Apr

21

Alexis Gideon: Antics/Musics

Filed Under Updates 

The LiophantThe sticks hit the timpani with a simple tap to start a song, beat beat beat.  You can almost see a smirk form in the corner of the drummer’s mouth as the beat intensifies and an electronica symphony elides into the beat.  The start of an Alexis Gideon piece of schizo-rap is like catching the moment when Fred Astaire simultaneously alights onto a set and a song and discovers that he can dance – the possibilities crackle and the potential hides in a corner waiting to burst out screaming “surprise!” to scare his maiden auntie. 

“I meld rap with a lot of other genres,” Gideon explains: “so many things inspire me.”  Gideon continues his list: “sounds of traffic, light through trees” – a clash of textures produced by light and sound colliding that flickers into his music through his multi-media interests.  Strobe-lit blocks of color base dancing Japanese kitsch in a music vid, Flight of the Liophant, and the liophant finds his way home in the same heart-warming cartoon musical performed by paper chain characters.  The liophant?  It’s a lion, with the head of a pachyderm and with the wings of a dragon-fly, and probably most closely related to Gideon drumming a rap with a ukulele somewhere in his back pocket and the Casio keyboard singing love.  His choice to cast Godzilla as the protagonist of his production of Hungarian folklore translated into video opera allies somewhere very nearby on the food chain.  Obviously, zanzithophones, ligers and Haribo Technicolor Jellybeans nest in similar topographical locations, although it might take an Alexis Gideon to put them all together and make us wonder what they mean.  

Gideon will perform Video Musics at the Nuart Theatre on Wedn., 22 April, 2009, at 8:00 p.m., with Shelley Short.

Molly is a freelance journalist and a senior at New St. Andrew’s College with a special interest in postcards and goldfish.  She writes for The Loop 21 and keeps the blog A New Amsterdam.

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