Good Stuff

Today I went to Zulu, probably the best record store in Vancouver. I ended up with four CDs, all one dollar each.  Cheap, but with outstanding quality. First off I found a CD from a group/collective I’ve been interested in for many years but have never come across: Hagans. The album is called Animation/Imagination and contained the title track that I have been so amazed by for so long. If the term “future jazz” exists it can definitely be applied to these guys. The album is released by legendary Blue Note. Click here for a listen: http://www.amazon.com/Animation-Imagination-Tim-Hagans/dp/B00000HYBM

I am right now listening to an amazing compilation that I also picked up, “Space” a mix album by Kenny Hawkes. If there is anything that gets me going it’s House music from 1994-1998. Why doesn’t today’s House music have that feeling anymore.

I aso picked up Micheal J. Schumacher’s “Stories” as well as some soulful electro by Robert Strauss in his album “Quasars and Phasars”

Now I got some listening to do.

Pappa talade med mig

Såsom i en spegel (Through a Glass Darkly) from 1961 is the first movie in Ingmar Bergman’s trilogy A Film Trilogy. A trilogy about Bergman’s personal relationship to God and religion. The film is an interesting milestone in Bergman’s career and life since he started to have a different approach to making movies and he also discovered Fårö, the island he fell in love with and later move to. He also won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. The film is about a family that are meeting up on a remote island. The father, David is a writer who have just come home from writing a novel in Switzerland, a novel that exploits his daughter Karin’s schizophrenia. Something she discovers on the island, there is now a tense feeling between the family, and Minus, the youngest son is having problems feeling acceptance by his father. The movie plays in the typical style of a Bergman movie, with tense dialogue, beautiful photography (by Sven Nykvist) and great acting. Personally I find the movie worth just watching because of my favorite actor couple, Max Von Sydow and Gunnar Björnstrand. Harriet Andersson and Lars Passgård are also great as siblings. The acting is especially evident in the movie since these four actors are the only actors, creating a very theatrical approach while also making the audience come closer to the characters. A very inspiring movie to say the least.

Sea Monster

http://youtube.com/watch?v=5uAxdBaF5Fg

Stranger Than Paradise

Considering how many movies I’ve been able to watch during this semester, this weekend has been a productive movie watchin weekend for me; I’ve seen three movies so far (or maybe two and a half since one was a collection of shorts). On Friday I watched Rataouille and Pixar Short Film Collection, not too much to say, entertaining and typical Disney, I found Ratatouille especially to be quite classic Disney, but I don’t really know what made me feel that way. I needed to balance this entertainment and easyness out with Jim Jarmusch’s 1984 indie film Stranger Than Paradise, a movie about a stiff relationship between Hungarian cousins. The movie is quite theatrical, many of the scenes are long and take place on the same set. The movie starts with a long scene at the main character Willie’s apartment and then turns into a sort of road movie with Willie and his friend Eddie. The two friends and later Willie’s cousin Eva go on a road trip to New York, Cleveland and Florida and the movie presents these places as very similar. It is a pretty stiff film, not too much happens but there is always that tension throughout the movie that Jim Jarmusch is so good at. I can definitely recommend this movie if you are a fan of Jarmusch or independent film.

Review of David Grove’s “Stops Starting (0.05)”

Walking into the Surrey Art Gallery is a quiet experience. It is hard to believe that the exhibition Open Sound is about sound at all. But when you reach the counter you will be handed a pair of wireless headphones, there is in fact a couple of different headphones for different works. Then you can walk around the gallery disconnected from everyone else. A phenomena that happened on the streets long time ago, in form of the Walkman, and to a much larger extent when the iPod was introduced, now it has happened in the art galleries. The piece I will be talking about is David Grove’s Stops Starting (C0.05), a work consisting of three tape loops that has three different sine waves with different frequencies. What is fascinating is that the light is controlling the speed of these loops, so the sound is always changing. I enjoy the fact that the sound/music is always playing, but also changing. It reminds me of the Internet stations that always play music, without a particular order or any sort of DJ, they are just constantly playing music. It is also an interesting notion that the creator of the piece, David Grove, hasn’t made the music, rather he has made the electronics that make the music, this reminds me of the works of artist like Tinguely; the artist is only the engineer or constructor of the machine that makes the art. However, the sound created is not very ground breaking, the construction and the sound alteration is what is fascinating. It question the format of music, do songs need to be in a particular timeframe to be counted as a song. Or can it just, like this piece, be indefinite. It also questions authorship of music, what and who should be defined as the author?
The exhibition catalogue says that the artist is creating “soundscapes with a conscious resistance to modern, digital methods of sound creation” (2). But I cannot see this at all; the materials he has chosen to create sounds with is just an artistic choice to me, just because it is not made by the latest technology doesn’t mean it is critiquing or resisting it, rather it just creates a specific sound, but then, it is also hard to understand what the viewer/listener is supposed to focus on, the actual soundscape or how the soundscape is made. I also found that the work was presented in a quite mundane way, the piece was hung up above the elevator, without the feeling that it was put there for a reason. It felt more like the gallery was out of space, this made it hard to study how the electronics actually worked, it also made it hard to alter the amount of light that reached the tape loops making it troublesome to actually witness the change of the loops corresponding to light. Overall the piece was an interesting experience, but not even close to be the main attraction of the Surrey Art Gallery, which is undeniably Janet Cardiff’s Forty-Part Motet.

Opening Day

People who know me, know the passion that I live for.

Baseball.

Today was the exciting opening day, the first game of the season. Atlanta Braves visited Washington Nationals in a pretty good game. As usual it takes some time for the players to get into the mentality and stadiums after spring training so they feel a little bit rusty, the weather during these early games tend also to be really cold (which is a big contrast from just coming back from Florida or Arizona in spring training). It was very interesting to see the National’s new ballpark, which had President George W. Bush throw the first pitch. Besides from a couple of home runs and spectacular pitching by the Braves the game wasn’t too interesting until Ryan Zimmermanthe hit a beautiful walk-off home run to end the game in favor for the Nationals. The game was entertaining though like always when Jon Miller and Joe Morgan are the commentators. Now I can’t wait to see Toronto Blue Jays against the Yankees, and Seattle Mariners against Texas Rangers tomorrow.

For anyone interested in baseball I can highly recommend a mlb.tv subscription which lets you watch every game being played, it’s great just coming home and being able to watch anything, there’s usually around 15 games being played every day so there’s always something to watch.

Vancouver in the Studio is online

Here is the link to the project’s website:

http://www.eciad.ca/~vsundin

This project is open to anyone who makes music and is inspired by Vancouver. Please send me an email if you’d like to contribute.

Digital/Acoustic (2)

Today I watched an interesting video from G4TV’s daily Attack of the Show podcast. The segment was called The Loop: Musicians in the Digital Era. A contributor for Wired News, Eliot Van Buskirk and Phil Kay from a Nuclear Free City was invited to discuss the new digital technology of music and how it affects independent musicians. Although interesting, I found the arguments and topic quite obvious, but what I think was the most intriguing point was when they started talking about the physical formats. Van Buskirk argued that people are beginning to go back to vinyl, probably due to that the format is far opposite from digital formats. I think this is a very valid point.

I now recall a conversation I overheard in one of downtown’s record shops. That business is going better due to all the kids that buy frames for record covers, want to buy vinyl because of the ‘cool factor’ of the covers. I like the fact that vinyl starts to get cool again, it’s not just a nerdy collector or a DJ (or a fusion of them both) who gives attention to vinyl, but a broader sense of the public. This will gain the true vinyl nerds because it will probably make less stores go bancrupt.

I was also skimming through a book today by Frank Broughton and Bill Brewster called How to DJ (Properly), I came across an interesting chart of positives and negatives of DJing with CDs compared to spinning vinyl. Although there were many positive notes on why you would want to play CDs the last one said “once you’re bitten by the DJ bug you’ll probably want to get into vinyl as well.” A quote I think signify the physical value of a vinyl record. As a DJ that grew up practicing on vinyl; I find it very hard to accept a strict digital setup. Since all my records are back in Sweden I am forced to stick with a digital setup over here. Playing on a computer is functional, but I honestly find it extremely hard to choose a song to cue up for the next song, since all music is just in a massive library of mp3s, they are all just in a dull list of titles, when playing with vinyl you have a whole crate of large colourful sleeves that you put together for that particular night, you don’t only get the pleasure of sitting home choosing what to bring and imagine what you might play, you also get the sense of where to find them in the crate (an important aspect of DJing, since not finding the song you want to play is one of the biggest nightmares of playing out). So even if more and more DJs play CDs today, understandably to the lower costs and and learning time, acknowledging both formats will definitely make you access a broader variety of music and hopefully that leads you to play better music.

Which one do you prefer?

Kafka

Kafka (1991) by Steven Soderbergh is a strange movie. Jeremy Irons plays Kafka (which he does excellently, like always), set in the very appropriate location of the old district of Prague. The location is in itself a reason to watch this movie, with harsh noir contrasts shot beautifully with black and white film. Kafka’s friend is found dead and he gets involved in an underground resistance group that tries to end a secret set of scientists who do very cruel experiments to human beings so they can create the perfect human. It is hard to explain the story, because it is filled of strange moments, that just have to be watched. Let’s just say Kafka looks more like James bond than one of most famous writers ever made. I can definitely recommend this movie to anyone, it is such a fantastic mix of moods, from horror to action to science fiction, although never really sentimental or romantic (which might fit with Kafka’s real personality).

Inspiration: Nicola Conte

I have been into lounge music for a really long time. I consider that the first song I ever heard of the style is the first track on a mix cd by Thievery Corporation that came with a magazine, many many years ago. The song was ‘Bossa Per Due’ by Nicola Conte. I’m guessing that being a very early James Bond fan made me get into it a lot. The music was modern bossa, with many sixties’ influences. Nicola Conte is an Italian DJ and producer and I love all his stuff: his DJ-sets, acoustic music, electronic music, remixes (they’re amazing). He gets away from one of the things that can bother me very much with lounge music; that it just become trendy background music for decoration stores.

A couple of years ago Conte released a record called Other Directions, the sounds on this album was very traditional, yet somehow very modern.

I have been DJing for many years, mostly Deep House music but I love to play more chilled sets, where I have more space to play things I have discovered, and listening to Nicola Conte’s sounds always make me contemplate to just become a pure Jazz/Bossa DJ. That would be cool.