Heavy Artillery Graffiti Crew

Despite Ultravox’s best attempts to promote the Austrian capital and joe dolci’s pro Italian pop smash ’shudupyaface’ preventing the uber slick scots power pop ballads much anticipated number one spot, Vienna still exists.

The Aroe live transparent and in effect on the streets of Vienna/Wien.

When i was initially approached by a French company based in Belgium to take part in a graffiti/football European cultural exchange in Austria i was as surprised as i was scepticle. Never the less i proceeded without caution and on my arrival i still wasn’t sure what was expected of me, this didn’t change for the whole trip. I was plied with free tins an apartment and big lumps of money so it wasn’t all bad. I eventually had to paint five canvasses (that i won’t bore you with) then i had to attend 3 nights of hip hop jams, both a blessing and a curse. The other writers invited were CAN2, DON & ZENOY (from France) and a young Viennese writer called NYCHOS, we all got on pretty good and the organisers were mad nice so the 9 days flew by. The following pictures and waffle are just some of the other stuff that happened while we were all out there.

AROE & CAN2.
This part of a longer production on the side of the canal in central Vienna which i will upload or stick in a mag at some point..

CAN2 & AROE.
Again this part of a much bigger wall and i will up the whole thing later. this spot was so dope right on the banks of the Danube which we regularly dived into when the heat got to much. No, i can’t believe Vienna was hot either.

The first time the ice cream dude drove past we couldn’t believe it, throughout the day he would fleece us of our (easily earnt) euros..

Not quite in the same vein as the above waffle we peeped this spot in central Vienna ever wondered what Andy Taylor, Roger Taylor, John Taylor did after Simon Le bon married Yasmin and Nick Rhodes turned semi pro photographer?

They opened the DURAN DURAN DURAN sandwich shop of course..

Despite the best efforts of the early 80’s super group we didn’t frequent their spot, our snack of choice was the fiery hot sausage snack and slice of bread? provided by wurst stands situated on pretty much every other corner. Street meat never tasted so good! washed down with the Austrian uber thirst quencher Almdudler (pro-nounced ‘arm doodler’)

Now my racking days are long gone but if you ever feel the window of opportunity needs crowbarring open try these cutting edge bad boys for size??

Now i’m no expert but i can see quite a few blind spots..

And finally our last days painting..

AROE NYCHOS & CAN2
not the best flick but a well baited trap should capture our in-house photoshopper then i’ll drop a clean sharp joiner..

respects to CAN2, NYCHOS, MIZ, DON, ZENOY, BLESS, WM, ACAB, MICKEY, MICKEY GLASSES, ALEX, BANDE CREW, SHWARZFAHRERS UNITED, THE DIVERSIDAD ORGANISATION AND THE VERY COOL AURELIA.

Having never been to south east asia the area formerly known as the orient i was really looking forward to the new cultural experiences that lay in wait for me and my seventh letter bretheren.

I won’t keep you too long with the factual stuff but the city and surrounding area of Seoul is one of the largest suburban sprawls on the planet with over nine and a half million people in the central area and then the masses in each outlying suburb (Suwon for example has around a million inhabitants and is one of many city areas that fall under the Seoul umbrella). The city on the whole has more neon signs and adverstisments than any other place i have ever been it’s almost as if there is no law against them or planning permission recquired. At night it definately has a bladerunner feel to it added to by the 24 hour lifestyles that the residents choose to live by.

THE SEVENTH LETTER CREW. SEOUL - KOREA 2008.

NOW ONTO THE PAINT SITUATION..
Please take your time to enjoy the above picture as this is the only bit of enjoyment that can be garnered from this garbage that has been pumped into a pressurised can.
Dong suh, the name is a hint to how it might behave.
Why has the hand using the paint wearing nail varnish on the logo.
please feel free to enjoy the colour range, all utilising the female cap system…. nice.
come back carplan all is forgiven.
THE PAINT THAT DID/DIDN’T ARRIVE.

Now it’s no secret that i personally consider spanish montana to be substandard sticky kids paint, but i would’ve given my left arm for a couple of boxes for the R16 events that we had to paint at.
the above picture is very misleading for the following reasons - we were supposed to be getting 600 cans, 300 arrived, 300 were stolen by our korean hosts before we got anywhere near them.
if you look closely you might be able to see that every can of the following is from the spanish ‘FLURO’ range, YELLOW, ORANGE, GREEN, PINK AND BLUE. The fluro’s made up around 50% of the 300 cans.
We had 6 cans of black and 12 cans of dark grey between 20 of us.
the remaining cans were a selection of turquiose, brown and khaki.
Then to top the event off just about perfectly the wall was corrugated with a powdery coating of white that didn’t enjoy being covered with any type of spray.
a few of the guys were able to keep their spirits up and produce work of a pretty high quality but i’m afraid i couldn’t travel that far on a plane, hardly sleep then pull out a burner with any type of paint with the scenario as it was… me a bit diva-ish? perhaps.

ONE GOOD THING.

This little dose of street meat got rocked by nearly everyone, its ingredients are a little mystifying but f*ck me it tasted amazing.
The bread was a little bit like french toast with honey spread on it, it had scrambled egg, cheese, salad and some type of pig meat i think but as a combination it was one of the best street snacks i’ve ever had the pleasure to eat.
THE BEACH WAS NICE..

The LA legend RISKY, AROE & the infamous JERSEY JOE. kick back..

GRAF FANATICS.

Now Korea is a very modern advanced country but tatoos are more or less illegal, they represent gangsters and koreans that have tatoos pretty much don’t exist. Now i’m sure JERSEY JOE didn’t invent the writing on peoples clothes phenomenon that seems to follow him wherever he goes but he can pretty much convince anyone to let him write on them. This got out of hand in Seoul, their was dudes walking around with what looked like a pages out of a blackbook scrawled all over their heads/bodies. I managed to capture this little fella for a quick snap…. mental behaviour.

R16 JAM - SUWON/SEOUL.

The obstacle facing us here was, we had used every shred of spanish paint on the corrugated debacle and we were expected to drop pieces in front of an audience at this giant bboy event. Armed with the now notorious ‘dong suh’ STEEL, NORM and myself decided to treat the wall as if it was an illegal street piece or trackside hoping that if we painted it real quick less people might see us.
To be honest i’m not entirely unhappy with the results but its not really why i travelled half way around the world.

I’m not really a complaining type of guy but if someone pays me to do graf for them i like to do something that we are both happy with, unfortunatley the paint situation kinda marred the overall event. It was abit like having a dj battle inviting 20 djs from around the world and then forgetting to organise any turntables and then expecting them to do their best with a couple of hi fi record players..

TRAVEL UPDATE..

after a mega long haul back from the states to iceland (via a rather big london gunfinger dance off with Relay and Tanone) I took a deep breath and about a days rest before jumping straight on plane to Copenhagen.

Not knowing what to really expect I met my adl homeys in blazing sunshine for beer plans and catch up. My main reason for going was to paint another mural/ projection for some icelandic ladies I know well at thier new bar (peep jolene bar if your in copenhagen). so the week was allready pretty much laid out for me.

Basically I wanted to keep my self as busy as possible so I went stright to copenhagen street wear store the next day to hook up an interview for grapho, that boxed off it was time for more beers and catch up with my buddys the street super heroes and duaboys. holla.

Then graf mode kicked in with a ten man wall at the infamous sundhavn harbour spot, good looking out all who attended. the weather stayed pretty fresh the whole week not a cloud in the sky. Next event was to hit up the nordic hip hop festival for a live board paint with blend, great, bates and a whole bunch of other scando’s thanks to all involved for the good day, good beers and good chicken sandwich. Peep me on the tinternet some time soon with a little interview on molotow tv at the hip hop fest, I felt like Ricky Bobby in taledega nights not really knowing what to do with my hands!!!

the bar painting took the best part of two days but I still found time to rock a cosmic castle blaster with the super talented gebes and my icebrother kopur at Christania.

all in all it was probably my best stay in cph, I love this city, wholesome girls on bikes, bombed to death streets and loads of good people to chill with.

jiroe a.k.a phileous fogg up in this graf game.

Since its been a while between postings i’ll display our latest outing in a step by step fashion..

The recent decision to drop more characters (puppets) has had us scouring the reference material for the stupidest ideas to transfer onto the wall. Today was no exception, throughout my youth sundays used to be a combination of various dumb ass activities in the morning, one of my mum’s disgusting roast dinners then some sh*t afternoon tv, the highlight/low point had to be ‘bullseye’. Perhaps someone has reproduced bully somewhere before i’m sure they have, but today we got our bully on.

Mulshing..

Bully starting to take shape and the one like GARY dropping some straightness (more on that in a second)

Bit more filling in..

When we paint at the boards lots of people pass by, some are amusing some are are drunken junkies that think they have some ultra deep interesting nuggets of graf info that they think you need to hear and others are just pricks that say dumb shit like “how much are you getting paid?” or “ohh look it’s the new banksy” or other really smart shit like ” quick mate, the police are coming”. But today a builder stopped in his van while we were painting and showed a genuine interest in the painting, he was amazed by GARY’S super straight lines to the point where to satisfy his curiousity he rifled through his tools to reveal a spirit level. Anxiously we waited to see if the inhuman one really did rock it as straight as we believe he can..

Please check the following picture for the absolute proof..

Ladies and gentlemen please recognise the human theodolite aka the inhuman GARY numan..

Here’s the final finished GARY & AROE ‘BULLSEYE’ production.
Obviously the letters are by GARY but i think the combo works really well.