The Sound of Dusk

2012-01-24T05:38:00.000-08:00

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you; 

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world 

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis 

-e. e. cummings  

Alba

2011-12-20T12:26:00.000-08:00

As cool as the pale wet leaves

of lily-of-the-valley

She lay beside me in the dawn

Ezra Pound

2011-11-24T06:36:00.001-08:00

I cannot say
  that I have gone to hell
    for your love
but often
  found myself there
    in your pursuit.
I do not like it
  and wanted to be
    in heaven.  Hear me out.
Do not turn away.
I have learned much in my life
  from books
    and out of them
about love.
  Death
    is not the end of it.

W.C.W.

The Dry Salvages (T. S. Eliot)

2011-11-20T04:53:00.001-08:00

Fare forward, travellers! Not escaping from the past
Into indifferent lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow that widens behind you,
You shall not think 'the past is finished'
Or 'the future is before us'.
At nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial,
Is a voice descanting (though not to the ear,
The murmuring shell of time, and not in any language)

Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.
At the moment which is not of action or inaction
You can receive this: "on whatever sphere of being
The mind of man may be intent
At the time of death" - that is the one action
(And the time of death is every moment)
Which will fructify in the lives of others:
And do not think of the fruit of action.

Fare Forward.
O voyagers, O seamen,
You who came to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,
Or whatever event, this is your real destination."
So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.

2011-10-13T09:40:00.001-07:00

2011-10-09T01:55:00.000-07:00

The old oak rustles about the past,

The moonbeam is lazily lingering.

Your blessed lips I

Never dream of touching.

A violet yashmak binds your pale brow.

You are with me. Quiet, ill.

My fingers chill and tremble

When I remember how thin your hands were.

I have been silent so many hard years.

The torment of that meeting is still unavoidable.

How long I have known your answer:

I love and was not loved in return.

Anna Akhmatova (1917)

Oser et l'espoir (Paul Éluard) au sujet de Violette Nozières*

2011-10-02T07:21:00.000-07:00

Lorsque le pélican **

Les murs de la maison se ressemblent
Une voix enfantine répond
Oui comme un grain de blé et les bottes de sept lieues
Sur l’un des murs il y a les portraits de famille
Un singe à l’infini
Sur l’autre il y a la porte ce tableau changeant
Où je pénètre moi
La première

Puis on devise sous la lampe
D’un mal étrange
Qui fait les fous et les génies
L’enfant a des lumières
Des poudres mystérieuses qu’elle rapporte de loin
Et que l’on goûte les yeux fermés

Pauvre petit ange disait la mère
De ce ton des mères moins belles que leur fille
Et jalouses

Violette rêvait de bains de lait
De belles robes de pain frais
De belles robes de sang pur
Un jour il n’y aura plus de pères
Dans les jardins de la jeunesse
Il y aura des inconnus
Tous les inconnus
Les hommes pour lesquels on est toujours toute neuve
Et la première
Les hommes pour lesquels on échappe à soi-même
Les hommes pour lesquels on n’est la fille de personne

Violette a rêvé de défaire
A défait
L’affreux nœud de serpents des liens de sang

*Accused of poisoning her mother and killing her father with poison, following a childhood of abuse and incest at the hand of her father M. Nozières, Violette Nozières became an emblematic figure of female oppression to the French surrealist movement. Here is a poem (Oser et l'espoir) by Paul Éluard on the subject of the injustices committed to her. Subject to the death penalty in France, her case became highly disputed but she only served time in prison and labour camp because her sentence was commuted in 1934 by the President.

**'Lorsque le pelican' a reference to Romanticist poet Alfred de Musset

2011-09-24T01:07:00.001-07:00

I do not love you except because I love you;

I go from loving to not loving you,

From waiting to not waiting for you

My heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it's you the one I love;

I hate you deeply, and hating you

Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you

Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume

My heart with its cruel

Ray, stealing my key to true calm.

In this part of the story I am the one who

Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,

Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.

Pablo Neruda

2011-09-24T00:53:00.000-07:00

I know a man

who photographed the view he saw

from the window of the room where he made love

and not the face of the woman he loved there.

Yehuda Amichai

2011-09-24T00:51:00.001-07:00

We're no good at saying good-bye.

We wander around, shoulders touching.

It's begun to get dark already.

You look vacant, I say nothing.

We'll stop in this church and see

someone buried, or christened or married.

We'll leave, avoiding each other's eyes.

Why does nothing work out for us?

Or we'll go in this graveyard and sit

where someone had already sat on the snow

and you'll draw with the end of your stick

dream-chambers where we'll live forever.

Anna Akhmatova (1917)

À peine défigurée

2011-09-22T11:58:00.000-07:00

Adieu tristesse

Bonjour tristesse

Tu est inscrite dans les lignes du plafond

Tu es inscrite dans les yeux que j’aime

Tu n’es pas tout à fait la misère

Car les lèvres le plus pauvres te dénoncent

Par un sourire

Bonjour tristesse

Amour des corps aimables

Puissance de l’amour

Dont l’amabilité surgit

Comme un monstre sans corps

Tête désappointée

Tristesse beau visage

Paul Éluard

Abraham Crowley

2011-09-21T09:02:00.000-07:00

A mighty pain to love it is,

And 'tis a pain that pain to miss;

But of all pains, the greatest pain

It is to love, but love in vain.

Mémoire - Arthur Rimbaud

2011-05-29T10:36:00.000-07:00

L’eau claire; comme le sel des larmes d’enfance,
l’assaut au soleil des blancheurs des corps de femmes;
la soie, en foule et de lys pur, des oriflammes
sous les murs dont quelque pucelle eut la défense;

l’ébat des anges;—non…le courant d’or en marche,
meut ses bras, noirs, et lourds, et frais surtout, d’herbe. Elle
sombre, avant le Ciel bleu pour ciel-de-lit, appelle
pour rideaux l’ombre de la colline et de l’arche.

II

Eh! l’humide carreau tend ses bouillons limpides!
L’eau meuble d’or pâle et sans fond les couches prêtes.
Les robes vertes et déteintes des fillettes
font les saules, d’où sautent les oiseaux sans brides.

Plus pure qu’un louis, jaune et chaude paupière
le souci d’eau—ta foi conjugale, o l’Epouse!—
au midi prompt, de son terne miroir, jalouse
au ciel gris de chaleur la Sphère rose et chère.

III

Madame se tient trop debout dans la prairie
prochaine où neigent les fils du travail; l’ombrelle
aux doigts; foulant l’ombelle; trop fière pour elle
des enfants lisant dans la verdure fleurie

leur livre de maroquin rouge! Hélas, Lui, comme
mille anges blancs qui se séparent sur la route,
s’éloigne par delà la montagne! Elle, toute
froide, et noire, court! après le départ de l’homme!

IV

Regret des bras épais et jeunes d’herbe pure!
Or des lunes d’avril au cœur du saint lit! Joie
des chantiers riverains à l’abandon, en proie
aux soirs d’août qui faisaient germer ces pourritures.

Qu’elle pleure à présent sous les remparts! l’haleine
des peupliers d’en haut est pour la seule brise.
Puis, c’est la nappe, sans reflets, sans source, grise:
un vieux, dragueur, dans sa barque immobile, peine.

V

Jouet de cet œil d’eau morne, Je n’y puis prendre,
oh! canot immobile! oh! bras trop courts! ni l’une
ni l’autre fleur: ni la jaune qui m’importune,
là; ni la bleue, amie à l’eau couleur de cendre.

Ah! la poudre des saules qu’une aile secoue!
Les roses des roseaux dès longtemps dévorées!
Mon canot, toujours fixe; et sa chaîne tirée
au fond de cet œil d’eau sans bords,—à quelle boue?

Lupercalia

2011-04-26T03:59:00.000-07:00

I am awaiting the release of Patrick Wolf's 4th album Lupercalia due on the 20th of June. As a preview to the wonders that this artist brings here is a performance of the first single of the album Time Of My Life performed in Moscow. He has also released a second single The City that encompasses the awesome range of performances that Patrick is capable of. More updates to follow!

Le dormeur du val (1870)

2010-12-30T05:45:00.000-08:00

After attending the Anselm Kiefer exhibition at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art I thought I would share a major poem by Rimbaud that served as the inspiration for Kiefer's work Le Dormeur du Val. Without going too much into interpretation, Kiefer uses Rimbaud's explicit allusion to the young dead soldier as a means of reverberating the feeling of silence often encountered at the site of battle.

C'est un trou de verdure où chante une rivière,
Accrochant follement aux herbes des haillons
D'argent ; où le soleil, de la montagne fière,
Luit : c'est un petit val qui mousse de rayons.

Un soldat jeune, bouche ouverte, tête nue,
Et la nuque baignant dans le frais cresson bleu,
Dort ; il est étendu dans l'herbe, sous la nue,
Pâle dans son lit vert où la lumière pleut.

Les pieds dans les glaïeuls, il dort. Souriant comme
Sourirait un enfant malade, il fait un somme :
Nature, berce-le chaudement : il a froid.

Les parfums ne font pas frissonner sa narine ;
Il dort dans le soleil, la main sur sa poitrine,
Tranquille. Il a deux trous rouges au côté droit.

Arthur Rimbaud

It is a green hollow where a stream gurgles,
Crazily catching silver rags of itself on the grasses;
Where the sun shines from the proud mountain:
It is a little valley bubbling over with light.

A young soldier, open-mouthed, bare-headed,
With the nape of his neck bathed in cool blue cresses,
Sleeps; he is stretched out on the grass, under the sky,
Pale on his green bed where the light falls like rain.

His feet in the yellow flags, he lies sleeping. Smiling as
A sick child might smile, he is having a nap:
Cradle him warmly, Nature: he is cold.

No odour makes his nostrils quiver;
He sleeps in the sun, his hand on his breast
At peace. There are two red holes in his right side.

Arthur Rimbaud

The Munich Mannequins

2010-12-08T19:02:00.000-08:00

Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb

Where the yew trees blow like hydras,
The tree of life and the tree of life

Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose.
The blood flood is the flood of love,

The absolute sacrifice.
It means: no more idols but me,

Me and you.
So, in their sulfur loveliness, in their smiles

These mannequins lean tonight
In Munich, morgue between Paris and Rome,

Naked and bald in their furs,
Orange lollies on silver sticks,

Intolerable, without mind.
The snow drops its pieces of darkness,

Nobody's about. In the hotels
Hands will be opening doors and setting

Down shoes for a polish of carbon
Into which broad toes will go tomorrow.

O the domesticity of these windows,
The baby lace, the green-leaved confectionery,

The thick Germans slumbering in their bottomless Stolz.
And the black phones on hooks

Glittering
Glittering and digesting

Voicelessness. The snow has no voice.

Sylvia Plath, 1963

My Lost Youth

2010-09-30T16:49:00.000-07:00

Often I think of the beautiful town

That is seated by the sea;

Often in thought go up and down

The pleasant streets of that dear old town,

And my youth comes back to me.

And a verse of a Lapland song

Is haunting my memory still:

"A boy's will is the wind's will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

I can see the shadowy lines of its trees,

And catch, in sudden gleams,

The sheen of the far-surrounding seas,

And islands that were the Hesperides

Of all my boyish dreams.

And the burden of that old song,

It murmurs and whispers still:

"A boy's will is the wind's will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

I remember the black wharves and the slips,

And the sea-tides tossing free;

And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,

And beauty and mystery of the ships,

And the magic of the sea.

And the voice of that wayward song

Is singing and saying still:

"A boy's will is the wind's will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

I remember the bulwarks by the shore,

And the fort upon the hill;

The sunrise gun, with its hollow roar,

The drum-beat repeated o'er and o'er,

And the bugle wild and shrill.

And the music of that old song

Throbs in my memory still:

"A boy's will is the wind's will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

I remember the sea-fight far away,

How it thundered o'er the tide!

And the dead captains, as they lay

In their graves, o'erlooking the tranquil bay

Where they in battle died.

And the sound of that mournful song

Goes through me with a thrill:

"A boy's will is the wind's will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

I can see the breezy dome of groves,

The shadows of Deering's Woods;

And the friendships old and the early loves

Come back with a Sabbath sound, as of doves

In quiet neighborhoods.

And the verse of that sweet old song,

It flutters and murmurs still:

"A boy's will is the wind's will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

I remember the gleams and glooms that dart

Across the schoolboy's brain;

The song and the silence in the heart,

That in part are prophecies, and in part

Are longings wild and vain.

And the voice of that fitful song

Sings on, and is never still:

"A boy's will is the wind's will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

There are things of which I may not speak;

There are dreams that cannot die;

There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak,

And bring a pallor into the cheek,

And a mist before the eye.

And the words of that fatal song

Come over me like a chill:

"A boy's will is the wind's will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

Strange to me now are the forms I meet

When I visit the dear old town;

But the native air is pure and sweet,

And the trees that o'ershadow each well-known street,

As they balance up and down

Are singing the beautiful song,

Are sighing and whispering still:

"A boy's will is the wind's will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

And Deering's Woods are fresh and fair,

And with joy that is almost pain

My heart goes back to wander there,

And among the dreams of the days that were,

I find my lost youth again.

And the strange and beautiful song,

The groves are repeating it still:

"A boy's will is the wind's will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 - 1882)

I Died For Beauty

2010-09-21T02:56:00.000-07:00

I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth,--the two are one;
We brethren are," he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms.
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

"La beauté sera CONVULSIVE ou ne sera pas"

2010-09-14T15:27:00.000-07:00

Pedro Calderón de la Barca, excerpt from La Vida es Sueño (1635)

¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.

¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,

una sombra, una ficción;

y el mayor bien es pequeño;

que toda la vida es sueño,

y los sueños, sueños son.

De la Barca's work encapsulates the human anguish and distress upon recognising an all-encompassing absurdity of life, the paradox that neither our conscious nor subconscious states really mean anything. For de la Barca life has an ephemeral character and is a troublesome journey from birth towards the grave with little to hold onto. However, de la Barca was not a nihilist because he finds catharsis in religious thought.

Painter Francis Bacon (1909-1994) , whose life was characterised by a constant enduring duress that manifested itself in all aspects of his life, bore a fascination for one of de la Barca's contemporaries, namely the painter Diego Velázquez and his depiction of Pope Innocent X

Velázquez Portrait of Innocent X (1650)

It is Francis Bacon I wish to focus on in this entry, having read art critic Michael Peppiatt's treatment of Bacon's life in Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma. The strength of the biography lies in the fact that Peppiatt knew Bacon personally for a time span of over 30 years.

Bacon remarked that his Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X was a combination of Eisentein's screaming nurse (see below) and the Velázquez painting. In Bacon's painting, the scream does not refer back to Expressionism and its attempt at depicting existential angst (like in Edvard Munch's painting The Scream) because, as Bacon said: "I am not expressionistic; I have nothing to express". Rather, his focus lay in the colour of the mouth, the teeth, the saliva, remarking that "I was absorbed by the beautiful red and purple of the interior of the mouth much like Monet was obsessed by haystacks and the light falling on them from hour to hour."

Bacon encountered most forms of problems during his life: From a harsh childhood at the hand of an uncaring and violent father, to a youth of drift and prostitution in the decadent capitals of Europe to the suicide of his lover and death of most of his close friends. He lived through both World Wars that traumatised 20th century Europe, survived the Blitzkrieg in London while being a staunch atheist: "We are born and we die, and in between we try to give meaning to this meaningless existence by our driving forces". He embraced nihilism from a very early age, stating that he did not believe in anything and was a fierce critic of established beliefs, with a certain emphasis on Christianity: "I myself want to go on living as long as I can ... After all, there's nothing else. You can only go on living from moment to moment. You cannot prepare for death, because it'snothing".

His childhood was one of mistreatment by his father (who had him punished by whipping) and general insensitivity to his quite fragile state (he had asthma and horse allergy but his father was a military man and constantly insisted on him riding long distances with the horses they owned, causing violent outbursts of allergic reactions). His family belonged to the Ulster loyalist segment in Ireland (the unionist movement that believed Ireland should be a constituent country of the United Kingdom and oppose any joining with the Republic of Ireland), which meant that the family lived in a constant state of fear of being attacked by the Irish Republican Army (IRA): "Disaster was the leitmotif of nearly every memory Bacon chose to bring up when he talked about his childhood".

Francis showed little interest in his education: "It was all rather ridiculous, my life at school. But then, for some reason, I had always known that life was ridiculous". He spent 18 months at Dean Close School leaving before he was to be expelled. Back home as a 16-year-old, Francis caught the wrath of his father for toying with his mother's underwear on, and was "expelled" from home.

So he was sent to Berlin in 1927 in the hopes that he would become more "manly". The man his dad sent him with was deemed very manly, but they nevertheless still ended up sleeping together (so that attempt failed). Francis was succeeding in his main ambition, which he called "simply to drift and follow my instinct -to drift and see". Peppiatt remarks that he was "part Rimbaud, part Genet, part theif, part prostitute". Berlin in the Weimar Republic was at its peak of decadence: "Berlin gave Bacon not only his first full exposure to metropolitan vice but also his first taste of Continental sophistication". He arrived at the peak of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement (a post-expressionist movement in the words of critic Franz Roh),with painters like Otto Dix and his evocations of Berlin's juxtapositionof luxury and degradation.

Otto Dix, Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden, (1926)

After two months in Berlin he left for Paris, the city that became the centerpiece in pushing Bacon towards the painted medium. It is explained that when he saw Poussin's seventeenth century painting Masscre des Innocents at Château de Chantilly, it served as a catalyst for his imagination. The painting of a mother, frantically trying to prevent a soldier from putting her infant to the sword, prompted Bacon's lifelong obsession with the mouth opened in a scream: "Probably the best human cry ever painted".

Poussin Masscre des Innocents (17th century)

He likewise engendered a fascination for Eisenstein's silent film Battleship Potemkin (1925), especially obsessing about the cry of the nurse. Peppiatt's thesis is that the nurse represents Bacon's grandmother, and Poussin's soldier represents Bacon's brutal father. Bacon's obsession led him to find a medical book with hand-painted illustrations of diseases of the mouth (by Ludwig Grünwald), reflecting his "inherent morbidity and interest in pathological conditions". It should be noted that Bacon's older brother Harley died of lockjaw (a disease of the mouth).

Eisenstein Battleship Potemkin (1926)

Besides Poussin and Eisenstein, Bacon closely followed the advent of surrealism across Europe. He was interested in Breton's Manifeste du Surréalisme and the subsequent publication La Revolution Surréaliste. Bacon argued that Picasso had come closer to anyone in the century to "the core of what feeling is about". Later on, he submitted his work to the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, but was excluded for being "insufficiently surreal", which was one of the great ironies of his life because Bacon was both highly obsessed with chance (an essential element of Breton's psychic automatism), as observed by constant visit to casinos (where he mostly preferred the roulette, despite its poor odds), and held Picasso as being the most inventive author of the 20th century: "Bacon absorbed surrealism through Picasso".

Bacon returned to London in 1928. It would be 15 years before he established a reputation in the art scene with Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). Peppiatt argues that rather than developing late, he made it very hard for himself to develop.

In his twenties Bacon formed a relationship with an Oxford man called Eric Hall who was 20 years his senior. The relationship lasting some over 15 years practically ruined Eric Hall's marriage and fortune (spent by him and Francis in Monte Carlo casinos), without mentioning that Eric's son Ivan went mad and blamed Francis Bacon for it: "It's because of you I'm like this".

Later on, his other partner George Dyer killed himself on the eve of Bacon's retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. Despite knowing of the news, Bacon carried on with a stoic demeanor, showing the then president Georges Pompidou around the exhibition during the vernissage. Bacon himself acknowledged that his life bore resemblance to elements of Greek tragedy. The work Oresteia by Aeschylus had impressed itself upon Bacon in his early years, having found it through a reading of T.S. Eliot's The Family Room. Both texts consider the themes of guilt and atonement, and this was something Bacon was very preoccupied by: "What Bacon admired specifically in Eliot was his ability to evoke in a new language ancient notions of despair". As in the later painting Triptych Inspired by T.S. Eliot's Poem 'Sweeney Agonistes'" from 1967 Bacon draws inspiration from an Eliot poem where the character Sweeney remarks that "Death is life, and life is death".

Bacon found inspiration in Jewish painter Chaïm Soutine and his theme of the dismembered carcass, setting forth his own vision of "a cannibals' world from which all moral relationships have been erased" .

Soutine Side of Beef (1925)

In post-war Britain Bacon painted some of the most horrid images of human pain, agony and distress to this date. Critic Robert Hughes has remarked that any distortion to a human body that an artist might make in a postwar society would have to bear comparison to the distortion of real human bodies in the Nazi death camps. The range of bodily distortions and contortions that Bacon treats in his painting can thus be seen in the light of the post-war trauma of Europe: "Bacon was obsessed with the mortality of human flesh." The seminal picture encompassing these ideas was Painting 1946 that Bacon claims came to him by accident:

According to Hughes, in Bacon's work the ideal body of classical art is dismissed. The nude becomes a two-legged animal with a drug addiction. Bacon was interested in depicting the isolation of humanity, and he did so by choosing to paint people alone in confined spaces. When he did paint people together they were men engaging in a sexual act. In Bacon's work all sexuality is turned into violence, a sort of dog-like grappling in closed rooms whose furnishings you cannot identify. The bed suggests an operating table, the walls the colour of cheap motels.

The mouth as an artistic motif played a major role in the repertoire of Bacon. The reason for this could be that he wanted to play with the dualistic nature of the mouth: The mouth being both the means by which lovers kiss as well as the treacherousness of the sharp teeth concealed within the mouth that can bite and kill. Similarly, the crucifix as a religious motif was a major element in Bacon's early painting. Some critics (e.g. Peppiatt) have likened his obsession with the cricifix with the thesis that Bacon possibly considered that his existence felt like a crucifixion; that he had been singled out to suffer, and that only by expressing the pain in the most highly charged fashion could he convey what he felt most deeply about human life. Picasso had painted Crucifixion in 1930, and this influenced Bacon's 1933 series of three Crucifixion paintings. The choice of religious motifs (not only crucifixion but also his obsession with the religious paintings of Velázquez) was very provocative given Bacon's atheism. It is furthermore ironic to add that Bacon died in a catholic hospital in Spain and was burned in a coffin bearing a cross.

Finally, it should come as a consolation that Bacon's ardent nihilistic paintings and beliefs were mostly accompanied by poignant observations on the human conditions. His work is indeed linked to "horror" in that it is shocking to see in a museum, but it also engenders a search for the truth about existence (and the element of horror might be necessary to achieve this). Bacon himself, while not adhering to any formal system of belief, held optimism as a lifelong exception to this: "Life is so meaningless we might as well try to make ourselves extraordinary."

In the spirit of the surrealist movement (that Bacon so deeply admired but was never allowed to join) we ought to remember that Breton in his novel Nadja remarks: "La beauté sera CONVULSIVE ou ne sera pas".

My Sad Captains

2010-09-07T09:41:00.001-07:00

London band My Sad Captains is a genuine discovery of solid vocal prowess. The quintet has drawn little attention from the media despite the release of Here and Elsewhere in 2009.

It is not known whether the band found its name from the namesake poem by Thomas Gunn called My Sad Captains (1961). The poem is about Gunn's recollection of former friendships:

One by one they appear in
the darkness: a few friends, and
a few with historical
names. How late they start to shine!
but before they fade they stand
perfectly embodied, all

the past lapping them like a
cloak of chaos. They were men
who, I thought, lived only to
renew the wasteful force they
spent with each hot convulsion.
They remind me, distant now.

True, they are not at rest yet,
but now they are indeed
apart, winnowed from failures,
they withdraw to an orbit
and turn with disinterested
hard energy, like the stars.

NME labelled the album "Nice-enough-but-predictable Americana-leaning indie", which is a fair judgement, but it still oversees the freshness that this album has brought to the indie music community.

The mixed influences of My Sad Captains spans decades and genres: The twee-pop influence of the American band When I Was 12 (S is for Subway) as manifested in All Hat and No Plans (nodding to the quaintness of the dominant Scandinavian indie pop scene), to the obvious Beatles-homage Troika, and the resonance of much of their oeuvre with contemporary band Tigers That Talked (23 fears). Think indie pop band Favours For Sailors and how it managed to drag 90's cult band Pavement out of the dark: Beach Boys meets Pavement.

Some of the highlights of the album Here and Elsewhere:

Here and Elsewhere: The poster boy of the album, a delicious eye-catching portion of pop, and nothing else. Predictable maybe, but the chorus "It's only a game so I'd rather be unknown" got me: Big melodies and jolly choruses is what makes the album great. The use of instruments is interesting, including a French harmonica!

All Hat and No Plans: This twee-influenced, summery track is sure to rate high on radio playlists everywhere. Think Architecture In Helsinki meets The Shout Out Louds.

Ghost Song: Another well-crafted pop anthem with the main thesis that "you can't have a ghost song, even with the lights on".

Troika: While not explicitly mentioned, this track is the most obvious manifestation of the influence that the Beatles have inflicted on My Sad Captains (without being credited). Their style is a furthering (a pastiche if you want) of many of the elements that made 60's britpop great: The fearless declaration of living in the now, the slight vocal trace of melancholy and the relentless youthfulness of each track: Nowhere Man, Norwegian Wood, Girl, In My Life, Here There and Elsewhere, All You Need is Love and With A Little Help From My Friends.

Great Expectations: Interesting attempt at covering Dickens in musical format: "I'm going to get you out of this, if it's the last thing I ever do". Think a crossover of The Magic Numbers with The Polyphonic Spree.

Autumn Day

2010-08-30T11:08:00.000-07:00

Autumn Day (1902)

Lord: it is time. Great was the summer's feast.
Now lay upon the sun-dials your shadow
And on the meadows have the winds released

Command the last fruits to round their shapes;
Grant two more days of south for vines to carry,
to their perfection thrust them on, and harry
the final sweetness into heavy grapes.

Who has not built his house, will not start now.
Who is now by himself will long be so,
Be wakeful, read, write lengthy letters, go
In vague disquiet pacing up and down
Denuded lanes, with leaves adrift below.

Rainer Maria Rilke - translation by Walter W. Arndt

Herbsttag (1902)

Herr, es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.

Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,

und auf den Fluren lass die Winde los.

Befiehl den letzten Früchten, voll zu sein;

gib ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,

dränge sie zur Vollendung hin, und jage

die letzte Süße in den schweren Wein.

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.

Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,

wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben

und wird in den Alleen hin und her

unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.

Rainer Maria Rilke

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"

2010-08-25T15:51:00.001-07:00

I have been reading a biography of physicist Robert Oppenheimer called "American Prometheus", which is a thorough and captivating study of the man, his intellect and subsequent terrible downfall of the father of the atomic bomb.

I will not paraphrase this interesting account, but instead highlight a few poignant points about Oppie's (or Opje's) life.

He was born into a wealthy family of Jewish textile importers, his father Julius S. Oppenheimer had married the very proper and bourgeois painter Ella. The product of this marriage were two children: Julius Robert and Frank Oppenheimer. Robert was 8-years older than Frank, and the former's public fame seemed to overshadow the latter for most of their life. Both brothers became physicists.

Robert had a passionate affair with literature and read widely and with depth (from Baudelaire to the Bhagavad Gita). The victories and downfalls of his life were often succintly summed up with a quote from something he had read. Like many Western intellectuals enthralledwith Eastern philosophies, Oppenheimer found solace in Eastern mysticism. He knew that poets like W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot had both studied the Mahabharata. To his brother Frank he says about the nature of duty in Eastern philosophy: "I think that all things which evoke displine: Study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, and war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude; for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace".

As a Berkeley academic Robert became indirectly linked with the Communist Party in the 1930's. Oppenheimer's politics were driven by the personal: "Somehow one always knew he felt guilty about his gifts, about his inherited wealth, and about the distance that separated him from others". Never in his life did he have to worry about money, and while very generous with some friends people still envied him for what he had been born with. The communist association would later on in his life transmute into grounds for persecution by the much-hated Joseph McCarthy: Oppenheimer, the man who had unravelled the secret of the atom would become a martyr of the fear that crippled post-war America.

This "distance" that separated him from others derived from his almost non-existent childhood. Oppenheimer's precociousness had resulted in a staunch rejection from his peers: "I was an unctuous, repulsively good little boy". Later on in life this distance was felt by others. One episode that is highlighted in the book is the relationship with Oppenheimer's student Edward Condon, who struggled to support a wife and an infant child on a small postdoctoral fellowship: "It annoyed him that Oppenheimer spent money so casually on food and fine clothes while seeming blissfully unaware of his friend's familial responsibilities". One day, Oppenheimer invited Edward and Emilia Condon out for a walk, but Emilia explained that she had to stay with the baby. Oppenheimer replied: "All right, we'll leave you to your peasant tasks". Another episode highlighting his poisonous tongue occurred when, upon seeing physicist Karl Compton's 2-year-old daughter reading a book on the topic of birth control, Oppenheimer looked over at the pregnant Mrs. Compton and remarked "A little late".

After his much-secluded undergraduate education at Harvard he went to study at the Cavendish Laboratory, in Cambridge, under the experimental physicist J. J. Thomson (discoverer of the electron), but Robert suffered several breakdowns at Cambridge due to a combination of factors (sexual frustration, social ineptitude and inability to excel as an experimentalist) and was diagnosed as schizophrenic: "I am having a pretty bad time. The lab work is a terrible bore, and I am so bad at it that it is impossible to feel that I am learning anything ... the lectures are vile". His erratic attitude during his year at Cambridge culminated in a series of very strange behavior, including an episode in a train where he saw a couple kissing very wildly, and after the man left, Robert kissed the woman. Consumed by feelings of inadequacy and intense jealousy, he poisoned an apple and put it on the desk of his head tutor, Patrick Blackett. For this he was nearly sent down (read: expelled) but managed to avoid this by agreeing to undergo psychoanalytic treatment.

The defining event in Oppenheimer's life was his assignment as director of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Briefly, this project was the culmination of "three centuries of physics" as eloquently put by Isidor Rabi, in that it sought to build the first nuclear weapon in time for the war in Europe. As we now know, this never happened; Hitler committed suicide on 30. April 1945 and Germany capitulated a weak after. By the summer of 1945 the team at Los Alamos had finished their original design and were ready to test the bomb. Oppenheimer dubbed the test site "Trinity" after a John Donne poem that opens with the line "Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for, you":

BATTER my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o' erthrow mee,'and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to'another due,
Labour to'admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely'I love you,'and would be loved faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie:
Divorce mee,'untie, or breake that knot againe;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you'enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

The name Trinity also suggests that Oppenheimer was once again referencing to the Hindu scriptures, the Bhagavad-Gita: Hinduism has its trinity in Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer.

One of the women Oppenheimer was closest to was the enigmatic mistress Jean Tatlock, daughter of noted Harvard philologist John Tatlock (a Chaucer expert). Jean introduced Robert to the poetry of John Donne (Trinity is said to be a tribute to Tatlock), was a Stanford-trained medic, an outspoken member of the Communist party and she tormented Robert with their on-going, 0ff-going relationship that became ever more distant with the years. Eventually, during the Manhattan Project they saw each other in secrecy once (we know of this because she was being wiretapped by the US army), but half a year later, in 1944, Tatlock committed suicide under suspicious circumstances. The autopsy report included findings of chloral hydrate (knockout drops) and concluded that the death was from asphyxiation (by drowning in the bathtub). Her suicide left Robert Oppenheimer with a recurring feeling of guilt and remorse.

The Trinity nuclear test forever changed the world in an irreversible way, from a pre-nuclear world into a post-nuclear world. It happened at dawn (5:30 am) on July 16. 1945, postponed due to poor weather (it was feared that performing the test in rainy weather would prove lethal to the surrounding team of scientists as well as carry the radioactive fallout much further than predicted). Chicago physicist Sam Allison read the countdown for the detonation.

Young physicist Richard Feynmann stood 20 miles from the Trinity site, and instead of wearing the black glasses he had been handed for protection against UV-radiation he hid behind a truck windshield to see the event with his naked eye. Feynmann explains that the detonation resulted in a white flash that changed colour into yellow and then orange: "A big ball of orange, the center that was so bright, becomes a ball of orange that starts to rise and billow". A bang was heard a whole minute after the explosion.

Oppenheimer was shocked by the event and famously recalled the Hindu scripture Bhagavad-Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form (as Shiva) and says: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of the worlds".

Much deliberation ensued regarding the bellic nature of the nuclear bomb: Should a bomb be used against Japan to ensure their full surrender, or should it suffice with a mere demonstration of the deadly power of the atom? Were the Japanese about to surrender at the commencement of the Russian invasion of the island? Would the Japanese fight until last man?

The bomb would be necessary, it was felt, if the Japanese would not surrender. The Americans would not tolerate the high casualties associated with fighting the Japanese man-by-man, house-by-house. The terrible irony of this story is that President Truman had very reliable information regarding the Japanese desire for voluntary surrender, so history tells us that the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, to some extent, cruel, inhuman and unnecessary: "Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands" Oppenheimer later explained, stressing the deep feeling of guilt that haunted him for the rest of his life.

"If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendour of the mighty one."

Yo Shakespeare

2010-08-19T07:56:00.000-07:00

I spent a part of my summer break in London visiting a good friend from my university. One of the things I did was to discover Wilton's Music Hall, the oldest grand music hall in the world and so inconnu that taxi drivers did not know it existed.

When my flatmate and I arrived (thanks to a GPS) we were greeted with the sight of a building in such a state of decay you were not quite sure how it had stood the test of time. The walls were cracked everywhere, the paint had faded and the wood looked more innate than normal, and yet all this contributed to a feeling of being caught in the past that was even different to how it feels to live in Oxford (despite Wilton's Music Hall being from 1828).

I had been on the look for the music they played there, and that evening it was an intriguing 20-member "band" from New York called Alarm Will Sound. More than a band it was a classical ensemble, only that they did not play classical music in the conventional sense. Alarm Will Sound hails down from the same contemporary classical music environment as that of the lauded New York musician Nico Muhly (Philip Glass's protegé), among others.

It might be tempting to try and compare Alarm Will Sound and the music it produces to composers like Philip Glass (Glassworks, 1981), Edgar Varèse (Ionisation, 1929) or John Cage (Bacchanale), but this comparison would fail because the ensemble does not focus on minimalism or aleatoric music, instead opting to focus on the merging of different media (the spoken and the played). Alarm Will Sound has more in common with its contemporary Nico Muhly: Mothertongue or Clear Music.

Emerging from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, in New York, the members of the ensemble are both well versed and trained in classical music as they are in the avant garde canon of the 20th and 21st century. Their director, Alan Pierson remarks that the ensemble works because it features "18 to 20 people that not only play really well, but also improvise ... they're all steeped in jazz and world music". They have worked with modernist compositions by figures such as Edgar Varèse and Harrison Birtwistle as well as the work of minimalist composers like Steve Reich and John Adams.

The programme of the evening included interpretations of "intelligent dance music" by Aphex Twin: Meltplace 6 (arr. Payton MacDonald), Omgyiya Switch 7 (arr. Evan Hause), Blue Calx (arr. Caleb Burhans) and Cock ver 10 (arr. Stefan Freund) as well as by a band on the same (Warp Records) label called Autechre: Cfern (arr. Dennis De Santis). The Aphex Twin reinterpretations were very interesting, combining beautiful xylophone with trombone, violin with cello and many unorthodox instruments (e.g. saws) as well as sporadic chants, shouts and whispers.

The programme then included deliveries of modern classical compositions by John Orfe: Chamber Symphony, German composer Wolfgang Rihm: Will Sound and Michael Gordon: Yo Shakespeare.

As a more esoteric inclusion was the rendering of Beatles' Revolution 9, the track now known as Lennon and McCartney's vibrant and unabashed take on musique concrète. The arrangement by Matt Marks made use of a very broad range of instruments (besides the vocal contributions of various chamber players) including everything from violins to cat horns. The repetition of the phrase "number nine" proved to be a core element of the rendition, very much in the spirit of Nico Muhly.

Album-wise, the highlights of Alarm Will Sound currently released (some of the pieces played at Wilton were brand new) must be the renditions of Aphex Twin's Blue Calx and 4 from the album Acoustica.

Stillness of the mind

2010-08-16T15:17:00.000-07:00

I realise I have not had time to comment on what has been hailed by many as the best soundtrack of 2010, that of Tom Ford's film A Single Man. Contributions on the soundtrack come from mainly two composers: Abel Korzeniowski and Shigeru Umebayashi.

Korzeniowski, a Polish composer, has worked with a front figure of horror film music, Krzysztof Penderecki, who was commisioned to compose the score for Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining (1980), starring Jack Nicholson among others.

The score, however, bears no resemblance to or signs of Penderecki's mentorship, but instead focuses on the portrayal of George, a stern and grieving gay English professor living in 1960's California, where the impending doom of a possible nuclear aftermath to the Cuban Missile Crisis looms in the air.

George is silently grieving the loss of his partner, and the film (based on the fine novel by Christopher Isherwood) portrays a day in his life. The viewer is shown a rather atypical day in George's life. Tom Ford first decides to show the viewer how little George feels a part of his domestic neighbourhood. The gentrification of what (we are told) used to be an area of bohemians and intellectual has resulted in what George seemingly perceives as a dull and uneventful community of child-rearing families. Umebayashi encapsulates the sterile but also pristine setting in George's Waltz.

George can be seen as neither interested in the comic hystericism of his contemporaries regarding the purchasing of bomb shelters in case of a nuclear attack by the perceived Communist "enemy", nor in the blasé attitude of the youthful students he lectures on English literature. He is an outsider in every way of the word: A single male living in gentrified Los Angeles, an Englishman living in America, too old to engage with his students on a social level and constrained by rigid norms and attitudes towards sexuality.

We are shown a day at the university where George lectures. Tom Ford uses his own background as a fashion designer to interject small but interesting details, such as George's attempt at guessing what perfume the female secretary in his office is wearing: "Arpège?" George asks subtly while attempting to hold onto the experience of the smell.

A certain emphasis is placed on George's decision not to spend the day's lecture on Aldous Huxley's novel After Many a Summer Dies the Swan but instead on discussing the notion of minorities (which both concerns himself very much, but also in the wider context of the silent war being waged against Cuba).

Ford shows us the more mundane aspects of George's life: A trip to the bank and a trip to the liquor store. At the bank George encounters Jennifer, the daughter of his neighbour mrs. Strunk, who, in a very innocent manner speaks to him about her pet scorpion, and how they feed it moths and other smaller creatures every night. The furthering of the theme of the alienation of the minority is quite well situated here, and yet George seems more concerned with meeting someone who will not judge him. The encounter is beautifully delivered in Umebayashi's A Variation On Scotty Tails Madeline. As the track title reads, this is a reinterpretation of Madeline from Bernard Herrmann's score for Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958).

George goes to see his lifelong expat friend (and former lover) Charley, who appears quite trapped in dwellings about former glory: "Living in the past is my future", as she bluntly remarks. The score captures both the dancing and the dwelling, with Etta James' Stormy Weather and the more edgy Booker T. & The MG.'s Green Onion. Their collective nostalgia for (better) times is fully conveyed by Jo Stafford's haunting delivery of Blue Moon, a relic of the wonderful years in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Kenny, a student of George who for unclear reasons has been chasing him down all day turns up in a bar with a clear intent of talking to George. The naïvety of the character Kenny ("Sir, I had a hunch that you were a romantic", "the future is death") allows George for once in the day to escape the stiffness of his life and do something unexpected and rather grand: They go swimming together in the pitch-dark sea, a climatic point wonderfully vowed together by Korzeniowski in Swimming; one almost feels 17 again just from listening.

Without giving too much away, a final and very underrated track is Korzeniowski's Sunset, a truly victorious day for violin music. The rough end-stroke of the violin is so sensual and earthbound that it finds proper placement near the end of the film. Script alterations have happened between the film and the original 1964 novel, but this final quote not found in the novel is still quite interesting:

"A few times in my life I've had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be."

The score is mesmerising and subdues the listener very quickly. The intertwining of nostalgia with stringency - strings with soft rock - yields a miniscule but appreciable picture of what the 60's were for someone like George.

"...and they have escaped the weight of darkness"

2010-08-14T09:07:00.000-07:00

I am sitting with Icelandic prodigy Ólafur Arnald's most recent album "...And They Have Escaped the Weight of Darkness" from 2010. At the mere age of 23 he has two albums and three EPs in his repertoire, and while his background is in classical music he has managed to transcend the genre of neo-classical music by evoking cold, emotive minimalism and merging elements of post-rock.

For ...And They Have Escaped the Weight of Darkness Arnalds pays homage to Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr and his work Werckmeister Harmonies from 2000. The opening scene of the film concerns a young man's attempt at explaining the astronomical processes of the Sun, especially that of the solar eclipse, to a group of old drunkards in a rather desolate bar. Tarr's opening scene yields a seminal filmic metaphor on the rebirth of hope in places where hope is not to be found.

"You are the Sun. The Sun doesn't move, this is what it does. You are the Earth. The Earth is here for a start, and then the Earth moves around the sun. And now, we'll have an explanation that simple folks like us can also understand, about immortality. All I ask is that you step with me into the boundlessness, where constancy, quietude and peace, infinite emptiness reign. And just imagine, in this infinite sonorous silence, everywhere is an impenetrable darkness. Here, we only experience general motion, and at first, we don't notice the events that we are witnessing. The brilliant light of the sun always sheds its heat and light on that side of the Earth which is just then turned towards it. And we stand here in it's brilliance. This is the moon. The moon revolves around the Earth. What is happening? We suddenly see that the disc of the moon, the disc of the moon, on the Sun's flaming sphere, makes an indentation, and this indentation, the dark shadow, grows bigger... and bigger. And as it covers more and more, slowly only a narrow crescent of the sun remains, adazzling crescent. And at the next moment, the next moment - say that it's around one in the afternoon - a most dramatic turn of event occurs. At that moment the air suddenly turns cold. Can youfeel it? The sky darkens, then goes all dark. The dogs howl, rabbits hunch down, the deer run in panic, run, stampede in fright. And in this awful, incomprehensible dusk, even the birds... the birds too are confused and go to roost. And then... Complete Silence. Everything that lives is still. Are the hills going to march off? Will heaven fall upon us? Will the Earth open under us? We don't know. We don't know, for a total eclipse has come upon us... But... but no need to fear. It's not over. For across the sun's glowing sphere, slowly, the Moon swims away. And the sun once again bursts forth, and to the Earth slowly there comes again light, and warmth again floods the Earth. Deep emotion pierces everyone. They have escaped the weight of darkness"

Ólafur Arnald's album title (...And They Have Escaped the Weight of Darkness) and the 9 track titles come from the dialogue of Béla Tarr's wonderful opening scene:

Þú ert sólin (You are the Sun)

Þú ert jörðin (You are the Earth)

Tunglið (Moon)

Loftið verður skyndilega kalt (The air suddenly turns cold)

Kjurrt (Complete silence)

Gleypa okkur (Swallow us)

Hægt, kemur ljósið (Slowly the light comes)

Undan hulu (The previous layer)

Þau hafa sloppið undan þunga myrkursins (...and they have escaped the weight of darkness)

By doing this, Arnalds undoes his rather depressing antecedents and reaffirms his belief in the good of the world (wherever it may be found). The album's poised lyricism can sometimes bear resemblance to the work of other neo-classical composers (e.g. Sunlight by Max Richter).

In the opening track Þú ert sólin Arnalds presents a string-led serenade, and while the title does not allude to Le Roi Soleil, the French king Louis XIV ("L'État, c'est moi", and whatnot), the idea of Arnalds doing this is in itself amusing. Instead, the daring track title (You are the Sun) could be an indication that this is Arnald's most ambitious work as of this day. Þú ert jörðin (You are the Earth), the second track on the album, is a subtle and humble continuation.

In Tunglið a minimalist piano meets a maximalist post-rock performance. There is a sense of urgency and splendour in the delivery, alluding to the Sun's powerful light. The slight irony of the track must lie in the title, Moon, the Moon being a completely opaque astronomical body and a certain antithesis to the luminous bolstering of the Sun.

The mood of the album turns much, much darker in the subsequent track, Loftið verður skyndilega kalt (The air suddenly turns cold) where Arnalds bridges the much colder and depressing work of fellow Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson (The Sun's Gone Dim and the Sky's Turned Black), while avoiding the use of Jóhannsson's electronically-distorted lyrics.

In Kjurrt (Complete Silence) a piano and string duet provides us the minimum point of the album in terms of emotion (or is it the maximum point?). This is the Ólafur Arnalds as he has been known since Eulogy for Evolution.

In Hægt, kemur ljósið (Slowly the light comes) Arnalds provides an emotive come-back with the catharsis of the album. The Sun has returned and hope is reborn (which seemed to not be the most probable outcome!). The video is distinctive and worth seeing!

The Stolen Child

2010-08-06T14:13:00.000-07:00

Where dips the rocky highland

Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,

There lies a leafy island

Where flapping herons wake

The drowsy water-rats;

There we've hid out faery vats,

Full of berries

And the reddest stolen cherries.

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses

The dim grey sands with light,

Far off by furthest Rosses

We foot it all the night,

Weaving olden dances,

Mingling hands and mingling glances

Till the moon has taken flight;

To and fro we leap

And chase the frothy bubbles,

While the world is full of troubles

And is anxious in its sleep.

Come away, O human child!

To the waters of the wild

With a faery hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes

From the hills above Glen-Car,

In pools among the rushes

That scarce could bathe a star,

We seek for slumbering trout

And whispering in their ears

Give them unquiet dreams;

Leaning softly out

From ferns that drop their tears

Over the young streams.

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,

The solemn-eyed:

He'll hear no more the lowing

Of the calves on the warm hillside

Or the kettle on the hob

Sing peace into his breast,

Or see the brown mice bob

Round and round the oatmeal-chest.

For he comes, the human child,

To the waters and the wild

With a faery hand in hand,

From a world more full of weeping than he can understand.

The Stolen Child, W.B. Yeats (1886)

"La vie est sans pitié"

2010-08-02T17:04:00.000-07:00

I have just returned from a teaching stay in Sigtuna, which is located some 40 minutes from Stockholm. I am now teaching at Bradfield College in the south of England. I have been reading a text about the highly influential architect Le Corbusier, written by the scholar and architect Kenneth Frampton. The book discusses some rather poignant points about his life.

Frampton tells us that Le Corbusier, finding himself in a post-WWII world, became involved with the idea of "intermediate technology", which he believed was capable of reconciling the split between modernization and local building culture wherever this could be found. In the last two decades this search led him to embrace pantheism, because he deemed it capable of "overcoming the confrontation between traditional culture form and the relentless onslaught of ever more volatile technology".

Le Corbusier's work is to some extent a reflection of his own rather bleak views on life, especially seen in the intersection of tragedy and the plastic lyricism of his later work, as encapsulated by his engraved saying that "La vie est sans pitié" (life is without mercy).

Being an influential figure in both Brazilian and Indian architectural development, he was far more reserved when it came to American culture:

"Le Corbusier had the temerity to declare that skyscrapers were too small and that Manhattan was a "fairy catastrophe" ... Although he was charmed by the utopian campuses of America, he was also disconcerted by the naïve, over-enthusiastic response that he elicited in places like Vassar, Cranbrook and Princeton"

Le Corbusier became interested in the notion of a total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk), as conveyed in the Phillips Pavilion in Brussels, where he collaborated with the musique concrète composer Iannis Xenakis. The Pavilion and its hyperbolic form, combined with Le Corbusier's poème electronique projected a kind of "cosmic synthesis" such as had previously been the exclusive province of the Church.

Finally, I am listening to The Boxer by The National, a band as good as the Magnetic Fields.

Not another generic folk artist, Gregory Alan Isakov

2010-07-15T12:29:00.000-07:00

Folk music has the ability of capturing certain moods particularly well (yearning, melancholy or contentment). Historically, folk music dates back prior to the recorded media, and thus formed part of a society's oral tradition. In America folk musicians like Woody Guthrie (1912-1967) and Leadbelly (1888-1949) sang about people and stories that were deeply rooted in the American psyche. Themes sung about included those of war, work, civil rights and (lost) love. Because the origins of the genre lay in the working class, it was a type of music appreciated by most.

Three periods in American folk history can be mentioned: Early modern folk, grounded in the toils of Southern slave's struggle to survive (We Shall Overcome, Down by the Riverside, etc.) before and after the American Civil War (1861–1865). With the advent of the Industrial revolution and Fordism, the genre focused around worker's conditions and struggle for child labour laws and the eight hour work day.

Middle modern folk music in the 1930's centered around the Depression and the crash of the stock markets in 1929. Folk music experienced a revival in popularity with folk musician Woody Guthrie (who later inspired Bob Dylan).

Late modern folk in the 1960's was concerned mostly with civil rights. Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, and others found inspiration in the black's fight for equality in a society that blindly would not recognize this. Karen Dalton revisited folk tales of the 18th and 19th century with haunting vocals (Katie Cruel dates back to the American Revolution of 1775–1783).

Contemporary folk has been accused of being revisionistic, lacking in innovation and excessively naturalistic for its time. Let us consider this: Today folk music certainly looks back for inspiration, but that is also allowed! New genres like alternative and indie folk are thriving and pushing boundaries in their own way: The New Weird America movement encapsulates some of the good ideas currently resurging (though plagued by hipsters like Devendra Banhart who try a bit too hard to be alternative, see my previous rant on this). The music is still heavily naturalistic (depicting life as it is) but that has also always been the essence of the genre.

Today I look at Colorado traditionalist Gregory Alan Isakov, whose album That Sea, The Gambler from 2007 has come to my attention for its lyrical purity. In the classical tradition of the genre, the album is heavily naturalistic, rooted in American rural life and beautifully delivered with banjo.

"Ring like silver, ring like gold
Ring out those ghosts on the Ohio
Ring like clear day wedding bells
Were we the belly of the beast, or the sword that fell?
We'll never tell"

Highlights:

Stable Song: Grounded in lyrical prowess, the song centers around the classical motif of lost love, which pains the artist in the night "And I ached for my heart like some tin man". There is a lyrical subtlety in this (his best) song that makes it hard to put down. I found the mood to be haunting and in proper tradition of seminal folk artists like Leadbelly or Karen Dalton, with infusions of modern folk artists like Leonard Cohen and the gravitas of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. However, Gregory is himself, not another Jeff Buckley-lookalike. His unrequited yearning lands him a place amongst other contemporary artists like Andrew Bird.

3 a.m.: Touching on classical notions of the American psyche (yearning to be home while driving across the expansive American territory). Driving is a central action of the song, as it is a central part of being American.

"well its 3 a.m again, like it always seems to be
drivin northbound, drivin homeward, drivin wind is drivin me
and it just seems so funny that I always end up here,
walkin outside in the storm while looking way up past the tree-line
its been some time…"

La samba de mon coeur qui bat

2010-07-15T05:31:00.000-07:00

I have just got hold of the newest release by the Swedish symphonic-pop band Sambassadeur, European. The band hails down from the mysterious city of Göteborg. This city is hometown to some of the most unprecedented music acts today, including: Jens Lekman, jj, Studio, The Knife, Air France, The Tough Alliance, José Gonzalez, El Perro Del Mar, Detektivbyrån, CEO, as well as long gone Ace of Base.

Needless to say, the album is a summery mix between Glaswegian band Camera Obscura and Stockholm-based Concretes, Air France meets The Tough Alliance, lo-fi indie pop and extroverted balearic dance music. Originally being signed by Swedish Labrador Records, it was certain that the band had an immense potential. They were a do-it-yourself take on ABBA, with European marking their transition to musical maturity.

European has an anthemic air over itself. It is their best album to date, with an incredible consistence throughout the entire body of music (c.f. Camera Obscura's album My Maudlin Career).

The portmanteau Sambassaudeur (Samba + Ambassadeur) appropriately encapsulates the spirit of the band: The output is balearic and is a good representative of Swedish music to the exterior world beyond the borders of Scandinavia.

Highlights:

Sandy Dunes: Infused with a beautiful combination of horns and strings, it is a celebratory accolade to the realms of the musical experience. With the same epic-nature of Jóhann Jóhannsson's Virðulega Forsetar, the pop-like status of Coldplay's Viva La Vida and the 50's, 60's girlpop stature of Camera Obscura, it is not difficult to be swayed by this piece.

Days: In the tradition of Swedish balearic pop that, while celebratory, is concerned with isolation and despair, Days is a sad song concealed behind musical grandeur: "Loneliness is something you’re accustomed to". Camus would have nodded in approval.

“I wander in the face, I wander in the landscape, I am a wanderer”. Kokoshka

2010-07-05T09:25:00.000-07:00

The second essay I consider is one of Oskar Kokoschka, an Austrian expressionist. His seminal painting The Tempest is considered a key image of Expressionistic love. The two lovers are in a boat in space. The shapes are broken, all caught up in a static dislocation.

On The Nature of Visions (1912):

Some background:

As Vienna became a centre of introspective Modernism by the fin de siècle a great deal of interest was paid to Freud's publication of his study Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) in 1900. The unconscious became a concept that artists considered through their art. Kokoschka summarised his theories on Expressionistic art in his essay "Von den Natur der Gesichte" (1912, On the Nature of Visions).

Kokoschka treats a constant motif of German Idealism: The Spirit. Hegel had used the word "Spirit" as interchangeable with "God" in his philosophical dialectic. Kokoschka's writings provide a vitalism (the doctrine that life processes arise from a nonmaterial vital principle) in which the soul (especially the soul of the artist), free and possessive of a vigorous innocence, is in direct harmony with the forces of nature and the universe.

o “The state of awareness of visions is a level of consciousness at which we experience visions within ourselves”.

o “The experience cannot be fixed … Yet the awareness of such imagery is a part of living. It is life selecting from the forms which flow towards it or refraining, at will”.

o “A life which derives its power from within itself will focus the perception of such images”.

o “There is an outpouring of feeling into the image which becomes the soul’s plastic embodiment”.

o “The unborn child receives through the mother all his visual impressions, even while he himself is unseen”.

o The life of the consciousness is boundless”.

o “We must strive through the penumbra of words to the core within”

o “All that is required of us is to RELEASE CONTROL”. “The inquiring spirit rises from stage to stage, until it encompasses the whole of Nature”.

o “The awareness of visions can never fully be described. Its essence is a flowing”.

o “Whatever the orientation of a life, its significance will depend on this ability to conceive the vision”.

o “Of the forms which come into the consciousness some are chosen while others are excluded arbitrarily”.

o “Consciousness is the source of all things and of all conceptions”. It is a sea about with visions”.

o “My mind is the tomb of all things which have ceased to be the true hereafter into which they enter”.

o “All that is essential of them is their image within myself”.

o Kokoschka concludes with a summarising remark on the nature of imagination: "Thus in everything imagination is simply that which is natural. It is nature, vision, life”.

»We must strive through the penumbra of words to the core within« Kokoschka

2010-07-05T08:46:00.000-07:00

I am back and breathing in a post-Finals life. The first thing I have been reading since finishing my "bachelor in chemistry" (strictly, my part I of the degree, since I am yet to complete part II which is also known as the masters) is a book on Modernist art source material (Theories of Modern Art: A Sourcebook by Artists and Critics) which covers all the way from Post-Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism.

While considering Expressionism I came across two seminal essays on Expressionistic art:

Wassily Kandinsky "On the Problem of Form" (1912)

Oskar Kokoschka "On the Nature of Visions" (1912)

First let me provide some initial remarks on 20^th century German expressionism:

19^th century romantic art considered the theme of “the world and the spirit”: Experiences that go below or beyond the conscious experience. In Hegel's philosophical dialectics the Spirit denotes God. Hegel referred to the spirit of the time as the Zeitgeist.

Some notions that prevailed included I) The grandeur of the outer world being regarded as a trace of the creation of God. II) The conflicts of the inner world, the unsatisfied self, were deemed important.

Nietzsche and Hegel

For most of the classical era, man and nature were considered to be under the pastoral care of God. In the 19^th century God died (Nietzsche), and artists were not feeling too well either.

Expressionism became less of a style or a movement than an attitude of mind accompanying the tumultuousness of the early 20^th century. It concerned itself with the idea that reality was so distant and intangible that great leaps of emotion must bridge the gap. The only secure point in a hostile or insecure world was the artist himself.

Kandinsky

The first essay I consider is one of Wassily Kandinsky, the spiritual leader of Der Blaue Reiter movement in Munich. Through his work Kandinsky attempted to unify the rational and irrational. He hoped to achieve a total synaesthetic form (a dream about letting all senses melt into a total synaesthetic form). Kandinsky was probably the first artist to paint transcendental images that were completely abstract. He was initially inspired by les Fauves (Rousseau, Matisse), but gradually his painting became more abstract.

“Colour directly influences the soul. Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul”.

Kandinsky was a theosophist: He believed that the sins of man came from too much material reality. He believed a spiritual age was coming and that the right art for it would be abstract, ideal and immaterial.

On the Problem of Form: (1912)

o Kandinsky sees two main roads: The “great realism” (e.g. simplicity of Henri Rousseau) and the “Great Abstraction” (e.g. Kandinsky’s own work).

o One goal: The expression of the artist’s inner meaning.

o Form itself is meaningless unless it is the expression of an artists’ inner necessity. Everything is permitted to serve this end.

o “At the appointed time, necessities become ripe. The creative spirit (which one can designate the abstract spirit) finds an avenue to the soul” Influenced by Hegel’s view on history as the process of self-replication by which the spirit (i.e. God) comes to know himself.

o “The act of choosing, so that the spirit may take form, leads to evolution, to elevation”.

o “When the conditions necessary for the ripening of a precise form are fulfilled, the yearning, the inner urge acquires the power to create in the human spirit a new value, which (consciously or unconsciously) the human being seeks to find a material form for the new value which lives in him in spiritual form”. Kandinsky argues that the Creative Spirit is not only “hidden behind matter but also concealed within matter”.

o “People are blinded. The veiling of the Spirit in the material is often so dense that there are very few people who can see through to the Spirit”.

o “The evolution, this movement forward and upward is only possible if the path is clear, that is if there are no barriers that stand in the way: That is the external condition”.

o “Then the Abstract Spirit moves the Human Spirit forward and upward on the clear path which must naturally ring out and be able to be heard within the individual; a summoning must be possible. This is the internal condition”. Obstacles to this process include “fear”, “the deafness of the Spirit (which is dull Materialism)”.

o “People regard each new value with hostility. The new value is laughed at and abused. This is the misery of life”.

o However, Kandinsky contends that that which is new today in turn becomes petrified and an obstacle to further progress: “The joy of life is the irresistible, constant, victory of the new. The victory proceeds slowly. The new value conquers people gradually. When it becomes undeniable in many eyes, this value that was absolutely necessary today will be turned into a wall erected against tomorrow. The changing of the new value into a petrified form is the work of the black hand”.

o “The whole evolution (inner development and outer culture) is a shifting of the barriers. The barriers are constantly created from new values which have overthrown the old barriers”.

o “Hence, the new value is not the most important thing, but rather the Spirit which has revealed itself in this value and the freedom necessary for the revelation”.

o Kandinsky stresses that the Absolute / Spirit / God is “not to be sought in the form (Materialism)”. This is because “the form is always bound to its time, and is relative, since it is nothing more than the means necessary today, in which today’s revelation manifests itself and resounds. The resonance is the soul of the form”.

o “The form is the outer expression of the inner content”.

o Kandinsky stresses that every “creative artist’s own means of expression (i.e. form) is the best for him, since it most appropriately embodies that which he feels compelled to proclaim”. From this conclusion is often falsely drawn, he contends, that “this means of expression is the best for other artists too”. “Since the form is only an expression of the content and the content is different with different artists, it is clear that there can be many forms at the same time which are equally good”. This is because “necessity creates the form”

o “The spirit of the individual artist is mirrored in the form”. “The form bears the stamp of the personality” “The personality is subject to time (epoch) and space (people).

o “Each individual artist has to make his work known, so do the people the artist belongs to. This connected is mirrored in the form and is characterized by the national element in the work”.

o “Each age has its especially assigned task, the revelation possible at a specific age. The reflection of this temporal element is recognized in the work as style”. I.e. three elemnts: Personality, national element and style. Kandinsky stresses that it is “superfluous and harmful to want to lay particular stress upon only one of the three elements. Today, too many people concern themselves with the national elements in a work of art, still others with the style and recently, great homage has been paid to the cult of the personality”.

o Kandinsky hastens to explain that the “Abstract Spirit" (another of Hegel’s synonyms for God) "takes possession first of a single Human spirit; later it governs an ever-increasing number of people. At this moment, individual artists are subjected to the spirit of the time" (the Zeitgeist) "which forces them to use particular forms which are related to each other and therefore possess an external similarity”. This way a “Movement” is formed. This is “completely justified and indispensable to a group of artists (just as the individual form is indispensable for one artist)”.

o Kandinsky concludes that “the form (the Material) is not the most important thing, but rather its content”.

Work, work, work.

2009-11-20T04:23:00.001-08:00

I doubt this blog will be updated for a while since I am incredibly busy with my third year of university. In the meantime, enjoy the poem To The Virgins, To Make Much of Time by Robert Herrick (1591 - 1674):

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may:
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles to-day,
To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the Sun,
The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he's to setting.

That age is best, which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times, still succeed the former.

--Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
You may for ever tarry.

L'Éternité

2009-10-04T18:51:00.000-07:00

I have been reading Une Saison en Enfer (1873), a poetry collection by Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, so I thought I would post my favourite bit of an otherwise quite extended poem. Rimbaud's work is not always as comprehensible as one would like, given that he wrote some of it under heavy drug influence. However, there are parts of it that are truly fantastic, especially given that this was written by a teenager in the nineteenth century. Some regard Rimbaud as the first punk poet that lived. He was a libertine and traveled relentlessly. He led a very tormenting relationship with the contemporary Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine, 27, who was married and had children but nevertheless gave it all up to be with the then 17-year-old Rimbaud. Their relationship was self-destructive to say the least, with Verlaine shooting Rimbaud during a jealous fit, which eventually landed Verlaine two years in prison.

Elle est retrouvée.
Quoi ? - L'Éternité.
C'est la mer mêlée
Au soleil.

Mon âme éternelle,
Observe ton voeu
Malgré la nuit seule
Et le jour en feu.

Donc tu te dégages
Des humains suffrages
Des communs élans
Et voles selon...

- Jamais d'espérance
Pas d'orietur.
Science et patience,
Le supplice est sûr.

Plus de lendemain,
Braises de satin,
Votre ardeur
Est le devoir.

Elle est retrouvée !
- Quoi ? - L'Éternité.
C'est la mer mêlée
Au soleil.

L'Éternité (Une Saison en Enfer) - Arthur Rimbaud.

La Subversion des Images

2009-10-04T10:36:00.000-07:00

On one of the last days in Paris we ventured back into the Centre Pompidou to see a temporary exhibition on surrealist art and photography that had opened. As we discovered, the roots of surrealism can be traced back to André Breton who had begun with Dadaism, movement founded in Zürich that played a prominent role in the art scene from 1916-1922. Dadaism intended explicitly to go against the conventional views on art: Dada was not art, it was anti-art. For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. In 1922 Breton breaks away from Dadaism and forms his own artist group, Le mouvement flou (the flux movement).

André Breton, founder of the Surrealist movement.

In 1924 Breton authors the Le Manifeste du Surréalisme by which the surrealist movement is formally defined. In the manifesto, Bretón defines surrealism as "pure psychic automatism whereby one's intention is to express, either verbally or in writing, or in any other way, the real functioning of thought". While Dadaism rejected categories and labels, Surrealism would advocate the idea that ordinary and depictive expressions are vital and important, but that the sense of their arrangement must be open to the full range of imagination.

Surrealism can be regarded as the product of the impact of Freud's psychoanalysis on fine art; it emphasised the attempt to access the unconscious. Initially, the movement had been purely literary (with French poet Arthur Rimbaud being regarded as a predecessor to Surrealism), with its field of inquiry being experimentation with language free from conscious control, having examined the Hegelian and Marxist dialectics (method of argument in Western philosophy).

Arthur Rimbaud, the French symbolist poet whose work heavily influenced Surrealism, especially Une Saison en Enfer.

Thus, the movement discarded the conscious production of art and sought towards the unconscious for inspiration. It was believed that art with its roots in the unconscious was more real or true than rationalist art works. Automatic drawing and writing, in which the artist holds a pencil and tries to clear away the thoughts of the conscious mind, then simply allow the pencil to flow, was considered the closest approach to the unconscious. Surrealists following Breton practiced the Automatism form of Surrealist art.

The exhibition was very big and extremely well curated. There were several collages which had never before been exhibited publicly, and the range of media considered included photography and film. The German artist and film-maker Hans Richter became iconic within Surrealist film. His film Vormittagsspuk (Ghosts Before Breakest) from 1928 incorporates elements of Surrealism when seemingly mundane objects like bowler hats rebel against their owners. The cinematographic techniques employed (such as the reversal of the time sequence of a clip) were avant-garde within film-production at the time. The original sound track to the film was destroyed by the Nazi movement on the grounds of Richter's work being of degenerate nature.

In photography, Man Ray, Maurice Tabard and Jacques-André Boiffard considered strange and unrealistic poses, people and situations. André Breton's wife was a common motif in these photographs.

The city was a primary motif for surrealist photography. Urban themes were common, especially the city as seen during the night. The famous photograph of two men looking into a manhole succintly encapsulates surrealist thought. A manhole allows one to enter the sewer system of the city, and thereby travel within the physical subconscious of the city, if you will. The manhole was thus considered a metaphor for the door separating the conscious from the subconscious.

Within the fine art and sculpture media the exhibition considered Victor Brauner who, like Miró or Dalí, breaches the realist painting by breaking certain laws of logic and incorporating real elements in such ways that the overall composition is surrealist.

Collages were very common, allowing the artists to experiment with thoughts and ideas.

The terms collage and photomontage were not strictly belonging to the domain of the surrealists. Early photomontages dating 30 years prior to the rise of surrealism were well known. Here an early photomontage from 1893, La tète sur un plat. This could, like the poetry of Rimbaud, still be considered a proto-Surrealist work of art.

Ultimately, I consider Surrealism to be a starkly tongue-in-cheek, imaginative and very vivid movement which would go on to influence nascent artistic movements of the post-war era, especially Abstract Expressionism, Neo-Dadaism and Pop Art.

Je veux te peindre ta beauté / Où l'enfance s'allie à la maturité

2009-10-01T15:39:00.000-07:00

One evening while strolling nonchalantly by the Seine I recall hearing Jeremy, a Harvard graduate I met through my friend Angel, say that what was keeping him (and us) here was the beauty exhuberated by the city of Paris. This might be the truest of statements I heard while living in that city of aesthetes. Paris caters for both those desiring an initiation into bohemian living as well as life in a stark intellectual stronghold; it is la cité des lettres et des arts. I had the pleasure of seeing its best and worst sides: The beautiful sunset behind the Eiffel Tower as seen from the top of the Pompidou (Musée National d'Art Moderne) and the vulgar cursing of stressed Parisians crossing the sidewalk (I was called by words that included both the highly refined salope for slut and connard for asshole).

I experienced the bohemian Paris of Baudelaire first hand from my flatmate Angel's 6th floor apartment on Rue Greneta, located in Les Halles and by the Maraïs District. The locations was a Parisian cliché in itself, with excess of corner cafés juxtaposed with (now) trendy sushi bars. I must say that having seen most of Paris on several occasions, the districts of Les Halles and Maraïs are some of the nicest areas of town, neither too pompous nor too sketchy like the Parisian banlieu which I (un)fortunately experienced first-hand. Impressionist painter Monet had a penchant for Les Halles too, as seen in his painting of Rue Montorgueil (the sidestreet to Greneta).

The flat I stayed in was of a curious sort, consisting of one very large room and an adjacent toilet. It had a bunk-bed like the ones I had slept in as a child and a beautiful view from the window, the sort you can imagine but seldom actually get to see, with a number of chimneys enriching the landscape of housing complexes, only to culminate with the Eiffel Tower as the tallest point in the horizon. It is said Sartre had a habit of dining at the Tour de Montparnasse, for only there could he escape the judgmental presence of the Eiffel Tower. Now I understand why.

I started out my trip by spending two full days in the Centre Pompidou, which was only a short walk away from the flat. This culture centre is intriguing both in its exterior appearance (built in the tradition of structural expressionism) and its interior contents of fine art. The key theme of said style (like in the brutalist style) is for the building to reveal its structure on the outside and the inside, with a visual emphasis on the internal steel/concrete skeletal structure as opposed to exterior concrete walls. Inside was a temporary exhibition on l'art féministe. In their attempt to assume the role of provocateurs, the artists took the liberty to try a variety of mediums, with one of my favourite works being a piece titled "my 7 days of menstrual blood". The underlying theme was the criticism of the male chauvinist, patriarchal nature of the art world until recently. It is said that art critics used the term l'art féminin as a derogatory term to distinguish art by females from the rest. There were very big names amongst the exhibitions, including Niki de Saint Phalle (Tinguely's wife) and Barbara Kruger.

The third floor of the Pompidou houses the permanent exhibition, this being one of the best I have seen in Europe. The works were all part of the forefront of 20th century art, well displayed and intertwined with both modernist and functionalist furniture and design. Everything from Marcel Duchamp's Fontaine (of which there are 5 copies, after the original was thrown out) and Bicycle Wheel, to Tinguely's kinetic art pieces (mobiles), Matisse, Derrain, Picasso, Braque, Miró, Ernst, Rothko, Pollock, Léger. Most movements were also represented, including a tiny section devoted to the short-lived Fauvist style of 1905–1907. A truly delightful experience without precedent, bigger than Stockholm's Moderna and as imposing as the collection of the Tate Modern. I am especially interested in the Color Field style, for which there was a lot to come for. Pollock, Rothko and Kline were there, but so was Helen Frankenthaler, one of the few female abstract expressionists.

Futurism was also well represented by Russian Kasimir Malévitch as well as Braque's Cubist-Futurist work. I always rejoice in a section of Marinetti's manifesto: "We affirm that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed". This enshrines the contemporary attitudes of the 20th century with regards to the simultaneous brusque movement of scientific and artistic paradigms.

More to come later.

Aussi devant ce Louvre une image m'opprime / Je pense à mon grand cygne

2009-09-18T20:43:00.001-07:00

This is an extract from Baudelaire's celebrated poem Le Cygne, which is found in his seminal symbolist oeuvre Les Fleur Du Mal (1857). I thought it appropriate for the occasion because I am heading to Paris this week to visit my flatmates in their apartment off the Maraïs district, so no more updates for now.

I will leave you with the song French Navy by Camera Obscura from the newest album My Maudlin Career. They were great live in Stockholm. I hear they are coming to Malmö and Göteborg in October, worth checking out.

You may read the full poem below. Notice how Baudelaire laments the urbanisation of Paris brought about by the Industrial Revolution.

Le Cygne

À Victor Hugo

Andromaque, je pense à vous! Ce petit fleuve,
Pauvre et triste miroir où jadis resplendit
L'immense majesté de vos douleurs de veuve,
Ce Simoïs menteur qui par vos pleurs grandit,

A fécondé soudain ma mémoire fertile,
Comme je traversais le nouveau Carrousel.
Le vieux Paris n'est plus (la forme d'une ville
Change plus vite, hélas! que le coeur d'un mortel);

Je ne vois qu'en esprit tout ce camp de baraques,
Ces tas de chapiteaux ébauchés et de fûts,
Les herbes, les gros blocs verdis par l'eau des flaques,
Et, brillant aux carreaux, le bric-à-brac confus.

Là s'étalait jadis une ménagerie;
Là je vis, un matin, à l'heure où sous les cieux
Froids et clairs le Travail s'éveille, où la voirie
Pousse un sombre ouragan dans l'air silencieux,

Un cygne qui s'était évadé de sa cage,
Et, de ses pieds palmés frottant le pavé sec,
Sur le sol raboteux traînait son blanc plumage.
Près d'un ruisseau sans eau la bête ouvrant le bec

Baignait nerveusement ses ailes dans la poudre,
Et disait, le coeur plein de son beau lac natal:
«Eau, quand donc pleuvras-tu? quand tonneras-tu, foudre?»
Je vois ce malheureux, mythe étrange et fatal,

Vers le ciel quelquefois, comme l'homme d'Ovide,
Vers le ciel ironique et cruellement bleu,
Sur son cou convulsif tendant sa tête avide
Comme s'il adressait des reproches à Dieu!

Paris change! mais rien dans ma mélancolie
N'a bougé! palais neufs, échafaudages, blocs,
Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allégorie
Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs.

Aussi devant ce Louvre une image m'opprime:
Je pense à mon grand cygne, avec ses gestes fous,
Comme les exilés, ridicule et sublime
Et rongé d'un désir sans trêve! et puis à vous,

Andromaque, des bras d'un grand époux tombée,
Vil bétail, sous la main du superbe Pyrrhus,
Auprès d'un tombeau vide en extase courbée
Veuve d'Hector, hélas! et femme d'Hélénus!

Je pense à la négresse, amaigrie et phtisique
Piétinant dans la boue, et cherchant, l'oeil hagard,
Les cocotiers absents de la superbe Afrique
Derrière la muraille immense du brouillard;

À quiconque a perdu ce qui ne se retrouve
Jamais, jamais! à ceux qui s'abreuvent de pleurs
Et tètent la Douleur comme une bonne louve!
Aux maigres orphelins séchant comme des fleurs!

Ainsi dans la forêt où mon esprit s'exile
Un vieux Souvenir sonne à plein souffle du cor!
Je pense aux matelots oubliés dans une île,
Aux captifs, aux vaincus!... à bien d'autres encor!

— Charles Baudelaire

The Tinderbox

2009-09-15T08:57:00.001-07:00

I have been listening to Patrick Wolf's EP Vulture which contains an overlooked song called The Tinderbox. This carries a special significance for me because as a child I starred as the soldier in our school play The Tinderbox, which of course is one of the more popular children's stories by Hans Christian Andersen.

The Tinderbox is a look at Romanticist Denmark through the viewpoint of a homebound soldier who by chance meets a Witch that commissions him to climb down into a tree and fetch a magical tinderbox. Down in the hollow tree he meets three dogs with eyes as big as saucers, mill weels and the Round Tower (a famous building in Copenhagen built by king Christian IV). He returns only to find the demand of the Witch unreasonable and thus chops off her head. The storyline then proceeds to portray the soldier's love for the Princess of the kingdom. This love is of course forbidden by the then contemporary societal conventions, causing lots of problems to the poor soldier.

Patrick Wolf has interpreted the story as a bittersweet lovestory.

And now I live alone in this dirty old attic
and my friends have no strength to climb up the stairs
so in the dark (dark), I spark (spark) a small box of tinder
and your love is ferried to here

And in the endless pause there came the sound of bees

2009-09-10T12:56:00.001-07:00

I have just got my hands on Jóhann Jóhannsson's 2009 release "And in the endless pause there came the sound of bees". It is an evoking set of compositions, albeit slightly bland at times. There is a high degree of film score-nature over the album, but this makes it a very likable piece of music.

The highlights of the album are:

Escape: This track is more in line with what one has seen from Jóhannsson in the past. A dark, almost dystopian, scenario is outlined (just like in certain parts of Englabörn, like Odi Et Ami -Bis). A faint cello gets to participate in what becomes a fantastic but also slightly terrifying build-up, culminating with electronically-distorted voices blended together with beautiful choir singing.

The Gift: Reminiscent of Harry Gregson-Williams' compositions (as in the Chronicle's of Narnia score) there are both elements of hope and despair crafted in this track: It starts off in a restless fashion (very much à la James Horner) with a beautiful choir to accompany the string music.

Inside the pods: Tiny composition with the aid of beautiful piano music and the angelic choir.

One artist that accompanies Jóhann Jóhannsson very well (in this context) is the Italian photographer Roberto Kusterle, who evokes a photographic fable through his work:

Virðulegu forsetar

2009-09-08T15:44:00.000-07:00

A lot has been written about Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson's sublime attempts at transcribing human melancholy and angst into the realm of music, especially after he shocked the music community with his debut album Englabörn in 2002 (originally written for a Reykjavik play under the same name). His second album, Virðulegu forsetar (2004), is a minimalist approach to the exploration of the relationship of man and his vast surroundings.

Virðulegu forsetar consists of 4 very long but mostly calm compositions that evoke very grand feelings about a lot of things. If one reads the second album not as a continuation of the underlying themes of Englabörn -Odi Et Amo's look at the paradoxical nature of human emotions, such as love and hatred- then Virðulegu forsetar is about man's reaction of despair and fascination with his state of being as an entity in a greater, external world (call it nature, if you will); the music is a celebration of things like the vastness of the night sky, the depth of the abyss and the hope brought with every sunrise. The album relies on the juxtaposition of periods of absence of sound with periods of grand horn and organ play, as well as Glockenspiel and bells. It should be classed as a neo-classical composition because elements of electronic music are added to the overall track.

Jóhannsson meticulously instills a certain expectation in the listener about a monumental climax to come, which ironically is never realised. It is an hour-long buildup that ends in nothingness. The irony is in line with T.S. Eliot's modernist poem The Hollow Man (1925), with an emphasis on the final stanza:

This is the way the world ends; This is the way the world ends; This is the way the world ends; Not with a bang but a whimper.

It is not a novel idea to create multiple copies of a basic pattern (Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol popularised the idea within the fine arts), but the 4 tracks on the album follow the same ground principles (the last one being longer than the other three parts). I personally saw the album as an ode to Mark Rothko, one of the greatest craftsmen of repetition known. Just like listening to Virðulegu forsetar could be seen as concerning the emotions associated staring into the abyss (or the sky!), so is the contemplation of Rothko's art about the emotions evoked when looking into his abyss of seemingly monotone canvasses. They are both forms of minimalist creations (Jóhannsson's compositions are about much more than vague horn play, and Rothko's art is certainly not monotone, but is instead characterised by a carefully crafted series of layers with extremely rich texture and subtle variation).

In Rothko's serial exhibitions at the Tate Modern, consisting of multiple paintings with essentially same motif, the serialism in the art directs the viewer not towards the motif itself (because you have so many canvas that look almost the same, so which one do you choose to look at?) but towards exploring what it means to look through the multiple shades of purple, blue, red, etc that the entire room is mostly made up of. Hearing the many similar horn utterances likewise focuses our attention away from the playing itself.

Morton Feldman was the first composer to pay tribute to Rothko (this being done explicitly) with his rather special album Rothko Chapel (1971), commissioned for the non-denominational Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. This album is one of the more accessible pieces of music from an otherwise slightly inaccessible composer.

Jóhannsson's album is a musical celebration unparalleled by anything seen in recent times; it will go down in history as one of the greatest minimalist compositions of the decade. Despite it's long duration, this Icelandic composer manages to captivate the listener with the beautiful horn play that constantly remind us of the great but also terrible existence we are living. Likewise, the monumental creations in Rothko's lifetime were accompanied by great personal tragedies (culminating in his suicide).

It is said that Rothko found inspiration in the work of Nietzsche, so I have a quote of his prepared that sums up Virðulegu forsetar quite appropriately:

"If you stare into the abyss long enough the abyss stares back at you".

Collapsing at your doorstep

2009-07-26T00:05:00.000-07:00

Today I am looking at one of Sweden's most prominent electronic twee music band, Air France. Like most other fantastic Swedish artists and bands (Jens Lekman, José Gonzalez, Pacific, The Embassy) Air France hails down from the city of Gothenburg.

Their repertoire includes stunning ensembles of old audio footage set in a novel context by adding the best of cute electronic tunes.

Their debut album is No Way Down, an absolutely splendid and very innocent release from 2006.

Highlights: Collapsing at your doorstep: Combining balearic tunes with cute background lyrics "Sort of like a dream, isn't it? - No, better!" this track won itself the highlighted position of the album. The excerpt of two children that you can hear in the song comes from the 1980's TV show "Beauty and the Beast".

Caribou

2009-07-25T19:42:00.000-07:00

Daniel Snaith (stage name Caribou) is a Canadian electronic musician whose eclectic take on electronic music combined with psychedelic folk has yielded quite a fantastic result.

I am highlighting Snaith not only because of his musical prowess, but also because of his abilities in areas outside of music. Snaith, or more appropriately, dr. Snaith has a PhD in mathematics from Imperial College London, his thesis being on the topic of Overconvergent Siegel Modular Symbols.

The album I am looking at is the recently released one, Andorra.

Highlights:

Melody Day: If you take 1960's psychedelic group The Electric Hole and revise it by adding distorted electronic beats you get what Caribou obtained. It is a rather bizarre, slightly schizophrenic release because the song seems to defy classification: On one hand it is psychedelic rock but on the other there is a distinct modern feel to it.

Melody day what have I done
Now our hearts are locked up tight again
And when I pray it's all begun
Then your smile it melts away again

The music video mimicks the characteristic acid-trips of the 60's.

Irene: Low-key song with a very fine introduction where Snaith experiments with volume regulation, which adds the feeling of the music being produced at the instant (because real instruments do have their irregularities). He then proceeds to add a trumpet, vocals and other instruments to his ménage électronique.

I am not updating the blog for a few weeks since I am off to London to teach some courses in mathematics and chemistry. See you in August!

Owen Pallett

2009-07-21T18:34:00.000-07:00

Owen Pallett is a Canadian multi-instrumentalist whose (almost) solo act Final Fantasy is gaining widespread attention for its quirky and creative grounding. The first question you are asking yourself is "does this have anything(!) to do with that game series for Playstation also called Final Fantasy?". Owen explains that in an act of impulse he decided to name the act like the game he is a big fan of. You might consider that extremely unprofessional or plain stupid (since it confuses listeners and yields poor Google search results) but I think it is cute. If you want to read about horrible band names go here. Owen furthermore remarks that: "“Final Fantasy” is far more suitable than “Owen Pallett” because “Owen Pallett” is a Welsh-y name that suggests leeks, projects and ‘I’m the only gay in Aberfynn-Weldy.’ So Final Fantasy it is"

Pallett combines and juxtaposes classical instruments like violins with African drums and animalistic screams in order to create a clash of the civilized with the primal. It is not a novel idea, I am aware, but it is very effective in his case. Owen himself explains that "Final Fantasy songs are all about ghosts, romance, cooking, fantasy fiction and guilt".

The album I consider to be his best is He Poos Clouds from 2006.

Song Song Song: The song starts off with the characteristic drumming that is so refreshing about Final Fantasy. Owen's bland vocals blend in with the drumming, and there are screaming interjections in the song. The violin complements the track really well, and we obtain this bizarre higher order from hearing a combination of African drumming, screams and fine violin playing.

Many Lives -> 49 MP: The song is characterised by a serious modus operandi. Owen's vocals express great existential concerns:

Hey Timothy I wish for clairvoyance

I wanna see my wife and kids

And how I will live and how I will die

(Son you should!)

Pallett is not the first queer artist to be featured here, I also wrote about Patrick Wolf. On the topic Pallett writes: “As far as whether the music I make is gay or queer, yeah, it comes from the fact that I’m gay, but that doesn’t mean I’m making music about the sexuality specifically”.

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Nicolaus Copernicus

2009-07-17T04:40:00.000-07:00

A name for the element 112 of the Periodic Table has been proposed by its discoverer Sigurd Hofmann (and his research group). The name still needs formal approval by the IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry), but the choice has fallen on Copernicium, with element symbol "Cp". The name honours Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus who proposed a planetary model (the Copernican Model) where planets revolved around the Sun, and who was a staunch opponent of the Aristotelian belief that the Earth was the centre of the Universe.

The boy who couldn't stop dreaming

2009-07-15T12:47:00.000-07:00

Club 8 is one of Sweden's most underrated bands. There, now I said it. The band was formed back in 1995 and yet the soothing vocals of Karolina Kromstedt and the introspective lyrics of Johan Angergård are still around to mesmerize.

Today I am considering a newer release, the album The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Dreaming from 2007. The really cute texts and vocals make for a really good blend of twee pop that goes beyond the shallowness that characterises the genre. In a recent interview on Lunarpark6 Johan listed English pop from the 1980's as his main source of inspiration:

"Our musical background is with the early 80’s UK pop bands like the Smiths, Field Mice, and the Orchids. That’s where we have our backgrounds. It’s what affected us the most. On the new album, we haven’t really thought about influences. I don’t think what we have listened to in the last year influenced the making of “The boy who couldn’t stop dreaming” at all. We have been focused on making the album as emotional as possible. Just trying to make every note, every little sound, as emotional as possible. Make every note fit the song as best as possible really".

Jesus Walk With Me: The title might seem misleading, suggesting that this is another Christian, God-praising song. Johan has stated in previous interviews that the song is not necessarily about his (or Karolina's) relationship with God. It should be read as a song about a person's love for another that is as strong as that of a devout Christian towards Jesus. Faith is juxtaposed with religious skepticism in the song: "Fool me into believing / I don't care if you are deceiving me". Either way, the vocals are gorgeous and the song is deservedly the main track of the album.

The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Dream: Cute track about daydreaming. Karolina sings about her love for a boy who is quite absentminded.

Leave the North: Interesting track with a stylistic digression from the remainder of the album. Johan employs strong images to depict the desolate territories of Norrbottens Län (the upper-most county of Sweden). It is a song about leaving the land one knows for the exoticism of the South.

"I don't know why
suddenly we changed into
the very persons
we said we'd never be"

Let us go then, you and I / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table

2009-07-09T03:16:00.000-07:00

I have been reading T.S. Eliot again. The last time this happened was in high school, when we diligently read a whole collection of Eliot poems, including the famed Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917) and Journey of the Magi (1927), amongst others which I only have a slight recollection of. Prufrock, as one fondly refers to the poem, contains some dazzling lines like that mentioned above which combine such rich imagery with a deep and utter self-loath (something I very much identify with). I was mostly moved by the question "And indeed there will be time / To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"". We know Prufrock is torn between his Edwardian prudishness and his desire to express his love to an anonymous woman vaguely referenced to in the poem, and thus the question goes on to signify the impotence of the modern man as Eliot observed from a distance during the Great War. His poetry is an echo of the disillusionment of a younger post-World-War-I generation with values and conventions (both literary and social) of the Victorian era.

Modernism has always interested me probably because of the equally interesting parallel movements in fine art, architecture and music. There lies a severe contradiction at the heart of modernism, that of the seemingly limitless potential of modern industrial development adjoined with this strong sense of disbelief in the ideal of the modern man. Industry has no limitations in the eye of modernism, but man can no longer yield. We have departed from the romanticist depiction of man juxtaposed with nature to man being crushed morally by the nature of progress turning us all into anonymous beings, or in the case of Eliot, beings trapped in endless social meandering that does not get us anywhere: "I have measured out my life in coffee spoons" as Eliot ironically writes.

"I have heard the mermaids singing each to each / I do not think they will sing to me".

The sound of nostalgia

2009-07-03T02:03:00.000-07:00

I have been revisiting an old classic, the album Honey From the Tombs from 2006 by Canadian indie rock musician Amy Millan. The reason why I consider it a classic, and something representative of nostalgia for my own personal sake, is the memories I associate with the music on the album. You see, my family and I made a road trip across Sweden that year, and the only two albums I carried on my iPod were Memphis' A Little Place In the Wilderness (another gem) and Amy Millan's.

Having lived in Sweden for two years without having discovered the scenery of the Swedish countryside made the trip even more interesting. We managed to re-visit Småland (where I had spent part of my childhood) including the city of Växjö, and ultimately ended up in the Stockholm archipelago to eventually settle outside Stockholm for a while.

What the album also reminds me of is the roadtrip we did around the Great Lakes in America and Canada in 2003. Granted, I wasn't listening to Amy Millan then, but her Canadian identity resonates strongly with those memories. We started off that trip by flying from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico to Chicago, Illinois. The Windy City, as they call, is far more beautiful than the media likes to portray it (with their constant emphasis on its delinquent past and present).

We then drove up north to the state of Michigan. Michigan has a very European feel over itself, with pretty, rural architecture and lots of lighthouses. Yet, the hospitality is as American as one can get, and this is what is particular about East coast America.

Subsequently we made it to Canada (the state of Ontario). This allowed us to visit both the Niagara Falls and appreciate the splendour of the Canadian landscape. We also managed to visit Toronto, a city of high culture. Other highlights on the way included the city of Thunder Bay where we found hordes of teenagers congregating in the local shopping mall like in any other city.

Finally, we drove West to the very flat state of Manitoba. Here we visited the city of Winnipeg. It had a rather charming air over itself, reminding me strongly of a city like Växjö (it is mid-sized, cute and not too pretentious). We were at one point considering moving to Canada and we had had our eyes on Winnipeg. Alas, that never became reality and we started driving south to the American border. We drove through North Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin, to finally end up in Chicago a month after we had started. Some highlights on the way included visiting the city of Fargo, where the neo-noir film Fargo (1996) has its setting.

I would like to look at Honey From the Tombs by Amy Millan. Amy captures the true essence of the road trip across the Canadian wasteland. Her voice is at times very raunchy and rural, and somehow she manages to embody what it means to appreciate the beauty that Canada has to offer.

Highlights: The whole LP is very accomplished and there is not a song that does not belong on the album.

Come Home Loaded Roadie: Singing about the man who left her, Amy uses background drones to carry us through as listeners. She makes quite a few allusions to the lonely life on the Canadian roads. Since the distances in that country are so startlingly large one is bound to have to drive alone quite a bit:

"I can hear your wheels on the lonely highway

Ice kicked up in the February sun of the town Thunder Bay

It's all wrong while your gone

Come home and the birds will bring you honey

Come home and flowers will bloom

Come home are you as lonesome

Come home soon

East to west, north to south, blind in the pines of highway 69

Thirty loads in thirty nights, thirty cities and dirty dashboard days

It's all wrong while your gone"

Losing You: "Your eyes are like burned-out headlights". Amy's melancholy about her irrevocable loss is effectively coupled with banjo music. Call her a hillbilly, maybe, but her talent goes beyond that.

Skinny Boy: Another country-sounding track perfect for listening in the car.

Wayward and Parliament: An observation on Canadian life:

"Man made moons they go on one by one
When the sun is done for the day
That's when the girls come by through the silver blinds
We'll watch the drinking lie on the pavement
That's our sentiment
Down by the railway the bicycles are there
An apocalyptic fair for the alive
It's a sign the messengers they bring
With their stainless steel wings on a 45

That plays our lullaby"

Taken By Trees

2009-07-02T17:49:00.000-07:00

For those acquainted with the Concretes (see previous blog post) the name Victoria Bergsman will ring a bell. The picture above perfectly illustrate this musician's extremely elusive nature. She has given few interviews, which have been quite unhelpful when it comes to characterizing Victoria.

On why she left the Concretes to start her solo project Taken By Trees she says:

I didn’t enjoy touring and being away from home as much as the rest of the band and I didn’t like to do shows that much either. I am very shy and easily feel uncomfortable. Another thing was that I started to lose belief in our ´democracy´ approach. I don´t think you can create something really true in a big group. I think I create art better on my own, otherwise you must compromise all the time and that wont lead you anywhere. I didn´t like the roles we started to adopt and become and not question it. I think it is important to question things all the time and be strong enough to say no.

Today I am looking at Taken By Trees' album Open Field from 2007. The album has the innocent vocals which characterized The Concretes' album Hey Trouble. Enough with the Concretes, I feel Victoria's solo effort is commendable and did not lead to the same outcome as when she created with the remainder of the group.

Highlights:

Cedar Trees: Overall a very cute song about love that did not quite work out. It starts out with a tropical-sounding entry incorporating xylophones and other good stuff. The song is really relaxing to listen to, and well worth a try.

"Will you will you will you be my friend,
Even though love came to an end?"

Sunshine Lady: Appeals of escapism abound in this song ("I cried me a river and hoped that it would come with a river so we could set sail, for faraway"). The structure of the song is very simple (it is based on one instrument) and generally pleasing.

Tell Me: Continues the recurrent theme of childhood flashbacks we saw with the Concretes ("Tell me, when it is time for me to play, cause I do not want to be left standing alone without a hand to hold"). The song is also based on repeated guitar play over-layered with Bergsman's vocals.

I have also got a new pair of shoes given that the last ones I owned had massive holes in the soles. It was embarrassing because in some pictures you could clearly tell, like in the following one taken in Trinity College, Oxford.

Overall, Victoria has managed to add her own personal touch to Taken By Trees which I feel she thought was not possible with The Concretes given the number of band members and each individual's fleetingly different ideas on how the band has to progress.

He regresado compañeros

2009-07-02T04:27:00.000-07:00

If I could afford it I would go to Way Out West in Göteborg this summer to see Patrick Wolf. He cancelled at the Oxford Union after feeling too intimidated to speak there. I don't blame him, seeing as the likes of the Dalai Lama, Winston Churchill, Mother Teresa, former US Presidents Nixon, Carter and Reagan as well as Albert Einstein have spoken there.

Today I am considering the overlooked past of American folk musician Andrew Bird. Bird is mostly known for his single performance as Andrew Bird yielding fantastic tracks like Masterfade, but there is more to come for with the 1990's band Andrew Bird's Bowl Of Fire.

Andrew Bird is a multi-instrumentalist, and he utilizes this in his favour with Bowl Of Fire, incorporating jazzy instruments like the trumpet with violins and percussion.

The first album to look at is Thrills from 1998. The music is a mixture of 1930's Django Reinhardt gypsy jazz with modern elements of folk music. Bird is a skilled troubadour and makes use of this, too.

The main track of the album is Minor Stab, which in my opinion takes on Django's famed track Minor Swing. The trumpet sounds exquisite, and Bird's vocals (which is where the song departs from Reinhardt's style of no vocal incorporation) are narrative and charming. An instant classic.

Somepeople was an angry thin skinned man

Couldn't get along with his one man band

Quarter stick rocket and nails in his pocket

And a crying shame, Somepeople is his name

Poor Old Pierrot Somepeople

What an unfortunate name

Some people have the low down notion

That he is the one to blame

The other track to highlight is Eugene. There is a Cuban jazzy feel over the track. Once again Bird's narrative vocals strike a resemblance with the likes of Jamie Cullum and the whole 1990's jazz revival movement.

Bird also takes up old Swedish folk music in the track Swedish Wedding March. This follows in the tradition of the likes of Romanticist composer Johan August Söderman's Bröllopet på Ulfåsa.

Overall, a swingy album with lots to come for. Definitely part of the better side of the tragic decade of the 90's when it comes to music.

Exams

2009-06-10T06:44:00.001-07:00

I have not been updating the blog because of the prospect of my rather terrible second year university exams in physical, organic and inorganic chemistry. Wish me luck!

In a week I shall be sitting under a massive portrait of Karl XII, King of Sweden in some of the most beautiful settings one can be in while under exam conditions. Oxford University has a monument of a building devoted for the sole purpose of exams (The Examination Schools) and the thought of going in there again does not make me happy.

Oh, and we have to dress up (we call the attire sub fusc) in order to be allowed into the examination hall... If you wear brown socks instead of black they can fine you sums of over £20... You must carry your mortarboard (the square cap seen on the picture) but not wear it except for in official buildings.

A number of myths surround subfusc and its use in examinations - for example, that subfusc has a counterpart in 'full fusc', said to be a full suit of armour, which if worn to Finals examinations automatically results in a student being given a First (ie. the highest mark attainable); or the claim that a student read the examination handbook prior to his finals and discovered that all students sitting exams in subfusc are entitled to a glass of sherry. He demanded his due in the exam, and the University's Proctors duly responded, before fining him one shilling for failing to wear his sword, allegedly also part of the archaic statutes.

Camera Obscura

2009-05-08T11:35:00.001-07:00

The Scottish band Camera Obscura released the album Let's Get Out of This Country in 2006. This is one of the few flawless indie pop albums currently out on the market, and so is definitely worth a closer look. Camera Obscura epitomised the revival of bands that sound like 1950's and 1960's pop groups by means of employing instruments one would associate with bands like the Shirelles (Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?), including the slow drum sequences famously pioneered by the Ronettes (Be My Baby), organ-like music, tambourines, and so forth.

Camera Obscura is not to be confused with the Swedish band the Concretes, despite head vocalists Tracyanne Campbell (Camera Obscura) and Victoria Bergsman (the Concretes) looking like twins and having identical voices.

Victoria Bergsman

Tracyanne Campbell

Highlights:

Razzle Dazzle Rose: This is the song showcasing the musical talent of the band. While less publicised than the other songs of the album, it shows technical skill beyond simple pop bands. The incorporation of trumpet play is startlingly effective with long interludes of trumpet solos. The song title is cute and based on a very particular Crayon colour we all used as children. The mellow, nostalgic mood of the song is chilling. No one does indie pop like Camera Obscura.

The False Contender: Cute mellow pop song about lost love. The keyboard play in the song is brilliant as it recreates that mood of ancienity and lost youth which Camera Obscura frequently refer to.

I once had a love, but soon had enough
For he was the false contender
He got so thin, there must have been
Deep sorrow gnawing away at him

Lloyd I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken: Aimed at musician Lloyd Cole as a reference to his 1984 hit Are you ready to be heartbroken, you might not find heartache as enchanting as this anywhere else. This is the pop song of the album, with Tracyanne mellowly singing about the sorrows of breaking up.

Contemporary classical music with a bizarre twist

2009-05-07T07:13:00.000-07:00

Nico Muhly, another 25-year old Juilliard School graduate, has made his mark in the world of music by means of his eccentrically beautiful compositions that are hard to forget once exposed to. His chef d'oeuvre is the album Mothertongue from 2008.

Mothertongue should be regarded as an example of unorthodox contemporary classical with heavy experimental elements showcasing Muhly's wide range of skills ranging from electronic elements, to string instruments, trumpet music, weird vocals, lyrical music and incorporated poetry.

Highlights:

Mothertongue 1. Archives Muhly juxtaposes beautiful classical music with both whispering voices, singing voices, electronic drones and static noise. It has the air of a dystopian technocracy while allowing for the Mezzo-soprano singer Abigail Fishcher to shout out numbers, place names and addresses that all stand as a testament to the modern age of chaotic urban living. It is a musical kaleidoscope of the finest kind.

Wonders II: The Devil Appear'd In The Shape Of A Man: One could see Mothertongue as an exploration of storytelling in music. Wonders II starts off with a narration in a Shakespearean fashion. The narrator presents himself and tells the audience that the story he is about to declaim is truthful. He then starts by describing a "Stranger, Parisian" coachman who encounters the Devil in the shape of a man while driving on a road in the English countryside. The Devil asks the coachman to drive him to a certain church yard. The story then takes on another twist and the narration continues for a few minutes. This occurs in the presence of harp music which slowly turns into bizarre Harlequin-style music. The narration in the song is beautifully done.

Au Revoir Simone

2009-05-04T18:47:00.001-07:00

The trio of pretty girls Heather D'Angelo, Erika Forster and Annie Hart from New York are back with the fabulous album Still Night, Still Light which has release date set for May 19 2009. I have been lucky to get my hands on it before its commercial release, and wow what an album it is.

To define their music a little more precisely, Au Revoir Simone are well known for synth-based ethereal, dreamy pop. It is uplifting and very laid-back music, which is extremely well crafted.

Highlights: The song of the album is without a doubt Another Likely Story. The synthesised ambient background music is very nice to listen to, the vocals are surprising and the song overall is a joy to listen to if you enjoy childlike-music. There are both drone elements and hi-hats. They are trying to create a folk track without folk instruments, and it works. It is the perfect dose of cute electropop for a lazy Saturday.

Norwegian electro/retro-futuristic pop

2009-05-03T11:44:00.001-07:00

Röyksopp (hailing down from Tromsø) are back with their album Junior released in March. I have had the luck of getting hold of it, and while stylistically they have changed a lot since Melody A.M. and their hit Poor Leno, they have not changed for worse. In fact, this has to be of the best electropop albums of the year. They manage to mix cute electropop with darker retro-futuristic sounds. This time they have got aid from some of Scandinavia's biggest vocal names: Robyn (!), Karin Dreijler Andersson from the Knife, Lykke Li and Fever Ray. The general theme that is so well known of retro-futuristic music is alienation. In The Girl and The Robot, for instance, it is the alienation of man in the face of a world run partially by robots whose work ethic is unparalleled and whose emotions are non-existent.

Highlights: The album is packed with uniquely sounding tracks. Let's look at the best:

The Girl and The Robot: Starring the amazing Robyn in a duet with Fever Ray concerning a dystopian relationship between a girl and her cyborg boyfriend. Robyn's vocals are perfect for the role and this must be the song of the album.

Baby I can't stand it when you go to work
You never seem to know when to stop
I never know when you'll return
I'm in love with a robot

Röyksopp Forever: Despite an awkward, self-praising title, this is the track that proves Röyksopp's worth as an electronic band. While The Girl and the Robot is the poster boy of the album, this track is far more sophisticated when it comes to musical prowess. There is a subtle mixture of electronic with contemporary classical music which is rather well pulled off.

Tricky Tricky: Featuring the head vocalist of the Swedish band the Knife, this is the other track worth listening to. The electropop beats are more apparent in Tricky Tricky and the upbeat sentiment is cool. If you're a fan of the Knife this is worth looking for.

Patrick Wolf

2009-05-02T09:50:00.000-07:00

The 25-year old multi-instrumentalist Patrick Wolf is well known for playing 16 instruments, having worked with music all his life, and these include clavinet, harp, harpsichord, guitar, piano, autoharp, organ, mountain, dulcimer, clavichord, harmonium, accordion, theremin, ukulele, spoons (!), harmonica, mandolin, viola and violin. He combines contemporary classical music with electronic music and other fantastic quirky sounds making his albums sound very distinct.

Patrick Wolf is also known for being rather eccentric in his performances, and became involved in an online feud with celebrity-blogger Perez Hilton over something rather petty. His latest moment of indecision includes rumouring to quit music for good after being fed up by the lifestyle and the psychological drain of being in the spotlight:

"dear all...
I should never have read this.. I really shouldn't. I dont think when I was 16 and dreamt of releasing records there would ever be so much crazy speculation about the person I am and that you want me to be. I have become so tired of this behaviour, sometimes I wake up and have to do six hours of interviews before doing a show, then go straight to bed to sleep a couple of hours to fly to a new country to be cross examined in the same way.. I dont know what is left of me sometimes, some mornings i dont know how i get on the flight or even open my mouth to sing that night. If I choose after working since the early hours of a day and then pouring my heart out for an hour and a half that I really have nothing left to give.. that I cannot be a fake politician and sign autographs for an hour.. does this make an asshole?
because my drummer was causing arguments within my road family, taking sedative drugs before an important show in a city i really love, so much so he could not play the music I wrote, the songs that I have survived on in the last six years... because I had to slap him to see if he was even CONSCIOUS on stage.... the fact that the only thing that got any reaction out his corpse happened to be made of metal.. because all of this.. does this make me seem like I was on cocaine, or on some power trip? I was pissed off because this was just one more musician or businessman taking my good nature and generosity for a ride... trust me, that moment onstage was the end of a long line of bad behaviour that it would unfair to go into in public. Yes I was drunk, but It was one oclock in the morning after seven hours of interviews.. i had been running on about four hours of sleep a night for about two weeks... such is the joy of promoting a record. Anyway, I was having FUN until that moment. So was the rest of my band until we realised my drummer was taking the piss out of all of us and our hard work. I dont work with liars and I dont work with thieves.

I dont want to have to share this information with you but so many seem so interested...

I have made a decision, my final concert will be this november, a retrospective with an orchestra in London. I am not sure wether there will be anymore public communications after that, Infact I am pretty sure there will be none. Of course, this has nothing to do with my drummer.. but a creative clock is ticking and I have many many projects to be creating with my time left on this earth. I hope to share my last shows with you this year.
still love x patrick."

Today I am considering the 2007 album the Magic Position.

Highlights: The song of this album is in my opinion Magpie. It includes a guest performance by Marianne Faithful. The song is a flurry and somewhat melancholic example of the strangeness of his work:

Magpie, was it you who stole the wedding ring?
Or what other thieving bird would steal such hope away?
Magpie, I am lost among the hinterland,
caught among the bracken and the fern,
and the boys who have no name.

It is truly an interesting song aided by the husky vocals of Marianne.

April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land

2009-04-26T09:08:00.000-07:00

It is said that strangers have come up to Icelandic musician Jóhann Jóhannsson and hugged him upon listening to his album Englabörn. I personally have not listened to an album of such profoundness in a long time. With Jóhann Jóhannsson slowly rising to the foot of mount Olympus, people will soon be forgetting about Sigur Rós and wondering what ever happened to Björk. Mr. Jóhannsson has established himself as the foremost Icelandic composer of our time.

The album Englabörn from 2002 is the debut album of mr. Jóhannsson, and one could not tell from a quick listen to it. Originally written for the Icelandic play Englabörn by Havar Sigurdjonsson, it was re-released upon being discovered as the gem it is.

Highlights: Where does one start when the album is flawless?

Odi Et Amo: The poem Catullus 85 by Roman poet Catullus was set to music by Jóhann Jóhannsson. This poem is an intriguingly short (lasting 2 lines) exploration of the conflict of human emotions:

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask.
I do not know, but I sense that it is happening and I am tortured.

The music is hauntingly beautiful, with vocals reciting the poem multiple times.

Karen Byr Til Engil: Has a Múm-air over itself. Use of toy pianos makes it very interesting.

Eg Sleppi Per Aldrei: Magical track building up heavily using string instruments, it is a gorgeous demonstration of contemporary Classical music with electronic elements incorporated. When I say it is magical I mean it, the music is like taken out of a fairy tale.

PS: The title is a reference to a former Mertonian's body of work. Can you guess whom?

Symmetry

2009-04-23T14:40:00.001-07:00

One of the most unravelling aspects of theoretical chemistry (and physics) is the study of symmetry. If one can classify the realm of Platonic solids and chemical structures into "groups" (known as point groups because one element is invariant under any symmetry transformation) then it becomes apparent that physical properties of the members of each group share common traits. This then allows for a systematic classification and prediction of properties of all known chemicals in a very hasty fashion. Chemical symmetry has gained a respectable place in any chemist' education because the theory is so elegant and the results so startling, especially because symmetry becomes a powerful tool in quantum mechanics, reaction mechanism studies and much more.

Symmetry relies on the mathematical sub-realm known as group theory. It is elegant, very easy to visualise and works neatly.

So next time you look out of the window, regard the symmetry as a manifestation of the elegance of nature.

Repose in blue

2009-04-22T15:25:00.000-07:00

Once again I am awe-struck by the art that the city of Portland engenders. Matthew Cooper is better known for his project Eluvium which is characterised by expansive music covering minimalism, electronica and piano genres. Today I am looking at the album Copia from 2007.

Highlights:

Seeing You Off the Edges: One of the most powerful metaphors about suicide (or death) in modern times. This track is what distinguishes Matthew Cooper from the rest of the music community.
Indoor Swimming at the Space Station: Long, introvert sequence of minimalist electronic music that examines the condition of being. There is optimism and wonder in the track. One word: mesmerising.
Repose in Blue: Introspection and less pessimism than in Seeing You Off the Edges.
Prelude For Time Feelers: Piano-incorporated electronic sounds.

Not only is Cooper an extremely elusive musician, his body of work carries an air of privacy that I find with few other artists. The music is expansive in the sense of the tracks broadening up as they progress.

The second album I am considering of his is the triumphant Talk Amongst the Trees from 2005. There is a tenderness in the way he composes tracks like New Animals from the Air, and the music offers a far closer insight into whom Matthew Cooper might be. The music on this album is less expansive and maybe more quirky. The electronic beats are more unpredictable (despite following a fixed pattern) and the sound is a little more grainy (which is really cool).

Highlights:

New Animals From The Air: I see this as an examination of a journey across the sea. There is an air of youthful hope and playfulness. Serenity rules in an otherwise grainy track relying heavily on electronic minimalism.
Show Us Our Homes
We Say Goodbye To Ourselves: Very peculiar track recurring to organ-like music with electronic background noise.
Area 41: Beautiful expansive music. Lasting 59 seconds it is a short electronic utterance.
Taken: Lasting a total of 16:56 it is an electronic ballad that is very interesting.

Dream pop

2009-04-20T07:35:00.000-07:00

I am standing with Asobi Seksu's album Citrus from 2007. This New-York based dream-pop band is so incredibly uplifting it is no wonder their popularity on the internet has sky-rocketed. Playing along on the shoegaze wave of the 80's, 90's their music is like a harder, more upbeat version of what Cocteau Twins were in the eighties. They incorporate elements of indie rock which makes the band rather special. There are elements similar to bands like Blonde Redhead.

Highlights: The feel-good song Goodbye incorporating bittersweet pop melodies into sensual, sonically ambitious soundscapes:

Once I had a girlfriend
she made my heart just want to die

It is music that is plain fun to listen to. For more ethereal sounds, consider the collaboration of Asobi Seksu with Ulrich Schnauss. Schnauss has remixed a lot of the band's releases into some fantastic low-beat dream pop releases with lots to come for if you like experimental music. Consider for instance the Ulrich Schnauss remix of Asobi Seksu's Strawberries. It has the characteristic ambient feel that Schnauss is famous for, while incorporating the amazing vocals of head vocalist Yuki.

Animal Collective

2009-04-19T13:59:00.000-07:00

Strawberry Jam is the Animal Collective release of 2007. It is an LP packed with experimental indie rock music that has lots to offer.

Highlights: I keep smiling after listening to Fireworks. The song has a very long build-up, with repeatable chord progression. There is such an upbeat feeling about the album that it reminds me of Broken Social Scene due to the sheer amount of volume that the songs take up (the sound is dense, if you want). If we take Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl as an example, the build up in both songs is similar. We are talking about several minutes of escalation only to be followed by an elusive climax. Equally, the track reminds me of Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, the album by Sigur Rós, with specific reference to the tracks Gobbledigook and Inní mér syngur vitleysingur (the two upbeat tracks of the release). Finally the track has an element of shoegaze over it à la Blonde Redhead's 23.

I don't know if I would call the release Avant-garde. I would have to know a lot more about music theory to actually tell if the elements of percussion in the track are in any way different from what has been done before. I would, however, say that there is an air of playfulness in the song unlike much of what has been seen before.

American indie pop and folk music

2009-04-18T12:22:00.000-07:00

I am back to blogging regularly now. It is such a great form of procrastination.

Today I am looking towards America for musical inspiration. Firstly, a lot has been said about the sensible lyrics of Sufjan Stevens, and while I cannot get enough of his music (he even made a brilliant interpretation of traditional Christmas songs which I might come back to on a more appropriate occasion) I think he is getting overexposed in various media forms, which might tire me after a while.

I thought I would bring you guys a song of his that has not been played as much on the radio: Pittsfield is a tiny village located in the state of Illinois, and is one of many songs about the America that is not always portrayed by the media, the America of normal people's lives. Sufjan sings about the small bits of life with a social-realistic tone: The loss of childhood friends in the Gulf War (Pittsfield), the lives of mass-murders (John Wayne Gacy Jr.), losing a friend to bone cancer and the tenderness of the first caress(Casimir Pulaski Day), the blinkering lights of the metropolis (Chicago), ... He pretty much touches on what it means to be American in the good sense. There is a lot of material on the exploration of the human condition in the US. I see him a bit as the Annie Leibovitz of music.

Sufjan spoke about this song in an interview: "The most personal one is "Pittsfield". That one's based on a lot of memories from my childhood, and I sort of transplanted them into this miserable little town in Illinois. Pittsfield is very similar to some of the small towns we grew up around in Northern Michigan." In the song he sings about a child being neglected by his mother. There is a recurrent theme of neglect in his music. Sufjan sings about the families we do not hear about normally: The dysfunctional, unhappy ones. It is worth listening to.

The other recurrent theme of his music is Christianity. Sufjan is very open about his beliefs, having made covers for most traditional Christian ballads like Amazing Grace and Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing. While I am non-religious I really find his interpretation of these songs intriguing. There is such honesty in his music, and his use of banjo gives it that extra edge which makes them great works of art.

For a more lively band I turn to Mates of State. A Kansas-based duo consisting of the married couple Kori and Jason. Their indie rock is joyful. The vocals provided by Kori are strong and the lyrics are uplifting.

Highlights: The song Get Better whose video has a Donnie Darko feel over itself with the recurrence of the bunny outfit. Do not read too much into the song. It is cheerful, that's all.

Swedish twee!

2009-04-18T00:40:00.000-07:00

I have been listening to 1980's Swedish twee / indie pop, especially the Smiths-inspired band Happydeadmen. Self-proclaimed as "the band that saved Swedish pop in the 80's", Happydeadmen have a lot to offer in terms of evidence for the early stages of independent pop in Scandinavia that is not Roxette or Cardigans. Formed in 1988 (the year I was born) as a response to the fact that Swedish indie music equated that of punk or goth rock, they wanted to introduce more bland, introspective music with lyrics that dealt with more than Punk alienation in a world that rejects social deviants. They prepared the music scene for later successes of the Cardigans, Popsicle and the rest of 90's indie pop in Sweden.

Highlights: The song Silent Sigh City carries an air of authentic late 80's nostalgia marked by high unemployment rates in Scandinavia. I personally find it to a very nostalgic release as it reminds me of my childhood summers spent in our summer house in Sweden. I guess it is the sound of having grown up.

London, emopop and 1980's britpop

2009-04-17T11:12:00.000-07:00

I am back after a great trip to London, which consisted of 6 days of teaching chemistry and mathematics at the premises of Regent's College London (a school for the affluent, nouveau riche) which is located in the heart of Regent's Park, in Bloomsbury. I lived at accommodation of the London School of Economics, which is much better than what London is reputed to offer, and yet it does not meet the standards I find at Oxford (I get my own room at uni for the price of a shared twin room in London). I really enjoyed teaching the courses, and the atmosphere was very international, with students hailing down from all the confines of the planet. I had jet-lagged students from the US who had flown all the way to London to take my course. That was neat.

I also had 2 days off in London and managed to squeeze in a visit to the Barbican, the British museum, a sushi restaurant and a Russian restaurant (at the company's invitation) with live Balkan music, which was pretty cool.

I lived with two other Oxford students who happened to be very nice people (I already knew one of them so having to live together was cool).

The first band I am exploring today is an American emopop band called Owl City, and the album is Of June released in 2009. The band consists entirely of this bloke Adam Young who is pretty talented both vocally and musically.

Highligths: The song Fuzzy Blue Lights has a nice piano background tune and good vocals. The synth solo is well located in the middle of the song. The reason why this band is emo is pretty obvious from the lyrics that are all about unattainable love and a mellow outlook on life:

If I was walking through a sad art gallery
And you were driving through the night
I'd feel rather alone and I'll at ease
Beneath the brilliant showroom light
If I was flying on a plane above your town
And you were gazing at the sky
Somehow I'd feel intact and reassured
If you began to wave goodbye

The album is better than your mainstream pop release. There is introspection about life and the band comes across as "genuine" in my opinion. It is, however, still emopop. It doesn't go any further or pretends to be anymore than that.

The second band I am considering is the British band Mystery Jets and their fantastic album Twenty One from 2008. Heavily influenced by 1980's Britpop (the Smiths?) it is indeed a pleasure to listen to.

Highlights: The song Two Doors Down. The song draws heavily on Morrisey's vocal style, and main vocalist Blaine Harrison looks like something out of Tim Burton's universe, or like a combination of Syd Barret and Robert Smith from the Cure. The music video is a great attempt at recreating the cliché of the 80's as the decade of oversized clothing of the wrong colours and poor video effects. This gives it a humorous air.

London Calling

2009-04-11T03:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was my day off in London so I decided to go to the Barbican Gallery (which is by the Guildhall School of Drama) to see a fascinating exposition on Le Corbusier and architecture.

It was divided up into 3 parts: Context, Modernity and his Works. Le Corbusier shaped the mentality of the metropolis with its concrete strongholds and the alienation of man in a world of stone-cold indifference and anonymity.

Highlights: Le Corbusier's also tried his luck as a film producer. I saw this film at the Expo:

I am now heading off to the British Museum. See you later!

Hipster Alert!

2009-04-06T22:10:00.000-07:00

After writing that post about Laura Marling I decided to do a follow-up on hipsters, the victims of my upcoming rant.

Firstly, let me define what I mean by a hipster: Young middle class white person who claims to be "alternative" by being interested in non-mainstream media and culture and yet move from trend to trend according to what is currently popular, while claiming to be "outside" of mainstream culture.

In other words, conforming bourgeois hypocrites that claim to be different by wearing Converse shoes, listening to indie music, taking "alternative" pictures of stoney walls and dirty side alleys, as well as wearing those horrible specs that suddenly became popular:

Here is a quote by another blogger on the nature of hipsters:
"They don’t seem to subscribe to any particular philosophy or particular genre of music. They are "soldiers of fortune of style" who take up whatever is popular and in style, appropriating the styles of past countercultural movements such as punk, while discarding everything that the style stood for."

South Park had a go at hipsters in the episode South Park is Gay!, where the male trend in town, metrosexuality, becomes an meaningless appropriation of gay culture. Gay culture as you may know is associated with rather flamboyant dress styles in order to mark their distinction as a movement. When metrosexuals made claim of tight trousers they were essentially ruining what gays had fought to establish as their trend for decades.

For more rants about hipsters there is a good blog called Hipster Runoff, which essentially takes the piss out of people pretending to be alternative while driving a Mercedez Benz. The entry I like the most is an attack on Devendra Banhart, the no. 1 hipster today.

My dislike of Banhart (né 1981) derives from two factors: (1) He has appropriated 1970's folk music as if it were his own. Ever heard of Marc Bolan (recording under band name T. Rex)? Devendra's albums are a complete plagiarised version of Bolan's four acoustic albums recorded as Tyrannosaurus Rex in the late 60s/early 70s. Banhart - talented maybe - is a direct copy!

(2) As soon as Banhart hears about yet another forgotten but re-discovered folk artist from the seventies (Linda Perhacs, Vashti Bunyan, ... you name it) he will stalk her up until she concedes to perform along with him. That way he gains even more credibility as an "authentic folk artist".

This image sums up the seeming contradiction that lies at the nature of people like Banhart. On one hand they root for the folk movement of pacifism, vegetarianism and political activism, while on the other hand they endorse the mainstream capitalist culture via consumption of Apple products whose identity has slowly been forged by means of heavy marketing campaigns that create supposed connotations to such values:

Laura Marling

2009-04-06T21:12:00.001-07:00

I am not the biggest fan of Laura Marling, simply because I find some of her work slightly pretentious and/or to be an imitation of Joni Mitchell, Linda Perhacs, Sibylle Baier and all those other folk artists. This teenager tackles issues like mental illness and adult suicide in My Manic and I in a way that makes her seem far older than she actually is (née 1990). All those grainy effects of the promo video make me think of Jack Wills and all the rahs at Oxford wearing that terrible, senseless brand, so I shout "Sell Out" from the confines of my bed (it is 06:20 after all).

Disregarding the fancy editing, I cannot deny that her voice is pretty amazing for her age, and that she can come across as authentic, especially in The Captain And The Hourglass

Let me know what you think, but please abstain from writing "Fuck the haters". I don't hate her per se.

The Partisan

2009-04-06T14:08:00.000-07:00

One of Leonard Cohen's most powerful songs must be The Partisan, a translation of Chant des Partisans, a French anti-war song about the brutality of the Vichy regime.

Cohen's English cover is haunting because of the seeming way it fades in -and fades out again- so inadvertently: It is like a whisper of protest that is quickly passed on through the masses, but also quickly dies out. To honour the song my entry stops here.

Music for lazy sunny days

2009-04-03T13:05:00.001-07:00

I have prepared a short list of tracks to take with you to the beach / the picnic in order to celebrate the arrival of spring (at least in Sweden where I am on holiday):

Sunny Road by Emiliana Torrini

Honey and the Moon by Joseph Arthur

Everything Will Be Alright (Will's Lullaby) by Joshua Radin

Take Some Time by Rose Melberg

Casimir Pulaski Day by Sufjan Stevens

Us by Regina Spektor

New Slang and Australia by The Shins

Almost Honest by Josh Kelley

I Love The Rain The Most by Joe Purdy

If This City Never Sleeps by Rosie Thomas

Time On Your Side by Emily Jane White

Breakable by Ingrid Michaelson

Anyone Else But You by The Moldy Peaches

Heartbeats by José Gonzalez

The Greatest by Cat Power

Clean Getaway by Maria Taylor

I Saw You In The Wild by Great Lake Swimmers

I Feel It All by Feist

Homesick by Kings Of Convenience

Naked As We Came by Iron and Wine

Fiery Crash by Andrew Bird

Huckleberry Finn by Anders Persson Och Carl Smith

To Hide This Way by Taxi Taxi!

The Last Trick by Anja Garbarek

Handle With Care by Jenny Lewis and the Twins

Losing You by Amy Millan

Butterfly Morning by Hope Sandoval

Pocket Knife by PJ Harvey

In The Cinema Alone by Memphis

Rosemary Lane by Espers

Oliver James by Fleet Foxes.

Ballad of Bitter Honey by Eef Barzelay

Willow Tree by Chad Vangaalen

Beautiful Things Can Come From The Dark by Azure Ray.

TBTF by Kevin Drew

Avant-gardish: Post-Rock and Experimental

Down From Above by Vetiver

Don't Bother They Are Here by Stars Of The Lid

First Breath After Coma by Explosions in The Sky

Harmonium by Rogue Wave

TV Peace Please by Television Pickup

Arch Dance With Trumpet by The Christian Wallumrød Ensemble

Dansbanan by Detektivbyrån

Collapsing At Your Doorstep by Air France

Passport Radio by Broken Social Scene

Twee

Kids by The Concretes

Mornington Crescent by Belle And Sebastian

Subtle Changes by Sambassadeur

Cedar Trees by Taken By Trees

Emma's House by Field Mice

So Responsible by Laura Waitling

La De Da by Milky

The Land Between the Solar System by Múm

Rocketship by Red Sleeping Beauty

Are You Still Evil When You're Sleeping by Siddeleys

I Love You More by The Softies

On Peak Hill by Stars

You and Me by Tiger Trap

The Opposite Of Halleluja by Jens Lekman

Unga Hjärtar by Kalle J.

Indie Rock

When Did Your Heart Go Missing by Rooney

A-Punk by Vampire Weekend

The Sound Of Settling by Death Cab For Cutie

Open Your Eyes by Snow Patrol