Issue 3 / August 2010

36
Bido Lito! August 2010
Sound and Vision
Nic Toupee
Nic Toupee
In order to really pick the lint from
the celestial pockets where visual art, performance and
sound meet, it is essential to look first at the signposts:
to stand at the crossroads and survey how the landscape
shifts where media meets.
It is no surprise to us, that
visual art and sound have a peculiarly symbiotic and fertile
relationship. After all, we need look no further than the
two essential accompaniments of any musical artefact’s
release: the CD artwork and the filmclip.
A twentieth century invention, with the first ‘album
covers’ being released for scratchy phonograph plates
way back when the Nutcracker was top twenty material,
many numerous and wondrous tomes have been released
documenting cover art.
Arguably, the first attention
grabbing album covers, melding ideas current in visual art
with what is, ostensibly, a very creative form of advertising/
product display, came from the fifties, principally from
record labels fundamental to the Jazz movement, Blue
Notes Mondrianesque colour fields and typographic
adventurousness, designed by Reid Miles, representing
powerfully the intellectual and sonic adventures and rulebreaking
involved in this daring movement, pioneered by a
largely African American stable of poster boys and girls - at
the time a far more radical idea than it should have been
in a perfect world. All in all, it was the daring of the Jazz
visionaries that led to the spectacular acid-fuelled album
cover renaissance of the sixties.
Of course, Liverpool’s own Trump card, The Beatles and
their art director Robert Fraser (and photographer Michael
Cooper), are credited with one of the greatest ever artistic
works accompanying a slab of wax in Sgt Peppers: a
phenomenal exercise in collage and allegory, metaphor
and melody. Perhaps it was the acid taking experiences
of these times and their synaesthetic phenomena that
convinced the psychedelic generation of the importance
of visuals to sound – not just the importance but some
fundamental, intrinsic harmony that those of us who
refused the spiked punch may struggle to truly appreciate.
Whilst we may not appreciate the synaptic backflips
of notes licking our eyeballs, we can thank the Byrds,
Beatles and Floyds of this world for putting the film clip
front and centre as a tool for provoking reaction to sound.
The previous standard clip comprising a bunch of skivvied
eggheads attempting the jive, or some coordinated girls
having a smiling competition were old hat compared with kaleidoscopic effects
and absurd visual tales to accompany music with lyrics finally venturing far
beyond the three chord tale of heartbreak or lovemake previously accepted as
pop’s main game. Thank you acid. Thank you mushrooms. Thank you hippies for
your face paint and performance experiments. They may have been complete
crap in most cases but you certainly opened the portcullis to the fair castle
where sound and vision may marry and make fine iterations.
Of course, it wasn’t all the hippies and the lysergic at the helm of art’s
infiltration into the low-culture world of pop. Let’s also give a nod to Warhol
and his Factory: in his commercialisation of the notions of ‘fine art’, he kicked
against innumerable stuffed shirts, bruised some ideals and perhaps did more
for the bastard child of art and commerce that is Marketing than any other
creative figure until Peter Saville’s Eighties coup. Although his contribution is
so very recent and is in fact ongoing to this day, there is no getting around Peter
Saville as one of the finest nexus points we’ve ever been graced in facilitating
the ongoing conversation between sound and vision. It can possibly be argued
that through the DIY ethic of punk, the neon largesse of Disco and the pomp
of space rock, cover art had taken a significant dive in aesthetic quality during
the seventies (of course with some exceptions). While album covers like ‘Dark
Side Of The Moon’ and “Hawkwind’ were elaborate and suited the quality of
fantasy that was the hallmark of Progressive concept rock, it was sorely in need
of a taste reboot.
The Futurist mentality of the early eighties came thankfully to its’ rescue,
replacing the noble wizard and fearful troll with abstract ideas, bringing back
the idea of elegance in typography, design and bringing a welcome breathing
space for photography, new digital media and a re-rub of classical sculpture and
painting. Peter Saville and yet another Factory were centrally, boldly, defiantly
exercising their muscularly different aesthetic like a heavy weight boxer in the
ring with fifty featherweights.
And last but not least in admiring the nexus-directing signposts to our
contemporary comfort in mixing media, let us stop at the Eighties ‘concept
video’, in which the visual narrative was just as strong as the song it promoted
– sometimes more so. Throwing the epic clip to Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ and
Duran Duran’s ‘Wild Boys’ into the ring, and of course Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ as
extended video clip meets film, let’s focus on those who added something a
little grander to the idea – in particular avant-garde film maker Derek Jarman for
his iconic clips for The Smiths, including ‘The Queen Is Dead’, ‘Ask’ and ‘Panic’,
in addition to Throbbing Gristle’s groundbreaking ‘TG Psychic Rally In Heaven’
and teaming up with ‘Suede’ to produce mesmerising backing visuals for their
early concerts. What Jarman brought to the already quite crowded table was
a, like Saville, embrace of the non linear, of the anti-commercial, in his case a
diy jungian body politic, encased in dreamlike non sequence. His vision was
abundantly fruitful, seeding ideas of video collage, political metaphor and the
waking dream.
Of course we’ve jogged past many a moment of enlightenment, a swathe
of technological advancement and realms of Serious Ideas. But nowhere
are sound and vision more closely aligned than in presentation of our body
of popular music itself. If any particular omission enrages you, write to your
editor! Plant your metaphoric flag on our supersonic highway!
And now for homework: Christian Marclay, Coldcut and Alva Noto.
www.bidolito.co.uk