August 26th, 2009
Sacred Bordello is one of my all-time favorite books about one of my all-time favorite artists. In an explosion of color and stark black and white, it chronicles the whole life and insanely multi-hued career of Charlemagne Palestine, who has been pushing the Milky Way-wide padded envelope of minimal music and maximal art since the middle of the 20th century. Starting out in New York City in the late 1950s as a student of accordion and piano, Charlemagne scored some early experience as a drummer for beat poets and Tiny Tim. In the ’60s, he studied piano, painting and sculpture, improvised some electronic drones, played the carillon at a church and composed music for the Tony Conrad film Coming Attractions.
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Posted by Arcane Candy
August 15th, 2009
Named after the Higgs boson, a massive scalar elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model in particle physics, Daniel Higgs made his first appearance in the musical universe via the 1980s hardcore punk band Reptile House, who went nova in 1986. Lungfish emerged from the stellar nursery soon after in 1987 and released the Necklace of Heads 12″ on Simple Machines. Almost immediately thereafter, they found their permanent home in the Dischord galaxy, where for the next 20 years, Higgs and company created music that was challenging and thought-provoking. The most prolific of any Dischord band, Lungfish recorded 10 full-length LPs for the label before going on hiatus in 2006.
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Posted by Arcane Candy
August 1st, 2009
Voice Crack was a Swiss noise duo consisting of musicians Andy Guhl and Norbert Möslang. They formed in 1972 as a free jazz outfit, but abandoned that format in the early ’80s to experiment with what they called “cracked everyday electronics,” which consisted of small, cracked open appliances rigged up with amps. This set-up produced sounds that could turn on a dime from a sparse clatter to an all-out noise tsunami.
The Sound Shifting book documents a sound art installation constructed by Norbert and Andy at the 49th Venice Biennal in 2001. It’s composed of a lengthy series of full-page bleed, closely-cropped blurry abstractions captured by a digital camera. Although one would never know just by looking, the subject of the photos highlights all of the hustle and bustle of traffic on the Canale Grande, one of the many busy waterways of Venice, Italy. Likewise, the CD is filled with nearly an hour’s worth of skittering, reverberated drones and occasional noise outbursts captured by an underwater microphone at the same location.
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Posted by Arcane Candy