Toog goes Karaoke

[imomus]

Toog caught the train from Paris to Berlin this weekend to sign to Karaoke Kalk, the esteemed boutique label and home of cute formalists like Takeo Toyama. On Monday Toog was in Kreuzberg mastering his new album 'Lou Etendue', a somewhat Gainsbourgian homage to Asia Argento produced by Digiki.

Apart from clocking the Amplify festival with its rustling, crackling and scuffling sounds, we also admired the trous de balle at the Pergamon Museum (where an archeologist from Oakland asked us both for autographs!), lunched with my sister, whose boyfriend is in Berlin shooting production stills on the new film from Fernando (City of God) Meirelles, looked at photos of Trabants and Hitler in the new I.M. Pei-designed Deutsches Historisches Museum (they currently have a nice show tracing the history of German advertising), caught an intimate turntable performance by Otomo Yoshihide at the Neurotitan record store and gallery in Mitte, hung out with Donna Summer (aka WFMU's Jason Forrest; he's just found a big apartment in Mitte and plans to stay here in Berlin for several months), saw new East European art at Kunst-Werke and the tail end of the Designmai exhibition, as well as an Anne Laplantine turntable installation, again at Neurotitan.

By the way, congratulations to Anne for the honorary mention she gets for her Hamburg album in the 2004 Ars Electronica prize list!

Comments

[dee-dee26m.livejournal.com]

Wow, you sure get up to a lot!

Were the photos of Hitler in the show about advertising? Or a dif. part of the building? (i'm scratching my head thinking how Hitler could be in an exhibition about German advertising, unless its something quasi-tangential about propaganda).

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The Hitler photos were on the top floor, which was just photos from the last century or so of German history. Although the section on the 3rd Reich did contain some images of propaganda and advertising, the advertising show on the floor below contained no images of Hitler, though it might well have done.

[dee-dee26m.livejournal.com]

Righto!

While i'm here, i'm dying to ask something about electronic music...and i figure here is as good a palce to ask as any...I'm wondering what those little black boxes are called that people use in electronica performances...no, not synths or laptops (i'm not that much of a luddite!) but little boxes with knobs that seem to somehow magically contain a zillion weird sounds and beats....

There were some photos yesterday on Lomo.com of an electronica performance and it got me thinking. Coz i think i want one!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm not quite sure what you mean. Most electronica artists improvise some network of instruments around a small desktop mixer. Some -- like Scanner (http://www.applied-acoustics.com/scanner.htm) -- have clever MIDI controllers that you play by hovering your hands over them or even moving your body around (http://www.synthzone.com/bsynth.html).

[geeveecatullus.livejournal.com]

a friend of mine made himself one and he called it "magic box" if I remember correctly.

[dee-dee26m.livejournal.com]

'magic box'!! Wonderful!
For the time being it seems i must make do with that...they certainbly do seem otherworldly to little old me.

I;ll find out one of these days!

I'm sorry i can't describe them better than 'black boxes with knobs on'...if i find a good photo of one i'll pop up again and pester the readers and the writer of this LJ !! :)

mysterious machines

[dopplerivets.livejournal.com]

i have seen all kinds of boxes with buttons, sliders and dials...and even more awkwardly shaped things attached to wire and strings. but the most amazing was the un-open-able, 'concrete' musique' box i was given(by my platonic other)before birth. when wound, it produces the most indescribably wonderous sounds which are then played out in deceivingly simple, yet unimaginably complex patterns. it also seems to be able to invent it's own random tonal structures and compose melodies that possess a mature sense of harmonic dissonance while hinting at a playful inquisitiveness mimicking, sonic-ly and evoking emotionally an almost child like naivety. but for me, the most intriguing(and most likely damning)facet of it, is this; it can't or wont play the same song twice. so, except for snippets trapped forever in the listeners' memory, it is never-ever heard again. i would like to think i have discovered something of the transitory and ephemeral nature of beauty from this device, but i am a slow learner and, sadly, all attempts to reproduce any of the lingering fragments that repeat and resonate, incessantly, inside of me, end dismally in failure. so, with set, tragic awareness i settle for loops of motifs and slight variations on themes before returning to the source of both my delight and misery to turn the key.

une liason amarouse avec une pomme du terre avec yeux et oreilles pears apples and oranges

[dopplerivets.livejournal.com]

an interview with toog in pixelsurgeon recently caught my eye. he mentions that his latest favorite Momus album is, 'Summerisle'. so, i got to wondering what sort of hybrid a pairing and planting of Gilles and Anne would grow.
also, he was quoted as making a comment regarding the album art for '6633'.the one where it looks like he is standing naked in front of a microphone, wearing headphones and making "eye contact" with an unpeeled orange that could just as easily be- not simply symbolically-a disembodied head that gots gear where its ears might be. too.(phew!). it(the quote)goes, "to listen to an orange proves that you respect it. the object is also a person." this computes. it is funny, to me, at least, because, i think, potatoes R people as well... and (co-not-additively)to respect a thing is to look at it again(and again)and maybe even see it in a different way, for a change. the trouble is, if your shy and the object of your attention and/or affection has so many more eyes to make at you, well...?

[carbootsale.livejournal.com]

are those lined up columbia gp-3's part of an installation of sorts?

the a.laplantine technique

[dopplerivets.livejournal.com]

oh yeah... in the pic. where anne is mixing(?) on the dex'. is she playing records with layers of textures and tones of her own material she has had pressed separately to vinyl, with locked grooves, maybe? this is something i have always wanted to try, on my modified fischer prices but haven't figured it out-about getting discs made in such limited pressings-yet. i read a blurb, a super-long time ago, in Wallpaper(i think), about a personalized etching device and assumed i would always be way too poor(poor me) to afford such a luxury, i guess. curious to know how it can go.

Re: the a.laplantine technique

[theilybinilwys.livejournal.com]

There is a guy in New Zealand, Richard King, who hand-cuts vinyl at a very reasonable price. Since he does them individually, you can get, like 10 made, or probably 1 if you ask nice and pay him. And since they're made of acetate test disks, they're all clear, and you can get weird 9 inch triangles or whatever. But it's cheap, since there's no metal master setup fee.

Catch is, he's not on the internet; you have to call, write, or fax him and ask him. I think someone publishes his price guide online; if you search for Richard King Records New Zealand on Google, it's pretty easy to find.

Re: the a.laplantine technique

[(Anonymous)]

Could a similar thing be done more cheaply by burning sections to a series of CDRs then playing them on a series of boom-boxes, switched to single track repeat. Might not work the same as using vinyl - preseumably, all Cd players will have a slight sound gap as they whizz from the end of the track back to the beginning, whereas I assume groove-locked vinyl would play continuously (?). I suppose it would be kind of similar to the Flaming Lips 4CD Zaireeka? Whenever I've set that up, the accidents involved in coordinating 4 cd players are always more interesting than when it plays right!

[dopplerivets.livejournal.com]

i agree. the accidental,(paraphrased) is a way of putting parameters (or parentheses) around the difference between what is ideally intentended and what is perceived contingently(the way things work, or don't, as it happens). i used to make use of this strategy(oblique?)too. in the time before big science(samplers and cdr's) or at least my awareness of it/(them), i used to make 'audio collages' out of recorded radio static and other random tidbits put to tape(household appliances, interceptions of neighbors telephone conversations by my radio shack walkie talkies, candy bars etc.) then i would chop it all up 'staccato style' making full use of start/stop/pause button technology and loop it by dubbing and redubbing between machines(a walkman and double sided tape deck patched together to work like an amateurish multitracker)all the while adding more and more stuff into the mix. over time the original and consequent layers would be drowned out by endless overdubbing, but it thrilled me to think that they were still there somewhere, inaudably but subliminally affecting the way it sounded(i had this idea about the attractive nature of an initial magnetic imprinting being the sonic equivalent of a basement in a building). a piece wasn't something i finished and then became ready to be listened to, it was just something i was always doing(we call this "the process" now, i guess.)only having a few cassetes and no money helped me keep my artistic integrity as a kid. when i got my first c.d. player, i tried to find the limits of it's musical capabilities too(recording a song onto tape and then using two sets of speakers to 'dopple' the sound and cause chorused rounds(or by putting pressure on the tape wheel, messing with the pitch by slowing it all down). my favorite thing was using a dry erase pen to make tiny markings on 'spooky sounds' and intrument sample c.d.'s causing them to skip and then isolating the good bits and copying them. i'm still doing pretty much the same things as when i was like six. i keep making the same mistakes, i just don't have as many or as good of ideas as i did then. but, iv'e got fancier equipment.

text on textiles and contexts texture or whatever

[dopplerivets.livejournal.com]

what about wax cylinders? do you know where i can get any? for a song. or a steal? or just flat out steal them... i have a thing for, still extant,but outdated modes of socio-cultural rep.s in replication and the new uses they can be put to too(not as a means of traditional preservation or as a retro ruse, but because the past and ignored before are always new and exciting to me). the thing i have about records, among other things,is their plasticity. i mean, they can be read so many different ways and mean so many things. sending mixed messages; as digitally encoded information copied onto analogue technology is(in turn) handled-once(or twice)again- in digital fashion. maybe, tangibility is thought of simply and illusively as being a more understandable and manipulatable way of interfacing, which plays to certain human sensibilities. i have a soft spot for tactility (it's an itch i can't scratch, really) and it is so much fun to touch stuff. plus, it would be just like me to think that vinyl discs are big and awkward and toylike or small and fragile and ummnnn...toylike. perfect for funktioning symbolically as cyclical symbols(form is essential)in a piece of performance artificing called 'playing at being a d.j. (shamen/showman: there are cults built up around these things)'. i also like the idea of unloading the 'ritualistic' 'gear' out of an oversized lidded box and spread out onto the floor.