69 Love Drawings

There's a great new project, currently near completion, that aims to illustrate each song of The Magnetic Fields' "69 Love Songs" suite. How Fucking Romantic is the home of the project, where contributors' creations are posted, and the list of illustrated songs is maintained.

The project is intensely Indirectly Collaborative: Originally, the songs were written by Stephin Merrit, and were then filled out by the musicians who played on the album. The songs were then used as inspiration by not just one, but a collection of artists to create a body of visual art that was originally never intended, but serves as a great compliment to the music. It's interesting to think about how such cool illustrations could not have come to exist were it nor for an influence so removed from the visual art field. I think this speaks volumes to Merrit's ability to conjure provocative imagery with his songs, and the artists' ability to distill the mood of the music.

From the project site:

We are a loose collection of mostly London-based comic-artists, illustrators and writers, who have grown up listening to the Magnetic Fields and got together over a mutual love of the songs. One day, on Twitter, a couple of us decided that illustrating – or writing a comic – or a short story – inspired by all 69 songs was a worthwhile and exciting pursuit, so here we are!

Image by Huw "Lem" Davies

Cage Match

GOOD Magazine, in their Slow issue, highlight a composition by avant-garde artist and composer John Cage, most well known for his four minute and thirty-three second piece comprised of no notes.

Another piece, Organ²/ASLSP, has an instruction that it should be played as slowly as possible. Some Cage devotees in Halberstadt, Germany have taken that direction to heart and have begun a very slow performance of it, begun in 2000, to be completed in 2639.

This is an interesting example of Indirect Collaboration, where interpretation is paramount to other types of contributions, maybe even including even the original input. Of course the notes being played are important, but those are mostly performed, or at least sustained, by mechanical means.

This calls into question the role of the gatekeeper. This instance could be considered to have two gatekeepers, or maybe none. Cage wrote the composition, but then stepped away. The Germans stepped in, free to meddle, but only in one direction. Is this creative? Collaborative? Certainly it's indirect.

The Public Record

While we're on the subject of collectively written music, lets take a look at The Public Record. This project has Mötley Crüe alum Tommy Lee offering some raw tracks of his music for download. Users can then play along and upload their own accompanying tracks to help create the new album of Lee's current (rap-metal) band, Methods of Mayhem.

My understanding is that Lee's producer Scott Humphrey came up with the idea when unsure that a new Methods of Mayhem album would move any units. I think this will certainly generate a lot of exposure and possible sales as participants point to their contributions and share the tales of their involvement. Scott Humphrey seems like a smart guy. Tommy Lee: definitely still an idiot.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out, certainly there's some semi-related precedent, with jazz musicians who have never met before coming together to create a new version of a standard, infused with their particular style. A step closer to this is Radiohead's public invitation to remix "Nude" from their In Rainbows album. With The Public Record though, contributors are able to get in much closer to the ground floor.

Shoot Yourself, Get Famous.

C-Mon & Kypski's video project is similar to the subject of Joe's recent post on this blog. The concept here is a little more straightforward, and for that reason I think it invites even more participants to pitch in – so far 8312 and counting. From what I can tell the band filmed the original video, and invited fans to replace certain bits of video with their own, not unlike the Star Wars Uncut project that had fans reshooting 15-second clips in their own style to remake the movie.

It almost seems the featured song was collectively written as well. Synth-ska? Hmmm.