One week till St. Patrick's Day, so let's celebrate our Irish heritage with some classic electronica from 1999 and one of the sexiest, freakiest, most awesome video of ever:
Window Licker by Aphex Twin.
To be honest, fabulous honeys shaking their booties in slow motion doesn't do much for me; back-up dancers and stretch SUVs leave me equally uninspired. But this 10:35-long video gives those tired, painfully overused elements the respect they deserve…those fine sugars in those white bikinis getting their sumptuous asses doused in champagne? Damn, son.
It doesn't even matter that they all have Limerick-born Richard David James' permanently grinning, bearded face (so brilliant/self-indulgent). And when the girl turns around? It's like when that homeless guy pops out from behind the dumpster in Mulholland Dr.
Amazing. (edited to get straight to the music)
Something very interesting about the track is that when viewed with your spectrum analyzer (an "instrument used to display the frequency domain of a waveform plotting amplitude against frequency"), at 5:27, you see the image of a face, his presumably.
Another hugely innovative electronic artist that likewise hides spectral images in their work is Aaron Funk aka Venetian Snares, who embedded pictures of his cats in the track "Look" off the 2001 album, "Songs About My Cats".
True story: one afternoon, chilling at the Irish Embassy Pub after a long, hard day of testing video games last summer, the waitress asked me where I was from while I ordered a beer. I said Winnipeg, and it was like BAM. Total change. She went from a nice girl who serves business men expensive pints and Pachos (fucking $12, goddamit) to nice girl who probably gets fucked up on mad drugs and goes to underground breakcore shows every weekend.
She then proceeded to tell me about Venetian Snares, who is also from the lovely Manitoba city. She called him a genius, comparing him to Mozart even. So much passion....
I can see it when listening to the song 'Hajnal' (Hungarian for dawn) from the album 'Rossz Csillag Alatt Szuletett', which is really beautiful - classical, anxious, tragic – then breaks into drums and bass. Another song off the album is based on Rezső Seress's 'Szomorú Vasárnap' aka 'Gloomy Sunday' aka The Hungarian Suicide Song. Urban legend has it that it inspired multiple suicides, including a boy who jumped off a bridge after hearing a passerby whistling the tune lol. Or more like song of death out loud. I'm listening to it now, and really, it's pretty much the opposite of the other music blogged here. Got to know your roots, baby. If you're Hungarian-Manitoban-Irish, it seems…
Back to Venetian Snares, I've got to talk about the album he released earlier that year of 2005, "Winnipeg Is A Frozen Shithole." Chances are you'll hate this album; I found it mostly unlistenable and I like abrasive, erratic jungle. However, I share his disdain for the frozen wasteland, and this album lays an incoherent hating down, with tracks like "Winnipeg as Mandatory Scat Feed", "Winnipeg is Steven Stapleton's Armpit", and "Winnipeg is Fucking Over". If you don't know anything about the city, you're probably thinking that it can't be bad enough to warrant nine tracks of unbridled abhorrance. In that case I suggest the song "Winnipeg is a Boiling Pot of Cranberries", which gives you a little explanation, or if you want something prettier, there's always the Weakerthans, "I Hate Winnipeg". At a (hockey) party this winter, I played some Tones on Tail, promptly to have it deemed as "too weird" and turned back to the Toby Keith classic, "I Love This Bar." Vomit.
To end on the St. Patrick's Day note, Steven Stapleton currently is living in County Clare, Ireland, on a piece of land with houses and caravans he hand-built and decorated.
Article written by contributing writer: CM Foxcroft
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