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Good to see you, kelley!kelley » Sat Nov 09, 2013 1:32 pm wrote:quick skim and looks fantastic
very dense and lots to ponder
thanks for posting
I found that post the other day, and nearly jumped outta my chair. Thank You, kelley. And Thanks too for Saurian Tail, who began that thread.kelley » Tue Feb 07, 2012 8:39 am wrote:if it's an eagle, herald of the gods, symbol of the republic, projection of empire, aquila, aigle de drapeau, nazi adler . . . if it's a dove, the figure represents not simply 'world peace', with the literal spelling of the word in place of an olive branch, but the appeal (as related to both plea and desire) of this concept. if nothing else, the comportment of this vague shape suggests to me the holy spirit hovering above the mystic of the lamb in jan van eyck's ghent altarpiece, which depicts an eternal reign of the divine christ.
this is what i mean by pastiche. there's no poetics of ambiguity in madonna's presentation of this iconography. instead, it's just the muddled esperanto of a procession of styles that's come to characterize 'postmodernism'. there's no wit in the quotation and no understanding of the reference; it really is drained of any suggestive or expressive power beyond the will of the individual who brandishes it.
MacCruiskeen » Sat Nov 09, 2013 2:52 pm wrote:From the film Berlin Now, 1985 (Dir: Wolfgang Büld & Sissi Kelling): "Tomorrow Belongs To Me":
The song "Der morgige Tag ist mein" was already well-known in the anglophone world due to the English version used 13 years earlier in Bob Fosse's Cabaret, and six years before that in the original Broadway musical:
Musik: J. Kander; Text: Fred Ebb
But the history of its composition (and reception) is more interesting than you might think.(Caveat lector.) -- On Edit: I decided (nobody asked me to, by the way) to remove that embedded link to a far-right US site. No reason why they should get traffic from RI. You can find a very brief and much less detailed (but sufficient) history of the song here:
http://duranduran.wikia.com/wiki/Tomorrow_Belongs_To_Me
Allegro » Fri Nov 08, 2013 9:54 pm wrote:Here’s the excerpted continuation of Ian’s excerpt in the above post. The music journalist, Ms. Bick, does have a way with words in that it took maybe three times reading the Halo review and listening to several of Halo’s recordings to get with Bick’s handy use of words on Halo’s behalf. I rather enjoy her writings since reading her reviews of others, too.
Highlights mine.
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The Quietus | Chance Of Rain Review
Emily Bick on Laurel Halo | October 29th, 2013 09:39Halo’s sonic palette combines this with cartoonish noises, filtered to sound scuzzy, brittle, gloopy, melted. These effects highlight manipulation and play, and blend with the soft-focus keys of some fern bar and quaaludes Paul Simon late 70s come down to create something grounded, specific to place, anchored in time. The track names here are all about dreams, what is real or archetypal, chases, mirages, all ideas that depend on a material foundation. The cover art - a drawing by Halo’s artist father from the 70s - shows gravediggers pulling up as well as burying coffins, while random men hang around, lounging in other coffins like they’re squashy coffee bar couches, or staring out into a distant field. In the foreground, a man who looks like a cross between Freud and Dracula grouches away.
In ‘Serendip’, Halo cues up about ten layers of low end, skittling around each other at different speeds and occasionally coming together. It sounds like one of those gravity well coin funnels at science museums where the coins all spin past each other, speeding up as they reach the bottom. When these reach a peak, hi-hats build an out-of-phase cicada chorus of fog, while swipes of clear, bright chords doppler past before the bass drops. What Halo does here is play with time, with these loops and layerings, these stacks of slides, while also staking territory within it as the track picks up pace, and scrolls ahead.
Her great leap is to move beyond retro-emulation for its own sake (conjuring ghosts from half-recalled soundtrack textures, however treated, is well and good, but what about the present, or the future? What comes next?). She also avoids the post-internet aesthetic of manipulation prevalent in both images and music. That sort of tweaking acknowledges the modular nature of pixels or bitstreams as objects in their own right, and applies filters, steps and repeats to create uncanny products that bear so little resemblance to their original sources that they can pretend to have sprung from the void. The album’s press kit points out that all instruments were played by Halo to generate the source material used. To be clear, this declaration of and pride in an origin point is, thankfully, not the same as authenticity. That’s a fetish that should stay in the twentieth century where it belongs, along with the idea that disconnected individualist atomisation is viable or even possible. (Would it even make a difference where Halo got her samples from? It’s not like you can say “pics or it didn’t happen”. It’s more interesting that she was bothered to make this kind of declaration at all.)
< end excerpt >
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In this Spin interview of Ms. Halo, she talks about how she constructs her works, how she produces dance music, and why she prefers not to sing live.
IanEye » Tue Oct 29, 2013 5:32 pm wrote:.
.Time, post-internet, works in two ways online. There's the slide/slice: the object, the moment, the discrete unit of time that acts as a node in the flat internet universe. Then there's the scroll/stream: this is stuff like Facebook or Twitter feeds; it appears to flow linearly, but it's essentially a skeuomorphic calendar filter applied to an aggregation of the flow of slides, because once new things are added, and then become part of the flat agglomeration of data, they are never lost. Lived time is another beast entirely: it seems to be linear, but memory isn't; bodies droop and look progressively worse in selfies; the second law of thermodynamics kicks in. There's a lot of post-net art that addresses the possibilities and trauma caused by the first two conditions while completely ignoring the third.
Chance Of Rain is one of the first albums I've heard that fully acknowledges, let alone addresses, these contradictions and compositionally works across all three modes of perception. All the tracks on Chance Of Rain are instrumental, anonymised and therefore more universal. Halo combines the time-sliced gloss of the digital eternal present - the short-phase loops of sound, the textural stamps decoupled from their eras of vogue declaring the infinite, brutal flatness of everything ever imagined available all at once - with the kinds of jazz piano chord progressions last seriously heard in the early 80s. Opening track 'Dr. Echt' begins with unfolding rolls up and down the keyboard that evoke the expansive wonder of structures used by new age composer Pauline Anna Strom, recording as Trans-Millennia Consort, on tracks like 1984's 'Alpine Flight'.
LINK.
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Yes, I tend to agree, Luther Blissett, and Thanks for posting .Luther Blissett » Sat Nov 16, 2013 8:12 am wrote:…and electronic music honed in on cultural critique and a realization that the millennial generation will not have it better than their parents no matter what they do.
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