#soft opening

[dannyfariiia]

Carlos Reyes, 'PROMESA (Sarah)' (2021), Acquired jewellery display, frame. Courtesy the artist and Soft Opening, London. Photography: Theo Christelis

[milk-and-wildflowers]

🪴 Three Ways Into the Garden

If you’re here,

you’ve found the garden.

It grows quietly,

between stories and stillness,

in the hush between memory and blooming.

🌿 The Milward Garden

This is the heart of it all.

Where every word breathes,

and every page waits with open hands.

You don’t have to knock.

You’re already home.

🪞 The Garden Gate

If you need a place to begin,

start here.

A soft welcome,

a teacup still warm,

a chair pulled out just for you.

📖 The Milward Story Collection

And when you’re ready—

the stories.

Four quiet books.

Full of sisters, letters, losses,

and love that lingers like perfume on a collar.

Read them slowly.

Or all at once.

They’ll wait for you.

We’re glad you came.

We’ve saved your place.

And the garden

remembers you.

[disarmluna]

[kingrobery]

✌🏽❤️🙏🏼 I’m happy to announce that in 2 weeks GOLD LION Online Store will be opening for beta testing. Starting 10/15/22 we’ll be offering a 15% discount to all day one supporters! Follow for updates and more drops from Gold Lion Entertainment.

ROBERY | Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, TikTok | Linktree

View kingrobery’s Linktree. Listen to their music on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music here.

[kakaji]

Carlos Reyes, PROMESA (Sarah), 2021

https://www.softopening.london/exhibitions/promesa

[dustedmagazine]

Terry Gross — Soft Opening (Thrill Jockey)

Photo by Peter Ellenby

Soft Opening by Terry Gross

The sprawling, multi-parted, prog-rock epic “Space Voyage Mission” zooms along for 19 minutes, rushing headlong through extended motorik grooves, anthemic, shout-along choruses, battering riffage and tumultuous bursts of drumming. It is long, but never dull, and if you enjoy the version on record a whole lot, you might want to agitate for the release of the original 48-minute version. It’s a good guess that neither iteration will appear on too many Spotify playlists, but then, this is not the kind of record that focuses very hard on commercial possibilities.

Soft Opening is the work of three friends—Phil Manley of Trans Am, Donny Newenhouse of KQED radio and Phil Becker—who happen to own a recording studio together. They started playing together mostly to test out their equipment, liked what they heard and went with it. Though they all play actual instruments (guitar, bass, drums), in a real sense what they are playing here is their studio. The music came out of improvisation but was cut, pasted, edited and polished on the recording deck. Like Manley’s other projects (Trans Am, the Fucking Champs), the music runs hard and loud and super clean, channeling the roar of metal through math-y complexities and ecstatic repetition until it is something else entirely.

This disc contains three tracks, two of them rather lengthy. After the operatic excesses of “Space Voyage Mission,” “Wormgear” feels earthier and more elemental, its bass/drums foundation brought forward in the mix, so that the guitar leads splinter and careen from this unrelenting foundation. The final cut, charmingly named “Specificity (Or What Have You),” is lighter and brighter, radiant splays of guitar notes spattering a terse and tetchy beat, not far off from certain Oneida cuts (another band in which Manley is a member). This last cut has the disc’s catchiest sung melody, whose uplifting vibe is undercut somewhat by the lyrics (“Time is a corrosive fluid/Dissolving motivation/Destroying flight, leaching the joy from life”).  

But though the words are nihilistic, the mood is anything but. You can sense the joy of three guys playing together, finding art and amusement in a few hours between work assignments and letting things run until they’re over. Terry Gross the radio personality might have a few questions for Terry Gross the band, but it all seems pretty clear to me.

Jennifer Kelly

[magics-rp]

Hello witchlings! This is it, today is the day we announce our site’s soft opening! Thank you so much to all the members who participated in our intros, dev challenge and made wanted ads during site buzz. And also, thank you all for your patience, here’s to hoping for a great site opening! The link is provided below. Can’t wait to see you on site! https://magics.jcink.net/index.php https://magics.jcink.net/index.php https://magics.jcink.net/index.php

[contemporaryartdaily]

Tam Ochiai at Soft Opening