{electronica} – Page 133

Reworking Kraftwerk

Ralf and Florian, 1973.

It’s a common problem when you like a musical artist so much that you own their entire catalogue: where to go next? In the case of Kraftwerk the problem has been exacerbated by the group’s famously sluggish rate of production: the last studio album was in 2003, the one before that was 1991. Cover versions are one solution, of course, and Kraftwerk have the advantage of providing simple yet memorable melodies that can stand no end of sonic mangling. I linked to a favourite Kraftwerk cover at the weekend, the Balanescu Quartet’s version of The Model. What follows is a list of favourite Kraftwerk cover albums (as opposed to one-off tracks). Given the vagaries of the music business some of these may now be deleted.

Possessed (1992) by The Balanescu Quartet

Robots
Model
Autobahn
Computer Love
Pocket Calculator

Kraftwerk are among the gods in the firmament of Mute Records so it’s not so surprising to find an erstwhile electronic label releasing an album of arrangements by Alexander Balanescu‘s string quartet. The Kronos Quartet were in the vanguard of working quartet variations on rock or pop music (their self-titled album from 1986 included a version of Purple Haze) but Balanescu’s arrangements still stand out for attempting to render electronic music with string instruments. Model is particularly good.

Trans Slovenia Express (1994) by Various Artists

Zrcalo Sveta (Das Spiegelglas Der Welt) by Laibach
The Robots by Coptic Rain
Trans Europe Express by The One You Love
Radioactivity by April Nine
Airwaves by Beitthron
Transistor by Data Processed Corrupted
Ohm Sweet Ohm by Borghesia
Neonlicht by Mitja V.S.
Antenna by Z-Entropa
Man Machine by Strelnikoff
Home Computer by Random Logic
The Model by Demolition Group
Kometenmelodie Part 1 by 300,000 V.K.
Spacelab by Videosex
Lie-Werk by Kraftbach

Also on the Mute label and less of a surprise since the contents are mostly from electronic groups. Laibach, who open and close the collection, were already Mute artists. Of the other Slovenians present, Borghesia and Coptic Rain were familiar names but the rest remain a mystery. This is nonetheless a great compilation with an equal mix of eccentric and sympathetic covers. Neonlicht features a banjo and the Enzo Fabiani Quartet, Coptic Rain give The Robots the Nine Inch Nails treatment while April Nine turn Radioactivity into a sublime mystery. Trans Slovenia Express Volume 2 appeared in 2005.

Die Roboter Rubato (1997) by Terre Thaemlitz

Die Roboter
Ätherwellen
Tour De France
Computer Welt
Techno Pop
Ruckzuck
Radioland
Mensch Machine
Schaufensterpuppen
Morgen Spaziergang

In which the musician/artist/theorist plays rubato piano variations on the well-known songs. The presence of Ruckzuck from the first Kraftwerk album is a surprise—hardly anyone does covers of tracks from the first two Kraftwerk albums. All Thaemlitz’s releases come with pages of accompanying text culled from Marxist theory, gender studies, queer politics and the like. Die Roboter Rubato is no exception:

Kraftwerk’s most vibrant celebration of this Homoeroticization is in the composition Tour de France. The sonic manifestation of the group’s well known adoration for cycling bears an undeniable resemblance to the sound of two men fucking one another – the rhythmic breaths of the top intermingling with the panting moans of the bottom.

Immediate questions come to mind: for all of the obviousness of homoerotic thematics in the world of the Mensch Machines, how do such thematics remain undiscussed by popular media? Is the dominant silence around homoerotic themes an act of social suppression or social obliviousness? (etc)

Subsequent Thaemlitz releases have given similar rubato treatment to Gary Numan and Devo.

El Baile Alemán (2000) by Señor Coconut Y Su Conjunto

Introdución
Showroom Dummies
Trans Europe Express
The Robots
Neon Lights
Autobahn
Home Computer
Tour De France
The Man-Machine
Music Non Stop

German electronic musician Uwe Schmidt uses his Señor Coconut guise to present songs by synth artists as though they’d been covered by a cheap Latin American ensemble. Swiss group Yello introduced Perez Prado-style shouts and brass stabs into the world of Fairlight samplers in the 1980s so this may be regarded as the logical conclusion. Funny arrangements, especially Autobahn where the car refuses to start and the radio is tuned to South American stations. Señor Coconut’s 2006 album Yellow Fever! reworks the Yellow Magic Orchestra to similar effect.

8-Bit Operators: The Music of Kraftwerk (2007) by Various Artists

The Robots (Die Roboter) by Bacalao
Pocket Calculator by Glomag
Computer Love by Covox
Showroom Dummies by Role Model
The Model by Nullsleep
Radioactivity by David E. Sugar
Kristallo by Oliver Wittchow
Spacelab by 8 Bit Weapon
Computer World (Computerwelt) by firestARTer
Electric Café by Neotericz
Trans-Europe Express by Receptors
Tanzmusik by Herbert Weixelbaum
It’s More Fun to Compute by Bubblyfish
Antenna by Bit Shifter
The Man-Machine (Die Mensch-Maschine) by gwEm and Counter Reset

The masters of minimal aesthetics here receive some minimal cover treatments. Advertised as being “performed on vintage 8-bit video game systems” I was disappointed when some tracks failed to adhere to this stricture and added other instruments.The voices can also be a letdown when they’re left unprocessed. Complaints aside, the fat and bouncy rhythms are a good match for tunes which in other electronic hands were being lured into techno remix tedium. And it’s also good to see Tanzmusik from the Ralf & Florian album given an airing.

As I noted at the weekend, Kraftwerk give a series of retrospective concerts at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, in April.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Martin Rushent, 1948–2011
• Autobahn animated
• Sleeve craft
• Who designed Vertigo #6360 620?
• Old music and old technology
• Aerodynamik by Kraftwerk

Weekend links 96

Sin título (monstruas) (2008) by Marina Núñez.

• Salon asks Christopher Bram “Is gay literature over?” Bram’s new book, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America, is reviewed here.

• Robert Montgomery is profiled at the Independent as “The artist vandalising advertising with poetry.”

In addition to aesthetics, McCarthy noted a deeper link between great science and great writing. “Both involve curiosity, taking risks, thinking in an adventurous manner, and being willing to say something 9/10ths of people will say is wrong.” Profound insights in both domains also tend arise from a source beyond the limits of analytic reason. “Major insights in science come from the subconscious, from staring at your shoes. They’re not just analytical.”

Nick Romeo meets Cormac McCarthy at the Santa Fe Institute.

• For FACT mix 316 Julia Holter mixes radio broadcasts, street recordings and music.

• This week in the Tumblr labyrinth: fin de siècle art and graphics from Nocnitsa.

“There’s a widespread cultural barrenness across art and political culture. But there are some pockets of resistance on the extreme margins, like the techno-savvy protest movements, small press, the creator-owned comics, that seem to be getting some signs of hope for the future,” he says. “All of the genuinely interesting work is being done on the margins, with independent companies, self-producing, and alternative distribution networks.”

Alan Moore on Watchmen’s “toxic cloud” and creativity v. big business.

• Stone Tape Shuffle, a 12” LP of readings by Iain Sinclair. Limited to 400 copies.

• Monolake on how we cope with death: mythologies, rituals, drugs and Ghosts.

• Kraftwerk perform at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in April.

• Kathy Acker (in 1988?) interviewing William Burroughs.

Willy Pogány’s erotica: illustrations for a 1926 edition of The Songs of Bilitis by Pierre Louÿs.

• Nicholas Lezard on David Lynch: director of dreams.

• Did otherworldly music inspire Stonehenge?

• Coilhouse has an Eyepatch Party.

• Tanzmusik (1973) by Kraftwerk | The Model (1992) by the Balanescu Quartet | Trans Europe Express (2003) by the Wiener Sinfonie Orchestra & Arnold Schönberg Choir.

Directed by Saul Bass

Phase IV (1974).

It’s been a thrill recently poring over the Saul Bass monograph, Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design by Jennifer Bass & Pat Kirkham, a large volume that weighs a ton and is as revelatory about the career of a great designer (and his wife and frequent collaborator, Elaine Bass) as you’d hope. One pleasure was getting to read about Bass’s film work from his own viewpoint for once. The curious science-fiction film he made in 1974, Phase IV, is well-known enough to have a cult reputation but too often his long involvement with Hollywood is passed over as a footnote to the careers of the directors for whom he worked. In addition to his celebrated title sequences, Bass was also a visual consultant responsible for the planning and filming of what used to be called “special sequences” within films, the most notorious of which is the endlessly argued-over shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). (See this authoritative post by Pat Kirkham on Bass’s special sequences, and the disputed history of those few seconds of black-and-white film.)

Phase IV (1974).

All of which sent me to YouTube looking for some of the shorter films that Bass directed from the mid-60s on. The monograph explores these and Phase IV in some detail, for the latter showing pages of sketches for unfilmed sequences. I’m not sure these would have improved a film which I find flawed and occasionally ludicrous but it’s good to see what the director had in mind. The film on DVD has no extras at all but a trailer can be found on YouTube that shows off some of the startling imagery, and also includes a few shots that were cut by distributors foolishly eager to try and sell it as a horror film. It’s ironic that a man who gained world recognition for his poster designs wasn’t allowed to design the poster for his own film.

Quest (1984).

Of the short works there’s Why Man Creates (1968) here and here, an examination of the creative impulse that’s been so popular with art teachers over the years that it’s probably been seen by a lot more people than his marauding ants. Both this and The Solar Film (1980), a documentary about solar energy, utilise Bass’s hand-drawn animation. The latter is also of note for its final shot of a baby walking into a sunset, a still of which was turned by Bass into an album cover for Stomu Yamashta in 1984. Also that year, Saul and Elaine produced their strangest work, Quest, a half-hour piece of science fiction based on a Ray Bradbury short story whose quest theme is overly-familiar from a dramatic point-of-view but which typically yields a wealth of memorable visuals. In Phase IV there was a nod to Dalí with the dead man’s hand filled with burrowing ants; in Quest we find imagery borrowed from Magritte (a floating castle-topped mountain) and MC Escher (his Cubic Space Division). The copy on YouTube is rough quality but it’s certainly worth a watch. I’m amused to discover how much Saul & Elaine were prog-rock heads (not that there’s anything wrong with that…): Phase IV has Stomu Yamash’ta and David Vorhaus from White Noise on its soundtrack, The Solar Film features a dubious cover version of Tubular Bells, while the score for Quest is mostly original music (with some borrowings from Holst) that sounds much of the time like Tangerine Dream when they were leaning on their Mellotrons.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Saul Bass album covers
• Pablo Ferro on YouTube

Weekend links 94

Mateo (2011), carved wood sculpture by Bruno Walpoth.

“Dennis Potter’s [The Singing Detective] is 25 years old but still feels avant garde,” says Stephen Armstrong. No fucking kidding, I watched the DVDs again last weekend. Potter’s drama featured non-linear flashbacks, song-and-dance hallucination sequences, an intertextual sub-plot, and a central character who was vitriolic, misanthropic, misogynist and covered from head-to-toe in flaking skin. This wasn’t exiled to an arts channel ghetto but was primetime viewing, Sunday evenings on BBC 1. • Related: “Is Dennis Potter’s singalong noir miniseries the all-time pinnacle of television drama? Graham Fuller thinks it is.”

• American band Earth are using Kickstarter to fund their next project, Wonders from the House of Albion, an LP/CD/DVD/book combining their music with “field recordings from various megalithic and other sites of human/fairy encounters across the UK, also the use of ritual and folkloric magical practices”. Dylan Carlson & Adrienne Davies discuss their work here.

…sort of like Nabokov’s objection to Our Lady of the Flowers, which he saw as a masterpiece but thought, “Why isn’t this book about women?” Nabokov hated homosexuality and was very edgy around it, partly because his own brother was homosexual and his uncle. And he believed that it was hereditary, so he was always nervous about it.

Edmund White chooses five favourite gay novels. Related: a dance adaptation by Earthfall of Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys.

• “The Belbury Tales is the kind of record you feel should have come out on Vertigo around ’73, but never actually did.” Belbury Poly‘s Jim Jupp on ploughman’s lunches, prog rock and avoiding “Clarkson/Wakeman territory”.

• Morbid Curiosity: The Richard Harris Collection, an exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center exploring “the iconography of death across cultures and traditions spanning nearly six thousand years”.

• Geoff Dyer’s Zona, an exegesis of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, is officially out at the end of this month. The book is reviewed here and here.

• “Through a blurry electronic prism“: MetaFilter traces a history of analogue video synthesis.

• Dylan Ricci‘s wonderful photography of the male body has moved to a new location.

• Infinite Forest by Studio a+i, a design for an AIDS memorial in New York City.

• Susan Cain discussing “the power of introverts” at Scientific American.

• Strange Flowers on that icon of Middle Eastern music, Umm Kulthum.

• Ewan Morrison on “The self-epublishing bubble”.

• Winter Sleep (2007) by Valgeir Sigurdsson feat. Dawn McCarthy | Black (2008) by Ben Frost with Valgeir Sigurdsson, Sam Amidon & Sigrídur Sunna Reynisdóttir | Unbreakable Silence (2011) by Ben Frost & Daníel Bjarnason

Weekend links 93

One of a series of tremendous designs by Malika Favre for a new Penguin edition of the Kama Sutra.

• New interviews: “…Americans — mired in individualism — prefer to think in terms of identity than in terms of roles and masks. An American would never have called a novel Confessions of a Mask.” Nicholas Currie, better known via his Momus mask. | “The horror in music comes from the silence,” says John Carpenter. | “It’s dangerous to be an artist. That’s what we talk about in Naked Lunch — and it’s dangerous on many different levels. Politically it can be dangerous, but psychologically it can be quite dangerous too. You make yourself very vulnerable. You put yourself out there and of course you open yourself up to criticism and attack.” David Cronenberg at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

• New books: Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, a Joycean memoir by Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot. | A stack of new works from Strange Attractor including a collection of Savage Pencil‘s Trip or Squeek comic strips. | Robert Irwin’s Visions of the Jinn: Illustrators of the Arabian Nights. A shame about the high price on the latter but I’m sure it looks wonderful.

• The Blu-ray release of Wings (1927), William A. Wellman’s silent drama about air aces during the First World War, has prompted renewed attention for the passionate relationship between its two male leads, especially this deathbed scene which is tagged as the first same-sex kiss in cinema. That’s arguable, of course, but it’s certainly a touching moment.

• From 2009: Searching the Library of Babel, a list of all the stories in all 33 volumes of The Library of Babel, a 1979 Spanish language anthology of fantastic literature edited by Jorge Luis Borges.

• Lots of newpaper attention in the past week for the not-so-fresh news that magic mushrooms could help fight depression. Nature went into the detail of the latest studies.

• French group Air have written the score for a rare colour print of Le voyage dans la lune (1902) by Georges Méliès. Air’s YouTube channel has extracts.

• From 1989: The Merchant of Shadows by Angela Carter.

• Will Hunt on the Ghost River of Manhattan.

• Selected Letters of William S. Burroughs

• Sexy Boy (1998) by Air | Surfing On A Rocket (2003) by Air | Mer Du Japon (2007) by Air.