Colleen Nika's Sonic Dissonance - YouTube NYFW A/W '12 Playlist

Colleen Nika - RANKIN

Colleen Nika is a music nerd turned writer, fashion editor of Rolling Stone, and burgeoning DJ who has several bylines in noteworthy publications like Interview, Style.com, Paper, and recently Popjustice, to name a few. This fashion and music maven curated a NYFW A/W ’12 Playlist for YouTube. The correlation between these two disciplines for her is very strong. They are mutually exclusive in that the aural component has the dynamism to make the wearable art come alive and at times overpower it. In terms of sound, she has an affinity for the sonic dissonance present in the urban decay, “synthetic, highly produced, and colder (sounds).” Although she is contently based in the East Village and being a culturist linchpin, she has considered being a recluse in Berlin making glitch music.

Source: A Big City Died

I chose a powerful series of high octane, haute grunge clips that I personally relate to and that, either sonically or visually, capture an unnerving mood of icy isolation and/or discord with their environments. Ranging from surreal to playful to brutally confrontational, these clips share a common theme: they pit the visceral and personal against harsh, indifferent tech-dependent backdrops, an age-old man-vs-machine contrast I find strangely alluring. There’s also more obvious aesthetic ties to be enjoyed here: bleak steely palettes, beautiful abnormalities, industrialism, ‘urban decay’. Many of my favorite designers–Gareth Pugh, Martin Margiela, Raf Simons, Rodarte in intervals–play with notions of disconnect from society and capturing the political tension between individual identity and imposed conformism…
- Colleen Nika (YouTube)

There are 22 videos in YouTube’s playlist. Here is a handful:

Atari Teenage Riot (Germany), Revolution Action (Banned Version), 4:57