This one is for all the fans of images with no definite locus to draw the eye, over which a viewer’s focus is asked to wander for a bit until the impression is complete.
Featherbone is an illustrator from New England. They sell prints. On their tumblr, there are more like these. These came to us through the Occult Artists Collective tumblr, from whom I’ve sourced at least 4 other artists.
The artist is Livi Po of Bucharest, who is on Instagram and Facebook.
A 2016 blog post by Dr. Michael Whittle, diagram expert, about Umberto Eco’s notion of an “open work” and how some composers have gone about notating a musical piece that is not just one thing.
Rather than continue to refine traditional systems of music notation toward the impossible goals of lossless information passage (from composer through conductor and musicians to audience member), these modern composers fully embraced the multiplicity of possible readings and different interpretations at each stage of the process.
The original blog post, which is fifth in a series of eighteen (here’s the first), is rich with examples.
Such manuscripts were no longer designed to be read from from left to right and top to bottom, but instead behaved as rhizomatic networks, from which music arises as an unpredictable emergent phenomenon.
Whittle himself, the author of this piece, is an artist as well as a scholar. If you liked the work of Minjeong An in issue 38, you’ll like his stuff too. Since next issue is for re-visits (every dozenth!), he can have top billing there.
New music: Days Like These by Low. (Bandcamp or Spotify or YouTube). Indie rock from Duluth. They’ve been cutting albums since 1994. This one’s experimental and moody. Stick around until 1:25 for the transition from clean, clear electric guitar back to the lead vocals, which have now been utterly crushed by a noisy, lossy filter.
New music: Orlando by Cherie Amour. (Label or Spotify or YouTube). Do you remember nu-metal, which was like prog rock with a vocalist who rapped sometimes? This is “nu-punk” from Baltimore.
Old music: All My Rage by Laura Marling (2012). (Website or Spotify or YouTube). The big stringful finale of an album of personal little songs sung with a lovely high-pitched lilt.
-Thomas