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Renaissance Arto
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Bossa-novayorican Arto Lindsay on faith, fucking and foreground telepathy
by ADAM GOLLNER
Question: what do Brian Eno, Blonde Redhead, Caetano Veloso, the early-'80s No Wave scene, Ryuichi Sakamoto, David Byrne, German theatre director Heiner Muller and DJ Spooky all have in common with the Reaganomics-era telepersonals classic Desperately Seeking Susan?
Answer: Arto Lindsay.
Perhaps the only John Zorn musician who has acted in a Madonna film, produced performance artist Laurie Anderson and translated tropicalista Tom Zé's onomatopoeic Portuguese poetry, Mr. Lindsay is also pleasantly at ease discussing Missy Elliot: "I really love 'Get Ur Freak On.'"
Born in Virginia, Lindsay's missionary parents moved the family down to rural Brazil when he was three years old. As a teenager, he rejected his parent's faith and became interested in Afro-Brazilian religions and rituals. "In high school at Recife, there was a big presence of those religions. I was fascinated by them and used to hang out around them. I observed possession and things like that. More importantly, I learned where a lot of stuff came from. We often forget where things came from here in North America.
"The English used to actively persecute the African tribal religions because they were afraid of slave rebellion. In Brazil, the Portuguese turned a blind eye to the slaves' religion and allowed it to continue so that the music, mythology and religion developed as it was in Africa. Those traditions were destroyed in North America. If you grew up in the States, you might not really think about where things come from. So much culture in the States is either African or Jewish, but so much of it gets subsumed."
Brave No Wave
Returning to American soil at the age of 18, Lindsay became immersed in the fledgling NYC punk scene, with his aural-shrapnel-assault outfit DNA becoming one of the major proponents of the No Wave scene (check out Brian Eno's No New York anthology LP, featuring DNA and three other groups). After stints in influential groups the Lounge Lizards, the Golden Palominos and the Ambitious Lovers, Lindsay discharged a flotilla of solo albums that chronicled his blossoming as one of the most consistent, sought-after and prolific collaborators in recent memory.
"There will always be great individual artists," elucidates Lindsay regarding his sprawling list of co-conspirators, "but collaboration is more and more the way to go. Actually, scratch that answer--that's a stupid answer. Collaboration is, uh, a mysterious thing that people don't quite understand. Hmmm. I mean there's William Burroughs's pseudo-mystical scientific writings where he speculates about the third mind and people getting together on another plane, but really, what is the essence of the collaborative process? I mean, my lack of conventional musicianship and technical skills makes it necessary to collaborate a lot of times." Note that, although he is known as a guitarist, Lindsay does not know how to play any chords or scales.
"Singing and playing guitar is a collaboration with yourself. So is playing drums. Feet play one rhythm, hands another. The idea of a great collaboration is not to deny individual expression but to heighten it. I guess some things you have to be content to leave mysterious and to learn how to nurture them in other ways other than rationally understanding them. Collaboration at its best involves a kind of unspoken communication that is the aim of a lot of art anyway. It allows you to foreground telepathy in a sense."
In what sense?
"Don't ask me," he laughs. "Yeah, I don't know, I can't really sum it up very neatly. These are the most interesting parts of making something. The parts that you can't really pin down."
Pornographic pachyderms
Pinning Lindsay down would certainly prove to be an exercise in futility. What has remained a constant through all of his work, however, is its sensuality and eroticism. Lindsay has claimed that, "All music bypasses the rational mind--it heads straight to the groin." In fact, he has described the title track on Prize, his most recent album, as possessing "state-of-mind during love-making" lyrics. What, then, does he think about during love-making?
"Well, I guess a lot of stuff. A lot of things go through my mind about what I'm in the middle of doing and also what I'm not doing. You can really reach a different mental state during sex. It's very contemplative, like meditation. Actually, I've never really thought about this analytically. At least not in a while!
"I always imagined a movie of one love-making session from beginning to end where you saw the whole thing, the laughing, the distraction, all of it, instead of the idea that you get excited and carried away and gallop away to orgasm. I've also wondered about what two elephants fucking would look like to an ant on the shoulder of one of the elephants. An earthquake? Bombing?''
At the Spectrum on Wednesday, July 4, 6pm, $29.50
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