Yes, it’s been a while since I’ve posted. You have to start somewhere, and I choose to start with Thom Yorke.
http://www.huhmagazine.co.uk/view_article.php?id=2186
I’m not sure what to think of this. At first it kind of upset me, thinking, “she’s just being exploited,” or “what value could come from a four-year-old; what meaning or intention could exist?” But perhaps those points could be redeemed. I mean, all things considered, this stuff is pretty slick.
^ Don’t Even Sing About It - The Books.
The sentence ends there because there’s virtually nothing to be said. Listen to The Books. Also see:
a true story of a story of true love
enjoy your worries, you may never have them again
smells like content
free translator
that right ain’t shit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7Gbiaq2l3c&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9Cqdt0S5u0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHNArEfBKdc
When google searching “crucifixion painting” this comes up FOURTH — that is, before the Velazquez hanging in the Prado, or the Tintoretto, or one of Dalí’s, one of Grunewald’s… Picasso doesn’t show up until page 6, yet Lambchop and Mufasa score front row tix?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AU1yyy_At4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD2LRROpph0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M11SvDtPBhA&feature=relmfu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JUvbJekM88
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMQTTpX3SE4&feature=fvwrel
Perfect! Pop is right as is should be, swathed in children’s voices. Now maybe we adults can get back to making real music?
I’m sorry if this offends anyone.
In the fluxing and fickle trends that tumble through contemporary art, it seems that installation work is carving a deep trough through the center, especially the overwhelming, the oppressive, and the magnificently gargantuan. Why?
In the words of author Michael Cunningham on film scores, we all want to be swept away. But much more than film scores, by the second half of the past decade the entertainment industry had exploded out of the gate to evolve controller buttons into motion sensors, HD to 3D, however gimmicky, before James Cameron could say “Pocahontas.”
And as the fact that film scores remain is testimony, internal to music remains a great capacity, above many other art forms, to contextualize thought through feeling—to be an emotional conductor as our story-craving brains wander through all varieties of imagined worlds.
Perhaps it’s a different timbre than Katharina Grosse’s resplendent real-life coloring book dirt sculptures, but with music I also seek something alien and mysterious. To capture the majesty of a long room filled with mounds of electric color; to recreate the taste and haze of an atmosphere on a saturnian moon, or the silence and solitude on the shore of one’s own sanity; these are the things I want music to do. And as expectations change, as they have in the theatre, as they seem to be in the gallery, even the radio might sound very different someday.
“Working in both real and pictorial space simultaneously, the artist emphasizes the instability of what we know as reality and the potentiality in what lies beyond the limits of conditioned sight and thought.” -MASS MoCA on Grosse’s “One Floor Up More Highly”
Perhaps the most interesting thing yet about installation work is that most of it will never be bought.
-Nicholas
More cool installations: Tara Donovan, Will Pergl, Clouds Installation, & Tom Shannon
Anonymous asked: Ever heard of Boris Smile? He does some neat samples from children too.
I just myspaced them, but didn’t find any songs with sampling.. what songs?
You are in a classroom of 20 first-graders. A grown man stands at the front explaining to the anxious children that he is going to pass around what he is holding in his hands. He tells them to be careful, but that it is not dangerous. He tells them they may hold it in their hands, or of course, if they wish, they can have it around their necks.
You are at a birthday party. It’s January in Australia, and you’re sitting on your front porch. Thirteen of your best friends surround your parents who bring out a birthday cake and place it in front of you. There are seven candles. The summer sun has just set. It’s your birthday party. They celebrate you, “hip, hip, hooray!”
You are in a bedroom. You are in front of a computer. You are at the point of tears. “Lights out in ten minutes—“ A door slams.
Through the sea of nervous laughter you find a child in a plaid dress and double French braids wide-eyed and shy, unsure of herself as the man approaches her corner sanctuary. He holds out what is in his hands, and she holds out hers to receive. It is a black snake and as it extends its body, it brushes against her cheek and smells her neck. It is a sensation received with irrepressible giggling and a broad smile.
_____________
Last month I visited the Prado Museum in Madrid. Within the incredible collection of western art one work caught my soul as well as my eye: Titian’s “Adam and Eve.” On the bench in front of the painting I sat down petrified, contemplating the gentleness in expressions, the innocence of Adam’s imperative gesture and the naivety of Eve’s intrigued reach. It profoundly occurred to me that there is a truth captured in this work that reflects a part of the human spirit to which we can all relate.
Growing up in the Christian west, we absorb a spirituality that begins with an explication of “original sin,” a concept that has always left me itchy and irresolute. As this project developed, it became for me a powerful meditation on moral self-awareness, culpability, and suffering. The sampled sounds come from three primary video sources, all of which are on Youtube: 1) a video of children in a classroom handling a snake; 2) seventh birthday parties from around the world; and 3) this.
As one small jigsaw within a long puzzling history stretching back to Titian and long, long beyond, this project is my attempt to probe the possibility of “original whatever” that might be buried within the catacombs of truth and redisseminated by the flowers that grow atop the graves in the cemetery at dusk. It is my meditation to better understand the line that connects Eve’s first flirtation with fruit to a disconsolate teenager’s final blog. It is the unconscious ambience in those deep parts of my own self, so deep that even the voices of those closest to me are barely a milky echo.
This is the sound children make, as one by one they leave their lonely planets of three volcanoes and a solitary flower, to follow the inevitable journey of all men east of Eden.
Enjoy,
Nicholas
I’ve been working on a few more entries and songs that I’d like to share, but have, in the meantime, crossed paths with so many interesting snippets about creativity that I can’t help but give into this umpteenth distraction first.
So true.
-Nick
