Ben Neill Blog

The Color Bar Remix from Palladio, the VJ movie I made with Bill Jones, is now online on the new Club Chroma channel on Joost. Joost (IPA: /Ê’uːst/, like “juiced”) is a system for distributing TV shows and other forms of video over the Web using peer-to-peer TV technology, created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (founders of Skype and Kazaa). It’s been touted by many as the next evolution of TV.

Joost began development in 2006. Working under the code name “The Venice Project”, Zennström and Friis assembled teams of some 150 software developers in about six cities around the world, including New York, London, Leiden and Toulouse. According to Zennström at a 25 July 2007 press conference about Skype held in Tallinn, Estonia, Joost has signed up more than a million beta testers and is on track for an end-of-year launch.

You can see our video here: Club Chroma

In our adaptation of Jonathan Dee’s novel Palladio the Color Bar Remix is the piece that pushes the central character’s art over the top to stardom. For more on Palladio check out the Palladio blog here: www.palladiomovie.com

Thanks to Eric Dunlap and Holly Daggers of Eyewash/Forward Motion Theater for including us!

Eric Calvi, who co-produced my Triptycal, Goldbug and Automotive CDs and later became my partner in Green Beet Productions, recently was interviewed for a book on Miles Davis’ late music. This period of Miles’ career has been consistently maligned by traditional jazz critics, but it is probably my favorite work of Miles Davis. I think Miles really saw where music was going, he did not see jazz as an academic or historical art form, rather he was interested in staying contemporary with music which meant embracing all kinds of popular music forms. Miles’ late albums were a big influence on me, and I felt so lucky to get to work with Eric, who had all of this experience working with the Prince of Darkness himself. This interview gives an inside picture of how the late Miles Davis albums were created. The full interview can be found here:

Eric Calvi-The Last Miles

This is an interesting interview with Deborah Johnson, who does live video with Sufjan Stevens. She talks about working with live music, her tech setup, etc. btw, she uses Modul8.

Last night’s Dubwar event at Love was probably the best one I’ve been to so far. The music was absolutely phenomenal, sound was perfect, great crowd and vibe. This kind of event is such a breath of fresh air; progressive dance music events have been pretty scarce over the last few years, but the Dubwar parties are bringing them back in a major way. I think dubstep has a better chance of being a lasting form of music than some of the other genres of breakbeat dance music such as drum and bass, which I always felt was too monolithic, too much the same all night. Last night’s DJs Quest and Silkie and Mala played a broad range of dubstep styles, which were quite varied, but all around 140 bpm with a strong debt to dub sounds. It was a definitely a memorable musical experience.

It seems there is a lot of room for individuality in dubstep which I think is a more interesting, less formulaic approach to beat and track making than a lot of past dance music forms. Another fun thing about last night was hanging with my old production mate Max Bogdanov, who is the Production Manager of Love. Small world…I’m presenting also Dubwar at World Financial Center this summer - July 1 is the date.

ben neill and bill jones at monkeytown
future dub jazz w/ sci-fi noir video played live on the mutantrumpet

saturday, may 31 at 8PM (reservations recommended)
58 north 3 street (btw wythe and kent)
williamsburg, brooklyn - 718 384 1369 - http://www.monkeytownhq.com/
$5/$10 minimum – monkeytown has a full dinner menu

Ben Neill and Bill Jones will present a new set of music and interactive video for Neill’s newly created mutantrumpet.. Dubbed “the mad scientist of dancefloor jazz” by CMJ Magazine, Neill’s music “masterfully blurs the lines between electronic dance music and jazz sounds” (Billboard). This new set of future dub jazz is the most recent chapter in Neill’s musical evolution which has included the CDs Green Machine (Astralwerks), Triptycal and Goldbug (Verve) and Automotive (Six Degrees). Neill has also recently created a new version of his unique electro-acoustic instrument, the mutantrumpet, thanks to a residency at the STEIM studios in Amsterdam.

Jones, Neill’s longtime visual collaborator, has created a new set of interactive video for the set. The imagery is primarily black and white and evokes a late-night urban vibe inspired by sci-fi noir films such as Godard’s Alphaville. The video and music are created as one hybrid form of expression, and the new capabilities of the mutantrumpet make it possible for the visual and sonic elements to be seamlessly integrated in real time.

Neill and Jones are continuing to explore ways in which the dynamics and improvisation of live musical performance can be translated across the boundaries of sound and vision. Their past projects have included the Pulse series of sound/light sculptures, widely exhibited in the 1990’s, MIDI controlled slide projector shows for Neill’s Sci-Fi Lounge tour with DJ Spooky, and Palladio, a VJ movie based on the novel of the same name by Jonathan Dee.

A new synthesis of art disciplines has been evolving for the last 30 years and is ultimately manifesting itself in the realm of technologically based music and new media art forms. The word is a central part of this new formal development, both in text-based works and as a structural element in pieces that are not directly based on language. Sampling and appropriation are also new ways of working with a text and have a major role in many of the works being examined. The aesthetic that is emerging in these new forms is an expressive one, not the cold, dehumanized approach that might be expected from a technologically based medium.

Musical history since the Renaissance can be viewed as oscillating between Classic and Romantic, Apollonian and Dionysian. Some of the key elements that mark the onset of a Romantic or Dionysian sensibility are an interest in the word and text-based forms, an interest in music of earlier eras (music history was invented in the 19th century) as well as an exploration of new technologies to implement new musical structures. The early operas and songs of Monteverdi and Caccini and the 19th century works of Berlioz, Schumann, Schubert and Wagner are examples of this phenomenon.

There are strong parallels with these historical works and musical pieces of today in terms of their relationship to the word and to new technologies. Works such as “The Cave” by Steve Reich, “Dennis Cleveland” by Mikel Rouse, “The Carbon Copy Building” by Bang on a Can, “Greendale” by Neil Young and “Medulla” by Bjork are all examples, and there are countless others. I am convinced that digital technology is leading us into a new mode of expressivity in music and art in general. The interest in the 19th century is part of this pattern in that the 19th century was the last era to have an emphasis on the Dionysian/Romantic sensibility.

Over the past few years many contemporary artists, yours truly included, have engaged in sampling and referencing 19th century art and music. Musically, groups such as the Decemberists have used Civil War-era references in their music and image; visual artists including Ed Ruscha, Walton Ford, Kent Monkman (and countless others) riff on 19th century themes and styles. Why is sampling the nineteenth century such a popular strategy? I think it’s because it offers an antidote to irony. Sampling is by nature somewhat ironic, since there is always at least one degree of separation between the artist and the expression. However sampling or referencing 19th century art forms is a way to move in the direction of a more sincere, personal, intimate form of expression while staying within the appropriative mode of creativity that dominates our age. There are other parallels with our time and the early nineteenth century as well, to be explored in more detail later.

Tribeca
Guest of Cindy Sherman
(Documentary)
By JOHN ANDERSON
A Filmlike presentation in association with Sundance Channel. Produced by Paul H-O, Tom Donahue, Anura Idupuganti. Co-producer, Christopher Trela. Directed by Paul H-O, Tom Donahue.

With: Paul H-O, Cindy Sherman.

If a doc manages to inform and entertain, it’s ahead of the competition. If it features engaging personalities (or penguins), so much the better. And if it manages not to lose its assets while dipping its toe into murkier issues — becoming, say, a brow-knitting thumb-sucker — then it’s really a work of art; such is “Guest of Cindy Sherman.” Co-producing Sundance Channel should immediately allow the film to run free in the theatrical playground, where art lovers/voyeurs will adopt it as their own.
“Guest of Cindy Sherman” was how co-helmer Paul H-O found himself described on a seating card one night at some glitzy art-world dinner, thus inspiring this good-natured, engaging and uncensored autopsy of male ego and strip-searched celebrity. H-O’s “girlfriend” was Sherman, the reclusive artist-photographer whose “Untitled Film Stills” are considered to be among the more important works of ’80s American art. How the two became girlfriend/boyfriend (or whatever they call it in the lofty regions of lower Manhattan) is included in the movie. But so is the issue of bruised selfhood, when the man is less famous than the woman, and traditional roles get flipped on their heads.

H-O (which stands for Hasegawa-Overacker; need we say more?) was the creator and host of a cable access show titled “Gallery Beat” during the Koons-Schnabel-Sherman-fired New York art boom of the ’80s. Irreverent and always an outsider, H-O was an ointment-occupying fly on Manhattan’s gallery scene. That he and Sherman would hook up was unlikely.

But thanks to H-O’s relentless taping, we see that they did, the evidence being a real-time budding, and blooming, of romance. Sherman, who usually never consented to do anything close to “Gallery Beat,” was clearly smitten with H-O and he with her. Watching their playful interaction, with the remote art goddess acting like a flirty schoolgirl, is alternately wonderful, and appalling: Should we be watching this? One of the film’s more ironic aspects is how H-O, who eventually found his second-banana status untenable, has now found his own vehicle, albeit one with “Cindy Sherman” in the title.

But he’s a likable tour guide through his own checkered romantic/professional history, never taking himself — or the art world, for that matter — too seriously. Which is likely what attracted Sherman in the first place. She is unseen save for the archival footage, but the fact that she OK’d its use is testament to a generous spirit, and perhaps a few tender memories the viewer gets to share.

Production values are iffy, grainy, sketchy.

Camera (color, mini-DV, Hi-8 video, DV), Dane Lawing; editor, Donahue; associate producers, Hertzel Abraham, Elissa Birke, Patty Casby, Ted Greenberg, Andrew Herwitz. Reviewed at Tribeca Film Festival (competing), April 28, 2008. Running time: 88 MIN.