My brain is too stressed to read long texts or cope with anything “serious” in my free time. Even music with a lot of words is a bit hard - @prgrzn_10 had to explain that Aya Nakamura is singing about snitches, not cookies in one of her massive hits. But I LOVE video art. Like: obsessive. It’s all @syntheticzero 's fault. The bug bit while I was staying at their house years ago. They ran an art gallery on the ground floor. In a dodgy New York neighbourhood, I think the same where @johncoate ran an abulance service/clinic for people without papers. People came in from the street and it was so nice seeing how everyone interacted with the works . It got so bad I went to Berlin to spend 7 hours a day for three weeks going through a video art collection. That in turn kicked off a sequence of events that lead to hanging out with @jaycousins in a treehouse they had built in an apartment. And @susa and @caroline. And so it goes. Right now I am stuck in this house feeling like the end of the world is here. It was the same when I met so many of the people who have come to be part of the garden of my soul. But now it’s not possible to spend time stumbling around outside into new worlds together. So it’s back to basics. Music or video art - if you have some work that opened something for you, please share?
I am not a trendy person that can catch all the recent vibes, not even when there is no lockdown and venues are not canceling all the concerts for which I bought tickets . My instinct during this period was to delve deep in some old music.
For some reason I have become interested in two songs in particular. “Interested” means that I want to do my own version of them.
- Nick Drake’s Way to Blue brings us a world that contains hints, clues to some elusive mystery. Things that have always been there suddenly jump at us: what might they mean? (“Do you understand/the light among the trees?”) It is beautiful and melancholic, like the deserted streets of Brussels these days, with the clear air and the slanted late afternoon light. I already did my version, sort of. I can do a passable solo version singing the vocal part and playing the strings quartet parts on my accordion.
- Arcadia’s Missing is my lockdown anthem: the haunting almost-presence of an absent lover, you feel her gaze on you, you think you could see her for a moment in the corner of your eye, but when you turn, sure enough, she is not there (“How can you touch me/when you’re not really there?”). I would like to do an acoustic guitar + loop station version, but that’s stretching my modest guitar playing. We will see.
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I’ve been listening a lot to Kishi Bashi recently!
And the conceptual masters of 1900
And there is the old classic Ah Pook Is Here
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Oh wow, what a repository. Really sucks you in! Thanks for sharing it <3
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Yeah - like this one: