The Airborne Toxic Event - Missy·I'm On Fire·I Fought The Law·Medley [HD] LIVE

The Airborne Toxic Event - Missy·I'm On Fire·I Fought The Law·Medley [HD] LIVE
Nice medley from Los Angeles' Airborne Toxic Event

Airborne Toxic Event's Song for Neda

Airborne Toxic Event's Song for Neda

The Call - ندا -Neda, originally uploaded by greggchadwick.

Gregg Chadwick
The Call - ندا -Neda
36"x48" oil on linen 2009

Thoughts on "No Line On the Horizon's" Cover Art: Hiroshi Sugimoto's "Boden Sea"

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, born 1948)
Boden Sea, Uttwil,
42.3 x 54.2 cm (16 5/8 x 21 5/16 in.) gelatin silver print 1993
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Seascapes

Water and air. So very commonplace are these substances, they hardly attract attention―and yet they vouchsafe our very existence. The beginnings of life are shrouded in myth: Let there be water and air. Living phenomena spontaneously generated from water and air in the presence of light, though that could just as easily suggest random coincidence as a Deity. Let's just say that there happened to be a planet with water and air in our solar system, and moreover at precisely the right distance from the sun for the temperatures required to coax forth life. While hardly inconceivable that at least one such planet should exist in the vast reaches of universe, we search in vain for another similar example. Mystery of mysteries, water and air are right there before us in the sea. Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing.
- Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto's haunting photograph Boden Sea, Uttwil graces the cover of the band U2's new album which was released this week. At its best the music on No Line on the Horizon, produced by Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois, and Steve Lillywhite, is open and atmospheric and in many instances raises similar questions to those found in Sugimoto's photographs in which water meets air. Since 1980 Sugimoto has traveled the world to find his locales. Ephemeral seaside moments are stripped away in Sugimoto's images. Rather it is the "particularity of light and atmosphere" at play in front of a distant horizon which compels Sugimoto. In each of his photos where sea meets sky, the horizon precisely splits the image into equal parts of air and water. From this combination. in primordial times, life began. The Metropolitan Museum in New York, in their catalog notes on Boden Sea, Uttwil, describes Sugimoto's photos as limning "the shifting envelopes of air and water covering the earth" and ultimately describing the ineffable: " the featureless purity of the world's first day."


Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, born 1948)
Aegean Sea, Pilion,
152 x 183 cm gelatin silver print 1990

What does the horizon mean? At some time we have each gazed across a body of water attempting to unlock the mysteries of life and creation. The Metropolitan Museum describes Sugimoto's horizons as both literal depictions of "the contact between Earth's surface and the ether" and also as "metaphors for the bounds of our mental and visual perception."
"The depth of field within each picture is as far as the eye can see. This visual approximation of the infinite is an apt expression of the sublime for an age that has forgotten that such majesty exists on a shrinking and polluted planet."
Like the light from distant stars, we are viewing the light of the past as it arrives in our sphere of vision.


Mark Rothko (American, born Latvia 1903–1970)
White and Greens in Blue, 1957
oil on canvas 1957
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
photo by Gregg Chadwick

Like Sugimoto, the painter Mark Rothko courted the numinous in his work. Standing in a front of a large Rothko painting is in many ways similar to gazing from a cliff across the sea to a distant horizon. Rothko resisted attempts to see his paintings as abstracted landscapes but we can't help but feel the mists and waves created by the seemingly effortless movement of Rothko's paint across the massive expanse of his canvases. Rothko's paint creates an interior luminosity that pours out of the canvas. Mark Rothko is not illustrating a pleasant day of sun and surf but instead is creating light with the barest of means. This moment of creation which reaches back to the origins of life is a direct connection between Rothko and Sugimoto. In this spirit Sugimoto writes,"The beginnings of life are shrouded in myth: Let there be water and air. Living phenomena spontaneously generated from water and air in the presence of light."


Caspar David Friedrich (b. 1774, Greifswald, d. 1840, Dresden)
Monk by the Sea
110 x 172 cm oil on canvas 1809
Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Another much earlier antecedent for Sugimoto's work is the 19th Century German painter Caspar David Friedrich, whose painting Monk by the Sea depicts the meeting of air and water witnessed by a lone figure. The art critic Robert Rosenblum connected Caspar David Friedrich's seascape and the paintings of Mark Rothko when he wrote in The Abstract Sublime that,"We ourselves are the monk before the sea standing silently and contemplatively before these huge and soundless pictures as if we were looking at a sunset or moonlit night."


Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, born 1948)
Time's Arrow,
(Seascape 1980/ reliquary fragment, Kamakura Period, 13th Century)
H 8.4 cm gelatin silver print, gided bronze 1987

Hiroshi Sugimoto collects fragments of the past. Time's Arrow combines a hoju (flaming jewel) shaped Buddhist reliquary from 13th Century Japan with one of his contemporary seascapes. In the catalog to his exhibition L'Histiore de L' Histoire, Sugimoto writes of this piece:

"In place of the missing ashes, I have inserted a seascape of a calm sea surrounded by fire, somehow reminiscent of the newborn earth. Time's arrow shoots from the primordial sea through a Kamakura period frame straight at your eye."

There is an interesting connection between Sugimoto's interest in time and Brian Eno's involvement in the Long Now Foundation. In 2003, Brian Eno took part in a fascinating discussion at Fort Mason in San Francisco. During the evening, Brian Eno described his musical and artistic goals:

"I was interested in losing the obvious boundaries of music, I wanted to make something that didn't sound like it had edges, sonic edges, or that it had a beginning and an end. I wanted to make something that belonged to a big space and you as the listener could hear some of that but not necessarily all of it, and I wanted to make something that felt like it had always been going on and would always be going on and you just happened to catch a part of it .... and I wanted to give the implication that this was not a piece of music in the ordinary sense of something that had been composed with a beginning, a middle and an end, but instead was a continuous endless place in time. So I was developing this idea of place of music being not so much a sonic narrative but more a sonic landscape - again with the feeling that this was a landscape that was always in the present tense, a landscape that was an extended present tense."

Gregg Chadwick
The Sea is Watching (for Hiroshi Sugimoto)
36"x48" oil on linen 2009

Listening to U2's new album No Line on the Horizon, I am struck how much different the music would be if the band had fully opened up to the sonic landscape that Brian Eno helped them create in the studio in Fez, Morocco. Instead of striving for a hit with Get On Your Boots, the first single released from the work and which reportedly Brian Eno disliked intensely, what if the band had allowed the organic process of creation to lead to an album that felt like a musical equivalent of a Mark Rothko painting or a Hiroshi Sugimoto photograph? There are moments to be sure, but overall the album doesn't reach the grand poetry of Sugimoto's cover image or Brian Eno's production. Ultimately, the final four songs - Fez, White as Snow, Breathe, and Cedars of Lebanon - stand alone as testaments to what could have been a rich voyage of sight and sound. Hiroshi Sugimoto writes in L'Histoire de L'Histoire, "Images of the sea have an evocative power to stir distant memories of where we humans come from. Such images possess a profound embracing gentleness, a healing quality of parental love."



Said Taghmaoui rows from Europe to Africa in the final scene from Linear, a film/music video mash-up of U2's songs from No Line on the Horizon directed by Anton Corbijn



Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, born 1948)
Sea of Buddhas
gelatin silver print 1995

Sea of Buddhas

The art scene I knew in New York in the 1970s was dominated by minimal and conceptual art, experiments in visualizing how abstract concepts. It occurred to me that similar motives inspired the making of art in twelfth-century Japan, when they reproduced the afterlife conceptualized as the Buddhist Pure Land Western Paradise in model form in this world. Thus we have an installation of a thousand and-one Senju Kanon "Thousand-Armed Merciful Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara" figures passed down eight-hundred years to this day in Kyoto. After seven years of red tape, I was finally granted permission to photograph in the temple of Sanjusangendo, "Hall of Thirty-Three Bays." In special preparation for the shoot, I had all late-medieval and early-modern embellishments removed, as well as having the contemporary fluorescent lighting turned off, recreating the splendor of the thousand bodhisattvas glistening in the light of the morning sun rising over the Higashiyama hills as the Kyoto aristocracy might have seen in the Heian period (794-1185). Will today's conceptual art survive another eight-hundred years?
- Hiroshi Sugimoto

More at:
Hiroshi Sugimoto's Website
Brian Eno's Website
Rothko at the Tate
Anton Corbijn's Website
U2 Performs "Breathe", "Magnificent", "I'll Go Crazy", and "Beautiful Day" on David Letterman

L.A. Calling: The Airborne Toxic Event Live in Hollywood on February 12, 2009

The Airborne Toxic Event played at the Music Box @ the Henry Fonda Theater in Hollywood last night. The evening was a homecoming of sorts for The Airborne Toxic Event as members of many of their fellow bands from L.A. were in attendance. The sold out crowd at the concert spanned all ages from kids to grandparents which contributed to the musical reunion vibe. Mikel Jollett, the lead singer and writer, in his drive to connect with the audience, reminded me of a young Bono or Springsteen blended with the bittersweet romantic yearnings of Smiths era Morrissey. Mikkel has a gripping but sweetly humble stage presence that projects power but not swagger. Guitarist Steven Chen lays down a sonic field that gives air and space for Jollett's searching soul to roam. Chen's guitar opens up ambient washes as well as chiming lines that bring to mind the Australian band The Church and the vast spaces found in their song Under the Milky Way. But even with the lyrical guitar and all the strings on stage as Chen told Scott Timberg of the Los Angeles Times that he "always loved it when you take something really clean and proper sounding and dirty it up a little bit.” There is grit in the music as well as haunting desperation in the vocals.


Wishing Well


Lead singer, Mikel Jollett is as much a writer as a musician and I think this is what gives the band such great possibilities and at times can drive some critics to write poison pen letters to the band in place of honest reviews. The painter RB Kitaj faced similar antagonism when he dared to present his writing as on a par with his paintings.


R.B. Kitaj
Los Angeles No. 22
36 x 36 oil on canvas 2002

The longing and loss found at the end of a relationship or the end of a life is a shared human condition that artists strive to get down on paper, or canvas or in song. But, that strange mix of dread, fear, anger, resistance and ultimately letting go can prove elusive or even bathetic in an artistic setting. RB Kitaj's late paintings of love lost work for me as do Mikel Jollett's song stories. The lyrics to the song Sometime Around Midnight are darkly evocative and well worth a read on their own:

Sometime Around Midnight


And it starts sometime around midnight, or at least that's when you lose yourself for a minute or two. As you stand under the bar lights and the band plays some song about forgetting yourself for a while. And the piano's this melancholy sound track to her smile in that white dress she's wearing, you haven't seen her for a while.

But you know that she's watching. She's laughing, she's turning. She's holding her tonic like a cross.
The room suddenly spinning she walks up and asks how you are. So you can smell her perfume. You can see her lying naked in your arms.

And so there's a change in your emotions and all of these memories come rushing like feral waves to your mind: of the curl of your bodies like two perfect circles entwined.

And you feel hopeless, and homeless and lost in the haze of the wine.

Then she leaves with someone you don't know. But she makes sure you saw her she looks right at you and bolts, as she walks out the door, your blood boiling, your stomach in ropes.

And your friends say "What is it? You look like you've seen a ghost."

Then you walk under the streetlights. And you're too drunk to notice that everyone is staring at you.
You just don't care what you look like, the world is falling around you.

You just have to see her
You know that she'll break you in two.

On stage last night the song was riveting. Couples danced, wrapped tightly together in the packed crowd as if this could be their own swan song.


Sometime Around Midnight


The Airborne Toxic Event is at the cusp of stardom and at times Mikel seemed apologetic for their recent success, thanking the audience at numerous times for being there - almost as if he needed to remind himself where he was now and how much he and the band had gone through and how far they still have to travel. Near the end of the night Mikel slipped through the throng pressing up against the stage and climbed up onto a side ledge in full voice while violist Anna Bulbrook was held aloft by the crowd. Mikel invited those lining the stage to join the band for their finale of Missy. The first lines of the song are: "Missy got off the bus one day in a crowded depot in downtown L.A. She looked around as if to say: "I'm home." The band was home for one night only then off to San Francisco the next and on up to the Northwest as the current tour continues. But for that moment as the audience joined the band and danced onstage Mikel's vision of Los Angeles held sway. As he told Molly Bergen, "I love that it’s ... all of these cultures rammed up against each other. People who don't live here think LA is Hollywood. But there are 14 million people here from somewhere else: Salvadorian, Ethiopian, Korean, Armenian...we're just one giant civil stew. "




Echo Park (New Song - First Time Played in Los Angeles)
*These clips by okeastron2008 provide a brief intro to the band and the inspired performance.

More at:
TATE'S website
TATE on LAist
mcsweeneys

Notes:

1. Paul Debraski writing about McSweeney's Issue #27 describes Mikel Jollett's short story in the issue:

"The story concerns a giant crack in the road of a major street of Los Feliz. The foursome gather their spelunking gear (so to speak) and decide to investigate this gigantic crack/sinkhole. As they dive in and discover a gigantic expanse of darkness, they become, obviously, very intrigued. Eventually some neuroses come to light. And, as they proceed further into the cave, they see some extraordinary things."

2. Molly Bergen in the LAist asked Mikel about the band's name:

I read that you took your name from the novel White Noise by Don DeLillo. For those of us who are unfamiliar with the work, what is that referring to?

In the novel The Airborne Toxic Event is a big cloud that is a result of a giant chemical explosion The huge poisonous cloud threatens a nearby town. The hero, Jack, gets exposed to it. He’s told by the doctors that he’s going to die. When he asks when the doctor says, "You may live a week you may live 40 years." Which is really unhelpful because that is true for everyone. The Airborne Toxic Event his fear of death. It changes him in these really important ways. The same thing happened to me in that year I formed the band with my mom dying and my own health problems.