YouTube as folk music
Feb. 14th, 2008 11:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusElectronic composer Midori Hirano is in Berlin just now at the invitation of the Berlinale; she's also playing a show on Friday night at the Electronic Church. I last saw her in June in Kyoto, where we ate a meal consisting entirely of different types of tofu.
Hisae and I invited Midori to dinner last night. After delicious dishes of shepherd's pie and banana cake (no tofu this time!) accompanied by projections of the semi-ambient films of Werner Nekes, I broke out the electric harmonium and Midori treated us to an impromptu version of Silviphobia, the track she made for o.lamm's last album. In fact, it was slightly "promptu"; Midori needed the Silviphobia video itself to remind her of all the song's different sections.
From that, free association on air-powered keyboards (Midori) and selected, projected internet (me) led us somehow to Airships by Metallic Falcons, a band involving CocoRosie's Sierra Casady:
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The desert theme and the beautiful dirgelike sound in Airships seemed to be a direct reference to Nico's "Desertshore". Midori had never heard the album, so I cued up the Japanese trailer for La Cicatrice Intérieure, the brilliant film Philippe Garrel made with Nico in 1972, basically a haunting longform video for "Desertshore" featuring Nico and her son Ari:
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Garrel seems to have blocked any DVD release of La Cicatrice Intérieure (I watched it -- repeatedly -- in Tokyo in 2001 on an old VHS tape rented from Tsutaya), but there's a torrent of some sort here. I love Nico's
"harmonium phase" -- songs where she's accompanied by nothing but her "throne of doom". They strike exactly the right balance between music and noise, avant and trad, and take me somewhere very beautiful, somewhere I feel better for visiting, despite the bleakness of the landscape.
Here's an interview she did with Pop 2, a French rock show, also in 1972, which shows her pumping the "throne of doom" and singing live:
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After Midori had disappeared into the night (leaving behind an improv composition she'd played into my sequencer), I got to watching some new YouTube videos using my songs. Well, they were new to me, anyway, and they seemed to express YouTube's typical tics as well as its ceaseless expansion.
There was a video of Spooky Kabuki featuring a rippling electronic skeleton, a version of Mnemorex with someone halfheartedly making a stuffed orange rabbit dance, an anime video of Situation Comedy Blues and a quieter vid of the same song just featuring my head spinning around on the record label.
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There was a race-track take on one of my better "lost" songs, The Hippy Analog Portapak Video Revolution, a reading of Summer Holiday 1999 just featuring the static cover of the album, a predictable Johnny Depp-ized Is it because I'm a Pirate? with the description "the song "is it because im a pirate" by the band momus not very good but if the images were better it would be funny" (luckily all the commenters liked the song better than the video), someone's holiday photos set to Rhetoric (it was odd to hear the lines "the lovely owl upon the bough is swooping down for me / the brambles tangle round and round far as the eye can see" and see a family seated around the dinner table) and a real-life reformed drug addict singing the song I wrote with an imaginary reformed drug addict narrator, Saved.
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It occurred to me that this is a vital form of folk culture, and that, while folk forms may have followed Nico into the left field or disappeared into ethnographic museums, popular contemporary folk improvisation is more likely to happen on YouTube these days than any barnyard hootenanny, and as likely to use computers and video projectors as pump organs, banjos and harmoniums. I say that based as much on self-observation as mass observation; the way I use YouTube has become a stream-of-consciousness, a train-of-association in which I jump from one "note" to another. Rather like an improvising folk musician, in fact, or an electronic hobo jumping trains.
Hisae and I invited Midori to dinner last night. After delicious dishes of shepherd's pie and banana cake (no tofu this time!) accompanied by projections of the semi-ambient films of Werner Nekes, I broke out the electric harmonium and Midori treated us to an impromptu version of Silviphobia, the track she made for o.lamm's last album. In fact, it was slightly "promptu"; Midori needed the Silviphobia video itself to remind her of all the song's different sections.
From that, free association on air-powered keyboards (Midori) and selected, projected internet (me) led us somehow to Airships by Metallic Falcons, a band involving CocoRosie's Sierra Casady:
[Error: unknown template video]
The desert theme and the beautiful dirgelike sound in Airships seemed to be a direct reference to Nico's "Desertshore". Midori had never heard the album, so I cued up the Japanese trailer for La Cicatrice Intérieure, the brilliant film Philippe Garrel made with Nico in 1972, basically a haunting longform video for "Desertshore" featuring Nico and her son Ari:
[Error: unknown template video]
Garrel seems to have blocked any DVD release of La Cicatrice Intérieure (I watched it -- repeatedly -- in Tokyo in 2001 on an old VHS tape rented from Tsutaya), but there's a torrent of some sort here. I love Nico's
"harmonium phase" -- songs where she's accompanied by nothing but her "throne of doom". They strike exactly the right balance between music and noise, avant and trad, and take me somewhere very beautiful, somewhere I feel better for visiting, despite the bleakness of the landscape.Here's an interview she did with Pop 2, a French rock show, also in 1972, which shows her pumping the "throne of doom" and singing live:
[Error: unknown template video]
After Midori had disappeared into the night (leaving behind an improv composition she'd played into my sequencer), I got to watching some new YouTube videos using my songs. Well, they were new to me, anyway, and they seemed to express YouTube's typical tics as well as its ceaseless expansion.
There was a video of Spooky Kabuki featuring a rippling electronic skeleton, a version of Mnemorex with someone halfheartedly making a stuffed orange rabbit dance, an anime video of Situation Comedy Blues and a quieter vid of the same song just featuring my head spinning around on the record label.
[Error: unknown template video]
There was a race-track take on one of my better "lost" songs, The Hippy Analog Portapak Video Revolution, a reading of Summer Holiday 1999 just featuring the static cover of the album, a predictable Johnny Depp-ized Is it because I'm a Pirate? with the description "the song "is it because im a pirate" by the band momus not very good but if the images were better it would be funny" (luckily all the commenters liked the song better than the video), someone's holiday photos set to Rhetoric (it was odd to hear the lines "the lovely owl upon the bough is swooping down for me / the brambles tangle round and round far as the eye can see" and see a family seated around the dinner table) and a real-life reformed drug addict singing the song I wrote with an imaginary reformed drug addict narrator, Saved.
[Error: unknown template video]
It occurred to me that this is a vital form of folk culture, and that, while folk forms may have followed Nico into the left field or disappeared into ethnographic museums, popular contemporary folk improvisation is more likely to happen on YouTube these days than any barnyard hootenanny, and as likely to use computers and video projectors as pump organs, banjos and harmoniums. I say that based as much on self-observation as mass observation; the way I use YouTube has become a stream-of-consciousness, a train-of-association in which I jump from one "note" to another. Rather like an improvising folk musician, in fact, or an electronic hobo jumping trains.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-14 10:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-14 10:28 am (UTC)STOP -- IN THE NAME OF LOVE!
Date: 2008-02-14 11:03 am (UTC)'ten morgen!
Date: 2008-02-14 11:04 am (UTC)When in Tokyo, did you have a manager or did you ever manage to manage yourself ?
Alex P.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-14 11:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-14 11:19 am (UTC)Jed
the red desert
Date: 2008-02-14 11:28 am (UTC)Re: the red desert
Date: 2008-02-14 11:32 am (UTC)Well, as long as she didn't love Mussolini, I'm okay with it. The important thing is that she never did anything as pretentiously awful as Madonna's new film (http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2256255,00.html) sounds to be.
Re: 'ten morgen!
Date: 2008-02-14 11:35 am (UTC)Judd
Re: the red desert
Date: 2008-02-14 11:41 am (UTC)Re: the red desert
Date: 2008-02-14 11:44 am (UTC)Re: the red desert
Date: 2008-02-14 11:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-14 12:18 pm (UTC)Combination
Date: 2008-02-14 12:22 pm (UTC)For that i salute you.
wewillbecome.com
Re: Combination
Date: 2008-02-14 12:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-14 12:47 pm (UTC)FAME AT LAST?
Date: 2008-02-14 01:09 pm (UTC)From last Friday's Holy Moly (British, bitchy and sarcastic celebrity gossip website and e-mail) mailout:-
Justin Currie from Del Amitri (Nineties Scottish band specialising in hypnotising the world to sleep via the power of dreary folk) quite often goes to Optimo at The Arches in Glasgow. A regular loves it when Currie turns up as it gives him the opportunity to run up to him wide-eyed and excited and go "Hey! Aren't you... Momus's cousin??" (he is, apparently Momus is an oddball Scottish journalist and songwriter, although it sounds more like some sort of chemical to us). Apparently Currie falls for this every single time and gets well hacked off.
I used to feel inclined to dismiss everything I read on there as tripe, not so sure I should be so cynical now!
He's not my cousin, I'm his!
Date: 2008-02-14 01:39 pm (UTC)lonely planet guide to heroin capitals.
Date: 2008-02-14 02:21 pm (UTC)Maybe it was someone who looked like her or had the same name. I can just imagine some dark centre roaming wraith like in and out of subdued lighting gouch flats and people saying, "Mmmm. Was that Nico?"
Just been watching Cicatrice and Le Berceau de Cristal. Her crying at the beginning of Cicatrice is quite demanding. I cannot imagine enduring it in a 1970s arthouse cinema.
Here's a nice "new" Nico song to me at least.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-14 02:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-14 02:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-14 03:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-14 04:36 pm (UTC)Better yet, Nico and the Iggy Pop monkey run!
pale faced backward
Date: 2008-02-14 05:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-14 05:31 pm (UTC)She's pretty much one of the best things ever, and I must see La Cicatrice. I don't care if Garrell is trying to have the DVD release blocked...
Man, her voice is like a tired yet eternally watchful mother of the apocalypse...A female Scott Walker.
I tremble.
Re: the red desert
Date: 2008-02-14 05:33 pm (UTC)I'm sure plenty of people have reason to want to misremember her out of jealousy for her radiance.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-14 05:43 pm (UTC)What I love about YouTube and the internet in general is that it is truly interactive. I'm reminded of what Godard said about video in the seventies. That video is more like the human body - it has an input and an output.
I'm also glad that the word tube is living on, now that the nineteenth century technology of the cathode ray tube is being phased out. A glass tube filled with magic (toxic) gas that pulled in sounds and images from the air. A beautiful thing.
Re: the red desert
Date: 2008-02-14 06:14 pm (UTC)http://film.guardian.co.uk/festivals/news/0,,2256320,00.html
Unrelated to the post..
Date: 2008-02-14 07:57 pm (UTC)Maybe we can call this day.. Happy PostOP Day. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-14 08:30 pm (UTC)stop trolling yourself.
B MINE ANON ILU KAWAII ^____^
Date: 2008-02-14 08:41 pm (UTC)Bran Van 3000's "Shopping"
Date: 2008-02-14 09:18 pm (UTC)Re: He's not my cousin, I'm his!
Date: 2008-02-14 09:50 pm (UTC)(Justin will always remain your cousin and not the other way around in my eyes. He's too whiny for me, with a look like he's always pissed off. At least you smile every once in a while!)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-14 10:41 pm (UTC)word, the folk tube is an epic and endless process of digestion and redistribution of cultural capital. it's a fantasy coming more true every second! everything is outsider art!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-14 10:55 pm (UTC)Just curious, you mentioned Nico's harmonium phase (which I love too, being both a fan of the harmonium and of the woman herself). What's your take on Chelsea Girl (the album)? Despite knowing the fact that she herself was unhappy with it, and wrote only a couple of the songs, I still can't help but love that album if only for fact that it appears to be incredibly influential in today's chamber pop.
I'm horrible at making commentary about music, but I'd love to hear your thoughts. =P
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-14 11:15 pm (UTC)as I have a number of portapaks I might make an improv video for it myself using my old analogue skip finds.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 05:08 am (UTC)Did you know that Jackson (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkygHThRiJk) Browne dated Nico when he was 16. And that he wrote "these days" for her. Talk about leading a charmed life.
cunt_vrnsky
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 06:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 10:13 am (UTC)le cicatrice interieure
Date: 2008-02-18 11:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-22 06:16 pm (UTC)now I just need a way of getting it you you. I aim to be in Berlin early July - funds permitting-to do sound work with Rinus. Failing that we'll find another way.