Found Artist

The Dresden Dolls

For this assignment, I choice the self described "Brechtian Punk Cabaret" band The Dresden Dolls. This band is made up of just two people, Amanda Palmer, piano and vocals, and Brian Vigllone, drums vocals, guitar and electric bass. The band is originally from Boston Mass. The pair met at a Halloween party where Amanda preformed on an old piano in an attic.
I decided on The Dresden Dolls for several very important reasons; one, as it states on their official website (http://www.dresdendolls.com/main1.htm), "The Dresden Dolls continue to defy explanation and classificationn". Two, the members of the band refuse to be seen as on gender for any real length of time. Amanda doesn't shave her legs or under arms, and Brian is often seen wearing a skirt or full on dress. In one of the versions of their video for the song "Backstabber" Amanda is shown dressed as a man and Brian is in a dress for the entire thing. Three, because there is only two members of the band and Amanda's singing voice is not what would be considered "normal" for a female singer to have. It's more in the vein of Courtney Love, with her grinding vocals and the tendency to be slightly off the music. And, four, the lyrics to their songs can be down right uncomfortable when paid attention too, here is a taste of some of their song titles, which are tame in comparison to the lyrics: "Sex Changes" , "Bad Habit", and "Mandy Goes To Med School".
It was near impossible to find any sort of "artist statement" from these two. While I did read around three interviews with them from different times, the bio on their website, and their myspace about me. The closest I could come was two rather vague quotes.
"...and working with the idea of being slightly painfully honest and making the audience squirm a bit." Amanda Palmer in an April 2004 e-mail interview http://onlyangels.free.fr/interviews/d/dresden_dolls.htm
and
"Music is one of those things that brings great joy to people, singing is a sort of unifier of people, no matter what political place or original place you come from, we are a lot more a like than different and it's important to remember that" Brian in July 2006 interview http://www.ondarock.it/Dresdendolls_eng.html
These quotes are really rather hard to understand if you have never seen/hear the Dresden Dolls, so I think this would be a good time to put a link to their video of "Night Reconnaissance" from their most recent album "Yes Virginia..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yC6xftLzrY
I'm not sure how The Dresden Dolls directly relate to the work that I am doing in this class, mostly because I have yet to have any feed back on any pieces I have made. But I can talk about how I relate to them, and how I hope some of their influence comes across in my work, in this class and out.
I relate to The Dresden Dolls for all the reasons I choice them, their crossing dressing, their undefinable nature, Amanda's strange voice, and their harsh/raw lyrics.
I hope that their influence shows through in my work in pretty much the ways I just listed above. However with some tweaks. I don't plan on writing any lyrics for this class, but I do intend to try and explore gender in music and sound, and I like the idea of being too honest to the point of discomfort. Music that makes people uncomfortable fascinates me in general, but the idea of being so honest that it makes people uncomfortable, is just to good to pass up with out playing around with it.

Reflection On My Work This Week.

This week wasn’t by my definition a very productive one. I upload “Good sister/Bad sister” to my Garage Band and played around with adding random sounds and interments to the beginning and end of the song. I’m not sure I like how it came out, and I’m still not sure how well I’m using the Garage Band application…I don’t even know how good I am at this.
I think I need a good dose of inspiration…I’m just not sure where to get that from. I’m a bit frustrated with the progress I’ve made so far, I wonder, is it possible to be born musically stupid? Maybe I’m just looking at it from the wrong side…Maybe I need to try something completely different.
I suppose I could try chopping the song up and mixing bits and pieces in with something else. I don’t really know. I still have to think on it some more.

Snap-Shot Of Where I Want To Go This Semester

I was thinking of ways to incorporate my work from last semester’s Writing About Music course; because it seemed like a shame to put all that work into something not to touch it again. That’s when I had a moment of inspiration. Why not take the work I did with Bikini Kill and Courtney Love and tweak it a bit? Why not take some songs from Bikini Kill and Hole and layer them? Or add sounds from the free sound website and make something really disturbing from the whole thing? Why not try, through added sounds, force people to pay attention to the lyrics instead of the people singing. I feel this is would be very interesting, especially in Courtney Love’s case, because she has such a reputation; no one I’ve talked to really takes time to try and hear what she’s saying. This wouldn’t apply, at least in my mind, as much to Bikini Kill, mostly because the lead singer married a Beastie Boy; and their music is so blatant in what it wants to say, it’s hard to miss the meaning. So that’s where I am at this moment. I plan on listening to Hole’s first CD “Pretty On The Inside” to pick a song to try and work with. Though I’m leaning towards “Good Sister/ Bad Sister” right now, maybe mixing it with “White Boy” by Bikini Kill.

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