{"id":14222,"date":"2013-08-14T13:46:36","date_gmt":"2013-08-14T17:46:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=14222"},"modified":"2013-08-14T13:46:36","modified_gmt":"2013-08-14T17:46:36","slug":"midweek-music-break-jherek-bischoff-and-david-byrne-eyes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2013\/08\/midweek-music-break-jherek-bischoff-and-david-byrne-eyes\/","title":{"rendered":"Midweek Music Break: Jherek Bischoff and David Byrne, “Eyes”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The pop-music landscape sometimes to me resembles coarse fabric — fabric with lots of weight and\u00a0substance<\/em>, which distracts you from the fact of all the holes in between: “holes” as in “opportunities,” for artists with just the right sort of corkscrew sensibilities.\u00a0Jherek Bischoff is one of those odd-duck musicians who periodically poke through the surface.<\/p>\n

Unlike most singers and songwriters, Bischoff seems to work in no particular niche. For his 2012 album,\u00a0Composed<\/em> (also released in a straight instrumental version, called\u00a0Scores<\/i>), Bischoff composed all the songs on a ukelele, with the idea that they’d eventually be performed by an orchestra. Then (in his own words<\/a>):<\/p>\n

This record was recorded with one microphone, an Mbox<\/a> and a laptop. I recorded each individual musician of the “orchestra” in their very own living rooms. I then layered each instrument (sometimes one violinist playing one part twenty times for instance) until it was the size of a huge orchestra. I spent the summer bike riding from house to house recording each musician. I then took a road trip and recorded all of the singers except Caetano and David.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(“Caetano” there is Caetano Veloso<\/a>, a Brazilian multi-genre performer, composer, and activist; Wikipedia describes his genre as a blend of M\u00fasica Popular Brasileira<\/em>, tropic\u00e1lia, psychedelic rock, folk rock, and bossa nova.\u00a0“David,” of course, is David Byrne.)<\/p>\n

I have no idea if Bischoff is exaggerating the makeshift elements in this description of the album. (And when he says he went “bike riding,” I sort of hope he meant via motorcycle.) However he did it, this song is a gorgeous, many-layered thing. Bischoff’s site includes some photographs<\/a> shot during the video’s recording, among them what seems to be a set of choreographic instructions for Byrne’s on-camera contribution:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

(In some respects, you might regard this as a catalogue of Byrne’s standard on-camera repertoire. It does not, however, seem to correspond to the actual sequence of movements in the video.)<\/p>\n

And here’s the video itself:<\/p>\n