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

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 i have a thing for, still extant,but outdated modes of socio-cultural rep.s in replication and the new uses they can be put to too(not as a means of traditional preservation or as a retro ruse, but because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.