(Via Information Aesthetics and Boing Boing.)

Neilson, Youngs & Kneale on Vimeo

Heavy, eh?

Neilson & Youngs were the highlight of a great Volcanic Tongue night, which also featured Kneale playing a weirdly rave-ish set, and Opaque doing their ‘masked highwaymen of feedback drone’ thing. The latter, excellent as usual, look dangerously like a supergroup nowadays—formerly a two-piece, members now include Nackt Insekten, Noma and frontperson/Kovorox label-founder Kylie Minoise (not their real names).

Also of note: inspired by a bloke in the crowd who stank like an old whore’s duvet, Guy, Len, Dave Clark and myself formulated a new entertainment concept, drawing on the immersive, often distressing, qualities of noise, but limited to olfactory sensation. We call it nase.

(There’s lots more Stevie Ray Vaughn on YouTube, too.)

Video the second, for the attention of all. There is, horrifyingly, a cat that sings the blues at the end of this clip:

Apologies for more video: despite initial resistance, I’m now as hooked on YouTube as everyone else.

Terri is an ‘outsider’ musician. Or, to put it another way, she writes naive-but-brilliant pop songs then performs them in a sub-karaoke style so jaw-droppingly bad that it beggars belief.

Interestingly, Terri’s work is conceived as a multimedia package—she first came to the attention of citizens of her hometown of Chicago by selling VHS tapes of her performances while she worked as a limousine driver—and, like her delivery, these promos are spectacularly inept.

So, what raises Terri’s work above the level of the plain old shite? Her nonchalance. Jan Terri knows that she is a great songwriter, Jan Terri knows that she is an attractive woman, Jan Terri knows that by rights she should be topping the pop charts. That few of these things are true matters not: Terri’s self-belief is contagious because she happily goes about her business, putting almost no effort into her performances, so sure is she that the mantle of greatness is upon her.

Here is Jan Terri’s best song, and best video, in my view, Losing You. I’m particularly fond of the literal visual interpretation of the lyrics. And the fact that she looks like a black pudding in those leathers.

By way of contrast, here is Get Down Goblin, a Hammer horror inspired Halloween song. At first viewing I worried that the relatively high production values of this piece diluted Terri’s appeal, but the moment roughly halfway through when she appears to forget that she is being filmed is so charming that I came around. Also, the scene in which Terri mimes an organ solo on a piano is, perhaps, an image that speaks more eloquently of Terri’s genius than words ever could.

See also: Baby Blues a love song which is, quite frankly, deeply terrifying, and perhaps the equal of Losing You (note that the blue-eyed subject of the song is played by a man with brown eyes). And finally, there is Little Brother, which both daringly appropriates Frere Jaques and features a nod to the Shangri-Las with its spoken introduction. Terri also released an album, High Risk, but, sadly, I can find no trace of it on the web.

Update: it has been brought to my attention that Jan Terri’s genius has been brought to the attention of the head of a major record label, and that a certain lupine pop star may have plans to cover Get Down Goblin—the Jan Terri revival starts here?

If you’re having trouble with the video above, or are reading via RSS, try viewing it on Vimeo.

Whitehouse, Live At Optimo on Vimeo

If you’re having trouble with the video above (technical, not aesthetic!), or are reading via RSS, try viewing it on Vimeo. Update: the clip should play in more browsers now, and won’t start blasting as soon as it loads, either.

The Institute for Electronic Artists is an organisation that has been established to aid, encourage and promote the continued development of electronic music and art. We provide a forum for producers of electronic art to share ideas, network and build relationships with other artists and people with related interests, such as promoters, DJs, VJs, etc.

Our events feature music, video and images produced by the artists present. Artists are invited to bring along there work on CD-R to be played or displayed and corresponding artwork and composer details are displayed using a projector.

Laudable aims, and I like that they’re taking the risk of playing music and video by anyone who pitches up.

The Institute also have a spot on Subcity Radio, every Monday at 10pm. After a quick listen to a recent show [.m3u stream], they seem to be defining ‘electronic music’ fairly broadly, but steering well clear of the wiggy fringes (everything I’ve heard so far has drums).

Perhaps I’ll pop along to the next event and foist a CD of me hooting into a load of broken effects pedals on them.