{"id":20688,"date":"2021-07-02T16:40:21","date_gmt":"2021-07-02T15:40:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=20688"},"modified":"2021-07-02T16:40:21","modified_gmt":"2021-07-02T15:40:21","slug":"gioconda-of-the-mausoleum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2021\/07\/02\/gioconda-of-the-mausoleum\/","title":{"rendered":"Gioconda of the Mausoleum"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"mona1.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

“MAGIC REALISM \u2022 Like the video technique of “keying in” where any background may be electronically inserted or deleted independently of foreground, the ability to bring the actual sound of musics of various epochs and geographical origins all together in the same compositional frame marks a unique point in history. \u2022 A trumpet, branched into a chorus of trumpets by computer, traces the motifs of the Indian raga DARBARI over Senegalese drumming recorded in Paris and a background mosaic of frozen moments from an exotic Hollywood orchestration of the 1950’s [a sonic texture like a “Mona Lisa” which, in close up, reveals itself to be made up of tiny reproductions of the Taj Mahal], while the ancient call of an AKA pygmy voice in the Central African Rainforest\u2014transposed to move in sequences of chords unheard of until the 20th century\u2014rises and falls among gamelan-like cascades, multiplications of a single “digital snapshot” of a traditional instrument played on the Indonesian island of JAVA, on the other side of the world.” \u2014 Jon Hassell<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"mona2.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Jon Hassell’s text is part of the sleeve note for his Aka\u2014Darbari\u2014Java (Magic Realism)<\/em> album which was released on Editions EG in 1983. The description of a picture of the Mona Lisa<\/em> made from tiny reproductions of the Taj Mahal always intrigued me even though it’s only a shorthand metaphor for the sampling process, as well as being an encapsulation in miniature of one aspect of Hassell”s “Fourth World” concept: the blending of East and West, the sacred and the profane. Nevertheless, 20 years ago\u201417th May, 2001, according to the date on the file\u2014after realising that Photoshop allowed the creation of just this kind of mosaic imagery, I decided to try and bring Hassell’s metaphor to digital life.<\/p>\n

\"mona3.jpg\"<\/p>\n

The end result in its full-size version looks at a distance like an ordinary halftone rendering of the painting but it really is made of tiny images of the Taj Mahal, albeit very rough ones since the process always resulted in a bitmap image. So much time has elapsed I’ve forgotten the procedural details although I do recall the involvement of one of those legacy features of Photoshop that most people ignore, possibly the Apply Image function. And I only did this at all because I’d found a tutorial somewhere that described how to create a mosaic image in this manner. The resulting picture wasn’t particularly satisfying but as a proof of concept it did at least work.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"mona4.jpg\"<\/p>\n

\"mona5.jpg\"<\/p>\n

\"mona6.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Plenty of tools exist today for making photo mosaics although the results are unsatisfying in other ways. The picture below is the result of images from Wikimedia Commons having been run through one of the many online photo mosaic creators. The online tool doesn’t modulate either of the images very much but seems to map the smaller image across the larger then adjust the brightness and transparency to match the equivalent values of the larger picture. The ideal version of this image\u2014if such a thing had to exist at all\u2014would be one created by a more sophisticated computer process, or a painting, something very large done in the hyper-real manner of Salvador Dal\u00ed or Hassell’s friend, Mati Klarwein, whose Soundscape<\/em><\/a> painting occupies the front cover of Aka\u2014Darbari\u2014Java<\/em>. Or maybe an animated zoom out of the Mona Lisa<\/em>‘s face would be better, like the one in The Public Voice<\/em><\/a> by Lejf Marcussen.<\/p>\n

\"mona7.jpg\"<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Aka\u2014Darbari\u2014Java<\/em> album is the most strikingly original entry in Hassell’s discography. In 1983 it sounded very avant-garde, and continued to sound that way until well into the 1990s when electronic musicians were beginning to catch up with Hassell’s innovations. It wasn’t the first album to use Fairlight samples as a compositional tool but most of the people using the Fairlight in the early 1980s were still working in a rock\/pop idiom, and many of them were using the instrument merely as another big and very expensive keyboard. The reputation of Hassell’s album would be greater today if it hadn’t been unavailable since 1991, one of the last albums to remain marooned by the collapse of the EG label and the ensuing tangle of company purchases. Copies of the album command increasingly high prices on Discogs so it’s worth noting that Burning Shed<\/a> still have remaindered vinyl copies available for a lot less than the secondhand discs that dealers are selling.<\/p>\n

Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 Sounds off the Beaten Track<\/a>
\n\u2022 Jon Hassell, 1937\u20132021<\/a>
\n\u2022 Jon Hassell, live 1989<\/a>
\n\u2022 Power Spot by Michael Scroggins<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“MAGIC REALISM \u2022 Like the video technique of “keying in” where any background may be electronically inserted or deleted independently of foreground, the ability to bring the actual sound of musics of various epochs and geographical origins all together in the same compositional frame marks a unique point in history. \u2022 A trumpet, branched into … Continue reading “Gioconda of the Mausoleum”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New blog post: Gioconda of the Mausoleum","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,29,3,44,15,23],"tags":[212,2392,295,87],"class_list":["post-20688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-electronica","category-music","category-painting","category-technology","category-work","tag-jon-hassell","tag-lejf-marcussen","tag-mati-klarwein","tag-salvador-dali"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-5nG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20688\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}