New Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album coming out. Who’s stoked?

Thanks Zane.

From the blurb:
“A Battles collaboration with celebrated light artists UVA (United Visual Artists), produced by Warp Films (This Is England, Rubber Johnny, Dead Mans Shoes etc.).”

While I love the song, what interests me more about this is the video as snapshot of a particular time, both artistically and politically. I love it.

A few years back, I lost my record/CD collection (it’s a long and heartbreaking story that I am not going to get into) and since then, I have taken that as an opportunity to rebuild my collection, digitally, from the ground up. In that time, I have amassed a collection of 10,000 songs, which translates to about 1,100 albums. Not bad. Of course, the upkeep on a collection like that is fairly daunting, if you want to keep artist names, album names, song titles, and play order correct. (I do. One of the quirks of being an artist myself is that I respect how other artists title and order their work)

One of the things that I have really latched onto though is the cover art, and more specifically the iTunes feature, CoverFlow. It allows for a digital copy of the artist’s work to be identified with the unique artwork that they create for the music. Since the 1960’s, cover art has been inseparable from the music that it represents, becoming a part of the musical experience. Except now as we move to a time when music files exist on their own, sans artwork. Of course, CoverFlow is a great step forward by allowing us to have a visual connection to the aural experience, but it by no means replaces the experience of physical packaging. (Think of Led Zepplin’s Physical Graffiti, the vinyl version) That, however, will be sorely missed. But we were already on a downhill slide, as far as packaging is concerned, from records (which had the most real estate), to CDs, and throw cassettes in there where ever you like. (Although, if you remember, the first CDs to come out had large packaging, and a lot of real estate for artwork, but those got a lot of static from environmentalists who were concerned about waste, and were phased out of production in favor of the packaging we have now. And you had to throw the exterior packaging away anyway.)

Design Observer had an article relating to this awhile back that is worth a read too, although it is a bit pessimistic. Personally, I am happy with CoverFlow (although there a few quirks with the program) in theory, as I am able to have that connection between the music and the visuals. My hope is that we will be able to also have liner notes, production notes, etc. along side the cover art at some point, completing the experience.

I think that my favorite review of this likened this to “the Smurfs as a fascist society, or Snow White and the Seven Dwarves at a German BDSM dungeon. Actually, maybe it’s just a really intense day at the Keebler factory.”

Still, Battles are one of the more interesting groups out there in my mind.

Nick Cave has always impressed me with the volume of his creative output, especially considering the personal demons that he has had to deal with.

Here is a collection of some videos, in no particular order.

When I was younger, I was into jazz, being a musician with the trumpet as my main instrument. Later on in high school, it fit into my (somewhat misguided) bohemian asperations, and I stayed with it. But somewhere along the line, I lost track of it, not in any sort of conscious way, but as music is a reflection of one’s life and the music that you listen to reflects your mood or life at that moment, my life went in such a way that I stopped listening to to because it just didn’t fit into it at that time.

But a recently, I heard something, and decided to pick up some of my old albums, and I have not been able to put them down, specifically John Coltrane’s Live at the Village Vanguard and Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come. These albums are ingrained into my memory (or what’s left of it) but the years that it has been since I have listened to them have given me a new perspective on them.

The big thing for me is the connection between what the early jazz artists were doing and the larger creative process. That is, the severing of the past for the creation of the new. Although later misinterpreted, the Futurists had a similar beliefs; in Marionetti’s manifesto, he called for the destruction of museums and libraries in order for art to move forward. A similar sort of attitude can be seen both in the title of The Shape of Jazz to Come and in the music, where it was a harbinger of a new style, breaking a lot of old rules of song structure, but doing so in order to move forward.