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

[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).