Merely approaching the field of art involving modifying and inventing instruments gives us a pleasant anxiety. There’s so much out there! Violins that play records. Artists that play buildings. Beats that play artists. Seems like magic happens when these mediums of creation entwine, but these few sound and look so amazing, it’s positively seductive. From replicas of Hieronymus Bosch’s surreal harp-lutes to Pierre Bastien’s tiny, mechanical orchestras, here are just a few functioning, artist-created instruments that we’d love to strum, bang, and play.
If you’ve ever wondered what your favorite literary characters might be listening to while they save the world/contemplate existence/get into trouble, or hallucinated a soundtrack to go along with your favorite novels, well, us too. But wonder no more! Here, we sneak a look at the hypothetical iPods of some of literature’s most interesting characters. What would be on the personal playlists of Holden Caulfield or Elizabeth Bennett, Huck Finn or Harry Potter, Tintin or Humbert Humbert? Something revealing, we bet. Or at least something danceable. Read on for a cozy reading soundtrack, character study, or yet another way to emulate your favorite literary hero. This week: The fearsome great white himself, Moby Dick.
You might have seen the picture doing the rounds on the web over the last couple of days – a screenshot of a YouTube video of John Cage’s 4’33″, with a whacking big notice at the bottom proclaiming, “NOTICE This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by WMG. The audio has been disabled.” The joke, of course, is that 4’33″ doesn’t have any audio — it’s four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. We’re sure that Cage would appreciate the humor here, but the fact that it’s all too believable that WMG might have actually done this is kind of sad. After all, getting this audio pulled from YouTube would be far from the most ridiculous thing the music industry has done in recent years in its ongoing war-on-drugs style exercise in copyright-litigating futility. Join us after the jump for some key moments in legal idiocy.
[Editor's note: While your editors take the day off, Flavorwire will be counting down some of our most popular features of 2011 so far. This post originally ran on April 10th. Enjoy your Memorial Day!] This week, New York Magazine ran a series of fairly great articles documenting apartment living in New York City. One of these in particular, entitled ‘The Perpetual Garret: Where the starving artists slept’ caught our eye for its rare peek into the homes of some of our favorite artists. Inspired, here we’ve put together some of our favorites from the NY Mag article as well as some of our other favorite artists’ lairs from around the world (and the internet), the whole collection running the gamut from the tiny and cramped to the ridiculously messy to the spacious and modern. Click through to see how the other half lives.
Daniel Fishkin is an artist with the kind of tenacity that is mostly reserved for politicians and mountain climbers. When he was in college, he became fascinated with the daxophone, an experimental instrument played by drawing a bow over a thin piece of wood — known as a tongue — that’s clamped to a wooden block. The daxophone was invented by the reclusive musician and typographer Hans Reichel, so Fishkin e-mailed Reichel, asking to purchase one of the instruments. His request was ignored. Undeterred, Fishkin began his own course of daxophone tutelage, seeking out a teacher and crafting his own tongues and eventually taking an immersion course in German. Three years ago, he arrived on Reichel’s doorstep and they spent a week together, talking shop and building new instruments.
Now, in his quest for still more exotic and interesting sounds, Fishkin has turned to yet another source: circuits. Specifically, the interaction between light and sound, as perceived by a series of cathodes and a battery. Check out photos and video of Fishkin’s inventions and read our interview with him, after the jump.
As the dance world reflects on the passing of one of its legends, we caught up with Village Voice dance critic Deborah Jowitt to get her thoughts on Merce Cunningham’s vast contributions to the art form, both as a choreographer and a dancer. “He had a tremendous air of animal alertness, a kind of inner fire,” Jowitt told us. “He didn’t mug, he didn’t emote. He had this blazing quality.”
From configuring choreography based on a roll of the dice to insisting that music and dance exist independently of one another, Cunningham revolutionized traditional ideas about what dance is and how it should look. Here, Jowitt talks about some of the defining characteristics of his work and recalls the first time she saw the company. Read More »
Way Station, (2001). Cedric Andrieux, Derry Swan. Photo by Tony Dougherty.
Earlier today the New York Times announced that modern dance master Merce Cunningham had died Sunday night at the age of 90. While his formal obituary isn’t up yet, this paragraph describing the famous choreographer in his later years on Arts Beat made us smile. Read More »
