FundamentallySound Blog

Tonight I am doing a performance at the LAB. Originally, the music I made was a kind of celebration of what I had deemed 'salvation songs' from all over the world. By salvation songs, I meant songs that somehow identified with a big power, that sought to appeal to unseen forces. Surprisingly, this whole idea came from listening to Laurie Anderson's "Big Science" and noticing how it was a kind of late 20th century post-religious, post-industrial appeal to a higher power. From there I started sampling sounds from South African gospel choirs, Haitian voodoo chants, the Velvet Underground's "Beginning to See The Light", De La Soul's "Trying People" , Robert Johnson's "Cross Road Blues" and so on. You can get the idea of the type of song I was going for. The results of my experiments sound like this, which I'm pretty pleased with.

Three Minutes of Salvation

After starting this process, Rémi Gerard-Marchant signed on to do an animation for the project. His take on the whole idea was darker, he approached it with suspicion. While I was celebrating humans' capability to find solace from certainty of the existence of powers beyond the physical realm, Rémi was showing the other side of that same coin. He seemed leery of the human need for clarity and singularity of purpose. He began sampling images much the same way as I sampled sound, only his image palette was comprised of scenes of destruction, particularly those of military aggression. His response to my rather naive sound choices explores how humans often destroy one another in the name of higher powers, whether they be god or country.

Rémi has taken the whole piece a big step further, his film is highly stylized and beautiful even as the images he is working from are themselves very disturbing. The result is a kind of brightly colored animated comic book that dances around our, especially we who are Americans, simultaneous disgust and sickening fascination with violence. It's a kind of Abu Ghraib Flash animation told in bold Mondrian colors.

In an email I just got, Rémi says, "Dunno if people will like it, but they should be stunned." And it is stunning. Also tonight, Life On Earth will be playing. The whole event is called Between Heaven and Earth, appropriately enough.