Once, before a concert, Laraaji contemplated a triangle. He spent “about half an hour, concentrating on the geometric form of a triangle,” before finally “letting go” and taking the stage to perform.
“After the concert,” he told me, “one person came up to me and mentioned that they kept getting a vision of triangles during my concert.”
The zither and autoharp virtuoso, laughter therapist, and new age music pioneer Laraaji was born Edward Larry Gordon in Philadelphia in 1943 – or rather, as he says in the extensive sleeve notes to his new album, “the body was”. Celestial Music collects material from throughout Laraaji’s recording career; from the thrumming, scintillating minimalism of 1978’s ‘All Pervading’ to the heavy drones and skipping rhythms of his 2011 collaboration with Blues Control, ‘Astral Jam’. It’s one of three new Laraaji releases on All Saints Music. On the phone from LA, where he is in the midst of a US tour, he told me about his concept of ‘architectonal music’.
Read the rest of my interview with Laraaji for the Quietus here.
TweetRobot telemarketing, via James D.
iO9: Freakishly realistic telemarketing robots are denying they’re robots
Recently, Time Washington Bureau Chief Michael Scherer received a phone call from an apparently bright and engaging woman asking him if he wanted a deal on his health insurance. But he soon got the feeling something wasn’t quite right.
After asking the telemarketer point blank if she was a real person or a computer-operated robot, she chuckled charmingly and insisted she was real. Looking to press the issue, Scherer asked her a series of questions, which she promptly failed. Such as, “What vegetable is found in tomato soup?” To which she responded by saying she didn’t understand the question. When asked what day of the week it was yesterday, she complained of a bad connection (ah, the oldest trick in the book).
(Source: SoundCloud / zekejmiller)
Monster Bobby DJ Set. Tonight. The Lock Tavern, Chalk Farm. 8pm – 1am.
Tweet2013’s Kraftwerk residency at the Turbine Hall was undoubtedly one of the most hotly anticipated events of last year.
With the Tate’s ticket office blowing a fuse at the unprecedented demand and diehard fans freezing outside the museum for hours in the vain hope of returns, love for the radioactive Maschinen-Menschen has probably never been greater.
In the event, audiences were treated to a pristine rendition of the group’s greatest hits delivered by four anonymous Tronprograms, standing nearly motionless behind oblique workstations, while the work of engaging the crowd was outsourced to an awe-inspiring 3D backdrop.
For those who were there, the experience, undoubtedly, was unforgettable, and few would question the quality of the music performed. But for the people behind the Science Museum’s imminent Kraftwerk Uncovered event, there is another side to the group that may have got lost amidst all the digital pomp and neon lights.
For James Poke, flautist and creative director to the group Icebreaker who will be performing the new versions of their music, Kraftwerk were at their most interesting in the late seventies “when they were playing at being robots but hadn’t actually totally programmed everything. So there was an interface between the robotic and the human. Later on,” he continues, “it becomes so robotic that that tension was lost.”
It’s a position shared by J. Peter Schwalm, the composer responsible for the Kraftwerk arrangements being performed by Icebreaker. Schwalm told me about a conversation he once had with Brian Eno after which both agreed that “Kraftwerk’s music was best when the technology and the machines were not perfect yet. When you listen to some of the older recordings and put them into a computer, you realise that even the sequenced music of Kraftwerk is running out of sync quite strongly. So you may have all the machines – but there’s a fragility that sounds very human.”
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The most famous work by Gilles Barbier depicts the superheroes of the so-called Golden Age – the mid-1930s to the 50s – finally showing their age. The sculptural installation L’Hospice (Nursing Home, 2002) finds Superman bespectacled and hobbling about on a Zimmer frame, Catwoman wrinkled and slumped comatose in front of the TV and Captain America bloated on a gurney with a drip running out of his arm. This work, flavour of the month for a while on such click-hungry websites as Trendhunter and Io9, nonetheless provides an immediate portal into some of the Marseilles-based artist’s central preoccupations: time and its suspension, and the fantasy space between the two.
Barbier has long used his own image in his work, and he tends to be as honest about his own changing features as Marvel’s comic artists aren’t. So after an association of some two decades with the Vallois gallery in Saint-Germain (he was one of the very first artists they worked with), and as he approaches fifty, Barbier’s own ageing process can be mapped in a walk around Nathalie and Georges-Philippe Vallois’s storage space. The latest addition to Barbier’s catalogue of doppelgängers sits in a side room of the present exhibition. Still Man (2013) is a mixed media sculpture, 180cm long and 135cm high. This photorealistic self-portrait presents the artist slumped down in the forest, apparently for so long that he has become a part of its undergrowth – vines wrapped around his arm and moss growing from his skin, he is thoroughly immersed in foliage. Like his earlier reference to superheroes, what we are being presented with is again a fantasy about time: of having so much time simply to sit and think that you become almost reabsorbed into the environment.
Read the rest of my review of Gilles Barbier’s recent show in Paris, at Art Review.
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I have a thing about music and ‘the post-human’ called ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Violins’ in this here volume. You can buy it. Do let me know what the rest is like…