Being mettul is hard on the joints, and no one understands our needs better than German agricultural marketing firms.
Number of the beast (er, cow?)
With a tag-line like “Hard types need hard bones… drink milk!”, beer is now officially relegated to Trivium fans, folks. The campaign was developed by Hamburg Technical Art School, who will hopefully not besuedbyMetallica for using their font.
Advertisers are becoming increasingly metal-friendly, although admittedly the genre is used largely as a vehicle for some ill-conceived punch line. But who can blame them? Metallers look like wankers and write shittier lyrics than Mariah Carey. Everything they touch turns into comedy GOLD:
My heart skipped a beat when I saw these images promoting Janet Jackson’s new album, Discipline. Whether it’s the strange photography, the retouching or the black and white, she looks damn hot.
I’m sure someone out there thinks Janet is exploiting the fetish scene for her newest album’s campaign, but I think it’s safe to say at this point that Miss Jackson is a bona fide superfreak. Please note the expression as she drips transparent goo, grips a riding crop and dons skin-tight latex. That is a face that don’t lie.
I rejoice at the fact that I can turn to my dog from the easel, genuinely say “Man, this is good” and be talking about Nine Inch Nails. It’s been too long. Ghosts I – IV is the album I wished for the entire time I suffered through Year Zero. Here Trent abandons vocals almost entirely and weaves a new sand-swept terrain of noise and atmosphere without deserting the industrial beats we hold so dear. I wouldn’t call it entirely different – it’s more like the subtle details dispersed through NIN’s other music, amplified, developed, mature. The accompanying photography by Phillip Graybill and Rob Sheridan is an elegant and seductive supplement to the sound.
The distribution method will keep fans and non-fans alike talking for some time. Namely, the $75 Deluxe Edition containing “Ghosts I-IV in a hardcover fabric slipcase containing: 2 audio CDs, 1 data DVD with all 36 tracks in multi-track format, and a Blu-ray disc with Ghosts I-IV in high-definition 96/24 stereo and accompanying slide show”. Under a Creative Commons license. This means access to every component of the music, for the general public to share, sample, remix and distribute, legally. Beyond the marketing brilliance it is indeed a revolutionary move that pushes copyright boundaries and adds an open source angle rarely seen in this, often individualistic, scene. Ghosts isn’t NIN’s first foray into this realm – With Teeth was streamed in entirety on the band’s MySpace page, and lossless multi-track audio files of 3 songs from Year Zero were made available for download on the band’s website.
Famed German/American composer Kurt Weill was born this day in 1900. He’s best remembered for Threepenny Opera and other collaborations with playwright Bertolt Brecht.
A clip from the excellent September Songs tribute, shot in the early 90s:
September Songs includes some great interpretations from Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, William S. Burroughs and others, but this scene in particular slays me. Charlie Haden’s bass is just dripping with feel. The couple depicting Weill and his wife Lotte Lenya are dancing to a sublime old recording of “Speak Low” sung by Weill himself.
C.F. Wick, Berlin, Theater des Westens, 1987
Weimar culture flat out refuses to die. There’s still a freshness and an urgency to the stuff that keeps generation after generation coming back. So many of us cut our teeth on either Liza and Joel or Alan in Cabaret and that damned Doors’ cover of “Alabama Song.” Without Brecht and Weill, there could be no Rocky Horror Picture Show. I must’ve played “Pirate Jenny” with the band Barbez a thousand times, and even after all these years, the sight of my friend Amanda battering her Kurzweil keyboard (altered to read KURTWEILL) still makes me grin from ear to ear. We have yet to tire of the cabaret. Why should we, with its immortal pledge to sexual freedom, inclusion, and playful rebellion? I think so long as there are perverts and revolutionaries in the world with a taste for whiskey and melodrama, Weill’s music, and its filthy little children, will have relevance.
Each furby has 4 controls: mute, crash, loop and reset. The handle turns 8 cams which operate corresponding microswitches to create interesting rhythmic patterns. Part of the ‘setting up’ section at the beginning has been fast forwarded. Please commission me to make lots more of these machines!
Hang in there ’til the furbies gets revved up. It’s actually rather beautiful.
Thanks for the heads up, Jhayne! (If you haven’t been over to Whitechapel’s filthy and absurd “Things That Should Not Exist” thread, go now. Bring wet naps.)
Laibach takes over Legoland, found here, via Paul Komoda.
Fun fact! Laibach’s original concept for the Kapital record was that it would be a collection of love songs. The idea was to parody romantic pop melodies and how pathetic most of them are, but that album never happened. Instead, they ended up releasing the more enigmatic Kapital that we all know and love, which proclaimed that the economy is dead and memorably included a hip-hop song about astrophysics. Laibach released three different versions of the album, each with a different mixes of the songs; one on CD, one on tape and one on vinyl.
Buried deep within the vinyl and tape versions of Kapital, one song from the lost album of love ballads survived! That song is Steel Trust, and it’s performed by the beautiful Anja Rupel, who also sang Laibach’s cover of Across the Universe and performed in their subgroup, Germania.
And someone uploaded this song (no video) on YouTube. Here it is, in all its Euro-disco glory. Enjoy!
The bald, glistening pate of Telly Savalas has always stirred unutterable longings deep within me. I’m having trouble deciding which video for his cover of “If” I love more. This first version, where Kojak’s officially the shy one at some orgy…
On Saturday I watched Sejayno at the Machine Project. Sejayno is a nomadic experimental noise group, composed usually of Peter B, Carson Garhart and Severiano Martinez. Machine Project’s website lured me in with promises of “homemade electronic instruments (renaissance trompette coat, spoon bowl shinth) and channeling ghostal hippy fluttertalk to enraptured open-mouthed audiences”, despite my fear of hippies.
It had been too long since the last time I’d seen or heard anything of the sort, and the entire thing actually took me on a ride down into the cobwebby recesses of memory. As one of the members put on what look like a cardboard half-moon from a samurai helmet, I wondered if this was going to hurt, and whether sitting in the second row of the small art gallery space was a good idea after all.
There were several instruments and contraptions laid out on a workbench in the dark room, and two video projections – one pre-recorded montage of distressed images reminiscent of El Topo, and another on an adjacent wall filmed live through what appeared to be a webcam.
The sound initially made me think of a project conceived by people deep in throes of a bender. It was unclear whether the performance was rehearsed or entirely improvised, reminding me of Throbbing Gristle, the Far East and Pink Floyd, to name a few. Members took turns singing, humming and muttering. Their instruments were indeed unique and handmade; there was what appeared to be a synth with a wind input, something reminiscent of a shamisen, a rice drum that sounded like the ocean and my favorite – the Sidrassi Organ – a pressure-sensitive appliance made of wood. Also impressive was an elegant hand-carved bass guitar.
The show lasted over an hour, though by the end I hadn’t even noticed how much time had passed. After, the audience was welcome to try out the instruments which had me poking at the Sidrassi Organ for a while. Conveniently, you can order Sejayno’s wonderful creations on their website [prepare to scroll, a lot]. And in case you were wondering, “inventor Peter [Blasser] is available to speak at your electronic circuits class, interface symposium, or wabi-sabi house conference.”
Posted by Zoetica Ebb on February 21st, 2008
Filed under Art, Music | Comments (5)
But DAF do. Let this German electropunk duo’s clicky beeps entrance into a world [or at the very least a basement] of mechanized taxidermy, dusty porcelain, cracked papier-mâché and moth-bitten lace. Here, sterile minimalism and granny frills co-exist in harmony, somehow.
George Harrison’s “Set on You” got nothing on this billow-shirted, leather-trousered alchemy of pop. Perhaps he was somehow inspired by it?
It would appear that the writer Douglas Wolk has only a single brain, of normal size, in his shaggy head. However, I remain unconvinced that he’s not storing another one (massive, turgid, jigglingly all-knowing) in some top secret subterranean storage facility which he accesses remotely. There’s just no other explanation for the bottomless depths of his knowledge on certain subjects, namely comics, pop music, fringe culture and vegetarian cuisine.
His latest book, Reading Comics, is a must-read for veterans and newbies alike, and there’s a fantastic interview with Wolk by Tom Spurgeon up over at the Comics Reporter right now. If you’re in the bay area, Wolk will be in town this coming Saturday, Feb. 23, for WonderCon, giving a talk called “The Senses-Shattering Return of the Novel of Ideas!” at the Comic Arts Conference. Not to be missed.
