White Stripes

 

Meg White and Jack White. 5.5 x 10 inches each. Oil on wood, 2007.

There is a precedent to the double portrait concept for the Top 100 2021 series. I took quite a few liberties with the double portrait concept for the Top 100 2006 though and I didn't manage to do all 100 as double portraits either. The idea then was to select two people who'd have a relationship to one another. While there were a good number of sound recordings belonging to world of ethno-musicology in the 2006 list, the bulk of musicians were rather well known and popular musicians compared to whose who are being painted in this year's top 100. It's now ten years since the White Stripes split, but in 2006 they were at the height of their popularity (they had four songs in the top 100 that year.) The White Stripes is one of those few rock 'n' roll bands that I still listen to every once in a while. I figure I'd share these with you since The White Stripes were not in the archive of this blog yet. I started the blog in 2010 and the band was not in any Top 100 since. In the meanwhile the hundred paintings (on paper) for the Top 100 2020 are nearly finished and those for the Top 100 2021 (on canvas) are well on their way. The newest addition of the latter series is a painting of Rosa Alarco, a composer and musicologist from the Lima Province in Peru, paired with a musician performing during the annual Festival of Water also from Lima Province. Alarco's name is closely associated with the festival. On the Smithsonian's Andean Music of Life, Work, and Celebration, two of Alarco's Water Festival recordings are included. A Harawi sung by three women is found at #19 in the Top 100 2021 as it stands. The painting again displays a reversal (or collapse) of the object/subject juxtaposition at the heart of the Top 100 2021 concept. While the musician in the image plays a western instrument (a clarinet) and is wearing western style clothing, the musicologist who recorded the music (and who took the photo I used) is wearing traditional Andean clothes (white stripes) and holds an ocarina, an ancient Meso-American instrument. 

The Top 100 2019 is finished!

György Ligeti

All images 14 x 11 inches, oil and spray paint on canvas, 2020

Les Siècles Live: György Ligeti (2016), directed by Francois-Xavier Roth featuring cover art that was found by the publisher Actes Sud on this very blog. A beautiful CD on which Les Siècles perform Six Bagatelles, Kammerkonzert, and Dix Pièces pour Quintette à vent. The last of these is in the top 100. I'm still very proud of their use of my painting. This one is brand new though.

Cat Power

For the upcoming Top100 2019 exhibition this painting replaces the concert drawing I did in September of 2019 that was to illustrate the track Robbin Hood from Cat Power's latest album Wanderer. The image above comes from an earlier Cat Power album Moon Pix. In the book called You Should Have Heard Just What I've Seen both my work, and the Moon Pix cover are featured. The Moon Pix cover is a work by renowned photographer Roe Ethridge.

Otto von Schirach

A track from my favorite hardcore disc Threat: Music that Inspired the Movie (Halo 8/King's Mob, 2006). The track Champagne Enemaz features a remix by Otto von Schirach of the recording by the Californian metalcore band Eighteen Visions. After Sun Ra, who I painted recently, von Schirach is yet another musician in this top 100 who claimed to have been born in outer space. His biography states that he was dropped either by UFO or Graviton in the third point of the Bermuda triangle, which is Miami. He was indeed born in Miami, FL in 1974 from German and Cuban ancestry. His grandmother practiced Santeria. As customary with DJs, I had assumed that breakcore musician von Schirach was an assumed name but apparently it's real. Typing von Schirach into Google search results in the biography of the infamous Nazi politician Baldur von Schirach.

Three Women performing 'Harawi'

The track Pasqakuymi comes from the cd Traditional Music of Peru, Vol. 6: The Aycho Region. Heard are women of Socos (Peru) performing Harawi. The women depicted above are not the women heard on the Pasqakuymi but part of a group performing harawi (a style of singing) on a later track on the CD. Pasqakuymi relates to, and is performed on Compadres' and Comadres' Thursday, part of the Peruvian carnaval following Ash Wednesday.

Mergen Mongush

Mergen Mongush is represented in both books (with cd inserts) that I have on the subject of Tuvan throat singing. In Overtone Singing by Mark van Tongeren three pages are dedicated to  including a biography. Mongush was born in Chadan, Tuva in 1962. The cd tucked in that book features an example of the 'chilangit' style of overtone singing that Mongush personally developed. Alash the track in the top 100, named after a Tuvan river) appears on the cd that accompanies the book Where Rivers and Mountains Sing: Sound Music in Tuva and Beyond by Theodore Levin.