NAU NUA MARCH 2011
SUMMARY
FRONT COVER Lissy Laricchia. Creationism
HOM
Looking for spaces
A cabaret garden
Capture the emotion
False beliefs
Without looking back
Mirror pieces
Duck love
All for nothing
ENVERS
Distressing perfection
Inner beauty
A goddess in every woman
Maternity
Portraits
DAAN
Looking for spaces
That picture you've been painting doesn't look a thing like you. Daan Stuyven alerts us of the dangers of building an image too far from ourselves in his song Icon. His last studio album Manhay (PIAS, 2009) contains this one and many other great songs which have a high success in his own country, Belgium, where DAAN is a leading figure in the music scene. He’s now defending a live acoustic overview of his whole career that goes beyond a simple review. In fact, Simple (PIAS, 2010), is a rereading with novel arrangements and gives his now classic songs a brand new life because You were hungry for some learning and all they gave you was retrograding, as he sings in his Brand new truth. Nothing will ever be the same as it was.
Exes opens Manhay in which DAAN exhibits a powerful pop song with a hymn air despite a very personal lyrics. Like a missile that ain't guided I was following my seed, like a horse that hasn't travelled I took hay for upper weed, I got excomunicated cause I couldn’t play the creep. His love life turned into a vital flag but also a fierce self-criticism. DAAN’s lyrics are always in black humor so nothing is as it seems, or maybe it is. Still, we face a huge pop monument which earns points performed live with its new perspective on the recent Simple.
I can't give you all that I want but I can give everything I have, when looking for love in any wrong place just open yourself to simple days, a little affair for who you can care will make you change all your wicked ways. DAAN’s Your eyes shows us his present, a new horizon, much calmer than remembering his past. But the weight of his great success in Belgium can also be a bad thing and so sings in Icon with Johnny Cash in mind as a clear reference. A great song where he says to himself The guy you know well that's just you and there is nothing you can do just a like a door you can't get thru when there is no one left to fool…Deeply accurate.
Bad boy, bad girl acquires an intimate tone in a certain exorcism way. We're models without roles, we are the curtain just when it folds the party bashing moles. A bigger but also contradictory tenderness appears in The great retriever looking to the past mistakes and admitting that My blood was never cold.
Manhay is an album that represents a higher quality step in the career of an eclectic artist even more with the recent Simple as a perfect complement which has been recorded along with the important collaboration of Isolde Lasoen playing various instruments such as vibraphone, drums, percussion, trumpet and many others, as well as providing her beautiful voice full of nuances. Performing live, DAAN and his band enhance the charm of a repertory that, once discovered, never leaves you.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photos courtesy of Daan Music
AGENT RIBBONS
A cabaret garden
You know I don’t need anything right now ‘cause I’m alright, I’m alright, I’m alright. Don’t give anything but your love. Agent Ribbons play rough guitar sounds in order to open their last album Chateau crone (Antenna Farm Records, 2010). And one feels really good too listening to them performing live thanks to their energy and nerve, always a great experience.
Agent Ribbons began as a duo formed by Natalie Gordon (voice and guitar) and Lauren Hess (drums and accordion), which was joined by Naomi Cherie (violin and cello) a year after. They are from Sacramento, USA, and since their early days attracted attention of audience and the media. Tours arrived quickly and their style grew around Natalie’s personal voice and their music with a deeply psychedelic and circus character which has connected with the European cabaret tradition really soon. Their shows are powerful and theatrical, a great feast for the senses. Their first album, On time travel and romance (2009), is a sonorous marvel woven in beautiful vocals. The second one which I could enjoy performed live, Chateau crone (2010), goes much further.
After the psychedelic I’m alright, in Grey gardens the guitar still underlines the tune along with some violin arpeggios. It’s like a walk around those grey gardens which take us to a peculiar imaginary world. Dada girlfriend gives us a precious calm, one of the best love songs I’ve ever heard thanks to a fifties sonority surrounded by a lyrical surrealism that shows us love as a field for an inexhaustible discovering.
Born to sing sad songs represents another highlight also as a declaration of principles. Musically it’s a really simple song but performed live gains strength thanks to its theatrical lyrics. Natalie’s voice sounds really charm and take us by the hand in a grey world but with a rainbow in sight. A more personal song is the masturbation chant called Your hands, my hands in which they play pleasantly with each other and the other with the rest ones and vice versa or the opposite but never against it. Playful violins and voices and a distorted guitar that invite us to the sex game as a way to explore ourselves and the others, the passion seed, the motor of life.
Wallpaper is a delight in an epic tone. Its sound is more dramatic but it never forgets there’s always light beyond and inside us. It’s one of my favourites from a band I guess will always surprise us because every performance is a new creation itself. They sing You’ll never know and my mind flies to an unknown world, a castle in the sky but with feet on the passion’s ground, the only possible vital reality.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photo 1 courtesy of Antenna Farm Records
Photo 2 courtesy of Festival de Cine de Gijón
Photo 2 courtesy of Festival de Cine de Gijón
OLGA CHERTOVA
Capture the emotion
Olga Chertova is already a remarkably photographer who has been awarded II Prize by the Russian Epson Photo Competition in its last edition. Her artistic experience has been developed in many fields. She has experience as a theatre actress, teacher of graphics, a graphic designer, web designer, owner of design studio, fashion photographer and curator of art projects. She’s currently focusing her activity in the artistic creation as a painter and photographer and taking part in exhibitions. Our present issue introduces her photographic series called Maternity in which he tries to capture the male emotion having a male hypothetic pregnancy as a framework.
The paradox is really interesting from the beginning. One could think if a man could experiment a pregnancy his body would be adapted to that circumstance, so he would be like a woman and that paradox would have no sense. But it’s really fascinating to think about that question just looking to Olga Chertova’s photographs in which there’s a powerful black and white giving them an intimate atmosphere, almost as a withdrawal.
It’s interesting the portrait of a pregnant man looking deeply female. Hysterics is the first piece in that series. It shows the man’s first reaction to the news of his own pregnancy. “He doesn't know what to do with that...Maybe it's a reason to change his life. Pregnancy is metaphoric. It may be a new way, new experience, new changes of his life and he is afraid of them.” In front of an unknown experience everything begins to shake.
And reactions succeeded each other from crying to pain. Crying and Eater are deeply expressive and desperate because he knows is completely alone in front of everything and everybody. When colour appears is in a subtle way, just to show us his body’s tone, raw and anxious.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photo by Olga Chertova
MARTHA COLBURN
False beliefs
To discover her in the last L’Alternativa Festival de Cinema Independent de Barcelona 2010 was really stimulating for all the cinema lovers. Martha Colburn’s fascinating Triumph of the wild (2010) was awarded exaequo as the best short film. It’s an intense animation collage about American history in which a landscape full of beasts is the frame of human life drawing a source of contradictions between prey and hunter, civilized and wild, horror and idealism, each one as faces of the same reality.
Martha Colburn was born in Gettysburg and she studied at the College of Art of Baltimore. After that, she studied at the Amsterdam’s Rijksakademie and she began to explore the creative possibilities of 8 and 16 mm filming in combination with existent material in order to recreate it and complement it around collages with a strong aesthetics and a deep content always resulting in a vibrating rhythm and handmade air films.
Visually her films are always rich in nuances, colours and textures. As a handmade work, it’s experienced as less artificial than the actual digital animation that dominates the market always looking for an excessively cold perfection. In Martha Colburn’s films one can perceive her creative pulse beat and a convulse soul full of questions that surface in frenetic rhythms and all the music she uses as a soundtrack. In her works art breaths, trembles with emotion, doubts, lives.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Video and shots by Martha Colburn
HIGH TONE
Without looking back
Passage of time is inexorable and the major part of the rhythms arrived from the inexhaustible net goes by with time too. Many of them will unjustly go unnoticed and many others will touch the sky maybe with no merit. The dub movement seems to be here to stay forever and is living a grace moment in which a lot of talents and some blasphemies appear every day. In the middle of that tumult, the French band High Tone is already a long-distance horse and winner one. Their latest album, Out back (Jarring Effects, 2010), portrays their ambition in a double format. High Tone is such a big magnitude reference in the French musical scene that one can hear their influence almost without trying. As proof of this, we have their numerous collaborations with colleagues in time and space. They began in the second half of the nineties as a part of the range of the rich French dub scene and then they shared a leader role with Le Peuple de l'Herbe, another classic band. Now, almost fifteen years later, they don’t stand by, they are challenging us.
Out back comes with being the assumption of double-siding the same coin, which is not easy. Indeed, everything has its own cross in this life but it’s hard to find it in a group that has its own handwriting in the continued encouragement. Is there nothing new under the sun? Ambition does not mean quality, it is true, but Out back has quality in abundance.
This tapestry of industrial and electronic darkness traps us in an almost hypnotic way. They are actually two albums rather than a double one. So, rather than Out back we should talk about Dub axiom and No border, two complementary works deeply characteristic of the signatories, dub finely seasoned with the new age of dubstep. Finally, it’s a hard and dark work.
Spank opens the first album, Dub axiom, in an Arab tone’s voice that quickly attacks with a sound in an industrial tone and rhythm. An underlying and in crescendo rhythm marks some vocal loops intertwined. Yes, for many people, that’s a perfect reflection of the present days. Impeccable and relentless, then they take us to the colorful but icy stream that starts Dirty urban beat, almost immediately vanished into the darkness of a dismal pace, paused only to certain echoes vocals and some melodic reflection. From this initial metallurgical industry, we fall into the electronic age curiously under the title Dub what, perhaps because the whistles which are intermittently heard wrapping up their first deeply melodic line. That song has apparently some reggae light, but soon we discover an almost lysergic loop feeling. More sluggish in the rate is the track Liqor, more clearly alluding to the origins of dub reggae. The sun makes its way across all those sounds wrapping the album's first words clothed in a good recurring melody. Taking an alcohol bath again, their dub origins are definitely manifested in Liqordub, asking for an energetic feedback. Their best achieved tune comes with a baroque basement in Rub-a-dub-anthem, melodically rhythmic. Fly to the moon takes us back to the daily darkness and leave us ready for the second part with a Boogie dub production in which they play and recreate all they’ve already showed.
The second part, No border, gets very dark. The guitar that serves us their Space Rodeo distresses us as a Kenneth Anger film, and High Tone quickly show themselves strong in the word and rhythm. The atmosphere becomes a dream sequence in Bastard, but it's a wonderful chiaroscuro. Then, eastern dyes and accelerated rhythms just pausing to dream in the back way home. And we follow their particular path of silk caressing sound fabrics of the most evocative. Propal is simply inspiring and serves as a disconcerting prelude to the mighty Uncontrolable flesh, although its carnal reference seems to me too remote due to its electronic sounds. Clearly, it doesn’t fit, and less when it talks about chaos from a scorecard. But it is undeniable its suggestive sound. Ollie Bible seems less exciting, without ruling out that this was the initial intention. And we got the 7th assault with a really exultant High Tone, displaying all their charms. It’s simply vigorous. In the end, they serve their Altered states and we are far, far away from our daily life experience that is finally all we have. Come back with more, please.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photos courtesy of High Tone
JULIETA TRIANGULAR
MIRROR PIECES
Amistad silente is the brand new work by Julieta Triangular as a promotional clip for the Denver song El corazón de Andrés. She defines her work as “experimentos cromáticos en pentagramas musicales” but all those experiments go much further. Her films are a deep inner experience and make all us feel as the main character of her last film, poets looking for our own identity.
Which is our identity? Does it really exist? Perhaps it’s just a rash to think we all have an identity just because we all are aware of our individual existence. Maybe that research is a futile one or maybe that identity is created in the course of it. As the Spanish poet Antonio Machado once wrote “caminante no hay camino, se hace camino al andar”. And the road drawn by Julieta Triangular is really fascinating and full of poetry. Every video she creates has a visual audacity that turns every slot in a poem. Every colour is a wonder.
Her Amistad silente was born as a consequence of one of her own poems. “Como suele suceder en mis trabajos la idea surge de un poema utilizando la palabra como base, la imagen se compone a partir de la pregunta ¿qué pasará cuando el poeta invada la luna? El poeta de la historia es un ser que ha perdido la inspiración, ya no tiene sobre que escribir, por lo que busca hacerse daño, reventarse la boca intentando alcanzar las estrellas, quiere reconstruir su vida, su poema”. A reconstruction trip in which Julieta creates new universes complemented with old NASA’s documentaries reworked in a colourful way.
The original poem shows us a creativity hungry poet who decides to invade the moon looking for a source of inspiration. But he hurts himself in order to find poetry in pain. “Caminando sobre calles de espejos que como en Alejandra Pizarnik le permiten ver su reflejo de animal herido, se da cuenta que debe ser más persistente en su cacería y si desea calmar sus ansias de depredador, debe ir por el único ser que falta por ser devorado, su propio corazón”. It’s self-destruction as the only possible door in front of the impotence of being beyond ourselves without knowing who we really are.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Video and slots by Julieta Triangular
CLAIRE WELLES
DUCK LOVE
Every duck needs an elephant is one of the tracks of the Claire Welles brand new album Wife Machine (2010). When I read that title I was deeply fascinated by her creativity but I must admit that fascination grew to incredible limits when I listened to the whole album. And I wanted more and more while I was discovering a wonderful album, a piece of real creativity which makes all those apostles that believe nothing new is possible look ridiculous. Wife Machine is a total expansion of our senses.
The album starts with Milk teeth in which sounds a playful keyboard in an irresistible tune while Claire sings I don’t know what is happening to me. But I knew perfectly what was happening to me because my admiration for a composer from Liverpool who is able to create a whole world full of honesty in every note she sings. Quickly, a song in a Carl Perkins style prevents us from relaxing. It’s Bicycle Shed and makes our bodies dance to the end when Claire whispers Thank you!
A kind of anarchy arrives with Lost moments, a wonderful piece that take us to the best psychedelic sounds and the early works of Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention. A reiterative rhythm and a piano tune surround her voice in a trip that reminds us our own lost moments, getting finally lost in a sonorous chaos black hole. We arrive to Christmas lights with a sound really far from any brightness. Deep guitars, drums in echo and some moments in a waltz rhythm while she screams I don’t play the game. Neither do I.
Sea waves whisper Every duck needs an elephant which is deeply true. A minimalist and dashing instrumentation along with Claire’s voice whispering between ducks and elephants in order to undress our ridiculous ordinary life. She bangs the guitar strings in Walking home, a bittersweet chant because home, sweet home is an irreparable trap sometimes.
When an Alpine cow appears in that sonorous landscape her voice sounds in an ironic sweetness. Acoustics sounds in contrast with spoken tracks such as Delicate tension. It sounds like being in a crowded bar while she regrets to be in a pretty home place where anyone wants to see my face.
Wife machine is an instrumental piece, except for the last seconds, and it reminds the sound of a clean machine but it also is the title track of an album that represents a big proof of Claire Welles creativity, a mirror in which just a few people will want to look because its deep honesty. It’s a wonderful discovering for open-minded smiles.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photos courtesy of Claire Welles
JOSÉ HIERRO
“Después de todo, todo ha sido nada,
a pesar de que un día lo fue todo.
Después de nada, o después de todo
supe que todo no era más que nada.”
a pesar de que un día lo fue todo.
Después de nada, o después de todo
supe que todo no era más que nada.”
“After all, everything has been nothing
even though one day it was all.
After nothing, or after all
I knew everything wasn’t more than nothing”.
Vida is the last poem of his book Cuaderno de Nueva York (1998) and the beautiful pain of someone who is arriving to his last days facing up to the only truth of our existence: all and nothing are two faces of the same coin. We cannot avoid the time passage so live take us to crash brutally against our own lies, that is, to pretend we are something else than simple life expressions. Life flows on within us without us, as George Harrison once sang.
José Hierro was born in Madrid in 1922 but his family soon moved to Cantabria when he was just two years old. There he studied for a technical degree which was interrupted by the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939. His first poems were published in the republican side against fascism for which he was jailed when the war was over and General Franco achieved the power. He was accused of being involved in an organisation for helping the political prisoners, one of them his own father.
After some years in prison, his poetry achieved an extraordinary maturity, something really unusual in a poet so young. He published Tierra sin nosotros and Alegría (1947). “Llegué por el dolor a la alegría. Supe por el dolor que el alma existe. Por el dolor, allá en mi reino triste, un misterioso sol amanecía”. The war years took him to work underground and finally to the prison, but all those experiences marked his spirit in an even more lively way. His poems are always full of intensity in a minimalist and clear style for which he received the Adonáis Prize in 1947.
After that recognition, he published more books and was honoured with more important prizes. Some years living in Valencia collaborating as a pictorial critic in radio programs and magazines, he finally moved to Madrid. He returned to his poetical work with Con las piedras, con el viento (1950) and Quinta del 42 (1953), and his poems had a deeper social critic but not in the realistic style that dominated the Spanish literature at that time which had a grey tone avoiding any conflict with the obscure violence of the Franco’s dictatorship. So, that realism was always an obliged subtle portrait. But Hierro walked different ways and drew his own traces with the same strength he showed through his face, hard but full of tenderness.
And that walk finished where it began, in Madrid in December 2002, and the ones who found a warm coat in his Cuaderno de Nueva York (1998) became orphans because in life all is nothing more than an echo born inside ourselves.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Poems by José Hierro
Photo by Alberto Schommer courtesy of Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao
OLEG DOU
Distressing perfection
Looking at Oleg Dou photographic works a strangle feeling invades you because of its artificial and forced perfection that contains a deep inner pain. Probably, they are a portrait of our daily scars due to the social roles which are impossible to achieve. Oleg Dou is a young Russian artist that expresses his fascination for classical painting portraits and a personal hate to be photographed. His work is really amazing because his portraits make us face up to the false image we are building about ourselves. Series as Toystory, Tears or Nuns have developed a personal creation that has a lot in common with all of us. It’s the imperfect perfection.
Are we all mannequins?
There are a lot of situations in our life where we don't have a choice or don't know that we have. In that case I can answer “yes” for this question
What does reality mean to you?
It is something that connects me with other people.
I feel a kind of coldness with the unreal perfection shown in your work which is really painful and distressing. Could you explain us something about your techniques?
I'm inspired with the paintings from very old time where you can see perfection and something weird at the same time. It is very interesting for me to “play this game” with the viewers. I always do something very attractive and disturbing in one work.
All your photographs are portraits always looking to the camera. What do you search in all those looks?
I used to be afraid of the camera when I was a child. I tried to smile, but the result was awful. I never liked my photographs because my eye's always showed I was unhappy. And I had a passion to find this kind of portraits everywhere from our family album to books of classical paintings. Now I'm trying to create such a things.
Your series called Toystory shows us child portraits in an albino look but wearing some red accessories that represent a shocking contrast. Do you feel childhood as a distressing period?
In some ways yes. I hated different celebrations, costumes, clowns and so on.
Tears is the most touching of your works because the women’s faces crying but in a cold expression. Is there no way out of social restrictions?
I wouldn't be so strict. But of course we are all limited by this social behaviour rules and stereotypes.
Paper and paints is more surreal because faces are painted or papered. Is it necessary to disguise ourselves?
It is necessary in some situations. For example it won't be good if you have bad mood at the party and spoil it, it would be better if you will smile or just won't come. But of course it is very important to be natural and not to pretend in the most life situations.
Nuns seems to be inspired by different religious iconographies, isn’t it?
Yes it is. Also I should say that I saw old photographs of nuns from the XIX century in the museum. And that pushed me.
All your series are about child and women. Are they the main social victims?
Actually I don't do man portrait because it doesn't look proper way. But I'm definitely agree with you.
What’s your freedom concept?
It is to live my own life.
Interview by Juan Carlos Romero
Photo by and courtesy of Oleg Dou
All rights reserved
All rights reserved
Subscribe to:
Posts
(
Atom
)