Process Piece - Wet Shave

Artist's Statement

Initially, Camlyn and I wanted to discuss the idea of industrialisation and convenience as a deteriorating force on the modern individual. We looked for a way to discuss this through sound and sound only, ultimately settling on a comparison between shaving with a disposable razor and taking the time to perform a traditional wet shave, badger-hair brush and all. However, due to time restraints and other factors, we settled with just presenting the wet shave on its own strength, neglecting the comparison and contrast. I feel that this was the better choice, and although we arrived at it serendipitously, it tied into the message quite nicely.

The conversation is one of tradition, of quality, of patient appreciation. With a traditional shaving kit, you have many different parts made with considerable craftsmanship - the old steel Gillette handle, the Derby razor blades, the badger-hair brush and ceramic soap bowl, the Pinaud Clubman aftershave - all of these are essential in delivering a good shave. To find them all and learn to use them well takes considerable time and effort, and mastering the wet shave is a long process with plenty of nicks and cuts along the way. The end result, however, is a steady hand, a close shave, and a priceless feeling of satisfaction. We tried to communicate this through the recording - the instruction and preparation for the shave are the majority of the piece, with the intensely gratifying sound of a hot razor taking stubble as the closer. This is only two minutes long, but we tried to take the months and months of practice and growth and represent it aurally in a condensed microcosm, and I think we did it quite well.

Thick Description

I'm sitting in a Panda Express, and I am unhappy.

An obese man is filling his cup with soda. The troughs of meat are exhaling upon the sneeze guards. There are seven couples seated around the room, and two groups of friends - one of which is seated outside. All are white. The men cooking the meat are both white, cropped blond hair on one. The two girls working the counter are Hispanic. There are pandas plastered on everything, and a sign made of thick neon tubes declaring the word "DRINKS." I see a man in a sports jersey at the counter, choosing his meats. Phrases like "Surf 'n Turf" and "WOKSMART" are printed on little plastic tags above the troughs. My family has a wok. My dad carefully seasoned it before I was born, turning the speckled carbon steel into a dark, thick black, mottled nest - the type that would last forever. When he went to Taiwan for a family emergency, he came back with photos of the night markets - vast crowds of stalls in a sea of glossy blue tarpaulin, pale fluorescent light rods hanging over men wearing baseball caps and cheap watches. All of them huddled over woks, pans, piles of food and piles of ingredients.

Right now, at this moment, I am sitting in front of a styrofoam clam-shell full of meat and rice. Several of the couples have left, and the cashiers are beginning to clear tables. A woman is staring at her phone, which came from the other side of the world, from a factory where fourteen men leapt to their deaths. A smiling panda holds a shrimp on a fork and is captioned in adorably, calculatedly broken English, proclaiming the advantages of shrimp which can be had for a dollar more. I sit in my chair and hear the obese man tell his friend that chopsticks are stupid and useless. Cartoon pandas recite broken phrases, factory worker suicides become a punchline to a cruel joke, a man flies over a city and two hundred and fifty thousand japs are turned to ash. The meat is old, and the rice is stale, and I sit and I eat, still unhappy.

Artist's Statement

I chose Panda Express because, to me, it is an excellent flashpoint that compels thought regarding race and culture, and because it is so banal - fast food with pseudo-oriental trappings aggressively aimed at white American patrons. I feel out of place in the restaurant, and wanted to communicate that feeling through this piece. I juxtaposed descriptions of the heavily Americanised assembly-line food service and descriptions of the chaotic and fluid night markets of Taipei in order to create this sense of unaddressable longing, and to highlight the triteness of the contrived enterprise.

I focused mainly on details, and tried to avoid voicing my own thoughts too overtly - the introspection, hopefully, comes from the dwelling on places and things and events. I feel like it is still easy to understand and to read, but this is an attempt at subtlety on my part and may have fallen short - I am unhappy with how obvious I am being but cannot presently articulate myself in a more satisfactory way - the pitfalls of a novice artist.

My main goal was to communicate the emotional impact Panda Express has on me and how I regard it against my own frame of reference, and I feel like I have accomplished that. I am satisfied with this piece but I am sure that more consideration and observation would have given me more to write about.

Music Mosaic - Source Images

I suppose that sharing one's methods will lead to a karmic return of some size, so these are the source images I used for my Music Mosaic.

WARNING: Pretty graphic medical images and other unpleasant stuff awaits you, but hit the jump if you're cool with that.

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.

Oceans Like Black Windows

I had a vision, or a dream. There was hell. Open before me, clouds made of burning stone, the crash of mountains upon mountains, the orchestra of shattering glass. A low rumble monitored my small boat, sailing across oceans like black windows, tossed beneath the waves, the sky, the sounds of marching armies.