Tropicana Magazine Sep-Oct 2018 #120: Art As Life

CULTURE | MUSIC
Treble, Clef and Canvas
The avant-garde artists bringing art to their music.
UTOPIA
BJORK
Released at the end of
2017 and the second
album to follow
the breakup of her
relationship, ‘Utopia’ is
Bjork’s symphonic ode
to love. Clocking in at
a record 72 minutes it
is also Bjork’s longest
studio album to date.
Collaborating with
Venezuelan producer
Alejandro Ghersim, the
effort is unabashedly
romantic, with the
Icelandic wonder opening up and baring her soul in a torrent of emotions
that explore the idea of togetherness. Musically, the flute takes centre stage,
while elsewhere the light airy sounds of an Icelandic Hamrahlid choir and
sampled bird songs take flight. Nevertheless, the album’s epic closer ‘Future
Forever’ is its most pared down, just a synth organ and Bjork’s trademark her
vocal gymnastics, swooping and diving with the grace of native Icelandic and
Venezuelan birds.
Our Pick...
THE VELVET
UNDERGROUND
The New York band’s
most experimental
album, ‘The Velvet
Underground & Nico’
heralded both a new
rock sound and grittily
realistic approach to lyric
crafting. Featuring 11
tracks, it mixes Lou Reed’s
deadpan vocals and his
undeniable ability to turn
the everyday and ugly
into visual poetry with
taut, groovy psychedelic
rock. Detailing paranoia, drug use, longing and addiction, some of the band’s
finest tracks appear, including ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’, ‘Venus In Furs’,
‘Heroin’ and ‘Sunday Morning’. German singer Nico guests on three tracks
at the insistence of manager Andy Warhol, whose by now famous yellow
banana sticker appears on the cover. Mired in a legal rights battle after it
was released in 1967, the album performed poorly, but remains critically
acclaimed and highly influential.
TANGERINE REEF
ANIMAL COLLECTIVE
Baltimore’s experimental pop band, Animal Collective,
is a quartet whose members float in and out of projects
at will. On ‘Tangerine Reef’, Panda Bear is missing
and with him his pop-centric hooks. Instead the
group has roped in Coral Morphologic for the band’s
second audio-visual output; the Miami duo, that
grow and photograph coral, capture the colour and
life of the underwater world. Combined with Animal
Collective’s ambient otherworldly soundscape of
noise rock and freak folk, and lead singer Avey Tare’s
despairing vocals, ‘Tangerine Reef’ conjures up the
marine devastation being visited upon the oceans by
coral bleaching, run off and plastic debris to suitably
mournful effect.
TRANS EUROPA
EXPRESS
KRAFTWERK
Before there
was EDM,
house, techno,
hip-hop or new
wave, there
was Kraftwerk.
Formed in
Dusselfdorf in
1970, the avantgarde
German
collective is the
progenitor of
modern electronic music laying down the foundations
for numerous musical movements that followed. Of their
many timeless albums, ‘Trans Europa Express’ is widely
regarded as their best and spawned its eponymous single
(later sampled by Afrika Bambaataa on ‘Planet Rock’) and
‘Showroom Dummies’. Today, its original members, now
in their 60s, have moved on; only Ralf Hutter continues
to perform live with newer members, yet 41 years on,
the album of pulsating beats and synthesized emotions
still sounds fresh, presciently predicting the ubiquity of
technology, computers and robots.
CURATED BY REMI DUTTA
TM | SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2018
18