Lau Nau is an impossibly talented artist from Finland. Her music draws on folk roots, but like the shamanic potions of lore takes listeners to distant dimensions. At times, she is capable of hewing magic from the ice; at others, she makes you hold your breath at the delicate tones of her voice. In this video, released to support her third album, she’s somewhere between the Earth and the Moon.
Rare Video of the Week
Zanias is the latest project from Australasian artist Alison Lewis. Now based in Berlin and performing as Zoe Zanias, Lewis has taken a step sideways from the darktronica of her previous acts, Keluar and Linea Aspera. In her new video, we see her as never before – bewitching and stern – with a sound that is as dramatic and angular as her look.
Through This Collapse [Zanias] from Ouroboros on Vimeo.
Belgians had the benefit of this performance, back in 1983, and it has thoughtfully been added to Youtube from an old tape of the Veronica’s Countdown programme. As is the way. Typically shambolic New Order, but with that human touch that means the machines never get in the way.
An awkward check-in at a hotel, an awkward discussion about synthesizers, an unusual use of shaving foam and a strange scene in a lobby bar – well, this clip has them all. Frank Tovey is sorely missed, and this early clip from Dutch TV provides a glimpse into his early steps onto the European continent in his Fad Gadget guise.
Ahead of its time, politically, “Security” was also one of Men Without Hats’ catchiest tracks. This clip is taken from the Montreal TV programme, MusiVideo. The presenter is a youthful Erica Miechowsky, before her stint on Canada’s national music channel, MuchMusic.
There aren’t many Western artists who have performed in Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The choice of Laibach, the controversial Slovenian arts collective, to play Pyongyang was certainly unexpected. Wham! went to China and Space played Moscow, but they had global hits behind them and were ideologically neutral – letting them play was relatively safe ground for cultural commissars. Laibach, on the other hand, occupy a space that is closer to industrial music than pop, flirt with controversial imagery, and are not well known outside of alternative music circles. Why them?
The answer might arise from the little-noticed fact that the Norwegian Arts Council was behind the concert. A Norwegian artist staged the event in order to film it; to make something of the absurdity of Laibach playing songs from The Sound of Music in a hall filled with technocrats in one of the last socialist countries. How he explained it to his North Korean contacts would be interesting to know, but chances are good that they were bemused by the performance.
Certainly, those who attended were unsure what to make of it. As a diplomatic DPRK worker told the band after their show: “I didn’t know that such music existed in the World and now I know.”
A TV presentation from 1981, this footage reveals Kraftwerk on stage to have a slightly kooky sense of humour. Robot dancing with smiles; audience participation in the use of the keypad controllers used in Pocket Calculator – it’s an easy-going Kraftwerk that appears to show off its accumulated body of music-work.
The loss of Nash the Slash was a terrible blow to Canadian alternative music. Nash had been one of the first successful electronic artists, first with FM and then in a solo career that took him to the UK to work with Steve Hillage and tour with Gary Numan. He made music for films and comic books, driven by an interest in the horror genre, but the man inside the bandages wasn’t accorded the recognition he deserved before he passed away. This clip was recorded four years ago this week, at a show in Toronto, and shows his version of the Jan & Dean classic, “Dead Man’s Curve.”