Creative Projects is a signature conducted by Gareth Mitchell and José Macabra. The following posts would be related to the thinking process for the album “I’ve been away but now I’m back” made by Group C.
Future can be very defiant to describe. As a part of group C, this thinking process was our first shot for a concept, being Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) the first recommendation to take place in our first meetings. Other films were presented concerning this matter, such as the 1982 film directed by Riddley Scott Blade Runner or Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. By looking at all these films we concluded that the subject wasn’t describing the future, rather describing the present by using the future as a reference. Therefore we decided to challenge ourselves to do the opposite – to depict the future by using the past.
We managed to find a few ideas that connected to this theme such as the north-American record producer Daedelus, who does electronic music (mostly IDM and Hip Hop) fused with samples taken from pieces of music of the ’20s. A great example would be his 2002 album “Invention”, where can be found his most knowledgeable work, with tracks such as Pursued Lips Reply, Astroboy, Adventress, Muggle Born, and Experience (song sampled by MF DOOM on the track Accordion – Madvillainy).
The artist Nmesh, who is a prominent musician related to the vaporwave movement, a genre of electronic music acknowledge by sampling 80’s songs and slowing them down, giving it a very futuristic look. Cocktails in Space is a great example of his work: a track where can be heard a space symphony with a considerable amount of reverb, vinyl crackle, and some small voice samples that work as garnish. The result is a beautiful feeling of “missing” and a never-lived nostalgia. Last but not least, it was suggested a Frank Bretschneider’s album supper.trigger and label Raster-Noton, which belongs to the same artist, Carsten Nicolai, as known as Alva Noto, and Olaf Bender, in 1996.
In a book called Retromania, by Simon Reynolds, it is explained this thinking as something that humanity does for centuries by doing questions like: is nostalgia stopping our culture’s ability to surge forward? or are we nostalgic precisely because our culture has stopped moving forward and so we inevitably look back to more momentous and dynamic times? He also refers to every avant-garde movement as arrière-garde, because for him almost nothing is new. The most evident example would be the renaissance movement, in which Greco-roman art was taken as a major inspiration.
As for the artwork and title for our album, we as a group liked the idea of “dancing with the past in the future”, not only because we looked at our project as something “danceable”, but at the same time, aesthetically, we liked the idea of fusing both realities. At first, we were considering taking a photo of Joanna Besarab, our colleague, dancing, as she is a really good dancer. Unfortunately, this idea didn’t enough resources to be executed. Instead, we decided to look after photographs of Dance Hall’s from the ’50s – they’re mostly long shots of hundreds of people dancing. This feature would represent the past, as for the future, we decided to collage the previous photo in a space scenario, but with a ’60s aesthetic. This would be a final result, well done by Rocco Wallis:
Lastly, the thinking process for the title was quite interesting, whereby we decided to select a line from the bar scene of Kubrick’s The Shinning. In that scene occurs an interesting phenomenon – the director induces the spectator to believe that Jack is hallucinating and that he can see and dialogue with people that lived in the Hotel he is in. Nevertheless, Jack uses the past to describe his current situation, while the imaginative characters describe him with occurrences that will happen in the future. In some way, this scene matches themes with our project, so we decided to take on the lines of that scene as the title for our album. I’ve been away but now I’m back.