JAPAN EDITION: BUILDINGS IN MOTION

1. Karlheinz Stockhausen performing at the Expo '70 in Osaka, in the German Pavilion, which he helped design.

2. THE CHANCE DISCOVERY
of the June 2003 issue of Yale's architecture journal, Perspecta, while rooting through magazines at ProQM, Berlin's premier English/German art and design bookstore, yielded an encounter with an excerpt of Kobo Abe's novel, The Box Man.



This is the edition that I just found in an East Villag bookstore, deep in leisurely pursual, similar to how any junkie picks at the scab of his addiction when in the throes of one of life's hollow interludes.

The Beckett-like story of transient lives in Tokyo carried out beneath the shelter of a carefully-designed cardboard container serves as a striking literary foray into the magazine's theme of temporary architecture.

A worthy soundtrack to this story, I would say, would be the German artist Alva Noto's collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Insen. Its spare, evocative electronic manipulation of Sakamoto's piano playing is a strong sonic example of 'buildings in motion': it has at the same time a transient, ephemeral quality, as if watching leaves disintegrate in a wintry gust, but also its static, ambient dimensions give a feeling of shelter, domain and anchor. As if one had taken the large shipping container which had previously housed a new refrigerator, cut an eye slit through the upper front, and without a second thought, had abandoned one's comfortable apartment. Seized by a nameless, nomadic compulsion that had blown in one day through the floorboards.

In other words, it's a great cold weather ambient record, one you can work to, stare at dying trees to, and be a Japanese homeless wizard in a box to.

ALVA NOTO & RYUICHI SAKAMOTO - 'INSEN'

Plus like doesn't the album cover totally look like a cardboard box???

3. TOKYO = NEW YORK + LAS VEGAS

In the midst of high-tech urban overload, LCD and neon haze, streams of light and sound, a 24-hour electrified day, there's often suddenly a kind of rural stillness. as if the sheer excess of digital stimulation transforms into the experience of seeing a massive waterfall, or an ancient glacier, or an unfathomably dense redwood forest.

I won't forget a night going through Tokyo alone, while my host was at her part-time job at a restaurant, listening to Chris & Cosey's "Walking Through Heaven", which suddenly revealed itself as if for the first time.

Stung by this nocturnal passage, I went to make two videos. The first, Shibuya Overdrive, features original music and video. The second, Training Through Heaven, is a supervision demo clip, featuring Chris & Cosey synced to the sci-fi scenes from Wong Kar-Wai's 2046.

Shibuya Overdrive, 2006



Training Through Heaven, 2007


4. RIYL: FACE-MELTING JAPANESE PSYCH!!!

Recently printed primer to insane Japanese psych band Les Rallizes Denudes. SO INSANE I HAVEN'T EVEN LISTENED TO IT YET.

is it good?

For real though it is ENDLESS SONIC FLAMETHROWERS OF PHASED WHITE NOISE DESTROYING YOUR MIND IN OUTER SPACE BECAUSE YOU ARE AN ASTRONAUT AND YOU ARE SO BAKED

ITS LIKE DID YOU SEE THAT MOVIE 'SUNSHINE' BY THE DUDE WHO DID TRAINSPOTTING? IT'S EXACTLY LIKE THAT!!

this is so psych that I couldn't even find a good jpg to use, because the sound destroys all images.

CAPITAL (IT FAILS US NOW)

Following an opening at the rivington arms gallery, stina and I had drinks with justin and christine, an artist couple whose project is that they think of things they want, ranging from a slice of pepperoni to an iphone, then paint said thing, then sell it for the price that the thing costs. Effectively incarnating the thing by painting it.
You can check them out at

http://www.wantsforsale.com

When the talk strayed into astonishment at the wild west that is today's speculative art market, they mentioned a swiss artist who was also involved in conceptually responding to the further interpenetration of art and finance, such that the scheme for buying his paintings was a complex model of bonds, where each painting could be 'cashed-in' after a several year period.

It became clear to me just how divergent their field was from my own in relation to contemporary capitalism. Music and art these days could not be more opposed in terms of money. Digital music, infinitely copyable, impossible to fence in, is this kind of frustrating threshold of capital, which is always trying to fight it, to domesticate it, profit from it. Technological reproduction is forcing the music industry to radically mutate. The art scene, on the other hand, is almost the apotheosis of capital, because it's based on these highly coveted rare objects with no real use-value. There's something absurd and fascinating about how the market has discovered how to make a use out of these purposefully useless objects.

That's where I part company with classical Marxism regarding the economic substructure. Economy doesn't determine culture, technology does. Today technological reproduction of music outstrips the economy, or acts as its limit point.

This leads to me to one of the central focuses of this blog, which is the singularity of listening. There's little white-box experience of music like there is of art in a gallery. Because music is disembodied and immaterial, the material contexts of when and where and how you hear something are more significant. So instead of writing about what a piece of music is, I tend to think about the particular time and place when I heard it, because that ends up being crucial to the illuminating experience of listening.

Electronic dance music is a very good example of this, because it is so heavily dependent on context that any single track can range from being unlistenable to glorious depending on how loud it's playing, what time of day it is, how much you've had to drink, who else is in the room, etc.

On that note, here's a contribution to the Beach House genre: "Hawaiian Island" by Sorcerer. Sort of if Manuel Goettsching bought a yacht and set sail for the lands of smooth disco. Their track "Surfing at Midnight" is also on the Milky Disco comp which I highly recommend.

Courtesy of the wizard who has no home

SORCERER - 'HAWAIIAN ISLAND'





And from allez-allez, Sorcerer makes you a delightful mix, full of sounds sure to evoke the gentle crashing of brightly airbrushed waves on cotton jersey.

SORCERER - A FLICK OF MY MUSICAL WRIST 2