Metamatic Forums John Foxx John Foxx D.N.A.

I've listened to it a few times now, and the CD could be sequenced a bit better. I think the thing to do is make some mp3 playlists adding tracks from DNA to other John Foxx albums they'd work better with.

FWIW, it's the more ambient stuff that works best for me on DNA, as opposed to the more upbeat tracks.

D.N.A. - why the full stops?

Best sleeve art on a John Foxx album since... erm...
ever??

But only John Foxx could do this:

A Secret Life 2 is of course 'A Secret Life' - Part 2 from META22CD.

I suppose it's too late to expect consistency in the titling of tracks. Leopards, spots etc... :p

Perhaps I should get out more...

...but of course, I'd prefer to stay in a listen to the latest John Foxx album!

Here's what my pen said after two plays of META25CD - Disk I - Sound

Tiny. Coloured. Movies

Having recently presented Jarre with a Lifetime Achievement Award and confessing that Foxx hated the Frenchman for his accomplishments in 1976, the opening strand of DNA is aptly titled.
'Maybe Tomorrow' (for Foxx own talents have yet to be commercially honoured) starts off immediately in the JMJ groove prepared by Kurfurstendamm and Looped Los Angeles, albeit punctuated by more bleeps and swirling string pieces than either of these soundtracks. Its fast for Foxx, pulsating and immediately catchy. Takes its cue from Trans Europe Express and mid-era Kraftwerk, but it also hints at some of the experimental rhythms Foxx composed during his Nation 12 period of relative anonymity in the earliest 90s. Which I guess lets him off...

Kaiyagura on the otherhand is a contrapunctal drifting piano piece. Quite beautiful. Simple and effectively calm-inducing. Full of ghosts and tiny fish.

City of Mirage hums its way into focus like a glimmer in the desert, a sequel to the wonderful Skyscraper - one of his finest pieces. CoM has a gentle but imposing majesty and carries you along with it. Thoroughly engaging and absorbing, and comes across as the most visual piece so far. Now I feel the lure of the accompanying DvD and look forward to Tezka's interpretation of this piece. Or was the music pulled together for the film? Resonant and ethereal. Almost choral in its structure. Haunting, yet absent voices. Fragments of Glass shimmer in the symmetry. A delightful piece.

Foxx brings the beat back in as Flightpath Tegel taxis onto the runway. Instantly familiar and with a strong hook, this will stand out as one of the most accessible instrumentals Foxx has yet released. Strident, heroic and easy. Rich with confidence and assuredness, and bursting with powerful dance-ability, this is the TV commercial he has always threatened to deliver. Yet you sense a nonchalant shrug, as if he could turn these things out in his sleep. And therein lies my problem with this kind of superficial synth-pop element that is creeping into to this chapter. It just lacks individuality and is too comfortable on the surface of the sea.

Thank heavens then that Foxx is a multicellular organism, and with a sigh of relief we glide back beneath the waves. This is where he blooms. It is in the ocean that he can breathe, more comfortable under the water than cruising on top of it. SInce first joining forces with sound engineer Steve d'Agostino, Foxx has become ever more experimental and diverse. Violet Bloom takes his sequence map in yet another direction and promises most for the future. Drones, echoes of engines, whispering voices. Splinters, cracks and fluid turbulence. Roses bloom in the mirror dust, and the tidal stream comes lifting us. Soundbites, heavily treated. Non-words. Memories. Footsteps and crackles.

Phantom Lover is an interruption. Cleverly placed, too - as if we have suddenly tuned in to a European radio station transmitting Radio Activity and Tangerine Dreams. Despite an ill-fitting title, its a charming chariascuro of light and volume, photography and watercolour. Quite deliciously weaves its way between all and everything.

A pleasant, refreshing and thought-provoking interlude. Where was I? Ah yes, I remember. Those derelict factories and empty hills. Distant skylines, chimneys and matchstick people. An earlier man walked this path, his memory blurred and shattered, his future behind him, lost in the warehouse. Holding hands and looking to the hand-held sky. Foxx first wrote of his Secret Life in 1981, and there is a biography of thirty years in these next two pieces. From the album of this name released twelve months ago, Part 2 has become my favourite piece, and again here it fits well and picks up the dreams of arriving. A hugely powerful presence. The listener, forward. Ominous and foreboding. The Quiet Man emergent. Chau gongs, black copper oxide. Intense. Bellini and Puccini, waltzing with Oppenheimer in the ever present hum of a distant machine. Melody is lonely, despairing and painfully beautiful. The sinister drone builds an atmosphere that evokes an intermittent spirituality against which the piano is crystallised. A battle of mistrust between tam tams and keys. Backwards treatment of sharp notes. Defiant. This is Foxx walking free, looking down and looking back. Experimental again, enjoying the freedom to reflect and inspire.

And so to next. Currently working with minimalist composer Rueben Garcia and avant-garde pianist Harold Budd, Foxx is in his ethereal element on Over The Mirage. He's back on the ocean, but this time drifting on its stillness, gliding blissfully through the gaps and relationships between music and silence, between self-indulgence and assured confidence.
His destination may be unknown, but the journey still holds many adventures to be observed from both the more familiar windows of a car and the mid-point of a grand and winding river.

DNA bases pair up with each other. Film and music. Acid and peppermints. Composition and freedom. Electronic and psychedelic. Digital and analogue. Painting and piano. Past and future. Foxx has always replicated and diversified, a genome taking care to ensure that each cellular organism contains at its core an exact copy of the hereditary text and grammar of the original cell. Sound and motion. Genetic makeup / Burton' s tailoring. Flicker down metabolic pathways...

The scent of eau de cologne, and the taste of tin.

Stand out tracks (for there must be those)
City of Mirage
Violet Bloom
A Secret Life 2 and 7

Listeners who like this album might also enjoy

Translucence and Drift Music
A Secret Life
Mirrorball
Tiny Colour Movies
The Garden
The Pleasures of Electricity
Cathedral Oceans 1 - 3
Shifting City
Metamatic

etcetra

Posted the above, then watched the DVD

Sorry Minty - but they are just NOT.

I found the whole play utterly absorbing, and was completely intrigued it. ALL the films work on different levels, both individually and together.
There are SO MANY links and hints and recurrent themes and bits of this album and that picture and that verse. Clever interpretations of this, and that, both on the part of the film-makers, the composer and the team that compiled this DVD.

There's an understanding beginning to emerge and it's enriching to witness...

I want to come back to this, but I felt I just had to counter this comment and re-dress the balance here.

Sorry Brian, but they just are. No amount of flowery prose, or pretentious twaddle, can conceal the fact that the films, are for the most part, Crap.

"There's an understanding beginning to emerge and it's enriching to witness..."
Pretentious or what?

Difficult to categorise "Flightpath" video as crap. Even stretching the mind, I can only see it as a masterpiece, and full of stuff that I end up saying "Wish I'd done that"!

The other stuff doesn't get to the same heights, but, I'll agree to disagree with you!

That is one that I agree is good, my full post was as follows, better to include the whole thing than just a portion to try and score points against.

Got mine today, agree it doesn't look like a "Foxx" release. Music I can't fault, Foxx just never disappoints. The Movies however are....erm.....crap!!! Karborn's is like a really early version of Windows Media players built in effects, really quite shocking how this can be classed as anything other than garbage. Violet Bloom is another that could be botched together in 5 minutes. The rest are fair to good. Music 10/10 Videos 4/10

That's an interesting point.

Have a listen to the first three Kraftwerk albums though, and there's similar juxtaposition going on there too.

Stratovarius/Megaherz for example on Kraftwerk 1 and Krisgallo/Heimatklange on Ralf und Florian

In many ways, D.N.A. bears a striking resemblance to these formative albums. And check out Un Chein Andalou if you want to fit the cover artwork in some kind of context

From the Quiet Man blog -

"The new John Foxx CD & DVD, D.N.A. receives a full release via Metamatic/Cargo Records on 11 October 2010. Described by The Wire journalist Mark Fisher as ”an album of achingly melancholic electronica with some beautiful films on the DVD’, D.N.A. includes a brand new Foxx/Budd/Garcia track, Over The Mirage. This is the first Foxx and Harold Budd recording since their work together on 2003’s two albums, Translucence and Drift Music. The CD & DVD package also features Foxx collaborations with film-makers that include Japanese director Macoto Tezka and British animator Ian Emes (on the heavily electronic Flightpath Tegel), and a previously unreleased recording taken from last year’s A Secret Life sessions with ex-Japan percussionist, Steve Jansen."