crazy enough to mod an old clapped out computer from the copper age of computing is also probably a total genius.

I discovered this glorious insanity on my new favorite retro blog, Retro Thing, which also features VIDEOS of this in action–definitely worth the flashback value. Bravo, Retro Thing…and the best part of this whole thing for me was the fact that it was on display right here in Chicago. It’s just a shame the post was already two years old when I found it!

Retro Thing is definitely still going strong and well worth a look.

The greatest thing about this clip is the complete lack of a statement, which in itself is taking a philosophical position. Warhol said of “static” films like these that when you see a famous person you want to “eat them up” and stare at them for a long time. Film studies like these are Warhol’s way of boiling film down to that sort of raw experience.

This most excellently retro album cover from 1965 comes courtesy of the delightful LP Cover Lover, which is a favorite of mine. One of the awesome things about this particular look is the “future now” vibe. I’m a sucker for those squeaky-clean whites and the rounded corners that let you know this girl just might have arrived from a space ship or time machine a few minutes ago.

We have the space race to thank for a lot of that futurist design and fashion, methinks…and I’m soooo glad it happened. Where would be we today if not for Sputnik, JFK’s moon landing ambitions, and UFO hysteria?