"The softest bullet ever shot..."

I've been having a great time watching a new documentary on Pitchfork about the Flaming Lips masterpiece album The Soft Bulletin. The album came out in 1999, and at the time my musical world revolved around rock music a lot more than it does now. Seeing these videos brought back the excitement and sense of wonder I felt hearing the music for the first time. I was lucky enough to see the Flaming Lips on the Soft Bulletin tour at a small-ish club in New Haven called Toad's Place. This concert is still one of the best of all time for me. I was totally blown away by the surreal spectacle of their show, which featured psychedelic video projection, theremin, gongs, and copious amounts of confetti thrown by Wayne Coyne.
The making of the album is a pretty interesting story. The band was about to get dropped by Warner Bros after failing to live up to the commercial hype of their hit "She Don't Use Jelly", and somehow they managed to stay on the label and make two incredibly experimental leaps into the unknown. First by recording "Zaireeka", a 4-disc concept album intended to be played on 4 separate sound sources simultaneously. Then, in the same session, recording the music on the Soft Bulletin which embraced lush MIDI orchestration instead of the Lips' trademark distorted guitar onslaught.

21st Century Rock and Roll Spectacle: Sufjan Stevens at Prospect Park

Last night I saw Sufjan Stevens perform at the Bandshell in Prospect Park as part of the Celebrate Brooklyn series. My mind was thoroughly blown. I was simply not prepared for the level of sensory stimulation at work in this concert. The large band (pairs of drummers, trombones, guitars, backup singers, dancers, keyboardists, flutists) were decked out in space-age neon garb and the stage props included giant angel wings worn by Sufjan.
Before I go on about the theatrical nature of the show, I should mention that the music was GREAT! They mostly played music from Sufjan's latest record, The Age of Adz, which is one of my favorite recent albums. The music is very epic with a futuristic electronic sound, and meticulously arranged.

Here's a trailer for the tour.

Sufjan Stevens Concert Trailer: Age of Adz / Prospect Park from Asthmatic Kitty on Vimeo.

The visual art element of the concert was very impressive. There was a lot of great video art synched up to the songs and much of it was breathtaking. I think Wagner would have approved, this was definitely a 21st century indie-rock equivalent of Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, or synthesis of the arts. The show also reminded me of seeing the Flaming Lips for the first time, another group that makes very creative use of video art. Sufjan mentioned briefly that the album was inspired largely by the artist Royal Robertson, and the video art in the show incorporated a lot of his images. Here's a description of Robertson's work.

"The Age of Adz refers to the Apocalyptic art of Royal Robertson (1930 –1997), a black Louisiana-based sign-maker (and self-proclaimed prophet) who suffered from schizophrenia, and whose work depicts the artist’s vivid dreams and visions of space aliens, futuristic automobiles, eccentric monsters, and signs of the Last Judgment, all cloaked in a confusing psychobabble of biblical prophecy, numerology, Nordic mythology and comic book jargon. Portions of the album use Robertson’s work as a springboard into a cosmic consciousness in which basic instincts are transposed on a tableau of extraordinary scenes of divine wrath, environmental catastrophe, and personal loss. In Robertson’s imagination, guns, lasers, gargoyles, and warring battleships upend the sins of mankind with the pageantry of a Hollywood B-movie. (A selection of Robertson’s work adds extraordinary color to the album art as well). "

This is a video that Sufjan made using Robertson's art for the song "Get Real, Get Right."

Get Real, Get Right from Asthmatic Kitty on Vimeo.