Anne is back from Go

[imomus]

One day, before Anne Laplantine decided Berlin was a "retirement home" and went back to the vitality of Paris, I took her to Koi Klub, Berlin's regular Japanese club event.

Held in a glass box on the Karl Marx Allee, Koi Klub's theme that evening turned out to be Go. People were playing the Chinese game under the scrutiny of video cameras, which relayed the images onto video screens. Anne was fascinated, and soon took her place at the table and began to learn the game.

Before long she was so hooked that she started telling everyone she'd given up music altogether and was now just living to play Go. It became a sort of joke -- this was Anne's version of Marcel Duchamp giving up art to play chess. But it was also a bit of a tragedy, because Anne Laplantine is one of the most talented musicians -- and the most interesting artists -- I've ever met. The record we made together, Summerisle, is gorgeous. All I did was sing some random phrases; Anne took them away to her studio and convoked fragile, delicate folk songs around them.

Well, Anne is still playing Go, mostly at a club in Paris. The passion hasn't diminished. In a month she'll travel to China with her husband Xavier on a Go tour -- a sort of package holiday organized by her club, which will visit Go-related sites throughout China. But -- as I learned when I met with Xavier, Anne and her sister-in-law Emmanuelle de Héricourt (vocal star of the Hypo / EDH album The Correct Use of Pets) at Le Point Ephemere in Paris on Sunday, Anne has started making music again.

For the moment this music is being treated as the soundtrack for another new enthusiasm, YouTube. When she lived in Berlin, Anne got into LiveJournal, but in the most original and peculiar way I've ever seen. She had a journal which consisted exclusively of animated GIFs. Now she's extended the idea to video. Her YouTube page alternates video responses to vloggers with arty and haunting animations she's made to accompany newly-recorded music which, Anne tells me, will eventually end up on a new record.

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Anne has very mixed feelings about American culture. But it's precisely because YouTube seems, mostly, so American that she's drawn to it, and drawn into peculiar dialogues with its peculiar users. Touched is "a video response to Me Test Shooting A .177 Bolt Action Rifle ( ZERO RECOIL ). It shows an animation of Laplantine crumpling to the ground after being "test shot" by a YouTuber whose original video depicts him pumping airgun pellets into a crudely-drawn image of a turban-wearing man.

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Anne's In My Hands is a response to the same user's Knife Dripping with Blood, and contains a new song. Again she shows herself as the victim of a creepy obsession with weapons. "It's the pain we share," reads the caption, as Anne's hand drips with blood. Burning My House shows some kind of friendly fire incident; military machines bombard a Little House on the Prairie-type dwelling. Just for fun is a song-response to the Virginia Tech shootings.

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Watching these videos, I can't help remembering how Tony Blair declared on Friday that "a false sense of grievance" fuelled Islamic terrorism against the West. The statement appeared in some newspapers alongside a story detailing how NATO troops had just killed 80 civilians in Afghanistan. But I also thought of the grim fate of the NHS doctors-turned-terrorists apparently responsible for this weekend's terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow. In the end nobody was hurt in the attacks except the terrorist-doctors themselves, one of whom was critically burned. It gave a grim new meaning to the phrase "physician heal thyself".

The rest of Anne's videos are here. It's an interesting way back into music, and a combative way back into artistic engagement with the world. Perhaps it isn't so far from Go after all.