Words About Things

Whoever creates Lynx’s adverts clearly know what they’re doing and who they are selling to. They are always amusing even though they always stick to the same underlying theme (women are attracted to the smell of deodorant). They also always feature attractive women which is exactly what young men want from an advert. Quite how they have managed to create a scent which only attracts supermodels is a mystery.

The latest Lynx advert takes the basic theme and makes it into an epic story featuring fallen angels who happen to look like supermodels (of course). Considering that one of the women is Adriana Lima they must have spent a fair few bob on this one. The special effects are also pretty spectacular. It’s amazing that we now have adverts with huge CGI budgets when you consider that in the old days everything had to be made out of papier mache and bits of sticky tape.

The video takes place in some rural Italian village by the looks of it. I wonder if the deodorant would have the same effect down the local high street? If I’m not mistaken the soundtrack is a cover of Sexy Boy by Air although it took me most of the advert to work out what it was. It’s not my fault though, I was distracted by the story!

Tahiti 80 Solitary Bizness from Tahiti 80 on Vimeo.

Legendary music producer Brian Eno has released his first album on legendary electronic music label Warp today. The album is called Small Craft on a Milk Sea and was created in collaboration with guitarist Leo Abrahams and keyboardist Jon Hopkins over the last two years. The album is the first full length since 2008′s Everything That Happens Will Happen Today which was a collaboration with former Talking Heads front-man David Byrne.

The songs on Small Craft on a Milk Sea where mostly improvised and some feature samples of ‘random’ chords which have been edited to fit the theme of the song. Eno has compared the tracks to film soundtracks divorced from visual images:

The work in this collection is a result of an occasional collaboration between myself, Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins. The two of them are gifted young player/composers whose work, like mine, is intimately connected to the possibilities and freedoms of electronic music. Over the last few years we’ve worked together several times, enjoying exploring the huge new sonic territories now available to musicians. Mostly the pieces on this album resulted not from ‘composition’ in the classical sense, but from improvisation. The improvisations are not attempts to end up with a song, but rather with a landscape, a feeling of a place and perhaps the suggestion of an event. In a sense they deliberately lack ‘personality’: there is no singer, no narrator, no guide as to what you ought to be feeling. If these pieces had been used in films, the film would complete the picture. As they stand, they are the mirror-image of silent movies – sound-only movies.

Eno has often worked using a combination of free improvisation and rules or structures. His Oblique Strategies cards are a prime example of this: they are cards featuring instructions designed to stimulate though and encourage the reader to think laterally. They include suggestions such as “Try faking it!” and “What would your closest friend do?”.

To see Eno, Abrahams and Hopkins performing Written, Forgotten, Remembered click on this linky link.