alexlewiswhitaker-blog

[alexlewiswhitaker-blog]

Statement for University of Brighton

I’d like to study Digital Music and Sound Arts as I love making my own music and art so I want to devote as much time as possible to it and improve my production abilities. I’d also like to study in a place where I’m surrounded by other music lovers and artists.

Recently, I’ve been listening to a lot of hardcore hip-hop group, Death Grips, particularly a song called ‘The Fever (Aye Aye)’ as this has been the inspiration for the album that I am currently writing for my virtual band, Hippo Island. The disturbing scene of a man battling personal demons which is described in the song has inspired me as a lyricist and the hard-hitting production emulates the emotions that I want to evoke, with such vociferous rapping and abrasive synthesizers. I also admire how the band produce the music themselves, ensuring that they are always at the forefront of the creative process. Furthermore, Death Grips take experimentation to the next level, particularly with their clever use of sampling, and so I find them to be incredibly influential as somebody who is tired of hearing artists conform to an overly-familiar, uninspired sound. A few of my other influences include anything from forward-thinking metal bands like Converge and Deftones to experimental hip-hop like Shabazz Palaces and Ho99o9.

Although I don’t have any qualifications in terms of music GCSE, A-level or grade exams, I teach myself to play the guitar and produce my own music. I can offer an unorthodox perspective when thinking about music. Instead of looking at what ‘should’ sound good using music theory and the conventional techniques, I go into a project with a more experimentative approach, trying to find what ‘might’ sound good and so hopefully creating something more original. Instead of focusing on one element, I like to put thought into every aspect of the project, including the visuals, as shown by the lyrics booklet for my most recent full-length album, ‘Columbus’, included in this portfolio.

My aspirations for the near future are to continue my musical projects at a higher level, in terms of producing it better and reaching a wider audience. I am yet to play my music live so I want to prove myself as a singer-guitarist, using the experience I gain through the course and from interacting with other students. I also don’t want to put my visual arts background behind me as I find art can harmonize so well with music, so I’d still pursue this in whichever way I can, perhaps by designing album covers and guitar stompboxes. Ultimately, I don’t want to creatively restrict myself; I just want to improve my musical abilities and begin to make a reality of my ambitions.

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This is a mashup of the latest two releases from my virtual band, Hippo Island. The first 11 snippets are from the full-length ‘Columbus’ and the last 3 snippets are from the EP ‘The Ancient Dualism’, both released in 2017.

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The Ancient Dualism - Commentary

This EP was part of an extended research project for my school over the summer. I wrote and printed a commentary about the making of the project to go alongside it. Below is my introduction to the commentary (the full essay is about 6000 words).

Chapter One - Introduction

The Ancient Dualism is a three-track EP by Hippo Island - a virtual band which tells the ongoing story of the fictional island and the animals that inhabit it. The band members are as follows:

Buff the Hippo (co-lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist) 

Yaya the Donkey (co-lead vocalist and DJ) 

Rhino the Porcupine (lead guitarist) 

Peanut the Gazelle (bassist) 

Mango the Gorilla (percussionist)

However, all the music is written, recorded and produced and the album artwork created by myself. In other words, these characters are entirely fictional and don't represent any real-life musicians other than myself.

The band already has two albums to its name, each detailing the story through the eyes of main character, Buff the Hippo. However, the concepts for these two albums were quite ordinary and uninspired so, for this EP, I wanted to come up with something more imaginative like so many of the concept albums I was inspired by, even if it wasn't consistent with the previous story.

The initial idea for what the story of this EP would be was based off my own tendency to daydream and escape reality too often. This offers an easy escape for anybody who feels completely apathetic to real life, rather than facing up to things head-on, but it can actually end up making reality even more unsatisfactory as reality is held to the unreasonably high expectations set by the dreams. These ideas are commented on in a song which would end up being one of my earliest inspirations for this project - Be Safe by Wakefield indie rock band, The Cribs. The song features a spoken-word monologue given by guest musician, Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth), which is narrated by somebody who is so unhappy with his life that he goes around denouncing pretty much everything that modern life entails.

"One of those fucking awful black days when nothing is pleasing and everything that happens is an excuse for anger An outlet for emotions stockpiled, an arsenal, an armour"

Here, the protagonist is describing how even the most trivial of things can trigger him into anger, including people getting tied up in routines that make every day the same as the last, and "petty concerns" such as "parking tickets, breakfast specials.."; things that don't really matter but which people concern themselves so much with.

These are the sort of things which can drive someone to find a means of escape. I wanted the overarching message of this EP to show how a detachment from everyday life can become unhealthy as you spend more time in this imaginary world than your actual world and so nothing ever gets sorted out, resulting in a downward spiral of dissatisfaction and despair.

But first, in order to avoid the ordinary, uninspired concepts of my previous releases, I found some relevant material which I thought might inspire me, including three books by sci-fi author, Philip K Dick (referred to from here on as PKD), and the movies Inception and Dark City, as well as the concept albums that had me get into this kind of music in the first place. I would go on to reference these influences in both the music and the artwork, such as the title of the EP itself being taken from PKD's novel, Ubik. The full quotation is "the ancient dualism: body separated from soul", which I interpreted as these 'dreamers' being physically present but mentally absent.

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This is the lyrics booklet for Hippo Island’s latest full-length album ‘Columbus’.

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Personal Study for Art

As part of the A-level Art course, I had the opportunity to write about anything I wanted related to art so I brought my musical interests into it by writing about the use of appropriation in the music world. The essay isn’t finalised yet but this is an extract from the current version, where I look at the appropriation in album covers.

In 1978, high school photography teacher Joseph Szabo released his book ‘Almost Grown’, featuring a series of photographs he had taken of his students in order to capture the ambivalence of adolescence. One photo, Priscilla (1969), was used as the cover for Massachusetts rock band Dinosaur Jr.’s major-label debut from 1991, Green Mind. The (visual) changes that were made were minimal: the addition of the band name and album title and the cropping into square format, so the first question to ask is why the band didn’t think further modification was necessary. Szabo himself says the image “expresses something about girlhood… a certain kind of maturity and experience”. Personally, I think maturity and experience is the exact opposite of what young girls (and boys) have but it is what they try to make everyone believe they have. The transition between adolescence and adulthood is often much harder than imagined; this girl is trying to express her strength and independence but inside she is probably confused. It is these sorts of youth-related issues that songwriter J Mascis addresses on the album, described by Rolling Stone as “fuzzy-headed treatises on boredom, fence-sitting and passive romantic longing”. Take the first verse of opening track ‘The Wagon’ as an example: “There’s a way I feel right now/Wish you’d help me, don’t know how.. Some help when no one’s got a clue”. These teenagers are trying to help each other out but in actual fact they don’t know what they’re doing just like how the girl on the cover, with her hands on her hips and cigarette in her mouth, is attempting to show how comfortably she is adapting to adulthood but actually the blurred out background suggests her vision is clouded by the labyrinth of new responsibilities that has accompanied her new-found independence. The childish handwriting suggests Mascis still feels naive and prone to mess things up just like a child, relating to the lyric “How’d you pin that one on me?/ I haven’t even done it yet” and even the title of track 3, ‘Blowing It’. The brightly coloured text distracts from the photo, again suggesting an easily distracted child, or one who has messed up a perfectly good photo. As for the album title itself, the colour green is associated with youth and inexperience, being the colour of unripe fruits and developing plants, and so, all things considered, this album cover seems to work well with the album concept and lyrics and even captures the stripped-back, fuzzed-up music with its absence of colour and blurred background.The fact that the original photo was unstaged makes this use of appropriation even more serendipitous. In an interview with Monster Children magazine, Szabo says he didn’t even know the girl in the image; she appeared in his line of sight while on Jones Beach, NY and he quickly snapped her, before she disappeared right after. This spontaneity makes the image a lot more truthful than a staged image; the girl didn’t even know she was being photographed so she must have been showing her true nature. The ideas on youth that Mascis and co. wanted to express on their album cover are ironically more authentic by using someone else’s photo than if they had hired a model to fake a relevant pose and expression. Furthermore, the use of the photo pays homage to Szabo by bringing his wistful, freedom-evoking photograph to a wider audience and so more people will respect and admire the photograph decades after it was taken. ‘Priscilla’ has been propelled to a plane of higher importance in the art world.

My other example of appropriation in album covers shows its importance in a political context. In On The Kill Taker, released in 1993 by D.C.-based post-hardcore band Fugazi, collages found images and text that filmmaker Jem Cohen found on the streets of New York. The photo is a faded gold polaroid of the Washington Monument and so, since the band is known for their strong anti-establishment views, the image which may not have intended to be political has immediately been given this connotation. The text, and subsequently the album title, came from a piece of paper containing the phrase “so I could have tried to put a stop to the hater, the adversary workers, iniquity evildoers. This is big because people in high places are in on the kill taker". The monument is a symbol of American values and the government itself. Perhaps the band wanted to challenge the government’s failure to adhere to these values or even the values themselves, some of which are dated and shouldn’t be applicable to modern society. Maybe they are the ones who are closing in on the ‘kill-taking’ government. There is hardly anything in the photo except for this monument, making politics the clear focus. There is a notable contradiction between the colour gold, with its connotations of prosperity and glamour, and the rather bleak image itself, suggesting a country with every opportunity to become great, being the richest country on earth, but instead is somehow rife with warmongers, shameless corporatism and discrimination, all of which are topics brought up on this record. ‘Smallpox Champion’ refers to the 18th century eradication of indigenous peoples through biological warfare, most likely an attack on Bush’s war in the Middle East at the time taking the lives of 3600 Iraqi civilians. The money-grubbing corporate world is brought up in ‘Cassavetes’, a nod to independent filmmaker John Cassavetes, who was known for his deeply personal, serious films as opposed to the regurgitated, materialistic tripe coming out of Hollywood. ‘Great Cop’, the most aggressive track on the album, confronts the ever-present discrimination of minorities by the police force in light of the Rodney King incident and the subsequent L.A. riots that resulted in the deaths of 60 people. Discrimination is brought up again in ‘23 Beats Off’, an attack on the ban on gay people in the military.

Similar to the fortuitous nature of Szabo’s photo, the fact that these collaged pieces were just found on the streets, with the polaroid being found in an entirely different state to where it was taken, suggests these American issues are not just Fugazi’s take on things, but a very prevalent attitude within the whole population. This highlights the seriousness of the situation and so appropriation is more powerful here; if Fugazi had taken their own photo of the monument and had written that statement themselves, this evidently widespread perspective on the government would have been lost because it would suggest that this was only the band’s perspective, not anyone else’s. Instead, this inherent resentment of the system is so obvious that the streets of New York are actually comprised of polaroids and pieces of paper that evidence it.