the blue room

UNDERCOVER

BY GIANPAOLO ARENA

The editorial Undercover opens to contaminations between music, photography and contemporary art in its broadest sense. Photography as a tool for a complex communication which takes in the womb multiple metaphorical meanings. The interdisciplinary nature of these discussions intimates depth, suggests paths, reveals links, and indicates relations between languages ​ that feed on one another. Photographies for the ears.

Originally published on Urbanautica, more here:

http://www.urbanautica.com/undercover

“Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust” (With a Buzz in Our Ears We Play Endlessly) is the splendid title of the Icelandic band Sigur Rós’ fifth studio album, produced by Flood and recorded in New York, London and Havana. This album merges the stylistic features that make this band unique, in light of a new awareness and maturity. Symphonic and choral outbursts; acoustic glimpses embellished with crystal-clear piano phrasings; long suites opening to occasional forays of euphoric and dynamic electricity; ethereal arrangements, celestial voices as mystical and dreamy atmospheres; a mellotron to fill a carpet of sounds and noises; a crescendo of orgiastic drums and psychedelic expansions define this album. In the cover photo we see between nudism and naturism, the same sense of freedom; a frenetic vitality, a tremendous joy and confusion of the senses of a restless youth. Ryan McGinley, born in 1977 in New Jersey, moved to New York where he studied graphic design and was introduced to photography. Living in close contact with the gay and hipster East Village, he began portraying his friends and fellow travellers. Although in accordance with the existence of excesses, vices and obsessions of Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Wolfgang Tillmans, Ed Templeton and his friend Dash Snow, Mcginley stands out for the fun, the exuberance, the joy of living and the amazing momentum that characterizes his life and his aesthetic gestures. Reality and fiction converging, the desire to make intimate public, alternating from immediate and spontaneous images to more controlled and someway ‘built’ ones, low resolution images, the brilliant colours and an easy approach to photography are chosen and practiced as a ‘philosophy’ and a peculiar glance on the world. 

LINKS

Sigur Ros “ Gobbledigook” with Bjork at Naturra

“Friends Forever”, a film by Ryan McGinley

“Film Diary of Agnes B Paris Exhibition 3+1” with Ryan McGinley, Harmony Korine and Dash Snow

“Dash Snow interview” excerpt ‘You Doing You’ by Daniel Joseph

The Destroyed Room: B-Sides and Rarities is a compilation by Sonic Youth containing 11 tracks from the period 1994 to 2003, the band’s transition years to a more accessible and less sharp sound. The album is also the farewell to Geffen, but it is neither a greatest hits collection nor a live album or remixes. In fact, there were bonus tracks released for the Japanese market that belonged to the compilation’s original lineup like “You Can Never Go Fast Enough, ” “Pola X”, “At Home With The Groovebox”, “All Tomorrow’s Parties 1.1” amongst other new tracks. The album, which sees Jim O’Rourke complet-ing the training stable in 7 tracks, highlights the band’s instrumental and soft electronic experimenta-tion, but is certainly not among the essential things by Sonic Youth. The gift, however, is the expanded alternate version of “The Diamond Sea” for 25 minutes, among accelerations, decelerations, feedbacks, subtractions, dissonant interludes, a chase and a series of dreamlike atmospheric moments and ecstatic melodies. The guitar textures, the reiterations of rhythm and expansions on the body of sound generate a disbelief tension towards the immaterial. The path of Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Steve Shelley and Lee Ranaldo has crossed that of the New York downtown scene, the reckless path of the avant-garde art and the fascination with the iconography of Pop. It is no coincidence that the cover choice was the work by Jeff Wall, a lightbox work from 1978. Stemming from the Canadian artist’s love for the great nineteenth-century Western paintings, particularly the encounter with the opera The Death of Sardanapalus (1827) by Eugène Delacroix, the photograph combines Classic painting’s three-dimensionality and the sense of scale with the atmosphere of popular film and advertising. Built in the studio with a manic attention on details, Jeff Wall’s large-format becomes an idea to address philoso-phical issues related to representation by transforming the photographic image into a painting of modern life. At the same time each image is a moment of lived experience, a drift of the real shifted through the accidental development of the variable of time. Like the “publicized privacy” that we find viscerally reproduced in 1998 by Tracey Emin’s “My Bed”, the intimacy and detail of his private life are shared in a dialectical relationship with the viewer.

LINKS

1) Sonic Youth “Beautiful Plateau”

2) Jeff Wall “Video”

3) Eugène Delacroix “The Death of Sardanapalus”, 1827

4) Tracey Emin “My Bed”, 1998

Rick Moody is one of the most known and appreciated contemporary American writers, author of The Ice Storm (1994) and Purple America (1996). In the first of his two albums released under the band Wingdale Community Singers, he is the author of beautiful lyrics, also playing and interpreting the songs of the album. With him are Hanna Marcus on piano and vocals and David Grubbs on guitar, piano and vocals. Former Squirrel Bait, Bastro and Gastr del Sol with Jim O’Rourke, Grubbs is one of the key figures in the Chicago music scene. Collaborator of Red Crayola, Brise-Glace, John McEntire, Bonnie Prince Billy, Niobe, Tony Conrad and Mats Gustafsson, he recorded solo short masterpieces in balance between melody and experimentation. In recent years he developed collaborations, in the context of sound art, with important media artists such as Anthony McCall, Angela Bullock and Doug Aitken. He also became the director of the Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) at Brooklyn College in New York.

The fifteen songs that give the album a country-folk array echo the great American musical tradition, from the Basements Tapes of Bob Dylan to avant and post rock lightings, making this record full of intimate tones, confidential and sensitive. The cover shot, taken from Alec Soth’s  “Sleeping by the Mississippi” series, concerns about America itself, its spaces sometimes boundless, sometimes intimate and gathered; a service station in the snow with its back to a cemetery, a ray of sun touching the mountain, too shy to heat up. They are from the cold, silent and snowy landscape of Minnesota, to the crossing of Wisconsin, Iowa, Kentucky, Illinois, Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, Mississippi and Louisiana. Among these places there is the house where Johnny Cash spent his childhood in Dyess and the river where Jeff Buckley dived for the last time in Harbor Marina, Memphis. The book, which was very successful, tells the modernity that emerges, crosses and retraces the centuries old course of the strong verbal and visual tradition of this country. Alec Soth, author of this reportage on the “social” landscape made ​​during several journeys along the great river, documents the everyday and the extraordinary story of these areas of the United States. Almost like a sad dream projected into the coming days.

LINKS

The Wingdale Community Singers “Blue Daisy”

Rick Moody reads at NY State Summer Writers Institute 2010

Gastr del Sol “Our Exquisite Replica of ‘Eternity’”

«Alex Chilton, described by some as the fragile incarnation of the beautiful loser, left us over a year ago at the age of 59 after a heart attack, just days after the death of Mark Linkous aka Sparklehorse. In 1967, at the age of seventeen as the lead singer of Box Tops, Chilton reached the top of the U.S. singles chart with the single The Letter. His full artistic maturity as a singer, guitarist and songwriter came after joining the band Big Star with whom he recorded masterpiece albums like “# 1 Record” (1972), “Radio City” (1974) and “Third / Sister Lovers” (1975). The band of Alex Chilton and Chris Bell was influenced by The Beatles, Byrds and Velvet Underground, but it brought its own identity with a power pop open to the influence of folk and soul; a country-rock acid and lysergic fruit of an artistic vein creative and elegant as much as dissolute and iconoclastic. There are countless bands that pay a strong tribute to the psychedelic pop of the first three Big Star albums: REM, Replacements (who titled one of their songs simply Alex Chilton), Soft Boys, Smithereens, Posies, Teenage Fanclub, Lemonheads, Elliot Smith, Primal Scream, Wilco… 

The cover of Radio City is one of the most famous pictures of William Eggleston. A naked white light bulb anchored to a red ceiling on a web of white threads. The author timidly points out to an evocative access to the sense of mystery and its enigmatic value. A picture that describes with extraordinary creative power and decisive synthesis the extreme beauty of one of the masters of American color photography. The marginal subjects, aesthetics of everyday life and its concerns, the threat and the danger lurking in the normal range will later become strong influences for film works like Blue Velvet (1989) by David Lynch and more. 

The simplicity and yet complexity of everyday life and relations between human beings are faced with no hierarchical assessment of subjects, treated democratically. The Democratic Forest is the title of his most important project in the 80s, preceded a few years earlier by a portfolio entitled William Eggleston’s Graceland, which contains a series of images taken during a visit to the residence of Elvis Presley. From Elvis’ birthplace Tupelo to Big Star and forward, Eggleston has in several times crossed dissonant moods and sounds of the twisted world of rock, from True Stories (1986) by David Byrne to the album covers of Alex Chilton, Primal Scream, Chuck Prophet, Silver Jews, Joanna Newsom, amongst others. We’ll talk about again in the future, but for now do not miss the photographer’s cameo role as a pianist in the video “Lived In Bars” by Cat Power. William Eggleston says about his photograph in the cover of the Big Star’s second album: “It’s just a picture I offered out of the blue,” … “I Happened to run into Alex [Chilton], and he said, ‘I’d love to use it ‘. I Said, ‘You’re welcome to’. There’s no more to that story.”»

LINKS
Big Star “September Gurls”
William Eggleston “By the Ways, a journey with William Eggleston”
Cat Power “Lived in Bars”