⚡un

Cat Power
12" x 12"
oil on masonite, 2012

 Silent Machine is the second Cat Power tune to enter into this year's 100. I saw Cat Power perform a few weeks ago in Miami, the first concert of her new ⚡un tour. It was good, but the beer way too expensive. It was good to hear the several parts of the ⚡un songs performed by the musicians in the band (as opposed to overdubbing and electronics on the CD. Silent Machine was the only song in the concert in which Cat Power played the guitar. The song is also the only that's not new. I known it as She Loves You So Hard for many years. This will be the last post before the opening reception of 100 Top 100 paintings at Pinecrest Gardens Gallery on November 2nd, from 6 to 8 in Miami. This painting of Cat Power will just be dry in time to be included. Hope to see you there. Southwest 57th Ave and 111th. (Beer is free while supplies last.)

Sugaring Season

Adaption of Sugaring Season
album cover, Beth Orton
12" x 12", oil on board, 2012

Beth Orton's brand new Sugaring Season is out and it's really great. I bought the 12" vinyl version that does the beautiful photograph on the cover more right than does the 12 cm CD. I don't typically use such an iconic image as a record sleeve, as a source to draw from but this time I wanted to make an exception. I don't recall ever painting on a 12" x 12" surface but it surely makes sense as it mimics the format of the LP.  Thus here is an adaption of the LP cover of Sugaring Season, same size, sans the title and name, but with my trademark backyard background. And the portrait, as always, is done freehand without any mechanical devices. The more realistic and true to the source material the painting is, the more important this issue is to me because all the character of the portrait in the painting hinges on small subtleties and distortions from the photographic original. In my self taught course psychology 101 I learned that involuntary distortions in reproduction tell a lot about some unconscious hidden aspects of one's psyche. So I'll add more and more material to be analyzed if someday anyone out there would have an interest. (Which most likely will be my psychiatrist after I've yet completed another thousand more of such paintings.) For the first couple of the next thousand paintings I'll stick to the 12 inch square format in order to produce some more record sleeve adaptations. The next Beth Orton song after the already discussed Something More Beautiful in the Top 100 2012 from Sugaring Season is the opening song Magpie. The song has a reference to a crow in it, which is precisely the animal I attributed to Beth Orton when, two years ago, I asked myself the question: "If Beth Orton would be asked what kind of animal she'd be, what would she answer?"

The Roro

Roro, South Coast, Papua
24" x 14", oil on canvas, 2012

There has been a disproportionate amount of popular music in the Top 100 2012 list that doesn't really reflect all the music I have been playing on my turntable. Academic style field recordings from all over the world has been and continues to be the main focus of my record collection and what I choose to play at home as well. Within these records I like the older ones the best, recorded and collected at a time when there still was little influence of the Western popular music styles onto the traditional music of a certain ethnic group somewhere on this planet. A whole bunch of academic  ethnomusicologists, as well as hobbyists with high ideals, traveled around the world in the middle and later parts of the 20th Century, to record and catalog the music they thought of as a fast disappearing local cultural identity. One of the most prominent collectors out there was Alan Lomax, who spent his life collecting and recording the folk music of the most remote regions of the world. He started documenting the various folk styles of the most remote areas of the US but soon broadened his scope to the whole world. His ambition was to have a giant library that collected all the traditional musics from around the world. He was part of the Library of Congress that focused mainly on the music of the US including all of the various immigrant group's traditional music identities, and founded the World Library of Folk and Primitive Music. All the music had to be available to any and every person interested. The scope of that library was broad and ambitious but only 18 volumes were ever compiled by the Columbia label. All 18 of these are sought after and very hard to come by. I just scored my second in a record store in Miami: The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, Collected and Edited by Alan Lomax – Indonesia, Edited by Dr. Jaap Kunst, Indisch Museum, Amsterdam is the full identifying title of the record in front of me. The record is divided into four geographical sections: New Guinea, Moluccas, Borneo, and Bali. New Guinea is subdivided into Eastern New Guinea (now Papua New Guinea) and Western New Guinea (now part of the Republic of Indonesia). The first song from this album to enter into the Top 100 is called Atestsua-Aroba and is from the Papua part of New Guinea, it's a song by Roro natives, who live scattered in small villages along the South Coast and on Yule Island. The three individuals in the painting (against a backdrop of once again my back yard) are adapted from a photograph included in the record album. The song was recorded by Dr. Kunst and the photograph is presumably his as well.

Top 100 Exhibition at Pincrest Gardens in Miami

John Coltrane and Miles Davis
13.25" x 10", oil on wood, 2008

While it's too soon to even think about the contents of the current top 100, there's big news concerning the exhibition of paintings that belong to this series. Nearly all of the 2012 paintings that are finished will be on display in November and December at Pinecrest Gardens, in Miami, Florida. The exhibition is a bit a of a 30th anniversary celebration of the Top 100. Besides the paintings from the current year there will be a large selection of last year's paintings on view as well as a selection of paintings from the top 100 dating back to the start of it in 1983. In total there will be exactly 100 paintings. The selected paintings can be considered the top 100 paintings from the Top 100 catalog. This time however it's not according to an objective list, but as a subjective pick from over 2,000 paintings I have made in the context of the Top 100. And... I've got to tell you... picking my favorite top 100 paintings  is the most fun project I've undertaken in along time. Going through all these boxes and boxes full of paintings gives me so much joy, and to select them in terms of visuals in stead of aural favorites gives it a whole new spin. For the first time the paintings are not an illustration of a piece of music but exist as painting. It's an art exhibition and the subject happens to be musicians. So if you happen to be in Miami in November or December be sure to come see it. The opening reception is on November 2nd in the evening and then there's an event on Sunday December 9th in the afternoon, where I will give a Gallery talk. That date, the latter, coincides with Art Basel in Miami. Well... hope to see you there. The above painting from the Top 100 2007 of John Coltrane and Miles Davis will certainly be one of the 100 displayed. At the time if functioned as an illustration for the track All Blues by Miles Davis accompanied by John Coltrane.

Hello Hallo

Hallo Dawe
24" x 12"
oil on canvas, 2012

I like strange recordings and the music on this cassette by Hallo Dawe that I found on Awesome Tapes From Africa certainly qualifies. Maybe it's not the recording that's so strange but the reproduction of it is perhaps. The playback doesn't seem quite right as it appears to be out of key and a bit too fast, maybe even more than a bit. Dawe's voice seems to have an unnatural high pitch that I really like–no matter if it's natural or mechanically (by accident) induced. There have been stranger things produced in Ethiopia. This cassette features Oromo music and that's right away all the information I have concerning this cassette, the recording, the singer, the circumstances. Trying to find out more on line proves a very confusing task. At this moment I'm not even sure the singer's name is actually Hallo Dawe as it may possibly be the title of the cassette (it sure sounds—on track 1 of side A—that the lyrics include the words Hallo Dawe) but it could be both, it certainly doesn't help that I don't know the Oromo language. Somewhere on line this recording had the year 1977 tagged to it, and that seems about right to me.