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Ridiculously dark photos from "Low Level Allstars," a performance night at Jeffrey Deitch curated by Cory Arcangel and Radical Software Group, highlighting demoscene graphics and new music made with old computers. Below: crowd pleasers Bodenstandig 2000, from Germany, with their beautiful, all numerical MusicMon interface in the background. The sounds they wring out of three square wave generators and practically no memory-load relative to current music simply bugger the mind. Their 8-bit drum and bass number would have had any club audience in the world screaming "rewind!" A mock rock video featuring Bernhard Kirsch (right) zipping through city streets on his scooter (you had to be there) also drew shouts of adulation. (Update: from his website it appears he designs these scooters and this was a promotional video? Sorry, my German is nonexistent.)
Performing earlier were Nullsleep of the 8bitpeoples crew, who specializes in that tuneless Gameboy stuff Malcolm McLaren likes, followed by Tree Wave (below), previously discussed here. Excellent drone-rock, as in John Cale, Faust, Kevin Shields, all done with Ataris and other vintage computers, and a hacked dot matrix printer. Lauren Gray's vocals work best when woven into the restricted tonal range of the music, as on "Sleep," a song as haunting live as on CD. The more expressive she is the more incongruous. On their cover of Eno's "Needles in the Camel's Eye" she almost sounded like a country singer--which turned out to be a very odd and good choice, though. The song should always be done that way!
The event included artists' talks and some fairly subtle music but the audience topped the charts for rudeness, issuing a stream of loud chitchat that didn't stop the entire night. Maybe it was the cases of free Red Stripe, or possibly the same swine that invaded vertexList a few months back moved to Deitch en masse. I mean, boogeying during Bodenstandig doesn't offend but there's a time to stand still (or sit) and shut up: like, when there are people on the stage talking into microphones. The worst club in Baltimore wouldn't treat performers this poorly. Art poseurs and moronic Deitch scenesters, kiss my ass! Okay, I feel better.
A final note: you can catch the same lineup of performers again tonight (Thursday) from 7 -10 pm. Also in photos: Dragan Espenschied (top photo, left); Paul Slocum (bottom photo, right). More thoughts on Bodenstandig here, here, and here.
"Strychnine Express" [mp3 removed] (my acid techno track; strychnine molecule from google images)
Audio Sketchbook
"Demo Primeval" [mp3 removed]
"Mr. Arkadin" (Club Mix) [mp3 removed]
"Apres-Midi" [mp3 removed]
"Apres-Midi (Clicks)" [mp3 removed]
"Desultory Arcade" [mp3 removed]
"Reel for Omniverters (Baroque)" [mp3 removed]
"Fangasia" [mp3 removed]
"Bass Iterator" [mp3 removed]
"Demo Primeval" is a mashup of demo samples for two products: the Beatburner and the Mutator, with some gratuitous metalizing added. Some of the tunes are MIDI drum files downloaded off the Net and used to trigger regular, tonal notes in a synth or sampler. A couple of tracks are reworkings of older tunes using better instruments. "Bass Iterator" is the sampler pretty much playing itself: all that dramatic stereo panning just started happening. I call this a sketchbook but these are all finished, if fairly modest, pieces.
Delirious Hong Kong: Check out Michael Wolf's photos of architecture there. Please tell me these are photoshopped:
(another hat tip to Lorenzo Bustillos)
Images from the spacebloom website, teaser for a high concept book about imaginary space flora. I'm not that into the somewhat giddy narrative side of it ("The fbloom prototype consisted of four solpans, two alseco betteries, a conventional emag propulsion unit, and a UPU, all of which were mounted around a tubular frame that housed the centrepiece: the unimbler-based matter processor"), and prefer these elegantly designed computer images against a white background to seeing them superimposed against starscapes. So I guess this is another minimalist remix. (Hat tip to Lorenzo Bustillos)
Noah Lyon reports:
"Someone sent me these pics just this morning. I had given a couple of these stickers to one of Christo's installation crew members a few months ago. He was a German fellow that I happened to sit next to on a flight to Paris. I even suggested he give one to Christo. So maybe this was an inside job (?)Jeanne-Claude will find that crew member and rip his lungs out for spoiling the "feeling" and "their aesthetic." Besides, we don't want to think about war now. We want to think happy thoughts.
UPDATE: These photos give you a good sense of how oppressively low the nylon curtains are, so that when you're walking through them you feel like you're in a subway tunnel. (You also get a good view of the clunky, provisional "feet" they're standing on.) A New Yorker posting on Sally McKay's page waxes eloquent that the gates opened his eyes to the beauty of the park, but I maintain that beauty is always there. Quite the opposite of being outward-looking, the gates hem you in when you're walking through them--they momentarily frame your experience as something cold, mass-produced, and corporate, eclipsing the subtleties of the surrounding natural environment. I believe they are hegemonic and unconsciously hostile, manifesting the relentless desire for power of the rich but frustrated Jeanne-Claude and her dated, captive husband.
