Fleet Foxes’ highly anticipated second album received universal acclaim immediately upon its release. Artboxes.org discovers how the production had to go through five studios, several scrapped songs and a highly difficult creative period before ending up at the top of the charts.

It all started when Seattle high school friends Robin Pecknold and Skyler Skejlset formed a band after they bonded over mutual musical interests. They called themselves ‘Fleet Foxes’, a name they chose because they thought referred to ‘some weird English activity like fox hunting.’ However, their weird activity turned out to be their own music. Their style, already very musically mature – was initially described as folk rock but later descriptions have went as far as calling it ‘folkedelic’, a distant relative of psychedelic folkers. Continue →

With the Malta Comic Con celebrating its third edition next weekend, ArtBoxes.org meets Tamara Fenech from Wicked Comics, the organization behind it all, to find out what this new comic hype is all about.

The first Malta Comic Con that took place in 2009 was an experiment for all those involved. The organisers did not really know what the public’s response would be, what feedback they would receive or how successful the Malta Comic Con would eventually become. All they knew was that there were quite a few people interested in comics, and some talent around, which they hoped would surface during the event, and that, eventually, a small comic community would eventually take shape.

In fact, this is what happened. Wicked Comics was before the Malta Comic Con. The organisers realised that they had a certain bond because of their mutual love of comics and, with time, they also realised that their interests varied, which meant that the organisation would be more diverse, with lots of different ideas, styles and tastes. Continue →

Pierrot le fou (1965) (dir. Jean-Luc Godard)

It could be argued that, contrary to the popular beliefs of critical accounts on the Nouvelle Vague, Jean-Luc Godard’s films are never merely about cinema. They are about the image itself. Godard constantly interrogates the possibilities of the image, the role it plays within a culture, and the manner in which a culture adopts the moving image as an art form. Pierrot le fou presents a narrative logic which brings into explicit focus the dominant conceptions of narrative realist cinema, and inquires into the divisions which supposedly separate the language of images from the language of speech. The film presents the adventures of Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Marianne (Anna Karina), who flee a stultifying bourgeois life, and escape to the south of France, in search of a utopia of love and freedom, which they never find. Continue →