wednesday, july 04, 2007
hollAnd
For the past decade I've been a fan of the work of Washington D.C.-based musician and artist hollAnd but I've never quite known who the hell he was.The various bios for the guy littered across the internet don't offer a hell of a lot of information other than his real name - Trevor Kampmann. Beyond that he's been accused of being a former teen actor, a computer graphics designer and reformed professional skateboarder. Photos of him - what few seem to be available - invariably omit his face.
It's hard to say how much of all that is true but it probably doesn't matter.
What I am sure of is that he took up his work as a musician under the name of Sea Saw in the mid-1990s and, before long, his work was appearing under the moniker hollAnd. Since then he has released nine albums of differing lengths that are all damn near perfect. He's also the owner of Analagous, a mastering facility located somewhere in the nation's capital.
That's about all you need to know. His work stands on its own.
He has gained a name as an indie producer who has worked with a number of bands you've never heard of but who are tremendously talented, awesome and worth taking the time to dig up their stuff. He also keeps busy with folks like New York artist Mark Borthwick.
hollAnd's work has the austere intellectualism of early Hal Hartley. In many of those Hartley was interested in using repeated and looped dialogue to break down meanings into completely divergent forms of communication. hollAnd is upping the ante by breaking down the entire relationship between the artist, the artwork and the beholder.
What's really amazing is that hollAnd heads out into these rather rarified fields of aesthetic endeavors but somehow never loses sight of the songs themselves. Sure you might take the time to dive into the possible exegesis of what is going on but that's not what is going to keep these songs rattling around your head hours later like I promise you they will.
Today you can access hollAnd's work relatively simply, either through his website or through his portal on virb.com. It wasn't so simple in 1997.
I backed into his stuff via one of the compilations issued by the delightful but now defunct Darla Records. That one song sent me on a flurry of searches across the nascent glory of the internet and into numerous indie record stores across the greater Los Angeles area. Oddly, it wasn't until I was idling through the stacks at Waterloo Records in Austin, Texas that I found the bulk of his work.
And it was so worth it. Songs like the chirpy "American Eyes" are undeniably upbeat but with an almost euphoric sadness. There are straightforward rock-stylings like "Mil" which turn out to be not that straightforward at all. "Stamp Stain" takes a simple keyboard chord progression and the most mundane pieces of club-goer life and makes a two minute and twenty-one second heartbreaker of a ballad out of it. Brilliant.
What is wonderful about these compositions is that they are stubbornly low-tech and refuse to be restrained by that. The analog synths and drum machines went pretty much obsolete after the 80s when artists discarded them as un-emotional and heartless. hollAnd is here to politely disagree with that assessment. He's here to show you the Casio doesn't have to go the way of the Dodo.
While the plastic disposability of synth-pop of the 1980s is now a generally accepted truism I'm here to tell you that really isn't the case. We assume Animotion and Howard Jones were all there was to offer but there was a lot more folks writing songs that dug a bit further under the surface than that.
It's not by accident that the B-52s wrote some of the most upbeat and catchy songs of the generation that happened to be about some of the most dark and twisted subjects. Doubt me? Take a listen to just about any track on Wild Planet and break down what they really are talking about.
hollAnd's early efforts tap onto this dark vein directly. His almost winsome melodies carry lyrics that are sung with a sad melancholy but make you feel slightly uncomfortable for some reason. Like the B-52s, he's dropping in some rather disturbing sexual imagery that, when you first figure out what is being said, you kind of wish you hadn't listened so closely.
But that strange mix of the beautiful and the profane is partly what makes these pieces compelling. The catchy harmonies that are going to stick in your memory dance around the disturbing that will leave a lasting disquiet with you as well. Fascinating stuff that I could barely find at the time and pretty much gave up every hearing any more from ever again.
So when he unveiled the austere and breathtaking I Steal and Do Drugs in 2004 I was simply flabbergasted. As incredible as the work he had done before was, this was nothing less than a masterpiece. This is a two-sided CD/DVD that is a collection of seven songs and six films. The films were shot over the course of a year in Iceland, England, and the United States and serve as the "videos" for several of the songs.
His previous efforts included some astonishingly hypnotic and seductive arrangements like the transcendent "Soft Limit" on the 2000 Neoprene: So Tight EP. It was with profound delight I saw he gave the not-quite-that-aweseome-but-good-enough-to-blow-everything-else-away "An Empire, a Sit-Com Set" on this disk an more than full seven minutes of glory. Finally a song long enough to just GROOVE on. And I've taken full advantage of the opportunity.
He followed that with this year's The Paris Hilton Mujahadeen which, I guess you can call an album but it really defies such a conventional description. The work exists as a CD, an internet site, an elaborately detailed cover, a collection of videos that would better be described as short films.
Musically, I found it uneven compared to hollAnd's earlier work. The catchy infectiousness of "Destroyer Bright" contrasts with the irksome moodiness of "Finnish Metal." But this is still the master at work in his own playground. He's writing turn-on-a-dime hook-filled masterpieces that are concerned with war, beauty, fame and meaning. Not necessarily in that order. And worrying about all of that certainly shouldn't impede you allowing yourself to enjoy it.
Where I Steal and Do Drugs and The Paris Hilton Mujahadeen show a musician at the peak of his game, they also show a filmmaker expanding into the peak of his abilities as well. Like the songs they are set to, the pieces seem overly simple and almost rudimentary when you first see them. But something keeps nagging at you. Like his music, I find myself compelled to watch these little movies over and over again to try and grasp what the hell is going on.
It's an economy of presentation but a wealth of meaning. The films break down the traditional ideas of storytelling and communication. While the songs themselves seem to have recognizable structure and forms the images you behold are doing things much more subtle and odd. hollAnd's getting under your skin again. Sit back and let him do his thing.
Take a gander at this work "big spin box micropop" The song is classic hollAnd, a synth-heavy pop masterpiece. Virally catchy and littered with hooks that pierce your consciousness and refuse to let go.
In this case there is also the video which was framed and filmed by flin flon's Mark E. Robinson (I'm going to assume the subject is hollAnd himself) It's a rather simple affair, really.
A skateboarder moves in front of the camera, jumps in the air spinning his board beneath his feet before rolling out of view. The timing is odd, sort of slowed down, but clearly recognizable for what it is.
You find yourself moving away from the "˜plot' of the skateboarder moving across your vision to examining the aesthetic of his form; the bird-like span of his reach and the odd posture he assumes while he regains his balance. The song continues apace, holding your attention while the film does its own thing.
They seem completely divergent yet you find yourself compelled to follow this train of thought, to break down the image further... but the film resists that interpretation. Each time the skateboarder appears he moves faster and faster until, at the end of the song, he moves at regular speed - a change that forces you to resume watching in the 'regular' narrative style.
We often think of music we choose to listen to as a soundtrack to our lives. If you let it, this piece turns the tables on that and show how your world can exist to be the 'film' for a song. Ontologically, you are left hanging in mid-air.
hollAnd presents the piece with a quote by Midori Matsui, a Yokohama-based art critic and scholar, defining "micropop."
- "Micropop can be defined as a "small-scale, avant-garde" approach or attitude that attempts to create a new aesthetic consciousness and norms of behavior through the combination of fragments of information gleaned through one's own experience."
Or, more simply, it's the need to create meaning out of the overwhelming torrent of data we are surrounded by in the world today. The internet and the colossus of technology have bestowed upon the world the means to move information around on a scale never before possible or even dreamed of.
And, to make matters even more complicated, the process constant. It never stops.
That said, there seems to be precious little "˜content' to it all and the individual is forced to find ways to assemble it all in the context of their own individuality.
Hedonism is one response. Nihilism is another. The current vogue seems to be the ethos of 'snark' in which cynicism is the watchword - a means of standing outside of the fray and, in your own way above it. My belief is that's just another form of nihilism but we shall see. More importantly one should recall Robyn Hitchcock's observation on the danger of cynicism - it gives you the excuse to become what you despise.
hollAnd is showing you there is another way to go. Make sense of the cacophony. Focus and find meaning. The feel-good fun of the composition itself underscores the point that despite the popular perception of enlightenment as a painful struggle, it's actually supposed to be a life affirming process.
more: Music
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