AUG008 – augurari

NICOLAS LOBO

Slowed and Mirrored

edition of 150 cassettes

duration: 45:00

Lori Kelly: You’ve done “Chopped and Screwed”, Go Go” and now “K-Pop”. Have you ever directly engaged with artists or fans of any of these genres? I’m thinking not, and if not, why?

Nicolas Lobo: I’m not really into music, so I’m not really looking to be part of a group associated with a particular sound. I just look for the by-products and try to fit them into some kind of progression. I did interact with Go Go promoters and musicians; sometimes it fits and sometimes not.

LK: By-products and progression… so you want to be the outsider who arranges? Sounds anthropological to me.

NL: Yeah, it takes a bit from ethnomusicology. I don’t bother with pinning it down too hard because I don’t think it fits entirely there either; it’s more of a third place. I think those academic disciplines are fine and I read from them but what I’m doing cannot be assimilated back into that circuit so easily. I am just as much an outsider to Anthropology as I am to Screw.

LK: You said “progression”… I hear contrast in these tapes, but am I also hearing a kind of narrative?

NL: I meant “progression” in the sequencing of my projects like Go Go leads to Screw… leads to K-Pop, etc. What’s interesting is that sometimes the basic values of the music can be in opposition, while the side effects dovetail perfectly into one another; as in Screw to “slowed and mirrored K-Pop“.

LK: The detritus matches even though the original intent clashes. So how did you work through the sequence? What lead you from Go Go, to Screw to… Exactly how many hours do you spend randomly trolling YouTube?

NL: hahaha… Trolling YouTube is a start, but only gets you so far. I’m looking for things that can be misunderstood. Things like: vibrations, flavored colors, patterns, mistakes, failed attempts. Like um… the space between the music; not the notes, the music itself. What I wanted to do with the tape was arrange it in order of decay so that the sides start with less decomposed music until, near the end of the side, the music has melted into Black Metal-sounding mush.

LK: I can hear it trying to get dark, but this underlying sweetness persists; chipmunk voices singing about their gangster boy… and did I hear a Michael Jackson riff in there? Did you choose that balance or is Pop Music indissoluble?

NL: Yeah, it’s like a sludge; something that just won’t completely dissolve. I chose the Michael Jackson riff because it’s the one all those prisoners in the Philippines danced to, famously. You can bet they had a slowed and mirrored copy of thriller in the prison rec room somewhere.

audio samples:

excerpt from… Slowed and Mirrored

$ 11.00 _{(postage paid)}