Music Mosaic

Music: Merzbow - 1930
Click above to listen, and listen loud.

Artist's Statement

Merzbow is a renowned noise artist, and I chose the title track from his 1998 opus 1930 as the inspiration for my music mosaic. I chose it because I found it impenetrable and completely alien, and subjected myself to somewhat masochistic repeated listenings of the track in an attempt to find a pattern or a speck of meaning in the grating and vicious soundscape. Luckily, I did - looking past the clear dada influence, I found the interplay of the sounds to be rhythmic in a hypnotic way, and the sounds themselves created a sense of violence and, well, harshness. Beneath that, though, there was an almost imperceptible sense of sensuousness - one that gradually came to the forefront of the track. The viciousness is the most easily noticed aspect, but there is beauty in this song and it frames the violent noise spectacularly.

Taking that as my main inspiration, I tried to think of a way I could represent it visually. Tying together the ideas of sensuous beauty and brutal violence would be difficult to do in a BYU environment, especially in a visual form, so I tried to create images that were not explicit in nature but still captured that feeling of disturbed shock that one would tie with those two central ideas.

I chose to use portrait photos taken by controversial fashion wunderkind Hedi Slimane as the basis of my images, as they captured a sense of beauty already tinged with darker, harsher tones. I also admire his work and felt that close examination would help me develop a better grasp of lighting and photography. Using Photoshop, I tried to alter the images so that the content would evoke an aroma of viciousness, without straying too far into gratuitousness or cheap shock. I used photos of things I was afraid of as a child, as well as things that disturb me presently or are the result of phobias - the first two portraits are combined with medical images of bisected tumours, while the third is combined with a photo of beef tripe - a source of great distress to my younger self. The others stem from the disturbed feeling I get when viewing surfaces with many small holes in them, and my fear of lampreys and cockroaches.

I hope these images make you feel uncomfortable in just the right way - that combined feeling of familiarity and shock, of pleasure and pain. I have tried to extract those same strange emotions from Merzbow's 1930 and then attempted to distill them in visual form, and hope that these striking pictures can instill those emotions in you as well.