Oh Lou, you’re such a… wag. Hot on the heels of putting his, er, difficult, Metal Machine Music onto the concert stage, Lou Reed has a high frequency—literally—concert event planned in Australia with partner Laurie Anderson: a concert for canines…
Lou Reed and his partner, experimental musician Laurie Anderson, will be putting on a concert exclusively for dogs as part of Sydney’s Vivid LIVE festival on June 5.
The high-frequency ‘Music For Dogs’ gig will take place on Sydney Opera House’s northern boardwalk at 10am (EST). The show will be 20-minutes long due to the canine audience’s short attention span and will be inaudible to the humans present.
“Taking the idea of the apparently inaudible dog whistle to new artistic heights, our canine friends will be treated to a glorious cacophony of sound, while all we will hear is the lapping of the water on the harbour,” festival chiefs wrote on the event’s official website, Vividlive.sydneyoperahouse.com
I have personally seen Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson walking their cute little dog many times in the West Village—I lived a half-block away from them for many years—so I think it’s pretty safe to assume that they are “dog people.” What would really be impressive, though, is if they did at least one show where no humans were present, just the pooches.
When I read that Lou Reed and others were staging concerts of his infamous 1975 fuck you to RCA, Metal Machine Music, as if it was truly a piece of avant garde modern classical music—as Reed claimed—and not just speedfreak manipulated feedback, I thought this sounded like a terrible idea. After seeing a YouTube clip of one of the performances and reading Dangerous Minds pal Skylaire Alfvegren’s eyewitness report, I’m thinking this looks like a must-see the next time it gets performed in Los Angeles:
Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music is often blamed for spawning the ear-throttling genre collectively known as noise. While musique concrète, city traffic and various 20th-century avant-garde composers were Reed’s inspirations as well, his 64-minute monsterpiece was largely improvised, and the fact that anyone — in this case, CalArts professor of Composition and Experimental Sound Ulrich Krieger (with help from Luca Venitucci) — would take the time to transcribe it into sheet music is both baffling and historic.
In the program, Krieger stated that “Metal Machine Music is a missing link between contemporary classic music and advanced rock,” and, hearing an even number of rock and orchestral elements in it, he figured out how to transpose Reed’s reel-to-reels and detuned guitars to the instruments of his own outfit, Sonic Boom, as well as those of the California E.A.R. Unit, an orchestral repertory ensemble which has been in residence at REDCAT since 2004.
Sans conductor, and with the music written in time notation, the musicians’ eyes darted frantically to a digital timer (a method first employed by John Cage in the ‘60s). MMM came across as far more musical than it does on disc; the transcription was madly inventive. Never had a trumpet player broken such a sweat onstage, nor had a tuba packed such a Mac truck wallop. Distinct bits stood out among the wash, which sounded like the inside of a barb-wired sea shell. Stringed instruments were amplified with pickups and microphones, and the rapidity of movement shredded bows. One viola player was so convulsive it looked as though she was going to fall out of her chair. Styrofoam was mic’d; velvet stretched like a trampoline and assaulted with lengths of heavy chain served as percussion. The effect — what an amplified pile of writhing nightcrawlers on amphetamines might sound like — was bliss or torment, depending on the lobes, an unholy din, an avant-horror movie score, hairraising in that maniac-around-the-bend kind of way. And like the music in Hell’s dentist’s office, it was uncomfortably soothing.
Above: Excerpt from Asphodel’s release of ‘Metal Machine Music’ performed by ZEITKRATZER.
“Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music may be the most misunderstood work ever created by a popular musician. The original two record set, released in 1975, was mostly noise: feedback squalls, amplifier hums and the tortured screech of electronic gadgets. Directed by Reinhold Friedl, the 11-member ZEITKRATZER ensemble from Berlin gave Reed’s album a thorough listen and and Ulrich Kreiger, the group’s saxophon transcribed the sounds to create an acoustic music score for their ensemble to play live.”
Below: An excerpt from the original Metal Machine Music:
Attention New Yorkers, don’t miss Return to the Pleasure Dome, a benefit concert event for Anthology Film Archives with a Life Achievement Honor for Kenneth Anger.
Featuring Technicolor Skull (Kenneth Anger and Brian Butler), Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, The Virgins, Moby & other special guests.
Wednesday, May 19, 8:30p.m at the Hiro Ballroom, New York City, $99 via Ticketweb
Video: Kenneth Anger’s 42-second long film, Death. Part of the OneDreamRush project.
You have to hand it to Lou Reed. For five decades, the guy’s been on the cutting edge of the cutting edge, from the avant-garde rock of the Velvet Underground to ... developing his own iPhone app?
Yup. Reed, perhaps rock’s most decadent artist of all, has just released his Lou Zoom app and it’s available at the iTunes store and his website. What does it do, you ask? Well, it’s not really for rock and roll animals; it’s more an app for old people. The Lou Zoom basically zooms in on your iPhone contacts list, turning it into the high-tech equivalent of one of those large-number telephones your grandma has. The price: $1.99.
I know we’re all making “walk on the ‘mild’ side” cracks right now, but the Velvet Undergrounder’s been snapping photos since the ‘60s, and is an admitted Leica-geek. These two images have been culled from Reed’s new book of photographs (his third), Romanticism, a series of landscapes shot exclusively in black and white.
Finding just the right sequence for the photos, Reed says, was really no different than sequencing an album, “The response is emotional. That’s all I want; they are taken with emotion and put together with emotion, equal emotion.” And while the quality of Reed’s light looks stunning,
Rarely is there a human mark on the scene; for the most part, his photographs are of nature untouched: woods leading down to the edge of the sea, a layer of thick mist covering the earth. The branches of a tree are abundant with fruit, another tree is dead; the trunk splinters as it disintegrates. “I have never seen a tree that is not graceful,” he says.
Only one photograph, towards the end of the book, shows a human form (see above). It is an androgynous gray figure, with short hair, facing away from the camera and outlined with light. Light ripples across the top of the scene, suggesting water, and the rest is a mass of gray. The figure is Reed’s wife, the musician and artist Laurie Anderson.
It used to pain me to think that the only footage in existence of the Velvet Underground performing was silent. Think about it: Have you ever seen any sync-sound film of the Velvets in any of the various documentaries made about them, Lou Reed, Nico, John Cale or Andy Warhol for that matter? I didn’t think so, but thanks to the rather enterprising employee of either the Museum of Modern Art or else the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh who liberated Symphony in Sound you can now see the Velvets in action and actually hear them too! That’s the good part.
The bad part is that this film, made to be screened behind the band onstage during The Exploding Plastic Inevitable “happenings” is pretty boring. It goes on for a LONG time with not much happening besides a drony primitive jam and a frenetic camera zooming in and out. Nico is there (with her young son Ari) but she’s not singing, just hitting a tambourine. Lou doesn’t sing either. At one point the camera droops on its tripod and no one readjusts it for a while. So it’s boring, most Warhol films were boring—Warhol himself always said his movies were better discussed than actually seen—but it is the freaking Velvet Underground playing live on camera for what is probably the ONLY time during their original incarnation, so it’s worth looking at for that reason alone. If you can get over how dull it is, it’s actually pretty cool. There are several versions of this online, this one, from Google Video is merely the longest. I don’t know if this is the whole thing but in the later moments of the bootleg DVD I have, it gets better when the cops show up due to a noise complaint and Warhol has to deal with them himself.
