We report now published, a text found by chance while surfing the net. The author, commandax , holds an amazing blog of art criticism and called Erratic Phenomena and, speaking of art, hath been focused on a post talking about the artwork of airplanes. Here are his thoughts about it. Original article in the June 14, 2008: Dreaming Awake: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea .
The other day, talking with some colleagues who are concerned with art as I do, I noticed many of them share a passion for an album released 10 years ago: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea Neutral Milk Hotel. I think one of the reasons why we all love so much this album is that it represents the consideration of which we are music lovers of art itself - emotional, symbolic, surreal, mysterious, enigmatic, disturbing, passionate, evocative. If you qualify as a musical masterpiece of surrealism pop (or magical realism or neo-romanticism phantasmagoric, or if you prefer), then In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is certainly the seminal albums in the genre.
will not talk about music, because it is spoken everywhere in blogs, and has also been explored at length in the book series 33 1 / 3 [Album of Kim Cooper's book, ndt]. Anyone universal need for an additional explanation of the immensity of this album, can be found here , here and here .
last decade, Aeroplane has sent more than a music critic ecstatic poetry, complete with revelations and epiphanies wet with tears. In addition, Aeroplane contributed heavily to create Devendra Banhart and the whole freak-folk scene, sowing also a breeding ground for revolutionary bands like Arcade Fire and Decembrists.
( If you are not already converted, at this point, hurry up and download , being careful to play the album in gapless mode )
To put it to Kevin Barnes, of Montreal " the greatness of the songs of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is that, although they are impregnated pain, confusion and madness, do not ever lead in self-pity or in self-indulgence. Never become commonplace. It seems to me that the voice of Jeff Mangum in that album was a portal through which the dying animal and the manic joy of the human spirit have found universal amplification. "
I think these words explain everything there is to say in this regard.
Since this is a blog about art, I thought I'd take this opportunity to talk about the artwork of the album, before going to dig in more esoteric fields. Surely every true fan of NMH has already examined every detail of ' art that accompanies this album, hoping to find some cryptic revelation. The first design was created for the album "Flying Victoria" by Brian Dewan . Brian, who is also a musician who makes musical instruments by hand (and is a dear friend), had already made some drawings for another Elephant 6 band, the Music Tapes , then the frontman of NMH Jeff Mangum, soon contacted him to see if he was interested in designing something for Aeroplane.
Brian also designed a "Magic Radio" Mangum, but did not arrive sull'artwork album ever, but you can see on the book 33 1 / 3, in case you decide to take it. It 's the design of an old radio that spits out items including a fish, an airplane, musical notes, a clock with wings and an angel playing a trumpet.
sull'artwork Here are some other revelations from the album 33 1 / 3
" Brian Poole, another member of Elephant 6, Jeff points out that 'loved that imaginary magical time gone, almost circus-, early-century arcade games from the past, 'examples of which were in shops with little money during his travels. Among the things that Jeff brought to graphic designers Chris Bilheimer, figurava una vecchia cartolina europea raffigurante dei bagnanti al mare, e questa fu l'immagine che Chris - lavorando a stretto contatto con Jeff - tagliò e alterò vagamente per creare la copertina di Aeroplane. Altre fonti di materiale includevano un libro di poster circensi storici , un libro con foto artistiche di formazioni nuvolose, il logo dell'Elephant 6 di Will Hart e la vista aerea su città di Brian Dewan.
Sebbene Chris Bilheimer lavori principalmente al computer, la sua estetica è più analogica che digitale. Le immagini disparate scelte per il design dell'album passavano dal nuovissimo disegno di Brian Dewan alla vecchia cartolina semi-sporca. Com'era possibile dare un'immagine visivamente coesa a tutti questi elementi? Chris risolse il problema scannerizzando la parte posteriore della cartolina, e usando questa carta ingiallita, segnata e sporca come sfondo in cui proiettare tutte le altre immagini. In questo modo, tutte le immagini sembravano essere più o meno della stessa epoca e stampate su carta simile, con un complessivo effetto di lenta decadenza ."
Molti aficionados dei Neutral Milk Hotel sognano ancora il giorno in cui Jeff Mangum tornerà dal suo auto-imposto esilio per registrare un altro beautiful album like this, even if in fact it seems rather unlikely.
When I read this interview to Mangum in 1998, his description of the images you see in the lucid dreaming made me think that these visions could become very interesting of the paintings - and that the pursuit of a much more solitary ( than music, ndt) career as a painter might be less painful for a person's temperament as sensitive. (However, after reviewing his plans , I decided that visual art is not his forte, after all.)
Here is the description of one of his visions, that he brings to a line from Holland 1945 ("How strange it is to be anything at all"):
" I wake up every morning completely panicked by the fact of being inside my body. Any dream face, always has something to do with being completely in panic for being in my body, and generally get up in shock ... It also has to do with all the incredible lucid dreaming I do. I have every hallucination kind of crazy, and it is very strange. I open my eyes and I see things. I have seen ghosts around the walls. I saw a vortex approaching through the wall. I've seen, through the window, small balls of light amorphous saltellare per tutto il giardino. Ho visto insetti giganti sul pavimento. Ero in una stanza d'hotel ad Amarillo, in Texas, e tutto quello che ricordo è che me ne stavo sul letto, e vedevo l'intera parete di fronte a me piena di luci che scoppiettavano come popcorn fuori dal muro. Poi mi sveglio e faccio: 'wow, stavo sul letto a fissare la parete '."
Queste visioni fatte da una persona che non si droga... non c'è da stupirsi che la vita sia diventata un pelo troppo intensa per lui dopo che Aeroplane lo spinse tra le braccia di una folla di fan assatanati ed adoranti. A sentirlo parlare, sembra che viva su un altro piano dell'esistenza.
" Ghost began to write the song that 'ghost, ghost I know you live Within Me' because we thought we had a ghost in the house, who lived in the bathroom. So I locked the door and begins to sing to the ghost in the bathroom. Over time, all became a little 'how to sing the ghost that we thought the same whistling in the next room, and he kept waking up, and as a result of a ghost that could live inside me.
Many of the songs on this album is dedicated to Anne Frank. The record is not necessarily set in the Holocaust period - more than anything else is a reflection of how I see the time. Among other things, I'm not even sure that time is linear and it all goes in one direction. The world is incredibly out of focus in this absurd dream my way stumbling
Many of the songs for me from Aeroplane impanicato, it took other people around me that makes me feel comfortable with them, I got to see that it was right to sing about those things, and do not close them inside. Because it was all just too intense. "
" Aeroplane After, I felt the need to look at life harder, and that is what I did [...] And try to address the suffering of the brutality of life and the joys of life. I'm trying to find world peace, as it is. I feel as if my soul slowly undressing, like layers of an onion. I'm starting to see through all these small structures that have been imposed on me by the company and they tell me how I should see life and the world. What should I consider important and what is not. Sometimes we see through so clearly that you'd be only a leaf carried by the wind. "
0 comments:
Post a Comment