Morph and hazard
Oct. 15th, 2004 09:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusOn Wednesday night I made the final montage of my 'Otto Spooky' album, splicing John Talaga's morphs to the songs they link. I'm gobsmacked by how much better the record now is.
It goes and it flows. It starts and doesn't stop until it stops. It really is 'spooky' now, because the morphs work as a kind of alienation device, smoothing the transitions, appetizing the listener for the next song, but also losing him in a murky broth of sound, a primeval pea soup song fog from which who knows what song-monster will rise? Otto is now 'an experience' rather than a mere collection of songs. It's immersive, conceptual, symphonic. A virtual place you can really get lost in.
As usual with John, there's a lot of subtle detailing to listen to in the morphs. The grain of the clicks at the end of 'Corkscrew King', the Antarctic gale that rages through the tail of 'Sempreverde', the splashy syn-snare that decorates the weird garbled vocal mantra at the end of 'Belvedere', the lovely Eno-esque analogue flute sounds that follow 'Mr Ulysses'. John's parts appeal to a different hemisphere of the brain than mine do. His are right brain, mine are left brain, so we have a whole-brain experience in the final product. It's like falling asleep and dreaming, then waking up and going to work, then coming back home and dreaming again.
I've always loved art that mixes modes of representation in one space, even something as simple as a film that switches between black and white and colour. At some point, every honest artist needs to foreground the medium, to remind the audience that it's not transparent. Jolts and juxtapositions and narrative hazards are a way to do this. An honest artist is one who doesn't ever let you forget that art is some kind of weird lie.
Something else great about this record is that John and I have basically hit on one of the formulas that makes pop from the 60s so good, which is the collision of a coherent tradition of vaudeville songs with an experimental mindset involving psychedelics and multimedia and art. I'm the vaudeville, John's the LSD. It's a satisfying combination -- coherence and craziness in quick succession.
Talking of things that alternate in quick succession, I've mentioned my love of hazard tape before. How do I love hazard tape? Let me count the ways:
* Hazard tape is a temporary way to redefine space. It betokens impermanence -- visually, anyway -- better than Buddhism and changeability better than Communism.
* Hazard tape appears, as if by a miracle, when something slightly unusual, interesting and dangerous happens in the city, breaking our habit routines. With hazard tape, you can never take anything for granted. People who see nothing on their way to work must open their eyes for hazard tape.
* Hazard tape has an almost Italian brio in its design. Its red and white diagonal stripes are forward-looking, brash, and cool. The repeating pattern is, of course, static, but its regular rhythm and rakish angle make it look very dynamic.
* Hazard tape shows the arbitrary nature of authority. Anyone who knows of a risk -- or just wants to jazz a place up with a whiff of danger -- can buy a roll and demarcate a space with it, feeling instantly the amateur, horizontal authority of the man who shouts 'Fire!'
* Hazard tape can also be used to make a 'citizen's arrest'.
* There can be no avant garde without hazard tape.
* Do not unroll hazard tape in a crowded theatre!
Except, that is, if you're the director and you have your actors unroll it on the stage during a scene. Which happens to be the case in Scene 3 of 'Attempts On Her Life' by Martin Crimp, the theatre production I'm working on at the moment. I have a small speaking part in the scene, which is set in an art gallery showing an installation based on a female artist's suicide attempts. There's me playing the voice of an art critic describing the work and how I wish she'd succeeded in killing herself the first time. Then suddenly the stage is full of actors stretching tape across the space, slicing it up and redefining it. The scene is distressingly realistic for me, because I really did have an artist friend who made her suicide a kind of installation piece. But the hazard tape is a consolation.
It goes and it flows. It starts and doesn't stop until it stops. It really is 'spooky' now, because the morphs work as a kind of alienation device, smoothing the transitions, appetizing the listener for the next song, but also losing him in a murky broth of sound, a primeval pea soup song fog from which who knows what song-monster will rise? Otto is now 'an experience' rather than a mere collection of songs. It's immersive, conceptual, symphonic. A virtual place you can really get lost in.
As usual with John, there's a lot of subtle detailing to listen to in the morphs. The grain of the clicks at the end of 'Corkscrew King', the Antarctic gale that rages through the tail of 'Sempreverde', the splashy syn-snare that decorates the weird garbled vocal mantra at the end of 'Belvedere', the lovely Eno-esque analogue flute sounds that follow 'Mr Ulysses'. John's parts appeal to a different hemisphere of the brain than mine do. His are right brain, mine are left brain, so we have a whole-brain experience in the final product. It's like falling asleep and dreaming, then waking up and going to work, then coming back home and dreaming again.
I've always loved art that mixes modes of representation in one space, even something as simple as a film that switches between black and white and colour. At some point, every honest artist needs to foreground the medium, to remind the audience that it's not transparent. Jolts and juxtapositions and narrative hazards are a way to do this. An honest artist is one who doesn't ever let you forget that art is some kind of weird lie.
Something else great about this record is that John and I have basically hit on one of the formulas that makes pop from the 60s so good, which is the collision of a coherent tradition of vaudeville songs with an experimental mindset involving psychedelics and multimedia and art. I'm the vaudeville, John's the LSD. It's a satisfying combination -- coherence and craziness in quick succession.
Talking of things that alternate in quick succession, I've mentioned my love of hazard tape before. How do I love hazard tape? Let me count the ways:
* Hazard tape is a temporary way to redefine space. It betokens impermanence -- visually, anyway -- better than Buddhism and changeability better than Communism.
* Hazard tape appears, as if by a miracle, when something slightly unusual, interesting and dangerous happens in the city, breaking our habit routines. With hazard tape, you can never take anything for granted. People who see nothing on their way to work must open their eyes for hazard tape.
* Hazard tape has an almost Italian brio in its design. Its red and white diagonal stripes are forward-looking, brash, and cool. The repeating pattern is, of course, static, but its regular rhythm and rakish angle make it look very dynamic.
* Hazard tape shows the arbitrary nature of authority. Anyone who knows of a risk -- or just wants to jazz a place up with a whiff of danger -- can buy a roll and demarcate a space with it, feeling instantly the amateur, horizontal authority of the man who shouts 'Fire!'
* Hazard tape can also be used to make a 'citizen's arrest'.
* There can be no avant garde without hazard tape.
* Do not unroll hazard tape in a crowded theatre!
Except, that is, if you're the director and you have your actors unroll it on the stage during a scene. Which happens to be the case in Scene 3 of 'Attempts On Her Life' by Martin Crimp, the theatre production I'm working on at the moment. I have a small speaking part in the scene, which is set in an art gallery showing an installation based on a female artist's suicide attempts. There's me playing the voice of an art critic describing the work and how I wish she'd succeeded in killing herself the first time. Then suddenly the stage is full of actors stretching tape across the space, slicing it up and redefining it. The scene is distressingly realistic for me, because I really did have an artist friend who made her suicide a kind of installation piece. But the hazard tape is a consolation.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-15 01:23 pm (UTC)-tomas
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-15 01:59 pm (UTC)certain aspects of it remind me of the subgenius pamphlets i'm about to link to.
http://subgenius.com/pam1/pamphlet_p1.html
are you familiar with these outdated attempts at something?
-tomas