Filming about architecture Last night -- just as I was being driven to the airport to fly back to Berlin, unfortunately -- was the Vienna premiere of the new film by Heinz Emigholz, Loos Ornamental.
Emigholz -- who teaches at the Berlin art school -- makes documentaries about architects which just show their buildings, in order of construction, as they are today, with no commentary whatsoever, but with immaculately-captured field recordings of their ambient sound. I've written about him before here on Click Opera, covering his films about Schindler and Goff. He's also made films about Sullivan, Maillart and Kiesler, and plans films about Luis Barragán in Mexico, Auguste Perret in France and Algeria, Pier Luigi Nervi in Italy and Ulrich Müther in Germany.
I look forward to Emigholz's architectural films more than anyone else's. They're quiet and simple, but they pack more atmosphere, beauty and interest than anything. We see places, we hear sounds, we sense the lives lived in the buildings as well as the lives of their makers.
As Emigholz puts it: “Architecture projects space into this world. Cinema photography translates that space into pictures projected in time. Cinema then is used in a completely new way: as a space to meditate on buildings.” It's a meditation I've come to love, a new, quiet cinema, ambient cinema, spiritual cinema. It's also what I responded to in Hermann Huber's video of Cairo's Tiring Building, and I spent time with Huber in Vienna this week, and will write something for his forthcoming book about the Tiring Building, whose Viennese counterpart I also saw this week.
To see Emigholz's film about Loos, the Vienna architect and critic who famously declared ornament "crime" at the start of the Modernist period (and who therefore progressively simplified it in his buildings) in Vienna would have been perfect. Alas, I had to rush to the airport. But I did manage to soak up some Loos this trip in the shape of the mock-up Loos room in the Vienna Museum.
There was a catch: right now, the Loos room is full of snow. Designer Robert Stadler has made an "intervention" which turns the heavy, cosy, dark space into a snow globe full of suspended polystyrene snowflakes, drawing attention to "the bizarre freezing of a living environment". That's something nobody could accuse Heinz Emigholz of doing.
How's my singing? (Your mileage may vary.) Being a bit of a fan of ambivalence -- that Janus-like state in which our reactions face in two directions at the same time, which means it has something in common with collaboration -- I rather enjoy nuanced reviews of my work. Outright pan or praise doesn't feel right, fair or accurate, somehow. All-good or all-bad is bound to be a lie.
So I enjoyed the mixed Joemus review in Brooklyn mag Prefix, which begins: "Nick Currie, who records as Momus, has spent much of his career treading some uncleansed middle ground between the irksome and the inspired". This review, which awards the record seven out of ten, leans to the "inspired" side but doesn't lose sight of failings, calling me on naff techniques and half-finished songs.
The review sees a natural pop singer with a "lopsided canon" thwarted by conceptual baggage and production tricks, but believes that "as soon as we’ve hit rock bottom we’re pulled up by our bootstraps". Almost every sentence has this ambivalent structure, as if to say "Although this record is pretty terrible, it's actually pretty good in the end". Of the work with Joe, for instance: "Occasionally the collaboration between these two disparate workers doesn’t gel... but it’s gratifying to hear how often they hit paydirt". Like The Vaudevillian in the final track, I'm "leaving the audience not knowing whether to applaud or call the emergency services".
Since many of you now have your copies of Joemus, I thought it might be time to issue a "how's my driving?" heads-up and a tollfree number. So how are you getting on with this album? Any juicy ambivalence to share? Tracks you skip, tracks you love, tracks on repeat? Are we talking curate's egg or Fabergé? Stinker or swimmer? Is Joemus the fourth worst of the twenty Momus albums, or the third best? A mixed bag or a nickelbag of funk? Jammus maximus or Janusbait? The lines are open.
A freaky weakling on the Heldenplatz I'm in Vienna, staying in a room in the Meridien Hotel, just across the Ring from the Opera, in a room bigger than some apartments I've had, and considerably more grand. I'm here for three nights, which is generous for a performance which will last just an hour on Thursday evening. But one thing I've learned is that Vienna isn't short of money, and loves to spend it on art.
This is a rich, conservative town with a taste for ostentation and the finer things in life. As I walk about dressed like a stevedore, I find the city is as culture-shocked by me as I am by it. People at the opening party for the Art Week -- held at the palatial Dorotheum in a room dominated by the twin-headed eagle of the Hapsburg Empire -- walked up to me as if I were an exhibit, took photographs, and left. They treated me as if I were a work of art, which in a sense is how I was presenting myself (I was dressed for my performance, though I've still to receive the shiny golden bullhorn the Vienna Art Week people have procured for me).
I knew nobody at the Dorotheum party, which seemed to co-incide with an auction event, so I just drifted around on my own, looking and feeling weird. An array of paintings, furniture and silverware was on offer, with expected auction prices marked on the labels ($20,000 for an Andy Warhol Polaroid). I was as fascinated with the audience as some of them were with me. That rich Japanese businessman, for instance, with his moccasined, Bambi-legged daughter -- but no, she's his wife! Look at the loving way they're holding hands!
After admiring Kokoshka paintings, a horrible photo of Madonna in a Keith Haring dress, and the Ettore Sottsass mirrors, I got too hot and a bit tipsy on sekt and pineapple juice. So I slipped away from the Dorotheum and just walked around the chic streets, passing the horse academy where horses are trained to do all sorts of fancy high steps, or record shops displaying nothing but classical records in their windows.
What's really striking is the sexy brutality of the statues around the Heldenplatz, which invariably depict muscular men clubbing less-muscular figures to death. It's as if Goliath had triumphed over David by sheer size and force. I have the feeling that I would certainly be the kind of freaky weakling this Viennese hulk would love to club to death, but that -- by means of an anomaly known as "art" -- I am not only spared, but have the bully on my side, protecting me, and laying down his club to snap photos.
Bullshit through a Viennese bullhorn For the next three days I'm in Vienna attending and performing at Vienna Art Week as The Munchausen Docent, an unreliable art tour guide shuttling between commercial galleries telling lies about the work on display -- dispensing bullshit through a bullhorn, or flüstertüte, as the Austrians call it. The performance is curated by local art magazine Spike.
Momus: The Munchausen Docent THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2008, 7:00 P.M. AN DER HÜLBEN 2, 1010 VIENNA
"Momus (named after the Greek god of satire) is mainly known as a musician and blogger, but also makes appearances as an art figure and performance artist in international galleries and museums. Thus, for example, he accompanied the 2006 Whitney Biennial, serving his “disinformation mission” as an “unreliable tour guide” with political to absurd commentaries."
I know I had mentioned the idea of switching the days that the choir meets sometimes so more people can be involved. Karl and I were talking about it the other day and decided that at least for a little while we would like to stick with Tuesdays from 5:30-7 at the Free School. It feels really good in that space and I feel like it will be a lot of work to have to find a new spot and time every week. So we would like to meet this Tuesday 11/18 at the Free School (617 Decatur SW Oly, WA). We will take the following week off because both Karl and I will be out of town. Unless you guys just want to get together and sing without us. I won't feel left out! Also, I was asked to play at the Olympia Library's Grand Re-opening on Friday January 16th. I am going to play a 45 minute set around 8pm and asked if the choir could close the night with a 15-20 minute set. The library was super excited about that idea! So mark your calendars. You don't have to be a part of live performances to be in the choir. I just thought it would be fun for people who like that kind of thing.
this whole learning process is like starting to mimic words
Constructing deconstruction stage 1.
The point that I have been thinking of for a long time now is the “doctrine of negation” and how it relates to the whole indictment against deconstruction. Derrida’s point does not deny the physical world; it is a claim of negating the norms of human knowledge. It challenges the conventions of the human thought, not the realm of concrete existence. I think what has not been understood by the conservatives and libertarians is that deconstruction does not claim singularity, it unites with the conventional and suggests that the opposites are imprints of each other. The simplest way to illustrate this is through the context of presence and absence where one does not exist on its own.
Deep in the world of the mushi Winter has come, bringing long evenings, preserved foods, darkness, fantasy, ghosts, and tradition. Hisae and I, sitting in a darkened room with the magic lantern of a video projector bringing the wall alive with light, are deep in the world of the mushi.
Mushi are insects, Jim, but not as we know them. As the Mushi-shi (a kind of blond, one-eyed ghost-buster) Ginko explains in episode one of the anime: "Put bluntly, it's like this. If my four fingers are animals and my thumb is a plant, man is at the tip of the middle finger, furthest away from the heart. The lower you are on the hand, the more primitive you become. If you trace them, the veins all converge around the wrist. Bacteria and microbes are halfway up the arm; at this point it's hard to distinguish between plants and animals. But there are things even lower than that. Up the arm, past the shoulder. Here are the mushi, the midorimono, the green things. Close to being mere essences of life, their shapes and essences are vague. Some can see them, some can't. A lot of so-called "ghosts" are actually mushi."
So far, Hisae and I have watched ten of the 26 anime episodes and the entire Mushishi feature film. The anime series is much better than the feature film (despite the presence of the lovely Aoi Yu in the movie). In the anime, each 25-minute episode is a model of clarity and atmosphere. The mushi-shi (a ghost buster, Shinto priest, shaman) arrives in a village afflicted by mushi-ghosts, uses his knowledge to cure the afflicted, explains a bit about the peculiar ghostly slime, and leaves. The live action film, on the other hand, tries to interweave all sorts of separate narrative strands, pasting over the cracks with CG animations, an orchestral score that tries to add spurious emotion to confusing, dark, tediously-miraculous scenes that should be under- rather than over-stated, and bashes the audience over the head with impact sounds that go "whoosh!" and "wallop!" These are, of course, tics endemic to epic films, and particularly Hollywood ones.
What's so nice about the anime series is that it's basically soothing and seductive. The episodic structure, the repetition with variations, gradually builds up our picture of a sort of alternative Shinto world in which animism becomes anime, and in which the hero's job is basically to make flying things a little less animated. Ginko does this by exorcisms of various sorts. Sometimes, even here, though, the explication gets clunky and arbitrary. As in Harry Potter and to some extent James Bond, the normal gravitational rules of narrative are suspended. Since we're in the thick of magic, anything is possible, though we know that our hero will never die. In this sort of narrative, the audience spends too much time learning all sorts of arcana which has simply been made up by the author (Yuki Urushibara, who published the original manga in Afternoon magazine from 1999 to 2008, according to Wikipedia).
If, in the land of magic, anything goes and the hero will inevitably save the day within 25 minutes, you basically want to spend your time enjoying the drawing, the characters, the atmospheres, the settings, and the weird inventiveness of the different sorts of inconvenience these primal flies can inflict (blindness and deafness are just the start). You don't want to clutter your brain with just-invented "rules" about this week's guest-star sub-bacteriological spectre.
Get on with it, ghost buster! Let's have another glimpse of that tatami room, that weird horned child, that sunlit coast, that snowy forest, while spooky Shinto gongs chime on the soundtrack!
Righthand Heart Ballad of the Barrel-Organist Shaftesbury Avenue Amongst Women Only The Girl Who Invented Sex Dear Boy George Let's Make a Baby Advertising Paolo Monsters of Love Kyrie Eleison Solemn and Cruel Confectioner A Dull Documentary Explicit The Old Die Young Let's Start a Trade Union The Filippino
The songs are mostly from the late 80s, though a couple of them date from 1983 (Ballad of the Barrel Organist, Kyrie Eleison, Solemn and Cruel). There's an overlap with the other demos podcasts, too -- Amongst Women Only and Confectioner have already appeared, though in different versions. Here for the first time are unpublished songs like Dear Boy George (later rewritten as The Cabriolet), Let's Make a Baby, Advertising, The Filippino, Explicit (which became The Emperor of Oranges), The Girl Who Invented Sex, and others. Apologies, as usual, for the beyond-lofi sound.
Unheard Vinyl 1: The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway The Momus loudspeaker saga had a happy ending: after naming a range of ultra-hifi speakers after a lofi artist, the Ukrainian company Sound Sound followed up with the gift of a NAD amp. I then added a Technics 1210 MKII turntable, which I'd been lusting after ever since seeing one in my friend Jan's flat (a record store was going out of business on my street and had a pair to sell).
The result is that I now have the best sound system I've had in my entire life. I've been bringing up boxes of vinyl from the cellar and ranging them in my pine Trissa LP boxes, and one thing that strikes me is that there are lots of records I've owned for years but have still never heard. This is mainly because I inherited the vast collection of a music fan I used to live with in London, a girl who had to hot-foot it back to New Zealand and left me pretty much her entire collection. Amongst these unheard LPs are some classics, and I thought it might be interesting to play them for the first time and give you a running commentary of my impressions.
We start with an album I've actually alluded to in one of my songs. "Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan" contains the line "on Broadway a lamb is lying down", which refers, of course, to Genesis' first album. The line is in there because I was reading Paul Stump's book about prog rock, The Music's All That Matters, at the time, and playing around with prog song structures. But the history of my non-meeting with this Genesis album goes back further; I was sharing a taxi with Edwyn Collins after a party at Malcolm Ross' house in about 1986, and as we approached my flat on Draycott Place, Chelsea, Edwyn confided that he'd heard my new LP and thought it sounded like early Genesis. For some reason (possibly the sense that this was not meant as a compliment) I never investigated. But I will now.
Putting records on my new deck is a pleasure. It's so heavy and solid, there's no lid, you examine the card album sleeve, note the secondhand sticker (the Genesis album was bought for £4 from Snooper's Paradise in Brighton), note that it's a double LP (blimey!), note the conceptual art-like imagery (a man observes a three-part scene in which he pulls himself out of a waterfall into a Room 101-type place, and then his vacant silhouette stands in a long hallway populated by what look like baby cheetahs), note that the label on the vinyl resembles the arty labels 4AD used to use.
Time to switch on! I'm not going to read any online commentaries, or even the album's voluminous sleeve notes (I glimpse a single phrase: "I will not chase a black raven"). No titles, no info; I'm just going to play the record and record my raw impressions and associations.
It starts with arpeggios, and Gabriel's rather annoying strangulated whine. It sounds very old-fashioned. The arpeggios get a bit more virtuoso and random. Gabriel sings what sounds like "I'm full of shit, I don't care who I hurt, I don't care who I wrong". Things are building up. Oh! Something quite good happens, there's a little embedded marching song, then Gabriel sings falsetto, then it goes into another new section, with organs, sort of post-Day-in-the-Life psychedelia (all those little interlocking sections). Big bass synth! Something about porcupines, strange bleated singing. I don't like the "heavy" bits, but I like the weird little Prussian songlets that come in from time to time. It seems to be ending with a gentle coda. Now there's something pacific and synthetic, a bit like Mike Oldfield.
What year are we even in here? I have no idea. I'd guess 1974? Now there's something Paul McCartneyesque going on -- "erogenous zones I love you". Actually it sounds Californian too, like Randy Newman. I hate Gabriel's voice, and the way these poppy commercial songs edge through over-complex arrangements. It's just not my cup of tea at all. The endless key and tempo changes don't take me anywhere. But then a sort of silly kazoo solo makes it all worthwhile. You can see that this music picks up where late Beatles left off. They're trying to be as creative and whacky as that, and then some.
More arpeggios, references to the Golden Fleece. I suppose this quiet number might be what Edwyn thought my first album sounded like. "You've got to get in to get out" -- that sounds familiar, this is like reading Hamlet for the first time and recognizing the quotes. Actually I quite like this one, there are recorders in the background. "The carpet-crawlers heed their callers". What is he on about? "The liquid has congealed which has seeped out through the crack... (something something) stickleback". The chorus is great, though. It's all very knife-edge, I don't know if I like this album or hate it.
More symphonic proggery, with lots of synths. Why does Gabriel harmonize in thirds so much? It neutralizes his melodies. "But the juggler holds another pack" -- I hate this sub-Dylan gaming-circus imagery. And, you know, do jugglers hold packs of cards? Come on! Conservative sentiments about trusting country men over town men, and people who work with their hands over others. Oh no, there's a "priest and a magician... and even academics searching printed word". Enough tarot! And this strangled singing style, like a bleating prog sheep! Will I make it to the end of Side One, let alone Side Four?
Oh, thank Christ, it's ended! I don't think I'm going to flip it over, this has gone on long enough.
Update: Okay, I looked at the Wikipedia entry on Genesis and this was actually their sixth album. I was right about the date, though: 1974.
Update 2: I also seem to have been listening to Side 2 thinking it was Side 1. In my day, when you put all the song info on one label and a picture on the other, the picture side was Side 1.
Watch UPCAT (5 pm), DOSE (7 pm) and IMBURNAL (9 pm) on Nov. 20 (Thurs) at the UP Cine Adarna.
Tickets @ 65 php each.
Contact 09274520710 for ticket inquiries.
SYNOPSES:
"Lucas and Joaquin are two teenage boys from the province who believe passing the UPCAT (University of the Philippines College Admissions Test) is the passport to their dreams. While Joaquin's goal is to get a well-paying job and bring his OFW parents back home, Lucas wants nothing more than to win the heart of his schoolmate Jane - and perhaps her family, all of whom are UP-educated. The two seek help in reviewing from Michael, a UP Fine Arts graduate with a secret. In this light coming-of-age story, Lucas and Joaquin discover some truths about life, love, dreams and shaded circles and a little more about themselves along the way."
“Dose” - In the eyes of a child, love knows no age or gender. An intriguing yet heartbreaking tale of love and romance between a gardener and a 12-year-old boy. This sensual melodrama is by award-winning writer-director Senedy H. Que.
One of the strongest contenders for the 2008 Cinema One Originals Awards this November, this is a tale of manhood that is about to erode two pubescents. While hanging out in the crevasses of Punta Dumalog, Joel and Allen both find solitary, dent their friendship and shape their orientations in life, taking about what they witness and encounter daily in their neighborhood. Slowly they are eroding their childhood and set forth their different desires towards “manhood”
Ohta Rina gravure mook One day last year Hisae and I were walking down a backstreet in Daikanyama when Hisae nudged me and hissed "It's Ohta Rina!" There, sitting in a cranny, chatting to a friend, was a short-haired girl, sipping a soft drink. I didn't know who Ohta Rina was, but Hisae seemed to idolize her. She was certainly pretty, anyway.
Yesterday I happened to interrupt Hisae's websurfing to ask her a question, and found her looking (slightly guiltily) at this page of photos of Ohta Rina, taken by her boyfriend's mother, the actress Miyuki Matsuda. The pictures all come from a new gravure mook (a magazine-type book made up of girly pictures) called Shincho Mook 107: Gekkan Ohta Rina. These mooks come out monthly, and focus on one girl exclusively.
Now, I'm not an unconditional fan of Rina Ohta -- in the video for AOR, her track on Towa Tei's new-but-90s-sounding album, for instance, she just looks too vampy in a Robert Palmer-ish way I find off-putting.
For me, Miyuki Matsuda's imagery is much more seductive. It refers to two visual keypoints I hold particularly dear: the ballerina imagery in the David Hamilton posters I had on my bedroom wall when I was a teenager, and Serge Gainsbourg's film Je T'Aime, Moi Non Plus, featuring short-haired, androgynous heroine Johnny Jane.
Scroll that vid through to the eight minute mark and you'll see, for instance, the scene in which Jane Birkin and Joe Dallesandro float on rubber tyres in a water sink in a rubbish tip. It's clearly the inspiration for this shot of Rina:
David Hamilton and Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus are both Shibuya-kei references -- Kahimi Karie and I injected Hamilton into Shibuya-kei with our tribute song to the "member of the Royal Photography Society", of course. And this shot of Rina sitting on the loo with her knickers around her ankles...
...also takes me back to the 90s. H magazine ran a sexy photoshoot of Kahimi and Miki Nakatani which included a very similar image of Kahimi on the toilet. A prim KK told me that she'd been wearing two pairs of panties at the time.
Something I find moving -- because it's on the edge of the grotesque, and beauty, as Rilke said, is just the first sight of terror -- is the amazing skinniness of Ohta's legs. Here, for instance, she looks like a spider:
And where exactly are her hips here?
Oh, they're those bobbles at the top of her legs. Cute!
More reviews, the Dracula song, and Kyoka Sorry to be all Joemus all the time these days, but it is kind of exciting to be getting feedback from my first new album in two years. We now have the first two real reviews of Joemus, in the form of The Boston Phoenix and the Dusted musiczine. Dusted even has a Flash-streaming file of the entire Dracula song, my duet with Onpa Records artist Kyoka.
For Gustavo Turner at the Boston Phoenix I'm "the Harry Smith of Nintendo" (a phrase which rather pleases me, though it's Hisae who spends all day prospecting for talent in Animal Crossing):
"Joemus finds him collaborating with Joe Howe, the Glasgow breakbeat manipulator behind Germlin and Gay Against You. Howe here plays the same role Currie assigned to Fashion Flesh for his three previous records: adding several layers of distortion and assorted digital wobbling to the singer's urbane chansons. As in that recent trilogy, the results are mixed, though the usual lyrical puns and jokes have given way to Kool Keith–style nonsense ("Mr. Proctor") and a very noticeable melancholy. The one track where Momus doesn't hide behind the lo-tech electro wizardry of his collaborator, the possibly unironic "The Man You'll Never Be," reminds us of his deserved reputation as a master of traditional song form, a cosmopolitan Stephin Merritt. That track leads into the West End mimicry of "The Vaudevillian," which adds one last layer of greasepaint to Momus's polymorphous career."
Casey Rae-Hunter's Dusted review is worth quoting in its entirety:
"There was probably never any real hope of Momus getting famous, no matter how hard (and often) he crooned for it. Yet, for a brief flash in the late 1980s and early ’90s, Scot-born Nick Currie’s mischievous music might have wormed its way into the neo-libertine consciousness of a generation exploring novel chemical compounds. Alas, lad-rock trumped pan-global bohemia, and Momus became the cult figure he was probably always destined to be.
For those unfamiliar, Momus mostly makes DIY synth-pop with vaudeville-lullaby melodies and scathing wit. His best work is what Oscar Wilde might have sounded like if he had access to cheap synthesizers and Japanese fetish mags. Currie’s 1998 classic, The Little Red Songbook, is the gold standard Momus disc, full of droll sensuality, flagrant Orientalism and a song about transsexual composer Wendy Carlos traveling back in time to marry her pre-surgery self. (The latter put Currie in legal and financial straits; he bailed himself out by asking his friends and associates to give him a $1,000 each to be immortalized in a song on his next record.)
Currie – also a journalist and long-time blogger – has, in the last decade, resided in Tokyo, New York and Berlin. Having worked with artists around the world, Momus gets an assist from a fellow Scot for his latest release, Joemus. Recorded with breakcore producer Joe Howe, the album infuses Currie’s electro-vaudeville sensibilities with a scrappy, 8-bit aesthetic. Ultimately, it’s not all that different from early Momus productions, with the exception of some modern (and deliberate) Auto Tune abuse and longer noise passages.
There are a couple of covers, including Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Thatness and Thereness,” which now plays like a love song between the HAL 9000 computer and astronaut David Bowman. “Jahwise Hammer of the Babylon King” features Currie’s trademark whisper-croon, married to Nintendo-glam beats. I can’t grok what the tune is about, but I did catch a reference to David Bowie’s “pink monkey bird” (which now “squeals” rather than “squawks,” as it did on Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream”).
According to Currie, “Ichabod Crane” is “the legend of Sleepy Hollow set to music that Howard Devoto’s Magazine might have made in 1979.” This describes it pretty well, but I’d add that the blip-hop breakdown sounds like Atari Teenage Riot commissioned to provide music for an episode of Voltron.
“Dracula,” a duet between Momus and Kyoka (who may have replaced Kahimi Karie as his Electro Girl Friday) is the most irresistible song on the disc. Momus is at his best as noble predator-cad – why not take it up a notch and play the Dark Prince of seduction? Except Dracula is too old to bite necks anymore, and Kyoko is “the kind of girl who does not take rejection lying down.” Flecked with spare acoustic guitar and thunderclaps that amplify the comic-tragic narrative, the song is everything you want in a Momus tune – opaque allegory and raw emotion combined with highbrow irreverence.
Now in his late 40s, you could say Momus has entered his “baroque” period – that is, if he hadn’t always been there. Currie’s paradise of lithe Japanese women pouring him champagne atop a techno-Mount Olympus is unlikely to ever manifest. But with plenty of wag left in his hoary tail, we can expect more whore-y tales. In 1991, Currie said that, “in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen people.” Count me among the elite."
Listen to the Dracula track here. We really ought to make a video for this song of a vampire who'd rather "lie here in my coffin drinking coffee, doing nothing or watching TV" than bite the necks of naked girls. Oh, and there's now a page of Joemus lyrics and videos.
so long to devotion and the relentless sympathy for the ungrateful I swore that I wouldn't let the weather or my lack of sleep be the one great cause to doze off in front of Sanya's mom aka my very hip Chem1 professor. I do not know what exactly happened there but in between extrinsic properties, NaCl and sublimation, I did. Hands down, the best way to start the sem. Wuuh.
Anyway, Thesis Proposal was surprisingly interesting as some of us really have planned to at least have something to pitch, even as vague and/or general as my experimental/Derrida project. For next week, we were asked to have a 1-page quasi-specific, semi-general concept and explain what we really want to do or say with the films that we plan to make. Of course I'm scared shitless but the thinking mood is starting to grow on me. I need to concretize my plans ASAP and watch more pegs and ask more people for feedback.
Inside every synthetic man there's an electronic woman
The woman on the lefthand side of the picture above does not exist. She's called Ursula Bogner -- I mean, she's NOT called Ursula Bogner -- and we know she doesn't exist because Wikipedia doesn't have a page about her. Not in German, not in English, not in any language.
What's that? Lots of people exist who don't have Wikipedia pages? All right, let's get more specific. This image purports to be a photograph of a pioneering electronica artist who was born in 1946 and died in 1994 at the age of 48. The label Faitiche (pronounced like "fetish"), run by loop-finding jazz-glitch pioneer Jan Jelinek (above, right), has released what purports to be a compilation of Ursula Bogner's radiophonic experiments between 1968 and 1988. You can listen to the album in its entirety -- and read the entertaining press release -- here.
Now, I'd hardly be the first person to say that this attractively eccentric music doesn't sound so much like a series of visionary, prophetic premonitions of 21st century quirky minimalist microsound as, well, the actual thing, composed and released recently by a contemporary Berlin-based electronica artist -- Jan Jelinek, say -- with a funny, playful press release. And I wouldn't be the first to speculate that the "woman" in the photograph is in fact Jelinek himself in drag.
Nevertheless, one of my favourite sayings is "Every lie creates a parallel world; the world in which it is true". So I'm interested in the parallel world in which Ursula Bogner really is credible, and really exists.
It doesn't require such a stretch of the imagination; after all, record labels have done a roaring trade over the last decade in exotic electronica compilations, many of them by "overlooked" women composers. The fictional Ursula Bogner takes her place alongside real historical electronic music composers like Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Clara Rockmore, Elaine Radigue, Else Marie Pade, Maddalena Fagandini, Glynis Jones, Pauline Oliveros and Baetriz Ferreyra.
Derbyshire (left) and Oram (right) worked for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the 1950s and 1960s, using tape editing, filtration and synthesis to make evocative sounds for drama and documentary pieces on the radio. Derbyshire's most famous -- and startlingly futuristic -- piece was the theme music for children's sci-fi series Dr Who, which pre-dates Kraftwerk by over a decade. Rockmore was a skilled player of the theremin in the 1930s, soon after the gestural, "singing" instrument was invented. Oliveros is a composer of abstract electro-acoustic soundscapes.
If Ursula Bogner can plausibly and comfortably fit into this line of electronic women musicians, her creator (Jelinek, Mrs Bogner's Dr Frankenstein) can also join another, equally plausible, tradition: the set of male artists with a female alter ego.
Here, admittedly, we find more precedents in the world of the visual arts. The french grandfather of conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp, had a female alter ego called Rrose Selavy (below, left). The British potter Grayson Perry dresses up regularly as Claire, a little girl in a party frock (right).
There are ambiguous gender-straddlers in the music world too, of course: Terre Thaemlitz, Genesis P-Orridge and Pete Burns have all transformed themselves into women or had surgery to make their bodies more feminine.
Music artists who work in the genre known as "clicks and cuts" may have a special interest in changing their gender. After all, if you're editing synthetic music every day -- open, change, save file -- why not apply the same principles of flux and fluidity, activism and artificiality to your body, your gender? Why not experiment on yourself the way you experiment on your music?
If no sound is "natural" for the electronic musician, why should there be anything natural or predestined about the body you happen to have been born into, or the gender assigned to it at birth? Why not click and cut your own flesh, and edit your own identity? Why not synthesize and syntheticize?
And, while you're at it, you might like to do what Jan Jelinek has done with Ursula Bogner: send your atavar back in time to perform a little cosmetic surgery on history, just to see how it looks.
Happy Birthday!!!!! We are at the very tail end of Ange's Birthday. I gave him a pair of jeans that don't fit and a bagpipe! One of his friends made this phenomenal film about him, when we were last in France. Panda has a really cute part in it and there is lots of good live footage. Check it out.
Joemus bold In late August, when I was thinking about the artwork for the Momus album, I happened to be in Trento, in northern Italy. Something about some funky fat lettering in a restaurant window appealed to me, and I shot some photos of it.
When I got back to Berlin I issued an appeal for some "extremely talented graphic designer" to turn these snaps into a font called Joemus. It looked for a while as if Hugo Timm of Studio Julia, creator of the Serious Sans typeface I wrote about in the New York Times, might make the Joemus face. But Hugo had to go to South America for a while, and we were keen to get the artwork done immediately.
That's when Stijn Segers of Belgian practice Werkmannen stepped in. With amazing speed, Stijn -- who specializes in making fonts from hand-lettered sources -- made a font based on my snaps. We agreed at the time that when the album came out, we'd make his font available here and on the Werkmannen site, so here it is:
At about the same time as the font appeal was issued, we were casting around for an artist to do the sleeve artwork for the Joemus album. That job eventually went to Stefan Sadler, who did us proud, but an interesting sketch by Mehmet Ulusahin has now gone up on his website. Here it is:
If we're "bold" in the font, we're positively ferocious in Mehmet's drawing!
PS: 30-second sound clips of every track on the Joemus album can now be heard via this Billboard page.
The 2nd get together of the choir will be tomorrow, Tues. Nov. 11th, from 5:30-7pm. We will be meeting at the new location of The Free School again (617 Decatur SW, Oly). Last week was really fun!!! I just got back to town tonight. I flew to Durham last Wednesday. So I might be a little brain dead. I am super excited though!
Jahwise Hammer of the Babylon King After Mr Proctor and Widow Twanky, here's another video single from the forthcoming Momus album Joemus.
The song, co-written by Joe Howe and Nick Currie, is set to images from the film that inspired it: Rockers (1978) by Ted Bafaloukos. Made in 1978, Rockers features some of the outstanding reggae musicians of the time in cameo roles as themselves: Leroy "Horsemouth" Wallace, Richard "Dirty Harry" Hall, Gregory "Jah Tooth" Isaacs, Jacob "Jakes" Miller, Robbie Shakespeare, Kiddus I, Burning Spear, Big Youth and Dillinger.
My song is a tribute not just to the Bafaloukos film (which I watched over and over in a snowed-in house in Hokkaido in 2005) but specifically to the walking styles of its actor-musicians, which I find inspiringly free and expressive.
The music is my chopped-up, rearranged version of the Germlin backing track for our Ashes to Ashes cover, which appeared on the 7" vinyl box set Recovery. Other videos of songs which appear on the Joemus album: Thatness and Thereness and The Next Time. And you can see Joe and me performing a rocking live version of Jahwise Hammer at Stereo in Glasgow last July about four minutes into this video (includes me attempting to emulate some of the silly walks).
The Joemus album is available from Cherry Red in the UK, Darla in the US, and on Amazon (US and UK). It's officially due on November 18th (US) and 24th (UK), but some reports suggest copies are shipping already.
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Last night -- just as I was being driven to the airport to fly back to Berlin, unfortunately -- was the Vienna premiere of the new film by Heinz Emigholz, 
Being a bit of a fan of ambivalence -- that 
For the next three days I'm in Vienna attending and performing at 
"Momus (named after the Greek god of satire) is mainly known as a musician and blogger, but also makes appearances as an art figure and performance artist in international galleries and museums. Thus, for example, he accompanied the 2006 Whitney Biennial, serving his “disinformation mission” as an “unreliable tour guide” with political to absurd commentaries." 
Sorry to be all Joemus all the time these days, but it is kind of exciting to be getting feedback from my first new album in two years. We now have the first two real reviews of Joemus, in the form of 
Casey Rae-Hunter's 
