Goin’ Back to Tropicália

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s near impossible that an art exhibit focused on Brazil would not have some sort of musical or otherwise sonic content, and the current show at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco is no exception.

Titled When Lives Become Form: Contemporary Brazilian Art, 1960s to the Present, the sprawling show takes for its poster a retouched photo of young (and almost comically well-endowed) Tropicália leader Caetano Veloso, his red cape and exaggerated smile making him look like an art superhero.

Key among the exhibited works is “Cabeça Acústica” (Acoustic Head), a 1996 object made from aluminum, rubber, and a single hinge by the artist Marepe, a Brazilian born in 1970. It is shown here:

The acoustic head is situated in the show below a framed photo of its employment in a performance, as shot by Marcondes Dourado, and made available courtesy of Galeria Luisa Strina in São Paulo, Brazil. The same photo appeared in another show, How Latitudes Become Forms, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis back in 2003:

The Marepe “Cabeça Acústica” object holds its own, whether used as an icon of Brazilian art, or of culture in an age of globalization. As with any sound-related art that is presented in silence, the Marepe piece embodies a certain ambiguity. In this case, does it symbolize focus or myopia — is a human whose head is placed inside the gadget benefiting from the emphasis on sound, or cut off from site, smell, and other senses?

In addition to the Marepe piece, there is in the back of the YBCA exhibit a large room in that pulses like a daytime rave, its colorful installation walls featuring an ongoing projection of Warhol Factory”“style communitarian art playfulness by the ensemble Assume Vivid Astro Focus (AVAG), aka Eli Sudbrack and Christope Haimade Pierson, plus various friends.

The When Lives Become Form: Contemporary Brazilian Art, 1960s to the Present exhibit opened on Nov 5, 2009, and will close on Jan 31, 2010. More details at ybca.org.

Killing Prog: Amendola, Dimuzio, Evans, Mendoza & Dominique Leone

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It wasn’t the night that prog died, though it was billed as “This is what happens when you kill prog.”

On the postcard for the concert held last Wednesday, January 13, at Cafe du Nord in San Francisco, “Kill Prog” was in large letters in the center, set in blood red against a darker background image that seemed to show the ceiling of a tunnel.

The image was appropriate, even if the musicians assembled at the basement-level speakeasy had come not to kill prog but to unearth it. They were tunneling back in time, to an era of jazz and rock fusion, and approaching it with a mix of rigor and affection.

If they were killing prog, they killed it they way one kills one’s heroes — to whittle away the lesser aspects, until what’s left is admirable enough to hold up to one’s standards.

The headlining quartet (shown below) featured Scott Amendola (Nels Cline, Charlie Hunter) on drums, Thomas Dimuzio (more adventurous, noise-minded projects than even could be hinted at here) on keyboards, Jon Evans (Tori Amos) on bass, and Ava Mendoza (Mute Socialite) on guitar. Together they summoned up a mix of Discipline-era King Crimson, and more broadly the fusion bands that flourished as various individuals left various “electric-era” bands of the late trumpeter Miles Davis and ventured down various different paths. Mendoza in particular mixed Crimson leader Robert Fripp’s looping and arcane scales with Adrian Belew’s penchants for backward effects and squawking seagull sounds.

At times I found myself thinking of MVVP, the New Orleans supergroup consisting of Stanton Moore, Johnny Vidacovich, Rich Vogel, and George Porter, though Amendola and company were less interested in trance-like communal music-making, and more in simultaneous individual soloing that allowed for stark, illuminating contrasts.

The opening act, the Dominique Leone Band, was a modular ensemble led by Leone on keyboards and vocals (the latter as nakedly impassioned as they are self-effacingly thin) — “modular” because a trumpeter and saxophonist occasionally joined the core of Leone, Matt Ingalls (clarinet), Shayna Dunkelman on Xylosynth (the sonic palette of which shifted with each song), and a guitarist whose name I didn’t catch, and who moved between electric and acoustic. Leone’s original songs channel pure-pop melodies and emotions through a performance style that is deeply informed by minimalist composition, by intricate melodic patterning and extended, dreamy repetition — the result suggested Animal Collective covering the works of Steely Dan, or of Steely Dan covering the songs of Philip Glass.

More on the musicians at scottamendola.com, thomasdimuzio.com, avamendozamusic.com, and dominiqueleone.com. Above image of Amendola and company from a set at flickr.com/photos/michaelz1.

Images of the Week: Xenakis’s Architectural Scores

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

These two drawings by Iannis Xenakis are currently on show at the Drawing Center in Manhattan as part of the exhibit Composer, Architect, Visionary. The top one is “Study for Terretektorh” (c. 1965-1966), the bottom “Study for Metastaseis” (c. 1953). Both are parts of graphic scores that characterize the abstract, percussive, maximalist, highly demanding (for both musician and listener) work that Xenakis created up until his death in 2001.

There’s been something of a surge in interest in graphic notation of musical composition in recent years, notably in the Every Sound You Can Imagine exhibit, first staged at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (October 2 – December 7, 2008) and later, in expanded form, at the now sadly defunct New Langton Arts in San Fransisco (February 5 – March 28, 2009), as well as the show Between Thought and Sound at the Kitchen in Manhattan (September 7, 2007- October 20, 2007). All these shows, like the Xenakis one, focus on the non-traditional strains of compositional visuals that flourished in the mid to late 20th century, and the arrival of the 21st.

There’s numerous other illustrations at drawingcenter.org, as well as videos that show how the images correlate with the sound of the particular pieces, among them these two: youtube.com, youtube.com.

The beauty of these videos is how clear and precise that correlation is — how what seems visually cacophonous and wildly extrapolation on paper proves to be fairly Newtonian in terms of the direct relation between image and sound, vector and continuity, density and volume, and so forth.

The show just opened on Thursday, January 14, and it is open through April 8, with a variety of talks and performances occurring throughout that run.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • RIP, Dannie Flesher (age 58), Wax Trax Records (Ministry, Underworld, Meat Beat, KMFDM) cofounder, industrial patron: http://is.gd/6fWsB #
  • ♫ Afternoon audio-stream: Gill Arno's eerily still field-recording soundwork courtesy of @soundwalk: http://is.gd/6dCH5 #
  • Darn good (and long) list of artists/inventors who work at the intersection of art and science: http://is.gd/6a52r (from andshakers.com) #
  • Noticed in last night's flashbacky episode of Fringe that "clairaudience" wasn't originally in show's opening-credits extrasensory litany. #
  • Morning sounds: no dogs, no cars, no planes, no birds, the rare bus, the neighbor's laundry, the siren hum of the hard drive. #
  • Off to Fillmore, 2nd concert of 2010: Cake, whose John McCrea wrote great sound-minded lyrics for Kinky's "Headphonist" http://is.gd/5ZcVc #
  • I miss the live cams of the Finnish-Russian border crossings. They all seem to have long since gone dead. #

Quotes of the Week: Machover, Banalaties, Suspicion

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The MIT Media Lab legend and early music-technology figure Tod Machover contributed a rangy essay at nytimes.com this week. After a brief autobiography, he talks about the relative democratization of music technology, and then about an opera he’s been at work on. In the process, he expresses his own concerns about the pace of progress and the potential negative influences of technology:

“Musical technology is so ever-present in our culture, and we are all so very aware of it, that techno-clichés and techno-banalities are never far away and have become ever more difficult to identify and root out. It is deceptively challenging these days to apply technology to music in ways that explode our imaginations, deepen our personal insights, shake us out of boring routine and accepted belief, and pull us ever closer to one another.”

And yet, as is so often the case online, the comments are riddled with enmity. One commenter writes, in full,

“One more marketing guru talking about ‘The Future Of Music’. What’s the name of his iPhone application we must buy to be considered cool hipsters?”

Another:

“This man is obviously desperate for big-figure grants.”

The culture war isn’t an entirely contemporary affair, either; writes a third,

“As far as music technology and pop music is concerned, you can directly trace the collapse of songwriting to the explosion of studio technology in the ’70’s.”

Another commenter goes all ad hominem, attacking not Machover’s ideas or his expression of those ideas, but his

“unbridled egotism and hubris.”

While the comments (55 as of this writing) aren’t necessary reading — nor are all of them negative — they do lend context to Machover’s article. Even for all the populist success of his efforts over recent decades — as he notes, Guitar Hero and Rock Band resulted from ideas explored in classes he has taught — the mesh of music and technology (more broadly, of art and technology) remains a potent source of suspicion.

Full piece at nytimes.com.