Weird Music: The Expansive and Personal
John Vogel's genre-encompassing passion project is a reminder of how deeply personal art can go in search for universal answers.
John Vogel’s surreal music starts up, equal parts inviting and plaintive. As it drifts along, the composition interweaves with voices that float in and out. One of them is Drew Daniel’s of Matmos, saying: “Sometimes the things art does to us say a lot more about our inner life emotionally than about what’s in the art. The art is empty and we’re pouring stuff into it. Then we think, ‘Oh all this stuff is in there.’ But it’s not. It’s in you.”
That’s the experience and epiphany that John Vogel’s passion project, Weird Music, brings to the proverbial table. That table is, of course, art, and the project is a solid reflection of its duality; its expansiveness and its personal-ness.
A lifelong musician and professed creative lifer, John uses his music, interspersed with his conversations with musicians (Matmos, Ches Smith, Man Man, etc.) as medium and method to find answers — or at least musings that get closer to the answers — to his questions about art, its meaning and value, and the life that comes from practicing it.
John takes the quest of Weird Music further with the added dimension of live performance accompanied by videos of the musicians and other visual prompts, such as the dual screens that flash transcribed parts of the interviews.
There’s no other word that encapsulates Weird Music better than “experience.” It wields music and words as investigative tools, almost treading into journalistic or documentarian territory, but not quite. Every insight and interaction, even as it relates to the communal, veers back to what’s personal. After all, it took years for this piece to find its final form, and from start to finish, the point of the experience is to realize that the meaning is in the doing, and the answers found in the shared moments between the art, the artist, and the audience.
This week, stay tuned as Talking Writing releases a limited podcast series doing a deep dive of the Weird Music interviews and themes with some extra background information and “extras” from John.