Think Tank

Out of Time

Recollections of life. The songs are words, the playlists, chapters.

As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I take a look at my life and realize there's not much left.

Blur as we know it was born in 1989 when the band signed to Food/EMI. Debut album Leisure (1991) announced the arrival of a band with pop suss warped by an art-punk eccentricity. Yet Blur had more in them: namely, a revolution in the sound of English popular music. Second album Modern Life Is Rubbish reintroduced the idea that English rock music could be cool, and by the time their third album Parklife emerged in 1994, the rest of the UK had caught up. 

The Great Escape (1995) refined the sound palette of Britpop, but Blur were already moving on. 1997's Blur was an about-face - scuffed and noisy and un-English. Follow-up 13 was an even a more radical adventure in sound as William Orbit refereed a truce between organic punkpop and new-fangled technology.

Seventh album Think Tank (2003) was Blur’s first as a three piece after the temporary departure of founding guitarist Graham Coxon, featuring an eclectic variety of rhythms and textures and glorious melodies. 

In 2009 Blur reconvened as a four-piece to play a series of UK shows including two sold out dates at Hyde Park and a historic Sunday night appearance at Glastonbury. A film about Blur, No Distance Left To Run, was released in 2010.

~~~ SOUL FURY ~~~ 
"This is how the heart sounds,
Do not change the melody,
this now, you and I, here together.
Let this being with each
other be heart-sound." 
~ Rumi & Tabriz COLLAB ~ 

All About :: The Art of Collage & Rhetorical Velocity

I am specifically interested in situations where composers anticipate and strategize future third-party remixing of their compositions as part of a larger and complex rhetorical strategy that plays out across physical and digital spaces. We find this type of thinking—the asking of “how might the text be rewritten?” and “why, where, and for whom might this text be rewritten?”—an increasingly important set of questions in a digital age characterized, for instance, by swift, easy, and deep web searching and by copying and pasting practices. 

COLLAGE ::  Artistic compositions of materials and objects pasted and/or sewn/woven over and through surfaces, often with unifying and/or juxtaposing structures, lines, colors, themes in order to create textured, alive, amplified spaces. 

SYNTHESIS (AKA Mashup): Creating Compelling Texts comprised of borrowed, reconstituted, and original material.

The art of creating such compositions.

An assemblage of diverse elements.

To paste and/or sew/weave (diverse materials) over a surface, thereby creating an artistic product.

To create such an artistic product.

Base Camp for Arctic Windhorse: Eagle River, Alaska

Out of Time

Blur Official