Gesaffelstein & Aleph: Electro's Yeezy

Gesaffelstein released a new album this past week, and I had no idea was in the works.  "Aleph" is a bizarre 14-track collection of music that carries Gesaffelstein's dark power away from dance-floor ready electro-tech into the arenas of trap and hip hop.  The best way to describe it actually vis a vis Kanye West's most recent album Yeezus (which fittingly Gesaffelstein helped produce).  With Yeezus, Kanye West continued his exodus out of the "rap game" and into electronic music.

With Aleph, Gesaffelstein has done the reverse.  He's taken his signature dark gritty electronic sound, and hybridized it with elements of hip hop.  It's as though Gesaffelstein is trying to reinvent himself as the king of a new breed of electronic music that borrows from modern hip hop--like he wants to be the "Yeezy" of electronic music.  The cover art for Aleph certainly indicates this desire.  It looks like a the lovechild between the gold patterning of Jay Z and Kanye West's Watch the Throne album, and Kanye West's austere Yeezus album, only with circuit boards instead of filigree.

Watch the Throne

+

Yeezus

=

Aleph

Cover art aside, I just don't love this album.  As a starting point, look at the BPM counts on each track:

1. 106BPM: Out Of Line
2. 71BPM: Nameless
3. 102BPM: Destinations
4. 101BPM: Obsession
5. 94BPM: Hellifornia
6. 90BPM: Wall Of Memories     
7. 130BPM: Duel                                  
8. 117BPM: Values                      
9. 95BPM: Perfection                 
10. 109BPM: Pursuit                          
11. 81BPM: Aleph
12. 88BPM: Piece Of Future          
13. 103BPM: Hate Or Glory              
14. 107BPM: Trans                        

The album doesn't really manage to find a comfortable niche to work in.  Spread between 71 and 130 BPM, Aleph it is unfortunately beyond what I would call "eclectic," and comfortably in the realm of "scattered."  None of the tracks sit in that golden zone of 123 - 128 Gesaffelstein did so well in, and in the teen count we only have Values (117), a track that's too morose and soft to be a dance-floor banger. 

The abundance of tracks in the 100 BPM range really bring the album down.  Slower, heavy beats take Gesaffelstein's signature dark sound--which at 120bpm range made for exciting dance tracks--into somethings that feels cumbersome and emotionally overwrought for an electronic album.  Interludes like Nameless, Perfection and Wall of Memories try to give the album emotional depth, but register flat and out of place in an album that's so scattered and forcible.

Hellifornia--the idiot lovechild of techno and 90's hip hop--is a droning, sterile hip hop beat glazed with the whine of synthesizers.  It's terrible.

Duel, at 130bpm, is the album's black sheep.  It's too fast, and too bizarre.  Jittery electronic digeridoos, ominous frantic chants, and plastic synth that pulses dangerous across the entire makes for a track that is   almost as bizarre as it is terrible.  Seriously terrible.  If autistic robots took cocaine and had an orgy, it might sound as bad as this track.

Other tracks are just decent.  Pursuit tries to scare and excite us with spook-show sounds and deep space synthesizers, but the builds and drop are formulaic and uninteresting.  It's ride we've all been on before.  Out of Line features church bells, nonsense vocals, and even a tribal beat with chanting.  But even with all of these gimmicks, it doesn't do anything for me.  It's boring.

There are a few bright patches.  Trans is excellent--a real Gesaffelstein classic.  Hate or Glory is bombastic and self-possessed (it belongs on Yeezus) but it's a decent merger of hip hop and techno that covers some new ground, and is grounded in an excellent beat.  But overall, this is only a decent album undeserving of the hype it's getting.  

Aleph: Nothing revolutionary.  

The Good: Trans

The OK: Hate or Glory

The Bad: Hellifornia

Jin Meyerson

When he lived in New York, the owner of the Santa-Cruz based Art Research Office (where I'm currently interning) used to own and run a gallery in Brooklyn.  The gallery--Brooklyn Front Gallery--was up against tough odds.  It was was located in a section of Brooklyn that hadn't emerged as an are known for art.  The gallery was undercapitalized.  Mark didn't have a staff.  And after about 18 months, the gallery was forced to close.

Nevertheless, the Brooklyn Front gallery managed to show works by some really interesting artists.  One of those artists was Jin Meyerson.  Jin lived and worked in Brooklyn at the time Mark was operating his gallery.  He was still relatively early to his career, and and was presumably still developing his practice as an artist.  But judging by the stuff he's doing now, Jin has always been a tremendously gifted artist.  Jin lived and worked in Brooklyn at the time Mark was operating his gallery.  He's since moved, and now divides his time between Paris and Seoul.

Although I have my own take on Jim's work, Wikipedia has a decent primer on Jin's method and his paintings:

Jin Meyerson’s paintings are schizophrenic semi-abstractions based on throwaway images from magazines and other random pieces of visual culture. Although the use of media imagery is common ground for many contemporary painters, Meyerson’s take on the topic is more manic than most; while artists such as Ulrich Lamsfuss, Johannes Kahrs and Gerhard Richter are more concerned with the faithful – almost obsessive – copy, Meyerson’s takes his source material as a sketch which he can distort, tear apart, rearrange and fill with psychedelic colour. Meyerson does not completely destroy or obscure the images, but by the end of his more-or-less unplanned interventions the painting’s origin is severely disguised. Most of Mayerson’s work displays his fascination with moving images, but for him a moment of speed or activity caught on film is not enough; the addition of swirling bands of striking colour add to the sense of motion to create something that functions beyond the limits of painting and photography, making the viewer ‘feel’ the energy of the image and invoke the spectacle of real life action when the moment itself is long over.

It's interesting--and perhaps a little reckless--to write Jin's work off as 'schizophrenic,' and 'manic.'  His work is anything but.  Although the images he paints are wild, featuring layers of distorted images juxtaposed upon each other, his actual paintings are absolutely meticulous executed.  The surfaces of his paintings are not like a De Kooning or a Pollock.  They're smooth.  So what looks like unplanned, hallucinatory images--chaos--is actually the product of a lot of planning and a lot of control.  It's one of the unique features of beginning the composition process on a computer.


One of the things I think Wikipedia leaves out is a particularly important motif in Jin's work: crowds.  Jin's best works appear to be those with crowds.  There is a certain resonance in pairing images of a crowd--which is by definition large, and wild--with a canvas that is equally large:

Carpal Fatigue, 2010

This particular painting, Carpal Fatigue, is truly monumental--something approaching a masterpiece.  I haven't fully understood its symbolism yet.  Jin has left us with a very "matter of fact" title--maybe in an effort to keep the meaning ambiguous.  There's certainly no shortage of narratives you could build around this work.  Salvation.  Consumption.  Circular envy.  It's all there.

And on the basis of its painterly qualities alone, there's also plenty gape at.  The way Jin blends colors, and pulls colors off of the edges of the images he distorts, exaggerating the chromatic aberration he's painted.   Jin bends perspectives and plays with your mind.  In some spots, he allows arms and hands to 'emerge' from the smooth, marbled waterfall of liquid limbs that flows like a slow lava up the sides of the painting.   It's really fucking nuts.  It's gonna take me a while to fully comprehend this piece.

a small corner section of the larger painting.

The Screenshot Collage

Screenshot Collage: a collage derived from taking many iterations of screenshots ("screenshot inception"), and strategically introducing and placing images into frame during those iterations, so as to include them in the history of the image-making process, and eventually the final product.  

Maybe it's a new form of art that I just invented. 

It kind of just looks like a really messy browsing screen, but it doesn't have to be pretty.  Too much grey in the frame anyways.

Jackson and His Computer Band "Glow"

Excited for Jackson and His Computerband's new album "Glow" to come out on September 2nd of this year.  It is long overdue.  His previous album "Smash" was released all the way back in 2005!  7+ years ago!

September 19th, 2005

I will confess that I only discovered Smash two years ago, and I can remember thinking it was one of the strangest albums I'd ever listened to.  It's mix of whimsical stories, interludes, ballads and bangers.  The tracks are all so different from one another that it took a while to appreciate the collection as a whole. 

At the same time, it also had the feel of a product that is uniquely the product of one man's feverish efforts and imagination.  It's like a beethoven symphony, or a Rodin sculpture.  You have a hard time seeing the work outside of the context of the artist, because the two are so intimately linked.  I read somewhere that he's a classically-trained musician, so it doesn't surprise me.   

Thus, I would probably describe "Smash" as "the electronic music equivalent of a Gorillaz album,"  --dark, lively, diverse and unexpected--the sort of musical game changer that is both rare and refreshing.

September 2nd, 2013

If the cover art is any indicator of quality, it looks like "Glow" is going to be a killer album.  This is one of the darkest, most elegant and austere album covers I've seen come out of EDM.  It radiates musical and artistic genius, and belongs in a gallery.  I'm curious to know who designed it, but I'm sure it will be hard to find out until the album is released.