Brad Barry

My latest mix for Dazed & Confused focuses on the long, resonant vibration of strings. Just...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:54:00 -0500

My latest mix for Dazed & Confused focuses on the long, resonant vibration of strings. Just like the piano, stringed instruments have been modified, repurposed, and co-opted to create a stunning variety of sounds — from the ancient harps and droning tamburas of Mesopotamia to the violins and cellos of Renaissance chamber music. Tapping into this rich tradition, the sustained, harmonically complex tones of stringed instruments provide a gorgeous palette for the modern underground musicians represented here.

Visit the Dazed Digital site for the tracklist and some commentary on the pieces I selected.

The Double Life of Terry AllenSynonym Journal, Issue 2Brad Barry Terry Allen doesn’t see the...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 17:14:38 -0500

The Double Life of Terry Allen
Synonym Journal, Issue 2
Brad Barry

Terry Allen doesn’t see the disconnect between recording an outlaw country album in West Texas and making fine art for a gallery in New York. At 69 years old, the Lubbock native has created art that jumps between genre and audience, but somehow remains authentic. In his 50 years as an artist, he has worked in sculpture, music, painting, installations, theater, lithographs, literature, performance art, and radio plays. And, to him, it just seems natural.

“As a kid I kept notebooks and I would make lists of what I wanted to be,” Allen explained from his studio in Santa Fe. “It would always rotate between writer, musician, and artist. It wasn’t until much later that I truly realized that I could do all of it — that it’s all just telling stories.”

It’s Allen’s prowess as a storyteller that prevents his work from feeling fragmented; his pieces, no matter the medium, are held together by detailed story lines. Like David Byrne’s 1986 True Stories, a film whose soundtrack Allen contributed songs to, he weaves individual, off-beat stories together into larger, united works. Allen’s pieces, whether theater productions, prints, or concept albums, are focused on making connections.

But telling stories in each of these different art worlds — worlds that are often exclusive and closed off to each other — leaves him as an outlier. His life has been an extension of the idea that the more “homes” one has, the less “at home” they feel in each. He was the Lubbock boy who wanted to be an artist, but also the LA artist who wrote country songs about West Texas. His ability to segue between those worlds, residing in both but belonging in neither, is still the driving force behind his work.

Growing up in Lubbock, Texas, a world where it was a foregone conclusion that boys would play football or baseball, Terry Allen was what he describes as a “closet reader.” For Allen, “literature and then, eventually, rock music were exciting because they offered the possibility of something beyond the horizon. It let me know there was something beyond Lubbock.”

Allen began writing in songs and playing in bands around town, but it wasn’t until he heard about Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles that his path out of Lubbock became clear. He applied to Chouinard and left Lubbock before he had even heard back from the school.

Moving to Los Angeles offered an escape from the anger and bitterness that Allen had towards Lubbock, and he confirmed that being around artists in a big city was the life that he wanted. At Chouinard, he found himself eating lunch with Man Ray and listening to guest lectures from Marcel Duchamp. But in that world, being from a small town in the wide open country of West Texas made him different.

“I’ve never been a big group person,” Allen explained. “Art movements and things like that didn’t interest me. I always felt like my work was this independent, private act — it was never my inclination to be a part of a group. I wasn’t the kind of person who lasted long in the Boy Scouts.”

Still, being around artists, many of them also outsiders, inspired him to look at the things he was already doing in a new light. Allen explained that when he got to art school, “that was the first time I was around people that made things seriously. I had written songs in high school, but those were really just to get in trouble, you know. To these people it was a cold-blooded act to make a song or a painting.”

Allen began working in earnest on his art and music. He wrote and recorded a song called “Going to California” and was a part of a large-scale performance art piece called Al’s Cafe, a working cafe that sold art instead of food. There were more art pieces and performances, but it wasn’t long until Allen was drawn back to West Texas.

“Out in LA, I wanted as far away from that Lubbock mentality as I could get,” said Allen, “but I eventually ended up back there to record. Joe Ely, who had gone to my high school, and Jimmy Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock, both of whom I had known, had a band and there was a studio, so I ended up back there recording what became Lubbock (On Everything).”

The album was a masterful collection of songs that Allen, in his mind, thought expressed the anger and hostility that he felt toward the place where he grew up. But, while listening back to the songs during the mixing of the album, he came to the realization that “all of those songs were really about loving the place. I had outwardly been so hostile, but it was then that I realized how important that area was in my life. Everything had come full circle.”

Allen’s skill for keeping one foot in Texas and another in Los Angeles mirrors — and may be the very source of — his comfort in dividing his time between art forms. As a musician, he isn’t afraid to try sculpture; as a painter, he doesn’t feel alien in the world of theater. For Allen, moving from medium to medium is just how he tells a story.

“The muse takes control of me in a funny kind of way. I can be working on a song that gives me ideas for some images, and so I go do a drawing, and the next thing I know there’s a narrative that emerges.” Whether it’s visual work or music or theater, Allen follows the stories he wants to tell — stories that are often rooted in the characters and landscape of his youth. But Allen doesn’t limit himself to rehashing those stories in a signature style.

“There is this cultural idea that an artist should just focus on one thing,” Allen said. “But it doesn’t hold up — limiting yourself like that would be like getting up in the morning and saying ‘I’m shutting down every one of my senses except vision.’ The beauty of life and of art is that it’s all there, it’s all possible at any given time.”

For Allen, exploring all of those available avenues is a necessity. He says that limiting yourself to a specific style or medium is just “looking for a way that you don’t have to think.” It’s when you open yourself up to new avenues of work that you see new possibilities to challenge yourself.

This is how he has ended up with the unique experience of being just as at home in a dive bar as in an art gallery. Not becoming reliant on one audience or one method is the message in Terry Allen’s work. For Allen, moving between mediums provides the same realization he came to when listening to Lubbock (On Everything).

“You really have to get away from a place to see it. You have to get out of the way. When you’re in a place or a certain mindset, you don’t know anything else. But once you get outside, that’s when you start to see it for what it really is.”

I’m starting a new mix series for Dazed Digital in the UK. With this first edition, I wanted...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 19:23:00 -0500

I’m starting a new mix series for Dazed Digital in the UK. With this first edition, I wanted to look specifically at the piano. Mostly through necessity, the piano served as the primary instrument for early experimental music. Even though we now have access to more instruments than those early composers could have dreamed of, the piano is still being used to create novel, surprising, and beautiful experimental music.

Visit the Dazed Digital site for the tracklist and some commentary on the pieces I selected.

Boredom Precedes ActionMaxime Guitton on Curation and ConsumptionSynonym Journal, Issue 1Brad...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:51:00 -0500

Boredom Precedes Action
Maxime Guitton on Curation and Consumption
Synonym Journal, Issue 1
Brad Barry

It turns out that Maxime Guitton is a fixture of the French music and art scene, but my introduction to the 35-year-old Parisian came in a much more pedestrian manner.

Last fall, I discovered, and immediately fell in love with, a mix of late 60s and early 70s folk and Texas country that Guitton posted online. After some additional searching, I found a few more mixes, each of which was equally astounding. Somehow someone in France was finding great, obscure American records and presenting them in a way that was not only cohesive, but told a story. After exchanging e-mails and links to YouTube videos, it became apparent that Maxime Guitton might be the coolest person ever.

In an e-mail interview, which he graciously conducted in English, Guitton revealed the scope of his artistic endeavors, discussed the difficultly of exploration in a world of huge archives, and dug into the responsibilities of both curator and consumer.

Starting this interview, I realized that I may have a very limited idea of what you do. What projects are you working on?

During the day, I work for the Centre national des arts plastiques. It’s a Paris-based public company funded by the French Ministry of Culture that purchases art on behalf of the State and runs the national collection. My job isn’t related to the collection, though. Instead, I manage a service in charge of running various committees of experts that give grants and financial assistance to artists, art dealers, art publishers, film producers, art historians and restorers of contemporary art works. I’m also working on an artist residency program, located in the former Alexander Calder studio in the French countryside.

Aside from my work, I write about music and put on shows as a freelance music programmer. In 2003, I started a music series called ali_fib (a wink to Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom) that focused on presenting music in interesting spaces around Paris, everything from traditional concert venues and festivals to squats, museums, art spaces, churches, and bookstores.

A few years ago, I also started assisting [groundbreaking French electronic music composer] Eliane Radigue with some concerts and reissues of her work from the 70s. Around the same time I was given the opportunity to put out a record of unreleased pieces by the bands I had been programming into my shows. That was an awfully great experience for me, and I’ve already started on a new edition that should come out later in the Fall.

As I needed a breather, I’ve temporarily withdrawn from music programming, but along with the compilation, I have a few film-related projects in the works. And hopefully more records to come out, as I’m sitting on hours of neat recordings of the many artists that I’ve invited to play.

You’re obviously incredibly busy. Do you ever get bored? Do you ever have time to get bored?

Haha, I do sometimes. But my boring moments are never wasted, because they always precede action. In other words, I tend to view boring moments as the very condition that allows me to release creativity. It’s sort of a sustain/release kind of process. In that respect, I think I need to get bored, and I enjoy getting occasionally bored. But to be honest, I tend to get more interested in the use of boredom in cinema or music than I will ever be able to value the use of boredom in my own life!

It’s interesting that you talk about boredom as the breeding ground for creative endeavors. Sometimes I think that there is so much breeding ground that it’s hard to know what to grow or make or share. At least for me, with both the Internet and with art in general, there’s the ability to be bored in two opposite ways: either with being daunted by the virtually unending supply of stuff out there or getting bogged down in one niche and exhausting it. But one of the things I love about following you is that you seem to have the passion to get really into a certain artist or group of artists without losing the ability to skip around and open people up to new things. How do you do that with such a large pool of art and music at your disposal?

As far back as I can remember, I’ve always felt excited by the endless quantities of things that I have still to discover. The very idea that this deep well of knowledge would be daunting, or possibly boring, never crosses my mind; I tend to view the acquisition of knowledge — making discoveries — as a joyful and never-ending process. Of course, I can remember feeling intimidated by jazz music or monster icons like Bob Dylan when I was younger, as I had no clue how exactly to step into those vast worlds. But I’m quite patient as a person. I kept in mind that it would take me years to figure out, and that was fine with me.

I can actually remember feeling bored with music in the late 90s. I felt that I was trapped in small circles and new music was nowhere to be found. But that feeling of boredom was misleading in the sense that music wasn’t the question; it was just that I had explored a certain genre of music. That’s when I started buying records from the 60s and 70s in second hand stores. Looking back at the recent past of music, flipping through stacks of old LPs, opened up endless new possibilities and new associations of ideas for me.

To answer your question, I guess the key to my ability to deeply explore a specific genre without losing the ability to open up to new things comes from my background as a history student. I love making connections and I easily remember dates and names. But the simple accumulation of data isn’t worth a penny if you don’t inject meaning to it. I’m not interested in knowing for the sake of knowing (the best way to get lost in an ocean of stuff or bogged down in one niche, as you say), but in creating meaning and output. If the connections that I’m finding make sense to me, I hope that I can manage to share my findings with other people, give them my own reading, and let them make up their own mind.

I like the idea that your job as a consumer of art and music is to not only consume, but to produce something from your findings. A word that you see around a lot these days is curation. Of course, in your day job you are dealing with curation in a very real sense, but do you consider your other work (putting together concerts, working with reissues, sharing images and music on the Internet) to be curatorial?

It is indeed a very commonly used word these days, including in France where people have dropped the French word commissariat for the more hip English word curating. Yet, there is a quite a bit of a resistance within the art world for extending the use of the word to other disciplines, like music or cinema. Subjected to the art-world use of the term, I’m pretty wary of its use in a broader sense. Hence, I define myself as a music programmer. And I would certainly not use the word curate to describing my nerdy online activities.

But if I start thinking about my concert programming activities, or the music that I compile on records, the difference between programming and curating becomes pretty thin. For me, programming concerts, for instance, has always consisted of an active phase of research and exchanges with the musicians, which precedes the actual event. Programming a concert isn’t about juxtaposing two or three bands on tour, but a matter of saying something, telling a story, linking the past with the present, finding the right match, setting a mood.

In most cases, I doubt that setting up a show leaves any room for questioning the music or the relationship people have with the music. But programming demanding music, bringing music to people who don’t really know what they are about to experience, occasionally ends up raising interesting questions and verging more on curation in a traditional art sense.

I think of a nearly silent music concert by Bernhard Günter that I put on around 2005, which triggered nervous reactions among the audience. I had never heard so many keys and cans dropping on the floor during a concert. The same goes with some noise pieces or very loud shows. Eliane Radigue performances are a perfect example of sheer musical experiences which move people and tell them important things about time, duration, silence, and the quality of listening. But to be honest, I feel that in these cases, the music is so rich, complex, or thought-provoking that it would be pretentious to take any credit in placing people in a situation where they question their relationship with the music. All of the credit goes to the composer.

Seeing how much energy and thought you put into programming, I’m interested in knowing if you find yourself curating your life in general.

It’s an interesting idea that one might be able to curate their life, but for me where I’ve ended up has been much more about curiosity than any conscious decision. The idea of the new frontier, for instance, is quite meaningful and central in my own life. As far back as I can remember, I’ve had an interest in space exploration and mountains. More than ever, the exploration of virgin territories is something that keeps me busy, be it through reading, collecting photos, or just hiking with friends in the mountains.

When I realized that my curiosity for music, cinema, and art was not only important, but a completely essential part of my life, it became clear that I couldn’t envision any other life than one intertwined with some kind of daily discovery or “food for thought.” In other words, I realize today that all of the little decisions that I’ve made out of curiosity now sort of define the kind of life I’m living: a life which is still a lot about reading, listening, watching, doing, and discovering.

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