Likely, you’ve heard of Grizzly Bear. You may even have very interesting opinions about which album or set of unreleased revisions or remixes you prefer. Maybe you know exactly how much to swoon when you hear the key change in the middle of Central and Remote. You may even despise their music, denying their attempts to move you by not trying too hard. Regardless of where your opinions lie, recently, Grizzly Bear in combination with some very talented visual artists and directors, have created some incredible music videos.

If Two Weeks is too catchy for you, give the video a shot. It’s confusion and pleasure wrapped around a glossy piano riff and not-too-complex-but-not-too-simple vocal harmonies. The second video, “Shift,” is an acoustic revamp performed in the bathroom of a Parisian hotel. The song originally appears on their 2004 release, Horn of Plenty, recorded and produced by La Blogotheque. The last video of three, “Ready, Able,” is off of Veckatimest, alongside Two Weeks. The claymation work is, as I interpret it, a homage to Frank Zappa’s use of Bruce Bickford in his own movie, Baby Snakes.

I am not sure if anyone knows if music videos are still relevant, but I don’t think that matters. While Shift is certainly artistically filmed, it’s a real-capture of their performance, unity and sensitivity as a group. The other two, certainly music videos, fall equally into the categories of music and visual art. They produce a sensation in me as a viewer which is distinct and different, and not to be measured against the sensation evoked in me while acting as a listener.

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3. UbuWeb: The Youtube of the Avant-Garde UbuWeb is a free independent resource of sound, text,...

Composer and Jazz guitarist Bill Frisell was asked to create music to accompany the pieces, and he did so faithfully, molding a score for still images that captures the kinetic energy, the strained pull of pigments against each other, and the metallic dis-likability that fuses gently into a pleasing picture. The quartet musicians are Bill Frisell on guitar, Eyvind Kang (a personal favorite) on viola, Jenny Scheinman on violin, and Hank Roberts on cello.

Listen, view, and enjoy.

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These photographs of Abelardo Morell’s are the most breathtaking that I’ve seen from the inside of a room-turned-camera obscura. Being inside a camera obscura is amazing in itself, the blacked-out room is lit from just a peephole to the outside and an entire landscape is projected on the opposite wall, but in Morell’s photographs, the image becomes flush with the room. The cliche landmarks are projected voyeuristically into rooms of various states of decor, repair, and wealth. The effect is eerie. At first, I saw the projections as wallpaper; the forest scenes are especially reminiscent of early 70’s decor. But then, when you realize how he’s captured the images, there’s the inevitable realization that the view projected is the view from the window. It’s the outside on the inside, but it’s all upside down, and fantastic.

Check out more of his work here

Grand Canal Looking West Toward the Accademia Bridge in Palazzo Room Under Construction, 2007

Times Square in Hotel Room, 1997

Upright Image of the Coliseum inside Room # 23 at the Hotel Gladiatori, Rome, 2008

Santa Maria della Salute with Scaffolding in Palazzo Bedroom , 2007

The Empire State Building in Bedroom, 1994

Castle Courtyard in Bedroom, 1999

View of Central Park Looking North-Summer, 2008

View of Florence Looking Northwest Inside Bedroom. Italy, 2009

Chianti Landscape Inside Room With Roberto Barni Art Works. Italy, 2009

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I dont often do posts based on visual work. Even less on fashion (though I have a soft spot for it). I stumbled upon these images from Vogue Italia, December 2007 and wanted to share them. The patterning absolutely blows me away. Whatever your reservations are with femininity and fashion, there is something incontestably breath taking about these images. They are pin-up made high art.

Source: The Photography Link

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They’re not pets, Susan

I found Slinkachu’s Little People in the City yesterday in a bookstore, and it blew me away. In his foreword, he describes his Little People series as an attempt to make people more aware of their surroundings and to make city-dwellers sympathize with the struggles of those differently-scaled beings who experience similar trials to anyone living in a large city. Obviously not everyone has to defend their children from killer bumble bees, but most people know the loneliness of going unnoticed everyday, or of feeling like the world wasn’t built for them. Slinkachu places his tiny installations in unexpected places, and although they are easily missed and or destroyed, you can imagine the joy of finding one of his people on a bench reading a newspaper when you sit down, or taking money out of the ATM at your feet. The experience would dislodge your day. It’s as though these miniature people have lived amongst you all this time, and once you’ve seen one, you look and see them everywhere.

http://little-people.blogspot.com/

http://slinkachu.com/

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Metal Heart from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Tilt Shift photography is a method for simulating a shallow depth of field using special lenses that literally tilt and shift from the camera body. I’m compelled by these images and videos because when the optical illusion is convincing, they’re completely magical. Maybe it’s just about fooling yourself, because for me they’re all about the clarity and detail of an imagined miniature. But the effect is beautiful even if you’re not suckered in. In the videos at the bottom, “Harrowdown Hill” is amazing, if you haven’t already seen it, watch! The mixture of effects and animation with altered live footage is inspiring.

Vincent Laforet

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There are tons of these images all over the web and they’re easy to find. The most interesting, I think, are the tilt shift videos.

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Claude Debussy was a french composer during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Musical culture now labels him as an impressionist, though he despised the term when applied to his music. Like most composers who we remember, he started as a piano prodigy and attended conservatory, but unlike most composers we remember he fought against the system. He battled his professors with unusual dissonances, outrageous chord parallelisms, mixed meters, and music without a “key” center. Where in impressionist art, smudgings and blurs allude to shapes, Debussy’s “impressionist” music alludes to the point, and his use of rhythmic shifting has a way of setting up the audience, and then disappointing them with a minor cadence.

The Music Animation Machine was developed by Stephen Anthony Malinowski. He has done a miraculously good job at documenting, explaining, and allowing his work to be accessible by anyone. The time line of creation for the Music Animation Machine can be found here, you can create your own musical animations by downloading his freeware software and importing your own midi files by going here, and an explanation of why the colors are the way they are can be found here. For more pieces you can purchase DVDs of his Music Animation Machine at high quality, or see his profile on youtube for a large number of works.

In music school, students are trained to hear in both pitch-relations and time-relations – we recognize aural shapes and patterns in beautiful music just as a geologist would recognize subtle changes in sediment below a stream  bed. What the Music Animation Machine has created is a visual representation where non-musicians can hear and see like a musician trains to.

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Mercier (Merce) Philip Cunningham died at his home in Manhattan on sunday, at the age of 90. Merce lived on the cutting edge of dance all through his life, dancing in every performance with his Merce Cunningham Dance Company until the age of 70, and In 2009, MCDC premiered his newest work, Nearly Ninety, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He also earned some of the highest honors bestowed in the arts, including the National Medal of Arts and the MacArthur Fellowship.

Cunningham collaborated mainly with John Cage (first row, right), Cunningham’s life partner and Musical Director for his Dance Company from the 1940s until Cage’s death in 1992. Cage had the greatest influence on his practice. Together, Cunningham and Cage proposed a number of radical innovations. The most famous and controversial of these concerned the relationship between dance and music, which they concluded may occur in the same time and space, but should be created independently of one another. Since the early 1950s the central, only occasionally broken, law of Cunningham dance theater was that the music, designs and choreography are made separately and not assembled until dress rehearsal or the first night. (NY Times)

A slide show of his life and career is here. (NY Times)

photos linked from MCDC Flickr.

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Superbomba (a collector of old photos on Flickr, as featured on LADP here) recently gave an interview. She talks about where she finds her photos, what she looks for, and which are her favourites.

Check it out

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