Headhat Records and Starving Raptors have teamed up to release an AMAZING charity-compilation, to benefit the New Hampshire SPCA. That's right, it's for kitties (and other animals).
This thing is, no exaggeration, 66 tracks long, and clocks in at almost 4 hours. It's only $5, which goes entirely to the charity, and features some phenomenal material.
My experimental-electronic outfit LeVautourEnsemble has a previously-unreleased, exclusive, otherwise-unheard track on this thing, called "Mamihlapinataei: Searching For Words In Other Tongues"... among an amazingly-diverse cast of characters, featuring some big names in indie-hip-hop, underground-celeb-types, and tracks that you probably haven't heard (but probably should) from as far away as Belgium, Australia, Japan... There's lots of exclusive content on this thing, and lots of things you'll hear and wonder how you POSSIBLY could have managed to sleep on up until now... Really, this is a QUALITY mix, from start to finish, that you absolutely need to hear.
Download it now here. (Dropped yesterday, MayDay, through Starving Raptors, available through Headhat later in the month.)
As someone whose academic and artistic work tends to revolve around various critical concepts of intermediality, with a general and passionate fixation on the blurring of mediums and boundaries between disciplines, I have a somewhat awkward confession to make.
Honestly, there are times when pop-culture's (and particularly consumer-culture's) emphasis on the "multi-media" weirds me the hell out.
I feel like a bit of a hypocrite saying this, back-pedalling, trying to explain how what I'm referring to is somehow different from what "I" do, as I research the role of music in Literature or vice-versa, or stress the importance of videos I make for a more thorough understanding of my musical-output that they accompany... (I know. How very un-post-modern [or un-post-post-modern/ un-"reconstructionist"] of me to try to distance my own work from pop-culture. This is an observation, not a theory, so I offer no direct apology). It is what it is.
I first jotted some of these thoughts down in a notebook a few years ago, while I was searching for a gift for a family-member. I was looking for an electronic-device that performed a single task in a simple, easy-to-use manner. I had owned a similar device years prior, so I knew that the technology existed... and honestly, as a musician who's a bit of a gear-nerd, I knew of quite a few ways to accomplish the task in question. Problem was, at the time, there were plenty of devices on the market that could handle this simple audio task.... in addition to a plethora of other far more complicated tasks that wouldn't be used and would render the device far too uselessly complex for the person it was intended for. Poking around in the stereo-equipment section, I was invariably directed to the "home theatre" section, to which I groaned. "Oh, we have plenty of things that do that... as a side-effect of all this neat video-stuff that they can also do!" Another groan. "No, those features will not be used." I wanted a device that accomplished a strictly-audio task simply and efficiently. There was nothing on the market at the time that did what I wanted it to (outboard, without needing to be plugged into a computer) that didn't also have a visual-component.
For some reason, these frustrations led me to think of how distasteful I found the "Bohemian Rhapsody" sequence of "Wayne's World" the first time I saw it. The Queen song had long-conjured its own set of mental images for me. The aesthetics associated with that song in the film, Garth and Wayne headbanging, provided such a harsh juxtaposition with my own imaginative constructs for the song. Afterward, it irked me irrationally and uncontrollably to no end that, among kids my age, whenever that song came on, the point-of-reference was inevitably "Wayne's World," rather than the dense operatic aesthetic landscape I'd constructed in my mind. {for the record, this no longer bothers me in the least. I was pretty young when that movie came out, and "A Night at the Opera" was the first record I ever purchased, so childhood feelings about this subject were rather biased and passionate.}
{contrast audio-associated aesthetic imagery and perceive intermedial dischord.}
{On a somewhat unrelated note, I'm developing an ever-more-detailed theory about how much you can tell about a person based on their opinion of Queen. I'm only partially kidding.}
Similarly, around the same time, I heard an article on NPR about how Disney's "Fantasia" shaped the way that entire generations qualified classical music with aesthetic imagery. (I think it was this article.) Although I found this story/ review fascinating, it also made me feel somewhat dirty. There's something deeply strange about how this classical content, works by Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Stravinsky, etc, was reshuffled, repurposed, re-imagined, and re-aestheticized forever in the collective consciousness.... by a cartoon.
As Lloyd Schwartz says in his NPR review of the Fantasia rerelease, "for kids, it's a delightful introduction to classical music. But bothFantasiafilms reveal how difficult it is to arrive at convincing images. Visual artists have to be deeply sensitive to music not to oversimplify, or betray, what's so deeply in the music." Maybe that's part of my discomfort, and the distinction I can't help but draw in my mind- pop-culture's use of "multi-media" tends to super-impose and interpret between mediums, whereas "intermediality" perceives and utilizes multiple mediums as components of an over-arching whole, multiple ways of understanding the same content, an ability for aspects of one medium to say things unable to be expressed with another, rather than a botched-translation from one format to another as if the vocabularies were entirely and seamlessly congruent? (See Deleuze and Guattari on mimicry versus Becoming?)
{I'm using this particular example not because it's the best-known and most narratively-accessible sequence from the film, but because the source-material for the musical-composition is literary [Goethe], which provides an additional layer of multi-media/ intermedial complication.}
I'll be the first to admit that, in all of these examples, the role of capitalism in our cultural reception of art is a large aspect of what I find off-putting... "You NEED more features... Why WOULDN'T we want our stuff to do more stuff??"... classic works of art repackaged and resold in more digestible forms to cater to a larger swath of the consumer population, scarring the new image-associations simultaneously to the parts of our brains receptive to the music, blocking our cognitive ability to let the music speak its own language... etcetera... {Breathe.}
Are these the only distinctions, though? As always, the line between audio (or any other medium) as product and audio as art is really blurry. I'm constantly trying to figure out where that line is, and how to most effectively discern and distinguish the force-fed "multi-media" that makes me feel like a dirty manipulated consumer from the uses of intermediality and the blurrings of boundaries between disciplines and distinctions that I find so vital and mentally-invigorating... Yet at the same time I'm entirely unsure as to why this line needs to be drawn or clarified at all.
In the meantime, exploring observational knee-jerks is always something I find important.
{Now, to cleanse your pallet, a bit of multi-media mind-candy I stumbled on while writing.}
I recently finished the first completed draft of a piece of short fiction that I'd had in the works for quite a while. I'm in the process of sending it out to some gracious readers willing to provide some feedback for future edits, help me get it out of my own head for a bit...
In the meantime, I figure I may as well share an idiosyncratic yet essential aspect of my writing-process. Many of my pieces of writing are composed to a dedicated "soundtrack;" as a musician and a writer in whose writing music and sound tends to play a large role, it's essential for me that the piece that I'm working on maintain a particular "sound" in the style that it's written in. Most of the "tone" of my writing is based first-and-foremost on sound. Therefore, I make a playlist of the sound and tone that I'm trying to achieve (often, like this one, including songs of my own that were composed exclusively for the purpose of capturing and understanding the "sound" of the piece of writing at hand [not all of my own pieces on this list were composed explicitly for that purpose however, some just fit the mood well] ) and listen to that exclusively while writing and editing.
Here is, then, the "soundtrack/ playlist" for a piece titled "Nails Dig In (In The Mouth of the Wolf)."
(wink/ hint/ wink to those who stumble on this while helping me edit/ reading for submission/ reading the work if it happens to get published somewhere; these tracks also feature/ include a few easter-egg internal-references within the work that add additional layers of meaning.)
1) LeVautourEnsemble- Physical Consent
2) The Stiletto Formal- ...tastes like black licorice
3) Placebo- Protect Me From What I Want
4) LeVautourEnsemble- Hybrid Eyes
5) Crystal Castles- Not In Love (feat. Robert Smith)
6) Miike Snow- Plastic Jungle
7) LeVautourEnsemble- Mamihlapinatapei; Searching For Words In Other Tongues.
(Sorry, this one is currently unavailable. It's slated for a forthcoming compilation as a "previously unreleased" track, and it wouldn't quite be "unreleased" if I dropped it here, now would it? ;) )
8) Bright Eyes- Lover I Don't Have To Love
9) Yeasayer- O.N.E.
10) LeVautourEnsemble with Antoine 518- Wave (Our Confusion Is Just What We Need)
(this is another in the previously-unreleased category, this one a recent collab-track, but I'm dropping this one here. That's right, this is exclusive-type-shit. Brand new, just for you.)
Because the logistics of selling mail-order art baffle me a bit, I finally broke down, revived my long-dormant Paypal account, and started an Etsy shop.
At the moment this shop is just for the variations on the Crazy-Chicken photo-reproduction prints that I've recently posted about making available (there are two different designs now!), but in the future I may or may not make one-of-a-kind pieces available here too, if there's interest in that sort of thing.
(I haven't posted any poetry here in a while... largely because my writing-output mostly veers in alternate directions these days. I do have a couple pieces in the pipeline for attempted publication at the moment... but here's one that I wrote off-the-cuff after watching a Portsmouth, NH landmark, the Memorial Bridge, being dismantled last week. Figured I'd post it here as a sort of an homage.)
My infamous "crazy chicken" design is now available as a limited-edition custom print!
Think of this as the LeVautour equivalent of the soup-can or Obey-giant. THIS is my pop-art manifesto. Get with it.
$10 for a basic, unframed, 8x10 matte or glossy print. Framing options, custom colors, bizarro printing options (I'll find a way to put this on ANYTHING you want...) are totally available, and pricing is negotiable. Get at me.
My solo musical outfit, LeVautourEnsemble, has just released our second record, "Machinique Meltdown," on the world-infamous Headhat Records!
Like the first LeVautourEnsemble record, (2010's long-delayed "...whose wings are a dull reality"... as well as Tipsy Cougar's notoriously chaotic 2011 album "Immaculate Conceptions" and a ton of other awesome and awesomely-odd stuff) this one is available to download for FREE/ donation through the "webhat" imprint. Download it here.... now. Because I said so. I mean, it's free, what do you have to lose??
Predictably, this record is an odd one. It's sorta-kinda a concept-record. It's sorta-kinda a response to a perverse challenge (I like challenges). It's sorta-kinda a hip-hop record (?!?) (emphasis on the sorta-kinda). It's sorta-kinda a whole bunch of things that it's really not at all.
As many who know me personally are probably aware, I get a strange sort of thrill from finding new odd-ball accolades for my press-kits ("... like a young CC Deville wielding an out-of-control fire-hose," anyone? "...mystical..."? lol) Well, from this one so far I've gotten an absolute GEM courtesy of Headhat label-boss/ noise-beat virtuoso Adhesiveslipper. (as if I needed MORE reasons to love Headhat to death.) This record, apparently... "has the headiest liner-notes of any record we've released so far." I'll take it! Thanks Dan! (To the rest of you, please take that as a challenge to listen to this record and give it the most out-there review [good, bad, outraged, indifferent, wtf, whatever]. It probably deserves it, and I'd love to hear what you think.)
Since I know that very few people even OPEN the file with the liner-notes in it for digital-downloads, I may as well just post those notes here, give you a taste of what this thing is about, what you're getting your eardrums into with this one....
LeVautourEnsemble- Machinique Meltdown
“Machinic, a word that does not exist, translates the French machinique, the adjectival form of le machin, a gadget, a watchamacallit.”
This footnote from editor/ translator Robert Brinkley’s notations to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s 1975 essay “What Is A Minor Literature?” provides part of the title and a sort of a point-of-departure for this collection of songs and sounds.
This album was spawned as an outlet for a meltdown of various sorts, in the immediate aftermath of a graduate-literature program which found me, by the end of the final semester, deeply immersed in attempting to understand and apply the critical-theory of Delueze and Guattari to a variety of research, writing, and art projects... resulting in a sort of troubling void where Deleuzian concepts such as rhizomatic mapping, deteretorialization, assemblages, “becoming,” and, of course, the ever-elusive “machinique,” acquired vast degrees of personal resonance on many different levels.
The resulting album was initially intended as a concept-record about varying sorts of apocalypses. In its finished form, in many ways it is this indeed... though, in true Deleuzian form, in a far more confusing, meandering, and easily-misunderstandable way than initially intended. You could probably refer to each resulting “song” on this short album as a “Plateau,” (and you probably wouldn’t be entirely wrong)... but I’d kind of prefer that you didn’t.
This album was recorded between January 2011 and December 2011, primarily at the LoftDeLeVautour, Portsmouth, New Hampshire. All instruments, sounds, voices, noises, etc were performed, created, and/ or mutated and heavily manipulated by Bernard P. Provencher LeVautour.
Again, in true Deleuzian fashion, I choose to refuse to explain anything about any track on this album with any further degree of detail within these notations.
For a taste of the record, as your download is downloading, and a taste for the accompanying video-footage (If I remember right, there's some sort of video or other for the vast majority of the tracks on this record if you visit my Youtube channel)... here's the intro-track, and the outro-track. Believe it or not, I totally feel that, over the course of the record, the transition between the two begins to make a little bit of sense.
