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.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I popped your comment cherry

More Summerisles, please.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

As far as I'm concerned, I'd put the two of you in a terrarium, and force blooms from you until your little rhizomes were depleted.

The dynamic imposed by the Summerisle project complemented and constrained each of your natural tendencies beautifully--text and texture enhance one another rather than dominate.

As I've said before, I think Summerisle remains the finest album you've ever been involved with. Even though your influences are evident, there's no pastiche--it's a diffuse, organic synthesis.

It would be a pity if you two were never to work on another album.

Re: More Summerisles, please.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Anne was saying at the weekend that it's the record of hers she's most proud of -- and most upset at the muted reaction to, too.

Re: More Summerisles, please.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I think Summerisle is one of those rare beasties that transcended the bugbears of contemporary music (rote pop formula; romantic sentimentality; glib, self-righteous political sloganeering; rockist bombast; bedsit wankery; retro pastiche; in-yer-face pomo; preening irony; flat, dinky, shrill "new way to say 'beep'" sonic palettes, etc).

Summerisle was far too compelling and original to be deemed merely radical; that's too easy. It was a marginal album, which is to say, it will be the one piece of work that will survive you both, because its true audience has yet to arrive onto the field.

But then, one might have to be a hopeless optimist to say as much.

Re: More Summerisles, please.

[kaipfeiffer.livejournal.com]

just commenting to add one more, if not very significant, voice of praise for this fantastic album. should have made you two "the wire" cover stars. its publicity fate had it otherwise, but there exists no rational explanation for that fact. your follow up duo album(s) will certainly change that.
(maybe it's because i heard summerisle first, that i often thaught something was missing when listening to laplantine's solo works. her music longs for dialogue. which is also the concept of her youtube efforts, so maybe i'm not completely wrong)

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

I also rate Summerisle highly.
I don't know all of your stuff but it seems Un-Momus.
I almost thought you had the most unusual backwoods Scottish accent for a while till I heard your lecture.
Its like some laughing gnome trapped offset in the Wickerman. In the cut, garden walk scenes.

The weekends events may also give a grim new meaning to "Nurse with Wound".

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

Pardon me. Of course its un-momus its a collaboration.
She is doodling some vulnerable and beguiling sounds.
I am fantasising now about Yoko Ono joining the Velvet Underground.

[flying-squid.livejournal.com]

You know, I'm almost surprised she didn't join them considering she'd throw Minimalist events in her loft, where La Monte Young (who Cale was with in the Dream Syndicate) was at. But then again, Lou Reed probably would've hated her guts.

[lupoleboucher.livejournal.com]

I wonder if she realizes that the superannuated adolescent she's pumping sanctimony at is as much a barking marxist amerikkka hater as she is?

Go is definitely worth wasting your life on. It's one of the few classes of game which humans can easily beat computers at; it's insanely deep, and makes chess look like tic tac toe.

[chronofile.livejournal.com]

Have you heard of arimaa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arimaa)? It's a chess variant that was created by an AI researcher specifically to be computer resistant. The inventor is so confident that he's offering US$10k/year until 2020 to anyone able to beat an advanced human player with off the shelf hardware.

[tim-ellison.livejournal.com]

I was just thinking of Anne the other day when you did that post about the ephemerality of blogging versus creative work that may have more long term resonance. I remember the last time you wrote about Anne and the fact that she was not making music, you said she felt that we were possibly in "a period of waiting."

Maybe what comes after waiting is re-evaluation, with the smoke clearing from our own involvement with modernism, postmodernism, etc. A psychic told me recently that the human race is in a period of re-evaluating self - an inward experience, but ultimately with the outward goal of beginning to establish new social connections.

And I relate this, Momus, to the dichotomy you were talking about in that post - blogging, an act that's more directly involved in the new, evolving social milieu versus removing oneself from the social milieu in order to contribute art to the new world.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I actually came up with a solution to that dichotomy yesterday, which will be revealed here soon enough -- if my publisher agrees to the plan.

Females and weapons

[hadleyburg.livejournal.com]

I was half expecting Momus to comment on this today:
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20070704a1.html

It's not entirely off-topic - Japan's (male) Minister of Defense has just resigned after saying that the atomic bombings of Japan were in some ways justified. PM Abe has replaced him with a woman - Yuriko Koike. I wonder if she has any Laplantine-like feelings about weapons.

The morning TV in Japan showed some surprised reactions from people they interviewed on the street. I assumed the surprise was because she was a woman, and defense is generally a man's role.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this appointment turns out.