Vienna: total quality women

[imomus]

My weekend in Vienna was dominated by the brilliance of women. Not just Tomoko Miyata, who played gorgeous glistening waterbowl music with me at our Into The City event, but also Frances Stark, an LA-based poet and painter whose Torment of Follies show at the Secession (based on phrases from Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz) I really loved.



Then there were the post-punk women who, for me, were the stars of the big Punk exhibition at the Wiener Kunsthalle: Linder Sterling of Ludus and Gudrun Gut of Malaria.

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I found myself photographing the oddly off-kilter images of women I found in neglected window displays all over Vienna, and when, in Cafe Phil on Gumpendorferstrasse, the track "Total Quality Woman" by electronic Viennese singer-songwriter Gustav came over the speakers I not only had to buy her new album Verlass die Stadt, I realised I'd found the perfect soundtrack for my sequence of Viennese shop window women. The video of my photo sequence is above. And here's Gustav live, singing the same song:

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I'm very glad to have discovered Gustav, a sort of Viennese Miharu Koshi or Togawa Jun.

Comments

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Well, that was creepy. Good song though.

[kubia.livejournal.com]

Hm, I'm going to see Gustav perform in Düsseldorf tonight. It will surely be fun.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

She played in Kreuzberg last night, but I was on a plane at the time.

[jannavarro.livejournal.com]

i loved gustav. it's amazing!

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

Ooh I like her.
I like the way she makes reading from her textsheet into a stage move. I'd like to see Bowie do that!
At first I thought this was for laughs but that's not really a smile one her face is it. Its like ecstatic accomplishment or animal fear at the prospect of eating the audience.
Also watching Mad Men and all those themed advertising documentaries with ever present jingle motifs I felt something.
As Draper says in Mad Men, "nostalgia literally means a wound"

Speaking of creepy, George Melly in his "Revolt Into Style" has some words about your angel Cliff Richard.

"(Cliff) Richard is a key figure in realtion to the castration of the first British pop explosion. (Tommy) Steele may have abandoned pop for showbiz, but Richard dragged pop into showbiz. He is still around, too, an enigma in many ways and apparently ageless. He alone among his contemporaries is still able to touch the very young. Only last year I heard them shrieking at a charity concert in the Festival Hall. There is an omnipotence about him and, at the same time, something a bit creepy."

This was written in 1970 and strangely still applies as he hosts political fixers at his island home.

Love one final reference to Cliff from Melly:

"As was customary he was booked into variety and pulled them in all over the country. "Handsome little brute, " said a middle-aged homosexual friend of mine after watching him appear at a provincial concert."

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

Ha ha!
"Gustav produces songs on the laptop, plays all kinds of instruments and "sings with the sort of inimitable power you cannot muster up any resistance to". With an origin in vienna, gustav's tunes are in various languages, sometimes English, sometimes French, sometimes German – " but the appeal ist completely universelle ""
I feel a temporary obsession coming on.

[geeveecatullus.livejournal.com]

Gustav is playing my city on Friday. I plan on going, she's awesome.

[eclectiktronik.livejournal.com]

Share your enthusiasm for Gustav!
sounds a bit like 'something special' or 'mambo craze ' by De Phazz

[kubia.livejournal.com]

Oh, it was absolutely fantastic. She's a wonderful and charming perfomer, has a great Austrian accent and her cover of a song by Rage against the Machine transforms the most unispired political agitprop into an empowering chant encompassing all genders. I'm a fan, I guess.

[(Anonymous)]

I've been a fan of Gustav's since the Songs of Suspects album. I think I might like her earlier, slightly rawer stuff better. I even did a cover of "Last Song for Sunny" but couldn't find a singer for it. Any interest Momus?