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.