CATEGORY: LOOKING AT MUSIC 3.0

Before Miranda July became an acclaimed director, she was a film school dropout who moved to Portland and started a video chainletter for women, Big Miss Moviola (later Joanie4Jackie). My favorite chainletter intro opens with July in front of a skyscraper wearing a navy suit, demonstrating with delightful irony how her scrappy video ‘zine had grown into a corporate behemoth; a “monster-like force in the transnational lady-made movie scene.” In reality, July was dubbing over old VHS on outdated VCRs that she kept in the living room, and often struggled to get by. Read more

An American friend recently introduced me to Sprockets, a fictional West German TV show created by actor and comedian Mike Myers. Myers, wearing round wire-rimmed glasses and a tight black outfit, plays Dieter, the finicky show host. Each show consists of Dieter interviewing different hosts and ends with a session of frantic robotic techno-dancing, an obvious allusion to the German band Kraftwerk, whose track “Electric Café” is the Sprockets theme music. Only when my friend told me how incredibly foreign this particular niche in German culture of the 1970s and 1980s was for him did I realize how very familiar it is to me, as well as to many other Germans. Read more

The idea of looking at music has percolated in my mind for decades. I followed how the violin prodigy Laurie Anderson successfully straddled the worlds of art and music. She cleverly harnessed media to merge visuals with lyrics. Her work unfolded in tandem with technology, as computers and software allowed her to move more fluidly between disciplines. Before long we all stopped seeing a distinction between art and music. Read more