you must check this

war photographer video

joel trussell's amazing animated video for "war photographer" by jason forrest.

courtesy of emi, via drawn.

check it!

revolver and the chems

i remember years ago when emi and i were talking about the beatles, and he mentioned the tape loop experimentation that they used to create revolver. a raver at the time, and i guess a raver lacking in a real music education, i was floored by the discovery that loops and sampling were nothing new.

it still blows my mind. the mythical recording "the void," a product of paul mccartney's tape experiments, became the incredible "tomorrow never knows," which is really the height of revolver. the chemical brothers, beatles fans that they are, reinterpreted "tomorrow never knows" and created "setting sun," a blistering song on their second album, dig your own hole. "setting sun" brings the vibrating bass line into the foreground and makes the drums much more explosive. but somehow, the song retains the swirling psychedelic tone of "tomorrow never knows," a dizzy, wonderful sensation.

in the july 2006 issue of MOJO, tom rowlands of the chems talks about playing "tomorrow never knows" during dj sets, and having people "ask if it was something new, or a remix - it just sounded so intense and wild." he also talks about searching for a copy of "the void" and never being able to find it.

it's hard for me to imagine a time when a loop was just that - a piece of a sound recording on tape, cut and spliced together end to end to create a continuous loop. for me, a loop has always been digital, a few seconds of a beat cut and pasted endlessly and layered with other sounds, something to move your feet to on a packed dancefloor. there's a great article in the aforementioned MOJO about paul, the one who pioneered the band's tape experimentation, heading over to the studio with a plastic shopping bag full of tape

iklimt.com

iklimt.com

this is a beautifully designed site that i stumbled across years ago. i still visit it from time to time because it's a very serene interface with music, a nice compilation of klimt's artwork, and well-written essays about the artist.

if you're viewing a painting, you can select a magnifying tool and a small viewing window appears, which you can drag across parts of the painting to see details up close. the essays attempt to contextualize the artist. they delve into klimt's connections with freud, and how freud's work influenced the content of his paintings. klimt seemed to invite a psychological interpretation of his work, stating that "whoever wants to know something about me, must observe my paintings carefully and try to see in them what i am." (this is a well-chosen quote by the author of the site, and appears as the site splash page.) the essays claim that klimt painted figures naked first, then painted the clothing on top - which appears to be documented in at least one painting, but i'd like to see more research on that before finding it to be credible.

aside from this minor criticism, the essays are compelling and worth reading. the essays, klimt's work, and the wonderful web design make this a truly great space.

the flaming lips

balloons, confetti, streamers, glitter, swirling in the air. people, dancing. film clips projected onto a screen: an eyeball, space, a bathtub. people in animal costumes jump up and down around a band onstage. searchlights shine out into the audience. fake blood drips down the singer's forehead onto his white suit. i feel disoriented, elated.

it's not a birthday party on acid, although that's what it feels like. it's not the end of the world, although, in a way, i want it to be. it's a flaming lips concert.

the lips went from being the band i somehow missed in high school (even though it was my scene) to being my favorite band. other than knowing the words to "she don't use jelly," i had zero lips knowledge until emi got their album "yoshimi battles the pink robots." it was epic. it was densely layered. it was sweet. it was about robots. i was hooked.

it's been a handful of years since then and the flaming lips are still kicking my ass every time i hear a song, read an interview, or pass by the band's website. i've seen two lips concerts, both of which count among the most memorable experiences of my life. what is it that makes them so addictive? bittersweet lyrics about saving the world, saying yes (that true, essential yes at the heart of all things), sleeping late, bugs, disintegrating. epic instrumentation. music that explodes with energy. performances that rival the best sixties-era psychedelic all-night jams, with lights and strange characters in your face. the way they play with childhood symbols. it's all that, plus intangible things, the way i feel in the audience at a show or submerged in lips music at home.

disoriented, elated.

the band website: flaminglips.com.
the documentary recently released about the band: The Fearless Freaks
the DVD of lips videos: VOID

thoughts from space

in high school and as an undergrad, i was really into existentialist writers. i loved the metaphors for existence that they used - the ocean, the desert - symbols of identity in constant flux. my own personal metaphor for this became space, planets spinning in their orbits, forever distant from each other yet exerting a definite influence on the structure of the whole.

planets spin on their axes, and endlessly orbit, within a larger galaxy that also rotates, composing a universe that itself is surely in motion of its own within a still larger space. spinning like dervishes, whose dance ritual evolved in imitation of the planets.

a lot of what i used to enjoy reading seems pretty insufferable to me now, but the image of humanity as the universe has stuck with me over the years. so here are my thoughts from space.