April 2006 Archives
just a quick note with some links to some documentation of white rainbow's "PRISM" performance/installation that took place a few days ago april 26th 2006 at holocene at the opening party of the PDX Film Festival 2006
picture and video:
steve schroeder's photos and videos
and a few more here: flickr whiterainbow photos
and a very nice, well written review: PDXFF06 URHO blog review
i never saw this review
its pretty funny
omg omg
thanks to the kindness and forethought of a very good friend, honey and i are going to see jandek tonight. i only wish it was acapella, like 2000's put my dreams on this planet CD:
we saw a place called thai pod today, which made us think of other funny thai restaurant names
thai hate god
thai stick
thai schtick
thai wad/thai't wad
pigs thai
thai as a kite
how thai can you fly
lets get thai
uhhhhhhh
bangkok block
thai ranosaurus rex
hypno-thai-zed
ok this is stupid
sorry to be so boring and self-centered as to post reviews of my own music on this blog. i'm just trying to archive these things, as old online reviews tend to disappear over the months and years. and they mean a lot to me, these reviews. i want to be able to look back at them later.
more funny stories and pictures and ideas soon (funny names for thai restaurants COMING SOON). and oh yeah, the donation post was a sort of a joke. i just found the html for the button on paypal. donations are always, of course, gladly accepted, but there is no emergency. if you are wealthy and have extra money after donating to more worthy causes, like tsunami and hurricane relief, please, feel free.
tinymixtapes white rainbow reviews
BOX REVIEW: gentle breeze. The hum of the open highway. The drone of a refrigerator.
These sounds invoke a nostalgia hard to capture outside of one's mind. Each may be uninspiring or even mundane to ponder, but somehow these everyday harmonies are able to link themselves to memories. A gentle breeze may recall the time you stood at the crest of ebbing ocean waves as the sun set. The collaboration of rubber and concrete may conjure up the many roadtrips to see friends, family, bands, or just to get away. The isolation of the refrigerator's motors working overtime just might make you hungry.
These reactions are what Adam Forkner appeals to throughout the five discs of his ambitious box set. Packed to the gills with drone and ambient detours, White Rainbow Box infiltrates each one of your senses, taking you to a time in your life when things were idyllic. And though one aspect of the collection may never stand out above another, it's the sum of the parts that creates a musical landscape as picturesque as Forkner's imagination.
The mammoth venture is a lot to devour, even in multiple sittings. With five discs of material, the peaks and valleys of each track get lost in the total listening experience. Your senses forego the luxury of picking up every little nuance of noise and sound as it's forced to absorb each disc as a whole. Forkner has passed up the prototypical verse/chorus/verse cliché in favor of a more classical approach. Each track is just a cog, a nut, or a screw in this very large and overreaching machine. Hell, it's even bringing out the worst clichés I can string together.
But that's what White Rainbow Box is truly about. Listen upon listen, the only thing that changes is how you interpret it. It's background music for reading or work; it's foreground music for relaxation; it's the soundtrack for imagination. Each movement of ambient sound and melodic drone becomes impossible to dissect. It becomes a part of your memories. It becomes the gentle breeze, the highway's din, and the refrigerator's monotone hum.
ZOME REVIEW
White Rainbow, a.k.a. VVRSSNN, a.k.a. multi-media artist Adam Forkner, gets around and has friends in high places. In the last several years alone, he's played on albums by Little Wings, Devendra Banhart, Jackie-O Motherfucker, and Dirty Projectors, to name a few. If this array of artists wants his talent as both a player and a producer, he must be some sort of musical savant genius, right? The concept for his recent outing as White Rainbow is intriguing to say the least. It's not a love song (in fact, there's nary a trace of a song on the whole album), but an audio love letter, made with no stylistic expectations or motivation other than new love. What comes out is an understated tour de force, with Forkner sounding humble and restrained as opposed to shouting out his love from rooftops. Its ambient cries of togetherness are formless and void of structure, with pieces ranging from 5 to 20-minutes in length (yet it seems completely arbitrary as to why some are long and some are short). Warm synths and reverbed-out layers of guitar pave a solid foundation for drum loops, vocal tracks, and various other instruments to weave in and out of at their own pace. Although it's a fairly one-note theme throughout the album, ZOME never sounds hesitant, and these four directionless pieces do convey raw emotion and the sense of young love.
The opening track "Guilded Golden Ladies" is the closest thing to a traditional song, with barely audible and vulnerable sounding vocals comparing how he used to feel to how he feels now. His simple vocal melody is overshadowed by Sigur Rós-like guitar swells and hypnotizing percussion. Both the title track and "How High A Ridge..." are textural studies that could've easily fit on Last Visible Dog's Invisible Pyramid: Elegy Box compilation that came out last year. Unlike ambient works that are often cold and void of emotion, these two pieces are warm and inviting like a lover's embrace (hopefully your lover isn't cold and emotionless). Whether his title is a coincidence or not, "Germany," the shortest track on the album, takes after the beat-driven Krautrock of Neu! and early Kraftwerk.
His aural love letter is brilliant in theory, but perhaps it was never meant for the world to hear. Actually, it never was meant for us to hear. Recorded while on tour in 2003, ZOME was made specifically for Forkner's then new lover, Honey Owens, with no hopes of anyone else finding meaning in it. Fast forward three years and he has now made his love letter available to the public. Maybe he's more comfortable in his relationship now, or maybe he's decided that it's a beautiful piece of music that a lot of folks could get something out of. Although Adam Forkner is full of love and great sonic tapestries, ZOME is somewhat unfulfilling without the relationship to accompany it.
It's not usually the business of Tiny Mix Tapes to critique people's private love letters, but that's the task at hand here. Since so many pop songs are fueled by spellbound, naïve lyrics about loving someone or being hurt by a lover, we should actually be pretty good at critiquing these strange testimonials of the human condition. So, starting tomorrow, feel free to send your most private love letters to us for review. Feeling uncomfortable? Eh hem... would you publish a book of your love letters?
cool blog gives props to the box
"I plan on only rarely posting newer music such as this, but I feel like this is something new that needs exposure. White Rainbow is Adam Forkner of Portland, Oregon. Instead of performing conventional shows, White Rainbow prefers to include much more than music by setting up installations that integrate visual effects. This song is very serene and dreamlike, although very complex in many aspects. I would recommend this for anyone who is a fan of ambient music in general."
review of the song "germany" on some miami news website
With the assistance of space-rockers Landing, indie superproducer/collaborative gadabout Adam Forkner's latest nom de plume nestles and sighs in a pile of Neu!-ly fluffed down. Mildly psychedelic and divertingly mellow the way a lava lamp can be under the proper conditions — dig those fluttering rabbit-hole guitars; in-a-trance one-note keyboard solos; and chromatic, evaporating tones gliding atop featherweight, monotone stickwork, maaan — White Rainbow's go at a done-to-death concept is nonetheless magical.
all music guide review of zome:
White Rainbow recorded a respectable disc of ambient music on Zome, released about two years (in November 2005) after it was recorded (in October 2003). Comprised of just four tracks, it was at times tangentially related to songs and rock music, and at others drifted into wholly instrumental electronic-dominated territory. The mood on the opening selection, "Gilded Golden Ladies," is languid and mellow with an electronic sheen, the vocals functioning more as ornamental elements than features on which to focus. The material gets less conventional as the disc progresses, at times skirting the space rock of a band such as 1970s Pink Floyd, but with a more placid, serenely passive ambience in its combination of crystalline reverbed guitar, basic keyboard riffs, and electronic skitters. The closing title cut, which at 20 minutes takes up about half the album, gets into more electronic, intelligent new age-ish territory, with spacious decaying and overlapping tones establishing an atmosphere of consistent but always-slightly-varying calm. Toward the final part, there's a mild buildup in tension as more parts are added and intersect, and gaps between the repetitions of notes become shorter and shorter.
indieworkshop review of zome
thick with layers of delayed guitar and fuzzy keyboards, ZOME is evidently an audio love letter, which has found its way (hopefully) into all of your CD players. Created by Adam Forkner (of phenomenally underrated Yume Bitsu, Surface of Eceyon, and (VVRSSNN)), along with his Surface of Eceyon conspirators and members of Landing, these four songs create a slowly evolving and ever changing pool of sonic light. The word "vibe" gets thrown a lot but in this case, there is a true vibrational force at work, shimmering just inside your ears, eyes, brain and heart when you hear the beautiful music on this record.
From the slowed down shoe-gazer opener, you can instantly tell that Forkner has forgone his beat experiments of (VVRSSNN) to come almost full circle to the Yume Bitsu sound, but then you would be only partially right. What Adam Forkner has done is create several levels of sound, several "mantles" that he wears equally comfortably. Perhaps it was his time playing with so many other projects, from the Hairy Fairy Band with Devendra Banhart, or his work with the Dirty Projectors or Little Wings, but he has successfully unfocused his sound in such a way as to not lose its appeal. Nothing here, or on any other White Rainbow release (generally mail order from Mr. Forkner himself, until the White Rainbow Box comes out) seems meandering or out-of-place. All is right with the world as the White Rainbow vibe floats over it.
While most of the songs here are fairly song-like in structure, although protracted and slowed down, it is the final and longest piece (ZOME) that points to the White Rainbow of today (ZOME the album was recorded in 2003). This twenty-minute track unfolds slowly into a flowing stream of peace, somehow not as hokey and new age-y as it sounds. I think for some the sputtering decay of distortion can be the great calming meditation, filling the head with gently burning white noise. That is the real treasure in Adam Forkner's work is his innate ability to capture the perfect tone of sounds, whether it be a flanged guitar or an ancient drum machine. He understands the sounds that he (and others like him) wants to hear in their music, and completely translates them to tape.
For that, I can only say, "Thank you for this love letter, even if it isn't addressed to me". Oh yeah, "Call me!?!?"
so the marriage records monthly over at towne lounge didnt happen last night. we got a posse lined up and t blood and aaron f and jona and honey and chantelle (not the booking agent) got there around 930 and brian t and mattty mcD were on their way with the bells and whistle and drum set but the door was locked and no one was inside and the lights were all off and so we just decided to go back home. watching the last 30 seconds of lost was completely dis-satisfing but then we oak streeters sat in a circle and drank beers and mumbled to ourselves and each other for a few good hours and that was pretty darn good. it ended with us all humming along to "whale mountain" in blood's space several hours later.
honey woke up with a scratch on her eye. she spent the day in bed with a cold wet rag on her face. i raced to get eye drops that stung and didnt really help and bubbly water and a lemon that tasted good. a gossip magazine. later, after work, we ate dinner in the wendy's parking lot watching the tale end of evening traffic as a few drops of rain and/or sprinklers from the manicured lawn hit the windshield.
saturday night at holocene the second annual ingredients show. a bunch of artists making audiovideo pieces using only a few preselected samples and a short amount of time. like one of those cooking shows but way nerdier. honey owens and andy brown and jason frank (ovid media brothers)and i are gonna do one under the team name BROTHER-AND-SISTERHOOD OF THE ETERNAL HEALING SPECTRUM OF NOW.
more info go to the official ingredients blog
been preparing (at least mentally and through deep internet research) for the pdx film fest opening party. title: WHITE RAINBOW: PRISM
perhaps i should add FREE PABST to the official name of my installation.
anyone got any kaleidoscopic sound-sensitive gobo light machines lying around?...yeah i didn't think so.
lovee
adam
valet, aka honey owens will be performing live at holocene thursday april 6th 2006. she will be accompanied by her new "tribe of mirrors" as well as legendary freeform dancer Fred Nemo
w/ evolutionary jass band, tara jane o'neil
holocene
1001 se morrison
$5
21+
9PM
check out valet's myspace for more tunes
HONEY SAYS: "HEY COWBOY! COME TO MY SHOW!"
dirty projectors, james sumner's the getty address screening, nat baldwin, darkest of yogas
towne lounge
sunday april 2nd