Record Club is an initiative of Beck, intended as “an informal meeting of various musicians to record an album in a day. The album chosen to be reinterpreted is used as a framework. Nothing is rehearsed or arranged ahead of time. A track is put up here once a week. The songs are rough renditions, often first takes that document what happened over the course of a day as opposed to a polished rendering. There is no intention to ‘add to’ the original work or attempt to recreate the power of the original recording. Only to play music and document what happens.”

Some true beauties:

Jamie Lidell covers Skip Spence’s Cripple Creek. As overwhelming as always, this rare Jamie species.

This is Skip Spence:

Alexander Lee “Skip” Spence (1946 – 1999) was a musician and singer-songwriter best known for his work with Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape and as a solo artist. He was born in Canada, and his family relocated to San Jose, California in the late 1950s. His career was plagued by drug addictions coupled with mental health problems, and is described by a biographer as man who “neither died young nor had a chance to find his way out.” During his tenure in the public eye, he had a profound impact on the outsider music and psych-folk genres.

One with hummingbird Feist, covering ‘Weighted Down’ of Skip Spence:

O and this one is so tribalistic! (with Jeff Tweedy junior on the drum computer):

One with Jeff Tweedy (Wilco) in full regalia, covering Skip Spence’s Dixie Peach Promenade (with jr on the real drums this time):

This week I saw what a tolerant mother, loads of time and an overexpressive Genesis-gene can do with a person. I went to see ‘Monster road‘ at the independent Off-screen festival in Brussels. This documentary tells the story of the legendary self-thought animator Bruce Bickford and his demented father. When he was young, Bickford started making stop motion animation films with plasticine, shaping and re-shaping thousands of little figurines frame by frame. He put his whole soul into animation instead of getting a proper ‘job’, to the dissatisfaction of his perfectionist boeing-engineer father but supported by his caring mother. Forty years later Bickford hasn’t stopped digging the plasticine, molding and morphing as if life depends on it (he really doesn’t understand why Bill Gates doesn’t spend his whole fortune on animation films).

What Bickford does is impressive. He works with a meticulousness that defies an ant’s work, creating a constantly changing universe with things continuously morphing into each other. Everything is organic, things change wherever your eyes can watch. The stream of information that gets to the spectator is like dreaming in fast forward. Movement is Bickford’s personal God. And violence, not to forget. Bickford abuses toy soldiers, giants and blond women who keep on hacking bashing slashing away each others plasticine fragile bodies. Bickford doesn’t know why he loves violence, but he thinks people like to watch it merely because of the relief that seeing violence on tv or in films simply means you’re not involved in it at the time of watching. Funny insight.

Considering his personal affection with destruction, I think the plasticine itself asks for creating and destroying. Plasticine is an excellent tool for shaping and re-shaping, and its creation/destruction property is even more reinforced by the nature of stop motion animation (to get motion, you need to play God and keep on changing changing*). It’s the tool, the medium which makes Bickford artistically violent.

After the documentary, Bruce Bickford himself answered some questions as if life didn’t depend on it at all (he’s getting a bit older). He talked about his work with Frank Zappa in the 70’s and said they didn’t come along that well, and he slowly explained his working process. He also complained about the lack of means to make proper animation movies (he still works at home), which was really really sad and difficult to believe when you see his work.

Then some die-hard Bickford animation work was screened. Impressive, but after a while I came to understand more why Bruce is still a needy man, living a poor life rich in plasticine. I got a Bickford overdose and suddenly the thrill was gone. All those hacking bashing slamming plasticine bastards morphing into faces faces faces time after time, suddenly seemed more of a therapeutic way of spending life rather than adding some meaning to the world. Of course, it’s still breathtaking and technically very inventive what Bickford does, and he surely is the master of plasticine stop motion, but I suddenly needed more (non-imagery, that is). So kids, please take his beautiful inheritance and inject some witty content into his work to make the man richer than ever.

* Blame this doubling tripling quadrupling of words on A million little pieces by James Frey, currently in my bag.

O so beautiful. This song deserves a kingdom.

Happy Janglin with Edward Sharpe and his Magnetic Zeros.

Nice part from 2:24 on..

And I just booked tickets for Micachu at the Brussels’ Botanique. Sounds coooool.

Kitty, Daisy and Lewis are between 14 and 19 years old and they rock their billies alll the way!

Also new (album) & very beautiful. A Weltschmerz mix of shoegaze, dreampop and wave. XX is OO!
(but only for a few songs, then I long for Micachu again)

Through this site, a very interesting tv-series on art came to me:

Art Safari is a BBC series presented by a characteristic – witty with a smile – BBC reporter guy (do they have a breeding room there?) called Ben Lewis, who talks with the most discussed contemporary artists and challenges their work with cheeky questions.

This very interesting one for example, deals with ‘Relational art’, a term invented by art critic Nicholas Bourriaud, ex-director of Palais de Tokyo. Ben Lewis goes on a search for whether relational art could be a new ‘ism’, the first real ‘ism’ of the 21st century..

You can find the art safari with Matthew Barney on Ubu Web.

And snippits of other ones on YT:

A very inspiring and resourceful new issue of the bimonthly art paper ‘HTV de IJsberg’ is out now. This 79th issue is called ‘Mental architecture/former utopian building’ and is guest-edited by artist/curator/scenographer/culture gourmand Jean Bernard Koeman. The magazine collects (three) personal statements and (hidden) work of several artists like HAP, Geert Goiris, Thomas Hirschhorn, Jan De Cock, on how they are inspired by the utopians and architectural achievements of the 1950’s and the modernist era. It is a magazine full of pictures and personal thoughts on why these buildings or structures are important, funny or fantastic. A wonderful extra region to feed your mental map.

Example of (a part of) HAP’s contribution, read on here.

(…)

The thumb with mindmap is made by Jean Bernard Koeman.

Note on mental architecture. Mental architecture is one of the guiding assumptions of evolutionary psychology: that the human mind is composed of semi-independent modules (left and right brain being the most common ones). Interaction with the environment, but also internal processes like meditation, can alter our mental architecture, or the way our neurons are linked and grouped. Conceptually seen, you can also use the term ‘mental architecture’ for mapping out how you see the world, and on which thoughts, concepts, experiences, and images your map is based. Mental architecture is the building in ourselves (Jean Bernard Koeman)!

No content! Just cool (willowy, flat-chested) birds! In a nice Parisian flat!

(Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon by Annie Leibovitz)

See more at Vogue’s Shape Issue..

The new video for ‘When I Grow Up’ from Fever Ray (Karin Dreijer Andersson, The Knife).
Intense, ominous, and other-worldly. Or very this-world, depending on the colour of your sunglasses.

In troubled times, the value of money takes a crash dive. Those slick financial penguins haven’t carried it so far yet that we have to push wheelbarrows full of cash to the bakery to buy a pistolet, but I wouldn’t sleep on both ears yet. Just take a look at both World Wars, not that long ago. With the German economy in tatters after World War One, money was virtually worthless. Cities, towns and even businesses had to issue their own currency. The general term of this inflationary currency was ‘Notgeld’, German for “Emergency Money”. It was not legal, but rather a mutually-accepted means of payment in local shops (in order to avoid wheelbarrow tableaus).

But here comes the nice thing – a crisis always has a bright side – Notgeld substantially fired the imagination among the German population. Everything was used to pay with: coins, leather, silk, linen, even aluminium foil, coil, porcelain and playing cards! And the designs were (mostly) created by anonymous commercial artists and local printers. They even wrote mini messages on the notes.

And much more here.

Sources: Designobserver, Wikipedia and flickr

(drawing by Suzy Creamcheese, evolutionary study by Julia Barr and published in JBScience 2007)

Gini Rose Choupay evolved excruciatingly slowly from a strange mammalian rabbitish fish into a much stranger mammalian bird. Her genes differ from what most scientists expect to be typical of a human being. Her brain-genes, for example, seem to burden her with a lot of strange quirks. One of these is her urge to endlessly compare human beings with animals, appearance- and behavior-wise. Likely, it has to do with the fact she replaces her parents – who she never knew – by dogs. You can read Gini Rose’s full fizzy story here.

Gini Rose also wants to congratulate Charles Darwin with his bicentennial anniversary today. She likes the way Darwin’s controversial theory of human evolution from an ape-like ancestor, inspired many artists (like Odilon Redon), often in dark and fantastic ways.

Vrij Nederland (Week 6 -2009) published an interesting article about why Darwin was less Darwinist than most people assume. In his ‘Decent of Man’, he allayed our fears for being pinned down to our genes only. It’s not all in the genes, even Darwin said. There is some play area too. Human beings for example, are a lot more altruistic than animals, even if that’s not always a good thing for the evolution of the human species. Nature shakes the cards and makes it all thrilling, but nurture is the crucial player when it comes down to shaping a person. Phew.