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08/04/2017 : Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, Château La Coste : exposition Mountains and Seas (Ai Weiwei)
There are records that belong to a particular year, and then there are records that seem to have wandered into that year from somewhere else, carrying a little history in their coat pocket. Aretha Franklin's ‘Aretha’, released in 1986, is one of those records.
Put the needle down and you can hear the decade immediately. The drums have that clean, hard eighties snap, the keyboards shimmer, the production has been polished until it almost reflects the light. This is not the smoky Atlantic studio of the sixties. This is not Muscle Shoals, not Detroit, not the church basement. We're in the age of MTV now, where the record has to compete not only with another record but with an image, a video, a hairstyle, a television screen. And Aretha walks straight into it. That's the wonderful thing about her. She never sounded particularly interested in belonging to the times. The times had to make room for her.
By 1986, Aretha Franklin had already lived through several musical revolutions. She had taken gospel and rhythm and blues and pop and soul and somehow made them speak the same language. She had given us "Respect," "Think," "Chain of Fools," "Ain't No Way." She had been the voice of an era before many of the people now buying her records had even been born. Yet here she was, standing in the middle of the synthesizer decade, not retreating into nostalgia but giving the machinery a try.
The album is produced largely by Narada Michael Walden, the man who had helped give her 1985's ‘Who's Zoomin' Who?’ and its enormous "Freeway of Love" a second life on contemporary radio. There is a sense that Aretha has discovered another gear. The record company wants the Queen of Soul back in the marketplace, and Aretha, rather wonderfully, seems to say: all right, but let's do it my way.
And her way, even in 1986, is still about the voice.
Listen to "Jimmy Lee" and you hear the modern studio wrapped around something ancient. The production is bright and muscular, but when Franklin opens her mouth the technology suddenly becomes secondary. It’s magic on earth. There is that extraordinary authority in her phrasing, the sense that she isn't merely singing the melody but deciding what the melody is going to mean.
That's the thing people sometimes miss when they talk about great singers. Great singers don't simply hit notes. They change the temperature of a song and Aretha could do that. She could make a perfectly respectable piece of pop songwriting sound as though it had just been delivered to her personally by the Lord and she had decided to improve it.
And then there is "Jumpin' Jack Flash," which is where the story takes a particularly delightful turn. Keith Richards is involved in the production, and suddenly the Queen of Soul is walking around inside a Rolling Stones song. You can almost picture the musical history sitting around the same table: Atlantic soul, British rock, gospel, MTV, eighties pop.
Aretha doesn't try to become Mick Jagger. Why would she? She takes the song's swagger and runs it through her own machinery. The Stones' riff becomes something more theatrical, more soulful, more deliberately extravagant. It's rock'n'roll seen through the stained-glass windows of a gospel church.
And that is really what makes ‘Aretha’ worth returning to.
It isn't a perfect record.
In fact, its imperfections are part of its charm.
Sometimes the production feels very much like 1986. You can hear the decade's obsession with polish, with big drums and immaculate surfaces. There are moments when you wish the furniture around Aretha's voice had simply been pushed aside. Give her a piano, a bass player, a drummer, a little room to breathe and you know she could have destroyed the place.
But perhaps that is asking the wrong question.
The interesting question isn't whether ‘Aretha’ sounds like her classic records. Of course it doesn't.
The interesting question is what happens when one of the greatest voices of the twentieth century walks into the middle of the eighties and refuses to become a relic.
Then, halfway through this story, George Michael arrives.
"I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)" is one of those strange pop moments that makes perfect sense only after you've heard it. On paper, Aretha Franklin and George Michael might look like two artists from entirely different musical planets. In practice, they fit beautifully. George brings the bright, contemporary pop sensibility; Aretha brings the accumulated weight of everything that came before.
The song became her first number-one pop single since "Respect," nearly twenty years earlier. Think about that. Nearly twenty years. A whole generation had grown up. Music had changed. Fashion had changed. Radio had changed. The Beatles had come and gone. Woodstock had come and gone. Disco had risen and fallen. Punk had kicked the door in. New wave had arrived. MTV had transformed the business. And Aretha still had a number one. That isn't simply a comeback. That's a reminder.
Then there is the record itself, because with ‘Aretha’ you really have to talk about the cover.
If you are the kind of person who collects Warhol album sleeves, this one is impossible to ignore. Andy Warhol's portrait of Aretha Franklin turns the record into a meeting between two different kinds of royalty: the Queen of Soul and the prince of Pop Art.
Warhol understood famous faces better than almost anybody. He understood that celebrity had become its own visual language. Marilyn, Elvis, Jackie Kennedy—faces that had already entered the public imagination could be transformed, repeated, flattened, coloured, reproduced, and somehow made strange again. Aretha was an extraordinary subject for him because she didn't need Warhol to make her iconic. She already was. What he could do was give that icon a new surface.
The cover has that unmistakable Warhol mixture of glamour and distance. Aretha is recognisable instantly, but the image is also stylised enough to become something other than a straightforward photograph. The colours and graphic treatment turn her into an object of pop mythology, while the very title ‘Aretha’ is almost comically simple.
Just Aretha.
No explanation necessary. There is something rather beautiful about that when you hold the actual twelve-inch record.
Streaming has made music weightless. A record has weight. It has edges. It has a front and a back. It occupies a shelf. You take it out, turn it over, read the names, examine the artwork, lower the needle. The music comes with an object attached to it.
With ‘Aretha’, that object happens to have Andy Warhol's fingerprints all over its visual identity.
Warhol also supplied the line drawings associated with the package, so the artwork continues beyond the front cover. The whole thing feels like a little Warhol world built around the Queen of Soul: black, white, colour, line, celebrity, reproduction.
And for a collector, that's where the pleasure becomes slightly obsessive—which is, frankly, what collecting is for.
You begin with one Warhol cover and then you start seeing the lineage. The Velvet Underground. The Rolling Stones. Diana Ross. Aretha. Different decades, different artists, different sounds, but the same peculiar Warhol fascination with the record sleeve as a piece of mass-produced culture that could also become art.
‘Aretha’ is particularly poignant because it belongs to the very end of Warhol's life. He died in 1987, shortly after the album appeared. So when you put the sleeve on the turntable shelf, you're not only looking at an Aretha Franklin record. You're looking at one of the final chapters of Warhol's extraordinary relationship with popular culture. That's why the cover works so well.
Aretha was an artist who had already survived several versions of the music business. Warhol was an artist who had spent his career turning the machinery of popular culture into subject matter.
Here they meet in 1986, right at the moment when music was becoming more visual, more commercial, more packaged and more dominated by television.
Two people who understood celebrity long before celebrity became the twenty-four-hour industry it is now.
So, does ‘Aretha’ stand beside ‘Lady Soul’ or ‘I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You?’
No.
Those records belong to another category entirely. They are monuments. ‘Aretha’ is more interesting as a document of survival. It tells you what happens when a legendary artist refuses to spend her later years simply looking backwards. She goes into the studio, accepts the synthesizers, accepts the drum machines, accepts the glossy production, accepts the MTV era—and then sings over the top of all of it with that voice. She kicks it. Not because she sounds like she's trying to be twenty-five again. Quite the opposite. She kicks it because she sounds like Aretha Franklin. That's the real lesson of the record. The eighties could change the clothes. It could change the drums. It could change the studios, the radio, the television, the hairstyles, the technology. But it couldn't change the Queen.
So you put the record back on the shelf, perhaps beside another Warhol sleeve, and for a moment the whole history of popular music seems to fit into twelve inches of cardboard.
The Queen of Soul on the cover. Warhol behind the image. George Michael waiting on the other side. Keith Richards lurking in the Stones' shadow. Narada Michael Walden driving the machinery. And Aretha, somewhere in the middle of it all, singing as though the decade belongs to her. Maybe it does. After all, some artists follow the times. Some artists define them. And then there is Aretha Franklin, who could walk into almost any decade and make it sound a little more soulful.
Installation shot from the exhibition "Ectopia" @ Rogaland Kunstsenter. Curated by Geir Haraldseth. jan 29 - march 1.
Genevieve Chua, born in 1984 in work Raised As a Pack of Wolves was Residency Programme at the Gyeonggi
Singapore, graduated with a Diploma in Fine Arts (Painting) from LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore in 2004. Her works span a variety of mediums including drawing, photography and installation. Genevieve’s works possess distinctive aesthetic and recurring motifs of nature and female figures in dim light. Genevieve’s art explores the fear of the unknown.
For a young artist, Genevieve has exhibited extensively. Her solo exhibitions include As Brutal As (La Liberia Gallery, Singapore, 2007), Lost in the City: Full Moon and Foxes (National Museum of Singapore, 2009) and Child and the Beast (Objectifs Centre for Photography and Filmmaking, 2011). Genevieve has also exhibited overseas at ArtHK 2011 (AsiaOne ChanHampe Galleries, Hong Kong, 2011).
Genevieve was also selected to exhibit at the Singapore Biennale 2011 where she showcased Adinandra Belukar at the Old Kallang Airport. In 2009, her digital
commissioned for the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival. Other group exhibitions in which she has participated include CUT 2009: Figure, New Photography from Southeast Asia (Valentine Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2009), Next Wave Time Lapse (Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia, 2010) and Cross-Scape (Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul; Jeonbuk Museum of Art, Jeonju; Goeun Museum of Art, Busan, South Korea, 2011). Her work, After the Flood (2010), was sold by international auction house Sotheby’s and was exhibited at The Singapore Show: Future Proof (8Q Singapore Art Museum, 2012).
Genevieve constantly seeks to expand her practice and this has led her to participate in numerous residences locally and abroad. In 2010, she was selected for the BMW Young Asian Artist Series at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute and the Late Fall Residency at The Banff Centre in Calgary, Canada. In 2011, she took part in the GCC Creative
Creation Centre in Gyeonggi-do, South Korea and The Art Incubator at the Centre for Creative Communications in Shizuoka, Japan.
Performance ritual | Sagrado Feminino | Investigação | O corpo da mulher é sagrado, divino e deve ser respeitado #artista #artistavisual #orixas #costume #performanceritual #tantrismo #sangue #natural #terra #indios #performance #performanceart #fotografia #photography #naturegirl #sagradofeminino #liberdadedeexpressao #livre #amor #ventre #sagrado #imersao #artetextil #textileart #curitiba #RiodeJaneiro #artecontemporanea #contemporaryart #visualartist #art
Installation shot from the exhibition "Ectopia" @ Rogaland Kunstsenter. Curated by Geir Haraldseth. jan 29 - march 1.
Pull your chair a little closer. Today we're following a road where the signs are written in bass clefs and the streetlights flicker in blue notes. The destination is the celebration of a fellow they called Guru.
Some people arrive like unexpected fireworks in the daytime. Others come in through the side door carrying a notebook. Guru was one of those. His voice never seemed to be trying to outrun anybody. It moved the way an old bike moves across the city—steady enough that you could count the spin. He had that rare gift of sounding calm while saying things that stayed with you for years.
You know, rap music and jazz have always shared a family resemblance. One grew up in smoky clubs, the other on concrete corners. Both know what it means to improvise when life doesn't hand you the melody you were hoping for. Jazz asks a question with a trumpet. Hip-hop answers it with a turntable.
Then along came “Jazzmatazz Vol. 1.”
Now there's a record that doesn't behave like it belongs to any one neighborhood. It's less interested in crossing genres than in reminding you they used to live on the same block. Guru invited real jazz musicians into the room, not as decoration, not as museum pieces, but as conversation partners. The beats don't push the saxophone out of the way, and the horns don't look down their noses at the drum machine. Everybody gets a chair at the table. Guru's rhymes sit in the pocket with remarkable patience. He understood that confidence doesn't always have to raise its voice. His delivery leaves space for the music to breathe, and the music rewards him by becoming something bigger than accompaniment. It's collaboration in the oldest sense of the word.
There are albums that sound like they were built in a laboratory. “Jazzmatazz Vol. 1” sounds like it wandered into a late-night rehearsal where nobody wanted to leave because the conversation was too good. The grooves roll along without hurry. The bass lines feel lived in. The guest musicians aren't there to prove a point; they're there because the tune asked them to show up. Oh me oh my that track “Le Bien, Le Mal” along with the exquisite french rapper MC Solaar is one magistral one:
“L'homme qui prend le microphone se nomme Solaar
Maître de la rime urbaine accompagné des comparses de Gang Starr
À Paris en France comme dans la Rome antique
Imite le maître, mate le mythe comme Spartacus limite les mecs
Qui millimètre après millimètre jettent l′intellect à des kilomètres
It's your turn, Guru”
Listening to it now, what strikes me isn't that it predicted the future. Plenty of records get credit for that. It's that it trusted the past enough not to fear it. The album says yesterday and tomorrow can share the same microphone if they're willing to listen to each other.
Funny thing about roads. You spend your life singing about them, walking them, trying to find where they lead. Most of them don't remember your name. But every once in a while, one does.
Over in Montpellier, France, there's a little stretch of pavement called Allée Guru. Imagine that. A man who spent his career making records about knowledge, rhythm, and self-possession ends up becoming a street himself. That's about as fitting a memorial as you could ask for. Streets don't ask for applause. They just keep carrying people forward. Every day somebody walks across his name without realizing they're following a path laid down by a voice that believed music could be wiser than noise. The choice of Montpellier wasn't random. The city has a long-standing appreciation for hip-hop culture and jazz, and local officials described Guru as an artist whose work transcended genres and generations. France overall has a larger hip-hop culture than you might expect, starting rapping in French already in the early 80’s. But that is another story.
Guru himself had a quality you don't find often in popular music. He sounded like a man who believed words ought to earn their place. No wasted syllables. No unnecessary fireworks. Just observation, rhythm, and a quiet certainty that truth can travel farther than volume.
Every now and then an artist reminds us that music isn't really about categories. Folk, jazz, blues, rap, yeah they're all trying to answer the same old questions: Who are we? Where are we headed? Who's walking beside us? Guru asked those questions with a voice as cool as midnight and as grounded as the first note from an upright bass.
So if you've got the sun burning in your head and your body stretching out ahead of you, give “Jazzmatazz Vol 1.” another spin. Some records ask you to listen. This one invites you to stay awhile.
ink, watercolor on paper
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com
Performance ritual "Sagrado Feminino" | Investigação | O corpo da mulher é sagrado, divino e deve ser respeitado #artista #artistavisual #orixas #costume #performanceritual #tantrismo #sangue #natural #terra #indios #performance #performanceart #fotografia #photography #naturegirl #sagradofeminino #liberdadedeexpressao #livre #amor #ventre #sagrado #imersao #artetextil #textileart #curitiba #RiodeJaneiro #artecontemporanea #contemporaryart #visualartist #art
"Nacer" 19cm
Acrylic on cork
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facebook www.facebook.com/LIM.LoanaIbarraMazari
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com
Good evening, night owls, dreamers, insomniacs, and those from the wrong side of tomorrow. Today we celebrate one of my absolute favorites in the game, a painter. Not the kind who put a fresh coat on your porch railing. I’m writing about the ones who paint with the stuff that's harder to come by: longing, fear, desire, the strange electricity that crackles between life and death.
Egon Schiele mi amor.
Now Schiele came out of Vienna, back when the century was changing its clothes. The old empires were still standing, but if you listened carefully you could hear the floorboards creaking. Horses pulled carriages through streets already haunted by automobiles. Freud was peering into dreams while composers were teaching music new ways to be restless. It was a town full of mirrors, and Schiele walked through every one of them. He was born in 1890 and didn't stay long. Gone before he turned twenty-nine. Some people spend eighty years learning how to tell the truth. Schiele figured out a way to do it in less than three decades, though the truth he found wasn't always easy to look at.
His paintings and drawings don't sit still. The bodies twist. Hands reach like roots searching for water. Faces seem to have just received news they can't quite understand. Looking at a Schiele portrait is a little like catching your reflection in a train window at midnight and realizing the stranger staring back knows more about you than you'd like.
He studied under the long shadow of Gustav Klimt, but shadows don't hold a man like Schiele for very long. Klimt painted gold and ornament, worlds draped in velvet. Schiele stripped things down until all that remained was nerve and bone and yearning. It's the difference between a cathedral bell and a wire humming in the wind.
The authorities didn't know what to make of him. That's usually a sign an artist is onto something. His work scandalized people. Some called it indecent. Others called it disturbing. They weren't entirely wrong. Schiele seemed determined to paint what polite society spent its days trying not to think about: loneliness, desire, mortality, the awkward miracle of having a body at all.
You know, there are artists who paint people as they wish they were remembered. Schiele painted them as they feared they might actually be.
Then came 1918. Influenza swept across the world like an invisible storm. It carried away millions. Schiele's wife died while expecting their child. Three days later, Schiele followed. Twenty-eight years old. The kind of ending that makes you wonder whether some candles burn brighter because they know they won't burn long.
But the pictures stayed: thanks Schiele! And that's the thing about art. A century passes. Empires disappear. Borders move. Languages change their shoes. Yet somewhere a young painter stands in front of an Egon Schiele drawing and feels the same jolt that people felt when the ink was still fresh. A nervous line across a sheet of paper. A tilted shoulder. A pair of eyes that refuse to look away. Somewhere between elegance and collapse, beauty and discomfort, Schiele found a frequency that's still broadcasting. And if you happen to catch that signal late at night, don't be surprised if it sounds a little like your own heartbeat.
ink, watercolor on paper
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com
Performance ritual "Sagrado Feminino" | Investigação | O corpo da mulher é sagrado, divino e deve ser respeitado #artista #artistavisual #orixas #costume #performanceritual #tantrismo #sangue #natural #terra #indios #performance #performanceart #fotografia #photography #naturegirl #sagradofeminino #liberdadedeexpressao #livre #amor #ventre #sagrado #imersao #artetextil #textileart #curitiba #RiodeJaneiro #artecontemporanea #contemporaryart #visualartist #art
art rotterdam 2016, art fair, van nelle factory, detroit house, artist: ryan mendoza
A home from Detroit is being demolished and shipped in containers to Europe. The home will be reconstructed at the main entrance of Art Rotterdam so visitors can experience the impressive installation by visualartist Ryan Mendoza, a world première.
Dahr Jamail the 44 year old American journalist best known as one of the few unembedded journalists to report extensively from Iraq during the 2003 Iraq invasion, has published an article on Aljazeera about the pollution of the world’s oceans, highlighting the alarm of Scientists and experts at amount of plastic debris and growing 'dead zones' in the world's oceans. Jamail states “The amount of plastic floating in the Pacific Gyre - a massive swirling vortex of rubbish - has increased 100-fold in the past four decades, phytoplankton counts are dropping, over-fishing is causing dramatic decreases in fish populations, decreasing ocean salinity is intensifying weather extremes, and warming oceans are speeding up Antarctic melting. … Scientists recently investigated the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, known as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch", and found an "alarming amount" of refuse, much of it comprising individual pieces of very small size. The eastern section of the spiralling mass, between Hawaii and California, is estimated to be around twice the size of Texas, and is having ecosystem-wide impacts… Another phenomenon afflicting Earth's oceans are "dead zones". While these can be formed by natural causes, climate change, along with human activities and industrial waste, have greatly aggravated the situation. The US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration released a study showing that rising global temperatures cause oceans to warm, which translates into a decreased capacity to hold oxygen.” Inspired by Aljazeera ow.ly/c4UXd image source Twitter ow.ly/c4UUI
Performance ritual "Sagrado Feminino" | Investigação | O corpo da mulher é sagrado, divino e deve ser respeitado #artista #artistavisual #orixas #costume #performanceritual #tantrismo #sangue #natural #terra #indios #performance #performanceart #fotografia #photography #naturegirl #sagradofeminino #liberdadedeexpressao #livre #amor #ventre #sagrado #imersao #artetextil #textileart #curitiba #RiodeJaneiro #artecontemporanea #contemporaryart #visualartist #art
A Glitch “Èride (Ἔρις) ~ Ètude VII”
by ™℗®© Louis M o n t i e l
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A Glitch "Erzulie (Ερζούλι) ~ Ètude IV”
by ™℗®© Louis M o n t i e l
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Fire. Not the kind that sets off the smoke alarm, although there are moments when this music might do that too. I'm talking about the fire that starts somewhere down in the rhythm section, travels up through the bass, catches hold of the drums, and eventually finds its way into a saxophone. And when that happens, you might want to listen. That saxophone belongs to Jessie Evans.
Jessie Evans is one of those musicians who makes the usual categories feel a little unnecessary. Punk musician, saxophonist, singer, electronic artist, cabaret performer, no-wave survivor, dark-wave traveller, rhythm explorer, yeah, you can use all those words and still not quite catch her.
She came out of the California underground, playing saxophone with the all-female punk band Subtonix, then became part of The Vanishing, a band that understood very early that a synthesizer and a saxophone could make a room feel considerably darker. There was punk in there, certainly, and deathrock, and no-wave, but also something theatrical and strangely seductive.
Then came Autonervous, her collaboration with Bettina Köster of Malaria!, and the music moved further into electronic territory. The machinery became more important. The rhythms became colder and more mechanical, while the saxophone remained this wonderfully physical thing floating through the circuitry.
And that's one of the interesting things about Jessie Evans. She has never seemed particularly interested in choosing between the machine and the body. She wants both. She wants the synthesizer and the sweat. The drum machine and the hips. The cold electronic pulse and the hot breath of a saxophone.
Then, in 2009, she made Is It Fire?, her first solo album, and suddenly all those different parts of her musical history began talking to one another. And they had a lot to say.
The record was made between Berlin and Mexico, and you can almost hear the geography in it. Berlin brings the shadows, the electronics, the punk history, the nightclub atmosphere. Mexico brings heat, colour, percussion, brass, movement and a different sense of rhythm. Somewhere between the two places, Jessie Evans found her own little musical border town. And there's no border control. Everything gets through. Afrobeat gets through. Mambo gets through. Funk gets through. Cabaret gets through. Electronics get through. Punk gets through. And the saxophone, naturally, doesn't even bother showing its passport.
Is It Fire? is an album that refuses to stand still. Even when the music is dark, there's movement underneath it. Even when the electronics sound cold, there's something warm happening in the rhythm.
The title asks a question. Is It Fire?
Well, you can spend eleven songs trying to answer it.
Take “Scientist of Love.” Now, love has always been a dangerous field of research. There have been laboratories, theories, experiments, field studies. Most of them have ended badly. Jessie Evans simply adds a saxophone to the experiment. “Scientist of Love” sounds like somebody who has been studying desire under controlled conditions and has finally decided that controlled conditions are overrated. Then there's “Class Magic,” which brings out the cabaret side of Evans. But this isn't polite cabaret. This is cabaret after punk has broken into the dressing room, stolen the lipstick and plugged a synthesizer into the wall. And then comes “Let Me On,” and “Blood and Silver” which might be the clearest example of what makes the record so irresistible. There's funk in the bones of it. The rhythm is physical. Evans's voice is commanding but playful, and the saxophone moves around the groove rather than simply sitting on top of it. It's music that doesn't ask whether you want to dance. It assumes you will. And that brings us to something important about Jessie Evans: she has always understood that darkness and dance music aren't opposites. In fact, they make excellent companions. Think about the history of the nightclub. People have been dancing in dark rooms for a very long time. The darkness gives you permission. You can become somebody else for a few hours. You can wear black. You can wear silver. You can wear something you would never wear in daylight. And Jessie Evans seems perfectly at home in that world. Her music has the atmosphere of a gothic club, but somebody has opened the doors and let tropical air blow in.
There's a wonderful contradiction there. The music can be dark, but it isn't miserable. It can be strange, but it isn't inaccessible. It can be experimental, but it still knows what a beat is for.
And then there's that saxophone. The saxophone is an unusual instrument in electronic and gothic music. It carries too much history with it. Jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, funk, pop — you hear all those ghosts whenever someone picks one up. But Evans doesn't treat the saxophone like an antique. She makes it sound futuristic. Sometimes it comes across like a siren. Sometimes like a lover. Sometimes like an alarm from a spaceship that has just landed outside the club. And sometimes it sounds as though it has been drinking. Which is probably when it's at its best.
The musicians around her on Is It Fire? help create this peculiar atmosphere. Pepe Mogt, from the Nortec Collective, brings an electronic and rhythmic sensibility to the production, while musicians such as Budgie, Toby Dammit and Martin Wenk add their own histories and textures. It's a remarkable mixture. And perhaps that's why the record still feels unusual. It isn't trying to sound like one scene. It's the sound of somebody passing through several scenes and taking souvenirs. And the saxophone sticking out of the back.
If you've spent time with Evans's later music, you can also hear Is It Fire? as the beginning of a longer journey. With Glittermine, the colours become even brighter and the cast of collaborators becomes even more international. Steve Mackay, Jimi Tenor, King Khan, Warrior Queen and others enter the picture. The music becomes bigger without losing its underground character. Later, Evans's move to Brazil opens another chapter, bringing Brazilian rhythms, dub, tropical sounds and new collaborations into her world.
But Is It Fire? is where the map begins to make sense. Berlin on one side. Mexico on the other. Punk behind her. Electronic music ahead. And in the middle, Jessie Evans with a saxophone, trying to figure out how many different kinds of music can fit into one room. Quite a few, as it turns out.
There's also something about hearing this album on vinyl. You put the record on. The needle drops. There's that small moment before the music really begins, when the room is quiet and you hear the surface noise of the record. Then the rhythm arrives. And suddenly you're somewhere else. That's one of the great things about records. They can turn geography into furniture. Berlin can be in the living room. Mexico can be in the kitchen. A nightclub can appear in the hallway. And if the neighbours complain, well, perhaps they're simply not listening carefully enough.
Is It Fire? isn't perfect because it is tidy. It isn't perfect because every song fits neatly beside the next. It's interesting precisely because it doesn't. It's restless. It's sexy. It's peculiar. It's occasionally theatrical. It's sometimes wonderfully excessive. And it has a sense of humour about all that excess. Jessie Evans doesn't seem to believe that experimental music has to be serious all the time. Why shouldn't an electronic record make you dance?
So, is it fire?
The answer is: Yes.
Installation shot from the exhibition "Ectopia" @ Rogaland Kunstsenter. Curated by Geir Haraldseth. jan 29 - march 1.
art rotterdam 2016, art fair, van nelle factory, detroit house, artist: ryan mendoza
A home from Detroit is being demolished and shipped in containers to Europe. The home will be reconstructed at the main entrance of Art Rotterdam so visitors can experience the impressive installation by visualartist Ryan Mendoza, a world première.
Serving plate
silver, worn down by years
of hands that passed it from table to table
carrying bread, carrying stories, carrying silence.
Holding a face
objects forget their purpose
and remember something else entirely.
Caught in that quiet in-between
like the moment before a song begins
or just after it ends.
Scratched up good
little marks
little ghosts
like raindrops that never quite dried
reflection comes through anyway
not perfect
not clean.
Wearing soft
peach-colored
like an afternoon that doesn’t want to turn into evening.
Got something to say
hasn’t decided if the world’s ready to hear
it
maybe already said
it
now just listening for the echo.
Silver serving tray.
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Sagrado Feminino | performance para Bienal do Pilarzinho 2017 | Investigação | #artista #artistavisual #orixas #performanceritual #tantrismo #sangue #natural #terra #indios #performance #performanceart #fotografia #photography #naturegirl #sagradofeminino #liberdadedeexpressao #livre #amor #ventre #sagrado #imersao #pb #atelierdach #iansã #curitiba #RiodeJaneiro #artecontemporanea #contemporaryart #visualartist #art #artista