September 2008

Comment left on the Mutant Sounds blog a while back:

Yes, it struck me when I heard it today (after a long hiatus) how close it is to the Byrne/Eno Bush of Ghosts sound--the heavy funk grooves with ethereal electronics and atmospherics hovering over and around.

They are dopes to repudiate it. In retrospect it was clear that they were paving the ground for the "'80s sound"--whereas the early ones that all the purists love hark back to the '60s and "roots jams."

My personal favorite is Landed, which straddles the earlier and later periods and is unique in some ways. It has excellent lyrics ("Half Past One," "Red Hot Indians"), some of their best musique concrete-y stuff ("Unfinished") and I love the heavily filtering on many of the songs. (I also like Karoli's vocals, it's how you know this is a German band and not just more eccentric Pink Floyd or Grateful Dead.)

But the later work needs its cult and I'm happy to join you in singling out Out of Reach as a candidate for major reinterpretation. Irmin, Hildegard, are you listening? (I also like Rosko Gee's singing and think the "Pauper's Daughter" is a great song.)

Typical new media artist: "Galleries just create artificial scarcity, cater to the rich, and perpetuate a materialistic culture, unlike me with my readily available, open source internet art, so why won't they pay attention to me?"

Reasons for art galleries 106: Some files are too big for the !!*#! internet and must be viewed on equipment that can display them. An example can be found in Kevin Bewersdorf's show at V&A gallery in Manhattan, which opened today. A mandala of about 1000 gif files downloaded from the internerd, with an image of the artist in the center in the lotus position with laptop on his lap, surfing. Within this cyber medieval Rose Window intricate arrangements of flipped, flopped, and symmetrically cloned eyeballs, Homer Simpsons, directional arrows, flames, firework explosions, and dancing babies jiggle and gyrate in an intricate mathematical ballet. And all of it as crisp as an image on a new laptop. One either has to go to the gallery to see this or read writers' descriptions. No internet-connected computer will do it justice.

Update: And with all of the above qualifications, here is a low res version of the piece. Guessing this will be much-delished and become the "definitive" version and only old cranks will talk about the "superior, gallery" model.

Update 2: Broken ink to Bewersdorf GIF fixed.